The Boy Who Kept Leaving Home

The Boy Who Kept Leaving Home

There once was a boy named Kirk, and whether there ought to have been is a question we will leave to the Almighty, because by the time anybody discovered what had happened the paperwork had already gone through. He was born at a very young age to a poor North Carolina farmer and a baker’s daughter, which gave him, before he was old enough to object, two competing theories about how civilization worked. His father’s side taught him that if you needed something, you planted it, fed it, built it, repaired it, hauled it, butchered it, or found a neighbor who owned the piece of machinery you lacked. His mother’s side demonstrated that flour, sugar, heat and sufficient determination could be converted into something people would pay money for. There are considerably more sophisticated definitions of entrepreneurship, but after eighty-four years Kirk has yet to encounter one that improves much on those two.

The boy went to school in a little four-room schoolhouse sitting out there among the cotton fields, where education was supposed to prepare a child for the world as sensible adults understood it. The difficulty was that Kirk kept becoming interested in worlds that sensible adults had not yet approved. One of those was underwater. In high school, when Mrs. Fallaw assigned a research paper and made the tactical error of allowing the students to choose their own subjects, Kirk decided to investigate whether people could live beneath the sea. He wrote to scientists and companies, received technical information and samples from Monsanto, studied materials and pressure, and built a model with some assistance from his mother and at least one household object that had previously enjoyed an honorable career involving cake.

The F That Went in the Sack

Mrs. Fallaw gave him an F. As Kirk remembers it, there wasn’t some magnificent scientific demolition of the proposal in which she demonstrated that his calculations were wrong, the materials would collapse, everybody would drown before breakfast, and civilization would be better off if young Ward went back to diagramming sentences. The subject simply wasn’t sensible. She offered to let him do the assignment again if he chose one that was, so Kirk did what any wounded young scholar devoted to the highest standards of academic integrity might have done under the circumstances: he cheated. He had a book by Willy Ley about rockets and jets, produced a respectable paper from it, improved the scholarly appearance with references and footnotes of somewhat imaginative provenance, and received an A-minus. Thus education taught young Kirk something education had probably not intended to teach: an original investigation could get you an F, while respectable bullshit, properly footnoted, could get you an A-minus.

Now, in a proper Jack Tale this is about where an old woman appears beside the road and gives the boy a magic bean, a talking frog, or a sack that can never be emptied. North Carolina being temporarily short of enchanted livestock, Kirk got an F instead. But he carried it with him, and that is one of the peculiarities of the things that shape us. We seldom recognize them when they happen. Nobody rang a bell and announced, “Pay attention, Kirk, because this unpleasant little bastard is going to turn up again seventy years from now.” The boy simply put the thing somewhere inside himself and went on down the road.

Jack Finds a Magic Box

The next useful object Kirk stumbled across was a radio station. Not merely a radio you listened to, but the whole mysterious contraption behind it: microphones, turntables, records, announcers and an audience you could not see. He had been drawn to the new music at the Barfield Youth Center and eventually found himself fooling around with records and disc jockeying, and somewhere in there he discovered the astonishing proposition that a human being could speak into a piece of machinery in one room and cause strangers somewhere else to laugh, listen, dance, buy something, remember something or conclude that the fellow speaking was an idiot. You couldn’t see them, but they were there, and if you failed to give them a reason to keep listening they possessed the remarkable ability to leave.

That lesson followed Kirk into radio, television, theater and eventually California. After a brief military intermission defending the Republic from the dreaded Red Menace at a missile artillery base located, appropriately enough, in another field, he headed west. A country boy from North Carolina going to California to seek his fortune has the proper architecture for a Jack Tale, although Jack generally encounters giants and enchanted castles rather than Pasadena and show business. Having observed the results, your narrator is not certain the distinction deserves much attention.

Things Begin Falling Into the Sack

At KRLA in Pasadena, Kirk found himself around people such as Casey Kasem and Bob Eubanks and doing promotional appearances, including basketball games involving entertainers and rock-and-roll people. His wandering through broadcasting and entertainment eventually took him to NBC in Burbank. Before that, the Pasadena Playhouse had exposed him to the machinery behind theater: acting, directing, sets, lighting, costumes, stage management, production and the dozens of decisions required to create an experience for an audience. He didn’t have a name for what he was collecting. He certainly wasn’t constructing a theory of innovation. He was a young fellow trying to make a living, have some fun and get somewhere, preferably somewhere interesting.

Looking backward, though, things can be seen dropping into the sack. Audience went in. Promotion went in. Production went in. Timing went in. Spectacle went in. So did the realization that what appears effortless from the audience side usually has an astonishing amount of machinery hidden behind the curtain. Nobody told Kirk to save any of it. Life doesn’t label the pieces it gives you. It just hands you something, waits until you have forgotten where you put it, and then thirty years later asks whether you happen to have one of those.

The Giant Who Sold Tacos

Somewhere along the road Kirk encountered Glen Bell, who was developing a fast-food operation involving tacos. Tacos themselves were not exactly a new invention, Mexicans having managed to discover them without waiting for assistance from American entrepreneurs, but Glen was doing something different with the system around them. Preparation, speed, consistency, price, location, promotion and repeatability were being assembled into a machine that could deliver essentially the same experience over and over again.

Kirk went to work with Glen, and after a while Glen financed him into a Taco Bell franchise in Central Texas. From there Kirk built a little four-unit chain under different names in Corsicana, Killeen, Belton and Waco. Now, when you say “four taco stands” it does not sound much like a kingdom, particularly if you have never had to make payroll on Friday. To Kirk it was a kingdom, and for a while he was a pretty successful young king. He knew how to promote. He knew how to get people through the door. He understood operations well enough to keep the machinery moving, and he was making more money than he knew what to do with.

When the Numbers Knew More Than He Did

There is a dangerous phrase hiding in that last sentence, and it is not “more money.” It is “than he knew what to do with.” Every month Kirk received financial statements containing rows of numbers that undoubtedly meant something. Numbers are patient little devils. They will sit quietly on a page knowing exactly what happened to your business while you run around out front congratulating yourself on how well everything is going. Kirk could operate the restaurants, sell the product and attract customers, but he did not understand what those statements were telling him well enough to satisfy himself.

So he did something that sounds peculiar when you tell it backward. He sold successful businesses and went to Baylor University to learn what his own money had been trying to tell him.

That may have been one of the more important turns in the road. Failure will send a man looking for answers because it hurts. Success can be more dangerous because it has a way of convincing him he already knows them. Kirk had enough sense, or perhaps enough uneasiness, to realize that something was working which he did not fully understand. He wanted to understand the machinery.

Jack Learns to Follow the Numbers

Kirk entered Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business intending to earn a BBA in accounting, become an older and wiser entrepreneur, and eventually return to the restaurant business equipped with the mysterious knowledge possessed by people who could look at a balance sheet without immediately wanting to go outside. It was a perfectly reasonable plan, which is probably why life paid no attention to it.

He graduated with a 3.85 GPA and was approached by a recruiter who introduced him to commercial finance and asset-based loan auditing. If you ever want to end a lively cocktail-party conversation, announce that you would like to discuss asset-based loan auditing. People will remember urgent appointments in other rooms. But Kirk discovered something wonderful hiding underneath that deadly name: it was detective work.

Taking the Cover Off the Machine

Companies borrowed money against receivables, inventory and other assets, and somebody had to go inside those companies and determine whether the assets existed, whether the borrower was complying with the loan agreement, whether the numbers made sense, and occasionally whether some ambitious soul had discovered an accounting principle unknown to the profession and possibly frowned upon by law enforcement. Kirk spent roughly a dozen years traveling almost fifty weeks a year and crawling through the innards of hundreds of businesses. He saw manufacturers, distributors, retailers and enterprises run brilliantly, badly, honestly, foolishly and occasionally with such creativity that the creativity required legal counsel.

Without realizing it, he had acquired another piece. Radio had taught him to ask what kept an audience listening. Taco stands had taught him that a successful operation was a system rather than merely a product. Auditing taught him to take the cover off the machine and ask what was actually happening underneath. How does this damned thing work? Why does it work? Does it work the way everybody says it works? Where did that number come from, and why does the fellow explaining it suddenly need to make a telephone call?

Those questions became habits. Kirk did not know they were habits. He certainly didn’t know that decades later he would be using essentially the same questions on inventions, sports, websites, business models and his own thinking. He was simply doing the work in front of him, but the sack was getting heavier.

Then Came the Lovely Celeste

Somewhere amid all that traveling, business and wandering, life gave Kirk something that doesn’t fit the Jack Tale machinery very neatly because she was not another magic object to be dropped into the sack. Lovely Celeste became part of the life in which all the rest of it happened.

That distinction matters now, perhaps more than it did when Kirk was younger. A man can tell his life story by describing the jobs he held, businesses he built, money he made, things he invented and dragons he believes he slew, while the person who actually shared the consequences of those adventures appears occasionally in the narrative carrying groceries. This produces a splendid autobiography if the object is to make the man look important. It is not necessarily a very accurate account of the life.

Building Something of Their Own

With a new wife and a baby, fifty-week-a-year travel had become considerably less romantic. Kirk wanted stability, and he eventually stopped spending his working life examining other people’s businesses and began building an accounting practice of his own. Over the following years he opened offices in Kennesaw, Georgia, and later Durham and Wilmington, North Carolina, while also participating in other offices as a marketing partner. He became an Enrolled Agent, and he wrote a review course for people preparing for the IRS Special Enrollment Examination. MicroMash published it, and that company later became part of Thomson Reuters.

There is a nice little circularity there. The young taco operator who had sold his restaurants because he couldn’t properly understand his own financial statements had become an accounting professional teaching other people how to pass a demanding tax examination. A Jack Tale would probably reward the hero with a golden crown at this point. The Internal Revenue Service issues credentials instead, which are less attractive on the mantelpiece and probably a bit more difficult to obtain.

Through all of that was the Lovely Celeste. Not as an audience applauding the Great Entrepreneur, and not as a decorative reward bestowed upon Jack after he escaped the giant, but as the woman sharing the actual consequences of the life: the family, moves, children, businesses, ambitions, disappointments, recoveries and whatever new notion Kirk had managed to drag through the front door. There is a kind of support that says, “Wonderful idea, darling.” There is another kind that remains present after the wonderful idea has acquired invoices, legal documents, equipment, deadlines and a disturbing appetite for money. Kirk has come, over the years, to place considerably greater value on the second kind.

When the Old Magic Didn’t Work

Eventually Kirk got the itch to return to restaurants. He had succeeded at them when he was young, knew business much better now, understood accounting, had decades more experience and possessed every reason to believe he ought to be better equipped the second time around. If life were properly managed, this would be the part where the experienced hero returns to his first kingdom and demonstrates everything he has learned.

Instead, Kirk opened a fast-food restaurant in Jacksonville, North Carolina, at about the same time it appeared the entire Marine base nearby was loading itself onto ships for Bosnia. Timing is one of those business fundamentals everybody understands immediately after it kills them. That operation failed, and a follow-up attempt in a bad location in Wilmington failed as well.

That taught Kirk something success had not. You cannot necessarily preserve a successful formula for twenty-five years, take it off the shelf and expect it to work because it recognizes you. The world has been out having experiences of its own. Customers change, markets change, costs change, competition changes, and the fellow attempting to repeat his youthful triumph has changed too, although he may be the last person consulted about it.

It was painful, but it belonged in the sack with everything else. Jack Tales usually allow Jack to outwit the giant. Real life occasionally lets the giant sit on Jack, after which Jack has to decide whether the story is over.

Kirk decided it wasn’t.

The Old Man Finds the Biggest Audience Yet

Kirk eventually returned to commercial finance and later took early retirement, settling for a time in the North Georgia mountains, where he encountered something called the Internet. Sensible retirement behavior would probably have involved fishing, gardening or learning the names of birds. Instead, he discovered the largest audience he had ever seen connected to the largest collection of information he had ever seen, all operating through systems nobody seemed to have completely figured out.

You could hardly have designed better bait for him.

Old Pieces Find a New Arrangement

Kirk noticed an underserved market among people trying to build accounting practices. They knew accounting, but many did not know how to market themselves. By then Kirk knew both. The radio fellow was still in the sack. So was the promotion fellow, the taco operator, the accountant, the auditor and the fellow who liked taking machinery apart to discover why it worked. Those pieces, acquired in entirely different parts of his life for entirely different reasons, suddenly had something to say to one another. Kirk built websites and began selling accounting-practice marketing information and training to firms in the United States and several other English-speaking countries.

That experience should have told him something about ideas, although he wasn’t yet asking the question quite that way. What appeared to be a new undertaking was actually assembled from old encounters. Kirk did not sit down one morning and invent himself as an Internet marketing fellow. Pieces that had been lying around for decades found a new arrangement.

Then, during a dinner conversation with an old friend, they began talking about the entertainment years and some of the “bright ideas” Kirk had conceived along the way. The question arose, in one form or another, of why he didn’t take one of those ideas seriously and see what could be done with it.

Something down in the sack moved.

Jack Goes Back Up the Mountain

By then the young fool who had proposed an underwater city had achieved the official rank of elderly git, and the world had given him considerably more evidence about why sensible people avoid mountains. Nevertheless, the old mechanism was apparently still functioning. Somebody said, in effect, “What if?” and Kirk went looking.

A sports idea began to grow. Then the sport required rules, equipment, playing surfaces and facilities. Facilities raised questions about transportation and deployment. Deployment raised questions about economics. Economics raised questions about audience, media, statistics, sponsorship, operations and repeatability. One answer produced another question, and one piece encountered another piece until the thing was no longer simply a sport but a system.

The Old Questions Come Back

That old accounting-auditor habit came back too. How does this damned thing work? What is essential? What function are we trying to preserve? What can disappear? If we change this part, what else moves? The same fellow who once stared helplessly at the financial statements from his taco stands was now worrying at a completely different kind of machine, but the manner of worrying had been accumulated over a lifetime.

Eventually there were patents and plans and diagrams and equipment concepts and enough paper to threaten a modest forest. There were successes, disappointments, people who believed, people who didn’t, money problems, family problems, age problems and the increasing realization that having a good idea and getting the world to do something with it are two entirely different professions.

The Person Still Walking Beside Him

And through this long attempt to resurrect some of the audacity and success of the young man, Lovely Celeste has been there.

That isn’t meant sentimentally. Sentiment is easy. Living with a man who has decided, late in life, to develop a new sport is a much more demanding proposition. She has listened to ideas that arrived before breakfast and ideas that arrived when sensible people were asleep. She has encouraged Kirk when he was discouraged, questioned him when he needed questioning, tolerated plans whose practical value was not always immediately apparent, and helped hold together the ordinary life while he went wandering off mentally after another damned rabbit.

When Kirk says he has been trying to resurrect his youthful successes, even he now realizes that description is incomplete. He has been trying to recover something he had when he was young: the willingness to go look before somebody proved he shouldn’t. Age complicates that. By eighty-four, a man knows too many ways things can fail. He has watched money disappear, businesses collapse, timing turn against him, people change their minds, bodies refuse instructions, relationships strain, plans decay and bright ideas develop expensive appetites. Youth walks toward the mountain partly because it cannot imagine all the things living on it. Old age can identify most of them by their tracks.

Lovely Celeste has known the tracks too, and she has still encouraged him to look.

That may be the part of the story Kirk understands least and values most.

What Was Really in the Sack

So here sits an old git, trying to answer a question that has followed him all the way from that four-room schoolhouse: Where the hell did that idea come from?

For most of his life Kirk thought the idea was the interesting thing. He looked at an invention, a business notion, a promotional scheme or some new connection and treated its arrival as the event. Now he is beginning to suspect he was looking at the wrong end of the process.

What the Road Left Behind

The interesting thing may be what accumulated before the idea appeared.

The cotton fields are in there, along with a farmer who understood that neighbors sometimes accomplish together what none can afford separately. Mrs. Fallaw and her F are in there. So is the underwater city. Rock and roll is in there, along with turntables, radio microphones and the discovery of an unseen audience. Pasadena is there. Theater is there. NBC is there. Glen Bell and the taco stands are there, along with financial statements Kirk couldn’t understand. Baylor is there. Hundreds of businesses he crawled through as an auditor are there. Accounting offices are there. Success is there, but failure occupies at least as much room. The Internet is there. Every person who taught him something, annoyed him, helped him, doubted him, surprised him or forced him to look again left something behind.

And Lovely Celeste?

And Lovely Celeste?

For a while Kirk might have been tempted to say she was in the sack too, because it makes the metaphor come out neatly.

But that isn’t right.

She helped him carry the damned thing.

Maybe that is as close as this old Jack Tale gets to a magic ending. There wasn’t one enchanted bean from which everything grew. There were thousands of ordinary encounters, collected without knowing why they mattered. Some stayed dormant for years. Some probably never mattered at all. Others bumped into one another decades after they entered Kirk’s life, and the collision produced something neither could have produced alone.

A Better Question

Which leaves the old fellow, after eighty-four years of wandering, with a somewhat different answer to the question he started with.

Where the hell did that idea come from?

Maybe the better question is: What had to happen to Kirk before he was capable of having it?

And that, dear hearts, is a considerably longer story.