Jack Kemp

It's funny how things one has a limited connection to in life eventually even out.

In the mid-1980s, I programmed computers for the large brokerage Shearson-American Express. It was in a big bulding that was a cubicle factory. Salaries there typically ran from $25,000 to $32,000, not a lot of money if one had to support a family or just oneself in New York City. Many people started to leave after getting a few years of big name corporate experience to go work in jobs much closer to their suburban homes, often for more money. But even without an increase in pay at their new jobs, the savings in time, energy and monetary cost in commuting was enough of an incentive to leave.

The American Express people, who worked in another building, had no concept of middle class lives. One year the small, symbolic bonuses in January were delayed for some thin excuse. But when the NY Giants won the Superbowl (while playing in New Jersey), American Express offered millions to throw them a parade in Manhattan. The late Mayor Koch had refused to pay for the parade because the Giants brought in no business to the City itself. Koch, in his typical manner, brashly stated, "Let them march in Moonachie (a very small New Jersey town near their stadium)." When I voluntarily left the company for another job, during my exit interview I mentioned the delay in bonuses and offer to pay for the Giant's parade. And then I said, "The next time one of the (accounting) computer programs goes down (stops working), let them call up Phil Simms (the Giant quarterback at that time) to come in at 1 A.M. to fix it." Even the Personnel guy laughed at that one.

But what was even more insulting than the parade that seemed to hold up our bonuses was a previous stunt attempted by the American Express Travel people as a "favor" to their middle class computer programmers.

It seems American Express created a very fancy tour that involved flying to Hawaii or somewhere else in the Pacific (at one's own additional expense, of course) and then boarding a huge motorized yacht, really a steel hulled square rigged ship, that would then sail to an even further Pacific isle. It was a trip involving perhaps two or three months as the passengers sailed around the Pacific. When the Amex Travel people saw they couldn't fill the cabins on this ocean going extravaganza, they actually printed some one page flyers (no gold leaf trim) and placed them at our department head's secretary's desk for all of us programmers to pick up and so be able to take "advantage" of this "discounted" tour (they knocked $1,000 or so off the fee, cutting it to a mere - if my memory serves me - $3000. As if the typical middle class programmer could afford this price and also afford being away from work - or their chldren's school - for three months. The elitist snobbery of this offer, which shouted, "Other people are loaded - and you're not!" to the computer programmers was totally not comprehended by the American Express Travel people. It would eventually yield a strong game changing backlash.

In the glowing description of the yacht on the one page flyer, they mentioned that this huge ship was built in Germany personally for E.F. Hutton and his wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post. E.F. Hutton, as some readers may recall from tv commercials of that era, was the creator of a major stock brokerage firm on Wall Street. And his wife, Marjorie, was the daughter of the Post Cereals magnate, the maker of Grape Nuts. Their daughter, who sailed on this yacht in her youth with her parents, was the actress Dina Merrill. The family also built a luxurious estate in Florida.

Well, American Express eventually sold their brokerage business. And as for the luxurious estate in Palm Beach, Florida named Mar-a-Lago, it was eventually sold at a fire sale price to a man with humble middle class beginnings. A certain real estate developer named Donald J. Trump.


2c from Dana Mathewson

You all remember the "When E.F. Hutton talks, everybody listens" ads/commercials, I'm sure. Well, during the 80's I was supporting a certain computer system at Carborundum in Niagara Falls, and every year, its year-end processing run needed a heckuva lot of baby-sitting, providable by exactly one of their programmer-analysts: me. I would typically take a "portable" computer and a modem home from work to do the job. Now, in those days a portable computer was a Compaq "luggable" which weighed about 40 pounds. And a modem connected at 1200 bps. I was alone in the house, that being a couple of months after my wife had left me for Martha's husband -- but that's another story. We had a pulse-dial line (yes, modems could handle it) and we also had call-waiting. There was a way to disable that when calling out with a modem, but I didn't know the character string to dial (can you BELIEVE I didn't know all there was to know at the time? It's true -- you heard it right from me.)

Well, the night I was having to baby-sit the system coincided with one of the nights E.F. Hutton was making one of their big selling pushes in the area, and every half hour or so they'd cold-call everybody in my neighborhood. Knocking my computer connection to the company mainframe off the air, of course. I was having a hard-enough time concentrating on things, being in a rather fragile mental state due to my marital status (also feeling I'd rather be on the phone chatting with Martha, whom I was already beginning to romance). And that night I particularly did NOT want to "listen to E.F. Hutton!" I called the phone company the next day and dropped Call Waiting (we only had it because my wife needed it for a business that was -- obviously -- no longer being run out of our home!). Good thing they were able to do it immediately, because I was baby-sitting the system the next night too

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