Unexpected Emotion from Motorcycles

As most are aware, this past week has been an awful week in Dallas. As expected, when the funerals began, the reporting on the news begin to wear down a lot of people emotionally. Usually, one can hold up and make it through the ordeal. It's hard. It hurts. It lingers. But as you make it through one, then the second one begins and the third and fourth. Today the fifth funeral takes place in Ft. Worth with a mass for Officer Patrick Zamarripa, followed by his burial at the Dallas/Fort Worth National Cemetery on Mountain Creek Parkway. It's a beautiful cemetery placed on top of an escarpment overlooking Mountain Creek Lake where, Dallas and Grand Prairie meet on the southern belt of the LBJ Freeway.

Still, after Officer Zamarripa's burial today, Officer Kroll's funeral that was held yesterday at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, will not be buried until Tuesday when his Detroit family will hold a service with burial in his native Detroit (Southfield), Michigan. Being familiar with Southfield area and it's infamous Southfield Freeway that splits Ford Motor Company's Headquarters with Fairlane Town Center, a large mall on the former Ford Property that sits east of the estate on Fair Lane Drive. The estate for the Ford Family, named Fairlane, near Evergreen and Hubbard area is  old Southfield, and the center of the universe known as  Michigan 12 and Southfield Freeway.  Ironically, Henry Ford Community College is in that same radii. The mile roads begin just north. Streets with names like Park Lane and Mercury Drive and Auto Club Drive, Lincoln Lane somehow just yell out FORD! The cemeteries up there are completely beautiful. They are like gardens very well cared for.  So, to me, it is fitting that the very last internment from last week will be Officer Kroll's. Then, the burials will be over. The healing is yet another thing. Most certainly, it will take a life-time for many and healing will never come for more than we will ever know. I've been there. The pain does lessen over time, but it never goes away completely. Yes, it's hard. it does hurt and it will linger on for a lifetime.

Waited for an hour to see the procession come over the bridge ramp.The procession is that of Sergeant  Michael Smith.

The sight brought an emotionally filled moment.

Then the sight of red, white and blue lights streaming in an endless line transferred to my arms as I held the camera, and with the shock mode still on, the blur is my emotional shaking from the sight. Over the years, I've seen a lot but never like this before this moment.

 

Funny Thing About Businesss

While I am not a big fan of gossip television shows, I do enjoy the spots were they talk about the massive houses of the stars that are up for sale, sold and re-sold and re-sold. You see the point. Real Estate changes hands daily but there are certain landmarks that age with a history of it own. I read the stories in the New York Times, LA Times, Miami Herald  and others about the sales and the storied past that goes with the article.

Recently,  the story of El Fureidis, 631 Para Grande Lane, Montecito,California appeared.

Even this A-380 can move a house or a steel coil Funny Thing About Business

It is one of those homes with a long storied past and an architects dream floor plan. It is the fabled home known as the Old Scarface Mansion. The house was listed for a mere $35 million but was marked down to $17.9. Roughly, a half price sale.

That article got me to thinking. Again. The real estate market can be a fickle business. The instability in the market and especially to the attachments and/or affections of its owners, move houses and also let them sit on the market, sometimes for years. While I was doing all that thinking, the eureka point finally materialized this morning as I was pouring my first cup of coffee. The real estate market is just like the steel business. If these two businesses are not twins, they most certainly are brothers and sisters to each other.

Over the years, I can recall one coil of steel sitting in a super large warehouse down off Jefferson in the old warehouse section of near Downtown Detroit. The coil sat in one bay, right on the corner of a cross isle were trucks would pull inside to load under an overhead crane. Nothing so unusual about that at first glance except, that the coil had been produced at the River Rouge Plant of Ford Motor Company's steel plant, which at the time was the 9th largest steel mill in the world. Another thing about those coils were that they were massive for steel coils, with 60 OD and weighing in 48,000 pounds. I have seen some that hit the 50,000 pound mark. The point being is that in the coil world, a coil that size is like having a 7-foot 6-inch center on a basketball team of 5-foot 8-inch players. It stood out like a sore thumb.

As I would walk through the warehouse, I would look at the tag. The names on the tag was always different. The coil had not moved an inch on the floor of the warehouse but the tag information told a whole different story. Going into the office and pulling up the information on the tag would bring up the coil sale price. That was where the story came about.

Sale 1

The coil came into the warehouse at a price of $18.00 per cwt (hundred weight). It sat for several months. Tag change. The coil now was sold to a steel company in Chicago for $13.00 cwt but the coil remained in the warehouse with a new tag showing the new owner.

Sale 2

Several more months went by and there was another tag change. The coil had been sold to a steel broker in Cleveland, Ohio at $15.00 per cwt. Once again, the steel coil never moved out of the warehouse.  At this point you are thinking that someone should be charging rent on that thing. Well someone did. The warehouse collected the rent fee. The typical rent went like this: $1.00 in;$1.00 on; $1.00 out. That translates to one dollar per cwt when the coil came into the warehouse. One dollar per cwt added on each month of storage and one dollar per cwt when the coil shipped out of the warehouse. Does not sound like much but there are no expenses. The storage bay can be under roof for more than a quarter mile, It's hot in the summer It's cold in the winter. The lights are provided by the day and at night it is a place where  horror movies sometimes got filmed.

Sale 3

The coil had another tag change. This time, nearly two years later, the coil was sold back to the original owner by the broker in Cleveland. The price was entered as $ 17.00 cwt. The original owner had repurchased the original coil, that he had sold to a Chicago warehouse at 13.00 cwt, for $17.00 per cwt. In essence loosing $5.00 cwt the first sale and spending $13.00 to repurchase. That is, if the original owner really did have $18.00 per cwt in the coil when the coil came into the warehouse the first time. Chances are he purchased the coil either from River Rouge or from a broker at $7 to $8.00 per cwt. Things like that happen in the steel business.

It's time to also mention that financial market conditions, supply and demand in the steel business, production at the mills, imports, exports, the automotive industry, the metal furniture business, the appliance industry all played a part in the sale of steel coils sitting in a warehouse owned by steel distribution centers, steel warehouses, steel brokers, individual fabricators, contractors and who knows who else excluding the scrap dealer.

The final sale

The shipping tag was finally placed on the coil some 5-years post arrival. It shipped to a steel ware house/service center near Richmond,Indiana where it was used in a small stamping plant that hammered out pieces for a metal casket company. The coil was a good buy at the time for both the seller and the end user.

So, in the long haul or in the short haul, steel coils sit as the unglamorous sisters of the real estate market. The are much the same, while being their own beast. The steel salesman, the warehouse owner, broker all have brothers in the real estate market. In the family of business every thing is much the same.

It was not so strange to find  steel industry people in a Federal Golf League; a bunch of steel salesmen, warehouse owners, steel processors playing golf weekly with partners that were FBI, IRS, US Customs, Postal Inspectors, US Attorneys,US Marshall's. My partner, Barney, was IRS, God Rest His Soul. As it turned out, Barney was the best golf coach I ever had. He even knew my neighbor, an attorney husband and wife that both worked for the IRS.

Funny thing about business.

20 July 2015 edit to change type points and take out a sentence to combine with another for clarity.

And The Winner This 4th of July Week

In the hay day of Detroit's auto prowess, it wasn't common knowledge, but loyalty customers to a brand could go to a depot lot to select their new cars after their dealer made the appointment.  An example of that process went something like this: You are at your dealer. You want to buy or lease the latest of Detroit's hot new car. The dealer says that it will take 12 weeks to order that car and that doesn't include shipping. But if you were a loyal customer to that dealer, he would send you to a depot lot after making your appointment. You go to the depot lot. They ask what color or what model you were looking for and then load you up in a golf cart and drive you "out back". Out back was a lot about the size of the Nebraska Furniture Marts store and distribution center that opened in The Colony, Texas. That's Texas style. That is about 22-football fields in size. So you say you want a blue car with 4 doors. The cart takes you down to row 47B and as far as the eye could see (so-to-speak) all you could see were blue cars with four doors. In short. on a depot lot, you are going to find what you want. Guar-an-teed.

It's the white one....oh, wait....

Or, the red ones.....

Oh, it's blue........ What's it's a KW,no it's a  Peterbilt. OH, so many colors, so many makes.....thank goodness I didn't find the Diamond Rio dealer!.They are all winners!!

It's been a while since I enjoyed the thrills and excitement of such an adventure. Egos ran higher then than they do today. But during the last month going down to the bridge complex to check on the water levels of the Trinity River, that  old excitement began to return.  Trip after trip I would pass this stretch of roadway. That is where I would slow down, stay out of traffic and just gaze at what I was seeing. It was awesome.

Yesterday, I make that trip again to see the waters finally receding after a month since Mother Nature turned off the taps. That stretch of roadway is Irving Boulevard beyond the renamed part known as Riverside Drive. It's beyond the Market District. It's beyond the Medical District. It's about midway between downtown Dallas and downtown Irving, but oh, it's that "Miracle Mile" of big trucks.

That miracle mile of logistics inhales and exhales commerce on such a big scale, it virtually goes unnoticed as cars whiz by on this stretch of road.  Only old marketing executives could appreciate finding such a gold mine and that creative approach to business stirs again from  terrain memory.

Boots On The Ground

Some cliche catch phrases are alright. Others, find me a bit uncomfortable because to me, they go against the grain of how I learned respect. Surprisingly, while I got a lot of learning from mom and dad, it was my maternal grandmother that kept me in check when mom and dad were working or being social at church functions etc. My maternal grandfather early on had worked in the oil fields. Later, he became a U.S. Marshall, but his greatest love was being a businessman. He had operated boarding houses and restaurants that served hourly workers to big industrial operations like the cabinet plant that made cabinets for the Singer Sewing Machine Company. He provided them with a room where the workers could sleep and also be feed three home - cooked meals for a weekly sum. His rooms were always filled. My grandmother was a good cook. He also carried basic grocery items that workers could buy for their days off or holidays. The passenger trains stopped just across from the boarding house and restaurant. My two older aunts worked there in their high school days.My mom being the youngest was only 4 and she was without doubt my grandfather's baby and favorite.

During the depression, they didn't have much, but they did have food. At 17, when the war broke out, my mom moved to Detroit to live with her older sister and to baby sit while my aunt worked. It wasn't long until my mom because one of the original Rosie the Riveters at the Willow Run Airport where a Ford factory began producing B-17 bombers. She riveted a set of bolts into the wing of the B-24 Liberator aircraft.

I remember going to Detroit in the early 1950s to visit my aunt and she took mom and dad and I and one of her younger sisters out to Willow Run to see the old hanger. For a 5-year old, it made a very big impression on me. To this day being an aviation geek is just something I still get goose-bumps from.

In 1998 my mom was visiting a very dear friend who lived just outside Columbus,Ohio. My son was living in Columbus, working and going to school at Ohio State University. There was  a B-24 Liberator on display at the Madison Country Airport near Rickenbacker Field. Mom was just like a child. She couldn't wait until she could go see that plane. After 50-years, she spotted the two bolts she riveted at Willow Run all those years ago. She bought a T-shirt and put it on right on the spot. She was happy or had fulfilled an item on her Bucket List if she had one. I think she did have one. She wanted to visit Vermont but would not fly and would not take long-over-the-road trips. I once ask here how did she think that she would get there. Her replay, through the eyes of Life and Look  Magazine photographers.

So when I hear the phrase: Boots on the Ground, it has a much more crystallized meaning to me that sending troops in to fight a country's civil war.

C-1928. Mom sits on the counter.The two older girls are mom's sisters. Her brother is not photographed. The man behind the counter is my grandfather W.S.

Traditional Boots of Military Issue in past Wars.
These may have been in the Pacific Theater


12/16/18 edited to clarify some meanings.