Isaac Laquedem

The Laquedem Plan to Improve the Discourse of Ideas - also, happy 20th to me

Today marks 20 years since I published my first blog post.  The Laquedem Plan to Improve My Small Corner of the Universe for the next 20 years is to write and publish more often, particularly in the Venn diagram overlap between analysis and amusement. 

Happy anniversary to me

On this day in 1876, the United States issued a patent to Alexander Graham Bell for his invention of the telephone.  My more modest contribution to March 7 is that on this day in 2004 I published my first blog post, a comment about the plan to put parking beneath the historic Pioneer Court House.  In the 17 years since I hope that I've occasionally led you to ponder, to get irritated, to be amused, to learn about our city's history, to consider plans for improving civic life, and sometimes to bellylaugh.  At the rate that our civic leaders are creating new material I'm optimistic that I'll continue to have plenty to talk about for years to come.

Jane Ace tells off a hospital that asked for a gift

On March 9 the Wall Street Journal published this article by Alexandra Samuel about feedback fatigue, describing how "in their eagerness to deliver a better customer experience" by incessantly asking for reviews and evaluations, "companies have created a new kind of bad customer experience: feedback fatigue."  Ms. Samuel cites two studies that discovered that customers don't like the surveys.  "Repeated surveys," she wrote, "may make customers reluctant to return."  She described a 2014 study as showing that "over-surveying by different organizations leads to exhaustion with all the requests for feedback."  

The article brought to mind one fine example of a business being less than careful with its customer outreach, way back in 1974.  The particular business was a New York City hospital, and it sent this letter to a former patient, Jane Ace.  I've shortened it a bit:

December 6, 1974

Dear Mrs. Ace:

As a recent patient you have seen how our hospital serves its community by providing a full range of medical services, offering a high level of nursing service together with physical amenities, enabling the hospital to treat the patient as a person, rather than a number.  We are appealing to former patients like yourself to contribute to the hospital's Capital Improvement Fund . . .

[Signed by the president of the hospital]

Mrs. Ace and her husband Goodman Ace were well-known radio personalities, and he was a veteran humorist.  He felt that the letter wasn't appropriate, and wrote the following response, which has stuck with me since I first read it in 1975:

December 8, 1974

Dear Sir:

As a former patient I did notice your high-level nursing service together with its other amenities, and I would dearly like to contribute to your hospital fund.  But, you see, on November 11 I died in your hospital.  Maybe we can get together later.

Sincerely, Jane Ace

 

One Hundred

If a young man in a German concentration camp 75 years ago were asked to define "surviving" he might have taken it to mean living to see the next day, or the next week, or the next month -- maybe, by a stretch, living to see the end of the Second World War.  He would not have imagined that "surviving" would some day mean what it meant this weekend: to have dinner and music in the company of his sons and grandsons and six decades of friends, gathered to celebrate his 100th birthday.

Happy birthday, Jake, and congratulations.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָה יהוה
אֶלוֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הַעוֹלָם
שֵהֵחְיָנוּ וְקִיְימָנוּ
וְהִגִעָנוּ לַזְמַן הַזֶה

A very special wish for a happy 99th birthday

In 2008, I wrote:

Some years ago, here in Portland, two businessmen had a disagreement.  One said to the other, "If you don't settle this dispute on my terms, I will sic my lawyers on you and they will tie you up in court for years.  It will be the worst experience that you've ever had!"  The other smiled benignly, and replied, "I was in Auschwitz for a year.  What can your lawyers do that's worse?"

They settled, mostly on the second man's terms.

Auschwitz was one of the three concentration camps in which the second man had been imprisoned.  He survived to come to Portland, raise a family, and enjoy a successful business career.  Today he celebrates something that in Nazi Germany in 1944 must have seemed impossible to him: his 90th birthday. 

It's now 2017, and the second man is celebrating something that in 1944 must have seemed not only impossible but inconceivable:  his 99th birthday.

Happy birthday, Jake, and best wishes for many more to come. 

בָּרוּךְ אַתָה יהוה
אֶלוֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הַעוֹלָם
שֵהֵחְיָנוּ וְקִיְימָנוּ
וְהִגִעָנוּ לַזְמַן הַזֶה

A job has opened up for which I am painfully qualified

Comedian Irwin Corey billed himself as "The World's Foremost Authority."  Authority on what?  Anything you might wish him to talk about, if you were willing to overlook how he could spiral from coherent and professorial English into a whirlpool of substance and syntax so mangled that George W. Bush would have cringed.  Professor Corey died yesterday at the advanced age of 102, and his death leaves vacant the post of being the world's foremost authority.  Until a less suitable substitute is located, I'm happy to claim the title. 

Immigration: if this is the way we treat our friends . . .

A year ago I'd written about Richard See and Paul Gold, who dominated downtown real estate for decades and whose exploits included acquiring and assembling the block where the Georgia-Pacific Building (now the Standard Insurance Center) became downtown's first modern tower.  Messrs. See and Gold were both immigrants, Richard See from Germany and Paul Gold from Russian Poland.  In 2011 I'd written about the three remarkable sons of Italian immigrant Carlo Piacentini, who landed on August 16, 1913.  Carlo's sons - John, Frank, and Carl - all became prominent in our city.

Last week I discovered an interesting coincidence.  On March 4, 1931 Paul Gold and Carlo Piacentini stood together in a Portland courtroom to be sworn in as citizens of the United States.  Messrs. Gold and Piacentini, as aliens, had served in the United States army, and qualified for expedited citizenship, and March 4 was the last day on which alien veterans could be naturalized without waiting out the arduous process prescribed for other would-be citizens. 

I thought the story of Paul Gold and Carlo Piacentini especially poignant when I read of Hameed Darweesh, the Iraqi man who had served as a translator for the United States army, and who had acquired the proper permits to enter the United States because of his service, who was stopped and detained by the Customs and Border Patrol last week solely because of President Trump's sudden change of policy.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, if this is the way the new leaders of our government choose treat the foreigners on whom our troops depend to communicate, we don't deserve to have any.

Venerable Mom asks for help on a math test

Though advanced age has made her eyesight mostly theoretical, Venerable Mom still maintains a lively interest in the affairs of the day, and we talk every week or so about something that's caught her roving mind.  Her question of a few days ago was off her regular pattern: she called to ask me how to count backward from 100 by sevens.  "100, 93, 86, 79, 72," I said, continuing until she insisted that I stop.  "No, no," she said, "I don't need to know the numbers, I want to know how to do it quickly."  I said, "Imagine that you're looking at a number line that shows all the numbers from 1 to 100 (my fourth-grade classroom had one).  Then start at 100 and move 7 places to the left and call out the numbers as you go."

"That won't work," VM told me, "you know I can't see a thing."  "No, Mother," I replied, "you don't have to see it; you just have to imagine it."  She rejected the idea, and also quickly rejected arranging 100 dots in a 10-by-10 array and visualizing 7 dots at a time being removed.

"By the way, Mother," I asked, "why do you need to count backward by sevens?"  She told me that it's part of the mental test that her physician gives her to see if her mind is functioning properly, and she wants to be able to score well.  "I can't believe this, Mom," I told her.  "You're asking me to help you cheat on a senility test?"

After a fit of laughter, she replied, "Well, that shows I haven't lost my mind yet."

 

Happy Mother's Day

Anita Renfroe says it well in her song "Momisms," which she describes as "everything a mother would say in 24 hours, condensed into two minutes and fifty-five seconds."

 

The media missed a little something about the Scappoose cattle baron

The local newspapers have had a few engaging stories (here's one from the Tribune) about an 86-year-old Scappoose farmer who was convicted on 27 pollution counts in February, and who has been sentenced to 5 days in jail and a $300,000 fine.

Apparently unremarked by the local media, the farmer, William Holdner, is a certified public accountant.  He's also the president of Data Systems, Inc,, a company headquartered in southeast Portland whose stock is thinly traded under the ticker symbol DSTO.  It's a very small company; Mr. Holdner's cattle ranching operations might be larger, but it's still one of the few public companies headquartered in Portland, and I would have thought that an enterprising reporter might have picked up on this.