One of these days, you too will get “The Call”. It will be opportunity calling. Expect miracles.

My son is off to Boston University for his final year of college. He is majoring in journalism and political science. I wrote this to give him some fatherly advice. When I finished it, I thought you might also find it interesting or inspiring. Feel free to pass it on to your sons and daughters or anyone you think might benefit from it.

A Letter to My Son

It won’t be long now until you’ll be starting your career.  Congratulations on making it to your Senior Year.   I am very proud of you.

Be sure to collect contact info from your friends and classmates. They will be of help to you in the future if  you keep in touch.  And its so easy to do these days.  You have iPhones, the Internet, the cloud, LinkedIn, Facebook, and email. Use them. All we had were our Rolodex our a Little Black Book both of which were analogue, not digital. Our Internet was the radio.

I am pleased to see from your Linked-In profile that you are following in my footsteps with a varied and interesting work history. You already have enough experience to write about sports, law, birds, and politics – and you’re just beginning.

In Your Father’s Footsteps

As I look back at my life, I might be richer if I had stayed with P&G or the FCC or Whiteford, or if I taken that job from the IRS, instead of starting my own law firm. But I would have been totally bored, I probably would have never had met your mother and then you wouldn’t even exist.

Your work as a journalist brings back memories of my start as a news reporter in my dad’s radio station. As the new kid I was given the assignments that no one else wanted — city hall council meetings, county fairs, spotting for the sports announcer at high school football and basketball games, calling the hospital emergency rooms every morning for accidents, and visiting the police station to see who got arrested last night.

It was very exciting for me. I loved getting the news before anyone else and typing it up at 100 miles an hour to meet the 6:00 am deadline for the first morning newscast. Sometimes, the news director had to rip it out of my typewriter.

The Night I Got “The Call”

Then one night I got “The Call”. Three little kids didn’t come home for dinner. They were last seen playing near the caves that the Mississippi River cut out of the limestone and mud. The assistant news director told me to “Get the station’s remote broadcas6t equipment and go down to the caves for a live report on the radio.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. ”You want me to go on the air? What do I say?”

“Just tell us what you see,” he answered.

Probably the best journalism tip I ever received.

The remote was the size of my gym bag and ten times as heavy. It was neon yellow. I slipped the yellow strap over my left shoulder so I could walk around and key the mike in my right hand. I could her the station announcer give me the countdown – five four three two (they don’t say the one so it doesn’t get picked up when they throw the switch from the radio station to remote control.

I took a deep breath and did the one count in my head.

“I am on the banks of the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri. And this is what I see.”

“In front of me there is a flat area of ground where three children were playing this afternoon. They did not come home for dinner.”

“Past flat place the ground rises and in the hillside I see an entrance — an entrance to the vast cave system that the river has cut out of the soft limestone that forms its banks. The caves are unmapped and go for miles. They are honey-comb mazes with several different levels. These are the same caves that Mark Twain wrote about Tom and Huck exploring. Only in the fictional account, they used string to find their way out again.”

“It is dark along the river tonight except for this surreal site. It is lit up like a movie set by a dozen flood lights. There is a red generator powering them. A lot of cars and trucks parked every which way. There is a hole in the side of a cliff that is the entrance to the caves.

A lot activity. Men with ropes and flashlights are going in and out of the cave. They have enlarged the entrance for easier access and I see a big mound of dirt in front of the cave. I see grim determination on the faces of these men, who are risking their own lives to search for these lost boys.”

The next day I went into the cave with those brave searchers (many of whom are FB friends 55 years later).  Eventually there would be about 200 searchers in was tlo become the largest cave search ever.    But the lost boys were never found.

Epilogue:  One Call Leads to Another

In my last year of law school at the University of Missouri, the  telephone roused me from the deep sleep of afternoon nap.  “Hello?” I answered, not yet fully awake.

The voice on other end sounded wide awake, “James?’

”Yes?”

“This is the recruiter for the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, DC. We’d like you to join our legal department.”

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Or, in your case, the future.

Love, Dad

It’s graduation time!  Caps will soon be flying as a new crop of graduates join the work-a-day world. My youngest graduates from high school this year. Time for commencement speakers to encourage and offer advice for new graduates.

I remember a lawyer spoke at my graduation from law school. He told us that while we fantasized about the luxurious life of a lawyer, the truth is that we didn’t know how good we had it as students. We would soon be longing for those bygone days when we had no court deadlines, client demands, irritating opposing counsel, and judges overruling our objections.

My first day of starting work as a lawyer, a seasoned attorney expressed a similar sentiment. He said, “You guys have it made. This is the richest  you’ll ever be in your life. No mortgages, no wives, and no children.”

I haven’t been asked to speak to a graduating class, but if I ever am, I would try to pass along some tips for their first job, like this:

 1.  Ask questions.

Your boss will give you assignments and tasks. The instructions will not be clear.  My niece interned in my office. Her first day in the office, I was meeting with a client. I called my niece on the intercom and asked her to bring two coffees to my office. She told me later that she had never made coffee before and didn’t know how to work the coffee machine. Now she has a PhD.

When I clerked for the Public Defender in law school, I was sitting next to him at counsel’s table taking notes, when turned to me abruptly and whispered urgently in the middle of a trial and said, “Run back to the office and draft a motion to suppress evidence.” That was my first motion and I had no clue how to draft it. That’s something they don’t teach you in law school. I was saved by Marjorie, the long-time secretary, who calmly pulled up an old one on her word processor and changed the names. Find the “Marjorie” in your organization and make friends with them.

Tom was the draftsman assigned to me when I worked as a chemical engineer at P&G. I designed, on paper, a tank to hold Toluene, which is a flammable liquid chemical used in making soap. I used pressure, volume, humidity, and temperature in my equations to calculated the size of the tank needed. But it was Tom who told me about the quick-connect flanges that would help the truck drivers load the tank so they wouldn’t be cursing the engineers who designed it. They didn’t teach that in engineering school.

The guys at the P&G plant in Hamilton, Ontario, wanted an air pressure line to deliver a soap making slurry to them so they would not have to move it across the plant in wheelbarrows. I designed a system that would do the job theoretically according to my equations. But again, it was Tom, who pulled out the blueprints for the plant to make sure there was room for me to run the pipes.

2.  Make a To Do List Each Morning.

I had a great boss at P&G. He was a quintessential engineer. When he assigned a job to me, he would pull out a little blue-green sticky pad, and in a very log key, calm manner, make a neat numbered list of the tasks that needed to be completed.

If you’re good, you will soon find yourself overwhelmed with too much to do. I had a paralegal who was very good at her job. But she suffered because she always wanted to give everything 100%. Perfection became the enemy of results.

Don’t lose sight of the 80/20 rule. That is 80% of the value lies in 20% of the things. So if you have a list of 10 things to do today, and you accomplish the two most important tasks, you have finished 80% of your work. The rest is out-plant. Out-plant means try to delegate it to someone else.

3.  Attack Your Work. 

You can learn things from bad bosses. One of the meanest bosses I ever had taught me this. He would call me at home about a contract of tax issue I was working on. He didn’t just work, he attacked his work, with a vengeance until it was completely defeated. We all have those projects that we just don’t want to do.

Try this. I take the case file and put it in the center of my desk. I clean everything else off my desk. Then I sit on my hands and do nothing else for 20 minutes. At the end of the 20 minutes, I attack the file. It works for me.

4.  Get Your Points on the Scoreboard. 

I recommend you keep a log of the projects you work on and the completion dates. You can  turn the log into a memo at the end of each month to give to your boss as a “progress report.”  Your boss is usually not aware of everything you are doing. It is important that you not only score points, but that your points get on the scoreboard so everyone sees them.

5.  One Word.

My high school commencement speaker was Scott Zimmerman, a local disk jockey on the radio. Scott started his speech by saying he was going to give the graduates one word that would be the secret to success in whatever they wanted to accomplish. At the conclusion of the speech he said he would now reveal that one word. At his signal, two students unfurled a huge banner that had one word written across it.  That one word was “UGOTTAWANA”.

 

President-Elect Biden calls for us to try to understand each other.

I just got off  the phone with a friend who voted for President Trump. I am trying to understand why.

My friend does not wear protective masks because he says that physics proves a mask will not stop the Covid virus. He says most experts agree with this. I do not believe he is correct.

He thinks that only 15,000 Americans have died from the Covid virus and that hospitals make more money if they characterize deaths as caused by Covid. I think that almost 250,000 have died from Covid and hospitals do not misreport the numbers to make more money from Covid deaths.

I told him that we can take some time now to sort out the facts, determine the truth without political spin, and come to some mutual understandings. He doesn’t think so. He thinks people are inherently bad. I think everyone is trying their best to be good.

There is a wonderful book called City by Clifford D. Simak. It takes place in the future and is a series of  stories told around campfires by dogs who were given the power of speech by an extinct creature, Mankind. One story is about a message, that when read, causes you to instantly understand another person.

Imagine what it would be like if such a passage existed.

You will be able to have a pleasant Thanksgiving this year, even if you invite your crazy uncle.

Democrats and Republicans will understand each other. Compromises will be made. Deadlock will be unblocked. Congress will get to work on bipartisan solutions to the pandemic, health care, the economy, criminal justice reform, and infrastructure.

Judges would understand what lawyers were telling them. Opposing counsel will suddenly become reasonable. Litigants will no longer need the courts to decide disputes.

Men and women will understand each other. Truce will be declared in the war between the sexes. Arguments will end. Spouses will stop getting divorces.

“Old too soon,
Smart too late.”
— Mike Tyson

I was on the phone with an old friend of mine when he remarked that people who wore masks to fight the Coronavirus were stupid.  I told him that I was wearing a mask.  That started a debate over the size of molecules and how porous cloth was.  We each recited facts and quotes from our favorite television news channels and the Internet.

Just the Facts

I argued with my friend that there are basic facts we all agree on.  For example, I told him, we all agree that a golf ball is round.  Otherwise we would be unable to communicate.

“Is a golf ball round?” he rejoined.  “Look closely and you will see it has little dimples in it.  And what if I called it a cube?  Would it still be round?”

What is the truth?

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, went to church every Sunday, and learned about how George Washington could not tell a lie.  And how Abraham Lincoln walked a mile to return three cents change to a shopkeeper.

I became a lawyer, swore to live by the Code of Ethics, act as an officer of the court, show candor toward the tribunal, avoid even the appearance of impropriety, walk far from the edge of the slippery slope, and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (unless it was told to me in confidence by a client).

My word is my bond. I expect everyone else to do what they say and keep their agreements. If not I will turn my back on them, excommunicate them from my circle of friends, and sue them for breach of contract and specific performance.

Upon Reconsideration

But my conversation with my friend had me thinking about truth and lies. Have I been too harsh in my judgment of others? Too harsh in my sentences? Too intolerant of appeals? Too rejecting of rehabilitation?

The people I banned from my life had both good qualities and bad qualities. I had not spoken to my old friend for 30 years over a disagreement we had. However, when I was spending too many hours at work, overweight, and headed for a heart attack, it was my old friend who dragged me up to the track and made me join the track club.

People come with good and bad qualities – even you and I.  If you can find a way to protect yourself from the bad part, short of banishing them from your life, maybe you can continue to benefit from the good part.