School Days Ii

By William R. King

SCHOOL DAYS II is the second part of an autobiography that began with School Days: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century (available at on-line booksellers). Although it primarily focuses on the author's personal life, it begins by describing the turmoil associated with himjoining the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh. He describes "debates" with Bill Gates, Milton Friedman, Senator Barry Goldwater and Vladimir Putin, travels around the world, several unique vacations and how his kids were able to maneuver him into getting an unwanted cat and dog and building an outdoor swimming pool in a cold-weather city. Two near-death experiences figure prominently--one involving SCUBA-diving in the Caribbean while breaking the rules of diving and one an overnight "lost-at-sea" incident in Maine. King describes himself as a pathological second-home acquirer leading him to becoming a farmer, learning to ski at an advanced age, acquiring a gas leasehold in the Marcellus Shale, sailboat, powerboat, all-terrain vehicle and snowmobile adventures and losing two homes to vandal-set fires.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483661483

William R. King

William R. King's previous autobiographical book, School Days: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century, available at online booksellers, roughly covered the first thirty years of his life. This one, School Days II, extends the coverage for about another ten years, beginning after his formal education and military service were done and he was about to embark on a 41-year career that would place him in the top ranks of academics, professional society leadership and business consulting. He has authored 17 books that have appeared in many languages and editions, and over 400 articles, op-eds and columns in a wide variety of professional and popular journals, magazines and newspapers. His contributions have been recognized by the Association for Information Systems' Leo Award for lifetime achievement, the McKinsey Foundation's book award for a "seminal contribution to management" and designation as one of about a hundred people, including several Nobel Laureates, who most impacted the fields of Operations Research and Management Science in their first fifty years.

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Copyright © 2013 by William R. King.

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Rev. date: 07/02/2013

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1 Our Early Days Back in Pittsburgh

Chapter 2 The Star of my Life

Chapter 3 My Wife’s Family

Chapter 4 My Elrama Friends and Neighbors

Chapter 5 Youthful Pleasures

Chapter 6 Falling in Love, Again and Again

Chapter 7 An Embarrassment of Riches

Chapter 8 A Racial Incident

Chapter 9 A Senior-Year, Half-Century Flub

Chapter 10 Tokens and Rings

Chapter 11 Our Honeymoons

Chapter 12 Taking Exams in College

Chapter 13 My Service as Cadet Wing Commander

Chapter 14 Pilot Dave

Chapter 15 The First Signs That I Didn’t Have a Future in the Military

Chapter 16 Our First Second-Home

Chapter 17 SCUBA

Chapter 18 A Summer in Berkeley

Chapter 19 Hawaii Vacations

Chapter 20 Traveling Around the World

Chapter 21 Camping With the YMCA

Chapter 22 Our Farm

Chapter 23 Skiing Adventures

Chapter 24 Lost at Sea in Maine

Chapter 25 A Medical Issue

Chapter 26 Brushes With Celebrities

Chapter 27 Telling the Kids That They are Adopted

Chapter 28 Unusual Vacations

Chapter 29 Our Pets

Chapter 30 News of Plagiarism

Chapter 31 The Home Collector

Chapter 32 Comments Made at a Graduation-Engagement Party

About the Author

And gladly would he learn; and gladly teach.

. . . Geoffrey Chaucer; The Canterbury Tales

When I was given the title University Professor—the highest academic rank that it is possible to achieve at the University of Pittsburgh—my dear Mother said, Bill, I sent you off to school when you were five and you’ve been at school ever since.

My Mother-in-Law, upon hearing from her daughter after I had graduated from college that we were moving to Cleveland for me to attend graduate school asked, Isn’t he ever going to stop going to school?

TO

Colton King Douglass;

born May 15, 2012; our newest Grandchild.

Although every inch a little boy, the sweetest and most congenial infant we have ever known.

Foreword

M y preceeding autobiographical book, SCHOOL DAYS: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century, covers the period from my birth in late 1938 to our returning to Pittsburgh in late 1967, roughly, the first thirty years of my life. Its title reflects that I was in school in some role—elementary student, high-school, college, graduate-school and as a professor, even while serving in the military—during almost all of that period.

This book, SCHOOL DAYS II, fills in some of the blank spaces that I left in that period, gives some better perspective on some of the things that I described there and extends the narrative of my life about another decade.

It focuses on selected incidents that served to inspire or mold me, and which were important to me, mostly before the age of forty. After that, I was pretty-much fully-formed and my life was a fairly routine story of a career and raising a family, so I don’t plan a third book.

But, I think that anyone who found the first book to be interesting will like this one also. Since the anecdotes in this book are not directly tied to the previous book, this one stands alone and can be read by someone who did not read the prior one without loss of comprehension.

As I describe in the second chapter of this book, the process of writing the first book gave me a new perspective on what has been important in my life. This writing exercise has been another revelation to me.

I have always thought of myself as being an unlucky person. I generally don’t gamble because I understand the awful odds, but also because I see myself as someone who never wins. I have never won a door prize at a banquet or a raffle drawing, seldom win coin flips and never have spent more than a few minutes gambling in Las Vegas because I set a maximum tolerable loss limit in advance and I usually reach it before I finish my first drink.

But, after completing this book, I realized for the first time how large a part good luck has played in my life—from allowing me to escape unscathed from SCUBA-diving and lost-at-sea situations in which I could easily have died, to having the opportunity to get two liver transplants (the first one was defective) that gave me a second life, to making several investments, especially one in land for recreational purposes that turned out, completely unexpectedly, to be financial bonanzas.

As a direct result of writing this book, I have, for the first time, concluded that I am indeed unlucky in small things, but in the big things of life, especially in love, I have been very lucky. I’ll take that sort of luck anyday.

I have organized this book in the same general format as the prior one. First, I discuss the years that are represented, then present the people who were important in my life, but who weren’t discussed much in the first book. Then, the chapters proceed roughly chronologically.

Chapter 1

Our Early Days Back in Pittsburgh

W e arrived in Pittsburgh in August of 1967 ready to start a new phase of our life. The education and military service were over; now, a career was beginning. We were living in a rented town-house while the new house for which we had contracted was being built. We had chosen a lot for our new house in a North Hills suburb of the city because all of our family members lived in the South Hills; we loved them and were happy to be close to them, but we didn’t want to be on the same drop-in basis with them as they were with each other.

I went into the University of Pittsburgh that first morning of the Fall Term. The Graduate School of Business was located on three floors of the Cathedral of Learning—the 42-story Gothic tower that is the center of the campus and the well-known symbol of the University.

I had chosen Pitt despite the fact that I had a couple of higher salary offers at more prestigious universities for three primary reasons: First, we wanted our kids to get to know their Grandparents, both sets of whom lived in Pittsburgh. Fay’s Mom had been ill and her prognosis was uncertain; this might well be our last chance for our kids to get to know her. Second, I believed that Pitt, some years ago a commuter school, had made a commitment to move into the big time and that the Graduate School of Business was one of several schools that was going to be the focus of that move. And third, I liked and respected many of the the people on the faculty and the Dean.

The Dean was an older gentleman, Al Frey, who was nearing the end of what had been a distinguished career as a marketing professor and consultant. He had been in his job for only a year. In conversation that I had with him and with the Provost during the hiring process, it was made clear to me that his job was to spend a couple of years before his retirement making the School be an attractive place so that it could hire top-notch faculty and a new, high-quality Dean. I had been hired that year as the most senior of three new faculty. The other hires were recent PhD grads from top universities, so I believed that the University and the School might well be serious about their goals, and more importantly, willing to spend the money to achieve them.

I had consented to an interview with Pitt when I attended a professional meeting in Philadelphia despite the fact that I considered it to be my brother’s university. (He had graduated from there and I was a true-blue-and-white Penn Stater.) If I had to travel there for an interview, I probably would not have done so. Rather than treating me like the prized-commodity that I was, and unlike some schools that had fawned over me, their interviewers, one of whom would become a dean with whom I would work for decades, rigorously questioned me about my research and my plans. They made me defend everything that I was doing, planned to do or said. I wasn’t allowed to pontificate as I had done elsewhere in interviews. After an hour and a half, I was intellectually exhausted, but impressed.

On that first day, I went to the Dean’s office, introduced myself and asked if I had been given an office assignment. The Dean’s assistant gave me a key to my new office and introduced me to my new secretary. I went there and found it to be furnished in antique oak furniture as were most offices in the Cathedral. I thought that style of furniture, which had bookshelves with glass doors and long library tables, was pleasing until I sat down in the desk chair and it fell apart. I was taken aback; I went back to the Dean’s office and told them that they must not have understood that I was a new professor. The Dean’s assistant said that sometimes when an office becomes vacant, a graduate student who wants a modern chair will sneak in and switch chairs. She said, We all like the antique furniture except for the chairs. I’ll have a new, comfortable chair there for you this afternoon.

Next, I read a half-dozen memos to the faculty that were on my desk. One of them provided a form to be filled out to get approval if one wished to make a long-distance phone call. I thought, If these folks want to be ‘big time,’ they are going to have to get away from such nonsense. So, I made a list of thirty or so people from around the country who I planned to call over a period of days to tell them that I was in a new place and give them my new phone number. I gave the list to my new secretary and told her to type up all of the request forms and take them to the Dean’s office for approval two or three at a time. I said, I want you to make a nuisance of yourself. Don’t worry, just say that you are following my explicit directions. I’ll take the blame for it.

When I got the first set back marked, Approved, I started making calls. I spent a couple of hours getting approvals and making calls until there was a knock on my door and the Dean entered. He said, Welcome, Bill. I hear that you’ve already stirred things up. He told me that my point had been made and that he was going to institute a new system of faculty budgets for things like phone and travel charges. Each faculty member’s budget would be determined by rank and research productivity. Obviously, yours will be among the largest of these budgets, so for now, just consider all calls to be pre-approved and please stop bugging my staff! We had a good laugh over this and he said that I was already fulfilling one of his goals for me—to help to show the School what it meant to be big time. In that conversation, I casually mentioned that I had chosen Pitt even though I had higher salary offers elsewhere. He asked me how much higher those offers had been and I told him because he needed such information in his constant search for new faculty.

A few weeks later, I received a notice from the Accounting Department that my salary had been increased to the level that I had mentioned to the Dean. I thought, These folks are really serious. I think I’ve chosen the right place. When I spoke to the Dean to thank him, he said, Bill, we want to keep you here and to attract many more like you. If you’re ever unhappy about the way that the School is being run, please let me know.

So although my 41 years at Pitt started with my chair falling apart, it got much better very quickly. During that first year, I was surprised to be told that I had been granted tenure (I responded by telling the Dean that I would give it up for a $5 a year salary increase. I said, If you ever want to get rid of me, don’t worry about tenure, just tell me and I’ll go.) At the beginning of my second year, before I was 30 years old, I was told that I would be promoted to the rank of Full Professor the next year.

Both of these latter things were not permitted to be offered as hiring incentives, and neither had even been discussed, but I was surprised to have gotten them about as soon as possible after I arrived—tenure during my first year and promotion after one year of service. When the announcement of my promotion was made, I got a call from a professor in the Engineering School congratulating me. He told me that he was the unofficial University historian and he believed that I was the youngest Full Professor in the history of the University, . . . at least since Colonial times. The records back then aren’t so good.(Pitt became chartered by the State of PA in 1787 as The Pittsburgh Academy after having begun even earlier without a state charter.)

Near the end of my first year at Pitt, Dean Al Frey announced his retirement and we began to interview prospects for the deanship. There were several good candidates including the hard-working Associate Dean, H.J.(Jerry) Zoffer, who had spent his collegiate life at Pitt. As were each of the candidates, he was the first choice of a number of faculty members, but everyone’s second choice. We all knew that he would do a good, if perhaps unspectacular, job.

One day, the President of the University visited the School and dropped some hints as to who his choice might be for our next leader. Pitt is a dean-powerful university and I believed that choice, while gaining us some notoriety, would not best serve the interests of the School. That afternoon, there was a faculty picnic at North Park where the possible new dean was the major topic of discussion. In talking with my colleagues, I perceived a widespread sense of impending doom concerning what was likely going to happen.

Ever the rabble-rouser, I ended up standing on a picnic table exhorting my colleagues not to let happen that which we all expected was going to happen. We concluded that the first thing the next morning, we would make an appointment for a faculty ad hoc committee to meet with the President to demand that he appoint Jerry Zoffer, with whom everyone could live. I noticed from my high vantage point that one faculty member, the oldest and longest-tenured, stood back, observing. I knew that he had close ties in the President’s Office and that he would pass on news of the impending insurrection to his staff.

The next morning, I arrived at my office to find a memo saying that the President would