On this Thanksgiving Day, I started by texting everyone I could to tell them how much I am thankful for them being in my life, especially my wife and sons. My daughter is not speaking to me, so I’ll just that percolate, and soon all will become new, but like that good Turkey, it needs time to cook.

I went fishing in my favorite spot in my front yard. You see, it is not the best spot in our pond to fish, but the view is best and less interruption from a pesky biting fish to distract my deep thoughts, LOL.  I’m a lazy fisherman. I put on a worm and a bobber, throw it out there and wait for it to go under (not too interested in working too hard at this).

Ladies, this is essentially a man’s thing; after all, even Jesus went to fisherMEN to be fishers of men. I know this is a metaphor for mankind, so as I feel the rush of ladies to slap me with sounds of sexist pig, other ladies just blow it off as an ignorant man’s rambling, not knowing who is the truly superior gender. I’m playing it safe here because my editor is my wife, and she controls my medications. Without them, I’d surely die.

Anyway, here are my thoughts on Thanksgiving, a product of my fishing solitude and only one fish to interrupt it, measuring a colossal 4 inches long.

Tradition says that the first Thanksgiving occurred on November 1621 between the friendship of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag to give thanks to each other and God to give them provision for the winter. (this was after the voyage of the Mayflower who left Plymouth, England, in September 1620). Anyhow, I find it interesting to know that man came together just to be thankful for the provision and each other before man destroyed it, and then the here and now generation wants to blame each other for each other.

Thanksgiving is in addition to a time of family and good food to share and just be together, with maybe a little prayer thrown in to be thankful for our bounty and each other. But I also thought about another bit of a play on words. Forgiving goes quite well with Thanksgiving. Giving forgiveness to those have who hurt us and accepting and giving of that forgiveness feast over the weight of guilt and hurt replaced by reconciliation and a boatload OF TURKEY AND STUFFING AND EXPLOSIVE BAKED BEANS prepared by selfless hands.

Thank you, crafty fish, for eluding my catch for occasionally trusting me to reel you in and hold you just long enough to behold your magnificent God-made creation just long enough to flop around a few times on the grass and be thrown back to swim freely. And besides, you’re too small to eat, I’m too lazy to clean fish, and I don’t want you to feed my family today.  

I Give thanks for a can of worms, fishing rod, a chair, and patient fish the simple things of life. I’m content today.

I’ve been MIA for about three months. I haven’t had the creative juices flowing through my veins and bringing them to my brain.  Having said that and my slight inspiration to write something and keep in touch with my followers, I write. At the risk of sounding like I’m sending out summer reruns of my past posts, I invite you to re-read or perhaps read for the first time my section called “Ten ideas on how to recover economically from the virus pandemic” and the later ones of finding God and so on.   This post is strangely prophetic to what is or should be happening now (and I’m no prophet).

Many have said I should change the title of my blog to increase readers, for in a nutshell, at first blush, well, it’s “depressing.” Maybe they are right. My intention was to open my heart and mind to self-perform therapy on myself and, just as importantly, get into the heart of what I am going through.   After writing this blog, I have discovered many who battle and struggle with similar quandaries of faith coping with the innermost, relating to their inner self to the beautiful but fallen world we exist in. 

My quest was never to make a living out of this being used by some entity to sell a product or diminish a pure albeit feeble attempt at literary honesty. As many of you know, I performed, wrote, and mixed sound for music. I’ve performed in classical recitals, jazz bands, symphonic bands, club bands (where it was difficult to discern who was enjoying your music soundtrack or just to fade into intoxication slowly or to get up the courage to ask someone to dance and more expectations of the carnal type. I’ve played High school proms, Frat parties, and endless corporate parties and conventions.  The definition of a musician – someone who loads up $20,000 of equipment and instruments drives 50 miles to play for $50-$100 for 4 hours load it all up and drive back and unload it at 3 in the morning and then repeat it the next night and more often than not go to a day job and repeat the whole thing all over again.  The day job fed you and paid the bills and maybe buy some more music stuff and gadgets.  We love music, and the interaction with the audience gives them a little lift, and maybe they might get what was on your heart through your music or not; in many ways, this is why I write this blog.

As I said before, I write for self-therapy, open my inner self and heart as honestly as I can, maybe give my “audience” something, I freely give whether or not it is useful or insightful or maybe at least entertaining and thought-provoking. What you will always get from me is unreserved truth (at least as I see it) and compassion for the reader.  We all are traveling pretty much the same road, maybe some different stops along the way, detours, and occasionally a soul healing stroll down a country lane on a brisk sunny Sunday afternoon.

I’ve re-read this blog lately, and right about now, I’ve not heeded some of my own axioms.  My faith is smaller than a mustard seed (Matthew 17:20), like dicing it with one of my pill splitters from my endless regimen of meds and the tiny pieces selecting only one to hold the entire inventory of my faith. 

I guess that is the case even with the most faithful at times. At least my priest friend postulates on his many and so much appreciated spiritual house calls.  Well, that’s all I can core dump on this subject with no actionable solutions. Still, I will be saying these screwed up times with violence, hate, and vitriol destroying our nation. Normally, dear friendships are also being ignited by an evil that hijacks lofty and just causes that otherwise could have been worked through with God in the center of the conflict. Love of humanity by children of God and just plain old respect of differing opinions with the common goal of something better and at its best achieved not by your own understanding but discernment guided by our loving but testing Creator. Look to God rather than man.

Till next time.

I’m posting this for all of you who want to know “what makes me tick,” so to speak.  I’m built to produce, create wealth and use it, invest it, or give it away to create things of good and lasting value and make the most of life.  I am a spring where blessing through God can flow. Just don’t put a pump on it and force out than naturally flows.  I think beyond today and years into the future. While we are here on this earth for a very short period of time, if I can discern what God wants me to do and not lean on my own understanding, then my creativity, hard work, my mind, and the resources I’ve been blessed with, I hope to make a difference in the world for the better.

That doesn’t make me a “do-gooder” but someone who believes we should all get a chance at success.  I have very little patience for those who demand my hard-fought gains for some philanthropic cause that is the desire of others to throw at some bottomless pit that has no planned benefit to seed more good. Plus, since my labors created it, I would like to be asked, not bullied or guilt-tripped, to give those hard-fought gains. Let me and God make that decision.  Just because my labors created honestly earned wealth doesn’t mean it’s automatically allocated to remember “the needy” just because someone has less. There may be a reason for that, including the possibility that the drive to EARN it was not there for the NEEDY person or cause. Or the cause or circumstances demand that someone step up. 

The fact of the matter is as Jesus himself said, “there will always be poor among you” we will always have more need than supply in this fallen world.  We are all created equal in God’s eyes but not guaranteed outcomes of our actions.  Whether or not you don’t have all the mentality to split atoms or physical differences, each of us, barring any manmade tyranny, have under God equal chances to live life to the fullest and be welcomed into heaven someday as good and faithful servants and find treasures there that we cannot comprehend.

Making money is inherently a Godly thing. It’s a product by which we measure our labors’ value and allows us to trade and conduct commerce. It’s just a thing that only fools’ worship in place of God.  Remember, He owns everything; we are stewards of it all. (1 Chronicles 29:10-18).  Like the parable of the servants granted their masters money to invest and grow, we can either hoard it, spend it foolishly or be wise, discerning, work hard, grow it, and not consume it beyond a point where it becomes your God. (Matthew 25:14-30). 

Communism sounds like a Christian way of life. Work hard and give back to each according to their need, just like the early disciples did, right? NOT. They were working on a huge project called The Church, and they needed working capital and long-term investment and a sustainable wage to see it through. Money, or its equivalent, was used (borrowed from God through the labors of man) to finance the spreading of the Gospel. But through prayer and hard work, not guilt-tripping the sources of that capital, and the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit did it all. Even the Apostle Paul (who was a tentmaker by trade) moonlighted his trade to pay his way to finance his travels and ministry. And when he got churches going, he asked for help, and they gave him in effect compensation for services rendered. No one forced Paul to do anything he didn’t want to do. He was in love with the Gospel and OF HIS OWN FREE WILL, relying upon God’s given wisdom.  Paul chose this for himself; not any man chose for him or goaded him into that mission.

For I am a Christian (follower of Jesus), God has given me certain gifts and limited talents.  Whatever missteps or limitations I have, working hard and with discernment has been my creed.  This, in large part, came from how I was raised. I was raised on a dairy farm. It was hard and honest work. My dad, in addition to being a hard worker, was innovative. He bought the first New Holland hay bailer in southern Wisconsin with money gleaned out of the farm.  He would leave the farm after milking the cows, hop on his tractor with bailer in tow and bail all night on other farms and get home just in time to milk in the morning (and, of course, in between times bail our hay. He would go to Illinois in the wintertime with our old International Cabover flatbed hauling load after a load of bailing twine that he bought cheap out of season and stored it on the top floor of the hog house to be used in his all-nighter bailing operation.

We had a welder on the farm, and all us kids learned how to weld (except me because only 8-9 years old at that time). I was raking hay with a tractor and mechanical rake to make rows of hay ahead of the bailer and haul wagon loads of hay to the barns. We’d make contraptions out of metal we’d fabricate out of anything we could find and weld chutes and parts for the machines. If it broke, weld it. We devised a green feed wagon that was filled with fresh alfalfa or fresh chopped corn that would be pulled to the cow pasture; gravity would feed the cows with no power, unattended until empty. We built an automatic feed lot feeder that, using an Archimedes screw, that would pull the corn silage out of the silo to carry the feed out to a long trough for the cows and pigs to feed at, all with the push of an electric switch. As a family of five, we made a little 160-acre farm produce enough to feed us, a surplus to sell and generously tithe to our church, and give away surplus to some of the other farmers who were a little short.  My dad would quietly go out at night and bale hay in the next farm over while he was having a hard time.  He would work in the farmer’s backfield, and the next morning, drive down the road by the field and see the amazement on the farmer’s face looking at a field full of bailed hay ready to be put in the barn and drive on by and smile to himself.  He enjoyed making a good deed turn into a prank by the way he didn’t charge the farmer.

Hard work innovation and free enterprise was the engine of our success. My dad wasn’t a “pray in public” kind of guy, but I know he had his way of relating. Mom was more open with her spirituality and kept the farm running on time, feeding us all and taking care of us kids. Dad, in general, while a fun-loving dad, hardly ever handed out compliments. You were expected to do your job anything beyond that was accepted without fanfare, and anything short of that was met with rebuke. Through all of that, he was a remarkable man who had a keen sense of timing, whether its business or when to plant and harvest. I loved and respected my dad, and my mom was the nurturer.  Their love for each other is rarely seen today. We finally moved to Florida, where my dad got into the sand business (selling sand in Florida? But my dad did it).

I lost my dad to a heart attack when he was 56, and I was 26 and thrust into our little company’s helm.  My brother, sister, and mom built the company 10-fold. We inherited our dad’s dedication to hard work and innovation, building the company into the only Florida Department of Transportation certified industrial sand mine on Florida’s east coast. The sand deposit was marginal for quality, but we built our high-powered dredge that pushed sand ½ to the sand classifying plant. We built an innovative device called an attrition mill, which uses counter-rotation neoprene propellers to scrub the sand before entering an Archimedes screw with an electric load monitor to regulate another Archimedes screw that added a coarse additive to bring the product into spec.  To test it, we rigged it up to an old Mack dump-truck transmission and rear end to get a right angle drive that drove with an 8-71 Detroit diesel later converted to a 200hpelectric motor once we saw it was going to work. We could use the transmission to shift gears to set the speed right to match material and slurry input.  Now that I have glazed over most of my female readers’ eyes, this section is more toward guy stuff lol.

We also piloted the trial testing of a new invention called the CH sizer that revolutionized how sand is sized (sizing something as small as a grain of sand is essential for concrete road and building construction). We built our radial stacking “cyclone” (which uses the same principle behind a tornado only using water) to capture the very fine sand eliminating the use of large and environmentally unfriendly settling ponds. We’d use this for filler material to make asphalt.  

So why did I drag your reading mind through all this?  Because this is mostly who I am—an extremely flawed but innovative production-driven guy.  I’m a sort of farmer, sort of a musician, and a pretty damn good accountant (old school).  While I have other sides to me, as you’ll see if you allow yourself to be tormented by my prose, but this is what makes me tick in my life’s work. By the way, who is John Galt? If you know the answer to that, then you know this side of me.

Both men have one thing in common Their desire for redemption.  The first I’ll share with you is a man who I will call M. He was an African American who worked for me a while back and is among the three black guys in the photo from my earlier post from A Tale of Two Crosses, building the crosses. He was one of three black guys, one Polish Italian, a Mexican and one Cheesehead half German and half Swiss guy (that be me). For that moment, at least we were all just children of God working together to build something greater than ourselves.

M came from a poor Florida family who grew up on Merritt Island, Florida when it was virtually all orange groves and cattle farming. Most of the fruit was picked and packaged by Black folks from kids on up to Grandma and Grandpa. M’s father disappeared when M was a child. His stepfather was an abusive drunk and made M work the orchards taking his earnings and not feed the family and drink up the proceeds between beating him when he didn’t pick enough fruit. M never learned much in what little schooling he had but grew into a strong, handsome man. He, too, had issues with alcohol, and it destroyed the one marriage he had. After he started working for me, I would notice when we took a lunch break; he would pull out an old, well-used bible and read a bit before returning to work. Why he clung to this bible amidst this life of tragedy and sin always confounded me.  Sometimes he lived homelessly and followed us from job to job, but he always had that bible in his knapsack. I never asked him how he got his faith. I just took it as it was and would pray with him once in a while. He really only excelled at one thing (which you can’t find anyone to do these days) final hand grading, slinging a sledgehammer, and carrying heavy stuff.  Like the many Haitians I worked with (See the previous post on Haiti), he was ignorant and a little slow but clever and innovative when the time came. We taught him how to help finish concrete, and the other two black guys on the crew would continuously needle him and tell him how stupid he was. They were excellent concrete finishers who were called “Fat Kenny” and “Skinny Kenny” since that was one way to avoid confusion when summoning them by name. It was easier that way “Skinny” could be Tiger Woods’s Twin, and “Fat” was more like Fat Albert from Bill Cosby days.   It really didn’t matter what your ethnicity was when you’ve got 10 yards of hot 4000psi mud getting ready to go off when Pat yells out “somebody get their ass over here with a mag and a trowel start finishing this stuff” (it didn’t matter what the color of the ass was at that point).

M never hardly ever had a chance in life and blew the ones he had mainly because of the carnal nature of his upbringing. But he always had that old bible, and because of that, he had my utmost respect.  I’d find little projects he could handle on his own at the job sites as well as my 9-acre homesite building little things and putting the finishing touches on my home and job site projects. He would walk to the job sites and usually refused a ride.  I helped him get a car and even gave him a company fuel card to put gas in it.  I learned that misguided charity causes more harm than good. He then used the card to fill up hookers’ cars and other low lives to purchase booze, sex, and other things. When I got a bill for $1100 plus, I knew I had done a travesty to this man. 

This story ends where it started, M just showed up, and then he disappeared.  I never heard from or saw him again. I enjoyed our time together, and my University Alum butt worked right beside him until he just didn’t show one day.  I never heard from him or saw him again. Maybe he’s somewhere in the woods reading that tattered old bible and still clinging to the hope of redemption. Well, M, you still have hope as long as you keep reading. My prayers are still with you, my old friend.

The tale of the other man comes in the next post.

Father’s Day, this is our day. Right Dads?  Fathers traditionally (although tradition seems to be a politically incorrect term these days) have been the leader of the house; that is until momma is not happy, and then there is albeit a temporary role changing.  For example, when I was growing up, dad would let off what was then called “blue language” when he wrapped the brand new disc-harrow around the corner post of the cornfield when preparing the field for spring planting on the farm in Wisconsin. Mom took over when we kids would use that language in the house, and it would result in either willow switches to the back of the legs or your mouth being washed out with soap (not an expression but the real Ivory Soap thing). But dads, then, and hopefully now, were looked up to as role models at least for the boys, blue language, and all. They were the main providers and life coaches.  Not all dads fit the old 50’s series “Father Knows Best” thing, but they were our dads, imperfect and sometimes very flawed, as I will go into in the next post. They were also simultaneously the source of love, pride, and self-worth that no son will ever forget through the best and worst of times.

I’m a dad of 3 very diverse, loving (when they want to be), talented, and yes, wise-ass children. They are the product of three separate marriages. 2 sons and one daughter. My oldest son is married and has my one and only grandchild. Next is my daughter, who lives in upstate New York, and my youngest boy (17), who is homeschooled and lives at home with us.  Raising a teenager when I’m nearly 68 is, to say the least challenging. My oldest runs our family site development business and has an Underground Utility license. My daughter did a stint at college and now works at home and lives with and attends to her mother, who is struggling with her health. My youngest is going into his senior year of high school, and as I said earlier is homeschooled.  Mainly because public school is lacking these days, and he, while smart as a whip, can’t sit still long enough to excel in a classroom and wants to be an air-conditioning tech. He has absolutely no inclination to go to college and will probably have his first house before his contemporaries pay off a 1/ 10th of their student loan. All my kids take turns pissing me off and then turn around and can be so thoughtful and loving; such is the life of a dad.

I sat through countless dance recitals (which I needed to mainline caffeine to stay awake through), band concerts with an intonation so bad I’d cringe, soccer games that he mainly chased the ball but seldom scored. In contrast, I sat with young “soccer moms” who ask me if that was my grandson making me feel young again, yeah, right!  I was the most excited when I was there when they caught their first fish, my oldest when we fished in the Indian River off a spot, where now is Rotary Park in Suntree that our family help build. Then it was a place where everyone dumped their junk, and we commandeered an old car seat (like Grumpy Old Men) and parked, and he caught a 2 foot vegetarian Mullet on a shrimp (the fish must have wanted a little more protein in his diet that day). My daughter and I crashed a private pond in New York State, and she caught the smallest panfish in the pond on a Mickey Mouse fishing rod. My youngest boy caught a 5-pound bass out of the pond in front of the house at the age of 3, and my grandson on the 4^th of July caught the smallest brim I’d ever seen.

My kids all ran heavy construction equipment at various times. My daughter, at around nine and youngest son around seven years old at the time, ran a vibratory compaction roller and my oldest just about everything, he starting out running a Dresser 560 a 90,000-pound front-end loader that he could barely reach the pedals on at 12 and by 13 was loading dump trucks at the sand mine

Enough about my kids, my dad raised me the same, running tractors on the farm, and when we moved to Florida, dump trucks, loaders, dozers, motor grader, and the sand dredge. I started out at about nine myself. My dad was great. He didn’t always play ball with me or take me fishing but was his shadow at work.  When I was a real little kid up in Wisconsin, I would ride with him in the dump truck. My grandma ran the local Diner called the Dairy Bar in the little town of Juda (pop. 300) about 3 miles from the farm. Near the end of the day of riding with him, he would always ask me if we wanted to stop at grandmas dairy bar and have a “beer,” he would have a Schlitz, and I would have a root beer which was the way dad and I went drinking together.

We all have had those moments and must cherish them. Later after graduating from the University of Florida, I came back and took over the accounting of the family business and managed most of the outside operations.  I received a baptism by fire by jumping right into a full-blown IRS audit for dad.  My dad was old school, and he always figured that as hard as he worked that Uncle Sam was always getting too big of a cut, and he was not discreet in creative accounting of cash sales and cashing a few small two-party checks. With my excellent training from my ex-IRS agent professor at the University of Florida, I was able to keep him out of the “gray bar hotel.” He only received a $20,000 assessment, which he paid immediately out of his cash stash he stored in the lettuce drawer in the fridge (no pun intended), and it was stored there in case of fire). He was a practical man lol.  My dad also loaned money to the family brothers, seldom charged interest, and helped countless other guys to get through some tight spots. He owned several businesses; some failed some were successful, but, in the end, he was a good man in the practical sense. He jokingly always coined the phrase while holding up a buffalo nickel.  “In God We Trust. All Others Pay Cash.”

When it came to the business operation, another phrase was used on him, “Mel could squeeze the shit out of a buffalo nickel.”  This same man taught Sunday school and served as an usher at the church. My dad and I worked side by side for almost 15 years through bumpy scraps, and good times and bad but always with mutual respect.

Then things changed six months after he turned 56. My dad always liked to say he would always keep me under his wing. Metaphorically we flew together all that time flying low and flying high. Then one day, we were flying, and he suddenly left me to fly solo.  He just flew off to heaven and never came back, leaving me to fly by myself at 26 and run the company, raise a son and a family on my own. My lesson was to fly like an eagle but never look down. I guess he just met up with a squadron of angles, and off he went.  In reality,  in his earthly state,  I got a call from my hysterical mother in the middle of the night to come to the house (which was only a  few hundred yards away), and  I found him in the bathroom dead of a heart attack.  It was his time to fly.

I went on to go through the ups and downs of business life and added a few more ups and downs of other kinds, but this isn’t about me. It’s about a journey we all have with our dads. Jesus even referred to his, a heavenly father as (Abba) or daddy. Here is where we all can celebrate this day maybe someday; we’ll see Him and our risen dads too.

Yesterday, I got to honor another father of mine. You see, after my dad passed away, 14 years later, God sent me another father.  His name is Walter.  He came along when my 2nd marriage was falling apart, and my business was doing the same.  I clearly was leaning upon my own understanding and not God’s will (Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Proverbs 3:5-6).

Walter was a salty old Irishman who knew how to play hardball and push through tough times with great business acumen.  He helped me through the toughest times of my life and was my father figure when I need one.  The years have passed, my wife (for the last 22 years), and I went and visited him and his saint of a wife Dawn in New Hampshire a couple of summers ago. He was having the onset of Alzheimer’s then, and now Dawn takes care of his every need, and they are many and of a very personal kind. Walter stayed on the phone, and he seldom remembers much; and, at times, is angry and abusive, as Dawn tells me. I knew they are in a bad financial way, and while we are struggling ourselves in my post-stroke world, we sent them $500.  Dawn used some of it and bought him an Acacia wood rocker that he now practically lives in out under the trees. She called me on Father’s Day, and Walter was fairly coherent.  I talked with him, and a miracle happened; we talked about old times like it was yesterday.

He was getting a little tired, and Dawn sobbing on the other end said that he had not been this alert in years, and there was a spark in his eyes that she hadn’t seen.  I guess the dad thing is a perpetual thing.  Walter is 92 and one of the sharpest business minds I know.  All his blood children have abandoned him, and he even outlived one of them. He was talking like he was ready to come to Florida, and he and I would go out and find some business that we could help some poor distressed owner that needed a little cheap business acumen and a little old school kick ass to boot.  It was like we picked up where we left off, and my adopted father and I told each other we loved each other. Then he seemed to drift away, and the moment was gone. I pray for them both each day in my prayer room and am so thankful that Walter, my adopted dad, and I could have this journey together.

One last thought cherish every moment with your dad while he is here. Bury old grievances, forgive each other for the sins, remember the precious moments, in time they last for a lifetime and hopefully beyond—happy Father’s Day to all.

After a few trips and lots of negotiations which I will get into later, our little family company ended up with 20-year lease renewable into perpetuity on a massive abandoned Bauxite mine complete with a deep-water port mining equipment and structures. The lease was for 1-gourde (Haitian currency) worth about 12 cents US per year. 

Because of the years of corruption and government malfeasance, outside industries were leaving the country in droves.  We were bringing the promise of jobs and a little contribution to Haiti’s virtually nonexistent balance of payments as well as fresh economic meat for the government to “tax.” We were big-time international operators who were legends in our own mind and in way over our heads. They gave us the keys to the whole place.  The main warehouse was loaded with spare parts, including lubricants, Ford pickups, and Broncos. 
Several brand-new heavy Cat engines fan to flywheel in shipping crates along with rolls of 72″ wide new conveyor belt for the ship loading cantilever conveyor to get the ore to the ships.  We surely needed this, since the locals stripped off all the previous belt in the past and cut it up to make roofs for their little makeshift houses. At about $20 per foot, it was a good thing we had about 1000 feet on rolls left behind in the warehouse so we could replace it. 

After we got settled and hired the 100 or so people, We took a large Cat 988 (about an 80,000 LB machine and the entire army of guys we had and pulled that massive roll of belt unto the conveyor and threaded over all the rollers and got that running again.  While we were doing all this, we got a $50,000 grant from the US government’s private-public insurance/foreign development/political risk insurance/loan guarantee OPIC to do a further study of the reserves of calcium carbonate. There were no core drilling rigs available; we did this by hand having a man digging a vertical shaft just big enough for a man to pass and hand up a bucket of spoil.  We cored the deposit down 30 feet and still didn’t reach the bottom.   Only in a third world country could you pull this off.

We hired security for the mine, to stop everyone from stealing our stuff, which consisted of one enormous and well-built gentleman armed with a machete, which he didn’t need since the sight of him made anyone give him a wide berth; like the Israelites fleeing Goliath but there was no David or God’s wrath to challenge him. He recruited his helpers just to cover the area, which were mostly unarmed. He was a gentle giant as long as you behaved yourself. He was so loyal that while we furnished baseball caps with the company logo on it, he also took it upon himself to get the local seamstress to sow on arm patches to his somewhat bedraggled shirt with a crude imitation of the logo denoting him as an official of the company. Our logo, by the way, was a melding of the Haitian flag and the US flag with Haiti American Mining Co. above and below it.

However, there was one attempt a couple of years before we took over the mine of grand theft when someone was able to try to steal a D-8 (30ton) dozer and drove it across the mountain behind the mine to National #1, the only main highway that crosses the country. They intended to transport it out of the country to sell on the black market in South America. It was easy if they had a cat key (which will start any cat machine) and a little fuel. They got scared and abandoned it along the highway. We intended to hire transport to haul it back to the mine. The problem with that was, having to go through the little town of Miragoâne, the turns on the streets were narrow to navigate. So, we decided to drive it the 3 miles over the mountain back to the mine. So off we go with our returned booty. When we started to climb the hill because it has been sitting so long, it leaked out enough hydraulic fluid that the drives in the torque converter wouldn’t turn so that it wouldn’t go over the hill. With the ingenuity of the locals, we rented a donkey and loaded him up with 5-gallon pales of oil from the mine and schlepped it over the hill to the dozer. News of this operation soon spread across the countryside. Since this doesn’t happen every day in Miragoâne, the headline, word of mouth joke was how the little donkey rescued the mighty D-8. After scaring a goat over the hill to his untimely death and plowing through a small cornfield (which we had to settle up the damages with the owner on the spot), We finally got it back to the mine and was once again peace in the valley.

We were off and running; equipment was moving stripping away the left behind Bauxite, revealing the white calcium carbonite below.  A lot of hand labor was also involved, and we even thought about using a human conveyor with baskets to get the ore down the hill to the port about a mile away but decided to do the heavy lifting with the equipment we had.

We ran into an unanticipated operational problem with productivity.  When I was at a meeting with Dean, our ramrod and he told me that by 1:00 in the afternoon, the labor force was wearing out (even the equipment operators). We made sure they had enough water in the relentless heat.  Dean said the problem is that they are so malnourished that they just give out.  We thought about that for a while, and we came up with a capital idea of hiring the local best cooks to cook an early lunch, give them an hour break and then start the afternoon shift.  We could buy plenty of beans rice and griot to feed the troops rather economically to get the productivity up.  We thought we solved our problem for about a day, and then something heartbreaking to see began to occur. At lunchtime, the men would meet their wives and children at the fence and hand their entire lunch over and feed their families.  Once again, we were back where we were.  Dean asked me, “what do we do now boss,” I thought for a few minutes, did some quick bean-counting in my head, and said, “I guess we’re going to need more beans rice and griot and hire a couple more cooks.” The third world is a different world, and you have to adapt to the conditions that Americans seldom face. Good old capitalism mated with heart and on we went. All was going well, and we were getting ready to mine, load, and ship our first load to the States within three months. Then the death blow hit. To grease the skids that Reynolds so dutifully engaged in for 30+years, I had to pay in the back of a car $10,000 to Baby Docs cousin (who also “owned” the Mercedes dealership in Port au Prince. Soon after that, one morning at 5:00 AM, Baby Doc fled Haiti along with the same cousin that I paid 10k to, on a plane out of the country.

Because of the turmoil of confusion that followed and not being able to determine who to pay off or who was in charge, we were forced to shut down and leave, just like Reynolds, only one big difference, we were a little company, and they were the Behemoth Reynolds Aluminum.  If we stayed another month, we would have been broke and lost our Florida family company.  The day we finally closed the gate, a herd of our workforce and their families stood at the entrance begging us not to leave.  It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. 

The intrigue, CIA, US government screw-ups, Voodoo, young girl prostitutes, Communist Cubans, and a pedophile corrupt Catholic Priest, who became president, are part of the next episode. Stay tuned.  Reliving this part of my life helps me battle my depression. Thinking of what I was a part of and how thankful, with all I’m dealing with now, to have my family, my home, and all of it in the good ole USA.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

I guess like every other writer, you experience the uncertainty of who will read it. So here I am, sharing my experiences, that have come to the forefront of my mind as I struggle to find the answer to the question, “What now?” It’s been a year and almost 7 months since I had a stroke that left me blind on the left side and unable to drive, with several seizures that occurred after being placed on anti-depressants. I am now anti-depressant free but on seizure medicine – it’s a twisted circle and I don’t like any of it.

I am sharing stories that I find myself re-living through texts to various people in my life. I feel that right now the only thing that I can do is have a text message ministry with people in my life, and every so often have been told to ‘write a book’. My psychologist has told me to start a blog, so that is where I find myself, with the help of my trusty sidekick, also known as my wife. If you join me on this journey, I hope you find comfort, peace, and every once in a while, a chuckle.