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MEMORIES OF DAYS GONE BY

by: Ed Henry

Today is December seventh, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and I’m sitting at a computer in the house my grandfather built in 1898 remembering that fateful day in 1941 when the Japanese started it all for us. My father woke me up at three in the morning to tell me we were going duck hunting. In no time, we were on our way downstate to sit in a duck blind on the Illinois River from daybreak until almost noon without even seeing a duck. I didn’t care because it was also the day my dad gave me a Red Ryder bb-gun as an early Christmas present. He didn’t fire his shotgun, but I shot a gazillion leaves and sticks floating down the river to Rock Island and points in-between.

When we finally packed up the decoys, trudged back to the car, and started for home, my father turned on the Motorola Marconi and quickly pulled the old Buick over to the side of the gravel road to listen. Roosevelt was giving his famous “day of infamy” speech which even to a nine year old was a stirring delivery. Life changed.

More than sixteen million men and women went off to war, later to be blamed for the fictitious “baby boomers” they fostered on their return either three years and three months later when Germany surrendered or three years and nine months later if transferred to the Pacific theater.

Those of us left home sacrificed by rationed gas, allotted stamps for items like sugar, meat, and cigarettes, flattened our cans because tin was in short supply, rubber and nylon were needed by the military, bundled papers and left them at the curb for boy scouts like me to pick up on weekends, and bought “war bonds.”

Almost every house had stars on the front door or window to mark the family members serving their country and I would count these on my morning paper route and when I went around collecting the money from my seventy-some customers. We also spent many summer weekends removing tassels from corn stalks, weeds from onion patches, digging up potatoes or picking tomatoes. The forty-six kids in my high school class could cover acres a day replacing young farmers gone to war while our parents tended “victory gardens.” We were the generation from the Great Depression and there were only half as many of us as there had been in the preceding decade.

It was a big treat to spend a quarter for a movie about John Wayne and other Hollywood stars flying smooth running powerful P-40s while they obliterated flimsy and rickety shake, rattle and roll poorly constructed “zeros” piloted by sinister looking Japanese that seemed to be all teeth and not to be confused with our Chinese friends like Chang Kai Chek. Propaganda wasn’t nearly as subtle as it is today.

Many years later, when I was doing market research for General Electric’s Consumer Electronics Departments, I caught holy hell for “talking to the enemy” without permission. As it happened, Panasonic was doing a fantastic job of “fair trading” its products to overcome the “beer can” or paper lantern image that had been drilled into the American psche, particularly in California where they sent their own people out to buy-back every one of their products in the hands of discounters running lost leaders and sidewalk sales or otherwise not sticking to recommended prices and margins. When these chains tried to reorder, they were treated politely but told about “out of stock” conditions and back orders yet to be filled. It didn’t take long for the discount retailers to get the point.

This was in the sixties and long after I had been laughed at for telling G.E. that the Japanese were the enemy. The G.E. people paid little attention because Panasonic and Sony were buried in the “all others” column while G.E. had a more than sixty percent share of the market.

Anyway, I was in New York City one day with time on my hands while waiting for a friend to get off work. So I decided to take my trusty “Reporter” tape recorder and walk into the Pan Am Building to look up Ray Gates, the marketing manager for Matsubishi’s Panasonic of America. When I told the receptionist I was with General Electric, Ray Gates came out of his office and invited me in. After talking for about a half hour with my recorder running, I asked Mr. Gates why he didn’t seem to mind my recording everything said. His response was: “I don’t mind at all. I know exactly how the G.E. people think and operate, and I know they won’t change no matter what I say.” Sound familiar?

In those days, General Electric had twenty-three departments under their Consumer Division and this was the smallest dollar division of the three – Armaments, Generators, and finally the Consumer Division – even though the Television Departments (major) in Syracuse and portable television in Norfolk were each larger than Zenith and Philco put together.

When I started a market research firm in Chicago, I wanted a client in the electronic entertainment business. This was a carryover from my days at the University of Illinois when I worked part time for the Control Systems Lab where “Illiac One” was being developed. I was just a student working as a draftsman for $3 an hour (which was very good money in the fifties) but I took coffee breaks with the geniuses that were developing the first computer under government contract. All of them were hi-fi bugs. One even had two houses; one for his family and the other for his stereo system. You had to make an appointment and have at least five other people with you before he would play a record. He played each record five times before he felt it was degraded or “grooved out.” They taught me to appreciate good high fidelity.

After sending brochures to every American manufacturer in consumer electronics, a sales pitch where we claimed they had “an eighty-percent failure rate to all things new that we can reverse” and “even good ideas need some help,” and hoping to land my neighbor Zenith but not being myopic. It was General Electric that responded first.

When I arrived at the Syracuse Airport and told the cab driver to take me to “Electronics Parkway,” I was still wondering what a little research guy like me could possibly do for the largest, most successful, company in the business their own David Sarnoff had invented. But as I gazed out the window, I noticed an eight foot stone wall that went on for mile after mile. When we turned into a gate and pulled up to a large building that was solely reception, I began to get the picture. A single secretary, sitting at a desk in a room the size of Central Station called the party I was visiting then told me “shuttle #6” would take me there pointing to the rear exit.

On the pathway to my destination, passing building after building on wide lawns, all the stories about “ivory tower” confinement came home like a lightning bolt. And when I met with the people in the middle of all this success, they told me “we don’t have an eighty percent failure rate. Ours is ninety seven percent.” I helped these guys for many years thereafter until I finally had to tell them it was no longer good for my own reputation to maintain the relationship. After dramatic product development, there was a general “council of hopelessness” I could not contend with. Ray Gates was right.

If any of this tale seems parallel to what happens in the federal government – you’re right, I think it is.

At the time, General Electric even had what was known as the “three year tenure” for mid-management people that is not much different than politicians in Congress. The first year was generally spent feeling out the ground. The second year was the time to make a unique and noteworthy contribution. And the third year was time to network for the next position in one of the other twenty-two consumer departments. The home office at fifty-first and Lexington in New York City considered this management training. And sometimes it resulted in disaster.

For instance, there was a time when the marketing manager for the Radio Receiver Department in Ithaca, New York developed what was known as the “over the counter exchange program” that was a huge success with retailers and the sales force. Rather than the hassle of sending a radio back for repair, making the consumer wait, all the retailer did was hand the customer a brand new radio and he or she walked off happy. The retailer then sent the damaged radio back to Ithaca and got full credit for a sale. Years after the innovative marketing manager was safely positioned elsewhere, current management told me they didn’t know what to do with warehouses bulging with damaged radios.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of what I did for this company resulted in overwhelming success. For instance, your parents or grandparents may still have a radio known to insiders as the “P-975” that we helped develop by focusing design talent on “place of use” rather than the “frequency-modulation” thinking common to engineers at the time. In one year, this single radio outsold all others in combined unit volume and did so at the healthy price of around thirty dollars during the early sixties. It was a vertically oriented; leather wrapped and heavily stitched, AM-FM portable that operates on D-size flashlight batteries with a single speaker and station position taking up the entire front, thumbwheel controls on one side, with a telescoping antenna on the other side and a leather handle on top. Something like seventy percent of the households in the U.S. bought one and the cry came back from other departments “help us develop another P-975.”

Today, I’m sitting in the same house I grew up in, contradicting Thomas Wolf’s “You Can’t Go Home Again” in Rockford, Illinois, a city of some 150,000 population. It has always been a factory town and will always be a factory town, but most residents don’t think of it that way and like to simply call it “a good place to raise children.”

My grandfather came here, along with three brother and two sisters, from a farm near Jefferson, Wisconsin. I have no understanding of why his German parents picked the black dirt of Jefferson to settle, but it’s today called “The Gemutlichkeit City – No WalMart.”

Rockford was established by furniture craftsmen who built their own tools and machines. Later it became a “tool & die” center, large machine manufacturing, and screw (fastener) capitol of the world. Screws are made from wire so we also have several wire manufacturers. In the early eighties, shortly before I returned, there were billboards proclaiming “Last factory to leave, turn out the lights” and most of it has been a downhill holding action ever since resembling Jimmy Buffet’s “Ringlin Ringlin.”

During WWII, it was rumored that we were fifth on Hitler’s hit list because of the munitions manufactured in Rockford. The fact that the government put a German prisoner of war camp here would seem to back up that rumor. Today, the population is about sixty percent German and no one talks about how the prisoners were released or where they went.

We also have military contracts at Sundstrand manufacturing, a company recently purchased by a British firm and now known as Hamilton-Sundstrand. And our congressman, Don Manzullo, brought us Eiger Laboratory that is housed in part of the old Ingersoll Milling Machine factory where I worked as a teen delivering stock to piece workers at lathes on what resembled a golf cart. Eiger deals in the development of “nano” technology and is probably developing George’s mini-nukes just a few blocks from my home.

I no longer have the staff to do attitudinal and behavior research like I did in the old days, but ever since 1993 when I read a pamphlet by Meredith Bagby titled “The First Annual Report of the United States,” an eight dollar book that read like a corporation’s annual report, I’ve been doing library research on the national debt. It shocked me to read that today’s generations would not have the wealth of their parents which, to me, meant that the “American dream” was disappearing.

I now believe that this dream is being thoroughly and deliberately run into the ground. I am also afraid that we are rapidly reaching the point where we may no longer have the option of a healthy change in direction and I definitely do not want to be the person to say “turn out the lights” on your way out of the country.

"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."