Introduction of the New World

I had purchased an Atari 401. It had been advertised as a computer, not a game console, but it was very restricted as a computer, though most expansive as a game console despite the hype. I could play a multitude of game cassettes through the box, which was fun and my kids loved it, otherwise, there wasn’t much to the system.

There was a keyboard and two cartridge slots above the keys. Besides the usual Atari game cartridges you could also use magnetic tape cassettes. This is what acted as your storage device. You see, you could write rudimentary programs using Basic, but if you wanted to use your program more than once you needed to save it on magnetic tape. Those cassettes loaded very slowly. There was no monitor. You plugged it into your TV. There was no printer so you were plain out of luck if you wanted a hard copy of anything. You could buy some software beyond games, such as Financial Planning.

Then one day in the merry, merry month of May I was strolling through the Christiana Mall and entered an Arrow Camera Shop. I had bought film and other photography equipment there and often went in just to browse. There was a new section at the very rear of the store displaying something beyond cameras and film supplies. It wasn’t even a full section, just a corner in the back and the lone sign said, “Apple Computers”. I wandered on back and when I left that store that day I was the proud owner of an Apple IIc. I bought a printer and an extra external floppy drive as well. The whole kit ‘n’kaboodle cost me $1,200.

There was a practical reason to buying the extra external floppy. There was no internal hard drive in the Apple IIc for storage. There was an internal floppy drive built in the CPU Unit. Everything ran off of floppy discs. There was included in the box software on both 5.25” floppies (true floppies because if you held them by the edge they would flop if you waved them) and on 3.5" discs still referred to as floppies, but these were very ridged and didn’t actually flop. My model only took the 5.25 discs.

You would insert a disc into the internal drive that contained the startup and operating system. You then would remove that disc and put in the Appleworks floppy. Appleworks contained three programs: word processing, spreadsheet and data base. I didn’t use spreadsheet so much in the beginning. I did use data base because all my life I made lists. I listed all the books I owned, all the record album and all the pieces I had written. I guess it is my touch of OCD. The pieces I wrote were typed on 3x5 index cards. On the front I put the title, what byline I was using at the time, date written and type. If it was published I put that info on the front as well.  On the back I put the information of my attempts to publish the work. This was the name of the publication sent to, the date sent and the date returned. The data base made this compulsion to list everything so much easier.

What I used most was the word processor. Oh man, this was like magic. If I added or subtracted any parts of a story I didn’t have to retype the whole anymore.   I loved this machine. It was an answered dream. It was so great I retyped everything I had written onto floppy discs. There was no problem with copies, no messy carbon paper to deal with. I could store what I wrote on floppy discs for future use. This was where having an external floppy drive came in so handy. If I hadn’t got the external, then every time I typed something I wanted to save I had to go through a routine that involved removing the Appleworks disc and putting in a blank disc, doing the save and then switching discs again. With the extra drive I could just save my work and not manipulate discs at all.

If I discovered a mistake or made a change or added or subtracted text to a document I didn’t have to retype the whole thing. No longer did I have to bother with messy things like white out to fix a mistype or carbon paper for backup copies.

The Apple IIc was not the first home computer, of course, but was probably at the heart of home computers blossoming in the consumer imagination. Keep in mind Apple had introduced the initial Apple II model in 1977. Steve Wozniak had created the Apple I in 1976 (Gosh, Woz was skinny in those days). There was a lot going on technically in the 1970s that would lead to the home computer revolution, but it wasn’t until the early 1980s that the public really grabbed the concept. Maybe the first hint of what was to come was when the game Pong was released in 1972, you know, the simple digital ping pong you played on your TV screen. I mentioned how a friend, Dave Mason, was one of the first I knew to have this game. How far we’ve come since.

       In 1973 the Wang 2200 was introduced. An Wang, a Chinese inventor was a pioneer in word and data processing. Remember I put the budget of Mercy Catholic Medical Center on a Wang Processor back in 1979. (By the way, as hard as this may be to believe, the Internet was invented in 1973 as well. It wasn’t invented by Al Gore, but from experiments conducted simultaneously by Xerox in the U.S., France’s Cyclades and Britain’s NPL networks).

In 1974, Xerox came out with the PARC Alto (right). They introduced with his machine such things as the Mouse, GUI (graphical user interface), printing that matched the screen called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and E-mail. It was for all intent and purposes the first personal computer. These innovations developed at Xerox would have a profound effect on the Apple people and would next be incorporated into the Lisa and the Macintosh and this changed the world.

WordStar, the first great word processing software was created in 1978. The first great spreadsheet software appeared in 1979. It was called VisiCalc and had been initially developed for the Apple II. (Left is Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, developers of VisiCalc.) Also in 1979 Atari marketed their first computers, the 400 and the 800. The 400 was the first so-called home computer I owned.

It was in the early 1980s that the idea of the home computer burst free out of the laboratories and techies. In 1980 something called the VIC-20 was brought out by Commodore. Commodore had greater success in 1982 when they introduced the Commodore 64 (right). Meanwhile, in 1981, with great fanfare, IBM brought out their Personal Computer operating from a MicroSoft system called MS-DOS. Soon we would know home computers by two family trees, Apple and the PC.

1983 was a banner year, the Compaq Portable found a niche and Apple brought out both the Lisa and the Apple IIc. Then in 1984 an iconic TV Commercial ran once during the Super Bowl (and only that one time) showing a shorts clad woman with a hammer run between a zombie-like audience and smash a giant screen showing a man’s face. The allusion to George Orwell’s Big Brother from his novel 1984 was obvious. This ad brought the attention of everyone to the Apple Macintosh (left). If the gist of the ad was that the home computer set us free from Big Brother, what was missed was the new computerized world would allow for the creation of Big Brother.

Anyway, enough about the history of home computers. This is supposed to be about the history of me. Let’s get back to that.

This stuff was not lost on me. I began by the time I had the Atari 400 to push for the inclusion of desktop computers in our division’s capital budget, even offering to teach the employees Basic. My request was rejected in 1982 and again in 1983. Our Senior Manager, George Craig, did not see any future in such gimmicks. He was a solid Mainframe guy. For a large institution like The Bank the Mainframe was the only way to continuing going. He viewed the home computers as nothing more than that, something that might have some use in the home, but not in business. I fought hard. Frankly, I wanted our division to be the first to utilize such technology, believing once we had some and showed the benefits, other’s would follow. (Mr. Craig died on May 30, 2016, age 85. That is a photo of him in later years on the right.)

Then in 1984 these machines were added to the budget. Not for our division, however. Senior Vice-President of Operations, George Craig had suddenly decided maybe we should take a look at these things, so he created a new Division of Office Automation, or something like that. It was set up as a time sharing operation. Believe me, I was down there signing up for as much time as I could grab. I was using the WordStar to write my documents and spending time learning Visicalc.

This new Division started with four computers, three of which were Apples. But the IBM PC was capturing the business world and Apple was becoming the computer of the educational system. Within a few months George Craig switched all four computers over to PCs. Meanwhile, I stuck the desktop computers onto our 1985 budget proposal and this time it got approved, although at first it amounted to only one machine and I got it, a Compaq Deskpro (left).

It was going to be interesting times ahead.

Me with my son Darryl, 1984.

Me with Noelle and Laurel, 1984.

Lois and I, 1984.

Day Job

Before we were interrupted by sexual pursuits I was left unemployed and in a high rise apartment in New Jersey. Olson Brothers’ Eastern Regional Operations had collapsed, the Blue Anchor plant would never be built and I and the General Manager did the final functions of closing it down, and then I was unemployed in a strange land.

Lois had left the University of Pennsylvania’s chemistry department when we moved across the Delaware River, so we were in somewhat tenuous shape that January of 1973. I received a few week’s severances pay, hardly enough to see us through the month. I had immediately gone to the Pennsylvania Labor Office and applied for unemployment. (I was now living in New Jersey, but the job had been located in Pennsylvania.)

Unlike the difficulties I would someday face with the

Delaware Employment Insurance, Pennsylvania approved me very quickly. Meanwhile I was sending out resumes and checking the want ads. One ad that caught my eye was for a job with a company called Bestline. I dialed the number and they gave me a date and time to go to the Cherry Hill Inn.

I went expecting an interview. Instead I was ushered down a hallway outside a large ballroom filled with chairs. There were finger foods and drinks on tables lining this corridor. A man with a clipboard greeted me, took my name and invited me to indulge in the edibles. There were quite a number of people nibbling at finger sandwiches ambling about. After a while we were each handed a folder and directed to find seats in the ballroom. The folder

contained a small booklet and several forms.  Once seated the lights dimmed.  A spotlight picked up a well-dressed fellow stepping out on a stage down at one end and he enthusiastically began explaining Bestline to us. The products were cleaners and waxes. It sounded like we would be selling these items like some scrub-it-up Amway peddlers.

A sales job, I had no interest in a sales job. I had tried training to sell Encyclopedias door to door for Colliers a few years earlier and left the training after a week. I did not consider myself any kind of salesman.

But no, we weren’t sales staff and this was not some salaried position. This was a great opportunity. As they say on TV, there’s more. This wasn’t just a peddler’s position. We would be like little individual franchises for Bestline designated local distributors.  It wasn’t that we would take simply take customer orders and Bestline would ship out the product to fill what we sold. No, we were expected to buy the products up front, like buy a whole garage full of the stuff,  at a discount beneath the retail price, of course.  The initial discount was 30%.The greater your sales, the higher discount you would receive, up to 52%. Sure, Bestline would get their money and we would have to actually sell all the junk to get back our investment plus any possible profit.

Yet, that wasn’t all at all! Selling wasn’t the main point. If you

really wanted to make money then you would recruit other local distributors. You yourself wouldn’t wear out your shoes going door to door, you would bring in your friends and neighbors into the scheme to order their own garage-size supply to sell and you would collect a commission on their sales. You only needed to recruit ten people to do it and then convince them to recruit ten of their acquaintances to also do it. Those ten would sent a cut to your original ten, and in turn your ten would pass on a percentage to you for of all these now 110 people. You would soon be rich as Bill Gates.

It was clear to me this was a good old fashioned Ponzi scheme. If you were at the top of the pyramid perhaps you would actually make something, but there would be diminishing returns down the line as each spin off group attempted to find ten suckers to be their own salesmen. For the scheme to work each person involved had to hook up ten more people. Think about it. If I got ten people and they got 10 people each, then I’d have 110 people passing a share up to me. And if those additional 100 people each got 10 recruits there would be 1,010 people sharing the loot with me. But for those people to earn anything they would have to keep recruiting. Twelve layers down and you would need to have 100 Billion Bestline dealers. You’d have to be recruiting on other planets because the population of Earth in only 7 Billion.

They really put on the pressure to sign an agreement right there and then. It felt as if they would let you out of the place until you did, but despite their ganging up on me and calling me names, I managed to break through the gauntlet and angrily stomped out.

         I came believing it was a real job offer and here it was a scam. I also contacted the Better Business Bureau (Part of the BBB reply is on the  right). 

Bestline was taken to court more than once and judgments brought against them for fraud and false claims.

People v. Bestline Products, Inc.

Annotate this Case

[Civ. No. 46034. Court of Appeals of California, Second Appellate District, Division Three. August 25, 1976.]

THE PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. BESTLINE PRODUCTS, INC., et al., Defendants and Appellants

(Opinion by Potter, J., with Allport, Acting P. J., and Cobey, J., concurring.)

COUNSEL

Humphreys, Berger & Pitto, P. C., Donald A. Drumright, Cotchett, Hutchinson & Dyer, Joseph W. Cotchett, Meis & O'Donnell, Owen P. O'Donnell, Gallucci, White & Kelley, Thomas E. White and Irving Reifman for Defendants and Appellants.

Evelle J. Younger, Attorney General, E. Clement Shute, Assistant Attorney General, Herschel T. Elkins and Michael R. Botwin, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.

OPINION

POTTER, J.

Appellants Bestline Products, Inc. (hereinafter "Bestline Products"), Bestline Corporation (hereinafter "Bestline Corp."), William E. Bailey, Robert W. Depew, David L. Eastis, James Rohn and Larry D. Huff appeal from a judgment dated December 21, 1973, in favor of plaintiff the People of the State of California. The judgment (1) permanently restrained defendants from operating or participating in a marketing program embodying proscribed features which the court found were in violation of Business and Professions Code section 17500 fn. 1 prohibiting "untrue or misleading" statements; (2) required defendants Bestline Products, Bestline Corp., and Bailey to offer to make restitution to victims of the Bestline marketing program, and (3) imposed civil penalties of $1 million jointly and severally, upon defendants Bestline Corp. and Bestline, Inc., $250,000 upon defendant Bailey, $100,000 upon defendant Eastis, and $50,000 each upon defendants Depew, Huff and Rohn. [61 Cal. App. 3d 885]

I needed have fretted about my situation for long. Three weeks after I applied for unemployment compensation my first check came. However, by then I had acquired a job with Welded Tube Company of America. I went from nothing to having a good salary and the extra bonus of three weeks of unemployment checks.

Welded Tube was located in South Philadelphia on world-famous Weccacoe Avenue. You’ve all heard of Weccacoe, haven’t you? It is a slanted street running between Snyder and Oregon Avenues, paralleling Christopher Columbus Boulevard about a block over along the docks. The plant and

offices of Welded Tube took up most of the west side of the street, there wasn’t much on the east side. Railroad tracks ran alongside the plant. There was a little shack down near Snyder that sold hoagies and other sandwiches, one of the few places to buy lunch nearby.

The offices and plant are still there, but the sign says Hyundai

Rodan, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with cars. But across Weccacoe it is not some wasteland  anymore  it is a large shopping center containing a Lowe’s, a Best Buy and an Ikea (right).

Welded Tube had another plant in Chicago, but Philadelphia was the headquarters. The founder was a native Philadelphia named Lou Baylis. He had started out in business with a push cart collecting and selling scrap metal. From that he built the largest manufacturer of structural steel tubing in the USA.

Baylis was Jewish and the upper management of the company were all Jewish and mostly his relatives. It had stock, but it was all privately held by the management. The vice-president was Lou’s son, Melvin Baylis. Another executive was Allen Baylis, either a nephew or cousin. Didn’t see him much. Melvin often put him down.

The real force was Jean Wexler (right) She was the Secretary, both to Mr. Baylis and on the Board. She is who hired me and she was a tough cookie who carried out Lou Baylis orders with an iron hand. Her brother, Sam Wexler was the main salesman and Ann Cooper, a sister also worked there. The controller was Dick Shafritz.

The rest of us were gentiles.

My first position was as an assistant bookkeeper and I reported to the Head Bookkeeper, an older man whose name escapes me.

Even in this lowly position my salary was higher than what I had been making at Olson Brothers. For some lucky reason, every time I changed jobs I began at a higher wage. I had been making $7,800 a year when Olson’s closed; I started at Welded Tube at $8,060 a year. When I left Welded Tube 6 years later in 1978 I was making $17,000. My next position was with a medical center and I started at $18,200. Two years later I got my first position at Wilmington Trust at $20,000. That was 1980 and when I retired from Wilmington Trust my salary was $65,000 plus an $8,000 Bonus and a number of stock options.

I was at Welded Tube three months when the head bookkeeper left the company suddenly. Dick Shafritz, (left) the Controller, who ran the clerical and accounting operations put out an ad for a new bookkeeper, but I went to him and told him I didn’t think he need do that because I was sure I could handle the full bookkeeping. He therefore took me up on my offer and I was doing all the book work.

By the way, Jean Wexler hated how messy Dick's office was. He had papers everywhere and his chair was festooned with notes. On one of Shafritz's vacations, Jean came down and cleaned up his desk and office. When he came back he was flummoxed; he couldn't find anything.

Anyway, as I began keeping all the books, I noticed a consistent discrepancy in the figures. This was constantly being noted as a balance adjustment in the overall reporting. It bugged me and I began searching through the records stored in a side room. I had time to do this because I once again brought my organization skills to improving the processes.  Finally, I uncovered the initial reporting errors and corrected the books and brought everything into balance.

After six months on the job, I was promoted to Assistant Controller. In this position I continued with all the bookkeeping and added such accounting functions as the monthly balance sheets, income statements and other reports. Now I also worked closely with the auditors and in the preparation of the annual report.

Lou Baylis did hire an Accounting Manager and I reported directly to him instead of Dick Shafritz. His name was James Schlief, called Jimbo by his friends (right). He came from the accounting firm of Ernst & Young and had his CPA. He and I hit it off great and I loved working for him. This affinity toward each other would pay off eventually.

Baylis had a computer system installed, the main piece being an IBM System 3. Hee also hired an Operation System Manager, another person whose name I can’t recall (am I getting senile )  even though he and I got along well. In the picture on the right he is the fellow kneeling down in front of the Christmas Tree. (I’m not in the picture because I took the picture.)

There were a number of malfunctions with the System 3 (right) and Lou Baylis fired the computer. He hadn’t liked the idea of getting the thing to begin with, but once he fired it he realized we probably did need some modern technology after all.

He had already booted the Operations System Manager out, though. Next thing I knew I was off to IBM for schooling in the System 3 Computer, and when I completed the course, I was named Operations System Manager as well as Assistant Controller.  I got a raise for now doing both jobs, a situation that gave our outside Accounting Firn, which was Ernst and Young, fits. They argued that it was a conflict of interest, but Baylis wouldn’t be budged.

He wouldn’t be budged on his hatred of the System 3 either, and despite having got me trained on that machine, he decided to get rid of it completely and replaced it with a Sperry Univac BC/7 System. I was sent off now to the Sperry Rand Corporation to learn the BC/7 operation and how to program in a language called RPG-II.

I came back and reorganized the Computer Department, did all the programming for the system and wrote the procedure manuals.

I had two young women performing all the daily jobs, while I attended to keeping the books up to date. One of my most firm rules was backing up the system. They were to do this at the end of each day. Storage was done of these large hard disks and the backup did take a bit of time to perform. One day there was a bad thunderstorm and lightning struck a transformer on the roof of the plant. It fried the disks in the computer. My workers were very upset, but I told them not to worry, just get the backup. They kind of turned pale. It turned out they hated backing up so much they had skipped doing it. We now had to reconstruct our billing and other information from the paper records. If they hated to do backup, they didn’t after that. They found working late manually entering months of records much more tedious than the backup had been.

I did very well at Welded Tube and it became my longest job since leaving ARCo, I was to work there 6 years. The picture on the right is me, well, most of me at the BC/7 console in the Operations Center. But life is always full of transitions.

A lot will change in my life during the time I worked for Welded Tube, a whole lot!