ACEs

https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/sesame-street-changing-childrens-lives-around-world

Luncheons with my Father

The first business lunch with my father was in North Beach at Enrico's.  The year was 1968.  I was 30 and my dad was 56.  We called them business lunches because I had reached that age of acceptance for a father, where we could engage in a conversation as peers of the business world.  He had his own business and I knew it well from years of listening at the dinner table as he unwound over the cocktail of the decade; martinis when he was younger, scotch as he mellowed in midlife, and wine after he retired.  I was able to comment intelligently because I had worked for his company half a dozen summers as I grew up, starting and staying at the bottom of the totem pole.  I had my career and it was a new field, computers.  He saw that their magic would transform the world.  We often ate at Enrico's over the next fifteen years and we always had the same thing, a Salisbury Steak on sourdough, and two tall gin and tonics, one before and one with the meal.  I never liked gin, but this was the right drink for the occasion.  He didn't just order gin, too plebian, "Tanqueray and tonic, please, … tall."

Enrico's was a favorite because it was a sidewalk café and we watched the pretty girls walk by on Broadway and Montgomery.  Hookers and hippies in outrageous clothing and I was in the middle of it with my involvement in Champagne Taste on Upper Grant Avenue.  My father got vicarious pleasure out of the social side, Carol Doda walking by and saying, "Hi, Peter."  He was based in San Jose, what many then considered a small town, and I was up here with the movers and the shakers.  I was working for an investment company that was responsible on some days for a significant percentage of the activity on the NYSE.  I was a consultant to the mutual fund manager, Bob Brown, in the trading room.  I would bring my dad tips and we would talk about the stock market.  The market was like gambling for him, just short term investments.  I would relay advice from Bob Brown.

My jobs changed like a light bulb over the next few years and there were gaps, like when I went back to graduate school.  When I moved to England, these luncheons stopped for good.  I was infrequently in San Francisco, and after I returned and he was too old to travel from his retirement in Carmel just for lunch.  So, the seventies define these luncheons.  These years spanned an extremely active period of my social life, many women, houses, parties, and other events.  He would avidly listen to my tales of adventure in the wilds of the San Francisco seventies.

We tried to eat at other places whenever possible.  Enrico's was a bit far from the Financial District and when I was busy with work and thought about what those two G&Ts would do to me, I redirected us to Sam's or the Tadich Grill.  Tadich's was our number two place.  Dickie always had Sand Dabs there.  I always had the Dover Sole, one of his favorites, but not at this restaurant.  Here I drank a glass of white wine.  It's funny how you pick up traits from your parents.  I follow in my father's footsteps.  I still always order the same thing at a restaurant; chicken livers at The Village Inn, Salmon at River's End.  Usually we would take a table; if we were feeling frisky, we would sit at the bar where one of the two of us would be successful in striking up a conversation with a babe.

We didn't miss many restaurants over the years.  I dragged him to a Japanese place on Montgomery where you had to take your shoes off.  He loved everything Japanese, so it wasn't much of a fight.  He liked Sam's, famous for fish and for curtains across the private booths.  I took the whole PEMEX team from Mexico there one time for a celebration and they loved it.  He also loved Jack's, although they always embarrassed him by forcing him to wear a tie.  We only ate there a few times because I didn't like the food.  I thought it was an old gentleman's club that was pretentious and stodgy.

I was only able to drag him a few times to Vanessi's on Broadway.  It never came off as well for lunches as it did at dinner time.  I was fond of the place when I returned to San Francisco after graduate school.  I had an apartment up the hill on Montgomery Street.  I would stop in on my way home from the Financial District.  Facing yet another 300-foot climb, I would decide to defer this until after a nice meal and a glass of wine.  I always sat at the counter where you could watch the Genoese saute chefs putting on a display of knife and pan tossing at the live gas flame grills.  There was always a special and I took it.  I always added a Zabaglione for a dessert.  This has disappeared off the menu of every American restaurant.  These days it is available only as an ice cream treat that is awful.  A web search finds it only at one restaurant, and that in New Zealand. 

The chef would start with a copper half globe bowl that he could hold over an open flame.  In would go the whites of several eggs, some white wine, and some sugar.  All these ingredients the chef seemed to just toss in randomly.  That was it, simple.  He wire-whisked it over a flame until the egg white began to froth up.  The chef then served it hot from the pan into a sundae dish; the extra coming after you had spooned in the first few mouthfuls.  It's a wonderful dessert but requires preparation when you are ready to eat it and that doesn't fit with today's restaurants.

My father and I did the luncheon thing because it excluded women.  I was a raconteur only because I was my father's son.  He lived vicariously through me in those years.  When we met at night, there were usually problems.  I don't remember how he roped me into it, but one night he dragged me to a dinner with an "investment prospect."  She was younger than I was and trying to market jewelry.  She was as embarrassed as I was, and she and I tacitly agreed to end the evening as soon as possible.  Worst case was when my parents and I were sharing an apartment on Nob Hill.  Late one evening, I went over to Blum's in the lobby of the Fairmont for coffee and a dish of ice cream while I read the next morning's Chronicle.  The sounds of a piano bar pulled me into the lounge and lo and behold, my father was sitting next to the piano.  "What are you doing here?" I asked.  Just then a hotel man came up to us, "Here is your key Mr. Andrews.  The lady is already up in the room."  What was there to say?  I left.

 

Recruitment

Mid-Term GJ Recruitment for 6-month Term

Sonoma County has tried something unique for Juror recruitment.  For the second year in a row, we found ourselves in an unenviable position, having a jury of less than nineteen, with no alternates.  We hope to cure this condition before it settles in.

Sonoma County’s local Grand Jury Association, the sitting Grand Jury, and the Sonoma County Superior Court launched an October/November, 5-week, blitz campaign for recruiting new juror pool candidates.  The candidates would only be committed to the 2019 half of the jury term.

Because of the short notice and duration of this campaign, we avoided events like speeches or mixers.  The only documents we used, specific to the Mid-Term aspect of this campaign, were flyer and PSA.  Our focus targets were each addressable by either telephone or internet:

1)     Prior Jurors – We have routinely asked them for the past two years, without remarkable success; but still, we did it again.  We maintain a list of past jurors from the last five years.  We sent them all a flyer.  BTW: our total pool this year was under twenty.

2)     The Press - Deadlines were a problem.  If we’d had two months lead-time, this approach would have been far more effective.  Nonetheless, we hit more than half of our dozen plus small town rags.  We wrote a letter to the Editor of each, linking in the October 2017 fires, and attaching PSA and flyer.  This was immensely successful, at least for stirring concern and discussion.  All the print media bought into the message and printed something, one monthly (35,000 print-run) published the flyer for free.  This seems to have generated over a dozen application responses.

3)     Senior Centers – We have fifteen senior-centric organizations in Sonoma County.  Our timing missed all but one of their monthly newsletters.  The good news was that, most of them put our flyer up on their online site, printed it out for display around their venue, and were anxiously ready to support us in December-January, when we come back again for 2019-2020 full year recruitment.  We sent a “suggested item” for including in their newsletter, the press Letter to the Editor. 

We are sending out the flyer again, with the suggested reminder that the Courts may consider applications for the Mid-Tern 2018-19 Jury, as well for the 2019-20 Jury Pool.

It is our hope that an early December announcement to ten thousand seniors will bring in another half dozen qualified applicants.

4)     Libraries – Sonoma County has a dozen regional libraries.  We placed in each of them, a 3-tier information display holder, which contained flyers, the PSAs, and applications.  This may or may not be a successful outreach contact, but it is at least a brick-and-mortar venue to pick up the information and application.

Questions

How do we measure success?  by the number of applications?
How will this group be trained?  CGJA has offered.
Will this group be offered first year membership in CGJA?  CGJA has offered.
How will the sitting Jury adapt to a mid-year freshman squad?

I was just settling in for that long Winter's nap

 when out on the TV there arose such a clatter,

   I sprang from my garden to see what was the matter.

 

Last year's remains of ten thousand new homeless,

  were redoubled with victims in this year’s.

It's the new norm says Brown,

    and Trump says, not his fault.

 

But that nap will need wait,

  for we're all watching for embers;

   floods are our past,

     with no rain in our future.

Pack Your Bags

Well, by now, everybody on the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, and the West Coast fully realize that Global Warming is for real and is a cataclysmic horror.

The only states not on board are the Great Lakes states.  Speaking from California, we were just coming to grips with Earthquakes, and myself floods, up in rural Northern California.  This Smokey Winter thing mandates a whole new survival plan. 

All of us have had an Evacuation plan of sorts, based on anything from a back-pack to a six cubic foot storage container.  Some survival necessities: food, water, medicines, etc., plus those things we couldn’t do without.  That list is personal.  It may include cell phones, computers, baby or wedding pictures, tax records, other financial documents, avocations, collections.  I could go on.

In this new age, it is different now.  Earthquakes could disarray things, Floods could distort them, but they wouldn’t be gone.  Fires turn things to dust.  No more to be seen, felt, touched, or experienced in any way.  Gone.

This is a characteristic of death.  Dust unto dust.

If I get an evacuation notice now, here in my rural community, for fire, there is nothing I need take with me, just as if the grim reaper had appeared.  There is no bag to pack.  I may head south to San Jose, but things could be worse there.  I may head to Modoc County, but by myself, no things.

Things are just mental triggers to remember the past – think harder and it will all come back.  The technological environment we live in will reconstruct your life – it remembers all faithfully.  It’s all in the Cloud, so maybe the one thing I’d keep handy is a flash drive with my latest thoughts, ideas, and plans, or artwork.

It’s of no use to the grim reaper, but you may run into a library computer and be able to plug in and continue.  The rest is just things, and when you die, they’ll all be gone.