The Canals: Two Paths (Part 9)

Last week Westphalia’s “ace reporter” called me a “Heterodox” and said he didn’t know how I wound up in Denver.

I’d like to fill in some blanks. It’s a long story. I’ll call it “My First 300 Years: The Making of a Heterodox eco."

No, obviously, I’m not really 300 years old. But this is a story of hope, a story of possibilities.

From the time I was in my early 20’s, my goal was to live 300 years; the first 100 in fun and frivolity, then settle down in my second 100 and then a life of leisure could occupy my final 100 years and I would be able to decide if I wanted to continue after that.

I’m sure most of you took the title of my story with skepticism and a little bit of whimsy. In all seriousness, it’s possible. Possibly there will be a time when we get to choose our lifespan. Nobody yet has discovered a scientific law proving it’s not possible.

Now, well on my way, I am right on schedule. Most of my life has been spent in fun and frivolity. Now, faced with the question of what serious career choice should occupy my time in the second hundred years, I’ve decided to be a Heterodox economist. I’ve always had a problem with Orthodoxy. It’s the story of my life.

The simplified Ancestry.com version is: father, Elmer Hans Theodore Pullmann; mother, Martha (nee) Gimbel; siblings, David Elmer, Donald James, Ruth Martha, Deanna Mardele and Rodney John. I have a cousin and a niece that put great effort in tracking down the family tree back several generations and the only non-German ancestor I can recall is a grandparent from Prussia. So, my heritage is primarily Germanic. I have no children but I have ten nieces and nephews and I’ve lost track of how many grand-nieces and -nephews. Each of my parents came from a family of ten children so I have too many cousins to keep track of.

My father loved to travel so we would stay at one of my uncle’s or aunt’s place as our family explored the country. I inherited that same wanderlust. During my first 100 years, I have been in every state in the U.S. and been to most countries in Europe, some countries in Asia, toured in Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and, of course, Canada and Mexico. During my second 100 years, I’d like to live and work on Mars or one of the asteroids.

I was born in Oelwein, Iowa on the 23^rd of May, 1946. My father was a mechanic who moved around as he took the best paying jobs he could find to support his growing family. We moved nine times before I finished High School. Mostly the moves were to small towns in Iowa; Maynard, Westgate, Aurelia, Sutherland and finally to Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota.

My parents were always buying a house they could fix up, so, as children, we learned to sleep through all the sawing and hammering. That still comes in handy as I can fall asleep in nearly any environment.

I learned to read well before Kindergarten and my parents encouraged all of us to read as much as we could. We got special permission to check out up to 4 books, even the adult books, at the small library in Westgate and I read every book in there that had the slightest interest to me. They were open only twice a week so I would check out four books midweek, four books Saturday morning, and four books Saturday evening and devour them in time to check out the next set.

I did well in school.  In Kindergarten, there were 23 children in my class in Maynard. But when I went to a parochial (Lutheran) school in Westgate, there were only two of us in my first grade class and then I was the only one in my class from the 2^nd grade to 4^th grade. In 5^th grade I was joined by two more children. The school had only two classrooms -- 1^st through 4^th in one room, 5^th through 8^th in the other.

I’ve often wondered if that was how I got my head start in school. I remember listening to the upper classes when I was in the lower grades and listening to the lower classes when I was in the upper grades. It provided a preview and a review. I essentially went over everything in grades 1 through 4 four times. I was supposed to be doing “homework” during the times the teacher was busy with other classes, but I finished those tasks well within the time allotted.

After 5^th grade and more moves I attended public schools until my junior year in high school when my parents sent me to Concordia Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota, another parochial school, Lutheran. My parents were very religious. We attended church every time there was any excuse to attend. My father had wanted to be a minister, but finances, a family, and World War II intervened. He still studied the Bible as though he were ministering to a congregation and probably knew it better than most of the pastors at the churches we attended. But just one year in the in a “Lord of the Flies” environment at Concordia was as much as I could take and I insisted I attend public school again my senior year, graduating in 1964 from Simley High in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota. My brother, Don, started Concordia a year after I did and when he tried to tell my parents he wanted to return to public school, they wouldn’t let him. Not everything an older child does makes it easier on the one following; sometimes parents learn how to handle something unexpected.

My interest has always been in science so I attended the University of Minnesota for two years as a physics major. The freedom of choice at the university left me free to skip classes, work 40 hours a week, play lots of cards and ping pong, and generally neglect my studies.

In retrospect, that wasn’t a good choice to make during the Vietnam War as I was failing my classes at a time when those not attending school were cannon fodder. 

My career path has never been linear. To avoid being drafted, I decided to join the Air Force. My rationale was that even if I went to Vietnam, I would be stationed with the aircraft and they would make every effort to avoid damage to aircraft (and, as a side benefit, me.)

I never went to Vietnam. A after boot camp I was sent to school in Denver to learn electronics repair and from there to cold, cold, cold, cold northern Maine. 

I was far too independent to enjoy military discipline, but it was in that environment that I grew up far quicker than I would have in college or at a civilian job. The discipline forced us to accomplish tasks in a wide variety of circumstances and with a diverse population of individuals.

It was in the military in the barracks during the bull sessions when we were discussing every topic under the sun that I, who was the champion of defending the Bible, suddenly realized that I was espousing positions I had learned as a child but didn’t really believe my own arguments.

After reflecting on how my thinking had developed over the years, I realized that I had solidified my beliefs by my senior year in high school. 

My knowledge of physics and chemistry convinced me that all we do or say or believe is contained within the chemical reactions in the brain. External events are similarly determined by laws of physics. For supernatural events to occur would require interaction between nonphysical and physical realms.

When I told my parents I no longer believed what they believed I was deluged with arguments and attempts to bring me back into the control they held on me since I had been a child. Since I was thousands of miles away and living independent of them, I was able to avoid being gathered back “into the fold.” It was about 30 years before any member of the family thought to ask me an obvious question: “If you don’t believe what we believe, what do you believe?”

After I left the Air Force I went back to the University of Minnesota for a quarter (they were not on the semester system), but moved back to Denver where my parents had moved.

But I soon moved out to room with Rick Parco, a friend from the military who lived in Washington near Tacoma. We collected unemployment as we, halfheartedly, looked for work. We did a lot of hiking, fishing, motorcycle riding, and a few drugs.

Soon we both landed jobs in Greenland. Rick left first. I didn’t have to leave right away so I went back to Denver to see my parents, but a drain cleaning accident kept me from meeting my employment opportunity in Greenland, so, while healing, I started a vending machine route. When that didn’t provide me enough income, Rick and I bought a Tastee Freez restaurant in Lafayette, Colorado. 

We sold the restaurant after a year and a half. By that time, Rick had finished the job in Greenland and we took a three-month vacation to California and Baja California. I had applied to attend the University of Colorado in Boulder and started there in June of 1974. Rick returned to the Tacoma area and went on to have a successful career repairing electronics equipment on sea-going ships.

I graduated from the University of Colorado in December of 1977. I had enough credits to get a degree in psychology and physics but, ever independent, I didn’t consult with an advisor to fill out the paperwork. My degree shows only the psychology. I didn’t get a minor in Math, either, even though I had the credits for it.

I had gotten interested in computers while at the university so I started one of the first computer stores in Colorado Springs. I had gone with a franchise that was useless as far as getting product for us and when they were bought out by a mini-computer company, I declined to sign on with the new deal so went independent. It was too early for selling large numbers of computers and margins were too slim to make a profit, so, after a year, I closed down the business. 

Now, highly in debt, I turned back to the company that hired Rick and went to work in Greenland. I worked in Greenland from late 1978 to the middle of 1981. While in Greenland, I went from repairing radar and communications electronics to repairing computers and was able to convince the company that I knew enough programming to land a job back in Colorado Springs as a programmer. It was here I met and married my wife in July, 1982.

One of the managers of the company decided to start a company of his own and invited me to join him as a programmer. He didn’t have enough work so I became an independent contractor for him and others. My wife decided she didn’t like making more than I was so we returned to the company that sent me to Greenland and accepted a job for both my wife and I to work at the end of the Aleutian chain of islands in Alaska.

The company lost the Alaska contract after a year so we both accepted a job to work in Greenland for Raytheon. The job in Greenland wasn’t quite ready for us so we cooled our heels working for Raytheon in Burlington, Massachusetts; Macon, Georgia; and San Angelo, Texas. In December, 1986 we went to Thule, Greenland to help with the installation of the new radar and stayed on to maintain it. 

If you were old enough to follow current events in the mid 80’s you may recall President Regan telling the Soviet Union that the radar being installed in Greenland was just an upgrade. It wasn’t; the frequency was in a different range and it went from a scanning beam and a couple tracking antennas to a phased array radar that could track many more satellites or missiles. I don’t know how much of the information is still classified so I’ll just leave it at “many.”

After losing a bunch of money on the mini-crash of 1987, my wife asked if there was any place to invest our money that was safer. My experience with the Tastee Freez in the early 70’s taught me that a well run fast food restaurant is usually pretty safe. My wife did research on various options and we decided that Subway restaurants were probably our best option. We opened our first Subway restaurant in New Richmond, Wisconsin in December, 1990.

We had intended to have a manager run the restaurant for us as we continued to work in Greenland but the contract in Greenland was becoming less lucrative and the manager we had intended to run the restaurant was having second thoughts. We left Greenland to take over management of the restaurant. We opened the second store a year after the first one. Eventually we started a total of 6 Subway restaurants in western Wisconsin. 

When my wife and I divorced in 2000, I took over the operation of the six restaurants and bought one in Minnesota with a partner. I sold four of the stores to pay off the divorce settlement. I ran the last two I owned for a couple years but sold those and the one held with a partner, started another one with two partners, and sold it. I was out of Subway by 2003. I used the money from the Subways to buy a collision repair business, a trucking business, a sit-down restaurant, several properties, and start a packaging business. 

When the crash of 2008 hit, I was over-leveraged and the bottom fell out of the properties I owned. I couldn’t keep all the businesses going or sell the properties, so, by 2012 I had lost my house, the businesses, and all but one property. The only reason I was able to hold onto the one property was because I had partners and to foreclose on me would be to foreclose on them as well. When it sold in 2016, I got nothing from it even though the partners did well. By a strange fluke in the repossession of the house, I retained ownership of 22 acres of wooded Wisconsin land.

I was able to sell everything I owned except the raw land (at that time I didn’t know I owned it) to provide me enough money to survive until I started working at a Firehouse Subs restaurant started by a cousin in the Denver area. I worked that until I could collect Social Security. When creditors caught up with me to take half my meager income, I decided I’d retire on the funds they couldn’t touch.

I started studying the causes of the economic crash of 2008 right as it was happening. I soon learned that we will never be able to maintain a stable economy as long as all money is created as debt. The process turns humanity into debt slaves.

My friend at the Westphalia Periodic News says that makes me a “Heterodox.”

Meaning “different.”

I could live with that for my second hundred years.