References for Robert S. Barnett, ex post facto (Resume ... Achievements) [170801a]

Best one

1. Bill "King" Krekel, hamburger chain owner, "Best grillboy ever" cause I could cook 24 hamburgers on a grill designed for 18. Had a system.
2. John Mars III, thoroughbred breeder: "Best tarbaby ever" cause I could daily paint a mile of four-plank while the average field hand did only a quarter of mile. Had a system.
3. U.S. Navy Electronic School, late 1960s: 25% of instructors said I understood electricity better than they did but they knew what the Navy wanted me to know. Recorded record high on final comprehensive exam.
4. Undergrad, early 1970s:
   1. Campus Medical Doctor: Told me to be a doctor, a researcher not a practitioner. (I did not like the attitudes of the pre-med students so I changed majors rather than consider working a career with them.)
   2. Organic Chemistry/Biochemistry Professor:  Held a patent on l-dopa  ... earned $60k annually while professor salary was $30k ... when asked why he kept teaching without a need for the money, he responded, "I like teaching." Told me to go into chemical research.
5. Mother: "Of my eight kids, I'm proudest of you but I like you the least." (I never met my father who was killed by his second wife at the time of my final undergraduate semester.)
6. Gave eulogy for Chiang Kai-shek's last education minister who had been one of the five-member Chinese delegation to the founding of the United Nations in 1945. Oxford grad. Translated Shakespeare into Chinese. He said that I seemed to work very hard and asked how many kids I had. When I said none, he responded,"You are not working hard enough."
7. A well-known , wealthy Virginian said we could do lunch and I could come to his parties when his mother was not there--she only did FFV.
8. Train travelers: The following can be read at face value or as confabulated falsehoods. During 2003-2008, I bought 30-day rail passes for Amtrak and VIA. (One month, as an exercise in foolishness, I laid out and traveled 25,000 miles in one month without using the same long-distant train twice--Around the World in 30 days on Amtrak with map, daily postcards and ticket stubs.) Consistently, talking with people and sharing Timism over a few days, I had some interesting responses to the six pages of the Morality of More Time.
   1. Chief Engineer for a major Canadian mining company, to wit, "Each part makes sense but the whole is unbelievably so simple. I cannot believe it. There must be something wrong in my thinking."
   2. Information System Manager, to wit, "I don't like it because it is a product of an individual rather than a committee."
   3. Australian physician: "I don't want to talk to you anymore."
9. DIBs
10. David Manning White: To weigh this unique reference, you need to find within his qualifications what he said about me. I thought I had had a lucky life, but this single son of Russian immigrants had a better one.
    1. Co-authored the book  (Mass Culture) that  contributed to journalism redefining and renaming itself as Mass Communications ... originated the "gatekeeper" principle to describe the pivotal role of journalists in educating or distracting the masses, essentially, "Those who control the present, control the past ... etc."
    2. Youngest full professor at Boston University. His final teaching years were at VCU because his wife wanted to tend her ailing mother in Richmond.
    3. Aide to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, writing propaganda in Japanese to drop on enemy troops ... could rattle off the Iliad in Greek (but it was all Greek to me).
    4. Charter member of the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
    5. Wrote 33 works published by first-line publishers.
    6. David had a mistress who wrote in her autobiography that David was the best lover she ever had. The Mistress? Betty Friedan, a mother of the feminist movement and author of the Feminine Mystique. (David, a cad at times, showed me her letters begging him not to break off the relationship as he did.)
    7. David's wife said she was tired of going to White House dinners, told David to find someone else to take.
    8. Katherine Graham, owner and publisher of the Washington Post, penned a short note to David's wife when David died, "Sorry to see David go."
    9. Mike Dukakis, 1988 Democratic Presidential candidate, was a personal friend who often telephoned during the campaign for feedback and advice. (I was there more than once when he called David.).
    10. At 29, David was the youngest full professor at Boston University.
    11. David had many famous friends. It was fun going to the movies with him two or three times a month. When the credits rolled, we would sit with David commenting on many of the cast and  crew. For many years he had been the film critic for Boston's largest paper (or TV station).
    12. David Manning White was a film critic for a Boston TV station. Attending movies with him was a blast as he would tell inside stories on individuals listed in the credits. His statue extended beyond his death in 1993. In 2000, Sony's picture, The Patriot, had rave reviews by a David Manning who did not exist. Sony paid a $1.5 out-of-court settlement for falsify reviews.
    13. A mentor of David's was Bernald Kilgore, the editor who took the Wall Street Journal from a small local NYC financial paper to a national powerhouse rag. The story I heard several times from different people was how the two would dominate the journalism conventions by playing the piano, Kilgore knew the songs before 1940 and David played the post-1940s songs. The story was that no one could come up with a song that one of them did not know.
    14. Live simple so others can simply live (Gandhi): When the VCU's original masscomm library was named after him, he laughed, "Here I am in my $5 thrift store suit." When we went to NYC during which we dined with the Episcopal Archbishop of New York at the Metropolitan Club, David insisted we take the bus so we could talk to the bus people. We gabbed the whole way, to and fro.
    15. David agreed that money was like breathing. Beyond a certain point one is wasting one's breath. David said he did not mind paying mid-five-figures in income taxes. He was thankful to be lucky enough to have the income on which to pay such taxes. (Something I call a lucky problem.)
    16. When I met David in 1980, I wrote a computer program for an instant tally of their financial assets. I learned they were giving away $50,000 a month to charities. (I also programmed David's last two books onto floppy disks so as to save MacMillan the cost of retyping, The Search of God and The Affirmation of God.)
    17. 1987 Stock Market Crash: David and I were tooling around to several venues as he was laughing, "There goes another $100,000, but Bill Gates is losing 1,000 times as much."
    18. Maid stealing $300,000: She took a check out of the back of the ledger, buying a house and a five-year prison sentence.
    19. David had good genes. His son was a renowned California gastro-enterologist who treated the King of Saudi Arabia at the Cleveland Clinic that earned  a bonus of a state-paid visit for his family to the Islamic kingdom. An amazing thing was that Steve was Jewish. He sold his practice in the 1980s to his associates for multi-million dollars. (While visiting David in the days leading up to his unsuccessful heart surgery, more than one physician stopped in and said, to wit,"Your son saved my [parent, sibling, offspring]. I am a consultant on your procedure, no charge." [David's valve replacement was useless as his aorta was paper thin--bleedout if unmedicated or suffer strokes if clotted with medication.])
    20. David spent hundreds of hours editing my writings with a qualifier: No distracting slop. One time he started a chapter and when the pencil marked a third simple typo, punctuation or grammar error he threw the sheets into the air, exclaiming, "I edit your works for the ideas, not simple mistakes." After he stormed out, I was on my knees gathering up the sheets. Thereafter, he found few simple mistakes as I hired a university senior English major to do pre-editing.
    21. Often, as the serious discussions became tedious to David, he would give me his "You have mustard on your tie," to wit, "What is more important than honor? Inner peace" which I (immersed in the discussion) always failed to catch before the punchline. (I did add an additional punchline which he thought was great: "And, how do go from honor to inner peace? Liquor.")
    22. When a business of mine went bankrupt in 1992, I announced it at the regular Sunday lunch with the apology of losing $30,000 of their funds. David laughed,"I wanted to see if you could translates your ideas into daily reality." [I'm still trying.] Catherine said, "You'll still come to Sunday lunch, won't you." (At one lunch, Catherine announced she was going to, in sequence, cook each of the meals in the New York Times food critic's "Best 100 meals in the world". Over three years, David and I enjoyed 5-star meals.)
    23. One time, David began to berate Catherine. When I told him that I did not like him criticizing my friend in front of me, he stormed off. Catherine looked at me and said, "You don't scold David, no matter what, if you want to continue to be invited into our home." After David's death, at a Sunday luncheon with three high school friends, one asked her if she missed David to which she responded, "No, I had 50 years with him." Since David was dead, the pre-nupe of living on their income, not trust funds, was null. A month after David's death, the 20-year old Volvo was replaced by a $125,000 silver Beamer. When she answered the door, I said, "Guess the pre-nupe is over?" "Yep, David is dead." I had driven the Volvo on occasion but Catherine said nope on the Beamer. (Catherine's grandfather had bankrolled George Eastman. Her father was a co-founder of Circuit City. In a quiet way, her parents integrated the Richmond Public Libraries in the 1950's.)
    24. Catherine edited my book "Managing without Manager: Profiting from Democratic Capitalism." David said she was a better editor than he was. She earned her PhD in biochem at the age long after most people retire from work.
    25. At one luncheon in the early 1990s, David and I encouraged a former student of his to stop investigating the "Octopus." A few weeks later, Danny Casolaro was found dead in a West Virginia motel where he was supposed to meet an inside source. His notes were gone, and his body was cremated without an autopsy or family knowledge. (Another former student was Henry Kissinger of whom David's opinions cannot be shared.)

After five years of friendship and hundreds of hours in his gratis editing of my writings, I asked David why he had me as a friend. His response: "In my life, I recognize five people smarter than me. You are the only one still alive." What a lucky mensch!

Between these references and the epiphanies of Timism, I have been able to forge forward without standard support and review.  Of the latter, on-going questioning found flaws.  On some paths, those who travel alone travel farther faster. Traditional feedback was and is a drag on progress. Google is faster and less political and less petty. Your respect for Timism--the Morality of More Time--will reflect your ability, motivation and time to inspect and re-inspect its tenets. But, the accelerating, synergistic existential meltdown will preclude this inspection.