Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

I first met Ralph Pullmann maybe five years ago. I’d recently retired and had started my own publishing company and Ralph was writing a book and looking for a publisher.

He was writing a book about economics. He even had a name for it: "ECONOMIC FIRE: The Power and Danger of Fiat Currency."

Hardly anybody reads books about economics, especially ones with graphs and equations. A publisher can go broke publishing a book about economics thinking it’s going to be a best seller and make lots of money.

My wife, Culley Jane, the retired professor and novelist, had known Ralph from before and introduced us at a Secular Hub social event in Denver. She knew — in addition to all the time I was putting into starting up a new company — that I was also writing a book about economics and had been for a long time. She figured Ralph and I would have lots to talk about.

I invited him over to the house and we sat out on the backyard patio with a six-pack of bottled German beer.

Before I even knew what kind of writer he was — like did he know that commas went inside quotation marks or that a dangling participle is called that for a reason — I knew I wanted to publish his book when, and if, he ever finished it.

Drinking German beer on the patio on a warm spring day, we had a meeting of the minds. We agreed on a first principle — that in the real world where people live there’s enough for everybody and that everybody deserves to have enough and if that was not the case then it was our job to know why so we could tell the people and the people would change their ways. We were both just like that, I guess, and I knew I would want to publish his book.

Five years later, I still haven’t finished my book, but he finished his and this week my little company, Westphalia Publishing, Ltd., incorporated in the State of Colorado since 2021, published his. It’s available on Amazon. It’s pricey, $29.99. Printing costs are high for five hundred pages of graphs, economic history, equations and grammatically correct text backed up by many pages of authoritative references to authenticate the writer’s conclusions. My book about economics, on the other hand, is a novel, a love story with international intrigue. I’ve probably written 80,000 words, but the ending keeps changing with each rearrangement of the geopolitical scene.

It was during the first decade of the 21^st century that each of us, independently, got the idea of writing a book about economics. At the time, I was an over-the-road trucker and Ralph owned and managed a string of Subway sandwich shops. The idea first came to me shortly after 9/11. It hit Ralph a couple years later, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

We’d both grown up in small towns in the Midwest, accepting as a given the “Idea of Progress.” We went to the moon because we could. But then one day a half century later like Rip Van Winkle we wake from the dream and look around and realize that THINGS ARE GOING DOWNHILL! and have been for some time, ever since we’d stopped going back to the moon.

Like I said, the realization first hit me shortly after 9/11. At the beginning of his book, Ralph describes his encounter with the realization:

“At the end of 2007, I owned $2 million in assets and had a net worth of $1 million. By the end of 2008, I realized I was broke. By 2010, I was homeless, carrying more than half a million dollars in debt, without even the resources to file for bankruptcy. That collapse forced a question: what happened?”

Twenty years ago, Ralph Pullmann, a bankrupted entrepreneur from a small Midwest town, embarked on a journey. He would write a book to tell the world.

Ralph working on the final draft of his book.