As it's pushing on close to midnight in certain time zones, notably US Eastern Time, where Wall Street is, then this not wholly Off Topic post is about on time....
Today, 1 November, marks 100 years since my father was born. I've shared a very small amount about him in the past, including that he was still working about 20-25 hrs each week, including sitting on the board of directors of six corporations, up to three weeks before his death in his 94th year. He had over time been on the board of some three dozen or more, a fact that in itself I know rankles at least one prolific poster here, but he viewed himself as a cross-pollinator, one of the very last of the so-called professional directors. It continues not to be appropriate to name the companies, but quite a number of them are ones whose names all of you would recognize; they range from finance to insurance to banking to railroads to oil to engineering to high tech to pharmaceutical to philanthropical.
As also will not be surprising to those who have followed my postings, he and I crossed swords - to great and unfortunate effect - and only barely reconciled ourselves before his passing. For all the faults I perceived and yet perceive in him, however, I also acknowledge and desire still to be able to act (sometimes!!!!!!) as he did. One nugget I wish to share with you on this anniversary, but first: I want each of you to think back to the year 2005, and consider what you were doing and how your thoughts and actions are similar to or different from those of today.
Now, the seminal part of Dad's life was WWII. He had prepped for military duty by having enrolled in the predecessor to the Navy's ROTC, and by ragged historical coincidence was scheduled to report to active duty as a Lieutenant (jg) on 8 December, 1941. As such, when the news of Pearl Harbor broke the day before, he immediately raced to his ship, the aircraft carrier Ranger, a day early - and therefore was on active duty, mostly in the Pacific Theater, from then until well after Hiroshima. Succinctly, he spent the entire war killing as many Japanese as he could, and trying to keep from being killed by them.
Now, as I was poring through cabinet after file cabinet of his papers after his death, I came across certain documents that form the crux of this post. In 1958 - and this at a time when it was incredibly difficult for an American to purchase shares even of a UK company, he bought - through the broom-closet Wall St office of a firm no one ever had heard of called Nomura Securities - a large number of shares of two companies: one called Yawata Iron & Steel (this later becomes Nippon Steel, the world's largest steel company in the 1970s-90s), and another unknown company called Sony Corp. Nineteen fifty eight.
1958 is 13 years after 1945. How have your views of things changed in just 13 years? Thus the 2005 question earlier.
I keep that story of him as close to my thoughts, and heart, as I can.
One more vignette, with which we will close the circle. As I wrote, for most of his latter years we were unreconciled, and of course, geographically I have been at the Ends Of The Earth, thus truly out of the loop, so I learned the following only after his death. Electric automobiles had been a passion of mine in the years before I left Wall St; my failure to bring to funding an EV venture was one of several important reasons I soured of the investment world and departed for the bosom of Alaska. In that where I live contact with the outside world was very difficult and tenuous - and even today internet connections are poor (so you all get to run rampant all summers, you heathens you) - for many years the only good source I had of news was the weekly delivery of The Economist. And some time probably late in the summer of 2012, I read therein of a company that not only had developed a really engaging EV, but it was actually producing them. <Skipping my own embrace of Tesla and move to....> . So after we revealed to one sister our Model S, she said "You know, Dad was in one of these"? Whaaaa? How could that be? "Yes. ______ _______ took him for a ride in his". Whereupon I learned from a close friend and former right hand to Mr. X that Mr. X had been an extremely large early investor, and thus Mr Musk gave him the opportunity to buy one of the fabled Final Five Roadsters. My friend said that after Dad's time in Mr X's Roadster, he turned to him and said "Now I've seen the future - and this is it".
Happy 100th, Dad.
