Category Archives: Bio

The author’s story

The last great iMac – September, 2016

Times past.

With my son recently registered at a Massachusetts boarding school, the full force of the sheer horribleness of living in the Bay Area invaded my psyche massively as I contemplated that great day.

I moved to California in 1987, Los Angeles. Loved it. Later stints found me in San Diego, loved it, and San Francisco, loved it a lot.

But, after two decades, no more. San Francisco and the Bay Area are a living hell. Maybe if you are here on an H1B visa and MacDonald’s is a new taste sensation for you, it’s heaven on earth. But for long time denizens, it’s anything but. Take the Mission District, which I love, as a microcosm of what has happened. Earnest Googlites are destroying the Hispanic culture, replacing it with seven figure condominiums and chic restaurants. We really need more of those. Housing costs effectively gentrify all poor areas – Millbrae, South San Francisco, SOMA, Oakland, and yes, even as far north as Sacramento, as our great capitalist businesses force out all those who cannot code social media apps. The result is that the people who keep a city running, the waiters and cooks, the house cleaners and secretaries, cannot afford to live where they work. That is not right.

So within a week, emulating my son, I will also take a one way flight out of here, to the more relaxed vistas of Scottsdale, Arizona in the desert that I have learned to love on my many travels there these past two decades.

That move brings with it the inevitable rigors of packing precious possessions, though in my case they are precious by association, not by value. And one which ranks right up there is the greatest desktop computer Apple ever made, the iMac G4. Here it is after the ever amusing task of trying to figure out exactly how it fits in all those complex polystyrene pieces, packaging which is a design masterpiece in its own right:

Design genius.

The original, butt ugly iMac may have saved an Apple headed for Chapter XI, when Steve returned. But it was a prosaic CRT design housed in a funky translucent plastic shell which was mostly silly for all its ‘Think(ing) Different’. The G4 iMac was something else. First there was the use of an LCD display, 15″ or 17″. No one used LCDs. SSDs did not exist – at least not at affordable prices – so Apple housed the HDD in a cheeky gargantuan half-cricket ball (OK, baseball) which formed the housing for the electronics and fans. And they boasted about it on that splendid box. See above.

But the genius of the design, an ergonomic masterpiece, was the elegantly cantilevered ‘screen on a stick’. Move it up, move it down, move it toward you, move it away, move it around. It did what it was told. Burning DVDs? Easy. At a touch of the button Pandora’s Box opened, and the DVD tray magically emerged from the cricket ball. It was fun, it was new and it was magic!

And that magical G4 iMac defines exactly what is wrong with Apple today. It’s the same thing that is wrong with the Bay Area. Life is not a mobile device looking for a new app. Life is not an overpriced condo which displaces good people. Life is a contemplative experience attended by an extended attention span which rewards those who indulge in that rarest of modern pastimes: thinking.

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Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.

Matriculation Day – September 2, 2016

Winston starts at NMH.

My education was interrupted only by my schooling.
Winston Churchill.

Friday, September 2 was the best day in my son’s life. He registered at Northfield Mount Hermon School as a ninth grader and you can read the whole run up to this event here.

The school’s organization of registration day was peerless; then again, they have had a few years’ practice at this sort of thing! With many sign-ins – bookstore account, IT access, health insurance, bank account opening, dorm check-in, followed by the very moving matriculation ceremony – the potential for chaos was significant, but NMH saw to it that all went smoothly. Given how potentially stressful a first move away from home can be for a young man I am in awe at the school’s capacity for warmth, empathy and caring. Winston is in good hands.


The names of the eight Ivy League prep schools are proudly displayed in the magnificent basketball courts, used here for registration activities. Competition is fierce in all events.


Sporting a new buzz cut – one final cruelty inflicted by his mother – my son gets his IT password.


The registration packet is handed out. Just 160 new freshmen will get one, out of 1,600 applicants. (The all boys UK schools of Eton and Harrow have 1,300 and 700 pupils, compared with NMH’s 650). My son goes by his mother’s name rather than mine. After a lifetime of spelling that accident of birth I had no intention of subjecting him to a like experience.


Outside the main administration building, Holbrook Hall. Winnie is lucky that his Advisor is none other than the Deputy Dean of the school. Many buildings in like colonial architectural style dot the 1,500 acre campus on the Connecticut River.


More signing up. Winnie opens his first bank account with a local bank. Yup, the boy is a leftie.


Moving in. I delegated packhorse duties to the boy. The smile on Winston’s face says it all.


Unpacking. We shipped all of 21 boxes to the school. How did we survive pre-Amazon?


Like father, like son. We are both twits. Winnie got the idea for the lined winter hat from the Coen Brothers’ ‘Fargo’.


In the dining hall. NMH food is renowned as the best in any new England prep school or college – vegan, vegetarian, salads, meat, sushi, you name it. A very smart policy by the administration. After all, the pupil will be eating here for four years.


Winnie went missing over lunch and on wandering outside the dining hall I found him busy at a game of frisbee with his newest friends. The open minds of kids are something to aspire to. He is on the right. The Memorial Chapel is in the back.


The Memorial Chapel. The matriculation ceremony found us singing ‘Jerusalem’ (40 years since I did that at my English prep school!) while freshmen signed the pledge in the school’s book, promising to agree with its principles.


The matriculation pledge, issued to each freshman, and signed by the Dean of School and the Dean of Students. Honor and decency are not dead.

A Day of Days, perfect in every way.

All snaps taken with the iPhone6.


At the conclusion of Convocation, September 6, 2016. Winston with the new freshmen in his dorm. My boy’s tie tying technique is more suggestive of a future on Wall Street than in the State Department! Photo by the Deputy Dean, Charlie Tierney III.

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Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.

A most extraordinary year – 2015

These pieces generally run annually in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.

Education is the best provision for old age.
– Aristotle.

This year’s Biographical piece is all about education, for what could be more important in a full life?

I had the great misfortune to attend what the British call a ‘public’ school for many years before going on to University College, London. I write ‘misfortune’ because these private institutions back in the 1960s were still rueing the loss of Empire with the faculty convinced that Americans were ‘over loud, over sexed and over here’, as WWII talk had it. Thus, much was done to inculcate a stout sense of xenophobia in students who, as a result, were still under the mistaken impression that the sun never set on Britain’s colonies. In reality it had set two decades earlier when all those colonials decided that being victims of British thieving and slavery was getting really old.

As for the wisdom of brainwashing the son of Polish immigrant refugees with negative feelings toward foreigners, I’ll leave that for you to decide. I made my own choice when immigrating to America in November, 1977 and there has not been a single day when I have regretted that decision. My high school had pointed me in the direction of foreigners whose company I preferred. Zenophobia if you like. What I do regret is that my parents chose England, not America, as their adopted home. What were they thinking of? The land of umbrellas trumping that of Chevrolet? Then again, keeping all their wealth in Poland despite 6 years’ undisguised warning from a German dictator did not place them high up on the roster of great analytical thinkers.

Add to this esteemed English education the fact that the private school I attended was Catholic, run by monks of the cloth no less, and yes, complete with the occasional pedophile or two, then it’s a wonder I survived unscathed and well, unmonkhandled, by the time I joyfully left for UCL in 1970. Resolving to avoid religion at all costs, I had meanwhile cultivated an enduring love of cricket and rugby. These gentlemanly sports found me a lousy batsman, a half decent off spin bowler and a thoroughly cowardly winger at rugger. The cowardly bit comprised two skills. The ability to run fast with the ball and the no less adroit way in which I would run off the pitch when physical violence threatened. Mercifully, this was generally mistaken for deep strategic thinking and while I love the game to this day my nose has never been quite right since, owing to a couple of occasions where evasive manoeuvres came too late.


The forbidding Victorian pile which was my prep school.

With this as background you might conclude that the idea of sending my son and heir to a private school would be anathema, yet that is exactly the process I commenced this year. A couple of things had happened to make me change my mind about the institution of private high schooling. First, having spent most of my life in the United States I had long ago realized that those WWII GIs were a far happier lot, in marked contrast to their British counterparts, the latter ‘under sexed, under paid and under Eisenhower’. Surely, American schooling had something to do with that? Second, it had become abundantly clear that American private schooling was quite unlike the often cruel and uncaring English model whose primary purpose was to secrete away the kids so that weekend parties in country homes could continue apace, unimpeded by the younger set. Choose the right Yankee school, meaning one that’s been around a couple of centuries, one with solid liberal values, one where boys and girls mix just as nature intended and one where religion is nowhere in sight, and you have the makings of the very best the aspiring college freshman can get during his four years in high school. Why, many of these schools even play rugby though cricket is sadly nowhere in sight.


A typical New England prep school.

Why private school, you ask, when a perfectly decent education is to be had at many American public schools? Statistically the odds are against you when you look solely to the taxpayer’s dollar for your schooling. Run the numbers and you will find the average ‘good’ public school matriculates its charges with an SAT (college entrance exam) score 15-20% lower than that for the average private school. Is the schooling that much worse? Wrong question. It’s the students who are the problem. And the class sizes. And the number of AP courses. And the teachers – ever tried getting a public school teacher fired for incompetence? And the lack of competition. And their pipeline to the Ivy League, or lack thereof. These are where your private school dollars go, toward a competitive system which exists to make money, not spend that of those who have no choice but to pay taxes. So what’s with the Ivy League crack, you ask? Why, Gates and Jobs and Ellison and Zuckerberg all dropped out. Uh huh. And the chances that your progeny is a Bill or a Steve or a Larry or a Mark are what, exactly? This is a game of odds, after all.

And survey America as a whole and it rapidly dawns that the greatest concentration of the best high schools and private colleges ever created by man exists in New England. These institutions were almost all created by wealthy, male industrialists who wanted to leave something permanent behind. And when it comes to education, I’m a huge fan of bad weather. I mean, look at Pepperdine, a stone’s throw from Pacific Coast Highway and the beaches of Malibu, complete with babes and surf. How on earth do you expect to get any serious studying done when surfboards, bikinis and a Corona beckon? Then look outside the window of your New England prep school, gazing at the two feet of freshly fallen snow and you do but two things: put another log on the fire and get your study materials out. Quod erat demonstrandum.


Where the schools are. New Hampshire to the north, New York to the west.

The idea of so remote a setting, away from home in the Bay Area, was at first forbidding but after knocking it around with the boy after he had first surfaced the thought, both Winston and I came away thinking we should at least visit these towers of academe before taking the local way out. With commercial flight being the only option, I gritted the teeth, bought the tickets and there we were, son and heir and I winging our way east. I had 200+ hours of research into the project by now, and modern research tools made the finding of the right school a simple proposition. Everything is disclosed, be it the curriculum, the number of AP courses, SSATs, SATs, faculty:student ratios, faculty resumés, ethnic mix, gender percentages, boarding rates, matriculation data, sports choices, alumni, the menu, you name it, and I had it narrowed down to five prep schools to be visited during the week through November 13 before you could spell ‘privilege’.

By way of background, we had set some early filtration rules, which included: New England location, no boys only schools (who in their right mind would not want to mix with women?), no Saturday class sweatshops (if you need weekend tuition there is something very wrong), nothing below 400 or above 800 students in grades 9-12 (small class sizes are essential), over 15 subject choices, over 15 athletics choices, must teach French and piano, must use the Harkness system, high boarding percentage to ensure superior choice of weekend friends, over 50% of the faculty with advanced degrees and, above all, no parochial schools. Religion and education should never mix. Men and women should.

All the schools we visited adopt the Harkness system of discussion based learning, which is about as different from the traditional lecture based ‘memorize and regurgitate’ approach I grew up with as it gets. In 1930, philanthropist Edward Harkness made a large gift to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire to finance a new system of teaching. Thank goodness for oil fortunes and American generosity. In the great man’s words:

What I have in mind is a classroom where students could sit around a table with a teacher who would talk with them and instruct them by a sort of tutorial or conference method, where each student would feel encouraged to speak up. This would be a real revolution in methods.

That translated into oval tables where the dozen or so students and the teacher can make eye contact, and focuses on discussion and Socratic approaches rather than learning by rote. It’s not too hard to see why so many of the world’s most successful people are graduates of American prep schools. This teaching method leaves no place to hide, no corner at the back of class. It helps the individual come out of his shell and get involved, participating in those most advanced of civilizing virtues: debate and argument. And in case you have doubts, Phillips Exeter, which was the first adopter, is reckoned by many to be the finest prep school in the world. The system spread like wild fire in New England prep schools and is now broadly adopted.

In the great tradition of American philanthropy, Harkness – his father was one of the five founders of Standard Oil – was a major benefactor to Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Phillips Exeter Academy, St. Paul’s School, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was an alumnus of the first two and of St. Paul’s.


November 9 – solemn at Cushing Academy, Ashburnham, MA. Bette Davis was an alumna.

Other factors with a high correlation to academic excellence? Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, the only other factor with a correlation coefficient over 0.50 is the size of the school’s endowment. The richer the school, the better the academics and the more impressive the matriculation data. Go where the money is. The richest schools send most of their students to the richest universities. It’s no surprise to learn that Harvard’s endowment, at $36 billion (despite Larry Summers’s best efforts as Dean to melt it down through his mismanagement – a rare error for one so impressive academically), is the largest of any university. Texas beats Yale into second place at $24 billion but I would really prefer not to think about that ….

The best US colleges do not accept low SATs so you can determine your college choices in eighth grade when your SSAT score is in. Yes, you still get the occasional moron legatee who ends up in the White House because of his dad, but those days are largely gone. So if you are under the impression that a fancy private school will make grit-eating Arkansas Billie Bob with an IQ in double digits and who is into muscle cars into Harvard valedictorian William Robert Junior the Third, fughedaboutit. Genetic capital is the key and it is not a controllable variable. Billy Bob Clinton formerly of Little Rock and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Georgetown and Oxford. Bill Gates? He entered Harvard with an SAT of 2385 (out of 2400), rues his ‘failure’ to this day, and would likely admit that he chose his parents well. To the best of my knowledge he eschews grits.


November 10 – small at Worcester Academy, Worcester, MA. Cole Porter’s old home.

The real heavy lifting here was done by my son who was truly stiff upper lipped about the whole thing. Not only did he have to complete his eighth grade absentee homework from his local high school during the trip, he had to start studying for the SSAT. Add preparation for the Admission Interview administered by each school and you get a sense of Winston’s resolve. As an aide memoire to assessing the schools visited, we came up with a spreadsheet with each school graded from 1 to 5 on the following attributes: Campus Look and Feel, Students, Classrooms, Teachers, Sports Facilities, Dorms, Common Areas and, last but by no means least, Food. Good eating is an absolute must, and after years of sodden cabbage and limp fries, what was then cynically known as ‘British cooking’, I was not about to subject Winnie to like treatment.

Finally, life is too short to be surrounded by ugly women and my son who knows beautiful when he sees it – he needs only look in the mirror – has been warned that I will cut him off if he brings anything ugly home, be it on wheels or legs. So assessment of the opposite sex is important to him. We completed our grading independently and came up with the same rankings. And no, I will not disclose our results, except to say that each school was very impressive indeed, the ranking differences small. He could be happy at any.

A related challenge was clothing. Preparing to interview in Massachusetts coming from a Bay Area public intermediate school, it is no exaggeration to say that Winnie did not own one piece of decent clothing at the start of this immense project. So after variously raiding the inventory of Brooks Brothers and Nordstrom, Winston looked quite the gentleman by the time I finished teaching him how to properly knot his striped, silk tie. Best of all, he actually enjoyed the dressing up part and I reassured him that while you cannot be overdressed for an interview, turning up in a T shirt and cut-offs was unlikely to help matters.


November 11 – empowered at Wilbraham & Monson Academy – Wilbraham, MA.
Political correctness had not reared its ugly head when the hall was named. Richard Fuld, who blew up Lehman Brothers and almost took America with it, graduated here. Oops!

In the event we had an absolute blast. The format for each visit was much the same, the morning taken up with a guided tour by wonderful students, lunch, then the 45 minute interview for Winston. By the time of his last interview Winnie was polished, never interrupting, never saying ‘like’ (a modern affliction with most children), paying attention, and asking hard, focused, insightful questions. At the conclusion of each interview he would close by handing out his grades for the first trimester of 8th Grade, and the straight ‘A’ ratings across the board, building on like results in 6th and 7th Grades, never failed to hit the bull’s eye. These are, after all, preparatory schools with 100% matriculation to university which is what ‘preparatory’ means. When you graduate here, you are prepared for university and the related academic demands.

And while a great interview may not get you accepted, a bad one will most certainly not get you an offer. “I propose to be the next Albert Einstein” will get you shown the exit really fast. Despite the forbiddingly low acceptance rates with 10% the norm, the competition here is not as severe as you might think. First, most kids apply to more than one school. Second, many foreign applicants are the children of oligarchs and foreign government officials seeking to clean up their money, ones to whom English is very much a second language. And while who your dad is used to really matter here, now academic acumen prevails. That and an ability to form grammatically correct English sentences, complete with prepositions. Yup, it’s off to Balls Pond High for you, Ivan. As for Affirmative Action, that most un-American and most discriminatory of concepts, it may exist in colleges but private schools show little evidence of it.


November 12 – confident at Northfield Mount Hermon – Northfield, MA. Western Massachusetts is gorgeous and Winston’s confidence is now abundantly on show, and hang the umbrella! Uma Thurman went here before Killing Bill and dating Marsellus Wallace.

We stayed in the Back Bay area of downtown Boston, a new city to us and we both fell absolutely in love with the place. Genteel and well behaved, and even when I took two or three extra spins around the traffic roundabouts while trying to figure out what the nice lady at Google Maps was trying to tell me, no one honked, and I most certainly gave them much cause. Try that in New York or San Francisco. My ineptitude also caused much hilarity in my offspring, a reaction I prefer to leave alone.


November 13 – cocky at Milton Academy – in Milton, MA. Milton was once home to RFK and his brother Teddy.

Each school visit was memorialized with the obligatory images seen above, and if the architectural styles appear similar it is because they are. These schools are typically 150 years old and built in the style of the day, and quite lovely to behold.

Side trips to take the Freedom Trail, visit the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and tour MIT were exciting ….


At MIT.

…. but the real icing on the cake came when we visited Harvard Business School.

I took Winston to HBS out of curiosity yet it turns out to have been the most effective – and unplanned – piece of stealth marketing imaginable for, by the time of our reluctant departure, we were both simply awestruck. I expect Winnie will graduate in the class of 2026.


Winston dressed for the occasion, inside Aldrich Hall at HBS, a Rockefeller donation.

In the movie ‘The Freshman‘, Marlon Brando, reprising the murderous Don of the Godfather movies in a lighter comedic rôle, visits the dorm room of a young protégé, and pronounces: “So this is college. Well, I ain’t missed nothing.” Maybe he should have visited Harvard, not NYU.


Harvard Business School – outside the Baker Library.

By the time you read this Winston will have taken his SSAT exam with the results due in a few days. As for the acceptance process, we will know in mid-March and whatever the outcome, we could not possibly have had a better time. The choice is his to make.


Did I mention Winston is beautiful? About to enjoy fish and chips at the Morse Fish Company after a hard week. Click the image for the map.

After the final interview, we repaired to the Morse Fish Company, opposite the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Washington Street. Boston has more cathedrals than Catholics but, unlike the cathedral, Morse FC is not much to write home about decor wise. The fish here, however, is excellent. A firm favorite with Southies, and even if we were a tad overdressed no one took any notice. Needless to add, the place has been around for ever, testimony to the food served.

Sad update 2018: Sadly the Morse Fish Company, at 103 years the oldest in Boston, has closed its doors. No reason given, no new location. Bang. Just like that.

That was the start of this, my Year in Education. Later this same year, a year in which my boy became a man with his own goals, his own mind, his own drive, I gave him the most precious gift a parent can bestow – opportunity. He can take it from here for I have done my bit. I can only hope that he gives back in like manner because, chances are, I will not be around to see.


The author, keeping the cold wind out, at Sam Adams’s grave in Boston.


My son.

Joyful update – March 31, 2016:

With a bunch of offers in hand, Winnie decided to attend Northfield Mount Hermon. He starts ninth grade on September 2, 2016.

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Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.

Bel Air – 2015

The best of the best.

These pieces generally run annually in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.

The only way to live and work in Los Angeles is to avoid the freeways, for they are a living hell. No matter the time of day or night, you can be sure of wasting horrible amounts of your dwindling life span in your car, parked on a way that is anything but free.

When I lived in Los Angeles (1987-93) I was lucky to have a home high in the hills of the San Fernando Valley in Encino and a job in Century City, the other side of the transverse spine that is Mulholland Drive. Mulholland, named after the DWP engineer who literally made Los Angeles possible (it’s called water) just happens to be one of the most dramatic of roads in that thrilling city. The beauty of this location was that I could zip up to Mulholland from home, turn down Roscomare into Bel Air then wind my way though the labyrinthine paths of this haven which is a very small part of Los Angeles, exiting at Sunset Boulevard with but one city block to my office on Century Park East. Traffic? Nowhere in sight.

The small firm I called home made for great friendships and as often as not we would gather monthly after work for camaraderie at the haven which is the Hotel Bel Air. I had stayed there on business from New York back in 1985 in one of the bungalows in the lush grounds and it was a memorable experience.

When a resident of LA, on one occasion while conducting arcane tests on my Mercedes diesel to determine the exact fuel consumption (don’t ask – it’s the Engineer’s Curse) I crossed Sunset into Bel Air on the way home only to feel that superb five cylinder turbodiesel motor stumble. Barely making it across I stopped on Carcassonne in Bel Air, out of fuel. I had miscomputed the size of the tank, smaller in the diesels than in the gas models …. bloody Germans. No sense of humor.

Flashers lit and making my way on Shanks’s Pony to the Bel Air I headed for the tea room whence I called AAA, alerting the valet that he was to direct my driver there upon arrival. Sure enough, the mechanic was unquestioningly ushered into the rarefied confines of the watering hole a while later and we exited magnificently – I in suit, he in overalls – to get the beast fueled and started. (Diesels need bleeding. Pumping is involved. Again, don’t ask). My love affair with the Hotel Bel Air and with Bel Air itself has proceeded apace since.

You see, unlike most places which boast wealth, the Hotel Bel Air specializes in those costliest attributes – discretion and silence. Not only is it hellishly hard to find, it’s buried deep within Bel Air on 12 acres of heaven remote from busy streets, and if there is a more perfect place on earth to relax I do not know of it. Thus on this, my son’s first visit to Los Angeles at age 13, I determined only the best would do and one night last week found us at the Bel Air in – yes, you guessed it – one of the bungalows in the grounds.


Our room. The bed was magically split into two as we dined.


Exquisite landscaping against Southern California pink.


Winnie checks out the pool. Notice the large crowds in attendance.

While my obligatory tea arrived poolside (you can take the boy out of England, but you cannot take England out of the boy) I obeyed Winston’s dictate to think not about work but to merely gaze into the distance and think peaceful thoughts. Much harder than it sounds for one who considers vacations a leading cause of stress, but the boy was clearly onto something. He is wise beyond his years.

These thoughts were interrupted by two young girls to my left discussing education, the one a UCLA junior trying to convince the other, a USC sophomore, to transfer, the better to enjoy their friendship. Half way though this dissertation the one decided they needed a late lunch served to them on the chaise longues surrounding the pool, but things proceeded to get sticky when it came to payment. The young woman dashed back to her room in search of a credit card, returning breathlessly to admit to the pool waiter that she could find neither hide nor hair of it. After some embarrassing back and forth she called her mum only to be reminded that she has an account at the place – this at the age of 17 – and a quick “Charge it!” resolved the issue. High class problems.

I contented myself with mindless thoughts (sort of like ‘military intelligence’ or ‘stock market predictions’ when it comes to grammatical logic, I suppose) and gazing at Winnie doing his thing was a subtle and sublime joy. My boy’s first visit to the City of Angels really had started at the top, and my joy was but sublimation of my hopes for him. He rejoiced in the heated pool and I rejoiced that he was there.


A lovely fountain in the large yet discreet grounds.


Winston at Swan Lake in the grounds. Back in the 1990 the swans used to be black.
Maybe this is more PC at work?

The Hotel Bel Air takes its tea very seriously.


Winston’s first ever cup of coffee at the Wolfgang Puck over breakfast.
You can read all about his Unfair Advantage here in a piece that remains 100% correct.

There’s no need to drive anywhere for dinner for the Wolfgang Puck Restaurant in the hotel would be hard to improve on. Dress code dictates a jacket and long trousers for dinner and tattoos are nowhere to be seen. White trash need not apply and the prices see to it that they do not – this is a feature, not an issue. The women’s dresses over dinner have to be seen be believed. And they are wonderful to behold – the women and the frocks. Breakfast dress code is relaxed as the above shows, and the staff is so professional you leave regarding them as friends. Jeans are notable by their absence and let’s all be grateful for that.

Money is quiet here and waistlines are slim. The bungalows are the preferred places to stay and many have been the location of choice for discreet assignations among the Hollywood set, from Frank Sinatra to Elizabeth Taylor who enjoyed most of her numerous honeymoons in one. Or was that in seven? They came here to not be seen. Ask nicely and the hostess who walks you to your room will point out the bungalow in which Howard Hughes lived, right around the time he crashed his experimental single wing plane at the LA Country Club next door, barely surviving. It’s an episode which is perfectly recreated in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, a favorite with both Winnie and I. Hughes was an American with a capital ‘A’, and Hollywood history is writ large at the Bel Air.

This is a haven for the visitor. If you crave isolation, hate crowds and desire peace and quiet with the most charming friends to look after you, a stay here is de riguer.

All snaps on the iPhone 6.

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Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.

Goodbye, dear friend – 1999-2013

A dear friend moves on.

These pieces generally run annually in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.

These biographical columns run annually, in no particular order, on December 16, and you can see the lot by clicking here.

The one constant of my years in New York (1980-87) was Mayor Ed Koch. Outspoken, candid, always a blast, a real Noo Yawk kind of guy. Most memorably he once had Manhattan paint white lines down its main thoroughfares, intended to designate bike lanes. This costly effort proved totally useless, New York cabbies not being about to respect the rules of the road any more than New York’s famously scofflaw, homicidal bicyclists.

Koch, true to form, came clean, endearing all to him in the process. “When I make a mistake” he candidly admitted “It’s a real Dusie”, the reference being to the gigantic, luxury Dusenberg car of the Roaring Twenties.

And looking back on 1999 when, for some reason still hard to comprehend, I decided to move to Charlotte, North Carolina from California, to work for a big dumbass bank, I made a Dusie every bit as big. Indeed, the quickest way to summarize North Carolina is to say that there is nothing to choose between its climate, its people and its food. All truly awful. No, wait. On reflection, it would have to be said that the local cooking is worse even than its cretinous people and miserable weather. Cretinous? A tad harsh you say? Sure, there are nice North Carolinians. Doubtless there are nice North Koreans too. It’s just that I have yet to encounter either.

But one really good thing came of that awful 11 months.

Flashing back to San Diego a year earlier, I had attended the Del Mar dog show, ever interested in the four-legged set. My previous dog had been a Scottish Terrier, a terrorist among dogs who revelled in attacking anything larger, which was just about everything. A dour Scot of seemingly permanently disgruntled mien, he left me questioning my love of things Scottish and very much wondering if any terrier would darken my porch again or could, for that matter, ever be gruntled.

The Del Mar Dog Show changed all that.

I had been wandering around and generally steering away from areas of loud barking, mostly occupied by Dachshunds, Alsatians, Dobermans, Weimaraners and Rottweilers. You get the idea. Killers all. Needless to add, all Germans.

So I meandered to a quiet area in the back and there they were. Some seven small yet tall British terriers, not an ill word spoken between them, faces replete with dignity and charm and generally a subset of the canine species you could see spending a lot of time with. It’s not that these Border Terriers did not bark. Rather they chose not to. You don’t argue with a rabid Kraut, you do the only reasonable thing and avoid him. Hence I resolved that a Border Terrier was de rigeur. Border? Yes, they hail from the south side of the border with Scotland, and there’s no questoning their judgment in things geographical.


Bertie as a puppy. Borders are born mostly black, then the coat lightens with age.

And if there was one good thing about North Carolina which makes me excuse the otherwise miserable 11 months I spent in that culturally arid desert, it was that Bertie the Border Terrier came into our family from a local breeder who specialized in Mastiffs (all 180 lbs of them!) …. and Borders. Borders typically come in litters of two and Bertie, unusually, was one of four.


Morning greeting.

Naming him was hardly difficult. As a gentleman of leisure it was obvious that he could only be named after that well-to-do man about town Bertram Wooster, the hero of many a novel from that greatest of English humorists, P. G. Wodehouse. The same Wooster who looked to his manservant Jeeves to get him out of the all too frequent sticky situations which seemed to seek him out, not a few involving various terriers. The nastiest of these involved one Bartholomew who yes, you guessed it, was a Scottish Terrier.

When a well-meaning friend in San Francisco called me one day, knowing of my misery in Charlotte and offering the opportunity to run a hedge fund in the City on the Bay, I was on the next flight out, one way ticket in hand and Bert the Border in a carry-on bag tucked next to me sharing the seat. Before we departed, reflecting the man’s good taste and judgment, he took one last leak on Charlotte’s airport baggage carousel as we left, never to see that blighted city again. It was actually with considerable joy that I signed the check repaying the unvested portion of my joining bonus to the uncouth people in the land of grits. The Border and I were free.

I was glad to be back in California and Bertie every bit as happy to move to a civilized climate and a no less civilized population. From grits and muscle cars to white wine and Porsches in one year.


On guard in Burlingame.


The Border Terrier in his prime, with Elenia.
Beauty and the beast. No problem, I divorced the bitch.

A dear friend, a fine painter of animals, did my image justice a few years later:

For the next fourteen and a half years, Bertie would seldom be far from me. He would come to work (small businesses are nice, that way), frolic on the beach during vacation times and keep me warm at night from his favorite vantage point at the foot of the bed. Mornings would commence with a cold nose in the face and a polite reminder that maybe breakfast was called for.

Three walks a day saw him charm the neighborhood, be it in Burlingame or later in Atherton, where one of his favorite things was to charge after Lisa in the UPS truck, hop in the cab and refuse to leave until rewarded from the bag of cookies she always had with her.

Gone was the debilitating heat and humidity of the Charlotte summer and the awful cold and snow of the winter, replaced with the balmy climate of the Peninsula and strolls down the lanes of that most calming of cities, Atherton. This was happiness for both pup and master.


Watchful in Atherton.

When we later moved to Templeton and a vineyard home, Bert immediately took control of the situation, hopping merrily through the irrigation hoses lining the rows of vines en route to his daily discussion with Jack the Jack Russell which invariably culminated in a race to and fro along the dividing fence. Yes, Jack did all the barking. Those of a quiet disposition should definitely steer well clear of Jack Russell terriers, a breed seemingly constantly ingesting amphetamines. That much was clear when an exhausted Bert would stumble through the doggie door, en route to his water bowl.

An earlier piece captures well the relationship between man and beast at the vineyard estate. Recommended reading as it’s the first and last time I ruminated on the existence of God in this journal and, no, you will not be offended, even if you are from North Carolina.


Sprightly at the Templeton vineyard home.

When our son Winston came on the scene in 2002, no one was happier than Bert. With guaranteed daily provisions of extra food from Winston’s high chair Bert was in doggie heaven, and the two took to one another immediately, forming a life long friendship. A delight to watch.

Then, one day, Bertie was gone.


A last picture with Winnie, just days before Bertie moved on
in October. Bert was three when Winnie was born.

Winnie was traumatized, true. Me? Devastated. All I can remember is the selfless love, the sheer joie de vivre, the generosity of spirit, the endless enthusiasm for life. The man’s sheer decency is not something to which my vocabulary can do justice. And when I think of his spirit, W. H. Auden’s words come to mind:

Goodbye, dear friend.

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Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.