After 2 weeks at Pepa’s apartment on Beacon Hill, I moved to 170 Babcock Street in Brookline. Pepa had found me the room, since his girlfriend wanted to move in and he only had one bedroom. The room and board cost 50 dollars a month, which was manageable on my dishwashing wages.
Continue reading The House on Babcock StreetFugitive Nightmares
For the first year or so after I arrived in America, I had a recurring nightmare. I would find myself in Prague, walking through familiar streets, meeting friends, everything feeling completely normal — as if I had never left. And then, gradually, the realization would set in. I was not supposed to be there. I needed to get back to Austria, but there was no way out of Czechoslovakia. The borders were closed to me the same as they had always been, and this time I had no bus tour, no plan, no Kudibal to advise me. I had nothing.
Continue reading Fugitive NightmaresLiz
Liz was quite a woman. Whenever I was home and Jeanne was not around, Liz and I would communicate as best we could. Growing up in Czechoslovakia, I had never met a Black person; there were essentially none in the country. But in high school in Prague, an American film came to the movie theaters — I believe it was called Syncopations, or something close to that. It was an old movie about the origins of jazz in New Orleans, interlaced with scenes from the Civil War era and following the music as it moved to Chicago. It portrayed Black musicians and white musicians together, and it had wonderful New Orleans jazz throughout. I saw it many times and for a period I wanted nothing more than to become a trumpet player like Louis Armstrong. That film started a jazz revival across Eastern Europe; dixieland orchestras were forming everywhere, and we learned from our mothers how to dance the charleston. So by the time I arrived in America, I was already very interested in Black history and culture, and I had a lot of conversations with Liz because of it.
Continue reading LizThe Draft
Every male who came to the United States as an immigrant was required to register for the Selective Service draft, within a few months of arrival. I registered as required. I was living at that time at 170 Babcock Street in Brookline.
The Passport
Sometime in 1967, not long after I had settled into my routine in Boston, I noticed something in the wording of my Geneva Convention travel document — the refugee passport issued to me in Austria before I left for America. The Convention was clear on the matter: after emigrating, the holder was obligated to surrender the document to the immigration authorities of the new country, and in exchange, the new country was obligated to issue a replacement. It was not a favor. It was a right, written into international law.
Continue reading The PassportKLH and Honeywell
Mrs. Toy got me the job at KLH because of my language handicap — initially as a laborer, unpacking and setting up record players. KLH made high-quality audio equipment and record players, and it was a real company with real production standards.
MIT
In the spring of 1969 I was overwhelmed with dealing with my mother’s and sister’s immigration problems and could not keep up with taking 4 subjects at Lincoln College at the same time. I could not afford to fail any of them, since I was required to submit my report cards to the Selective Service board and a failure would have ended my student deferment immediately. So I made the decision to stop night school and instead look seriously at becoming a full-time university student. After discussing it with Jeanne and with my mother and sister, I started applying.
The Czech Community
When I arrived in Boston there were not many Czechoslovakians in the area. Most of them were older people who had come to the United States right after WWII and the Communist takeover in 1948, and they had organized themselves around the Masaryk Club. Pepa told me that there were only 2 Czech girls around our age, Marie and Anneta, and that the rule between us was to stay friends and nothing more, since a romantic involvement could spoil the friendship. After my experience in Austria I was not particularly interested in joining the Masaryk Club, but I met with Marie once in a while. She helped me practice for my driver’s test using her car, which I appreciated. I kept the rule Pepa had asked for.
My Sister’s Visit — Summer 1968
In the summer of 1968, the Prague Spring was underway in Czechoslovakia and Dubček had loosened enough restrictions that ordinary people could get passports and travel to the West. Because of that, I invited my sister to come visit me and paid for her trip. I picked her up at the airport in my Mustang — a used one, about a year old, but I was proud of it. The first thing she told me when she got in the car was that she was here only for a vacation and had no intention of staying, since life in Czechoslovakia was much better under Dubček. I assured her I had no intention of trying to persuade her to stay, and I meant it.
Continue reading My Sister’s Visit — Summer 1968My Sister and Mother Stay in America
At the end of August 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and my sister immediately wanted to go back to be with my mother. I talked her out of it, and we decided that we would first try to get my mother out to join us; only if that failed would my sister go back. We made the invitation right away, and some friends in Prague helped my mother get a passport quickly and obtain her visa. She was able to come. I do not remember the exact timeframe, but it worked out. After the invasion, even the hardline communist government employees were helping people get out — it took several months for the regime to tighten its grip on the population again and close things back down. We were lucky to get her out when we did.
Continue reading My Sister and Mother Stay in AmericaJeanne and the Move to Sherborn
The house on Babcock Street had been owned by Geoffrey’s father — Alan’s grandfather. Geoffrey had been paying Jeanne alimony and child support since the divorce, and his father had covered certain other expenses — use of his car, Liz’s wages as housekeeper, and the house itself, since Jeanne paid no rent. In 1970, Geoffrey told us that since we had been living together for 2 years we were in a de facto common-law marriage, and that under Massachusetts law at the time that entitled him to stop paying alimony. He also told us he wanted us to leave the house.
The Road to the Shell Station
In the fall of 1970 I realized I had to start making money. MIT was too great a financial burden to continue, and I was 27 years old and no longer subject to the draft. The engineering job market was not strong — there was a mild recession and it was not easy to find work in the computer industry — so I started researching going into business instead.
The Shell Station
The Shell station was on Route 9 in Wellesley, a busy divided multi-lane highway with heavy traffic and strong competition. At that time the oil companies were putting gas stations wherever they could, concentrating on market share rather than profitability, so there were many stations competing for the same customers. The location itself was good — Wellesley and nearby Weston were upper-class residential communities with well-maintained cars and people who cared about quality service.
Three Fires
One thing I learned at the station was how to handle disasters. We had several, and the lesson each time was the same — there is no time to think, only to act.
The Gas Shortage
In October 1973 the oil shortage hit suddenly and without much warning. The oil company informed us that our allocation — the quantity of gas we were permitted to purchase — had been cut to a fraction of our normal supply, based on our past purchase history. From the first day, cars began lining up as soon as we opened, and within 2 hours we had sold what would normally have lasted a full day.
The IRS Visit
About 6 months after opening the Shell station, a man came in and introduced himself as an IRS agent. He said they had not received payments for employee payroll tax withholdings and wanted to see my accounting books immediately.
Learning to Run a Business
When I started at the Shell station I was not a good salesman. I felt embarrassed, for example, to check a customer’s oil and tell him he needed to add a quart, worried he would think I was trying to sell him something he did not need. On the repair side I charged too little for labor, and even when I charged what others charged I felt uncomfortable about it.
Employees
One of the ongoing challenges was managing employees. I was demanding when it came to the gas attendants — full service at the pumps, windshields washed, oil checked, everything done properly. The attendants were paid minimum wage, since the gas side of the business actually lost money once you accounted for all the associated costs. The oil companies justified this by arguing that pump traffic brought customers into the repair bays, which was where the real money was made. Most of the attendants were part time. If I caught someone skipping the windshields and they refused to do it, I fired them on the spot.
Interesting Customers — The Russian Millionaire
We had many interesting customers over those years. A few are worth mentioning.
Continue reading Interesting Customers — The Russian Millionaire
Interesting Customers — Tocci
One customer I was never entirely sure about was a man named Tocci who owned a large construction company that built schools and other public buildings on government contracts.
Interesting Customers — Sal
One evening a man dropped off his car, a nice one with an oil leak from the rear differential. Vasek was working that night and fixed it while the customer waited. His name was Sal Macarelli. He was relatively short and stocky, with shoulders about twice as wide as mine — a very powerful man.
Life in Sherborn
We enjoyed living in the house on Maple Street. The Shell station was considerably closer than the Texaco had been, which made the long hours more manageable. Jana and Milan married and took the master bedroom. I married Jeanne, which made my mother very happy. When I went to the immigration office in Boston to obtain my citizenship it was the first time I had ever been treated pleasantly there — the employees were kind and welcoming, as opposed to every previous experience I had in that building.
The Vacation with Zdenek Renftel
Zdenek Renftel was one of my closest childhood friends. We had been in the same class from 1st grade through 8th grade in Prague and stayed in touch right up until I left Czechoslovakia. Zdenek had married young — he and his wife were both eighteen when their son was born, about a year before I went into the army. To avoid his own 2-year military service, he took advantage of an exemption that was available at the time: he signed up for 10 years as a coal miner in Ostrava.
Trying to Go Back
In 1975 I learned about a new diplomatic arrangement between the United States and Czechoslovakia that had come out of the Helsinki Accords. Under this agreement, naturalized American citizens traveling on US passports would be guaranteed consular protection and could not be detained for previous offenses against the state — provided they obtained a Czechoslovak visa legally in the United States. For people like me, who had left without permission and faced criminal charges for doing so, it was the first time returning to Czechoslovakia had seemed legally possible.
Separating from Jeanne
At some point I told Jeanne that I wanted to have my own family. She did not want more children. Together with everything else that had happened over those years, we decided to separate. I moved out and rented a room in a house in Weston, not far from the station. We stayed in touch and the parting was without bitterness.
Passing the Station to Jana and Milan
At the station I was paying Milan good wages, and Jana helped part time with the bookkeeping, for which I also paid her. I covered my mother’s health insurance as well. Milan was an excellent mechanic and a reliable worker, but he had no interest in the headaches that came with running a business. He was strictly 8AM to 5PM.
The House in Weston
After moving out of Sherborn I rented a room a few blocks from the Shell station in Weston, from an older woman whose husband had been an airline executive. He had died before they could realize the house they had planned together, and she had used his life insurance money to build it herself — for both of them, in his memory. It was a remarkable house. My room was lined with built-in storage and cedar closets. She had added a large living room with a fireplace, a 2-car garage with a loft, and converted the cellar into a complete separate living area. All the equipment and furniture were of the highest quality. It was a genuinely wonderful place to live.
Looking for Work
While I was still running the station I had wanted to buy a computer to improve the business — not just for bookkeeping, but to track car maintenance services by time and mileage, send reminders to customers when an oil change or tuneup was due, and build the kind of systematic customer relationship that would grow the business over time. I did buy an address-making machine and tried to build a manual file system to do some of this, but it was slow and labor-intensive. Any computer, even the smallest PDP-11, was too expensive at the time.
Lamar’s Business Schemes
Before I found the programming job there was another business I was reluctantly drawn into considering, and it started with a customer named Lamar.
How I Approached Programming
From the beginning I wanted to do application programming because I felt my business experience from running the gas station gave me something most programmers did not have — a real understanding of how businesses actually worked and what they needed from software. That was where my interest was and where I thought I could contribute most.
The Path to NEC
The Modcomp Business Systems venture lasted about 4 months before the company declared bankruptcy and closed that division. After that I found a position at Digital Equipment Corporation in Maynard, where I stayed for approximately 6 months.
NEC Information Systems
I was hired at NEC not into the application programming group as I had hoped, but as the second person in the systems engineering group. Initially I became an expert on NEC’s Astra minicomputers, and as the industry evolved so did my work — moving through engineering workstations, personal computers, servers, desktops, and notebooks over the years.