Letter 36 - Don't do as I do

Well, today’s musings are constrained upon me. By happy circumstance, Ruth (a fellow Substacker - ) and her husband were vacationing mere miles from my haunts and we met up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire to chew the fat for an afternoon. And also the butter and eggs and whatnot at a pretty darn good bakery/café by the name of Elephantine. A curious name, no? A quick trip to Wikipedia (to which I send money on a yearly basis as I value the resource greatly - you might consider doing so as well if you find yourself utilizing it during your web excursions) revealed Elephantine as an island in Egypt and according to good authority (if you consider ancient Egyptian religion to be good authority) the home of Khnum, ram-headed god of the cataracts. He guarded and controlled all the waters of the Nile from caves beneath the island. Kind of like Bruce Wayne overseeing Gotham City from his batcave beneath stately Wayne mansion. Batman and Ram-man, superheroes separated by time and distance but brothers in spirit.

If you’re in the area, you should definitely check it out.

And you should also check out Ruth’s Substack Ruthtalksfood , as I’ve mentioned before. You’ll learn all about New Scotland and why they paint their homes in bright colors. Not all the colors of the rainbow, but certainly a colorful mix of hues.

But first … Substack tells me to pay attention to my brand and today when I got some paint sticks at Ace Hardware I noticed that they were branded. Name and number on the sticks. And, of course, one continually hears about how trademarking is important to protect “your brand”. So … do you know where all this talk about branding started? Hmmmm?

Well, I’ll tell you. With booze.

Yes, that’s right. The word itself is old and originally only meant the cowboy connotation. “Those are my cattle, mister. You can see by the brand!” A brand being a symbol burned onto the surface of the object, in this case the cow’s hide.

Which reminds me. This morning I was mentioning to my wife that she should act more like granny from the Beverly Hillbillies when she wants to be emphatic. And as I cast around for a grannyism I came up with “Jethro! Get in here before I tan your hide!”

And I suddenly realized “Wow, that is one dark threat”. Because to tan Jethro’s hide she’d have to kill him, skin him and then set to work tanning that skin.

Brrrrr. What that tells me is that granny is one hillbilly you do NOT want to mess with.

“Yes granny, right away granny!”

Okay, back to branding. Way back around two hundred years ago, the folks brewing and selling beer and whiskey started to burn their own marks onto the barrels to distinguish themselves from the other guys. They “branded” them. And, as the populace looked for quality they naturally looked for the brand that they knew they liked. The good stuff.

And that’s where it started. The good stuff was identified by its brand and reasonably quickly the word oozed itself onto the stuff itself, not just the barrel. Brand loyalists had been born.

The more you know. And what I know is it’s time to loop back to that fateful bakery.

Whilst taking in a vast array of seductive and alluring calories, Ruth and I got to talking about this and that and we wandered onto the topic of “how did I get to where I am now”. I ended up promising to reveal some of the naked truth in my next Substack regarding The Adventures and Crowden and Wife Moving to Stanford for Graduate Study and Fun in the Sun California Living. I COULD have spilled the beans then and there over the delicious poached eggs, garlic labneh and crusty bread but my motto has alway been “eat first, eat some more second, talk eventually”.

And so - the tale begins like this:

The scene - my dorm room. The place - my desk. The topic - filling out the Stanford information form.

It should have been so simple. The item to be filled out: “Marital status”. It most definitely did NOT say “Will you be married when you arrive at Stanford four months from now?”. If it HAD asked that I would have obviously answered “yes” as my marriage was scheduled for a week before we left the East Coast.

And you know what? From my viewpoint years further along the turbulent river of life, I can confidently assert that whoever wrote that item figured whoever was reading it would realize that what was meant was “Will you be needing married student housing?”

Ah, but they hadn’t counted on a literalist like me, had they? So I honestly and forthrightly answered that no, I wasn’t in fact married at the time I was filling out the form while being totally aware I would be married before arriving at Stanford.

Ah, to be young and clueless.

And so, when we hit the ground in sunny old Leland Stanford Junior University I found out that I was only 365th on the list for married housing. Gosh, barely an inconvenience!

But, no matter. I would simply seek out alternative living arrangements. Hmmmm, I thought to myself, Stanford is in Palo Alto and I note that there is an apartment open in East Palo Alto. Perhaps we should investigate!

Possibly because I grew up in a town called West Orange, which was next to Orange, East Orange and South Orange (but no North Orange and don’t ask me why - I have no clue) I was accustomed to the ideas of spatial variations on a theme in city names. Although the varying demographics and income levels of these different compass points of Orange WERE known to me. Alas, I failed to draw any parallels.

And curiously, amidst all the documentation sent to me, the administration of Stanford never thought it important to mention that, yes, Palo Alto is a nice place but that East Palo Alto was more akin to what one thinks of when one thinks of Harlem. The less nice parts of Harlem. The WAY less nice parts. Somehow I guess they didn’t see that as a positive selling point.

As already established, I was excellently oblivious and only noted with mild interest the heavy bars in front of the apartment’s entry as I made my way to the East Palo Alto place of living. And so I paid a one month’s deposit, went upstairs, and went to sleep, lulled into slumber by the soothing sounds of gunfire and screams for mercy from outside the window.

The next day, curiously unrested, I spoke to the only person I’d yet met at the school and who was far more sophisticated in such matters. He proceeded to tell me that I’d moved into the Hell hole of all Hell holes and could expect an interesting array of muggings and robberies outside my lodgings during my stay, especially as it was opposite a liquor store known far and wide as the place to go when you needed intoxication at a bargain price.

This information landed like a blow from Mike Tyson upon my innocent brow. How could I have messed up so badly? Clearly, I reasoned, I have no ability AT ALL in determining things like where to live.

And so, and this is true, when I drove back home (and happily found my wife still in one piece) I did the obvious thing. I picked up the phone and dialed the operator.

For the benefit of my younger readers, I need to digress a bit and explain what an “operator” was, the species having gone extinct at this point. An “operator”, as distinct from “a smooth operator”, which is a TOTALLY different beast, was a person, usually female, who, when you picked up the landline phone and dialed “O” would answer the phone and speak with you.

Kind of like when you hit the “chat” button on a web site but instead of it being someone intent on helping you to buy something off the site, it was a person who was there to answer your questions. Kiiiind of like asking Google, but the questions were typically along the lines of “What time is it?” (believe it or not) and “What’s the phone number of Ace Hardware in Milwaukee?”

One other thing that people would often ask would be to be connected to their Aunt Mildred in Connecticut, when in fact they were calling from Florida. Staggering as it is to believe, back in the old days the way this was accomplished can best be explained by garden hose analogy.

Say you want to water a flower bed and the flowers are 100 feet from the faucet. And, although you have several hoses, they’re all just 25 feet long. And it’s not possible (for some reason) for the same person to screw them together. The way you have to do it is to screw one end of hose to the faucet outlet and then ask Ken, who is holding hose number 2 twenty five feet away from you, to connect one end of his hose to the free end of yours. Then Ken has to call to Jerry, who is 25 feet closer to the flowers and with his own hose, and ask him to connect them up. Whereupon Ken yells to Sally (yup, 25 feet closer still) to hook up HER hose to the chain. And then Moe grabs the furthest end and says “Let her rip!” You thereupon open up the faucet and the flowers give thanks.

That is close to precisely how it used to work with the phone. Each phone connection could only go so far and to get further out you’d have to patch the physical line with another so the signal could continue. Banks and banks of operators would communicate back and forth and plug lines together with the result that two people, one in Connecticut and one in Florida, could happily natter away on this and that and ‘tother.

So there we go. Yet another nugget of nollege derived from college.

Anyway, by far the most common use of operators was in finding the telephone numbers of various places. All you had to do was dial “O”.

And so, it’s time to return to that callow youth, cowering and beaten, trapped in a dismal apartment and surrounded by evil miscreants of every kind. A youth who has just concluded “There’s only one thing for me to do.”

Which was to dial “O”.

“Hello, may I help you?” the operator asked.

“I hope so,” I answered. “I’ve just moved to East Palo Alto and I’ve been informed it’s a Hell hole. I’ve realized I have zero ability to determine where to live. My decision-making is clearly terrible. And so I’m asking you. Where can a Stanford student and his wife find a place to live around here?”

Note that this was not EVER a common thing to ask an operator. It’s not in their job description to be a part-time realtor. Among the many things they’re called upon to do, finding housing for random strangers is definitely not in the list.

But in spite of this …

“Well, you could come live with me,” she replied after a moment. “I’ve got a second bedroom and my apartment is just ten minutes down the road from Stanford.

Well, THAT was certainly unexpected. And, being a cold and rational engineer, there was clearly only one way to answer such an off the wall reply.

“Sure! That’d be great! What’s your address?”

Hey, you know what? That’s a cliff-hanger isn’t it? So let’s leave it hang and move along to the star of the show, Nicky!

Nickyitis

As the studious reader will recall, Nicky and Elf have just recently met …

Some things are universal constants, aren’t they?

And with that we come to another stopping point. And remember, only YOU can leave a comment …

And when you’re done commenting, share share share why don’t you?!

Fin