First Quarter Update

 

 

Dear Friends:

 

I cannot remember the last time I was on the ground for almost eight weeks.  We landed from Frankfurt on December 3, and I did not take off again until January 24.  I was ready!

 

Whoosh, up we went in an American Eagle small jet, bound for Amarillo.  I was grinning.  Some might cynically remark “big deal,” or “Wow, Amarillo,” but I was excited to visit the panhandle for the first time, if only for several hours.   Flying closer to Amarillo, the Caprock Escarpment came into view, marking a transition between lowland plains and the high plains.  Along it are interesting, deeply eroded landforms; it’s fascinating, mostly because it doesn’t look like Texas – it looks like New Mexico or Arizona, little valleys and arroyos and lovely red soil that was especially colorful in the bright sun.   Two big storms had brought winter, and the snow also seemed un-Texan.  Waiting to be picked up, I stood in a warm sun and made three or four snowballs; I still had the skill.

 

Along came Jerry Bergeron, an officer of the Amarillo Advertising Federation.  I was the “ad club’s” lunchtime speaker.  We had a good visit (a fellow Midwesterner, he grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota), and he showed me a bit of the downtown.  Like many towns this size (about 180,000), Amarillo is now way overbuilt, because retail has departed the core; thus the challenge is what to do with the old, big buildings – the hospital, the old hotels, the lovely old Santa Fe railway building, and more. 

 

An observer could quickly see civic-mindedness in the landscape.  The local paper, the Amarillo Globe-News, provided funding for a new, nicely-designed performing arts center.  Jerry described some worthy chamber activities.  It’s great to see that sort of commitment to community.

 

In the 1980s, Texas Commerce Bank (now Chase) built a skyscraper downtown, and it was the venue for my talk, way up to the Amarillo Club on the 34th floor.  After lunch, more evidence of civic spirit, in donations from the ad club to a local speech and hearing agency, and $200 for our Dallas Ramp Project (I solicited the donation in lieu of travel expenses, but it was still very welcome). 

 

After lunch, we headed to Jerry’s office for 90 minutes, then out to the airport.  Flew home, vowing to return to another interesting Texas place.

 

Four days later, on Sunday the 29th, Linda and I headed downtown to the Meyerson Symphony Center, for a farewell service for our pastor, Jon Lee, who is retiring after 35 years at King of Glory Lutheran Church.  It was a wonderful event.  I peeled off, headed to the airport, and flew to Montreal, landing at dusk.  Hopped the bus into town, and then a free shuttle to my hotel.  On the little bus, I had my first Talking to Strangers encounter of the year, with a Calgary lawyer, born in Hungary in 1948 and raised in Montreal (I gather they arrived after the 1956 uprising, but we didn’t get that far).  He had four degrees from McGill University, where I would be teaching.  The conversation began when he asked about the leather Texas flag tag I have on my suitcase – he had been to Austin two weeks earlier, and loved the place; he confessed that prior to that visit, he held the usual stereotypes about our state.

 

Checked into the Holiday Inn on Rue Sherbrooke (remember, dear reader, that this was Québec, where French is the language), and set off to find dinner.  It was just above zero F., and a once­-familiar sound came back into my brain – a particular squeak of snow under foot, only heard when it is really cold.

 

I did a bit of research and jotted two restaurants in my PDA a week earlier.  I set off down Rue Aylmer, and easily found the first one, closed for renovations.  I pressed on to the second, on Place Youville, closed Sundays.  I was now in the old city, Vieux-Montréal, and with clear bearings I found Les Ramparts, a restaurant I visited on my last trip here in October 2005.   I had another great meal, grilled sweetbreads as appetizer, and a plate of halibut.  I declined dessert, but they brought a complimentary truffle and a small portion of ice cream made from goat’s milk.  Yum!  Walked briskly home, past the wonderfully ornate old city hall, watched the CBC news, and clocked out.

 

Up at seven, out the door, to a simple Canadian breakfast at Tim Horton’s, the chain of coffee and donuts places found across that big country.  Two bran muffins, a large coffee, and I was ready for the day.  I ambled up Peel Street to the law school, for a lecture on airline alliances to a group of graduate law students in McGill’s Institute of Air and Space Law.  My host, Professor Paul Dempsey, head of the institute, arrived after I began.  We had the whole morning, and it was a good group. 

 

Left just after noon, walking briskly back to the hotel for a credit union board meeting via telephone, then back to meet Paul for a late lunch at the McGill Faculty Club.  That place was the definition of Old School, built in an 1887 mansion that once belonged to Dr. Baumgarten, a German noble and chemist, the fellow who discovered how to extract sugar from beets.  Awesome woodwork and other detail.  Paul and I had a good lunch and caught up – I met him 15 years ago when I worked in AA International Planning, and lectured once in 1994 or ’95 when he was still at the University of Denver.  He knows a lot about our business, both legal aspects and business fundamentals.

 

Said goodbye just before three, hopped on the Metro, and rode to Ile St. Helene, an island in the St. Lawrence.  I had been there 40 years earlier, when the island and an adjacent one held expo67, the big World’s Fair that marked Canada’s centenary.  Back then it was summer, and we were 15.  Now it was winter, and I was older.  It was great to be back.  That first Canadian trip imprinted many things on me, and laid a foundation for an interest in the country that endures.  The fairgrounds are now a park named for Jean Drapeau, mayor of the city back then.  I ambled around, walking inside the spherical geodesic dome designed by R. Buckminster Fuller that was the U.S. pavilion.  It was a cool time.  Cold, too, with a brisk wind.  The St. Lawrence was moving quickly, and small ice floes rolled past.

 

Took the Metro back to my hotel, worked my e-mail, and set off at seven for another lecture, this time to MBA students.  My host, Demetrios Vakratsas, introduced me.  The talk went well, lots of good questions.  We walked back to the hotel (Demetrios lives in the old city).  I was hungry, and grabbed a sandwich at a nearby supermarket, walked back to my room, and tuned in NHL hockey – the hometown Canadiens versus the Ottawa Senators.  The broadcast was in French, but it didn’t matter.  Watching hockey in Canada was a perfect end to a swell day.

 

Up early again, breakfast at Chez Cora, a local chain, then into downtown to take a few pictures of their underground concourses, begun in the 1960s to keep folks out of the cold.  Ambled back to the main railway station, to snap pictures of wonderful 1950s-era friezes on the upper walls of the main waiting area.  Back to the hotel, grabbed my suitcase, and back to McGill for a lecture to undergraduates.  Lunch with Demetrios, another lecture, and out the door at 3:45 for the bus back to the airport and a flight home.  A great start to the spring 2007 semester.

 

I was home for less than 24 hours, the last day of January, just long enough to do a bit of work and strike a blow for the environment by picking up a Toyota Camry Hybrid.  I had been eyeing hybrids for awhile, and this one had the perfect combination of great mileage (40 MPG), virtually zero emissions (what’s called PZEV), and comfort (leather seats and good audio).  I was feeling pretty good as I tooled across North Texas, polluting nothing and sipping regular gas.  At the risk of piety or smugness, I’ll only say this: each of us can make choices, and ultimately, much of the state of our world depends on the choices we make.

 

At six I flew back up to winter, this time in Minneapolis/St. Paul.  Picked up a Hertz car and motored in a new direction.  The “bunkhouse” at Chuck Wiser’s house, my usual digs, was being used by another friend, so I headed northeast to the Como Park neighborhood of St. Paul, to billet with longtime pal Bob Woehrle and his new partner Paula Kelty.  We yakked for about an hour, then I clocked out on their living-room couch, snug under one of those wonderful Hudson Bay Company point blankets, the white ones with the red, yellow, green, and black stripes.  Slept hard.

 

Up at 6:30 early breakfast nearby with Bob and Paula, and we peeled off, me motoring local routes toward the West Bank of the University of Minnesota.  I smiled when I passed Luther Theological Seminary, the place where our retiring pastor studied.  It was as cold as Montreal, -3 F., and Minnesota Public Radio was promising the arrival of a cold front by the end of the day.

 

At 9:30, I met my host at the Carlson School of Management, Debbie John, for my third visit to her class on Advertising and Brand Management.   After the talk, I headed to lunch with Mike Houston, Associate Dean for International Programs.   Mike knew that I had retired and was keen to do more teaching, and we yakked about opportunities in Carlson’s joint ventures abroad, as well as overseas programs for Carlson students.  I was delighted with the prospect of deepening my relationship with a great part of my beloved U of M.  I then met Wayne Mueller, an adjunct professor who taught the Ad class to part-time (evening) MBA students.  Debbie let me use her office, and I worked some e-mail and other stuff, then headed down to Wayne’s class.  Two good sessions.

 

At 7:30 I headed across town to my favorite Black Forest Inn, sat down at the bar that I’ve known since 1971, and sipped a big glass of Summit Pale Ale, brewed across the river in St. Paul.  In a couple minutes hosts Paula and Bob arrived, and we had a swell dinner.  Headed back to their house and was asleep under the point blanket in no time.

 

Bob is between jobs, and we took our time the next morning, yakking and drinking coffee from 6:30.  He’s a great friend, a fellow who has shouldered more than his share of challenges, always with grace and a broad smile.  At 8:30, I headed back toward the U of M, taking side streets.   I stopped in to see one of my Ph.D. advisers, John Fraser Hart, still going strong in his 80s.  If you think the words on these pages are written properly, you can thank Fraser, who taught me how to write.  

 

I met Betsy Taplin from the College of Liberal Arts for a visit about speaking possibilities, had a great tour of the Borchert Map Library (though I had spent a lot of time there years ago – it was the place where I wrote my dissertation in 1977-78 – I welcomed a proper tour of the place that honors the work of my mentor John Borchert).  At noon we drove across the Mississippi and met Genie Smith, who writes and edits stuff for CLA.  We had corresponded at various times through the years, and it was great to finally meet her.  Lunch venue was the Campus Club (the second such venue in five days), on the top floor of the student union, not as old school as McGill, but with a great view of the river, the city, and the older core of the campus.  We had a great time.

 

At two I drove along the river, back to St. Paul and onto Palace Avenue, to meet Todd Heimdahl, an artist and teacher, and to pick up a remarkable watercolor that won a ribbon at the 2006 Minnesota State Fair art show.   I had hoped to retrieve it months earlier.  It was great to see it again, and to visit with Todd, a talented painter lately focused on scenes from the northern Great Plains.  This painting was a four-foot-wide panorama of bison grazing along Sage Creek in the Black Hills of South Dakota.  As in previous years, it was a great joy to meet and visit with the artist.  Todd showed me his studio, and explained a bit about how he works – from visiting the sites to a color photograph to a pencil sketch to the final composition.  He put the bison in a box, we shook hands, and I departed, a bit worried about my ability to carry it onto the plane. 

 

At the airport, I checked my suitcase so I’d only have the painting and my backpack.  Got through the TSA gauntlet without a hitch, and ambled down to the gate, where Mrs. Wolf, a South Dakota native now living in central Texas, asked me what was in the box.  Thus began a nice TtS experience.  I gave her a print of a pencil sketch that Todd gave me, a simple composition of a bison nursing her calf.   She was on her way back from visiting her 96-year-old father, who was near death, and she needed some cheer.  That was my job.

 

A nice trip, but it was good to be home.  Even better to be out the door at 7:30, MacKenzie pulling eagerly on her leash, both of us exhorting each other to greater speed.

 

Four days later, back into winter, back into Canada.  We crossed into Ontario just north of Detroit.  I looked down, and from seven miles high I could see a different place.  Everyone had health insurance, for example.  I smiled.  We landed 30 minutes later, and as I’ve done every winter for the past four, I hopped on the Toronto Transit Commission’s “Airport Rocket,” Route 192, riding five miles south to the subway, then east to the city.  Walked a couple of blocks to Lowther House, my Toronto “home” B&B; it was good to be back.  Owner Linda Lilge showed me to an enormous suite in the front of the house.  I worked my e-mail briefly, and headed back to the subway, riding east across downtown to Danforth Avenue, a vibrant arterial best known for a string of Greek restaurants.  It was good to get indoors at Mezes, a Greek place. 

 

Walking from the train, I returned to a thought I had an hour earlier when leaving the subway: Toronto reminded me of Chicago when I was really little and holding my grandmother’s hand, riding their subway.  Why?  Perhaps because Toronto is closer to the ideal city that forms in a child’s mind – clean, orderly, safe.  A nice image, to be sure.

 

Twenty minutes later, an Upper Canada Dark Ale in my hand, I met my old friend Harvey Wise, who years back worked for American’s advertising agency in Canada.  Harvey had spent his first years working in the airline business, then a stint in adland, and more recently launched a successful career as an interior designer.  We had a great yak over a couple of hours, and he drove me back to my digs.

 

Next morning it all came at me pretty fast.  Most years, the breakfast table at the B&B is empty, but that Thursday there were three Iranians, one of whom, Pantea Bahrami, I met the night before, a refugee and filmmaker now living in Germany.  Twelve hours earlier, she told me she was in town to screen her documentary about a woman imprisoned and tortured by the Ayatollah’s regime.  Now I was sitting next to that woman, Soudabeh Ardavan, and her 14-year-old daughter, both now living in Sweden.  Whoa.  Face to face.  I could feel a tear forming.  The filmmaker sat down, and we had a nice chat (Soudabeh’s harrowing story is at http://www.iranian.com/Arts/2002/September/Ardavan/index.html).

 

A few minutes, Joel, a young postdoc physicist, joined us.  I yakked with him, too, learning, for example, that the new particle collider about to go online in Geneva will have sensors that collect 250 megabytes of data every second.  Past eight, I stood up and said goodbye.  I took a photo of the three Iranians, and said I’d post it on my website in a few weeks.  Then I told Soudabeh that I was glad to have met her, “And I’m glad you are now free.”  Whoa, again.  Quite a breakfast.

 

I walked over to campus, drawn magnetically – as I am every year – to Soldier Tower, the memorial to Canadian fighters of the two world wars, and the marvelous inscription on its wall from the ancient Greek historian and philosopher Thucydides, that I last recorded on these pages in 2004:

 

Their story is not graven only on stone over their

native earth, but lives on far away, without visible

symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives.

 

Inspired, I headed to the Rotman School of Management at the U of T, and at nine met Prof. Joe D’Cruz and a researcher Jennifer Riel, working out some details for my lecture that evening.  I headed back out 45 minutes later, pausing to work my e-mail on a wireless connection at a coffee shop.  Across Bloor Avenue was a dramatic addition to the Royal Ontario Museum, the Daniel Lee-Chin Crystal, designed by the hot architect Daniel Liebeskind.  Who was Mr. Lee-Chin, I wondered, and Googled him.  He was an immigrant from Jamaica, same age as me, who arrived in Toronto in the 1970s.  He’s done well, and donates a lot of money in both countries.  A success.  Hooray for immigrants!

 

While online, I also watched a brief clip from Dr. Bahrami’s documentary about Soudabeh.  Powerful.  Scary.

 

Past eleven, I hopped on the subway and rode into the middle of downtown, and at noon met Lorne Salzman, an attorney I’ve known since 1993, and who has done a lot of work for American over the years.  We had lunch a year earlier, and have now vowed to make it an annual event.  He’s just a great fellow, full of interesting stories, including many adventures from his youth, like hitchhiking from an intern job with Swissair in Zurich to Sri Lanka in 1970-71. 

 

At two, I headed to the Toronto City Center Airport, a small facility on an island in Lake Ontario.  Canadian city politics can be messy, and anti-noise people and Greens have seen to it that there’s no bridge to span only about 400 feet of water.  Thus, one rides a free three-minute ferry.  A new airline has begun operations there, Porter, flying to Montreal and Toronto, and its prospects were the subject of my short lecture that evening.  At the terminal, I met Porter’s sales and marketing director, and toured the terminal and one of their new Q400 planes.  Impressive.  Headed back to the B&B, worked my e-mail briefly, and at 5:30 walked to the U of T Faculty Club (my third school club in two weeks).  My talk was to 120 alums and volunteers who would judge student teams’ work on a proposal to obtain additional capital for Porter Airlines.   I didn’t get on until after 8, and we were to be done by 8:30, so I stepped briskly through a half-dozen slides, answered some questions, and walked home on a cold night.  It was a full day.

 

Was up at 6:15 on Friday, and downstairs to say hello to fellow U of M alum Kim Bates, who was my original host at the U of T.  She didn’t get tenure there, and was quickly hired at a smaller school, Trent University, in Peterborough, about 75 miles east-northeast of Toronto.  We ate breakfast, said goodbye to Linda Lilge, and headed up to a new campus.  The ride was fun.  Kim’s a good talker, and we covered a lot of ground in 90 minutes.  I had not been in rural Ontario for a lot of years.  The first part of the drive was purely freeway and suburbs, but the landscape changed after we turned north on a smaller road and headed toward Peterborough.  We rose about 500 feet, from the flat plain along Lake Ontario, and soon were in forest, a hint of the dense woods that began not far north of us, and spread hundreds of miles toward the North Pole.

 

We arrived on the new campus (Trent began in the late 1970s), parked the car, and dashed into the classroom, a few minutes after the 9 A.M. start.  The lecture was new territory – a month earlier, Kim put me in touch with John Bishop, who teaches business ethics.  The talk was titled “Corporate Ethics: A Personal View.”  I was, truth to tell, a bit nervous, a fish out of water.  But it went well, with some good questions.  At ten, we plunged straight into my alliances lecture, more familiar ground.  An hour later, we were done, and headed to Kim’s office.  The business-admin. Department shared a new building with the Math and Indigenous Studies departments, the latter lending a lot of décor – prints and sculptures by Native Canadian artists. 

 

Before getting in the car and heading to lunch, we detoured 50 feet from the car to see a tipi (“teepee”), in the thick woods that gird the campus.  The school clearly had an orientation to what Canadians call the First Nations, and it was all interesting.  We joined John and Stefan, a recent graduate, for lunch at Taste of India, yum.  Before starting the drive back, we parked in a mall lot and checked the trunk of Kim’s rental car for a jug of washer fluid.  It was one of those moments I recall from years back, hands freezing, raising the hood, finding the washer reservoir – ah, the joys of winter!

 

The ride to Toronto was another chance for a good yak – about Kim’s Irish partner Johnny, her family, business trends, rising awareness of global warming, and more.  A stimulating ride.  She dropped me at YYZ, Toronto airport, just after three.  I had several hours, so worked my e-mail to zero, and flew home. 

 

A half-hour out of DFW, while waiting to use the washroom, I started yakking with two flight attendants, one of whom I had met a couple of years ago.  She’s battled a lot of personal tragedy and still smiles.  Her cancer returned last year, but she’s still fighting, and still smiling.  She looked good.  I gave her a hug and told her that I’d add her to my prayer list. 

 

We spent most of the next day, Saturday the 11th, building a 50-foot ramp for James and Vivian in South Dallas.  We needed to remove quite a bit of earth for the ramp to reach pavement, and the task soon became aerobic ramp-building, with your scribe alternately wielding a pick-axe, pitchfork, spade, and scoop shovel.  A good workout for the lungs, arms, and lower back.  Got home at 4:30 and somehow did not feel a pressing need to ride my bike for exercise!

 

Sunday morning we were up early and out the door, for a day trip to Minneapolis to see twin nephews Sam and Ed, now 15 months old and quite mobile.  Linda’s brother Mike and sister-in-law Melissa brought them to my mother-in-law Karen’s house in Edina (the town where I grew up), and we had brunch and a nice visit.  I took a bunch of pictures – they are seriously photogenic, with big eyes and expressive faces.   I am always grateful for the blessing of almost-free air travel, and a day like that reminds us of the enormity of our “magic carpet.” 

 

On the morning of the 15th I flew to Columbus, landed at noon, and motored with pal Gary Doernhoefer back to the Ohio State campus (first visited just three months earlier).  Ohio State’s aviation program is part engineering (the school in which it resides), part pilot training, and part airline management.  Gary and I jointly delivered a presentation on airline sales and distribution to a class on the latter.  The prof., Jim Oppermann, was an interesting fellow, a long-time America West airport manager, with good insights on the pluses and minuses of how we run our business.  With about an hour between classes, Gary and I grabbed a quick sandwich and yakked, then it was my turn in his aviation regulation class, a lively group of ten students.

 

After the talk, I worked my e-mail in Gary’s office, and we then headed to dinner on nearby High Street, an eclectic and hip place called Alana’s.  Gary is a great conversationalist, and we yakked across a range of topics.  But by 8:30 the bags under his eyes were large – he had just flown in from an aviation law conference in Istanbul, and had a 60-minute drive home to the small town where they live.  It was a fun day.  Was home by 10:30 the next morning, Friday, flying back on a cold, clear day. 

 

The next morning, we ramp builders liberated Margaret from her homebound prison on Morris Street in West Dallas.   Her young son answered the door, and led me to Margaret’s bedroom.   She had no legs, and her hands were disfigured, her skin uneven.  I didn’t need to ask that dear soul what happened; our mission was to get her out of the house, into the bigger world.   Unlike so many whiners in our society, Margaret did not act like a victim.  Her handshake was firm, her smile genuine.  I still had tears when I plugged in our extension cords in the living room.  Face to face with adversity puts things in perspective.

 

Was back out the door Monday morning, on the 7:05 rocket to Chicago.   Hopped on O’Hare’s people mover and rode out to the remote parking lot, to the bus stop for PACE, the suburban transit service, a new way to get east to Evanston and Northwestern University (in previous years it was a train-bus-train operation, fun but pokey).   A dollar fifty got me all the way there, in about an hour.  I was the only suit on the bus, which appeared to cause many patrons to pause and somehow reprocess what they were seeing!

 

Just after eleven, I was ambling east on Church Street and onto the Northwestern campus.  Paused to photograph a handsome Romanesque Revival building that thirty years ago housed the Geography Department, and headed toward Kellogg, the business school.  Met my long-time host, Anne Coughlan, and Gary Doernhoefer, for the second time in four days.  We had a visit (Anne was excited about her new promotion to full professor), lunch, and it was time for class, Gary and I team teaching.  We then headed downtown for the evening class, had an early dinner, and were done by 7:45.  Walked to the hotel, headed out for a couple of beers and a good yak.

 

Was up at 5:25, onto the #65 bus and the Blue Line to O’Hare.  On the train, I turned on Aaron Copland and his stirring “Fanfare for the Common Man.”  When we came out of the subway and onto elevated track, I could see the spiky Loop skyline and was transported back to a ride to the airport in August 1977, after saying goodbye to Linda (who was there for the ABA annual meeting, just before her last year of law school).  In a few minutes, we were at the California Street station, and I was carried further back, to a winter in the late 1950s, when I held my Gram’s hand on the opposite platform, as we waited for a train to carry us downtown and to the toy department at Marshall Field’s (see comment about the idealized city, 20 paragraphs above).   I said a prayer for a long-time friend of Anne Coughlan’s, Erin Anderson, one of my hosts at the French school INSEAD, who Anne told me was very ill.  Travel provides lots of moments for reflection on all that has happened.

 

I was at my desk for about six hours, then flew west to Tucson, picked up an enormous Ford Explorer (I had reserved a Focus), and motored to my hotel.  Next morning, I was up and out the door well before dawn, motoring west on Speedway, downtown to Manning House, a 1907 mansion that was venue for the monthly breakfast meeting of the local chapter of the American Marketing Association.  I was the speaker.  A friendly group of 40 or so, a good breakfast and – for a change – a whole hour for the presentation, evenly divided between the slides and Q&A. 

 

At 9:15, I set out on foot with camera to wander around the northwest part of downtown.  In less than 40 minutes I saw the oldest house in town, the 1854 la Casa Cordova, the 1924 Pima County Courthouse with tiled “Easter egg” dome, and lots of interesting cacti.  I have not spent much time in the desert, and I enjoy every visit because of those curious, spiky plants (on the way to the hotel the night before, I swear that the thick, curvy saguaros – the signal cactus of the American West – were waving welcome).  Got in the car and drove to the south end of downtown, through an old barrio that looked like Mexico.  But it was all fixed up, with bright-colored adobe houses.  The mission of San Agustin de Tucson was established here in 1779, and because they came from the south, they called it the “mission at the end of the world.”  Stopped to snap pictures of the Spanish Colonial-style cathedral, then headed back to the hotel, detouring to an old-style produce stand at 6th and Speedway, where I bought a garland of red chili peppers for the kitchen – decorative and edible.  I saw a lot in an hour.  It was fun, an I’m getting paid for this experience. 

 

Worked my e-mail, checked out of the hotel, and drove a mile to 12:15 Ash Wednesday mass at the Episcopal Church of St. Michael and All Angels.  The day before, realizing, late, that I would not be back in Dallas in time for services at our church, I Googled “Ash Wednesday, Tucson, Arizona,” and up popped a link to St. Michael’s.  I think God had a role, too, especially when I dug deeper and found it was less than a mile from my hotel.  A lovely adobe sanctuary in the mission style.  Inside, a formal, high-church mass, imposition of ashes, and communion.  A great experience.

 

I asked a parishioner about nearby Mexican restaurants, and he directed me to Casa Molina, established 60 years ago (when it must have been out in the country).  Friendly people, awesome hot sauce, and a chile relleno lunch.  Fortified, I set off to see the aircraft graveyards that are east of the airport and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.  I saw hundreds of military aircraft, and the first aviation junkyard I’ve ever seen, with both military and civilian hulks, including a Pan Am 707 and only the nose of a Canadian Airlines 737.  I pulled into the dusty parking lot, walked into the office, and politely asked the lady if I could poke around.  She smiled and declined, but did allow me to park the car and walk down the sidewalk to photograph the jets.  It was a cool, and eerie, moment for the Transport Geek.  Motored back to the airport and flew home.  Tucson is a cool place, and I’ll need to return.

 

For the third time that week, I drove to DFW and flew out, on Thursday the 22nd, a short flight south to Austin.   Picked up a Hertz car, motored eight miles west to the Travis Heights neighborhood, a couple miles south of downtown, and met a former AA buddy, John Morton.  Like me, John is now an AA consultant, doing speeches and other stuff for our Chairman and other senior officers.  I’ve known him for a dozen years.  We dropped my stuff in his cool house, and headed to lunch at Guero’s on S. Congress.  It was one of his neighborhood faves.  I had been to Guero’s on my very first trip to Austin in August 1988, but it was in a different location.  We sat on the front sidewalk, had a plate of Tex-Mex, and yakked.  It was good to see John.  We headed back, I worked my e-mail a bit, and visited briefly with his wife, Kate, a reporter for the Austin American Statesman, and about to become a mom. 

 

Surveying the scene from the Morton’s second-floor porch, it was not hard to see why Austin is such a wonderful place, a lively mix of university town, state capitol, high-tech, and music (plaques on the jetbridges at the airport proclaim it as “Live Music Capital of the World”).  Once we are truly retired, in a decade, I’d sure consider living there.

 

At six I drove north to the UT Club, in the east structure of the huge Longhorn football stadium, to attend a dinner for the Marketing Advisory Board of the McCombs School of Business.  I had been on the board for two years, but had not yet been able to attend an event.  Met a bunch of faculty, some students, and a number of industry folks from companies like Frito-Lay (a steadfast supporter of the school), Dell Computer, Dow Chemical, and GE.  Motored back to John’s house, read for a bit, and fell hard asleep.

 

Up early and back to campus for a daylong meeting of the advisory board.  A McCombs alum, recently retired from Procter & Gamble, has taken an active role in managing the board and a related Center for Customer Insight, volunteering – as I do – to help the school.  A good meeting, focused on corporate social responsibility, my kind of topic.  Flying home two hours later, it occurred to me that a record had finally been set: I had not ever been on the road every day of one work week.  It was good to get home.  Linda was at a juvenile-law conference in Houston, and dear MacKenzie had been cooped up all day, so we raced down Cheyenne Drive at high speeds.  It felt great.

 

Was up early the next morning, and out the door to build a ramp nearby – it was the first time I had built in Richardson.   The client’s husband, George, visited with us while we built, and told us his story.  He and his wife were farmers in Zimbabwe, until the nitwit Mugabe seized their land in the name of redressing past wrongs.  He was 75, and though they had little money, he was happy to be in America, a free land. 

 

Four days later, bam, I’m down on the pavement again, another bike crash.  This third time it’s way serious.  To the ER, wait two hours, body tightening up, x-rays, and then the good news: no damage to the hip joint or the innards.  The bad news: three broken ribs, a lot of bruising on the hip, and a small fracture on the top of the pelvis.  Ouch.  Took pain meds for the first time in my life.  I was happy to have them. 

 

I was happy that I was able to convince Linda and Robin to press on with the plan to attend American’s Celebrity Ski fundraiser in Vail, and they left the next day.  So it was me ‘n’ MacKenzie, and Jack in the evenings (he’s been living at home during his internship with Ernst & Young).  Plenty of time for thinking.  And a little work.  I was sure I couldn’t leave the following Monday, March 5, for Dublin, but I was keenly focused on departing on the 7th for London, to keep two of the three teaching promises I made to students.

 

And I did.  A week after the crash, I was feeling a lot better.  I gave up the pain meds, climbed on a shiny 777, and flew to London.  It was so great to be headed to Europe again, after more than three months.  I didn’t sleep as well as I would have liked, maybe because of the delight of heading back overseas.

 

Landed at 7:30 and caught the train to the City at 8:38.  It was packed with commuters, and I had to stand for the first 20 minutes.  Fellow travelers were an interesting lot, yakking, reading, working their laptops, playing games on their mobiles.  In no time the high-rises of the new downtown, Canary Wharf, came into view, then the SwissRe “gherkin” and Tower Bridge.  It was a clear spring day, lovely.  I normally walk from the train to the hotel on Gracechurch St., but a taxi was in order, and at no extra charge a nice yak with a Jamaican driver.  He mentioned “The Knowledge,” the term London hackney drivers use to describe the body of local geographical data required to pass the exam to be licensed.  I love that term. 

 

The hotel proposed to charge me $70 for early check-in, or wait an hour, so I naturally opted for the latter (last time I was here it was a longer wait, and I sprang for the surcharge), and sat in the lobby and worked my e-mail on a fast wireless link.  Headed out at noon to meet Scott Sage, longtime Richardson friend of Robin’s, who has been working and studying in London for nearly two years.  Had a sandwich and good yak on Carnaby Street, Soho, then crossed Regent Street and ambled down Savile Row, the famous street for tailoring.  Back to the hotel, 90-minute nap, then out the door to the London School of Economics.

 

Met host Geoffrey Owen for a coffee.  I was there to see the final presentation from the American Airlines team in his strategy class (seven other teams reported on BMW, ICI, British Telecom, and other firms).  The multinational team did a good job. I offered comments at six and answered questions.  We were done by 6:30, and headed to a bar for a drink with two other faculty who sat in on the presentation, and at 7:30 met Geoffrey’s wife Miriam for dinner at an Italian place, Orso.  A nice meal, calamari starter and pot-roasted rabbit, with red wine.  Walking back to the Tube, my left hip crunched a bit, and became quite sore.  Sigh.

 

Was up at 4:30 the next morning, hip still sore, a five-block walk to Liverpool Street Station and the train to Stansted Airport, locus of activity for Europe’s low-cost airlines.  Flew to Rotterdam on Transavia, the Dutch low-cost airline controlled by Air France-KLM (the Rotterdam School of Management, RSM, my real destination, picked up the tab, but the ticket was only about $60).  When we broke through the clouds, the first scene, so Dutch, was huge greenhouses.  And soggy fields.  Landed at the tiny airport (we were the only plane on the ramp), hopped on the #33 bus, and was downtown in 20 minutes, rolling past canals and bridges – if you live in a flat land close to the sea, you get good at managing water (after Katrina, some of the first true experts to weigh in were from the Netherlands).  Jumped on the #7 tram and rolled out to the Erasmus University campus, home of the RSM.  With the hip still sore, I lurched a few blocks east to my hotel in the splendidly named high-tech office area called Brainpark.  I love that name! 

 

Worked my e-mail, rested a bit, and at 12:20 met my RSM host, Joëlle Vanhamme.  She was amazed at my pluck in traveling with injury, but I shrugged it off.  We walked to the classroom, and I delivered two back-to-back lectures to 45 Master’s students.  Said goodbye, walked back to the hotel, and changed clothes.  My hip was better, the rain stopped, the sun was shining, and it was time for a little exploration.  I took the tram back to downtown Rotterdam, jumping off and photographing a monument to those who died when the Nazis flattened the city on May 14, 1940 – it’s a striking frame of a building, in steel painted a maize color.  From there to the wonderful city hall, which survived the bombing, then by train to Gouda, 20 miles northeast.   The fields bisected by canals were already bright green, and the white sheep contrasted nicely in the late-afternoon sun. 

 

Best known for cheese of the same name (indeed, it promotes itself as the Cheese City, Kaastad in Dutch), Gouda had some cool old buildings worth seeing, including a 15th-century town hall, glowing in the low sun, gray stone, towers, curlicues, and red-and-white shutters.  It’s always cool to be in a place when the light is just right, and was that afternoon (take a look at the pictures at http://www.robbritton.net/RecentPhotos-T&L/RecentP-Mar07/index.html.  Ambled past St. John’s Church, then along a few canals, and back to the main square, where I spotted the Kaaswaag, the historic (1668) weighing-house for the cheese, now a cheese museum.  On the front façade was a frieze depicting the weighing process; what was cool was that the piece was pure white, the color of milk.  Awesome. 

 

I needed liquid of another sort.  My legs were doing pretty well, but I was tired, so I headed into the Stadscafe van Zalm, in the old hotel of the same name.  A perfect spot for a beer, in that case Affligem, a strong dark Belgian beer.  I sat by a front window and had a perfect view of the main square as well as the Friday-afternoon tipplers in this bar, what the Dutch call a “brown café.”  I found a wi-fi connection, and worked my e-mail down to nearly zero while enjoying the scene – a twofer!  Had another beer, this time a Wieckse wheat beer brewed in Maastricht (Netherlands), walked back to the station, retracing my route back to the hotel.  Had a late, light dinner and clocked out.

 

It was a bumpy night, and the deep sleep of the final two hours almost caused me to miss the alarm.  By taxi to the main station ($16 for about 2.5 miles, 10 times more than the tram, but it was not running that early), and onto the 6:25 train to Brussels.  An interesting ride, across the Maas River and the much wider Rhine, right into central Antwerp and a wonderful old railway station recently renovated (note to self: visit that place, and soon).  Hopped a connecting suburban train to Brussels airport, the closest American Airlines point.  Flew to Chicago, trotted through Customs, and onto a connecting flight to DFW.  It was good to be home – to hug Linda and MacKenzie – and I was really glad I was able to keep my promises.

 

Four days later, Linda drove Jack and me to the airport, and we winged west to Tokyo.  Jack’s original spring break plan was to St. Thomas with the frat boys, but the opportunity to tag along with his Pops sounded better.  I was headed over for a lecture and a small writing assignment for the oneworld airline alliance.  It was a fancy ride in First Class, with a swell Japanese lunch (grilled eel on tofu, dried sea urchin, all sorts of exotic stuff to whet my appetite for several days of eating in a land that cares deeply about food). 

 

We landed about two, hopped on the Narita Express, and rode into the city.  Jack was really excited.  Got to the hotel, showered, and headed out for some touring, a few kilometers south to the Omotesando area of fancy shops and a new shopping mall designed by Japanese star Tadao Ondo.  My hip hurt, but I trekked on.  About 6:30, we headed into Ginza, gawking at the illuminated signs in all directions.  Had dinner at the Lion Beer Hall, opened 1934.  Headed back to the hotel, and we were asleep by nine.  Jack struggled that night (he slept too much on the flight, despite my Strong Advice!).

 

We were up early the next morning, to breakfast and out the door.  Headed to the youthful Shibuya shopping area, then to the Meiji Jingu shrine, an impressive memorial, then walked back toward Shibuya (I had forgotten that shops don’t open until 11).  Showed Jack around the Tokyo Food Show, a fancy grocery in the basement of the Tokyu Department Store.  I found an even costlier cantaloupe than when I visited the previous year – a two pack for ¥31,200, or $267!  From there we headed to the Canadian Embassy to meet a fellow I had met through correspondence; Jack had never been in an embassy, and we both found the brief visit with Don Bobiash (Canada’s #2 guy in Japan) interesting.  From there it was lunch at Subway, then the small-S subway into downtown.

 

The Tokyo railway station is to me (the Transport Geek) interesting, and Jack took my suggestion to see the famous Shinkansen, or bullet trains.  From there we walked south, stopped for a jolt of Starbucks, then back to Ginza, wandering into stores.  At four, we toured the Sony Building, an eye-popping showroom for their cutting-edge consumer products.  Then back to the hotel, tired from miles of walking.  We took a brief nap, then headed out to a pasta dinner and beer at a café near our hotel.  It was lights-out again at nine. 

 

Up early Saturday morning.  After breakfast we hopped a taxi to the Tsukiji fish market, the largest of its kind in the world.  Jack loved the place (I had been there before).  We walked all over, keeping our eyes open and necks swiveling, because there are motorized carts and trucks everywhere.  It is just a way-cool place.  From their, back on the Metro to Ueno Park, a large green space north of downtown.  The park is home to the zoo, temples, and several museums.  We enjoyed ambling through the park and residential areas nearby (Jack shares my interest in ordinary landscapes).

 

At noon, we met John Vandenbrink, a 1983 Wharton classmate of mine who has lived here for 18 years.  We visited as we walked around the Asakusa neighborhood, and enjoyed a traditional Japanese lunch at a famous older restaurant.  Like me, he has just retired, and like me has recycled himself as a B-school prof, at Tsukuba University.  Walked the streets some more, said goodbye, and rode back.  Jack wanted to track down the store of a Japanese hip-hop brand called Bathing Ape, and we did.  Their hoodies were $120, which seemed a bit silly to me!  Then back to the hotel to put our feet up.

 

At 6:30, we met my ad-agency friend Yukiko Nishi for dinner (I wanted to give Jack the chance to meet people as well as places).  We had a nice visit and a good meal at a contemporary Japanese restaurant.  Said goodbye, headed back, and were again asleep early. 

 

Up early again Sunday morning.  It was a perfectly clear, cold morning, and we ate breakfast at the top of the hotel, 40 stories up, with a fabulous view of Tokyo and clear views of Mt. Fuji.  Took the Metro west to Shinjuku, and froze as we walked around this “new downtown,” full of high-rises.  Back to the hotel. 

 

At 10:15, we met Scott Maltby, director of McGill University’s MBA program in Japan.  From 10:45 to 12:20, I delivered a lecture to 32 varied students (plus Jack), a lively group with great questions and comments.  This was a weekend executive program, and the theme for that weekend was human relations, so I developed a new talk on managing people in the airline industry.  It went very well.  Afterward, Scott, Alex Gallacher, one of the Canadian profs (who fly in for two consecutive weekend sessions), Jack, and I had lunch at a yakatori restaurant, skewered meat cooked on an open fire.  We walked around the lovely garden of our Hotel New Otani, hopped a cab to Tokyo station, the train to Narita, and flew home.  It was a sensational trip.

 

Three days later, on Wednesday the 21st, I flew north to Vancouver.  It’s a long ride, and I was deeply into some homework; head-down deep.  Two-plus hours into the flight, for some reason, I looked up, and just outside the window (or so it appeared) were the jagged teeth of Wyoming’s Teton Range, wreathed in cloud.  It was an awesome sight, another reminder of our treasured West.

 

Landed in British Columbia at 12:15, into the rain.  Hopped a cab to the campus of the University of British Columbia, and my host’s assistant found me an office.  In an hour Prof. David Gillen arrived, and we visited for awhile.  The Sauder School of Business at UBC has a well-developed transportation and logistics focus, with experts to cover all transport modes.  The Transport Geek feels especially at home on that campus!

 

Worked my e-mail and some other tasks, and from 6:30 to 8:00 I presented my alliances lecture to a combined class of MBAs and undergrads.  Like Vancouver, the class was heavily Asian – perhaps 75-80% of the students, something quite remarkable.  After the lecture, the department chair, Tae Oum, took me downtown to dinner and to my hotel.  We ate at my favorite Cardero’s, which I have described in earlier updates.  For the first time in awhile, they had fresh oysters, and Tae ordered a dozen big ones from Cortes Island, in the Georgia Strait between Vancouver Island and the mainland.  They were succulent.  Main course was a seafood wok dish, nice, but I would have been happier with another six oysters.  We also enjoyed a couple glasses of Russell Cream Ale, locally brewed.  He dropped me at the Fairmont Waterfront, and I slept well that night.

 

The next morning, the original plan was to meet my friend Jeff Angel, who was to fly down from Calgary, but his plans changed, and I had the morning free.  So the T-Geek had a couple of muffins and a coffee at Tim Horton’s, and climbed on the light-rail line called Sky Train, riding about 15 miles east to New Westminster on the Fraser River, and back.  Along the way, I saw a lot, but what was most striking was the greater range of multifamily house types than we have in the U.S.  We Americans pride ourselves on choice, but when it comes to dwellings, the Canadian beat us by a mile – or 1.6 kilometers!  Back at the hotel, I worked my e-mail to zero and hopped on the bus to the airport.

 

While waiting for my flight, I saw a woman composing a picture of her husband and son.  As I always do, I jumped up and offered to take the picture, so that everyone would be included.  They smiled and thanked me profusely, and this little gesture reminded me of a thought from a few weeks ago: I think we all have a duty of kindness.  I must remember that duty and work hard to keep it every day.

 

Two days later, I was back on two wheels, and not in the garage.  Hooray!  I bought a new Trek 7.6 FX, what is known as a hybrid; it’s almost as light as my road bike, but has regular handlebars, so upright posture makes you more visible – and you’re forced to look forward.  Bright red, it brought a broad smile to my face.  It was a joy to ride, and it felt really, really good to be back.  About 90% of the ride was on a bike trail, away from cars, which made Linda happy.  Our two kids remain skeptical!

 

Two days later, on Tuesday the 29th, I drove to DFW before dawn.  My 7:05 flight to Philadelphia was canceled, yikes.  Due in class at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania at 1:30, I needed a new route, and quickly.  Walked quickly to the next terminal, bought breakfast, and hopped on the 6:45 to Newark.  On the way, I listened to a lot of college fight songs and John Williams marches, gearing up for the next legs of the trip that I hoped would result in my arriving at Steinberg-Dietrich Hall in time for my debut in the Wharton MBA program.

 

We landed about eleven, and I trotted (left hip still a bit sore) to a taxi and rolled four miles to Penn Station, Newark.  Bought a $60 ticket on Amtrak (they’ve learned revenue management from airlines, and last-minute tickets are pricey) to Philadelphia, scheduled to arrive before 1.  Good!  Called my Penn host, Bruce Allen, bought a sandwich, took a few snaps of the wonderful station, and hopped on the 11:52 rocket southwest.  It had been at least 20 years since I had been on the New Jersey portion of the Northeast Corridor.

 

The train was relatively clean, with a tray table for the big tuna sandwich I bought in the station.  We rolled through Elizabeth and Rahway, past Rutgers in New Brunswick, through the backyards and past the golf courses of wealth (big chunks of northern New Jersey are affluent), past Rutgers University, across the Delaware River at Trenton, just south of the bridge with the big sign “TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES” (a reference to its former manufacturing importance, the message now seems more fitting for, say, Guangzhou), and through the northern suburbs and ‘hoods of North Philly.  We arrived 30th Street Station right on time.  I ambled several blocks southwest, across the Drexel University campus, and onto familiar turf at Penn.  I bowed slightly as I past the bronze statue of Franklin, who founded the school in 1740.  I was in the classroom with 20 minutes to spare. 

 

Met Bruce Allen and delivered a show to about 25 MBAs and undergrads in a transportation management class.  It was over in a flash.  Bruce apologized, but he had to teach another class, so I walked upstairs to the main lobby of Wharton, and worked my e-mail.

 

A few times that day, I thought back to 1983, when I attended a postdoctoral program at Wharton that retooled 40 Ph.Ds for careers in the private sector.   I rewound the tape of the entire experience, beginning with word that I had been admitted to the program from the waiting list.  I will never forget that moment, in a hotel room in Steamboat Springs, Colorado in April of that year.  I had flown there from Denver to write a travel story (that was back when I was doing a lot of freelance writing), and had called home.  Linda gave me the news, and I floated like a helium balloon to the ceiling of the hotel room.  I can still feel the sensation of floating upward.  Back then, two dozen years ago, I suspected that the Wharton program would change my life, and it did.

 

I walked around the campus a bit, then ambled to the University City station and the suburban train to the airport.  Flew home.  A long day.

 

Two days later, at noon I flew back to the Northeast, landing at JFK at just before five.  Enroute, I read a short interview with former U.S. Senator (and NBA star) Bill Bradley, a fellow I have long admired.  Asked about the proper Democratic agenda, he noted that we’ve fought two wars about oil in the last 15 years, yet “we are not willing to fight against oil dependence.  If we simply had the same gas-mileage average as Europe does, about 43 miles per gallon, we would import no oil from OPEC.  Zero.”  Whoa, I thought.  Then I smiled, because I am there: my new Toyota Hybrid averaged 43.2 MPG on its third tank.  We make choices, as I wrote earlier in this update.

 

I was at the hotel by 5:30, and out the door at 5:41, walking west on Conduit Avenue.  Had my vectors to the Q40 bus, several blocks west.  Rode that north to Archer Avenue and the E Train west to Jackson Heights, then on foot a few blocks to the apartment of Matteo and Holly Pericoli.  Matteo is an architect and artist who is drawing an enormous mural, “Skyline of the World,” for our new terminal at JFK.  I met him in 2005, and we’ve become friends.  He’s a wonderful guy.  I arrived in time to see their 10-month-old Nadia eat dinner (well, okay, she barfed the avocados, which was very colorful).  Holly gave Nadia a bath, Matteo stirred the pots in the kitchen, and we yakked about a bunch of stuff.  A lovely dinner, nice to get to know them better.  Matteo grew up in Milan and Holly in New Jersey.  Hugs at 9:45, back out the door, retraced my steps, and was back at the hotel at 10:30.  Way cheaper and more adventurous than a cab (South Jamaica, the area just north of JFK, is mostly black, so there were plenty of stares on the Q6 bus, but I did not fear).

 

Up at seven the next morning, clear and crisp, a lovely spring day.  Breakfast from the Dunkin Donuts two blocks west of the hotel, then by hotel shuttle to our new terminal to meet Matteo, his agent Teresa, Tom Sparks from our airport real estate team, Bob Shaffner from the company that will convert Matteo’s art (rendered at a 1/30 scale) to a 360-foot-long mural.  A good meeting.  Out the door at 10:30, by AirTrain to Jamaica, Queens, then the E train to Manhattan.  At Grand Central, I detoured to the annex of the New York Transit Museum, tucked into a small space beneath the railway terminal.  They were featuring an exhibit about Heins & LaFarge, the original subway architects from a century ago.  Some very cool artifacts from their 1901-08 designs for stations, kiosks, and other facilities.

 

At 12:20, I walked across Vanderbilt Avenue to the Yale Club, and sat in the lobby, awaiting my lunch partner Gayle Maurin, an old friend from my nine years on the American Youth Hostels board of directors (Gayle was a staff officer, heading up our marketing efforts; she was, in retrospect, way too capable for that organization).  Eager to be productive, I sat down and pulled out my laptop, which attracted the attention of the lobby’s major-domo, who ever so politely told me that club policy prohibited the use of laptops in the lobby.  Yikes!

 

Gayle met me at 12:30 and we headed to the top of the building for a delightful lunch.  Everyone knew her, and I soon learned that she was on the club’s board of directors (her B.A. was in theater from Yale).  I had not seen her in four or five years, and it was great to catch up.  At two I ambled across town to meet Matteo’s literary agent, Tracy Fisher, at the venerable William Morris Agency.  That was pretty cool.  We yakked about some things we could do of mutual benefit, focused on the unveiling of Matteo’s mural in May.  At three I headed back to JFK, to find that my flight home was canceled.  Yow!  After a bit of research, I headed across Queens to LaGuardia and some AA angels found me a seat on the last flight back to DFW (Texas weather had disrupted the operation).  Our Chairman, Gerard Arpey, was on the flight, and we had a short chat.  It was good to land, and it was nearly the end of the quarter, another great one.

 

 

Your friend,

 

Rob Britton

 

 

P.S.  Check out the new website for my consulting and teaching brand, AirLearn, at www.AirLearn.Net.

 

 

 

 

 

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