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Early Days in Texas
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The best tamales come from San Antonio
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I was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1947 and moved to Biloxi, Mississippi before I started the first grade. But I'm still a Texan, although I don't say that so proudly anymore subsequent to George Bush's reign of havoc on the American people.
I had an older sister who started grade school in San Antonio several years before me. Even then, San Antonio had a large Hispanic population, so much so that the public schools would serve Mexican food on Wednesday. All I barely remember of San Antonio is going with my sister to school on Wednesdays and having Mexican food.
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Biloxi Boy
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From tamales to oysters
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I moved to Biloxi just before I started elementary school. Yes, I remember my first grade teacher, Mrs. Brown. And I remember many a hurricane washing the man-made beaches of Biloxi.
I got Best Dressed in high school. No wonder! My father ran a clothing store -- and I worked there until I left for college.
College days were looked forward to: I'd get away and leave Mississippi for good. So I made the big break and went to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. I remember considering going to the Sorbonne at the time (It didn't cost any more than the U of Alabama!) but my French was non-existent.
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Alabama Days
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Popcorn and caculus comes together
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I enjoyed the U of A very much. I thought it'd be fun to organize things so I started out in Industrial Engineering but the summer jobs were in the oil business. So I switched soon to the Mineral Engineering Dept once I got a whiff of oil during my first summer of work as a roustabout in Louisiana.
I did well in engineering school. I was a whiz in math, getting a 104 average in the 5-hour calculus class under Colonel Yarborough. He was tough but he could teach calculus. I learned calculus so well that one summer I proved to a movie theater, via the calculus, of course, that their cone of popcorn was not holding as much popcorn as they claimed.
I was president of my engineering class, had SDS over to the Engineering school for a lively discussion of the Vietnam war -- and saw early on how conservative the south (really) was. I had several 4.0 years, was elected to some prestigious honoraries -- and had a great time, all things considered.
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Head Sounds
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Surfing the radio waves
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During my last year at the University, I started an FM commercial radio show, Head Sounds. What a hoot! Although I'm not a voluble person by nature, I never had any dead-air time and ad-libbed my way through one year of air-time, including all the commercials.
Head Sounds was one of the best experiences of my life -- and I found I had a great ear for creative music. I was listening to Pink Floyd while they were on Harvest Records. I only played LPs and Head Sounds became known for the best music on the radio between Atlanta and New Orleans.
This all occurred during my fifth year in school. I was quite busy then: doing Head Sounds from 11PM until 3AM in the morning, six days a week. And then going to class early. I'd sleep in shifts, from 4-7AM and 2-5PM. Fun times.
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Oil Futures
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Ask for what you want 'cause you might get it
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After college, I went to work for AtlanticRichfield Oil Company. I left for west Texas and began my career as a drilling engineer with the hopes that I'd travel. Boy, did I! Texas was big.
And so were their meals. I remember once ordering a steak for lunch and complaining to the waitress that I ordered a small steak, after seeing the meat spill over the sides of the plate. "That IS the small steak.", she replied.
After a year and a half in Texas, I told my supervisor that I'd like to travel. And two weeks later I was transferred to ARCO's International office in New York City. This was in 1972. There was only a handful of us at the time in the international group BUT they had a lease in the Java Sea off the coast of Indonesia. And the economics were good based on oil at USD2.78/barrel. Yes, ARCO's figures were profitable then based on oil at USD2.78/barrel.
One morning, the senior engineer (I was the junior engineer.) used my desk to call someone in Canada to see if they wanted to go to Indonesia to drill. I overhead the conversation and said "Why don't you send me?".
When I came back from lunch that day, I was offered a job in Indonesia. I was in Jakarta in two weeks, just about the same time that Barack Obama was hanging out there.
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Indonesian Oil
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The gentle beauty of Indonesia
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Indonesia was great in the mid 1970s. I was, perhaps, the youngest drilling engineer in the world to run an offshore drilling rig.
And I discovered that the Indonesian kitchen on the rigs was far better than the American food they fixed. Duhhhh! I learned (on my way to Indonesia) that Bali was there. So weekend trips to Bali were frequent.
After two years of good money, I quit my job and began traveling back to the US, overland. Katmandu by Cat Stevens was the big song then. I went to Laos and discovered that the road to Lao Prabang, the old capital was now open -- after being closed for a long time due to the war. So I and about ten other gringoes jumped in this open truck and took off for the old capital. After travelling through open fields all day and seeing anti-aircraft guns still being manned, we found out that this had been the 2nd trip on the road after being closed for 2 years. Ignorance is bliss.
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Indonesian Gold
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The future is inevitable
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I got another job in Indonesia, worked a year to save up some money and quit so that I could start a business of buying and selling Indonesian antique textiles. I had learned the Indonesian language and traveled extensively looking for rare, unusual ikats and batiks.
But the quantity of great weavings was limited. Along the way, I found that Indonesia produced high-karat gold jewelry at attractive prices, enough that there seemed to be money to be made by exporting it to the US. I developed an unusual investment scheme based on using physical gold as currency -- and financed my jewelry business.
But I had no marketing expertise and eventually sold the idea to a gold bank in NYC. Believe me, it takes a lot of gold to make money in gold!
The move to NYC was predicated on the fact that I wanted to be with my future wife with whom I was having a long-distance affair while I was in Dallas and she was in NYC.
Part of my pitch to the NYC bank was that I would "hypercard" their office -- and I was hired to develop their coin-jewelry department and, as much, for my computer expertise which I had developed with the gold business because the IRS required that I track my assests on a daily basis.
So one computer program led to another, the Mac led to the PC and I learned database programming.
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