Matters of Life and Data: The Remarkable Journey of a Big Data Visionary Whose Work Impacted Millions (Including You)

By Charles D. Morgan

Thanks to Edward Snowden and the N.S.A., “Big Data” is a hot---and controversial---topic these days. In Charles D. Morgan’s lively memoir, "Matters of Life and Data", he shows that data gathering itself is neither good nor bad---it’s how it’s used that matters. But Big Data isn’t the whole story here---Morgan is also a champion race car driver, a jet pilot, and an all-around gadget-geek-turned-business-visionary. Life is about solving the problems we’re faced with, and Charles Morgan’s life has been one of trial, error, and great achievement. His story will inspire all who read it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781630474669

Book preview

PROLOGUE

THE BAD GUYS DATABASE

SEPTEMBER 14, 2001, three days after 9/11. Everybody in the country was still glued to the television, still struggling to comprehend the horrific images that now couldn’t be shut off, even without the TV.

In my office at Acxiom in Little Rock I was going through the motions, trying to find normal in a world blown off its axis. A colleague knocked on my door. Look at this, he said, and he seemed nervous. He handed me a computer printout. Data was our business, and these pages described a man who worked as a clerk at a Florida 7/11 store, had 14 credit cards, and had racked up $150,000 in credit-card debt.

What is this? I said.

This guy, answered my colleague, lived in the same apartment building as Mohamed Atta.

The name Mohamed Atta was now infamous worldwide, thanks to the recent FBI announcement identifying the 9/11 terrorists. Once these names had become public, some of our people jumped on our databases to see what we had on them. They’d found Atta’s address and cross-referenced it to pull up other names, including that of the free-spending 7/11 clerk. We think this isn’t a coincidence, my guy said. We’d like your okay to look deeper. But it might be necessary to take a peek at Citibank’s or Chase’s data. Without permission, I mean.

Holy shit, I thought. Client trust was one of our most hallowed tenets, along with data privacy; legal liability was also up there in our concerns. But this was a unique situation.

They worked through the weekend, and on Monday they’d amassed enough tantalizing information that we knew we had to take it to the next level. Our company lawyer arranged for us to be subpoenaed by the U.S. Attorney’s office, so we could hand over our findings. Soon a half-dozen wide-eyed FBI agents descended upon us. I personally called Bill Clinton, who would spend a couple of hours at Acxiom debriefing us on what we had uncovered.

But that was some three months later, after we’d gone to our buddies at TransUnion, one of the big three credit reporting agencies, and received permission to delve into their credit data. That was a breakthrough. Also vital was the fact that this terrible event occurred after we at Acxiom had developed revolutionary techniques in data processing and data matching, as well as our new grid computing system—essentially a private cloud. Armed with these tools, we began putting the credit bureau data with all our info-based data, along with some data from Citibank—this time with their blessing—and a very shocking picture began to emerge.

That’s when I decided to get a dedicated server and build a database so we could look harder and deeper. We outfitted an empty room in our headquarters building with computers and high security, and for a time I had 30 people working fulltime on what we now called The Bad Guys Database. I eventually made a presentation to Vice President Dick Cheney about our data-gathering capabilities.

DID WE CONTRIBUTE, inadvertently, to the NSA’s clandestine activities? I have no idea. I am extremely proud of our work with the government following the events of September 11, but thanks partly to Edward Snowden and the NSA’s excesses, today’s ubiquitous Big Data is a concept that many people respond to with suspicion or outrage. It’s absolutely true that some holders of information misuse it—I’ve met some of those people over the years—and others don’t give a damn about your privacy—I’ve run across those types, too. But in telling my story, what I hope to show you is that data itself, as well as data gathering, is neither good nor bad; it’s how it’s used that matters.

I didn’t set out to become a collector of your and your neighbors’ information. When I was growing up, in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, nobody but egghead scientists talked about data. It was the mechanical age, and I was a gadget geek, taking apart my cousin’s toys and my mother’s toaster and trying, unsuccessfully at first, to put them back together again. I was especially crazy about cars and engines, and had it not been for a fateful encounter during college recruiting season, I might’ve lived my life as a race car mechanic instead of learning about computers at IBM. As it turned out, pursuing Big Data allowed me the resources to become a professional race car driver on the side, competing against the likes of Paul Newman, who makes appearances in these pages as well.

Such are the wonders of this journey we’re all on. Mine has taken me from the frontier of western Arkansas, where my ancestors owned a hardware store selling iron tools to westbound travelers, to the frontier of the digital age, where room-size computers have become eclipsed by the power of smart phones. But while much has changed in our world in these decades, even more has stayed the same. There is no software for reprogramming human nature—believe me, I’ve had ample reason to hope for such.

In a sense, then, the story you’re about to read is not so different from those of the colorful adventurers who stocked up their wagons at my family’s hardware emporium and headed west to make their fortunes. Data mining is the new gold rush, and we were there at first strike, dragging with us all our human frailties and foibles. In this book’s cast of characters you’ll find ambition, arrogance, jealousy, pride, fear, recklessness, anger, lust, viciousness, greed, revenge, betrayal—and then some. Of course love, or the lack of it, plays a part in this tale: I once traveled to Saudi Arabia to rescue an office sidetracked by love—a sad event that secured my own rise. Later, my own divorce was so overheated that Oprah invited me to be a guest on her show (I declined).

It is a messy story. In the big picture, this could be called a narrative of America since World War II. But in the micro telling, think of it this way: The man who opened your lives to Big Data finally bares his own.

Part One

HARDWARE

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1

DRIVE, HE SAID

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I GREW UP on the frontier’s edge, at the jumping-off point for the Great Plains, where Indians, homesteaders, trappers, outlaws, and all manner of fortune seekers had vied for supremacy in the untidy settling of the West. All these people needed supplies, and so in the late 1800s my Arkansas River town of Fort Smith, Arkansas—last outpost of civilization before you crossed into the vast unknown—was a good place to own a hardware store. So good, in fact, that my maternal great-grandfather, Dave Speer Sr., moved all the way from far north Missouri to Fort Smith in 1887 to open Speer Hardware Company, a large retail operation located near the river and the rail line, perfectly situated to outfit the westbound hordes with wagon wheels, whips, cast-iron stoves, and tools.

Five years later, as the Oklahoma Territory moved toward statehood, he expanded to wholesale, becoming a major distributor for the entire region. My great-grandfather’s five-story brick hardware store sat just across the street from the courthouse of Judge Isaac Parker, the legendary hanging judge. Had Judge Parker still been alive for Speer Hardware’s grand opening, I have no doubt that my great-grandfather would’ve supplied the lumber, nails, and rope that were at the heart of the judge’s brand of frontier justice.

Hardware appeared to be my destiny from the start, thanks to the double whammy of genealogy and genes, which are not exactly the same thing. By the 1940s my great-uncle Fred Speer was running the hardware business and his brother, my grandfather Ralph Speer Sr., worked alongside him. Now enter my father, Charles Donald Morgan, a traveling salesman of dry goods. The year was 1941. Having been rejected by the military for his migraine headaches, he spent the war years working for Rice-Stix, a wholesaler and manufacturer in St. Louis; it was a major company—at the time of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Rice-Stix was said to be the largest business in the city.

My father’s territory was Northwest Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma, an area that made Fort Smith a good base of operations. On this particular sales trip he was working out of the then-famous Goldman Hotel—center of Fort Smith society—and my mother, Betty Speer, Ralph’s youngest daughter, ran the AAA desk in the Goldman lobby. So one day my future father dropped by her desk and said, My, that’s a lovely dress you’re wearing. May I feel the material? What a line! But Father’s story, and he never abandoned it, was that he had to feeeel the fabric in order to decide if it was a cloth he should be carrying. Long story short, they got married on the Fourth of July, 1941, and I came along in February 1943. February 4, to be exact.

Don Morgan was a good salesman, and soon—I was probably 6 months old—he got promoted to a larger territory, working out of New Orleans. We lived in New Orleans for about two-and-a-half years, and then my father was promoted again—to Griffin, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. In January 1946 my brother Speer was born. He was a difficult pregnancy, and Mother went back to Fort Smith to have him. I think by this time she’d had enough of following a traveling salesman around from post to post, and she had no fondness for St. Louis, where he was likely to end up in the suffocating comfort of Rice-Stix middle management. Mother wanted to settle down in Fort Smith. And the way she managed that was to ask her dad to give Don a sales job in the family hardware business.

Everybody’s road has its fateful forks, and this was the first of mine. My grandfather—whom we kids called Pop Speer—was a wonderful man, friendly and funny and unassuming, and he liked my father a lot. He also dearly loved my mother, his baby girl, youngest of his four children. We lived with my grandparents when we first moved back to Fort Smith. They had a comfortable two-story house on 14th Street, with several bedrooms, large living and dining rooms, and an ample kitchen with spacious pantry where I could always find something good to eat. My grandmother, Betty Black Speer—called Woggie by us kids, for reasons I’ve forgotten—was a spirited woman and I loved riding in the car with her. I remember her zooming down 14th Street in her 1940 Plymouth, me standing on the front seat while she tore through the intersections and I bounced up and down, bumping my head into the soft felt ceiling, laughing all the way. I probably got my love of racing cars from my grandmother. But our joyrides stopped being fun the day a car pulled out in front of us and Woggie slammed on the brakes, sending me head first into the windshield. I didn’t go through it, but I cracked the thing, earning me a well-deserved reputation for hard-headedness.

Once Father and Mother found us a house of our own—a few blocks from my grandparents on North 21st Street—we still went over to see them every Sunday night for supper. Eventually Woggie fell and broke her hip, due to brittle bones from severe osteoporosis; she became an almost total invalid. But Pop Speer had an excellent cook, so we would go early and visit with him while the cook fixed supper. My grandfather was a shy man. His normal routine when company was present was to settle back in his easy chair and puff on his pipe and hardly say a word; he’d just listen, the way he listened to his big console radio. But my dad had a way of getting Pop to open up and tell about his days as a star pitcher for a semi-pro baseball team back in the 1920s; or about the times, in the early part of the century, when Grandfather would go with his father, Dave Speer Sr., and other men on two-week hunting trips to their camp in wildest Oklahoma. Camp Plenty, they called it, and my brother has photographs of one of those hunts; judging from the pictures, the Plenty in the camp’s name refers as much to whisky and cards as to wild game.

In 1951 my grandfather would become president of Speer Hardware Company, so you would think that Don Morgan, his son-in-law, would be in a very favorable position. There was only one glitch in that scenario: Pop Speer’s son, my uncle, Ralph Speer Jr.

HOW CAN I convey the character of my Uncle Ralph? I’ve consulted several relatives, who tend to remember him in monosyllables—ass, shit, dick. Let me explain. Status, which Uncle Ralph had been handed at birth, was everything to him. He had been sent off to Sewanee, the University of the South, to acquire a gentleman’s education, and he had accomplished that, in 1927, complete with Phi Beta Kappa key. In those days there weren’t many people in our part of Arkansas who even had a college degree, much less one from a prestigious out-of-state university where students actually wore academic gowns to class, like budding oracles. So even as he worked in various junior positions in the hardware store, expanding his knowledge beyond the Silver Spoon Department, Uncle Ralph enjoyed a certain big dog status in Fort Smith. Then, at a summer resort in Winslow, Arkansas, where the Speers had a cabin, he met an oil heiress from Houston, Melanie Holt—pronounced Me-LAN-ie—and they got married. With her money fueling his social climbing, they were able, even in their 30s, to live in a big sprawling house—much grander than my Grandfather Speer’s—on leafy Hendricks Boulevard, one of the city’s best addresses. And of course they belonged to Fort Smith’s venerable Hardscrabble Country Club, on whose manicured golf course Uncle Ralph regularly reinforced his position as an important man about town.

But there appeared to be one stubborn spot of tarnish in Uncle Ralph’s otherwise golden life: his brother-in-law, my father, the—dare we say it?—traveling salesman.

To Uncle Ralph, his sister Betty had scandalized the family by marrying beneath her station; Uncle Ralph had personally been humiliated by the union of this flower of the Fort Smith Speers with the cloth-peddling offspring of an itinerant West Virginia ne’er-do-well—if he knew that much about my father at all, which he probably didn’t. The term traveling salesman, with all its attendant jokes, was indictment enough. It must have galled Uncle Ralph when Grandfather Speer hired Don Morgan to work at the family hardware store. From that moment on, my uncle, a blustery redhead who started most sentences with Goddammit, did his level best to make my father’s life miserable.

Unfortunately, Dad was particularly susceptible to Ralph’s bullying. My salesman father’s gift of gab camouflaged a bundle of insecurities, not to mention contradictions. He was uncomfortable with personal relationships, especially with other men. Maybe that had to do with his upbringing—his own father, a tall, handsome, garrulous fellow, had never quite been able to find his calling, and consequently had moved from place to place and job to job. And even though my dad had managed to put himself through college, in Illinois, his position as traveling salesman clearly didn’t bring him much respect. Dad had also been divorced—though I wouldn’t know that for years—and divorce was very much a stigma in those days. Even if others didn’t know about it, he was probably ashamed. He was a sensitive soul who loved theater and literature and writing; a religious man with an eye for the ladies; a Sunday School teacher who, until the kibosh of divorce, had hoped to become a preacher; an unabashed dreamer who never met an opportunity he didn’t like. All in all, he was as unlike rich, swaggering, establishment Uncle Ralph and his cronies as it was possible to be. I don’t know how much of all this Ralph knew, but surely, like a predator sensing an opponent’s fear, he smelled my father’s intimidation.

I remember many evenings when Father would come home from work feeling downtrodden, nursing yet another insult from Uncle Ralph. My mother would try to smooth it over, to urge him not to take things personally. But he did take personally the fact that he was given the worst sales territory—hole-in-the-wall general stores inevitably situated out in the farthest boondocks, five miles down a pock-marked dirt road; or that his commission plan was deliberately structured to be less lucrative than those of the other salesmen; or that Uncle Ralph had said something disparaging to him in front of the other men.

This last item was one of my uncle’s favorite tactics for making people around him feel small. Though our family didn’t spend a lot of time at the home of Uncle Ralph and Aunt Melanie, we were invited, apparently to keep up appearances, for most major holidays—Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Fourth of July. Sometimes other friends of my aunt and uncle would also be there with their kids, and my brother and I grew up swimming in our aunt and uncle’s pool with our cousins and their rich friends. When I was young and less aware I looked forward to these outings, but now I know that my parents—at least my father—certainly didn’t.

I’ll never forget, nor forgive, one July 4 when Dad, never much of a drinker, was in a group of highball-swilling men gathered around Uncle Ralph, who was holding forth, as usual, on some subject of the day. My father ventured a comment, and Ralph turned on him with surprising venom, even for Uncle Ralph. Goddammit, Don, he said, why don’t you just shut the fuck up, you don’t know a goddammed thing.

My father was humiliated. And when Mother confronted Uncle Ralph about it—a rare occurrence—he was just as ugly to her.

The fact is, Uncle Ralph was congenitally rude to pretty much everyone. Which is why it’s so surprising that he was always kind, even solicitous, to me. I appreciated that, but also came to resent it, wondering if it wasn’t the ultimate insult to my father—trying to co-opt his eldest son. My cousin Margaret, Uncle Ralph’s daughter, has said she thinks I was probably influenced in my business career by the pattern set by her dad. She’s right, I was influenced by him, but not in the way she thinks. From very early on, some part of me burned to show him the meaning of a term that would never apply to him: self-made.

DOES THAT MAKE me sound like an angry boy? Nothing could be further from the truth. What I was, was determined. And consumed.

Earlier I said that hardware seemed to be my destiny. I was around it a lot, of course, given the family business, but mere proximity is never the point. Instinct and passion are the keys. Whenever I walked into Speer Hardware, I saw those thousands of mostly metal products not so much as items in and of themselves, but as bits of matter in a larger mechanical universe. As far back as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by machines, especially engines. How in God’s name do they work? What can I tweak to make them go faster, higher, farther?

But you have to begin somewhere, and I started with my cousin’s toys. Whenever Mother would take me over to visit my cousin Reaves Lee, I would take apart his playthings—his music box, his whirring tin police car, his mechanical cash register—and try to put them back together. Unfortunately, I was still of an age—6 or 7—when I usually couldn’t get them completely back the way they’d been. Reaves was a good sport, I have to say—though as time went on, he was increasingly careful about what toys he left out when I was around.

At home, I drove my mother nuts. She might walk in to find that I had cracked open the toaster, or the radio, or her mixer. I couldn’t help myself—it was as though I saw the world inside out: While others focused on the sleek exterior of things, I was drawn to the gears and springs and tubes inside. But the day Mother finally went over the edge, it wasn’t—on the surface—due to my destroying anything mechanical. Her prize possession was a fancy gilded plate that she kept on a stand in the center of the mantel. That day I was playing with one of those ’50s-era toy guns that shot darts tipped with suction cups, and I hit the bulls-eye. Holding my breath, I watched—seemingly in slow motion—as the cherished plate teetered on its stand, toppled from the mantel, and crashed into shards on the hearth. When Mother ran in and saw what had happened, she clasped her hand to her mouth… and then it was as though a switch had been tripped: Opening the china cabinet, she began flinging plates and cups and saucers like a mad woman. You’re going to tear up everything! she screamed. "You’re going to ruin everything I’ve got! I might as well do it myself!"

For a boy with a mind like mine, postwar America was a great time to be alive. The mechanical age had spread from the factory to the home, and the country was bursting with cool new products. To me, the coolest of the cool were cars—both inside and out. My dad still drove a ’46 Plymouth sedan, with its small windows and a roof that sloped, like a claw hammer, down to the back bumper; in our part of the world, that was pretty much the status quo—even Uncle Ralph, never a car guy, drove a frumpy station wagon so he could haul his golf clubs and hunting gear. But cars were changing, and the magazines my parents read were full of splashy ads showing cars that were ever lower, ever longer, ever more streamlined. I was obsessed with cars, and by the time I was 8 or 9 I knew the specs of just about any model of automobile you could name.

It’s no coincidence that, in 1952, when I was 9 years old, my father announced a plan so off the wall that the rest of us just stared at him in disbelief. The plan was for us, as a family, to build and operate a motel. Not only that, we would live in it. Apparently Dad had been taking note of the same car ads that I had salivated over, but he saw something beyond sleek lines and powerful engines. He saw restlessness, mobility, a country ready, after years of World War II belt-tightening, to get on the road and go. Yes, the Korean War was still hot, but it wasn’t so all consuming as to restrict growth and movement; besides, the Korean War was a key part of Dad’s scheme. Camp Chaffee, built as a training facility during World War II, was located a few miles southeast of Fort Smith on Highway 22. The camp was once again filled with soldiers, and there was a lot of coming and going, including visits from family and friends. As matters now stood, the closest place for those soldiers and their visitors to get together was all the way in downtown Fort Smith, at one of the hotels. Dad’s idea was to build our motel out on mostly undeveloped Highway 22 between Fort Smith and Camp Chaffee.

No doubt part of the impetus for this plan was for Dad to forge a degree of independence from Uncle Ralph. He would still have to work at the hardware store, at least until the motel began making money, but no longer would he be completely beholden to his brother-in-law. We were also going to keep our existing house and rent it out, generating additional income. Dad couldn’t wait to get going on the project, to buy the land and start construction. Sharpening his pitch like the salesman he was, he convinced the bank to lend him a portion of the $60,000 he needed; the rest he got from my grandfather. Did Uncle Ralph know that? I sincerely hope so.

We moved into our new motel home in 1953, when I was 10 and Speer was 7. It was a gutsy move for our parents, most especially for Mother. In Fort Smith, as in most places in America, there were the respectable areas of town to live in and the parts that were considered unacceptable for nice people. Being a Speer, Mother had always lived in respectable areas; for that matter, so had we all. But now, even though we were still within the Fort Smith city limits, we had crossed a line. In those days, you didn’t want to live east of Waldron Avenue; our motel was three blocks into the no-go zone. Our neighbors included a gas station, a quarry, and a junkyard.

The motel was U-shaped, with 10 guest rooms configured in five freestanding duplex buildings—three on one arm of the U, two facing on the other—and the small office/residence, about 1,000 square feet of living space, centered in the U’s base. And what do you think my dad named this attractive inn? The Farm Motel. Worst idea in the world! In those days, most farm families used privies, and so a lot of potential guests checked first to make sure we had indoor plumbing. I hate to think how many didn’t stop at all.

But life at the motel turned out to be very good. My parents lived there for 16 years—eventually, in the late ’50s, changing the name to something classy, as my father put it, remembering the finest hotel in St. Louis, the Chase. That’s how The Farm Motel became The Chase Motel. For me, though, and I suspect for Speer, what resonates about those days is a sense of adventure, of growing up slightly on the edge. For two young boys from historic Fort Smith, this untamed neighborhood was our own personal frontier.

WE HAD TO fight our way in. Not long after we moved to the motel, Speer and I were playing in a vacant strip of land behind our house when suddenly we were pummeled by rocks—jagged rocks, sharp and weighty. Our attackers were a whooping pair of boys whom we would eventually know as the Helms Brothers, but at this moment all we knew was that they were wild and loud and moving closer. Speer and I picked up rocks and hurled them back, but the Helmses didn’t run away. The fight must’ve lasted five minutes, though it seemed like an hour, and we got the worst of it—especially me. I leaned over to pick up a rock and then spun back to face them, and wham! One incoming rock hit me square in the forehead, opening a nasty gash that spurted blood. I stood there dazed, knocked starry eyed. Blood was running down my face, dripping off my chin, soaking into my shirt. Time seemed to stop. Wide-eyed, the Helms boys stared at me for a long moment, then turned and hightailed it back to whatever hole they’d come out of. I headed for the house, where a friend of Mother’s, Mrs. Cabel, was staying with us while our parents were away. I almost scared the poor lady to death.

There were other confrontations, various kinds of testing, as there always are in the world of kids. Outsiders have to prove themselves. But once Speer and I were accepted, we formed friendships—some more stable than others. Our closest and most reliable friend was a quiet, curly-headed boy named Junior Smotherman, real name Hoyt, who lived catty-cornered across Highway 22 in a three-room house with his mother; no father was in evidence. Even though Junior was a couple of years older, he and I spent a lot of time together, at his house and ours, and he was very protective of Speer with the rougher kids in the neighborhood. Junior was a responsible boy. He delivered newspapers to help his mother make ends meet. She worked two jobs and still had a hard time of it. We’d never seen that kind of struggling before.

Now it was all around us. Another pair of brothers, Jerry and Jimmy Prescott, lived in a tiny house at the other end of Holly’s Junkyard, two blocks away. Jimmy, who was my age, was mostly mean to us, but his older brother Jerry was a friend—especially to Speer. The Prescotts had a garden out back, and Speer remembers that Jerry practically lived on tomatoes; in their house, there wasn’t much else to eat. Speer and Jerry sometimes went fishing, and for Jerry it was more than just recreational—he really needed those fish.

Down a block from the Prescotts was where Ralph and Ronnie Ingram lived, again in a sad, miniscule house with a single mother. Ralph, a tall, skinny kid about five years older than me, was my neighborhood hero. His yard was strewn with the carcasses of old lawn mowers and other machines, which he either fixed up or scavenged parts from. But the thing that really impressed me about Ralph was his Harley Project—he was in the process of rebuilding not one but two Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and I couldn’t get enough of it. I spent as much time as possible at the Ingrams’ watching Ralph tinker with the Harleys and hanging onto his every word. Ralph Ingram was a mechanical genius, my personal guru of the internal combustion engine.

And then there were the Helms brothers—one was called Dub, and I can’t for the life of me recall the other’s name. Dub was a couple of years older than I was and his brother was a little younger. They lived about three blocks from us, down past that vacant lot where they’d attacked us with rocks. Their house was small, but nice—it was at the Helmses’ that Speer and I first watched television. We called Dub and his brother The TV Boys. Their dad was the main mechanic at Holly’s Junkyard. At least they had a dad, and he had a job; that alone made them the best off in the neighborhood, after us.

Money and status weren’t subjects we often spoke about, but they were as much in the air in our edgy world as if we’d lived west of Waldron Avenue. The neighborhood kids seemed to consider Speer and me rich because our parents owned a business and we had nicer, newer cars, and also because we were connected to a family whose name was emblazoned on a big building in the heart of downtown. And in a way we did live in two worlds. Every Sunday morning, our family would dress up and drive to the venerable St. John’s Episcopal Church downtown, where Father taught Sunday School—I was in his class, along with the children of many of the city’s most prominent families. Then we four attended church service together, always sitting in our place—third pew from the front, right of center aisle.

Speer and I also profited from Aunt Melanie’s ongoing guilt over the boorishness of her husband, our Uncle Ralph. Bending over backwards to be nice to us, she invited us to spend many a summer afternoon swimming with Cousin Margaret and her privileged Hendricks Avenue friends—Ann Oglesby next door, whose father was a doctor; and the Dills girls across the street, Jane and Nancy, daughters of the owner of Arkhola Sand & Gravel. Jane Dills, by the way, will play a very important role in my story, but for now I’ll just say that she was an older girl (by two years) whom I seemingly always knew. In fact, continuing the two worlds theme of this narrative, it was at the Dillses’ house that I got my first taste of Champagne, at the tender age of 12, when my cousin Ewell Lee—Reaves’ older brother—married Jane’s sister. At the reception, the Dillses had a Champagne fountain on a table with a skirt around it, and I hid under the skirt and drank way more than my share.

By age 12, I was, at Mother’s insistence, also attending cotillion—what they called Tea Dances in Fort Smith—and so I learned to waltz and foxtrot and dance the Lindy Hop with many of the proper young ladies in town. He was a great dancer! says my former cotillion partner, Jan Whitcomb—now Jan Phillips. But I deemed it wise to keep mum about Tea Dancing around the neighborhood guys, with whom I was spending more and more time the older I got. With the motel and Father’s job at Speer Hardware, my parents were now too busy to chauffeur me around to visit my old pals on the other side of town, and in fact I was often busy at the motel myself. But this surface shift in domestic gravity coincided with that first major sea change in every school child’s life, when he leaves behind his familiar friends from elementary grades and faces the uncertainty of the new, and the large, and the scarily unknown—junior high school. In Fort Smith, there were two junior highs, and many of my old buddies were bound for the other one. So for a period of time in these years, the neighborhood east of Waldron gradually became my primary turf.

Junior Smotherman never made much of Speer’s and my somewhat heightened circumstances. Junior was perfectly happy to enjoy our air conditioning—to this day he remembers being welcome at our house even when Speer and I weren’t around, and he would come over and stretch out on the living room floor and soak up the cool. He was a smart, easygoing kid who maintained a joking relationship with my mother, butchering the King’s English to drive her crazy. But others in the neighborhood sometimes couldn’t contain their resentment. One day when I said something that the Prescotts and Helmses took exception to, Jimmy Prescott started needling me: "Is your name King Charles, or just Charles?" The others joined in and it got pretty ugly, pretty pointed, and I was mad and didn’t handle it well. King Charles! King Charles! I probably ended up stomping off while they laughed and jeered.

On other days we played together like the best of friends. The quarry was across the highway on the other side of Waldron, and all summer long we would swim in the deep quarry lake, which we called the strip pit. These are dangerous places, with treacherous ledges and sharp, underwater outcroppings that you could break your neck on if you dove in head first—local legend had it that several people had either died or become paralyzed after doing just that. For this reason, the entire quarry was cordoned off by a high chain link fence, topped by barbed wire. We would climb up and over it, and swim for hours. I even took my little brother there. That’s where I learned to swim underwater. Without goggles you could still see 10 or 15 feet.

But I was never reckless, at least as I defined it. Even as a young boy I was an odds kind of guy: risk/reward, risk/reward. For example, I wouldn’t dive off the cliffs head first, a reluctance that often elicited catcalls and dares from the usual suspects. I hated their taunts, but they couldn’t make me cave to the pressure. What would be my reward—becoming a dead stud? And when we staged BB wars in the woods below the quarry, shooting at one another with our Daisy Red Ryder air rifles, I participated a few times. But always, and increasingly, there was this nagging thought: The more I do this, the better the chance I’ll get my eye shot out. I was, as my parents always said, their grown-up little boy. I was too analytical to be a hot head.

THE MOTEL WAS a life laboratory for me. I started working there at age 10, handling repairs, cleaning bathrooms, checking in guests after school on weekdays. It was at the motel that I learned about managing money—I bought my first car at age 12 from the wages my parents paid me (and they always paid me). I also learned to talk to grown-ups one-on-one. Most kids don’t get to do that, but you meet a lot of people working in a motel—some friendly, some crabby, some demanding, some weird as hell. Fielding their requests while maintaining control was a balancing act that helped me greatly later in life. And speaking of weird, it was at the motel where I was introduced, after a fashion, to sex.

To help us around the place, Father and Mother had hired a wonderful black woman named Earline McBeath, from Mississippi. Earline, whom Speer eloquently and accurately remembers as a figure of order and grace and intelligence, was with us from the very beginning to the very end, when my parents finally sold the place. Charles and I tried to talk Earline into making wine for us, recalls Junior Smotherman. Predictably, she would have none of it.

Earline’s husband, Willie, used to drive her to work every morning, and when Speer was in junior high, Willie would take him to school. Willie McBeath was a powerful presence in my young life. He’d been in the war, on an aircraft carrier, and his foot had been nearly shot off. It was all but destroyed. He could get around, but he walked with a terrible limp, and with excruciating pain. For me, that mangled foot opened all kinds of windows into the way of the world back then. The government had done nothing whatsoever to help Willie. He’d