Meeting the Marlboro Man

It was one of those spur-of-the-moment, I-can’t- believe-I-did-that types of decisions when I look back on it. I had occasion to visit Oklahoma City on business several times during the early nineties and one of those visits included a tour of the Cowboy Hall of Fame, now called The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Fascinated, of course, by all things cowboy my entire life, I felt a connection, so I joined the organization.

My membership included a subscription to their magazine, Persimmon Hill (that’s the name of the site where the building that houses the museum stands). I eagerly devoured the magazine every month.

I don’t recall how much later it was, but I received an invitation to attend their annual Western Heritage Awards banquet. I also don’t remember how much the tickets were, but they were more than I was used to paying to for a night out on the town. Not exorbitant, but not a paltry sum. So I put the invitation aside. There was, after all, travel costs and the time to consider.

Then business called me to Oklahoma City again. I am not making that up. It really did. The trip was necessary. Really. It just so happened that I had to be in Oke City (that’s what Okies call it) on the night of the banquet. The coincidence was just too much—and I had already stopped believing in coincidences, anyway. I felt as if I was being called to attend this banquet. I made reservations without a minute to spare.

Jan and I felt right at home in the sea of black ties and boots, black hats, and friendly, welcoming down-home folks during the reception. When it was time for the banquet to begin, we were ushered to a front table only a few feet from the stage. We felt fortunate, but had no idea just how fortunate we were (and uninformed).

I don’t recall everyone who sat at our table, but a humble man to my left looked very familiar. He certainly looked very comfortable in his cowboy hat. I knew that I should know him but was reluctant to ask.  A classic, handsome, chiseled-face cowboy, that I guessed to be in his early sixties. He introduced himself as Bob Norris, a rancher from Colorado. 

Someone else at the table had to add that he was the original Marlboro man (there is a lot of confusion as to who was the original guy in print ads, but Bob is the cowboy who first appeared in TV commercials). An ad agency rented use privileges for part of Bob’s T-Cross ranch to shoot cigarette commercials back in the sixties. They brought along a model to be the Marlboro man.

But as Bob rode out horseback to offer assistance and expertise, the contrast between the model and Bob became so obvious that they fired the model and hired Bob. He was under contract to Marlboro for twelve years, but he told us that his conscious about the links between smoking and cancer led him to finally give up the gig that made his face famous.  

I was certainly impressed enough that he was the owner of a large ranch in Colorado (130,000 acres) and was the Marlboro man, but Bob also failed to mention that he was the grand-nephew of a guy named Gates who owned a little oil operation called Spindletop that later became Texaco.

I found out much later that Bob was chairman of the stockholders’ committee that locked horns with corporate raider Carl Icahn that led to a three billion dollar settlement with Pennzoil. He also has his own charitable foundation. What we still don’t know is why Jan and I were at the table with him and his wife. I expect there was a last minute cancellation by someone else.  

In his eighties now (and still looks in his sixties), Bob spends his winters in Arizona, but still does a little cowboy work on the T-Cross during the other seasons.

But Bob was just the first person we met. Wait till you hear who else was at our table and at the banquet. I still marvel that we had such an opportunity and that we chose (or had chosen for us) such a propitious date to attend.

Texas Scribes  Here is another installment on reading from Go Down Looking at KETR.

Whose Names Are Unknown

I have always been fascinated by stories of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. I have read many books (The Worst Hard Time, The Grapes of Wrath, etc…) on both the greatest economic catastrophe and the greatest interrelated weather tragedy our country has ever faced. 

I enjoy looking at photographs taken during the period. In the faces of the folks who struggled to survive during this period, I see my parents and grandparents staring at me, telling me to be grateful for what I have.  Those feelings and my great curiosity about how these brave folks survived led me to Sanora Babb’s novel. 

Babb was born in 1907 in Oklahoma Territory. Her family later moved to the Oklahoma Panhandle. She experienced what she writes about. She taught school for a time and wrote for farm magazines. She moved to California when she was twenty-two to become an AP reporter, but the depression stopped that. Babb was usually broke and at times, homeless.

The title to Babb’s book came from an actual eviction notice: To John Doe and Mary Doe Whose Names Are Unknown. She wrote the book during the thirties while working with refugee farmers in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps of California.

One of her closest contacts with the FSA was Tom Collins, the founding manager of the Weedpatch migrant labor camp in Arvin, California. Collins asked Babb to keep notes of what was taking place. He was impressed enough by her writing that he passed on her research to another writer who was visiting the camp to research a novel. That writer was John Steinbeck. Babb reports meeting him twice.

It is easy to imagine that her notes played a critical role in Steinbeck's writing of The Grapes of Wrath, a novel that later took America by storm. Babb submitted her manuscript to Random House in 1939 even though the giant publisher seldom looked at agentless manuscripts. 

Co-founder and editor Bennett Cerf (remember him from the old TV show What’s My Line?) liked what he saw and sent her an advance.But Babb’s and Cerf’s plans were dashed when The Grapes of Wrath sold almost half a million copies in five months.   

Cerf backed off her manuscript, saying it was too much like Steinbeck’s book. She was also rejected by Scribner’s and Colliers. Steinbeck’s editor at Viking sent her a letter indicating no interest in publishing a novel that would compete with their star writer.

So the manuscript sat unpublished for more than sixty years. The story of Julia and Milt Dunne that begins with their struggles in Cimarron County of Oklahoma and migrates west to California remained untold. How does it compare to Steinbeck’s great novel? Read it and judge for yourself.

If your group is looking for a speaker, contact me through my website, or by e-mail jim@jimainsworth.com.  Here are some auditions your program chairpersons might want to review.

A&M-Commerce Commencement Address or  Texas Scribes. 

Under the Porch

Daddy was sick a lot when we were kids and doctors could not determine the problem.  He spent the better part of four years going in and out of hospitals and Mother almost always stayed with him.

I was the youngest child, so she usually took me with her. I went so often that I still get a little nauseous when I enter a hospital. I remember sitting in Janes Clinic in Cooper, watching the door that led to the stairs, afraid that every footstep was someone coming to tell me that Daddy had died.

That scene was repeated so many times that I had nightmares about it. He lost about a quarter of his body weight during one particularly bad time, but only missed work when hospitalized. His face stayed contorted with pain a lot. He could not keep any food in his stomach long enough to gain nutrition.

Desperate, he and Mother decided to go through an extensive diagnostic program at a hospital in Dallas. They sold virtually everything we owned to pay the cost.

The day he was scheduled to leave, I hid in my usual spot underneath our tall front porch. The dirt was cool there and it was a good place to shoot outlaws through the cracks in the boards. I watched through those cracks as our driveway filled with cars. Nobody gave me details; I just sensed that something ominous was happening.

When the time came for Daddy and Mother to leave for Dallas, (which seemed like a foreign country to me), he asked all the relatives and well-wishers to give him a few minutes alone with his kids. They left the house and stood by their cars in the driveway, reminding me of a funeral procession.  I know now that most thought he would never return.

Mother sent Eddy, my brother (six years older) to find me. Even when his calls became impatient, then threatening, I did not come out from under the porch. But my hiding place was well known.

He crawled under the porch and dragged me out. Everything I had dreaded waited for me in the living room of that old, drafty, leaking farm house we lived in. My whole family was standing in the living room. Mother’s eyes were red and held a look of desperation I had seen in hospitals before as she stood beside Daddy’s bed.

My sister Trish was sobbing. Daddy’s copper colored skin could never look pale, but it looked faded. He looked less powerful in his best khakis and shirt than he did in his usual overalls and brogans. The man I had looked to all my life for protection, a bastion of strength and authority, the man I wanted most to please in my short life, looked afraid.

Mother lined us up and I was sure this was the end. I bolted to return to the porch, but Eddy caught my shirt and held me. The line was oldest to youngest and Daddy hugged Trish first and told her he loved her. I should pause here to say that we were not a hugging family, nor did we express our love much in words. Somehow, however, our parents made sure it was never doubted. Not for a minute.

Hearing love expressed by my tough-as-nails daddy, the hug, were ominous signs for a small boy. I lost it when he hugged my brother and spoke of his love. I blubbered against his shoulder as he dropped to one knee to hug me and tell me he loved me.

He put a hand on each of my cheeks and told me he would be back. Things changed then. I believed him. He told me not to stay under the porch so much and to help my mother and my brother and sister. As I recall, he went through a list of my daily chores and told me he was counting on me to keep them done.

I had seen Daddy cry only a few days before when he came out of a doctor’s office. He waited until we were in the car and then whispered to Mother that the doctor said he probably had stomach cancer.  His voice broke when he gave her the bad news.

I wasn’t supposed to hear, but I did. But on the day he left for Dallas, his were the only dry eyes on the place, the only smile.

Time has claimed many of the details of that day, but I will never forget the smell of him, the feel of his rough hands on my cheeks, the sound of his words, believing him when he said he would return.

It’s good that we did not know what heartaches were in our future that day, how much more suffering Daddy would have to endure. There was a lot.

The best doctors in Dallas were not able to diagnose what was wrong, but a few months later, Dr. Olen Janes in Cooper did. He performed surgery and Daddy’s pain and suffering appeared to be over. It was not cancer, just an abnormality in his digestive organs.

I was at a ballgame in the West Delta gym the day he came home after the surgery. I think Trish found me in the crowd and Aunt Hildred took us home. I was almost embarrassed as I walked into my own house. In the kitchen, I saw something I had not seen in a very long time—Daddy seated at the head of the table (though my memory says he was on the wrong end).  He was eating a breakfast-supper, eggs and ham and homemade biscuits, food he had not been able to digest in years.   

Daddy left us before he was sixty. More than three decades after his death, he returned as Rance Rivers in Rivers Flow.  Jake saw Rance leaning against a cattle trailer, arms folded against his chest. When Jake looked at him, he unfolded his arms, put a finger and thumb on the brim of his hat, and tugged slightly. Jake took a deep breath. The Rivers’ Flow was back. Rance returned in Rivers Crossing, Rivers Ebb, and Go Down Looking. I think he would smile and tug on his hat brim at that.

Formulas, Secrets, Universal Truths

Graduates, families and everyone who came to celebrate this momentous occasion, thank you for the opportunity to participate.

Thomas Szansz said that boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity is the feeling that nothing is a waste of time. So let’s begin by striking a bargain. If you will choose serenity for the next few minutes (and it is a choice), I’ll try not to waste your time.

Let’s talk about formulas, secrets, and universal truths.

I dedicated my last book to the memory of my grandfather, saying “I wish I had known then what I know now.”

I don’t mean that I wish I had known life’s secrets, nor do I wish that I already possessed the wisdom that can only come from success and failure, tragedy and triumph. What would be the point of living if we knew it all from the start?

What I mean is that I wish I had known better and sooner how to listen, how to pay respectful attention in order to better build my own belief system sooner.  

Here are a few tidbits of the advice that I received before I really paid attention:

                       

            You have two ears and one mouth so you should listen twice as much as you talk.

            Life is not fair; deal with it.

            Successful people make a habit of doing things other people don’t want to do.

            Spend less than you earn; save and invest the difference .

            The workplace is a hierarchy, not a democracy.

            Accept responsibility for all aspects of your life.

            And the one I really did not want to hear on graduation day, “Your education is just beginning.”

        

           

With the great advances in technology since my graduation, especially during the last two decades, I am told I must say something about it. So here is my technology story.  

I arrived at my first job after graduation and took my junior accountant seat at an old oak desk farthest from the 7^th floor windows of the oil and gas building in downtown Fort Worth.    

My first assignment was to go down into the basement and make copies of a report. You might think I was put off by such an assignment, what with my freshly minted degree. I wasn’t—I had more serious concerns.

In the basement, I saw this giant machine that I knew must have cost thousands of dollars. I had seen a Xerox machine before, but had never used one. I walked around it a few times, afraid to touch the myriad of buttons for fear I would break it. I was about to panic when a lady about my mother’s age walked in and stood behind me, waiting her turn to make copies.

She saw my red face and asked if she could help. Oh, how I hated to admit that I didn’t know how to use that machine. I worried for days whether she would tell my new colleagues just how green I was.

If I can advance from that point to having my own website and writing regular posts to my blog, then I’m not worried about a generation who likely had computers in their baby cribs. Some of you are probably texting right now.

Here is what does worry me. That in the rush to keep pace, we will forget or never learn basic principles that never change—timeless and universal truths that have been recognized by great men and women for centuries. These truths are more important than technology. Much more important.

I learned these critical lessons, but I wish I had learned them sooner. I have told my wife Jan that I want these words on my tombstone. Could have done more, could have done it better, wish I had. If I had only known sooner.

I had eight jobs in eight years after my graduation. Two companies went bankrupt while I worked for them, one more fell shortly after I left. I got justifiably fired from another.

I felt like the cartoon character who walks around with a cloud over his head. I hope your first decade is better. But it is almost guaranteed that you will experience some missteps along the way, if not downright failures.

I discovered later that each of those failures had taught me invaluable lessons—lessons that led me to run a successful business of my own—even to advise others.

But in midlife, it seemed I had reached a plateau in my career and personal life, and that plateau was not very high. I opened branch offices in three other towns. Two failed, one struggled.

This was the era of learning leadership and business principles through books like  In Search of Excellence, Thriving on Chaos, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,  and just about the time I jumped into shark-infested waters, Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive.

A year or so into reading and listening to these great trainers and writers, one of them told me to look in the mirror if I wanted to find the source of most of my problems. So I asked the image in my mirror, “How long before you start applying what you have learned to your own life?”

That look in the mirror led me to self-improvement and positive thinking folks like Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn, Brian Tracy, and many others.  They convinced me that certain truths applied to a country boy from Klondike, just like the successful and famous. And they taught me how to set goals.

But I was still a skeptic, dismissive of rah-rah and platitudes. I wanted things to be proven by logic and empirical evidence.  I sought the secret, the formula for success, while doubting that either existed.

W. Clement Stone, a poor boy who made good (very good), took Og Mandino, an alcoholic, under his wing. Og went on to write some of the most successful business books ever published, became editor of Success Magazine, and was one of the best motivational speakers I have ever heard.  One of his books was called The Greatest Secret in the World.

Mandino led me to Earl Nightingale and his recorded message in beautiful baritone called The Strangest Secret. The lights began to come on.

Stone also introduced me to a book that virtually every salesman (but few accountants) knew by heart in those days, Think and Grow Rich, written by Napoleon Hill and first published in 1937.  

Hill had been commissioned by Andrew Carnegie to research and write a book about why successful people succeeded. And Carnegie gave him access to some of the world’s most accomplished people. It took Hill twenty years to complete his book.

My skeptical ears perked up when I heard that. In twenty years, Hill had surely found that elusive formula I was seeking.

So now I had it—Hill’s well-researched formula and Mandino’s and Nightingale’s secrets.

They led me to Dr. Joseph Murphy’s book, The Power of the Subconscious Mind, to Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics, and to Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. They proved to me the connection between mind and body.

My career took a new direction as I took their ideas and weaved them into the message I was conveying to the relatively new financial planning profession as part of my new company.  One night in Canadian, Texas, the Oasis of the Panhandle, I had another awakening.

I did a presentation for local CPA Mike Gardiner. Mike invited all of his clients to the community room of his church to hear me. After the program, I discovered a set of my handouts had been left in a chair. They had been scribbled all over. Beside each of my formulas and secrets, someone had written a biblical verse. Mike’s pastor had occupied that chair.

At Mike’s house, we looked up the verses.  The man had found biblical prose that espoused every principle in my handout. As my plane took flight out of Amarillo, I looked out the window at the desolate but beautiful Panhandle landscape and understood what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant when he said, “All my best ideas were stolen by the ancients”. Humility settled on me like a warm quilt on a cold night.

Alexander Graham Bell (the Steve Jobs of his day) said, “What this power is I cannot say, all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.”  I now knew what that power was.

I told about my encounter with the preacher to one of the acclaimed trainers and authors I was following; about my discovery that his ideas and others were as old as time; about the

Source of the subconscious; about the connection between affirmations and prayer.

His response: “It took you long enough.”

I asked, “Why didn’t you just say so in the beginning?”

He replied, “Would you have believed me or would you have turned away? You were focused on results, not on principles. The what of things vs. the why. You wanted proof instead of truth.”  

That sent me back to the mirror and a serious look at whether their methods worked. I was  surprised to find that many of my goals had already been achieved. Maybe not exactly when or how I had envisioned, but achieved nonetheless. I had just been going too fast to see it.

As I looked back at some of the irrational, out-of-character, and risky decisions I had made, the only explanation possible was that I had been guided. When I left the path, Guidance set me on the path again. All I had to do was ask. I understood then that life is lived forward, but understood backward.

So what are these universal truths?  

In a quarter century of conducting thousands of client interviews and asking about their fondest hopes, dreams and aspirations, one word was repeated most often. That word was freedom, freedom to pursue life’s path with joy.

We all have a purpose in life-a call, if you will. Find yours. It’s okay to find the correct path by making mistakes, taking the wrong path. In America’s unequaled system of free enterprise, search for your particular way of providing value, whether in a good or a service. Money will follow.

When you find your path, follow it, and ask for help to keep you on the path. The only thing that stands between you and what you want is the will to try and the faith to believe it is possible. Don’t delay, as I did, in finding your purpose. 

Find folks who have been-there-done-that and emerged as successes on a personal and financial level. Study what they did. Read their work, listen to them, seek their advice.  Jim Rohn put it another way when he said, “Find out what failures do, and don’t do it.”

           

Success formulas and secrets have been known since ancient times.  But it’s in the implementation of the concepts where the rubber meets the road. One quality possessed  by every person Napoleon Hill studied was self-discipline.

You must choose to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not. Self discipline is also what keeps you from doing what you should not.  

Read at least one hour a day (tweets and texts don’t count).  We need longer attention spans, not shorter.

If you really desire to be successful at anything, you must engage in deliberate practice.

           

Enjoy the little things, because someday you may look back and see that they were really the big things.

           

Go wide and deep. And no, I don’t mean football. I mean life. You may have within you  the capacity for several careers and endeavors. But if you must choose between wide and deep, go deep.

                       

Daniel H. Burnham said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.  Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.”   

One more story: Renowned author and investor Alexander Green knows about universal truths. He was browsing in a bookstore with a friend when they encountered Nicholas Taleb, the best-selling author of The Black Swan. All three were speaking at a financial conference close by. 

Nicholas’ announcement that he was planning a book on religion prompted an argument with Green’s friend as to whether a particular theological point "was true."

Nicholas pointed to the fiction section of the bookstore and asked, "How about all those books over there. Are they true?"

"Of course not," Green’s friend said. "They're novels."

Green stepped into the argument. "But they are full of universal truths."

Nicholas smiled with satisfaction and said, "Exactly!"

In Green’s book Beyond Wealth, he says, “Seek enlightenment wherever you can find it. It doesn't matter whether the source is ancient, modern, mythical, foreign, mystical, or verified by the latest scientific findings. It only matters that it's true - and that it has some practical application for more skillful living.”

In his timeless book, As a Man Thinketh, James Allen said:

Cherish your visions, cherish your ideals, cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts. If you will remain true to them, your world will at last be built.

I leave you with my own words to remember when you become discouraged:

Enjoy these days of struggle, the best you can.  Because almost surely you will look back on them with fondness. Try to hear the music that sings in all of our souls. On some days, success will seem to reside on a mountain that reaches through the clouds – a mountain you sometimes tire of climbing. But then there will be other days when success visits like a firefly at twilight, elusive and distant at once, then brushing your cheek or resting on the back of your hand, too swift to touch.  Someday, a firefly will land in your palm. Don’t close your hand around it, because the light will go out. Allow yourself to feel the thrill of success changing from stranger to friend, then let it fly away so you can find it again.