P.S. A Column On Things

Great Jobs 1: RIP CMP

I was sitting around trying to count my blessings recently, and I had to give up when I got to “innumerable.” Among them is the fact that of the amazing jobs I had with the six organizations I’ve worked for between 1974 and my retirement in 2013, including the very best, my home from 1979 to 1999, under a couple of different names, under the general rubric of CMP, a company which published newspapers and magazines (and eventually websites) for people in the computer and electronics industries, such as Computer Systems News, InformationWEEK and Techweb.

My employee number was in the 80s, at a company that hit 1,000 at its peak, and sold for a billion dollars shortly before it became worthless and disappeared. The culture that made it great disappeared when it was sold in 1999—not by coincidence, the year I was laid off. But I made my peace with that bonehead move a long time ago, and I’m not going to insult the leaders I disrespect, since some of them read this column now and then.

Instead, I want to sing the praises of the two finest business owners I have ever known, Gerry and Lilo Leeds, and the terrific company they founded. This isn’t easy for me; I am the son of a milkman, a lifelong member of the Teamster’s Union. My father’s opinion of American corporate management could not have been lower. Even he had to admit the Leeds were something else.

I’m not going to try to write a history of the company, or a memorial to the Leeds family. Instead, I simply want to say that I know a company can put human values first, because for a while I worked for one that did.

Yes, I know that some of you who worked with me there and still read this will be moaning. “Schindler is such a sucker. He drank the Kool-Aid.” Maybe, but to me it tasted pretty good, and it wasn’t poisonous until the end.

I’ll spare you the details, but the Leeds constantly put their people first. When I had newspapers and magazines shot out from under me, they kept me on the payroll until something else came along, because they knew I was good. And I know I’m not the only one of whom that is true. They encouraged a family feeling by holding a corporate retreat every summer (derisively nicknamed ‘Camp CMP.”)

 There were people who found it cloying and hokey; I found it motivating and enjoyable. We were put up in nice resorts, heard interesting speakers, and got to know the other employees. I thought it was grand, and it was unique in my experience. The only thing that ever came close was the PC Week Black Tie dinner (see part 2 of this series, coming soon), but I only went to one of those, as opposed to 19 CMP retreats.

The owners of a thousand-person company knew the names of my wife and daughters. Gerry rode in an elevator with me once, and as we got out on the executive floor (I was just visiting), he said, “Who was that in the elevator with us. I hate the fact that I don’t know everyone’s name anymore.” He sincerely meant it. Since he didn’t have Pat McGovern’s eidetic memory (see part 3), he just did the best he could, because he cared.

Employees were treated with respect. Talent was recognized and rewarded. Managers were (with a few exceptions) good and decent people. It wasn’t until later in my career that I became familiar, at a small remove, with the concept of “management by rubber hose.” I’m not going to name the good managers, because I don’t want to insult the bad ones. No organization is perfect, but it was a warm and remarkable home. After I spent 10 months at Ziff-Davis in the middle of my CMP tenure, Gerry called me upon my return. “I just view it as a paid sabbatical, paid for by Ziff.” He restored my seniority (later stripped from me by the new owners). As it says in Black Beauty, for 20 years, when it was cold, I had a blanket and warm mash.

I know for a fact that most employees don’t feel this way. My father, for example, regularly referred to the owners for whom he delivered milk to the homes of Portland, Ore. as “unmitigated idiots.” And in fact, I had a few such managers along the way. But my time at CMP was a blessing.

Of course, the obverse is true: every silver lining has a dark cloud. In my last year, I was feeling pretty good about the fact my website Winmag.Com had zero turnover at a time when the division averaged 30% turnover. I ran into a manager I had known for 20 years, and said, “Pretty good huh?”

“I’m not your manager so I can’t say.”

 Classy huh? He couldn’t say ‘Not bad?” Not every manager is classy and supportive.

See also: Department of Gratuitous Detail (from next week's column)

Apostrophe Champion Dies

I have heard of and enjoyed this British gentleman’s work over the years, but without a kind forward from a friend, I would have missed his obituary in the Washington Post (behind firewall): John Richards, bulwark for the apostrophe against grammatical ‘barbarians,’ dies at 97. The best sentence in the story:

“Just take the sign outside a block of flats,” he once told Slate Magazine. “‘Residents’ refuse to be placed in bins.’ Remove the apostrophe and you see a very different notice.” For the imagination impaired, it reads: Residents refuse to be placed in bins.

I strive to avoid the sign painter’s apostrophe, but sometimes it just looks better… a very weak excuse.

In our era where, apparently, punctuation in a text message is a micro-aggression, I am sad we have lost a grammar cop. The perpetrators will now run wild, undeterred.

RIP Maija Meijers

From https://www.angelsdailymessage.com/: “This is from Bruce, Maija’s loving husband. Maija, the conduit for these messages, passed away on 4/21/21. This page will no longer be updated with new daily messages. I hope that the Angel messages have brought you a measure of peace and comfort.” She served the angels by channeling their messages for the last 40 years of her life.

Maiji Ingrida Meijers was 69 years old, and lived in Western Massachusetts. I would have been glad of her for a few more years in my life, but I must not be selfish. As the angels told her to tell us, “There will be a time to Go Home.  There will be a time to lay aside the body illusion and fly free in Wisdom and Light.  But, meanwhile, be the window through which the Light shines.” She was that window her entire life.

In some sense, I am sure it is a relief to her to remove the makeup and costumes of the life illusion. On the other hand, she often said we aren’t going to heaven; we are already there. She’s just had a change of address.

I won’t be presumptuous enough to attempt an obituary, as my knowledge of this beautiful soul is fragmentary. Maija Ingrida Meijers lived in the room next to me at MIT’s co-ed co-operative Student House during the 1970-71 school year. MIT turned out not to be for her, so I last laid eyes on her almost exactly a half-century ago in the spring of 1971. At the age of 19, she was already deeply spiritual, and touched my soul in a way it has seldom been touched.

I was fortunate enough to be able to catch up with her, once the Internet had sufficient moxie to lead me to her website. She offered me telephone counseling several times, and was a regular e-mail correspondent. I was a daily reader during the 21^st century. I recommend the now-static site and her books, available on Amazon. We are never gone as long as someone remembers us; Maija will still be here until I’m gone.

UnFox Your Box Redux

Regular readers will recall that I decided to Unfox my cable box. As the site notes, your options are limited if you don’t wish to send $20 a year to a nest of treasonous, seditious vipers―AKA Fox news personalities. Comcast does not have a tier that includes CNN but excludes Fox, although I did ask for one. So, I slashed my Comcast package to cut out the carriage fee. And CNN does not offer an Over The Top service (apparently because it fears offending cable providers).

Alas, the site doesn’t tell you who DOESN’T pay carriage fees to Fox. Until Comcast wakes up and offers a Foxless tier, I have decided to go with Sling TV Orange. (thanks to the Daily Kos contributor who actually did the research). You should too.

Pseudonyms

 

A while back, I ran an item about Allen Smithee, the name directors once used on films they thought had been butchered. Daniel Dern knew Harlan Ellison did something similar:

Ellison on occasion used the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird to alert members of the public to situations in which he felt his creative contribution to a project had been mangled by others, beyond repair, typically Hollywood producers or studios (see also Alan Smithee). The first such work to which he signed the name was The Price of Doom, an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (though it was misspelled as Cord Wainer Bird in the credits). An episode of Burke's Law (Who Killed Alex Debbs?) credited to Ellison contains a character given this name, played by Sammy Davis Jr.

The "Cordwainer Bird" moniker is a tribute to fellow SF writer Paul M. A. Linebarger, better known by his pen name, Cordwainer Smith. The origin of the word "cordwainer" is shoemaker (from working with cordovan leather for shoes). The term used by Linebarger was meant to imply the industriousness of the pulp author. Ellison said, in interviews and in his writing, that his version of the pseudonym was meant to mean "a shoemaker for birds.” Since he used the pseudonym mainly for works he wanted to distance himself from, it may be understood to mean that ‘this work is for the birds’ or that it is of as much use as shoes to a bird. Stephen King once said he thought that it meant that Ellison was giving people who mangled his work a literary version of ‘the bird’ (given credence by Ellison himself in his own essay titled Somehow, I Don't Think We're in Kansas, Toto, describing his experience with the Starlost television series).

And then of course, there were mine: Gene Paul (KLIQ. The Tech), Paul St. John (KVAN), Gary S. Paul (AdWeek) and Reginald A. Stuart-Smythe (The Tech). Air names were because that’s what people used to do in radio; Gary S. Paul because I wasn’t supposed to be free-lancing at the time, and The Tech because of a rule prohibiting the use of the same byline twice on a single page. And another radio name (see the bottom of the right hand column on this page), Eugene Oregon.

Relationship Advice Redux: Ocean, Mountain or Desert... Or City?

Robert Malchman commented on my first item on this topic:

“You forgot City. I can tolerate Ocean (I like to look at the water, not go in it), Mountain (the Catskills are nice, but haven't been in a decade) and desert (Southwest is beautiful, but haven't been for 30 years). But City is where I want to be, both to live and to vacation (best vacation of our marriage was Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Berlin and Copenhagen). That said, somehow my son loves the Ocean, so we try to go for a week each year, despite it being something my wife and I would rarely do if it were just us.”

While Vicki and I have enormously enjoyed London, Paris, Venice and Amsterdam—even San Francisco (25 miles away) from time to time, she summed up my feelings when she noted, “A city doesn’t feel like much of a getaway.”

It may also be a West Coast thing, or an Oregon thing; I grew up an hour from the beach, an hour from the mountains (REAL mountains, the Cascades) and 90 minutes from the Eastern Oregon desert.

Maybe I should have used the word getaway instead of vacation…

Orinda Theater Marquee

Movies haven’t started up yet in Orinda, Cal., so the marquee of the lovely Orinda Theater can be rented for a special message. Regular readers will remember the couplet from my love poem You Affect Me that goes:

Every single thing I do
is better, proximate to you

There was only room for half the couplet.

The Threat Of Nuclear War

Kevin Sullivan so enjoyed my anecdote about passing second-term calculus that he shared one of his own:

I instigated one very-MIT hack that has often warmed the cockles....

Following an evening film at MIT (part of a Course XXI film class) about the bombing of Dresden, I found myself returning home walking along the river with a few other Student House friends who attended.

Noting the clear sky conditions that evening, I put out the ideas to my now sensitized and empathetic fellow film-goers that

1. a) the people of Dresden thought they were in a 'protected' city at the time,  that
2. b) in Boston we were in heightened danger of a first-strike nuclear attack by the Russians on our technological center of the universe, and
3. c) one would see the flash from an atomic bomb (and be dead) long before they would hear it. 

The deeply-rooted seeds of the prank bore fruit when within 10 minutes as the whole sky light up in an enormous flash coming from the Boston skyline which just as quickly died down.

As a current participant in Doc Edgerton's High Speed Photography class, I knew he had rented a penthouse apartment on the Boston side of the rivers so he could take evening big-flash photos of MIT with his 100,000 candlepower strobe light. After pointing out to my crouching friends that hiding behind a bush wouldn't be much of a cover, I decided to make my way quickly to a more congenial location.

…

Kevin’s story triggered some recollections. It resonates with me because in my youth, we all thought my hometown of Portland, Ore. (a coin toss away from being Boston, Ore.) was a target because of the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia river. Many was the night I went to sleep anticipating not waking up in the morning after a nuclear Holocaust. Vicki tells me people in West LA weren’t worried, but maybe it was just her family. The threat of nuclear war, of course, never really stopped, but it seems most people have ceased to worry about it on a daily basis. I asked my daughters and neither of them could ever remember having nuclear anxiety.

I think that, at mid-century, everyone thought they were in a Ruskie bullseye. So, yet another appeal to readers: was your hometown a target or not, and why?  

Audio Editing Hacks

If you ever looked at the “Menu” to the right of my column  you’d find this at the very bottom:

Fun with electronic editing. At WTBS, these were called hacks. Back in the 70s they were done with spliced magnetic tape. Now they can be done with electrons.
Alphabet Medley

Frank Sinatra/Ella Fitzgerald Duet: I've Got A Crush on You

Alphabet Song from single sung syllables

(I mentioned it once before, in the Oct. 18 This and That)

I have enjoyed reacquainting myself with this hobby of late. I realized that two of my favorite audio hacks were requests: my daughter loved I’ve Got A Crush on You, and said she wished Frank and Ella had sung it as a duet. Now they have.

I did the Alphabet Medley 10 years ago, after I realized how many songs included spelling sections (Sexxy, Respect, Saturday Night, Back in the USSR, YMCA). I dusted it off and my wife said, “Why not create an alphabet song for our grandson” (who is almost two years old).

Yes, of course there are dozens of alphabet songs that are just sung as alphabet songs, but where is the challenge in that?

Creating the Alphabet Song From Sung Syllables took hours, but they were hours of pleasure for me. A tip of the PSACOT hat to the Jackson Five’s ABC and to Detroit’s WXYZ radio. Not to mention Frank Sinatra’s It Had to Be You, (U) and the song Cutie (Q-T) Pie.

The best hack I’ve ever heard I CANNOT find a copy of; a team of experts at my college station (then WTBS, now WMBR) managed to get the Beatles to sing “WTBS, Cambridge,” using only razor blades and tape.

Chuck and his Ban-Lons

I revived this headline from a half century ago because it tells a story.

Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner thinks he gave me my MIT degree at commencement. But the fact of the matter is, I got it from a female grad student a year earlier.

By the way, if you know any female grad student who was grading 18.02 self-paced exams during the spring of 1972, let me know, since I’d like to thank her personally. I hope I thanked her at the time.

I finally passed second-term calculus the second term of my sophomore year (a year late), because of the little strike (the big strike came during Cambodia. The little strike was a half-hearted measure in May 1972 over the mining of Haiphong harbor. Funny, I doubt I could point to Haiphong on a map, but without it I would never have gotten my MIT degree).

To be precise: MIT said you could get a “pass” if you only finished half your class work. I only needed one more test to pass 18.02, second-term calculus (I had already flunked it twice).

I took the self-paced test and went up to the female grad student who was going to grade it. “Paul Schindler? The one who met Charlton Heston?” She was fascinated with my stories of my interview. She looked at my paper: “Arithmetically, all your answers are wrong, but you showed your work, and you clearly know the calculus.”

I wish I knew her name. She, Charlton Heston and Richard Nixon enabled me to graduate from MIT.