Kennebunkport Patrician, Red-Neck Riveria, Skull Valley

RMG Consultants, Inc. was mission driven, not pursuing rational self interest as conventionally defined.  Rob’s mantra was to remain “ruthlessly objective” and have no conflicts of interest.  We served the library as civic institution of learning and education. 

Douglas became a corporate officer, with increasing responsibilities, was named Vice President of Operations and Treasurer of RMG Consultants, Inc.  He encouraged Rob to pursue the for-profit sector and so they launched Infostrat, Inc., then formed an Australian-based company, RMG/CAVAL to pursue the Austral-Asian market. Douglas became an officer of those entities.  

On the home front, I had left the barrio, moved north to Rogers Park, on the lakefront.  Brian had graduated from Cornell College with a Bachelors of Arts in Economics and Political Science, moved back to Chicago, full-time at RMG, and lived with me. Douglas also moved to Rogers Park, but found a studio apartment off Howard Avenue, at the El terminus.  I believe there was a crack house across the hall, and once he heard gunshots while walking on Howard Avenue.  We were on very opposite sides of Sheridan Road.  

In January 1991, the first patrician from Kennebunkport, Maine announced that Operation Desert Storm – the First Iraq War – would be televised live; we all pulled up chairs around the TV.  Tal Lekberg, my carpenter friend, was in the Coast Guard and had been called to active duty in the Persian Gulf.  Not knowing if he would return home alive, he brought his entire collection of single malt Scotch Whiskey to our apartment – at least two dozen bottles – asking me to safeguard it.  “It’s okay if you drink it.  Maybe some will remain if I return.”  Like a fox guarding the hen house, we heartily imbibed while watching the destruction of the cradle of civilization, in pursuit of the quest for oil.  

December 1991, Douglas and Laurie had decided to get married, and Douglas pined to be wed in Paris, at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, I as their witness.  It made great sense and we all bought tickets, flew across the pond; I arrived first, Douglas and Laurie a day or two later.  A friend arranged an apartment for me, and Laurie knew someone from the U of C who had a flat there.  We met and celebrated love in Paris, when we were young and all life easily opened before us.  But Notre Dame was not so easily scheduled and the wedding did not take place.  We took the train south to Chartres, and beside the Cathedral I ran the table at a bakery beside the nave doors.  I bought one of everything and together we ate pastries, at the foot of Chartres Cathedral.  It was grand.  Essentially they were married then, but officially it took two months more.  

In February 1992 Douglas and Laurie got married.  In April I moved off-grid, to Holmes County, Florida’s “red-neck riviera,” to a swamp along the Choctawhatchee River.  Such was the synchronicity of the times, that even the swamp had a role in library automation.  

In the tradition of eccentric booksellers, Bob Allenson seems worthy of mention.  He is a third-generation bookseller of religious literature but his passion is making bibliographies of rare antiquarian books; his “John Henry Newman, 1801 – 1890: A Preliminary Register of Editions from 1818 to 1890, Together with Original Editions Published Posthumously” is the definitive catalog of Newman’s work.  Sometime in the 1980s he was hired by the American Theological Library Association to select the texts that would be digitized for their online corpus of theological literature. Bob was still working on that when I moved there. 

Alec R. Allenson, Inc., was launched in London, then relocated to Baltimore, Maryland and eventually to Naperville, Illinois.  Bob’s father was a businessman who created a successful company selling textbooks and research materials to Christian seminarians.  Bob is a Quaker, committed to social justice who joined the March to Selma and has little interest in business.  By 1979, he had decided to remove himself from the mainstream culture and purchased acreage along the Choctawhatchee River in rural Westville, Florida, population 261.  Wanting to get away, he found his spot.  A friend and I packed the Naperville bookstore – a most remarkable experience – and shipped five semi-trailers of books to the swamp, where Bob’s son-in-law Caleb had built two pole-barn houses where the books would be stored, for sale.  

I had kept in touch with Bob, and he asked me to help him with the business.  To my mind, at the age of 31, moving off-grid seemed a most sensible thing to do.  In April of 1992, Brian and Douglas drove me to Union Station in Chicago, we said goodbye, then I climbed aboard Amtrak’s “City of New Orleans” southbound, down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.  I spent the night at a hostel, then boarded a Greyhound Bus east, along the Mississippi and Alabama coast.  Somewhere along Florida State Route 20 I got off the bus, then rode my bike north. The Sheriff and his men stopped and questioned me – I stood out like a sore thumb – but let me continue and eventually Bob and his wife Dorothy Ann drove down to pick me up.  

Bob embodied his Quaker ideals by visiting prisoners in the State Penitentiary, and, for honesty and transparency, by wearing no clothes.  I recall Bob in his kitchen, holding a glass of white wine, cooking ratatouille and lamb chops, discussing the Christian mystics Swedenborg and Meister Eckhart, all while standing buck naked in his birthday suit.  To the question, “what’s the recent weather like over there Bob? I’m trying to figure out what to wear?” he replied “Well as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need to wear anything at all.” My guess is he wore clothes to the State Penitentiary.  

There was no work to be done, and neither electricity nor running water, so in the swamp – which was, in fact, an oxygen factory – I mostly sat, listened and read.  Storm clouds would amass over the Gulf of Mexico, then by afternoon would float north overhead.  Almost daily, rain like a typhoon fell, massive amounts of water, relieving the humidity.  Caleb and his family also lived in the swamp and at night we would paddle on the river, I in front with a flashlight, scanning for the green eyes of alligators at the water’s level.  Once found, they would drop beneath the water and silently swim away, even beneath our canoe.  Caleb laughed at his unseasoned passenger from the North.   

Eventually it became clear that life there was not sustainable and so I returned to Deerfield, and then unexpectedly, moved out west to Prescott, Arizona.  I settled into a trailer, at the foot of a butte, near Skull Valley.  By coincidence I had been introduced to an older gentleman, who was active in trading agricultural commodities.  Given my background, he was curious of my interests and offered to introduce me to a financier he knew, who purportedly had helped launch McDonald’s Corporation.  He had two conditions: I needed to write a Business Plan and get the approval of the Senior Chairman of the Board of McDonald’s Corporation.  No small task, although the writing seemed more daunting than the approval, so willing to shovel coal, I was willing to get to work.  

The Chicago Tribune had announced an architecture competition for public housing, to redesign the Cabrini-Green projects.  I entered.  I had met Paolo Soleri, the architect and urban planner – a visionary, widely overlooked – who had built Cosanti and Arcosanti based upon the design of medieval cities of the Italian countryside; he advocated a hyper-dense city surrounded by open space and the natural environment.   Living on the high desert, in a trailer with no phone or TV, I began to ponder the social contract, how design manifests those ideas, and the coming impact of unlimited access to information.