TODAY'S RAMBLINGS

I'M NOT KIDDING ABOUT THIS DESTINY THING
One of the best Christmas movies is the Eddie Murphy classic Trading Places.  Relevant here is its environment vs. hereditary subplot, especially Mortimer Duke's proclamation to his brother, "Breeding, Randolph, same as in race horses.  It's in the blood." 

It's true.

My blood on my father's side is British, but also entrepreneurial.  A first-generation American entrepreneurial butcher was my grandfather, Elias.  Here is a sign from his and partner Fred Gray's butcher shop's inception in the 1920s . . .

. . . before it was moved around the corner to its final location, at Bailey and Kensington, in Buffalo.  This was probably around 1935, and features the proud proprietors and my grandmother, Elsie.

Dad?  Well, our family's entrepreneurial blood skipped him and went straight to me.  Yet look who also got on ladders to install technology in homes.

That's Dad in the late 1940s installing a residential telephone line.

He also spent time in some swank offices, but wisely went from manual labor to the office suite.

But all for the same company, for 37 years, the original AT&T.

Me?  An entrepreneur like the grandfather I never met, with experiences similar to my father, but in reverse.

I went from Charles Schwab, the glamour of London Calling, and enterprise consulting (like Dad, who oversaw new telecommunications systems for The New York State Thruway and the historic Saratoga Race Course), to oft-grueling physical work and driving all over the 9 county Bay Area doing residential technology installations.  

That's what Dad did after WWII, albeit in Buffalo, not San Francisco.

So as I kept going with Casa Integration, it increasingly felt like the right thing.

For some reason.

I regret the lack of respect I showed my father when he tried to coach me on selling during this time; he died in 2007 at age 87 after a short illness.  

While he was indeed a salesman in one capacity or another for The Bell System for many of his 37 years there, the company was a fucking monopoly, so people had to purchase his wares.  

So it was a lot - a lot - different than the selling I was doing, to some of the smartest and most successful people around, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the 21st century.  Who could buy whatever they wanted from whomever they wanted.  

I was still wrong.  Dad knew plenty.

RETROFITS IN REDWOOD ATTICS
Apart from being in San Francisco itself, Larkspur, a suburb of SF in Marin County, is about as good as it gets here.  Sun-splashed by day and cooled by coastal fog at night, its wooded hillsides and valleys are dotted with some of the finest homes in California, and thus by extension, the world.  It was on one of those hills where the home of my client Lauren Peichel was located.

By now, I had a more appropriate car, and most of the correct tools. 

I even had the expertise necessary to run the wiring through her attic and down inside a kitchen wall, such that the 42" plasma TV I was installing would have zero equipment or wiring visible.  Lauren loved the idea of locating the cable box and DVD player in a closet upstairs, as long as she could control everything.  With the pro-grade remote control system I was providing, she could, and that's why the biz is called custom installation.

But what I didn't have were the right clothes.

The installation itself was a breeze.  Lauren's house, likely built in the early part of the 20th century, was gorgeous and built like a tank, in large part due to its framing.  For a long time, buildings here were framed with redwood timber, nice but a shame when it came to destroying the forests of the same that used to dominate coastal northern California.

But I wasn't thinking much about that as I headed up into the attic.  I was wearing my normal clothing for summer work, attic or not:  A pair of work shorts and a T-shirt.  It wasn't that comfortable, scurrying across the redwood beams on my knees, cable bundle in one hand, with the other used to prevent myself from falling through the ceiling.

I also wasn't thinking much about cutting or otherwise hurting myself by crawling across wooden rafters in shorts.  I finished the install, and that was that.  It went great, and Lauren was very happy.  Me, too, as quality installations were starting to become repeatable.

Anybody who's been in SF for a long time knows about Liverpool Lil's, a beloved institution sadly lost to fire in 2015.  But it was still very much our go-to back in 2006.

I don't know how many special (and not special) occasions I've spent here, but this was just Julie and I grabbing dinner after a long week.  Shockingly, I arrived early and had a pop at the bar.  I think it was Gil Hodges - not the owner yet - who seated me at one of the many perfect tables.  Julie arrived soon after.

"I am fucking exhausted," I mumbled, as Julie, used to this by now, lent a sympathetic ear as she sipped her perfectly prepared Manhattan. 

I didn't think anything was wrong as I sat there at Lil's.  I thought my knee throbbing and being sore was a function of crawling around Lauren's attic and the other acrobatics I had done all week.  My condition worsened through dinner, but the Metaxa 7 Star Greek brandy I enjoyed post-meal continued the numbing I had begun at the bar earlier.

We walked home, past SF's beautiful Palace of Fine Arts, and went to bed.  

The next morning, I was running a fever of 102°, my knee was hot and swollen, and the next stop was the Kaiser Permanente emergency room on Geary.

The doctor treating me said I had gotten a severe infection in my knee, and it was bad enough that it could have killed me if I had left it untreated for a couple of more days.  True and fun!

Because I wore shorts in Lauren Peichel's attic.  I didn't know any better, and had gotten a redwood splinter in my knee, and hadn't noticed.  But my blood had.

So I would wear Carhartt work pants - not shorts - for the next 11 years.  But I still had to get on ladders.

MR. LARRY
The experience of having two great almost-partners, David and David, and then not, was frightening.  Of the endless things I didn't know when I started Casa Integration, a biggie was that virtually every installation required - or at least was made tolerable by - two people.  Put simply:  I needed someone.

And that second person was a reflection of myself and my business - I had realized that early.  I knew by now it would have to be someone with a professional background:  Concerning myself with an assistant smoking on the job or worse, stealing anything from the extraordinary homes we'd be visiting together, was not an option.

But where to find someone like that?  A person who wanted to crawl around, lift heavy objects, and put up with me regularly?

Since attracting a full partner hadn't worked, I decided to get creative.  I would find an independent contractor, one that didn't need full-time work, but someone who could use assured income each month. 

My offer?  $2000 a month, guaranteed, but the person must make themselves available for 40 hours during a given month.  So $50/hour, but the contractor would get the $2,000 each month, whether they worked 2 hours or 40.  I had already established a price point of $90/hour for both my and my assistant's labor, so this worked well on my side.

Well, as long as I could keep us busy, by selling projects.  But by now, I was learning that I could,  and I desperately needed an assistant.  But an independent contractor assistant; I had no desire for employees and all that comes with it.

It took a day of me interviewing about a dozen hopeful candidates at a local coffee shop, but I found my man.

Of all the unusual and extraordinary characters woven through Casa Integration's history, few match one Larry Feurzeig, whom I hired in 2007.  Referring to himself as Mr. Larry, he was yet another connection to Charles Schwab.  

Larry was an occasional actor, handsome, and the manager of a classic and big apartment building in the less glamorous part of SF's Pacific Heights, on California near Franklin.  We're about the same age.

Over time, he explained the details of his stint at Schwab, on the investor side, and why he had left.  He also explained how ideal this was for him:  he could make himself available however much or little that I needed.

He was perfect.

"Good morning, sunshine.  How was the weekend?" would be a typical Mr. Larry greeting.

"Fantastic," and we'd go on to chitchat about the news of the day or whatever, and then start work.

Me:  "OK, let's get the speakers installed in the ceilings, and then we'll hang the TVs.  I'll come back tomorrow and rack all of the electronics, and put in the remote control systems."

Mr. Larry:  "I think we should hang the TVs first, and then put in the speakers."

But it would not be until I hired Steve Chuck, late in the Casa story, that I had anyone as good again. 

So thank you, Mr. Larry, and here he is in action in 2012.  We had just hung this ginormous (for the time) 80" TV at the impressive Woodside home of two of Casa Integration's best customers, Dana and Pat Meade.

For the record, the speaker bar below the TV, from Atlantic Technology, was one of the best ever made.  Big, yes, but boy did that thing jam.  Dana and Pat were very happy.

Me?  It's now year two of a 13-year run of luck and success, and it is about to take a tropical turn.

Next:  THAT'S THE WAY I LIKE IT

FROM THE UNWASHED MASSES

 This was 1974, well before my time there.  But still, pretty cool.

Done With Mirrors is an interesting album - it has a raw, unfinished sound, as it was recorded in Berkeley (an effort to keep the band away from drugs) and Ted Templeman even admitted he wasn't familiar with the soundboard.  The band doesn't like it, but Joe Perry has said a lot of fans tell him that they like it, so he's fine with that.  It was also the last album by the band without outside writers.

Despite the album's lack of success, the band still managed to sell out Madison Square Garden, and it was a phenomenal show. They opened with "Rats in the Cellar" and the entire show was an incredible mix of their first five albums, with only a couple of tracks from DWM.

Better than Led Zeppelin?  Them's fighting words, my friend!

KLUF

This is a pleasant surprise:  One of my favorite Guided By Voices albums hasn't been played to date here on KLUF.  Better still is how well it fits today's topic. 

"Gonna Never Have to Die" and "Window Of My World," sure, but don't miss "Sing For Your Meat," as its ominous tone captures the vibe of our more challenging installs.  Here is yet another Diamond Certified GBV masterwork, 2004's Half Smiles of the Decomposed.