Act 1 – Gonnections
Scene 4 – Building a Future
So things went well enough at McMillin through 1978. I was in Marketing at the end of that year, setting up model-home sales offices, writing ad copy, and taking photos of houses. My boss was just 10 years older than me, and we got along well. Josie was kind of jealous of her. Sandy was attractive and charming, as was expected of any woman heading a marketing department those days. Josie and I had given up our shared quarters. She was living in a travel trailer in one of those trailer parks left over from the 1940s. Not pre-war Grapes of Wrath, but not much better than that. We were still connected, enough so that I was giving her $100 a month. For most of that year, I shared a house in Chula Vista with a friend of that co-worker who had set up the newspaper interview. Only in retrospect do I realize how many of life’s changes revolve around one’s family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.
Gary was one of those guys who did everything to the max. If he went jogging, it became a major workout. If he went on a date, there could be only one satisfactory conclusion. One Saturday, we went to a Mexican restaurant he had been telling me about. We got loaded and had lunch. It was fun, but not good enough for Gary. We went home, got loaded again, and went back for dinner.
Sometime that year, my dad got us a deal on a very basic condo just finished by one of his builder clients. It was apartment-quality in a marginal Chula Vista neighborhood. But it was cheap. My dad put up the down payment and I agreed to make the payments. I took a roommate and was on my way to building equity.
In early 1979, McMillin hired a heavy hitter, Hank Litten, to run the marketing department. Like Richard Nixon, he graduated from Whittier College, served in the military, and had an old-school sense of leadership. He insisted I shave my beard off. His idea of a compliment was to tell me that I had missed my calling because the pictures I took of houses were so good. Can you imagine telling a 23-year-old that he had missed his calling? Then something happened that I don’t remember anymore, but someone else got the credit for some work I did. So, in March 1979 I took a job with a small builder. Yes, the pay was 1.5 times as much as I was getting at McMillin, but the bigger motivation was to have fewer layers between ownership and me.
FLJB Associates had three passive investors, an active owner, a project manager, a bookkeeper, two superintendents, and an estimator/purchasing agent. I was to assist the latter. According to Don Knox – one of my former management-trainee colleagues – I was excited by the opportunity to learn from the estimator. Don says I called him two weeks later quite concerned because my mentor had given notice. Suddenly, I was responsible for bidding out and contracting about half of the trades on a 52-unit project that was already underway.