Once I got to college, summers opened up and there was the prospect of internships. Pretty much the whole time I was in college I viewed it as a sort of minimum security prison sentence — a period you had to get through in order to actually start working and making money. I was always interested in making money so that I could eat out, travel and eventually retire. Those were pretty much my priorities. It put a damper on my academic career and my overall college experience, but I was never there for the academics, just the credential.
Busboy in Key West (Summer 1977)
My first college summer, between freshman and sophomore year, I stayed with my sister Len and her husband Mike in Key West. Mom and Dad were enjoying their last summer in Hong Kong and touring Australia, I believe. I slept in Scott’s room in their trailer while I guess he was away visiting his father for the summer. Len helped me get a job as a busboy at Logan’s Lobster House (or was it Logun’s, as spelled in this postcard image I found?). I don’t know if I realized it at the time, but it was a family legacy as Len, Sue and Laurie had all waitressed there at one time or another.
This was my first paying job and I learned a few things. I used to tuck a napkin in my back pocket to clean tables and wipe my hands, until one day a patron informed me of the handkerchief code of which I’d been completely unaware. After that I just carried a napkin when needed. I learned that restaurant workers get fed in the afternoon, and that was pretty good. I also learned that bus boys don’t make much of anything off of tips. But at least I was making something, living for free with Len and having a pretty good summer.
Legend has it that Logan’s was where Jimmy Buffet first played “Margaritaville” and Truman Capote was in the audience. I find that hard to believe; I don’t remember any live acts there, just the Eagles’ Hotel California album being played endlessly over the sound system. Buffet was already a pretty big star and his Key West days were mostly behind him by the time I got there.
Business got slow in Key West in July and August and I got laid off (I think…I don’t think I got fired) toward the end of summer. I was able to get another busboy slot at another restaurant that featured massive beef spare ribs. I remember getting some of those as leftovers but that’s about all I remember about the second place; I was only there a few weeks before heading back north to school.
The other memorable aspect of my time in Key West was learning to drive using Len and Mike’s gold Corvette. I drove up to the DMV in the Corvette to take my driver’s test and the guy pretty much passed me without any question. I think he just enjoyed the ride.
Sears (part-time, summer 1978)
Georgetown only guaranteed dorms for freshmen in my day and I had to move off-campus in my sophomore year. I found a tiny, very cheap and run-down two bedroom apartment in Clarendon, Virginia, over an old antique store. My roommate, Vas, was a scary, right wing nut case before such things were common. He used to build his own bullets and was an expert on thermonuclear missile throw weights. But the room was cheap and the place was convenient to food and transportation so I lasted there two years.
Just down the road was an old Sears store. I didn’t want to be a sales clerk but I found they had part-time openings for back-office accounting clerks so I got a job there for the summer of 1978. Computers were still relatively rare, so our job was to compile all the day’s sales receipts from the cash registers and double check totals against the cash from each register. We never handled the cash, just mountains of daily receipts and rolls and rolls of adding machine tape. There was a roomful of folks like me, all chunking away making sure the totals reconciled. It was mindless work but I got pretty good at using an adding machine without looking at it.
Mattress shop warehouse assistant (part-time, summer 1978)
In addition to the part-time Sears job, I found part-time work at a mattress shop abut a mile up Wilson Boulevard. My job was to hump mattresses around the warehouse and load the trucks for deliveries. I didn’t go on many actual deliveries but spent a lot of time shuffling incoming and outgoing mattresses in the non-air conditioned warehouse. I remember it being hot, nasty and boring. I also remember the boss eventually wanting to fire me for being lazy, though I can’t remember any specific incident other than resting on a mattress now and then (who wouldn’t?). I do remember begging to let me stay the final week or two before I was going back to school anyway and him grudgingly relenting. Looking back, this was my only experience with manual labor and it was enough to teach me that I greatly preferred sitting at a desk in an air conditioned office.
IRS Internship (summer 1979)
For my last summer between junior and senior year, I applied for internships at various government agencies. I really hoped for a State Department internship but ended up getting offered a spot at the Internal Revenue Service in their DC headquarters building. I didn’t foresee a career with the IRS, but was happy to get a relatively prestigious-sounding paid internship (I especially liked the paid part, even at the lowest GS-level government employee. I was basically a file clerk, dealing with mail and stuffing things into various folders and file drawers. Every now and then my adding machine skills were put to use. I don’t have a lot of memories of the work other than two specific assignments.
I got to go on a field audit with a team of agents, a week at Sumitomo Bank in New York City. My first business trip! I had to dress up in a suit every day, a true challenge for me. We were mostly sequestered in a conference room in the very upscale Sumitomo Bank Building at 277 Park Avenue, though we could take breaks in their lunch room which had a glorious midtown Manhattan view. We stayed most of the week; I don’t remember going out with the other agents much, but in general had a fine time wandering around, especially considering my journey to the city. It was a story in itself, one I’m still a little reluctant to relay.
I took the train alone from Union Station to Penn Station and had to navigate my way to our midtown hotel (not sure which one, but it was a short walk from the bank). I must have looked like a lost rube standing in Penn Station with my suitcase and trying to decide whether to catch a cab (expensive) or take the subway (scary and unknown). I was approached by a young man who asked where I wanted to go, I told him the hotel and he said he’d be happy to lead me on the subway. I don’t know if I thought this was some tourist service or what I was thinking but I agreed, he grabbed my suitcase and off we went. I hustled to stay up with him as we went through the turnstiles (I guess he must have given me a token) and caught a train. It finally dawned on me that he could be taking me anywhere to kill or rob me, or jumped off the train with my suitcase, but I was relieved when we actually got off at one of the midtown stations and sure enough he led me straight to my hotel. All he wanted was a tip and I think I gave him $5, got my bag back and was happy to be alive. I felt like Blanche DuBois (“Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers“) and about as gullible and helpless. But I survived, somehow, and overall had a great time in NYC.
Back in DC, as I was nearing the end of my internship and they were running out of projects they could usefully assign to me, I was told to organize the files in one particular case. It was a sprawling case against the Rolling Stones and their various managers, including Allan Klein and Prince Rupert Lowenstein (article about his book), with folder after folder of documentation filling multiple file drawers. I can’t remember the specifics of what I was supposed to “organize” but it was fascinating rummaging through all the articles, court cases, financial statements and ephemera collected relating to the Stones over multiple years. It was a complicated mess of multiple offshore holding companies around the world. I don’t know if the IRS ever made a case against the Stones; perhaps the Stones have me to thank.
Congressional Intern (fall semester, 1979)
In my senior year, I decided I wanted to take better advantage of being in Washington, DC, and harbored interest in some sort of career in government service. So, with the good graces of Georgetown’s placement office, I applied for part-time internships on Capitol Hill and ended up getting one in the office of Congressman Berkley Bedell of Iowa. I still had a full course load at school, but arranged my schedule to have at least two free days per week.
I remember commuting to Capitol Hill on Metro from my Arlington apartment (I had by then moved closer to Rosslyn and roomed with Bill Englehart) and feeling very grown up. It was especially impressive getting off at the Capitol Hill stop and roaming the halls of the House office buildings. My tasks were mainly sorting incoming mail and answering constituents using a small library of boilerplate responses. I didn’t know much about Bedell’s politics but he very heavily supported ethanol subsidies for his Iowa corn farmers. It seemed vaguely progressive at the time, but even then it was obviously more about money for Iowa than any real commitment to cleaner air or better environment. It has since become clearer that ethanol, particularly from corn, is not a great energy solution but we were in the midst of the 1979 oil crisis which caused rationing and long lines at gas stations. It was quite the hot topic at the time but I notice ethanol is not even mentioned in Bedell’s biographies, though he is now a member of the Bass Fishing Hall of Fame and still kicking at 97 today.
Other memories include getting to use the Autopen signature machine for his correspondence, which was kept under lock and key and seemed like cheating. I got to watch a few debates on the House floor and spent some time in House committee meetings, taking notes and reporting back to actual staff members, and sometimes running things to or from a Senator’s office on the far side of the Capitol (no using the trams during a vote!). I never actually got on the House floor or interacted directly with the Congressman other than occasional staff gatherings in his office. I also remember scouting out the various staff cafeterias and eating options on Capitol Hill. I still have an affinity for Senate Bean Soup. Overall, I was very pleased to have this internship, enjoyed the experience and was grateful to add it to my resume. It also made clear that a career as a Congressional staffer was a thankless, low-paying, back-biting existence unless you were really trying to ingratiate yourself and move up the political ladder. Not for me.
Washington International and Bei Jing-Washington intern (spring semester, 1980)
When I applied for the Congressional internship at the beginning of my senior year, I had also seen a posting in the Georgetown placement office for interns at a small consulting firm, Washington International. I came to find it was a 3-man consulting firm operating out of the Chevy Chase home of its president, Neal Weigel. I was in touch with one of the people there, Ted Mann, about the internship but by the time we made our connections I had already taken the internship with Congressman Bedell. I stayed in tough with Ted and in November wrote Neal that I was still interested in interning in the spring semester. They decided to take a chance on me.
There were several interns and we did research on obscure marketing projects conjured up by Neal and his colleagues. Two I remember were projects for the embassy of Sri Lanka, one on marketing handcrafted jewelry in the States, and another more detailed analysis of the potential US market for coir, or coconut fiber. We also did a lengthy study of the potential US market for ceramic tiles from Honduras. In each case, I learned quite a bit in those pre-Internet days about each of the products and I enjoyed the research process, but I began to wonder about the value the market analysis of a 20-year old unpaid student analyst. I didn’t see a lot of analytical value being added by Neal or his two colleagues, though they were the ones out drumming up business and cashing the checks.
Here’s a letter I sent to Mom and Dad in the summer of 1980 which describes the ceramic tile project (which was actually done after I graduated and was working full time) in a little more detail.
One of the other principals, Bruce Enz, had his hands in at least three different companies in widely different areas. He imparted the wisdom to always have multiple pots simmering in case any one of them failed. Neal passed away in 2016, but Bruce is still out there, according to the Internet, having seemingly settled into one of his other careers, automobile crash analysis, though not without some major litigation along the way. The third principal, Ted Mann, was working on his own project for Washington International and once it was done he disengaged from the company and I lost track of him. If it all seems rather fly-by-night, it was. But it was a lesson that you didn’t really have to know much to pass yourself off as an expert, a variant of the notion that there’s a sucker born every minute.
As all this was going on, Neal started getting more leads in China and decided to form a separate consultancy, Bei Jing-Washington, Inc. The idea was to help China source US manufacturing technology and then theoretically help market Chinese manufactured goods in the US. We started to focus on electronic component manufacturing because it was clear China was more interested in that sector than in, say, ceramic tiles. We didn’t let it deter us that no one knew anything about electronic components. I ended up getting books from Radio Shack to explain the functions of things like resistors, capacitors and potentiometers (you have no idea how much easier it is to learn things now from Wikipedia and the Internet).
If I seem a bit cynical, there were things I liked about working at Neal’s. One was that he would often throw together a one-pot meal like a hearty soup, chili or stew and we’d all have it for lunch. I learned some basics of cooking there, and still love one-pot meals. I also remember cranking up WHFS in the afternoons, especially on Fridays at 5pm as Weasel would kick off the weekend. There were usually one or two other interns there and we all seemed to appreciate the same music. It was also frankly exciting to be on the ground floor of what seemed to be a potentially growing enterprise, particularly as we started to focus more on China. Neal started getting other interns with Chinese language skills and we seemed positioned for whatever was to come from the “opening” of China under Deng Xiaoping as the 1980s began. As I neared graduation, I shopped my resume around other prospective China-related employers and took the Foreign Service test, but in lieu of any other actual offers, I hoped there might be the prospect of an actual job at Bei Jing-Washington. I’ll save the rest of the Bei Jing-Washington story for a separate post.
Next job: Bei Jing-Washington, Inc.
Work page: My Brilliant Careers
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