Tennis Racquets

President Max Cardozo

Mama Cardozo and Sherry Tsang, my Asian partner.

I was unsure of my future at Gateway, so I ventured into the metal tennis racquet business. The Tensor Light Company of New York (by the Chemold Harp Factory) designed the Tensor tennis racquets. Both factories had large floors where they made the racquets, and engineers from both companies walked me through the creation process. I was interested in the quality of the two different racquets, so I had tennis players test the racquets. I sponsored a tennis tournament where athletes played as long as possible without keeping score. If they got tired, another player took over. We held the competition in the parking lot of the French Market in Overland Park. It took seventy-two hours, and both Chemold and Tensor lost to the Slazenger wooden racquet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOxmUFuLFuk

I decided to manufacture and sell my racquets and took the winning racquets to a neighboring company, Parker McCrory, whose market was electric fences. However, Merl Turner, the President of Parker McCrory, and his engineer liked the idea of making an additional product. A representative from their die maker (The Essex Aluminum Company), and salesman, Lars Hederson, came down to Parker McCrory with the aluminum samples.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WwlmlcrY6k

Parmak Electric Fencing - ParmakUSA

We all got a lesson on aluminum alloys. Later we purchased two die casts for the yoke and another for the frame. First, I bought a few Ektelon tennis stringing machines. In 1968, this company developed an aluminum tennis racquet and racquet stringing machine in a garage workshop, where we purchased its first machines.

Racquetball with aluminum racquets soon became a tremendous hit with tournament players, so I decided to start manufacturing racquets on a large scale. Our tennis racquets varied in length, weight, and head size; 21 inches to 26 inches is usually the length of a junior tennis racquet, while more significant players use a racquet of about 27 inches to 27.5 inches. Weights for unstrung racquets are somewhere between 8 ounces and 12.5 ounces. Manufacturers started making racquets from laminated wood throughout tennis history, and their heads were around 65 square inches. Made famous by Jimmy Connors, Wilson's T2000 steel racquet of the late 1960s had wire wound around the frame to make string loops. In the mid-1970s, aluminum construction allowed for a still more considerable increase in the head size of a racquet. Prince racquets had a head size of about 110 square inches, and later, other brands had different non-standard head sizes, like the midsize 90-square-inch racquet head and the mid-plus size 95-square-inch racquet head.

In 1971, my sister Betty married Robby Lobatto in Holland. I took a 72-hour weekend and brought my son, Alan, with me on the trip. We were to fly 450 kilometers—first, to Reykjavík, Iceland, Luxembourg, and Amsterdam. I had no idea that it would take another nine hours to get from Luxembourg to Amsterdam. Mama had brought Dutch liqueurs along on the trip to Amsterdam, which I loved. However, after we had driven for one hour, Alan got car sick and threw up, and was still ill upon arriving at the border.

I worried that Alan might develop croup, which can develop quickly in a child with a mild cold. Croup usually begins at night with a barking cough and a slight fever, so on our arrival in Amsterdam, we called our friend, Dr. Alphons Noach, who suggested that we put Alan in the bathroom for a while; the steam was supposed to help his cough. We decided to get Alan back to the United States, and so it seemed that we were now going to miss Betty and Robby's wedding. Telling the doctor why we came, he said not to worry and jokingly added that he would be a groomsman in my place.

Early the next day, we had to return to the international airport in Luxembourg. However, they canceled our flight because we had not confirmed our reservations. I got agitated and took Alan and set him on the airline counter. I demanded to see the manager of Icelandic Airways. I let him have it with both barrels. He kept apologizing but said that it was my fault: "You have to reconfirm your flight within seventy-two hours." I said that I had bought my tickets less than seventy-two hours earlier. Finally, the manager called British Airways and got us on the next flight to London. On the airplane, Alan kept coughing. We arrived in New York to make our connection to Kansas City. Alan wanted to call his mother, and on the telephone, he said, "Mommy, I'm going to die." That was all Lenore had to hear.

On top of Alan's illness, the airport situation became more serious when we tried to make a connection to our 1971 Pan American flight in New York. There were 400 people in London to New York in the waiting room. An overhead announcement said that our plane was ready to board at the international terminal, so everyone got up onto the moving sidewalk through a small doorway. Of course, this was early in the days of commercial flying, and people were piling up at the entrance while the walkway kept moving. I grabbed Alan and jumped over the ramp, saving us from getting hurt. It was a mess. Today passengers board in sections.

My tennis racquet business continued, and I had invested over $100,000 in a tennis factory. To cover my expenses and ensure an income other than the tennis racquet factory, I called my friends at Stebco Bowling and Camping Supply. I also called Wilson Golf Bags, my friends at Lynx Golf Clubs, Etonic Golf Shoes and Clothing, and Nat Nast Sports Jackets. My idea was to sell some of its products as a traveling salesman, so I purchased a new American Motors Gremlin.

I had an office showroom in the Continental Oil Building at 75th and Mission Road in Prairie Village, Kansas. I received some samples of the Stebco Athletic Products and set off in the Gremlin for a sales trip to Iowa and Nebraska. As you well know, Gremlins have a see-through back window. Because of this, some thieves were able to steal my golf shoes and gloves. I learned that if you travel with samples like this, you should always take a right or left one with you from your car to make them useless to steal. On my trip, I went through Wyoming and Colorado, and then on to a sporting goods show in Los Angeles.When I left L.A., the weather forecast was for snow in the Rockies, so I drove to Las Vegas, promising not to stop. However, off the I-5 highway in the middle of the desert, I saw a giant billboard that said, "Fox's is a great place to get ...pastrami, corned beef, knishes, matzo ball soup, stuffed cabbage, and of course our pickles. Sandwiches are overstuffed with at least one pound of meat. Famous cheesecake." The desert had made me hungry, so I stopped. I got two sandwiches—pastrami and corned beef—and dessert— the famous cheesecake. The food smelled so good that I finished everything in one go. As I crossed through Arizona and went over the border into Utah, I got so sick, so I had no choice but to find the next motel; I had only driven 239 miles.

I planned to continue to Denver early the following day, but ice and snow made this trip very difficult on the two-lane mountain roads. It was 493 miles to Denver. First, it was raining, and then when I hit the mountains, I was hit with ice and snow. It took me two days to get to Denver when the trip typically took half.

I visited some of my most significant customers, the Gart brothers, Dave Cook, and an Air Force base in Colorado Springs, while I took a more southern route to Manhattan, Kansas and then drove north on I-35 to my home in Prairie Village, Kansas. The trip took five weeks and was very successful, where I had written some substantial orders. However, the journey was a difficult one.

By this time, I had invested well over $250,000 in the tennis racquet factory, including computerized drill machines for the aluminum frames and racquet yokes. My all-new tennis racquet machinery included baking ovens, stringing machines, and a large inventory of leather grips, nylon string, etcetera. The factory was in the West Bottoms, in 100,000 square feet of rented space. I had a large payroll that included Victor, the plant manager in charge; Bill Huges, a toolmaker; Julla May, a shipping manager; and a full-time bookkeeper (not to mention over fifty salaried workers).

I sold over 300 racquets each day to K-Mart, catalog houses, sporting goods stores, and promotional events. I started making racquetball racquets and designed a racquet with mercury, where the mercury shot forward and allowed the player to hit the ball much harder. I had a contract with the industry for the blind to string the racquets. Stringing racquets is something that visually impaired people can do without eyesight. It is all about the strings' feel, and so I taught them how to string them. People who were blind, somewhat like piano tuners, were often the best racquet stringers out there, so they could string as many as ten racquets per day. I used their versatility in Topeka and Kansas City, Kansas, and received a contract from the Head ski company to string their racquets. I attended a meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Del Webb Hotel. I met several American store managers and members of the national industries for the blind, who strung racquets nationwide. I wanted this group to help me market the racquets, through their name, to local sports shops.

When I returned from a sales meeting in Kansas City, my secretary told me she had requested to meet with some of the largest sporting manufacturers. We were to talk about how to save U.S. sporting manufacturers. I had to fly to the Doral Golf Resort & Spa. Thas was a perfect time to experience the unparalleled golf and amenities at the resort. I looked forward to spending some time on the courses, relaxing by the Blue Lagoon pool, and dining at fine restaurants in the area.

I called my mother and asked her to come to Miami, telling her that I would take her to Kingston and the Bahamas. The moment I opened her hotel room door, I saw a giant iguana on her pillow. I quickly moved it away, for she would have wanted me to take her home if she had seen it.

As the writer that wrote the book, A Child Underground, I was deeply impressed by the American athletes when he set foot on U.S. soil. With my ongoing friendship with black athletes, I learned how African Americans were barred from most public activities in the U.S. It started in Fort Smith with my friend Richie White; in my book, The Glass is Full, we boarded a bus to a New York train station to Fort Smith in 1957. On arrival, I suggested that Richie grab a drink at a local bar, but Richie didn't want to go as people of color were banned at local bars. I forced Richie to come with me. We sat at the bar and ordered two beers. Then the bartender said, "we do not serve n****** here." I was ready to fight. Some physical and verbal harassment started, but I wasn't going to leave up until the bartender opened his coat and showed me his two pistols. I responded by telling him that we were soldiers of the United States Army and had the right to be here.

In response, the bartender threatened to throw acid in our faces if we did not leave at once. What a welcome to my new home! One year before I arrived from Europe, where they displayed "Jews Not Allowed" signs, I was angry and shocked that such a thing would occur in the USA. While I was in Fort Chaffee, the only place I went was with my friend Richie White. I learned how to eat southern-made beef on oil drums that he were cut in half.

On an airport shuttle on my return to Kansas City, as luck would have it, I sat next to another great tennis player, a then-teenager in the 1960s. I remembered the extraordinary achievements of Arthur Ashe on the tennis court. But I knew little of the obstacles and challenges on my return to Kansas City.

Arthur Ashe would have turned 78 this month, who is the only Black man to win the singles title at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the Australian Open and was once ranked No. 1 globally. He retired from tennis in 1980 and died of AIDS-related complications in 1993. But his legacy on the court was arguably superseded by his contributions to educating others about HIV and AIDS, founding the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS and the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, and being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton after his death.

The film "Citizen Ashe" features contemporary interviews with Ashe's widow, Jeanne Moutousammy-Ashe, his brother, Johnnie Ashe, and fellow tennis legends Billie Jean King, John McEnroe Donald Dell, and Lenny Simpson, as well as activist Professor Harry Edwards. The film shows his relationship with his early tennis mentor, explores the death of his mother at a young age, his technical form on the court, the cultural significance of his Grand Slam wins, and how he managed a quiet, stoic dignity in public, despite the racism, he endured throughout his life and career.

As a Buyer of Tennis and Golf, Gateway

After that meeting, it was my birthday, January 11, and I had breakfast at the National Sporting Goods Association. I had an appointment with the president of Wilson Sporting Goods, Rau Islii, and I got a surprise. Attending the breakfast were famous sports stars, and Rau Islii made them all sing happy birthday: Bill Tilden, Bobby Riggs, John McEnroe, Tom Okker, Fernando Gonzalez, Patty Berg, Helen Hicks, Dorothy Kirby, Louise Suggs, Babe Zaharias, Peggy Kirk, Pat O'Sullivan, Beverly Hanson, Fay Crocker, Mickey Wright, Marilynn Smith, Kathy Whitworth, Greg Norma Samuel, Jackson Snead, Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Elwood Cooke, Pancho Gonzales, Ken Rosewall, Jack Kramer, Ellsworth Vines, John Newcombe, Donald Budge Wilmer, Allison Frank Sedgman, Ken Rosewall, Sedgman, Fred Schroeder, Bobby Riggs, Pancho Gonzales, and Ken Rosewa.

I took my sons to the 1971 National Sporting Goods Association (NSGA) show in Chicago. I rented an ample display space in Chicago to show my manufacturing items. Elliott loved to string tennis racquets, so the racquet-stringing area became his site of interest.

Ronald was our spiritual advisor to the president of MASH International.

Alan got close to Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.), and since Muhammad Ali stayed at the same hotel we did, Alan loved to play chess with him at night.

Ali was an American boxer and three-time World Heavyweight Champion. Boxing experts considered him one of the greatest heavyweight championship boxers of all time. While still an amateur, he won gold in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. Once he became a professional, he was the first boxer to win the lineal heavyweight championship three times. Ali changed his name in 1964 after he joined the Nation of Islam. He later became a Sunni Islam in 1975, and he has more recently converted to Sufism. In 1967, Ali famously refused to be drafted into the U.S. military, citing his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. He was charged with draft evasion and found guilty, the verdict stripping him of his boxing title and leading to the suspension of his boxing license. He did not go to jail, but he also did not box again for almost four years, as the appeal of his conviction made its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ali won his Supreme Court case.

Muhammad Ali's nickname was "The Greatest." He took part in several historic boxing matches, including three against Joe Frazier and one against George Foreman, which he beat by knockout.

I rented an ample display space in Chicago to show my manufacturing items, and I also spent time at the manufacturing display rooms. I met some of the top sporting goods buyers through the people I represented. At the same time, a Stebco sales manager joined my company and brought all of his sales representatives with him.

So now, I had a team and a leader for my tennis racquet business. As a tennis company, you must also offer accessories like covers, balls, tennis clothing, and tennis shoes in the tennis business. I took a trip to Holland to see my parents and went to Belgium and contracted for shirts and shorts. Because I was close with the Bata Shoe Company management, they told me I should get a big-name sponsor for the racquet and the shoes. Bata Shoes talked with Jimmy Connors, who was then only fifteen years old. At the NSGA exhibition at the San Francisco Cow Palace, I nearly made a deal with him. Mr. Alley, the sales manager of Bata Shoes, was going to set up a meeting with Mr. Connors, but as a result of the meeting, I learned that the price for Jimmy Connors' endorsement started at $5,000. Because Mr. Connors was young at the time, it was hard to imagine how his career would go. I turned down the deal. Sadly, the decision was my mistake, and Jimmy Connors became one of the greatest tennis players of all time.

At the same sporting goods show, Bata Shoes had set up a meeting with the Atomic Ski Company of Austria, which made alpine skis, ski bindings, ski boots, snowboards, snowboard bindings, snowboard boots, and after-ski boots. They were presenting a metal sandwich ski at the show. Atomic's reputation spread when, in the 1968 Winter Olympics, Olga Pall won the women's downhill using Atomic Skis.

I was in the market to add a ski line to keep up with my competitors at Head. A ski line would be a natural addition to our current operations. We organized into four divisions: winter sports, racquet sports, tennis, squash, paddle and racquetball racquets, and tennis balls and footwear. I was ready to negotiate with Atomic to bring its products into the U.S.A., so we started discussions in 1971.

We sold our products through several thousands of accounts, including mass merchants in the U.S. and other countries. My Gateway Store's opening order was 50,000 Tretorn tennis balls in 400 stores. I had joined the Meadowbrook Golf & Country Club so I could relax. However, I soon learned that the country club life was not for me, so I let my friend Alex George use my golf course membership whenever he wanted. Alex became very helpful to me as a friend. He would take my place if I had a buyer guest like K-Mart's Henk Baisetty. It was not funny. Henk was a big buyer of most of my products, and we felt we had to let him win at golf. My sales manager, Ken, invited Don Carter, the bowling king, to play against Henk. Ken jokingly said, "I will cut off your hands if you beat Henk in golf."

Imports were killing American jobs. President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to the People's Republic of China served to formally normalize relations between the United States and the people of Taiwan and Korea. They soon started to dump sporting goods into the American market. "Dumping" is a pricing practice where a firm charges a lower price for exporting goods than it does for the same products sold domestically. My cost for an aluminum racquet was approximately $1.00, a leather grip was $0.50, the string was $0.50, plastic grommets and a plastic yoke were $1.00, and labor and packing scrap were $3.00, for a total of $6.00 per racquet. Taiwan and Korea delivered racquets to Kansas City for $1.67 each. Worried Nixon would sell them out, the Asian companies turned their plants into cash boxes. There was no way I could do this with the tennis factory of fifty employees.

We formed a national organization with leaders from A.M.F., Void, Wilson, and other athletic goods suppliers in response to this problem. At a sporting goods meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, our organization arranged a golf tournament at the Camelback Inn. We discussed our various issues with imports, but the only result of the meeting was that Washington gave us a trade adjustment.

Luckily for me, one of my friends was Frank Nelson of Nelson Sales. Frank Nelson had sold the company to Fuga, becoming the director of their sporting goods and leisure companies. He asked me to take over as President of Pioneer Cap when the Pioneer president retired in a year. Pioneer Cap operated four factories, providing domestic manufacturing to wholesalers and distributors. However, the company had a real problem with theft. Employees were stealing everything, from brooms to toilet paper to headwear, daily. I brought in security officers and called employees one at a time, and had them take a lie detector test. I told them of their need to be truthful, or I would contact the police department to do the job for me. The lie detector needle almost broke, and I surely didn't make any friends.

I hired a new warehouse manager, John, and kept Merl to supervise the four manufacturing plants in Pattonsburg, Grant City, Stanberry, Missouri, and Mt. Ayr, Iowa. I opened a new promotional market. Our caps served as walking billboards, and this new market became the largest yet. The promotional segment demanded a significant increase in manufacturing to keep up with demand. We had to increase production and expand to other parts of the world while keeping our domestic plants full. Like most companies, it was easy to replace our local products with imports; however, we made manufacturing more efficient by making it more automatic. Keeping the same workers, we increased production twofold. Sewing was the tricky part.

When I returned from a sales meeting in Kansas City, my secretary told me she had requested to meet with some of the largest sporting manufacturers. We were to talk about how to save U.S. sporting manufacturers. I had to fly to the Doral Golf Resort & Spa. That was a perfect time to experience the unparalleled golf and amenities at the resort. I looked forward to spending some time on the courses, relaxing by the Blue Lagoon pool, and dining at fine restaurants in the area.

I visited one of our larger customers and met the manager of Sun Dry Goods in El Paso. I made arrangements for Jack Cohn to become my partner and set up a new company, MEXTEX, which stood for "Mexico Texas." I offered Jack all of my irregular jackets and baseball caps and shipped him one million patches for coats and hats. One of my customers left all of these goods at the St. Louis International Shoe Company, a worldwide uniform supplier for oil companies.

I took a ride over to Juárez, Mexico. Ciudad Juárez, also known as Juárez and formerly known as Paso del Norte, has a population of about 1.5 million people. It stands on the Rio Grande (Río Bravo del Norte), across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas. The literacy rate is very high; 97.3% of people over fifteen can read and write English. With new industrial real estate available, this area was one of the largest manufacturing centers with an enormous manufacturing base. The industries include automotive parts, medical devices, consumer products, electric motors, electronic components, etc. Because of the strong manufacturing and outsourcing activity, Juárez has always had the lowest unemployment rate in Chihuahua, frequently among the top five states in Mexico with the most foreign investment.

We contracted with an agent to buy two buildings in Juárez. After we received the buildings, I sent Merl to set up two factories and train the operators. Thus, we started our duty-free operation. Every few days, I would post a forty-foot truck to Mexico, and it would return with a full 150-gallon tank of gas. Gas prices in Mexico were ten cents a gallon, far less than in the United States. I-35 was a direct ride, and we would press and box. After that process, we had a daily truck transfer the goods from the four factories and shipped them to our Kansas City distribution department to send to our customers.

The second place I set up operations was in Haiti. My in-laws had just moved to south Florida, so I made an appointment with an industrial representative, Tom, and his assistant, Jack. I then took a non-stop flight to Haiti. Tom had told me he would send a driver, Mr. Drew, to pick me up at the airport. He said he would hold up a tennis racquet so I would know who he was. The driver took me to Tom's house in Port-au-Prince, where I met both men. The next day, we visited the plant site. Tom had already purchased all the machines from a past contract. The plant site was next to the Rawlings baseball factory. Again, I sent Merl to Haiti to work with the plant manager there, and two weeks later, I followed up to inspect the first shipments.

Tom was well-known in Haiti, where he owned a house and swimming pool in Port-au-Prince. I would stay at his home when I was there, and each week, we shipped one full container to Kansas City or drop-shipped goods to other companies. This operation lasted four years. François Duvalier died on April 21, 1971, in Port-au-Prince. Jean-Claude, his nineteen-year-old son, was named the new President and became the youngest President globally. Jean-Claude seemed to take little interest in managing the government, and his mother took over much of the country's running. Jean-Claude was known as "Baby Doc," a reference to his father's nickname of "Papa Doc."

Expansion in Asia

Four years after expanding my operations, my future at Pioneer Cap was ending. Frank Nelson resigned. The previous President, Abe, refused to allow me to leave. The new President of sporting goods and leisure was a man named Barney. His son was married to Abe's daughter and had plans that I did not know of. When Abe refused to allow me to resign, I offered to become a sales agent on a commission basis. Because they only provided me the Northwest, I decided to leave.

Within a few days, I purchased a ticket to Taiwan and opened a temporary office at the Taipei Hilton in Taiwan. I wanted to design and test a line of wood, stainless steel, and aluminum tennis racquets. I had never manufactured wood racquets before. Upon arriving at the Taiwan Hilton, I called the Kunnan Company, making tennis racquets for Slazenger and Dunlap. The racquet factory was in Taichung.

Slazenger tennis has one of the longest and most distinguished heritages in sports history, a history in tennis that few others can equal. It has been the official supplier of tennis balls to every Wimbledon Championship since 1902 and the racquet designer for some of the world's best players: players on the ATP Tour, British number-one players, and World Top 10 players for the past six decades. U.S. Davis cup players also trust Slazenger. I was interested in working with a company that made such excellent products.

The Kunnan Company, which later became Kennex Racquets, was in Taichung. Jimmy Lee, its sales manager, got on the phone and told me he would be in Taipei in three days and that he could meet with me then. I told him, "If you have no time today, I will come to your factory. I will get a private vehicle to take me there." He told me that he had an office in Taipei and that he could send a driver over to pick me up and take me from Taipei to the factory, a four-hour drive. A driver and a secretary who spoke English picked me up and came over to delivered me to the Taichung factory.

When I arrived in Taichung, they drove me to the Taichung hotel. Having come from the U.S. to Taipei and then straight to Taichung, I was so tired that I wanted to take a hot bath. The secretary made the arrangements and showed me which was hot and cold water. When she turned on the water, it was solid brown from the rusty pipes, so I put my clothes back on and decided to meet with the people from the factory as tired as I was.

But I needed coffee or else. I was a heavy smoker, and when the secretary offered me a cigarette, I knew it was not polite to say, "No, I have my own." I had never smoked marijuana before. The world started to turn around. All I know is that I woke up in my hotel room in only my underwear on the following day. Someone broke most of the hotel windows, and the curtains were waving on the outside. Nothing was missing, which was a relief. The room boy brought me some hot tea, but my mouth got filled with leaves. An hour later, a message was put under my door: "Welcome, Mister Max."

Somehow, when I registered at the hotel, I must have said something about buying sporting goods. I had several messages, one being from Kunnan. I had the floor boy call the sales manager. Within an hour, there was the driver again, who took me to the factory. What a mess! There were wood panels all over the road. They told me later that the wood was for the wooden layers of the tennis racquets.

There must have been 500 people working on wood racquets for Dunlop and Slazenger and various brands. The wood racquets looked good to me. They were reliable and had leather grips; however, my main reason for coming was metal racquets.

My hotel in Taichung was more like a brothel than a hotel. Its walls were thin as paper, and I could hear people making noise in the other rooms. However, I did not speak the language, so those noises made no difference to me. The sheets on my bed were dirty, but my wife Lenore made me a flannel sleeping bag for my previous trips. I crawled into that to sleep. I also traveled with a bottle of Lysol disinfectant spray, and I used it in the hotel bedroom and on the headboard and mattress. After a week in Taichung, I went back to my hotel room in the Taipei Hilton.

Transportation in Taiwan was unusual. The city mostly had private vehicles. You had to hire a driver and car for the day. There were plenty of pedicabs, and these were the order of the day. The city dwelt under a blue haze generated by the hibachis that people used for cooking. I recall with nostalgia the acquired art of walking from the main road to factories, through rice paddy fields checkered with open sewers that represented traps for the unsure-of-foot. And there were other, more lethal, dangers to avoid. Anyone out after curfew could get shot by a R.O.C. soldier.

Generally speaking, the most exciting part of this book consists of its early chapters, which contain much source material about a city that has disappeared under tons of concrete and a lifestyle that died with black-and-white movies.

Some parts of Taiwan were dangerous. The safest place was The Grand Hotel, followed by the Hilton and Ambassador hotels in terms of buying drinks. In those places, you were safe, buying drinks and dancing in the bar area. Being by yourself in other local bars was very dangerous. Firecrackers went off twenty-four hours a day in the streets. When I was in Taipei, some boys had successfully blown up a bathroom with a firecracker.

Jimmy Lee came to my hotel and wanted to take me into town. We went to an area called the Peitou District, the northernmost of the twelve districts of Taipei City. The historical spelling of the region is Peitou. The name originates from the Ketagalan word Kipatauw, meaning witch. The current vernacular of the district is Beitou, and Beitou is the most mountainous and highest of Taipei's districts. Beitou is famous for its hot springs. This district's residents note that sulfuric fumes from the hot springs ruin their electric appliances in the long term.

While wandering down one end of the Snake Alley, or Night Market, in the wee hours of the night, Jimmy Lee and I noticed there were not so many people moving around this area. We walked down one alleyway, and standing outside a funny sort of done-up shack were girls dressed in white—maybe twenty-five or thirty of them—and a madam standing at the back near the door. The girls had probably never seen a white European male close up. Jokingly, they asked if I wanted to "pop in." I thought the situation bizarre, so I smiled at the girls and passed on down the alley, realizing this was the brothel area. Already, it was a surreal evening, without the addition of the brothels and the girls, all dressed as nuns on their day off.

We begin to see what it meant when he commented, in an interview with the English-language Taipei Times, that "themes kept emerging, such as the constant comparisons between the Chinese and American education systems."When I received this offer, the local mayor invited me to celebrate the opening of a new Kaohsiung Free-Trade Zone to cool the situation. My idea was to set up a factory and export processing zone, allowing me to bring in raw materials and machinery without paying import duty and then export finished products to the U.S. with only a tiny percent as import duty. A system like this one successfully helped Taiwanese and American buyers to be competitive.

As my luck would have it, the Taipei trip to the Kaohsiung Free-Trade Zone would take over six hours. I could not get a first-class ticket, and as a result, I picked up an illness on the train. I developed a fever of 103 and had to fly a doctor in from Japan. I missed the Kaohsiung Free-Trade Zone opening.

I took a week's rest at the Kenting National Park Resort, where I found the unique conch shells and pearl shells over twenty-four inches long. The horse conch is enormous and also one of the largest univalves in the world. It has a shell length of twenty-four inches (sixty centimeters). I also found oyster shells that were fifteen inches long. I had them shipped to the U.S. as gifts for some of my close friends.

I soon learned the wisdom of the Chinese family. Along with political awareness, I developed an understandable desire to test the system. In contrast, one set of rules applied to westerners, another set of rules used for the Chinese, and a third for Taiwanese-born citizens. Anyone who broke the rules could land in jail. It has generated some ugly behavior. Chinese boys formed gangs, primarily for reasons of prestige, but quite bitter fights were not unknown. At those times, in the words of one person, "International relations just went down the toilet."

But this was also an era when foreigners were encouraged to reach out and explore Taiwan. Doing charity work with the local orphanage groups from the population became popular. On the whole, it was an innocent time. Few people had any inkling of the tensions the seventies would bring.

Anti-war protests, Black Power, civil rights, and the drug culture helped polarize the United States during the early seventies. The period between 1971 and 1974 set the tone for that era. The United States disengaged from Taiwan. U.S. service members were selling drugs. Fathers were living overseas with Vietnamese women while their wives carried on adulterous affairs at home.

On October 25, 1971, the United States moved to take a separate vote and "expelled the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place they unlawfully occupied at the United Nations and in all the organizations related to it" in the draft resolution. This motion would have allowed the P.R.C. to join the U.N. as "China's representative" while allowing the R.O.C. to remain a regular U.N. member (if there had been enough votes for it). They rejected the motion by a vote of sixty to one. According to the One China policy, the R.O.C. was no longer a member of the U.N. U.S. ambassador to Taiwan received the formal notification while attending the American Chamber of Commerce's Christmas ball. That is bleak, but this telling detail says much about the way governments seem to work. The ambassador, to his eternal great credit, ignored his instructions and sought an audience with R.O.C. President Chiang Ching-Kuo at three o'clock the following day to give him the news ahead of the announcement. By that single act of personal conscience, he perhaps did more than any other individual to ensure that America did not go down in Taiwanese demonology as the Great Satan of the East. "This was a time when Americans and Chinese had to work together if these things were going to be accomplished," says Robert Parker, who headed up the AmCham of the day. "They performed magnificently."

An angry mob threw eggs and rocks at the U.S. embassy on Taipei's Chung Hsiao West Road. Some 2,000 tried to storm an American compound and were driven back by Marines with tear gas. Nearby, students daubed slogans on white sheets taped to the walls. One message: "We protest American recognition of the Communist bandits. We will oppose Communism to the death."

As Taiwan struggled to deal with America's virtual abandonment of its one-time ally, the mood was tense and bitter. President Chiang Ching-Kuo, 68, had only a few hours' warning of the move from U.S. Ambassador Leonard Unger, who was himself startled by it. Chiang lost no time calling an emergency Cabinet meeting, putting all military units on alert, and issuing an angry statement. Carter's decision, he said, "has seriously damaged the rights and interests of the Republic of China's government and people, but also has a tremendous adverse impact upon the entire free world."

The U.S. had made possible the prosperity of Taiwan, not just by its defense alliance with Taiwan but by sponsoring Taiwan's membership in such critical international financial organizations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Now Taiwan's eligibility for loans from these organizations would come into question. Particularly endangered was the island's most-favored-nation status. Indeed, the island's whole business climate might have been its most vulnerable element once they removed the American defense umbrella in 1980.

A New Contract

Throughout this time, I was having the Kunnan Company make me some tennis racquet samples. By the time we finished making the samples, I had had enough of Taichung, so I returned by first-class air-conditioned bus to my Hilton Hotel in Taipei. One week later, Mr. Kunnan came into my hotel with a finished racquet.

The Kunnan racquet was an exact copy of my U.S.-made racquets for K-Mart. It looked no different. It looked 100% like the one I made in Kansas City. Even the scratches on the yokes were identical. I said, "It looks good. Would you believe it?" I also received a Chinese-made copy of a Wilson Stainless. I wondered if it was an actual stainless racquet. I wasn't sure how to tell the difference between regular steel and stainless. I removed the magnets from the hotel closets, and they did not stick to the racquet. What I did in two months in Taiwan took me one year and thousands of dollars in the United States. I placed my contracts for oversized aluminum racquets with the Kunnan Company, bought some wood racquets, and put my logo on them. In a few days, I gave Kunnan a contract. Then, I checked out of the hotel and went home.

While in Taiwan, a manufacturer offered me an electric rodent chaser—a powerful ultrasonic pest control device. With over eighty oscillations per second, this device used a jackhammer-like sound to create intense auditory stress for rodents. The sound of the instrument emitted was utterly inaudible to people and non-rodent pets. Varying the intensity and frequencies of the ultrasonic sound waves would prevent the rodents from getting used to the repellent sound. Because the sound was inaudible, the device was considered kinder than traps and safer than poisons, and because there were no dead rodents to dispose of, the method minimized human contact with mice and rats.

This type's standard ultrasonic pest control unit had not yet hit the market when I received this offer. My partners tested ultrasonic repellents at the local grain silo. However, I soon learned that the engineer piloting the device had had a sudden heart attack. They didn't record the date for this incident, but I stopped the project because of this situation. We now hear in the news that birds are mysteriously falling from the sky. I think their ultrasonic frequency is between 32 and 62 kilohertz. I wonder if ultrasonic devices may have something to do with the death of these birds. I hope not.

I now had to close my factory in Kansas City, a five-story building in the stockyards of Kansas City. I had a study done by the University of Missouri to keep my people on the payroll. I purchased some new samples to produce sailboats made out of Styrofoam and had drawings for the forms made. Then, the trade department in Washington offered me four million dollars to retool. I had a jacket manufacturing plant ten miles south of the factory in Kansas City. The jacket plant was on one floor, which was necessary for making boats. But then, the trade adjustment pulled back its offer because I had to move out of that zip code. I had told them we would get a small bus and bus the workers to the new plant and use the same workers. So, I had no choice but to stop making tennis racquets in Kansas City. Some of the workers helped me rebuild my house, and we added 2,000 square feet to it. I moved my office into the basement.

We had a furious incident on our street. Some of our neighbors put up a Christmas light display, with people from all over the city coming to look. The neighbors were all upset because there was suddenly so much traffic on our street and no parking. So, the neighbors came to my house with a petition they wanted me to sign. I said, "No. I'm the only Jewish family on this street, and in the Jewish religion, lights mean pleasure. We have boys losing their lives every day in Vietnam. No way." The next day, my car tires were slit. I got distracted by my neighborhood.

We took the boys out of school and went to Florida during our neighbor's times for the next few years. We were one of the first families to have a recreation van. It slept six and had a T.V., a toilet, and two air conditioners—front and back. I used the vehicle several times to make sales trips. It was easier to unload and to take to my exhibitions in places like Chicago.

I had learned some tricks from Sam Walton. When you walked around Wal-Mart stores, everything looks made in the U.S.A. The stores had red, white, and blue all over them and all over their signs. So, I had hang tags made in red, white, and blue and a giant eagle on each one. The tickets said, "Made with U.S.A. know-how." I had the tags printed in the U.S.A., so the titles were U.S.A.-made. But the bottom of each racquet said, "Made in R.O.C." Now I could offer a racquet at a price competitive with those of the Korean and Taiwanese factories.

With my new contracts in hand, I went back to Taiwan and started teaching the Taiwanese wood tennis racquet factory how to make aluminum and stainless steel racquets. They would have to build heating ovens to harden the aluminum, and they would need to create a bending apparatus.

After several years of traveling between Japan, Holland, Taiwan, and Korea, I became aware of the effects of the Arab-Israeli War or the Third Arab-Israeli War of 1967. During that war, many soldiers had received first-degree burns on their skin. And many were hospitalized or resuscitated. Doctors said their wounds would heal independently, but the soldiers would have increased sensitivity to fluid loss and dehydration. The medical teams then explained the importance of using air mattresses for their burn patients.

Soon, the demand for inflatable beds and air mattresses created a shortage. Taiwan and Hong Kong made air mattresses, but they were of inferior quality. So, I placed an order for inflatable air mattresses. Sadly, I had no market for air mattresses in the end, so I sold the whole lot to Cabela's, considerable camping equipment mail-order house in Sidney, Nebraska.

In the past, I had visited Cabela's with my Stebco products. Each visit cost me a fortune because it took me one day to drive from Omaha, Nebraska, or Denver, Colorado. With the air mattresses, I finally made a profit from Cabela's.

At that time, I was working out of the Tokyo Hilton. Working out of a Hilton, I could use a business office, I had a telex, and all of the Hilton employees spoke English. Across from the hotel, there was a golf driving range on the roof of an office building. To be honest, I knew nothing about Tokyo but the stories I had heard from my friend Frank, who had a Japanese agent in Tokyo. However, I could not let Frank know my plans. He was very close to the people of Gateway Sporting Goods.

I realized that I needed a manager in Asia. I advertised and got a person's resume, and after reviewing the applicant's resume, I realized that I had found what I needed to start in Asia. The applicant's name was Sherry Tsang, and we began to work out of the Taiwan Hilton. We needed to rent office space, so Sherry and I braved a rainstorm when no taxis were available and checked the listings in the business section of the Taiwan newspaper. We purchased a sign with the name "Cardozo Manufacturing Company." When you had an office in Taiwan, you had to picture the Taiwanese President, Chiang Kai-shek, on the wall, so we got that.

But we still had a problem. To get a license as an exporter in Taiwan, you had to export at least one million U.S. dollars' worth of goods. Sherry came up with borrowing one million dollars on the black market for 1% a day. We would deposit it in a bank account. Then, we would have a counterclaim for that amount. So, we took the bank book to the Taiwanese authority and received a business license to export. We soon paid the black marketers back and deposited my transferable L/C to the bank. We were in business. After celebrating our success, we decided we needed a corporate name. Sherry said it should be a Chinese name, and so I said, "What do you think about Mash Max?" I explained what "mash" was in English. Sherry translated "mash" into Chinese, and we had a Chinese-and-English name. Then, we made a new business sign that said: "Mash International" and the same in Mandarin.

I moved out of the Hilton and into an apartment in Lincoln Center, the American section of the city. Now, I had to go out and furnish the place. This task was not so difficult. The apartment had one bedroom, a small living room, and a small kitchen. I was happy to have Sherry helping me do the shopping. Each day, Sherry would take me to the apartment and pick me up breakfast, lunch, and dinner—all Chinese style.

I had no idea what she ordered for me. She would always say, "This is healthy for you." One night, I invited Sherry to see a movie with me. It was called "Earthquake." At some point, the theater's sounds were so loud that I thought I heard the real thing. A few days later, I was lying in my bed, and I noticed that the curtains swayed from left to right. The following day, I found out that there had been an actual earthquake. Taiwan had a few earthquakes each month.

Because I did not understand Mandarin, I used to ask myself what would happen in my apartment if there was a fire. The fire alarms went off in most of the flats—usually a few a night. People would cook or smoke and set them off. I knew because every Sunday, I had people from the factory cooking for me. I do not like to be alone so that they would bring their families and their children. We would have fun, but the fire alarm went off almost every half hour. We had purchased a large wok, so it smoked well, and I was also a heavy smoker, and most of my male guests loved American cigarettes. I would bring five cartons, tax-free, with me every time I went in or out of the country. Each container cost approximately five dollars, and I learned that I could bring in more tax-free if I opened some cartons. I also brought in wines and whiskeys.

I liked the way Sherry was operating, and I felt that I could learn from her and her background in the trading business. Eventually, Sherry married a man who was a resident of Taiwan. In the beginning, there was a tug-of-war between the two families. Sherry's father and mother had come to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang party, which raped, imprisoned, and slaughtered thousands of islanders.

I had set up my business to offer a racquet at a price competitive with other Korean and Taiwanese factories. Sherry's husband Johnny had eleven brothers, one of whom had a metal factory. This brother wanted to make some racquets for me. I know you do not do business with friends and relatives, but Sherry asked me to do it. I gave Johnny an order to make one forty-foot container of racquets. Kunnan was my manufacturer, and it had already shipped at least ten containers on ninety days' pay, so by the time I got paid by the stores, I could pass this payment on to Kunnan. I had very few problems with the quality of the Kunnan product.

When I got Sherry's husband's racquets, I got into so much trouble. You have to age aluminum to make it strong enough to hit a tennis ball at ninety miles per hour. None of the racquets were aged correctly, and when you hit the ball a few times, the racquet would bend and stay bent. My wife Lenore received a call from the K-Mart buyer, who raised the roof with her. I demanded credit for the racquets, but both Sherry and Johnny pleaded with me to hold off on loan. We got into a big argument, and Johnny said he promised to pay me back.

To cool the situation, I had to go back to Kansas City and visit K-Mart, Sears, and many other chains. I was lucky because the Kunnan racquets held up very well, and the racquets have spread the damages around among many different stores. Fast credit would be sufficient. On my next trip to Taiwan, Sherry picked me up at the airport and took me to my apartment. Because the trip lasted sixteen hours, I always made sure to arrive on Saturday night to sleep on Sundays. That Sunday morning, I heard a knocking on my door. It was Johnny, saying, "I'm sorry about what I did to you." I was agitated, and I let him know and then went back to bed. On Sunday night, I heard knocking on the door again. Once again, it was Johnny, and I pushed him into the hallway. His jacket opened up, and 10,000 dollars fell all over the floor. I felt terrible. Johnny had kept his word. That was my first lesson in not being so fast to make a decision.

My next idea was to design a line of headwear. Pioneer Cap sold caps to the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. I offered them a range of headwear with their famous brands printed on it.

The brands of R.J. Reynolds included Camel, Kool, Winston, Salem, Doral, Pall Mall, Vantage, Viceroy, and others. R.J. Reynolds placed a large order and gave Mash the cash upfront. I put myself in a worldwide expansion position, buying raw materials, especially for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco company. We had opened a letter of credit, and our factory was up in one week. We had to buy exclusive polyester and laminate for the foam on the caps. The white foam started to turn yellow, and it would show through the fabric. Sherry and I spent one month trying one material and then another. When we had our fabric choice under control, we had to start working with charts of PANTONE Colors. For the actual fabric colors for the different brands, we had to go as far as South Korea. South Korea was already making this fabric, and their customer, the Young An Cap Factory, was so large that they did not even want to talk with us.

We consulted with a local fabric agent in South Korea and told him that our fabric would go to different factories in Taiwan. If that was a problem, we said that we could buy the material from the U.S. if we could place orders for several million yards in Korea. In Taiwan, Sherry got a phone call from a large material maker who knew about our Korea trip. Rumors travel fast. He was already buying millions of yards of cloth for the Hong Kong market at the same time.

At that time, I had so many contracts that I wanted to set up my own business in China. Most people are familiar with Nanjing and Shanghai's past during the 1930s and 1940s. When I saw Shanghai in the 1970s, it had not yet changed, but the People's Liberation Army had removed all luxury items during those thirty years. There were busy pedestrian streets; people were still wearing the "uniform" of white shirts, but you could already see some red skirts. All heads were still black; no one dyed their hair yet! Only a few buses ran on the empty streets; the centuries-old colonial buildings were torn and broken. In the city center, people lined up to get on buses. I saw, too, a scene that once seemed to have disappeared, but that is slowly coming back today: red-roofed houses without skyscrapers taking up the sky. There were very few paved roads nor any decent buildings.

During the next twenty years, I saw a tremendous population increase in China. I used to go to Beijing and Shanghai by rail. The trains were almost empty, and I would sit in a better class. One time, I had the whole cabin to myself. A female conductor opened and closed the door to my cabin and told me to sit down. Conductors wore small pistols on the sides of their uniforms. If you got caught with a Chinese female, you were thrown out of the country or killed in earlier times. However, this conductor said, "Shh," and pulled a red book out of her pocket. She said, "You teach English."

For many years, I traveled with large sample suitcases. In the beginning, you got out of the airplane, and the luggage got thrown on army trucks and then taken to the baggage claim. I had to carry several large suitcases to another car that would take me to the train station. I once got off the train on the wrong side of Shanghai. I forgot either east or west when I was looking for my transportation. An old Chinese lady approached me and said, "Hey, you big-shot, you got out at the wrong station." We talked for a few minutes. The lady learned English when the Americans left China. Once I got back on the train to Shanghai's central station, it took me twenty-four hours. Now, the same trip would take less than six hours.

In 1990, you could catch the 6:00 pm train in Beijing, sleep in a comfortable sleeping car, and when you opened your eyes again, it would be 7:00 am the next day in Shanghai. Wonderful! Many businesspersons took the train between Beijing and Shanghai, not because it was cheap, but because it saved time. Passengers were also much more reliable than other forms of transportation around China.

I met an intelligent lady in the Hilton business center in Shanghai and asked her to be my partner in China. This partnership was a success until the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989. When those protests happened, I called my partner in Shanghai and offered to fly her to Japan. From there, we would see what to do for the future. The next day, all phones were dead. I never heard from her again—a Soviet archive document estimated that the Chinese government killed 3,000 protesters in the Tienanmen Square incident.

In 1970, I had a Canadian friend from Midway who was importing fur for western hats. He was also looking for nylon and polyester for the Shanghai market. China could not buy from Korea or Taiwan. However, Canadians in China could bring purchases to Hong Kong. They initially put these goods on barges to Canton, China, to move both fur and cotton. All this wheeling and dealing brought cash flow in for me. I knew of a New York selling agent, Bobby Brett. I told him that I would like to make him a line of children's hats in my Taiwan office, which was massive. Bobby flew to Taiwan but did not like any of the samples we had made for him. However, he brought his sample collection of U.S.A.-made caps. We had copied his examples in our China factory within two days, and they came out looking great.

Although China had good-quality cotton at this time, they did not know how to make graphics stick to it and had no printing ink. In China, if you ordered a red image on fabric, you would see different reds, and most of the color was outside the lines of the artwork. It worked great but was not legal. The labels said made in Hong Kong.

My next move in textiles was to look for more business. I had friends who worked for Lee Jeans, and I learned that Lee Jeans' sales were in trouble. So, in Hong Kong, I made 100 leather-like briefcases. At the Lee sales meeting, I presented each salesperson with a locked leather briefcase with no key. After spending some time listening to a top marketing sales manager, I told them that each of the salesmen would receive a key that would open their briefcase. Inside each suitcase were the latest promotional products to sell with their Lee Jeans.

My briefcase idea worked great, and the premium buyers were happy. We introduced Lee Jeans to ten different items, not well-known during the '60s and '70s. We soon had so many orders that we could not ship enough 400-foot containers with premium products made in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Sherry gave each fabric and color our style and had the manufacturer report any rumors of other buyers from the States looking for material with our numbers. Many tried to learn our code system. We could not hide the brand name, but we would drop them as one of our suppliers if there were manufacturers.

Back in the United States, my son Ronald had his barmitzwa, and we had to plan his party. While in Hong Kong, I met a Kansan who had a partner who had a stake in the Elms Hotel and Spa in Excelsior Springs, near Kansas City. The elms were well-known as a retreat for U.S. Presidents. He offered it to me free of charge for four days. However, I had to pay for everything else myself. The party could not have been more fun. My family flew in from Holland, and all of Lenore's aunts, her mother, her father, her sister, and her sister's husband all came as well. Every room had an exotic hot tub, and there was a vast round swimming pool underground. We brought in a bluegrass band from Lake of the Ozarks. I had bought scarves and straw hats with Ronald's name on them. It was an absolute western blowout.

In Kansas City, I wanted to start a Chinese fast food delivery service. I hired a managing partner, Kevin Lee, an excellent cook at a local Chinese restaurant. Starting a carry-out business is much like opening any other eatery, except that the food, the ingredients, and most importantly, the equipment and supplies are different. I learned that Chinese cuisine required specially designed cookware for sautéing, steaming, flavor-potting, smoking, chopping, and slicing. I called the restaurant Papa Chen, and we guaranteed that customers would receive their Chinese food within thirty minutes of placing their orders, or they would get it for free, along with a coupon for $3.00 off their next order.

Lunchtime was very difficult because most workers and executives had lunch between 12:00 and 1:00. Dinner was better because diners set their times. We had outstanding clients at the I.R.S. offices. At night, they would call in as many as fifty meals at a time. We boxed our meals with plastic trays with entrees, desserts, beef, or chicken soup spaces and offered egg rolls or crab rangoon with imitation crab meat. Meals came with rice, chopsticks, and a fortune cookie. They cost $5.95, and the drinks were an extra $1.00.

A client from Detroit, a sales company, wanted to buy one million domino sets for Domino's Pizza. I did not believe it, but I placed an order of 30,000 domino sets with the factory. I then called the buyer to say there were only 30,000, asked for dominoes, asked if he had placed an order with sales company John Chuck, and told me no way can we use a million sets. I told the sales company in Detroit to forget it. I'm not going to let him hurt the buyer from Domino's over buying, so I made 30,000 and paid commissions to my sales company. From then on, Domino's pizza became my second-largest buyer.

Tom Monaghan renamed the business Domino's Pizza, Inc. in 1965. In 1967, the first Domino's Pizza store opened in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The company initially planned to add a new dot to its domino logo with every new store. This idea quickly faded as Domino's experienced rapid growth. The franchise opened its 200th store in 1978.

A local businessman came to me and said that he needed one million timers to put on the table to time how fast customers got their pizzas at Pizza Hut. The company wanted to promote its new idea that customers would not have to pay for pizzas that took longer than five minutes to arrive at their tables. I opened a letter of credit at the Mercantile Bank, and I started to make the timers in Hong Kong. It took me over four weeks to design the timer because it was a timepiece that had to run backward. I was ready to ship the timers when the local sales company pulled out its guarantee by removing its CD from the bank. Now I had all those timers and no warranty. We made all of the timers for Pizza Hut, which advertised its promise within thirty days of arrival.

The local sales company begged me and said that they had the purchase order and that they were the only ones who could use the Pizza Hut label. I told the sales representative that I would need $1,000 cash up-front. They told me that after receiving the $1,000, they had only received 853 timers instead of the one million they had ordered. Before loading them on the airplane, the timers were in sealed boxes were placed on a scale. I called Pizza Hut and told them they could have all of the timers and purchased them if they made them out and payable to my firm. If not, I said I would dump the timers into the ocean. Knowing that selling these products to others could land me in jail, Pizza Hut agreed. I trucked the load to Wichita, and I had my money in the bank within thirty days.

Dan and Frank Carney, two brothers, founded Pizza Hut in their hometown of Wichita, Kansas, in 1958. One of their friends gave them the idea to open a pizza parlor, and the brothers thought their concept might be a success. They borrowed $600 from their mother and joined business partner John Bender. Their first operation was in a small rented building at 503 South Bluff, and they bought used pizza-making equipment. They gave away their pizza on opening night to encourage business.

Their choice of the "Pizza Hut" name was based entirely on the size of their sign, which only had room for nine characters, not including spaces. They opened their first franchise in Topeka, Kansas, in 1959. They later relocated the original Pizza Hut building to the Wichita State University campus, Pizza Hut's prototype version of the restaurant (1950–1961) at Wichita State University. They used this design for only four prototype Pizza Hut locations. There are only a few menu items available from this first version of the restaurant. Dan and Frank Carney soon decided that they needed to have an excellent standard image. The Carney brothers contacted Wichita architect Richard D. Burke, who designed the distinctive mansard roof shape and standardized layout, hoping to counter competition from Shakey's Pizza. This chain was expanding on the west coast. The franchise network continued to grow through friends and business associates, and by 1964 a unique standardized building appearance and layout was established for franchised and company-owned stores, creating a universal look that customers easily recognized.

I received an order for 1,000,000 painters' hats from a company called Kelly-Moore in Iowa. Kelly-Moore asked if I would fly 1,000 samples in for a sales meeting. I told the salesman to tell the buyer that the hats would need to be made in China to get eighteen cents per piece. It was just an advertising gimmick; the buyer said no one looks at the label. Kelly-Moore opened a letter of credit; however, the letter of credit said in total that I had broken the contract by shipping him the 1,000 samples. What had happened was the carpenters' union received some of these samples and threatened to stop buying from Kelly-Moore. There was no way I could win a lawsuit against an Iowa company whose workers were all local voters. It was a significant loss to the business.

A local advertising company salesman for the V.F.W. ordered 1,000,000 pencils from me. In tiny print, the pencils said, "Made in R.O.C." Although the U.S. Air Force Flying Tigers had saved the R.O.C., the veterans still canceled the order because they made the pencils in China. So we had to eat that loss. For years, my staff used V.F.W. pencils.

Our salespeople were getting rich, and it was time for Max to go on the road and start selling. I had a call to license sports teams, so I flew to Boston and introduced myself to Henry Arthur D'Angelo. He wanted to see my cotton factory in Bombay, India. Surprisingly, the cotton factory agent was Anglo, a very loyal person with a brother who was a doctor in Kansas City. "Now, the Twins sold more caps than anybody in the world," said D'Angelo, who, along with his four sons, ran Twins Enterprises, Inc. D'Angelo said he probably bought about forty million hats a year. In my business, we supplied every ballpark. We made hats for all the major league teams. We also sold licensed products for hockey, basketball in Europe, and world soccer. We also had to license 200 colleges. I used to have to go to the factory in Canton, China, seven times a year. It was a good, sizable business. “ Because D’Angelo grew tired of traveling, he decided to turn the cap business over to Mash International.

My son Elliott stopped going to Kansas University and wanted to take a six-year medical course at Missouri University. He only lasted one year in the medical curriculum. Due to this, he became the assistant to the Chinese manager, Pauline. However, Sherry Tsang did not approve of this move and for this reason we brought Elliot back home.

The important thing was for me to have good relations with my Chinese suppliers. A Chinese delegation would periodically visit New York and fly to San Francisco. They made a stop-over in Kansas, where I would reserve a few suites at the Embassy Suites hotel. I used the hotel for most of my guests. When the delegation came in, the hotel would loan me the limo with the flags on the front. I would have my driver take the commission around, serving them dinner at my house. They often said they would like to go to a Chinese restaurant, but that was a no-no for me; the restaurant people would listen to our conversations. I had a huge kitchen and living room; both were forty feet by forty feet, so we had enough space for these delegations.

One of these Chinese delegations wanted to build a hospital similar to that in Kansas City. They copied everything to scale and bought medical equipment. They placed the material as it was in the U.S. hospital. However, MetLife, Inc., a leading insurance and financial services company throughout the United States owned the building. Through its subsidiaries and affiliates, MetLife, Inc., those sales are posted, and I would get those offers from time to time.

We received some interest from buyers of disposable medical products, especially latex and sterile examination gloves and surgical gloves. The best factories for medical and hospital products are in Malaysia. I invited my son Elliott to go with me to Malaysia.

I learned that the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur were 452 meters high. One World Trade Center was 417 meters (1,368 feet) tall at its roof and 526.3 meters high with its antennae. Competition is genuine in that part of the world, so I assume that was why the Petronas Towers were taller than the Twin Towers in New York.

When I learned statistics about the height of the Petronas Towers, I was apprehensive about our Twin Towers. CNN had run several commercials about the world's tallest buildings, and I had even seen drawings with the Twin Towers in the background and airplanes coming in over the Hudson River. Elliott and I also stopped in Singapore for a few days.

The 1984 Summer Olympics

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley offered Olympic licenses to the minorities in southern California. However, there was a shortage of available funds for minority businesspersons. I received a call from a businessman named Wilson, who wanted to make Olympic souvenirs. Elliott and I took the next airplane to Mr. Wilson's office. I offered to make his souvenirs in both my domestic and overseas factories. I had a large group of designers in Hong Kong, and we made the items for him. Mr. Wilson was not happy that other companies besides his were making Olympic merchandise. Mr. Wilson had the official license and thought he should have an exclusive, but other companies, like McDonald's and American Airlines, had Olympic appointments and could make Olympic-licensed items. The official mascot of the Los Angles Games was Sam the Olympic Eagle.

The War of the Roses in Kansas City

I started a rose business in Kansas City and called it Roses Only, Inc. We sold Ecuadorian roses, and our slogan was: "Roses are all we do, fresh from our farms directly to you." Our summer prices were $5 to $13 a dozen.

The rose business sounds rosy; however, I never believed roses would become more valuable than diamonds on Valentine's Day. Two times in a row, gangs of thieves had planned their thefts and taken the roses to street corners before the flowers had even arrived in the stores. Later, I experienced the valentine's massacre. I had twenty delivery drivers who made deliveries starting at 9:00 am.

At 4:00 pm, whatever they had left, they would steal and give to their buddies to sell on street corners. I would not find out for several days. Sometimes, they wouldn't even bother to make their deliveries. I had already paid them, and I got complaints that customers had not received their flowers. I had to refund these purchases all at once, which hurt business. I had commercials advertising my rose business on CNN Radio, NewsRadio 980 KMBZ, five days a week from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm. My ads said I sold roses directly from the farm, starting at $5 a dozen and in dozens of colors.

We had a very efficient system of getting our flowers quickly from the growers to the buyers. When the first flight arrived in Kansas City from Miami, the process from farm to the end user took no more than seventy-two hours.

When the Persian Gulf War started, I advertised that anyone who could prove that they had a son, daughter, or partner in the conflict would receive a dozen yellow roses free of charge. The moment my commercial aired, I could look out the window of my store and see the automobile drivers getting off Interstate 35 and people getting in line for their flowers.

Our store closed at 7:00 pm, and whatever we had left at the end of the day went to the elderly and hospitals at no charge. We would use bleach to scrub down the cooler and the entire store to kill any viruses, contaminating the new flowers we delivered in the morning.

When I ran this rose business, I was absent from Asia for quite a while. I do not know what would have happened to my Asian business if I had stayed away any longer. I needed to avoid more losses from my so-called "loyal" customers in Asia, like the twin brothers who had taken over and had turned their orders into my factories. It was then that I changed my game plan from buying in Asia to selling to Asia. I became the largest exporter of foreign-made cars: Mercedes, Volkswagen, and American made vehicles to sell to the Asian market. Thanks to my friends at the Merchant Bank, my business grew even more and became very large in 1989.

In 1994, I went to Vietnam to set up a company to export machinery and medications. Vietnam was instructive, but it was not exciting. Vietnam did not have a car rental agency, so a friend suggested that we offer the local Catholic church $500 to let us use one of their staff cars. The church accepted our offer, and we drove around with diplomatic license plates. The guards at every guard house opened all the doors for me with a salute. Gas stations were almost nonexistent in Vietnam. Locals stood on the side of the road with bottles of gas to sell to motorists. After I had seen them, I had an idea. I took my car to the Saigon Oil & Gas company headquarters and offered to set up a chain of gas stations.

I had a friend who was an executive at Black & Veatch, specializing in engineering, consulting, and construction. Black & Veatch is a leader in both the U.S. and global markets and one of the industry's most diversified contractors. Its professionals have experience on projects of complex size and scope throughout the world. The World Bank hired Black & Veatch to build the highway from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, and now, I was going to set up gas stations and 7/11-type roadside shops along this road.

I had met the manager of a large textile factory that was a significant supplier for European fashion houses. At my meeting, I found out that they had about $17 million in cash flow. So, after a few days of talking, I got them to become partners in my Vietnam business. Because K-Mart had its problems at this time, I called the President of K-Mart and told him of my plans. I said that to get their profits and sales up, I had a small store in mind, like a 7/11.

Back in Vietnam, I tried to get some papers signed. As I walked through the factory, I met some German-speaking people who were slave laborers. Vietnam sent prisoners to East Germany to work in the factories. My French was good enough for me to carry on a conversation with the Vietnamese. However, I soon realized that the French speakers had all gotten their positions because they were Communists. I learned that they built the business on top of a mass grave of unidentified bodies. My proposal depended on them tearing down the five-story building and having the graves marked adequately. I went back to the house I had rented for a year, packed my travel bag, and went home to Kansas City.

On my return, I got the bad news. Papa had had a stroke. While not usually fatal, a stroke is a blood vessel blockage in the brain that stems from the built-up pressures caused by stressful conditions. Papa was fighting a battle to get back his strength. He understood his situation and trusted his family to help him. However, I had problems of my own. I could not spend more than thirty days at my papa's bedside to allow him to recuperate. I told my father that I had to return to the U.S. When he heard my news, he got worse again and had to be flown to Holland to be with my sisters and my mother. He wanted us to take him out of the rest home to recuperate, but we refused and left his room. He got worse one week later, and I got a phone call to come to Holland. I spent two days with him, and then I lost my father.

I had purchased twenty acres of land and had a local architect design an office complex with a railway siding. Because of the siding, the railway company would put some cash into my compound. I was one of the largest importers of merchandise containers on the railway flatbeds.

After a few years, I got a phone call from my sister Betty, who said Mama had cancer and did not have long to live. I asked her to put Mama on an airplane and have her fly to Detroit, where I would send one of my workers to pick her up and take her to Kansas City. I said that I would take a break. We took Mama to see some Las Vegas shows. Then, my mother and I met my two sons, Ronald and Alan, a week later at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and had some of the best food. Then, we took off for the Honolulu Hilton and the Marriott Maui. We first spent Christmas and a few days in Honolulu. Then, we spent a week in Maui for New Year's. Then, we went back to Los Angeles for a few days at the Marriott. We took a non-stop flight to Kansas City and spent a week at our home in Kansas City. Then, I flew my Mama back to Detroit and then to Amsterdam.

One month later, I received a call from my sister: "If you want to see Mama alive, come over at once." My brother-in-law Robby had made special arrangements to get me from the airplane to Mama's rest home, but I was too late.

In 1996, I received a great honor from my corporation—one of the most significant increases in businesses, with sales of over $2 billion. However, the increase was too substantial. The bigger you are, the harder you fall.

I had decided to step away from my company and retire. Traveling all over the world had exhausted me. I had built a world with serious challenges that I could not handle by myself. However, I was disappointed to realize that my partner, Mrs. Sherry Tsang, and two of my sons were not ready to take full responsibility for my company's operations. Only I could lead this business. However, I acted on my doctor's advice and took this opportunity to retire. I decided to conduct a simple life in a place where everything moved at a slower pace.

I planned to set up a cottage operation in Cuba to make uniforms and caps for some of my key customers, like Domino's, Pizza Hut, and Adidas. I learned the cottage industry system from my time in Scotland and the English textile industry, a comprehensive network of cloth production. Workers collected the raw materials and worked from their homes. Then, they returned the finished goods to a central place to be forwarded to Miami and sent to the customers.

However, my plans changed because Castro got into a war of words over the downing of a private aircraft depositing leaflets over Havana. My new goal was to purchase sewing machines and raw materials from the United States, send them to a duty-free zone in Costa Rica, and then send the finished products to the United States. This kind of textile business was huge in Costa Rica. Some 219 companies were doing this work, and they employed 31,000 workers. That was a good business for Americans. Nearly $3.6 billion in benefits extended to qualifying companies, and these companies got a one hundred percent exemption from all import taxes for the goods used to make export products. They granted the same exclusion for the equipment and machinery used to produce and process these goods. There was also a 100% exemption from sales and consumer taxes. I looked at a manufacturing facility in Costa Rica.

Life in Costa Rica

In Costa Rica, I soon realized that the house I was staying at was too far away from the business section of San José. I called a friend who worked for UNESCO and asked to find a real estate agent who could get me a house I liked. Located in the Pavas sub-area of San José, I fell in love with the place. It had a beautiful view of the volcano and mountains, a vast living room with thirty-foot ceilings, gorgeous front and rear gardens, and a double garage. I told the agent to prepare the contract because I would take the house.

Within one week, I moved into my new quarters. However, I had no furniture or cooking stove and no bed. I had arrived in Costa Rica with only one small suitcase. I went downtown and purchased a mattress and box spring and asked to be delivered immediately to my house in Pavas. Getting a telephone in Costa Rica was very difficult, but I was very fortunate. I got a phone and called Lenore. I told her of the new house and said she had to make arrangements with the management office villa in Overland Park to break the lease and move to Costa Rica with the dog. However, it was close to freezing at night in Kansas City, and the airline would not accept traveling animals when there was frost in the air. My dog didn't arrive in Costa Rica for three months.

Before my wife got to the new house, I hired a carpenter to build some furniture for the kitchen and bedroom. This process took about thirty days, so when Lenore arrived, we had some tables to start. At a local synagogue, I had met a couple who helped us get some items I had wanted to purchase for the kitchen, including a butane gas stove. My friends also helped me find a housemate, which is a common thing in Costa Rica.

I had real fun designing all the furniture. I went to a wood factory and purchased a large piece of plywood and had it laminated with a sheet of Formica to make a dining room table and two extensive cocktail tables. I also had built fifteen unique chairs, which I am still using, twenty years later. I had the carpenter build a platform in front of the oversized windows for the couch, and I shopped downtown for fabric and foam for the cushions, seats, and backs. I had the carpenter build a cabinet twenty feet wide and nine feet high with a middle section with sliding doors on the twenty-foot wall. I was planning to fly to Miami and pick up a big television.

The synagogue introduced me to Ernesto and his family. We got a good education about what was right and what was wrong in Costa Rica. Ernesto and his wife, Alice, wanted us to go to the beach. They usually took the bus. I asked Ernesto if we should drive. He said, "With pleasure." He told me that almost all Yankees had trouble navigating in Costa Rica. I asked why, and he said, "You will see," and on we went. Only one hour into the drive, I hit a pothole you could bury a Volkswagen in and cut my car's front tire in half. We switched to the spare, but would you believe another pothole cut the spare tire in half? Stranded in the middle of the rainforest and hot as hell, Ernesto knew of a service station four miles up the road. He and Alice decided to walk to the service station, and within three hours, they returned with a tow truck. Ernesto had brought with him a new recapped tire. So, we spent $100 before we even got to the beach.

We drove about a mile farther, and Ernesto showed me lots of wild alligators in a place where I otherwise would have walked with Lenore. By this time, I do not think she wanted to stay in Costa Rica. Ernesto had reserved a cabin for us at Los Sueños in Jacó Beach.

Los Sueños Marriott Beach and Golf Resort occupy more than 1,100 acres (445 hectares) of rainforest on Playa Herradura, close to Jacó Beach. We spent one week at Los Sueños with Ernesto and Alice. The beach was beautiful. I love to eat fish, so we went out to eat every night, and I had bass eighteen inches long, cooked in butter and garlic. I loved it.

When we returned from the beach, my sons informed us that American Airlines had shipped my dog and arrived at 9:00 pm. When I called American Airlines to confirm the flight, the lady said, "Come to the freight counter, and Customs will give you the dog." Meanwhile, we experienced our first earthquake, and Lenore got nervous. I called Ernesto, and he picked us up at our house. We went to the airport. The airplane had landed, and we went to the freight counter. The American Airlines agent said, "We have your dog. However, the Customs agent has gone home for the night." I got upset while they told me that for $50, a Customs agent would clear our dog. It was now 11:00 pm. Everything had closed, and our dog came over to me without any tags or leash. I grabbed her and walked to the car, and I said to Ernesto, "We will pay them in the morning." I already had the dog in the car, but Ernesto finally found the Customs agent and gave him $75. I was agitated at Ernie. I wondered why he would pay when the dog was already in the car, and the Customs agents were not entitled to extra charges. I had already paid $300 for her ticket.

Ernesto said I should go to American Airlines the next day and pick up her cage because Customs could not release it without an American Airlines agent. I had taken a taxi from my house to the airport to pick up a pen. Now, American Airlines said that I would have to pay $50. I said, "Let me see if the cage is undamaged." I lifted it and said, "Now, you get out of my way, or I will walk right over you." I put the cage in the taxi and went home.

After all that, I wanted to have a good time with Lenore. I felt that I deserved it. They introduced me to a Dutchman named Levy, a member of Chabad who was in all kinds of businesses and had a law office but was not a lawyer. He had hired four lawyers to do his work, and he was active in real estate, helping foreigners get title to their properties, a business that many see as a scam. Many local lawyers go down to the courthouse and, for a fee, but people's names on properties do not belong. Several of my friends had used Levy and gave him good reviews. Levy had several thousand acres of prime land to be developed for a hotel, a shopping center, and housing. He had defended a high-stakes money laundering case and ended up with an oceanfront mansion high up on a mountain. I began to do consulting work for Levy. When I worked on his projects, I used this home.

I did some consulting for one year with Levy until I told him, "Levy, I like you as a friend, but you are playing high-stakes poker. You drink too much and spend profits you have not earned in the casinos." I resigned after he paid me my consultant's fee. He offered the house any time we were in Guanacaste, and we did use the house many times.

One day, Levy's wife, Olivia, asked me to come to their house in San José to fix a computer. She asked me if the machine would work on 220 volts. When I got home, I said to Lenore, "I think Levy is going to skip the country." A month later, he was gone. He left $4 million worth of debt behind. I think gambling and alcohol were the cause of his problems.

To start a business in Costa Rica, the first thing you will need is lots of patience. I contracted with a young student attorney who would help me set up a corporation and prepare to start the following process, legally allowing me to operate a business. The locals refer to the Business Operational License as the "Patente Comercial." Like other businesspeople, I had to apply for this license at the Municipal Government office where my commercial property was. The application had to be accompanied by a) a copy of the light bill for the retail location, b) a certified copy of my identification document, c) a Certificate of Standing, and d) a certified copy of the identification of my legal representative. My business license application would also include:

• A zoning certificate.

• A property survey map ("Plano catastrado").

• A certified copy of the Commercial lease.

• Proof of an existing workman's compensation ("Poliza de Riesgos del Trabajo") issued by the National Insurance Institute.

I also had to register with the Costa Rican Tax Department ("Tributación Directa") and show proof of registration to the Municipal Government with the Tax Department.

After all this, I received a business license. I had purchased an existing business called Hugo as Made and made sure that I had covered all taxes and liabilities. Then, I went to an international business school and put a notice on a blackboard, saying that I wanted to hire a female secretary for a trading business. I interviewed several people and ended up with Vanessa, who worked with me for over ten years. Instead of doing a textile business, I went into the flower business. It was a fantastic opportunity to see the country and its beauty.

I also offered my consulting services to local companies. We moved to several different synagogues and ended up at Chabad's house. It was there that the rabbi asked me to help one of his members, Phillip Unger, who had two drug stores in San José and was losing money. I suggested that he close the drug stores and start buying pharmaceutical products from Asia to sell to the Social Security Administration in Costa Rica. We offered our prices to the Social Security Administration and won almost all tenders for several million dollars. We took these tenders to Asia. The rabbi made arrangements for Philip to offer his letter of credit for the merchandise we contracted for in Asia.

Phillip became successful, and I left him to run his own business while I continued with my flower business, exporting flowers to Holland. Meanwhile, I received a large contract with a Russian flower importer who wanted some flowers delivered to Russia at a specific time. However, my flowers were delayed for one week at a Russian airport because of the Russian bureaucratic system. Flowers cannot take frost, and I lost the entire order of approximately 10,000 dollars. I decided to do no more Russian business, even if it was very profitable. I continued with my buyer in Holland until the quality of the flowers declined. I decided to pursue two business goals—to go directly to my end users, advertise in English newspapers and web pages, and build a customer network of 500 people. This project was very profitable.

Our private life in Costa Rica was just what the doctor had ordered. We had a helper in our house, Veronica, from Peru. We ate most of our meals on the back patio, where we had a beautiful but small garden with banana and lemon trees and all kinds of flowers. The flowers attracted songbirds. Every Friday night, Lenore would have dinner for our friends. Most of my friends belonged to the reformed synagogue, but I did not feel comfortable at the reformed synagogue. I wanted a more Orthodox service because I preferred to follow the laws of Moses and Israel more closely and take the Sabbath.

We particularly enjoyed Hannukah celebrations in Costa Rica. Each year, Costa Rica lit a five-meter-tall menorah at La Sabana Park on the south side of San José.

When we went to the beach, we sometimes took a trip to the Arenal Volcano. Seeing an active volcano is a great experience. We would sit in the hot pools and waterfalls, where the mineral water splashed in different temperatures from hot to cold. All around us were the beautiful landscapes around Arenal.

We also liked to go to Lake Arenal, which we reached by following the same roads that lead to Arenal National Park. Lake Arenal has the best freshwater fishing. You don't even need worms; just put a piece of fruit on your hook, and the fish will bite. We had several friends out in that neighborhood. Coen had built a country club-type resort with twenty tennis courts, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and cabins. For several years, I played in a tennis tournament sponsored by the Dutch club. Another of my friends, Joney, had a mansion away from the lake, and he gave us apples, bananas, and lots of aloe vera, a natural miracle plant from which you can make juice to put on your skin.

We visited a king-sized coffee cooperative, Naranjo, which owned several thousand small coffee growers and worked hard to present us with a blend of their coffees. We purchased 100 pounds of coffee and talked them into opening coffee bars throughout the U.S., even before Starbucks came on the scene. We took the coffee, especially roasted for me, to the U.S. and tested it with American coffee drinkers. On a scale of one to ten, we got a ten. On my return to Cooperative Naranjo, I learned that the five-story building belonging to the cooperative had burned down. I gave up on the coffee project.

Tamarindo in Guanacaste and the Playa Tambor Resort were on the way to our free beach home from Levy. My sister Betty and my brother-in-law Robby had flown in from Holland, and they wanted to change some money on our way to the beach one day. We stopped to get some English pounds sterling and fell into conversation about the U.S. dollar. I stopped at a friend's house and learned that a severe accident had just taken place. He had had trouble with theft around his house, so he had armed himself with a pistol. One night, the door opened, and his son walked in. The man shot and killed him. We gave up on the money exchange and went to the local bank the next day. However, we could only change money at the central bank in San José.

We had a wonderful time with my sister, who was an excellent Dutch cook. One funny incident did happen. My sister told me she had a giant spider in her room, so I went to her room like a good brother and killed the spider. As I walked back from my good deed, I forgot a swimming pool between her office and the dining area. I walked right into the pool, and it was the laugh of the night.

The following week, Lenore and I went on a bus tour to Bocas del Toro Archipelago, consisting of nine islands, fifty-two keys, and some 200 tiny islets. The largest and most developed island is Colón Island, where the capital of the province, the town of Bocas del Toro, is located. The archipelago's total population is around 5000 people, of whom roughly half live in the village of Bocas del Toro.

When we arrived, a young man was waiting for us. On that day, the island was mostly taken up by backpackers. There were only three hotels, and the backpackers had taken most of their rooms. There were very few restaurants. The young man took us to his restaurant. However, when we ordered our meal, we learned that the restaurant only had a few pans to cook, so the meal took about an hour.

The tour bus took the road via the Inter-American Highway. We walked over a wooden bridge used for the transport of bananas. For hours before reaching the bridge, the border to Panama, we could only see banana plantations. We got the wall, and the border police stamped our passports, and we walked to the next bus station. Lenore wisely asked the customs agent if she could hold his 16 mm rifle. He said, "Be my guest," so we shot a great picture.

Each day, we rented a boat. One was a glass-bottomed boat that allowed us to see the beauty of the coral reefs. On other days, we went sailing on a catamaran and snorkeling among the most abundant marine life we had ever seen. At the end of our trip, we returned to the bus station at the International Hotel in Escazú and then homed to our house in Pavas. Bocas del Toro has changed since we went there. There are now many hotels, restaurants, and facilities for ecotourism and other adventures there.

Lenore likes to go shopping and especially wants to buy handmade wood products. We went to see the descendants of the Chorotega tribe living in the village of Guaitil. They still produce fine-quality pottery. "Having changed with the times, much the way the oxcart manufacturers of Sarchí have, the ceramic ware made in Guaitil is now destined mostly for the souvenir trade."

Living in Pavas, we had a few break-ins. They turned out not to be so bad because my dog was beneficial, and my alarm system worked. However, Lenore watched al-Qaeda at work on the morning attacks of September 11. That morning, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. They flew two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board. They crashed a third airliner into The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. The last crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania after some passengers attempted to control the airplane.

I tried to settle an option with the original owner of the house in Pavas. I had hoped to buy the Pavas house, but I had to go into a lawsuit. We were now going to spend a few months back in the U.S. I decided to rent a storage place and store all my belongings in a well-guarded place. I made arrangements to keep my housemaid on the payroll to keep our dog and get our new home ready when we returned to the country.

We rented an apartment at Deer Creek in front of a golf course. We spent the weekends at the Marriott suites and had our granddaughters over for a swim on the weekends. We had bought a new bedroom and living room sets because that was cheaper than renting a furnished apartment. We rented a P.O.D. from the container company to store our things over the Winter months while we went back to Costa Rica.

Meanwhile, we had decided that we wanted to move closer to the beach in Costa Rica. Christiane Goldsmith, born in and grew up in The Netherlands, was a member of the Dutch club and a Costa Rican real estate agent. We decided we wanted to buy property in La Garita or Atenas.

According to National Geographic, the area of La Garita and Atenas has the best climate in the world! In the rainy season, when the San José area is pouring wet, around noon in La Garita, the sun still shines, and temperatures remain at 24 Celsius and 75 Fahrenheit. The climate is one of the reasons we moved away from the Pavas suburb of San José. La Garita is well-known for the country houses of the upper classes of San José. It is a beautiful, tranquil area to spend weekends and holidays. We put a deposit down for a five-acre piece of land with the most beautiful garden and a new house in the best climate, all as per photographs from Christiane.

Time used to stand still in La Garita, and years ago, the journey to La Garita would take the city-folks hours. However, they built the highway to Puntarenas on that same stretch; the Costa Rica International Airport, La Garita, was no longer a remote paradise at the far west end of the Central Valley. It became reachable in thirty minutes from San José and ten minutes from the International Airport.

Around the end of 2003, I started to get upset with the seller of our house in La Garita. Besides the deposit, I paid several thousand dollars to make the home livable. It was a newly built house, but the upstairs bathroom floorboard cracked, and so did the tiled balcony. Water would come in from the kitchen ceiling, and in my office, water had leaked onto my computer. The house telephone and cable television were 400 feet from the main switch and connected to the house a year later. There was more trouble behind the house, where they were building a smaller home for the workers. However, they used my gate until they made a divider. If someone did not close the gate, horses and cattle walked free on our property and would eat our flowers and shrubs.

Then, I had thought that we had a water well. The builders built it like a well, but a pipe from the city water company below it. I only found out about that setup from the neighbors because I thought it would be no problem to water the grass. But the neighbors got very upset that I had wasted all their water.

I decided to get set up with a satellite dish to get television service, and I purchased two cell telephone lines. I used one for incoming and outgoing calls, and I connected the other to a modem for internet service. Next, I had to get a television service from DirecTV. We went to their office in Escazú. It was raining that day, and I stopped on the road before getting on the highway to go home. A truck behind me kept on driving and damaged the whole back end of my car.