Dad's Biggest Payday Ever Thanks to Muhammed Ail

My Dad was a soldier during World War 2 and a middleweight boxer before the war.  After the War he went to work for a chain of grocery stores that eventually opened a three-acre warehouse in Charlestown, Mass.  Dad was a driver and a warehouseman for Purity Supreme Grocers making about $150 per week in 1964, not bad money at the time.

Dad played poker a couple of nights a week and confined his gambling to cards, except for an occasional bet on boxing.  In January and February of 1964, the talk among the Teamsters where my Dad worked was all about the Cassius Clay vs. Sonny Liston fight.  Most everyone he worked with was sure that Liston was going to pummel the loudmouth Clay.  My Dad was equally sure Clay was going to knock out the older fighter.

In the weeks before the fight, bookies were giving ten-to-one odds in favor of Liston.  Dad had a savings account he called his "Swiss Bank Account" where he kept his poker winnings.  He told me after the fight that he had withdrawn several hundred dollars to bet on Ali.

We listened to the fight on the radio, I don't remember why we could not watch on TV.  But Dad was right.  Ali KOed Liston and Dad won enough money to buy the only brand new car he ever owned.  One of his poker buddies owned a Chrysler dealership in Reading, Mass. He had a new car on the lot for more than a year that nobody wanted.  It was a blue 1962 Chrysler Newport sedan, the absolute basic model.  It had hub caps instead of wheel covers and it had a three-speed manual transmission with a stick shift.  My Dad bought the car with his winnings from the fight.  Dad never said how much he won, but it was clearly more than $2,000--the biggest payday he ever had.

  
Shortly after that fight, Clay changed his name to Muhammed Ali.  My Dad remained a fan.  "He's a loudmouth, but he is not all talk.  He can fight," was my Dad's view of the Ali.

History Made Wonderful! Podcast Review: The History of Rome

At a recent meeting, the group leader gave us some “get-to-know-you” questions.  One was “What’s your favorite group/singer and your favorite song.” 

I answered immediately:  Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and their song “I Hate Myself for LovingYou.”  

But I haven’t listened to that song in months. Questions like this remind me that most people listen to music when they drive, work, exercise or commute. 

Really, I should have said my favorite “singer” is Mike Duncan; my favorite song is his “The History of Rome” podcast.  The podcast was launched on iTunes in September 2007 and was an instant and enduring hit.  I did not begin listening until 2013, long after the final episode was on iTunes, but the podcast was still in the Top 50 on iTunes at that time.

In nearly 200 episodes (179 numbered episodes, some with multiple parts) Mike Duncan guides us from the founding of Rome through the Republic, Julius Caesar and the Civil War, then through the many great and terrible Caesars who followed to the end of the Western Empire in the late 400s.  Duncan did not try to chronicle the Eastern Empire through its end in 1453.

I have read and re-read the Aeneid, including reading it in Iraq.  I love history well told and “The History of Rome” is 70 hours of solid information by a great storyteller.

If you have not listened to podcasts and are interested in history, “The History of Rome” is a great place to start. And the series has its own Wikipedia page.

Re-Enlisting In a Parade: Army Love

In the early 80s, I was a tank commander in the 68th Armor, a reserve unit in Reading, Pa.  We trained at Fort Indiantown Gap, but had a couple of M60A1 tanks and other vehicles in an armory in the city of Reading.

Each year, the 68th put a vehicle or two in the parade through downtown.  Like most reserve and guard units, members of this unit were neighbors and some were life-long friends.  The year I joined, everybody was talking about one of the gunners in the unit who re-enlisted in spectacular fashion the year before.

Billy loved tanks, loved the unit and wanted nothing more than to be a gunner.  He had served four years on active duty, then came home in 1978 and served two years in the 68th Armor.  He wanted to re-enlist, but his wife insisted he get out.  So he left the Army in 1980.  The following summer, in 1981, Billy came to the parade with his wife and young son.  A dozen members of the 68th were riding in the back of a deuce-and-a-half truck, waving at the crowd.  They saw Billy and all started yelling.

Then his best friend said, "C'mon Billy!  Jump in!"  His wife was furious.  Billy looked at the slow-moving truck, at his wife, the jumped the barrier and ran to the truck.  A dozen hands pulled him up and beaming Billy re-enlisted the following week.

Who Hates Amish and Mennonites? World War II Veterans and their Families

When I moved to Lancaster County in 1980 to go to college, I was surprised to find people who hated the Amish and Mennonites.  Who could hate people who drive buggies and farm with mules?

World War II veterans.

From 1981 to 1985 I worked on the dock at the Yellow Freight break-bulk terminal in East Petersburg, just north of the city of Lancaster.  As I got to know my co-workers, they mostly fit in three groups:

1. Former athletes, either amateur or college, with a career-ending injury, but who could still load trucks.
2. Vietnam War veterans and other former service members.
3. Farmers who needed the extra money a Teamsters job provided.  We made $12/hour.

It was the third group who first told me about how their father or their uncle or their neighbor served in World War II and how the family ended up selling the farm while the soldier was away at the war.  The buyer of the farm was often an Amish or Mennonite farmer who did not have to serve in the military and made a lot of money growing food for the war effort.  

Nearly forty years later, those resentments were as acute as at the end of the war.  "My father did his duty.  They stayed home and made money."  Most of the men I spoke with had some variation of this statement, usually laced with swearing.  

Envy destroys communities.  When one guy gets something and the other guy doesn't, hatred follows. Whether pacifists are sincere or not, they start life well ahead of the soldier who goes to war.  In yesterday's post I quote C.S. Lewis on why he is not a pacifist. You can follow the link or read it here:

Lewis describes the life of a soldier on active duty in a war:
All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally,
 is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. 

Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. 

Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. 

Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. 

Like exile, it separates you from all you love. 

Like the gallies [jail], it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions. 

It threatens every temporal evil—every evil except dishonour 
and final perdition, and those who bear it like it no better than you would like it. 

Then he describes the life of those who avoid service, 
whether by pacifism or other means:

Though it may not be your fault, it is certainly a fact that Pacifism 
threatens you with almost nothing. 

Some public opprobrium, yes, from people whose opinion you discount 
and whose society you do not frequent, 
soon recompensed by the warm mutual approval which exists, 
inevitably, in any minority group. 

For the rest it offers you a continuance of the life you know and love, 
among the people and in the surroundings you know and love.

For Most Countries, At Most Times, People Looked at Military Service with Dread

C.S. Lewis, best known for The Chronicles of Narnia served in World War I in the British Army.  He was a citizen of Northern Ireland and was not subject to the draft, but volunteered to serve. He was badly wounded twice and between battles lived in cold, muddy trenches.  During the first year of World War II, Lewis spoke to a pacifist society at Oxford with the title "Why I Am Not a Pacifist."  Most of the speech is technical, but he gave a haunting summary.  

He describes the life of a soldier on active duty in a war:


All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. 

Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. 

Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. 

Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. 

Like exile, it separates you from all you love. 

Like the gallies, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions. 

It threatens every temporal evil—every evil except dishonour and final perdition, and those who bear it like it no better than you would like it. 

Then he describes the life of those who avoid service, whether by pacifism or other means:

Though it may not be your fault, it is certainly a fact that Pacifism threatens you with almost nothing. 

Some public opprobrium, yes, from people whose opinion you discount and whose society you do not frequent, soon recompensed by the warm mutual approval which exists, inevitably, in any minority group. 

For the rest it offers you a continuance of the life you know and love, among the people and in the surroundings you know and love.

Army, Adoption, Racing and Faith: Don’t Start Unless You Are Ready to Suffer

Beginning in 1971, Army recruiters advertised “Be All You Can Be” to pitch enlisting in the Army.  They used just five words with thirteen letters to suggest that you can fulfill your dreams, learn a career and otherwise let that wonderful person inside you bloom and grow in the fertile soil the Army would provide. 

They did not say you could also be maimed or killed.  Every soldier is a rifleman and the Army teaches you first to be a rifleman before they teach you turbojet engine maintenance or auto repair. 

I quite obviously love the Army.  I love bicycle racing.  And I love my adopted children.  But I am also the sort of person who thinks a good life is impossible without risk and suffering.  So when people ask me if they should enlist, race or adopt, I tell them, “Yes!”  But if they ask, as has happened many times with racing, “Is there a way I can race without crashing?” I suggest they take up knitting. 

I give the same advice when someone asks about joining the Army. “Yes, enlist!”  But I suggest enlisting for combat jobs, because Army skills really don’t transfer that well to civilian jobs unless you work for a government contractor or the government itself.  In the Army, the infantry, armor, artillery and aviation do the really fun stuff.  I am also very clear there is no safe way to be a soldier.

Recently a woman I have worked with for several years asked me about adopting.  She and her husband have a six-year-old son.  Her husband wants to adopt.  She is less sure. 

We talked about the various kinds of adoption.  Her husband would like to adopt a kid that needs a home.  My wife and I adopted three children and tried to adopt three more with that same goal foremost.  It is a lovely and lofty goal, but the underlying fact is that someone who needs a home has lost a home.  More importantly, something bad happened to the home they had.

So I gave the adoption version of the warning I give to prospective soldiers and bike racers:  If you race, enlist or adopt, you will suffer.  If you really commit to any or all of these, your life will change or you will lose your life, either practically or actually.

In my years of military service, I have been blinded by shrapnel, had surgery to reattach my fingers, been thrown in a ditch by my hair by a sergeant saving me from a missile blast, held another soldier’s hand with his thigh bone sticking through his uniform, heard and saw a soldier’s pelvis break when he was caught between a tank and a truck, had so many fly bites that my eyes swelled shut, stood guard in a sideways snowstorm thinking I would be found dead frozen in a drift, and suffered many other minor discomforts over the years, like wearing a 45-pound armored vest in 130-degree heat in Iraq.

But bicycle racing really tops my injury list, a spreadsheet I keep of broken bones, surgeries and hospital stays.  Bicycling accounts for half of the 33 broken bones and 19 surgeries I have had in my long life. When I really go all out racing or training, my throat aches, my body aches and for a couple of days after I suffer intestinal distress.   Becoming merely a mediocre racer meant a commitment to training that blocked so much of the rest of my life.  I worked as a consultant 15 years ago when I got serious about racing. I limited my work hours, and my income, so I could train more.  When I took a full-time job, the big negotiation was a schedule that would allow me to ride.

But, of course, the thrill of victory (occasionally) in bike racing and the intense pride of wearing our nation’s uniform to a war compensated for some of the suffering of being a soldier and racing. 

With adoption, the feeling of giving a family to a kid who needs a family is among the greatest joys of this life.  But then there are the persistent sorrows.  Adopting a kid with in utero drug exposure means the child will always have difficulty reading and have many limitations in school and in life.  Children who grow up in a family other than their birth family are going to wonder why they are not with their birth families.  And kids who are torn from their birth parents and put into foster care will spend the rest of their lives with an enflamed survival instinct.  When our adopted kids do things that leave me wondering what they were thinking, I try to remember they were not thinking they were surviving. 

Part of the reason my wife and I adopted is because the most clear command in Scripture after loving God is to care for widows and orphans.  Paired with that clear command is the equally clear promise that suffering is the mark of a Believer.  When I get an email telling me I need to come to school right away and talk about my son’s behavior, or I open the on-line grading report and find a series of assignments never started let alone completed and D is the highest grade, I am suffering.  I try to remember this is a mark of True Faith. 

I am in counseling.  I started last fall after one of the inexplicable episodes adoptive parenthood put in the center of my life. 

So I told my friend if you adopt, you will suffer.  But I working with the counselor helped me to realize if I had a chance to do this all over again, I would.  

Recently, my son with the most troubled past has become a boxer.  He lost his second match earlier this month and decided to really train, including running the two miles each way each day to the boxing gym.  He is rapidly becoming a tough, determined young man. 

As with Faith and the Army and Racing, Adoption has made my life richer and more vivid than it ever could have been on safe path.

Machiavelli on Leadership: The Staff Shows the Character of the Leader

Good leaders surround themselves with good people and inspire them.  The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli has much to say about leadership. This post is about how the leader's character is evident in her staff. 

Early in the book, Machiavelli tells the reader that those who want to understand a valley climb a mountain and those who want to understand mountains look up from the valley.  With this he says leaders understand the people and the people understand leaders.  

My view of leadership, like Machiavelli's, is from the valley looking up.  I was never higher than a staff sergeant in the Army and turned down any job above manager as a civilian.  

But looking up, I could see things differently than the person in charge.  Machiavelli says that a leader must be sure that the staff directly reporting to her be completely loyal to her, or she should dismiss them.  Machiavelli says the character of her staff defines the leader herself.  

In my experience both in and out of the Army, one sure sign of a weak and indecisive leader is a staff that is fighting among themselves for power rather than working together for the interest of the leader.  My last civilian job was at a museum and library founded by a man who raised more than $100 million for the place he founded and was viewed as an autocrat by his staff.  But during the five years I worked for him, his senior staff made sure their part of the organization pulled together when the President gave them a job to do.  The founder left at 25 years with an amazing run of success.

After he left, the next president and one one that followed were the kind of leaders who wanted concensus and cooperation.  Very rapidly, the senior staff became a group of separate businesses who happened to occupy the same building.  At this time the museum and library is searching for the next president.  Machiavelli says if they don't find a strong leader, the infighting will only get worse.

On the other side, I was part of Brigade '76, a Mechanized Brigade sent to Wiesbaden, West Germany, in 1976, to add more troops to defend against the Soviet Union.  Our alert area was Fulda on the east-west border.  Within 48 hours of landing in Germany, the tank battalion I was in, two mechanized infantry battalions, artillery and support units were fully combat loaded and patrolling the border fence.  

Col. Riscassi took that mission and made sure every member of his staff was executing their part.  Or they were gone.  I worked in his headquarters the following year and saw his leadership up close.  He was very formal, took advice when he asked for it, but not otherwise (another maxim of Machiavelli) and was always in charge.  

Machiavelli says if you want to see how good a leader is, look at the staff.  If the people who are closest to him respect the leader and carry out commands with energy, that is a good leader.  When the staff shows infighting and turmoil, the leader is weak and irresolute.  

Rather than try to review this gold mine of leadership in one post, I am going to spread this review over several posts talking about Machiavelli's many maxims on how leadership works.