I guess I’ll turn this 2014 reprint into the annual Year End Shit. It’s a heartfelt piece expressing how I feel about the world, and has some up-to-date resonance.
Normally I try to reprint or link my best tech history piece or my best blog writing. This year I’ve been tired and distracted by external and internal crap, and haven’t written anything worth mentioning here. Lots of people in the neighborhood are clearly tired. Less Xmas lights, less outside activity despite decent weather.
2025 rule: You finish one damn thing properly. Before you get a chance for pride or enjoyment, another damn thing slams into you.
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Reprinting the item about the little house in Ponca mentioned in previous. The 2014 piece happens to resonate nicely with my point about Altman. Maybe that’s why the dream-scripter chose the location.
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It’s an old theme and an old tune, but always valid. Woody Guthrie put it in an oddly delicate way: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”
The standard intro of the 1952 TV series ‘Racket Squad’ puts it much more accurately: “The carefully worked-out frauds and schemes by which confidence men take more money each year from the American public than all the bank robbers and thugs with their violence.”
Certainly fits my own experience. I’ve been robbed with digital fountain pens several times, totalling more than one year of income. A couple of debit-card identity thefts, $6000 in lost interest on savings, and right now JPMorgan is snatching part of my annual royalties to satisfy its hostile-takeover debts against the bankrupt publisher. [2025 edit: the lost interest on savings totaled around 15k for the whole ZIRP theft period. I eventually got the royalties but without interest. If I had delayed paying JPMorgan, you can be damn sure I’d have to pay interest and penalties.]
I’ve been physically robbed only once. It was tiny and nonviolent, and left me feeling more guilty than angry.
In 1974 I was making good money for an unskilled dickhead, somewhere around $9K per year, or $40K in today’s Bernanke Bucks. (Old Economy Steve, spot on.) I lived simply, in a Ponca neighborhood well below what I could afford. Every week I’d cash my paycheck, put most in savings, and keep a rationed amount in green rectangles. Paid bills in person when possible, or with cash in envelopes in the night-drop boxes of utility companies.
One night I came home from work, left the prepared envelopes in my unlocked VW Bug (of course) and went inside to eat. When I came out to run the cash-drop errand, I saw that the envelopes had disappeared. Called the cops and learned that the cops already knew about the theft. The kids across the alley had seen and grabbed the cash-filled envelopes. Their mother had immediately reported the event to the police. The cop and I went across the alley where I identified the envelopes and took them back. Cop wanted me to give the kids a lecture, but I couldn’t muster up any anger. Clearly the mom had already administered sufficient punishment. The house was full of tears.
These neighbors needed the money much more than I did. They were truly struggling for survival, and the kids were probably happy to bring home a little windfall. Mom thought it was more important to raise law-abiding kids than to have 30 extra dollars. Heroic. Nothing less.
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This is where my rented house was. All empty now. The garage frame is about where my back yard was. The beige house across the alley is where the mom and kids lived.
Boom-bust ratchet again. Ponca is in a big bust now, and might not recover soon. Enid, with income from wheat and oil services and an Air Force base, always bounces back from oil losses. Ponca has nothing but Continental, and now Continental has moved all its offices to Houston.
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From a followup post on the house’s history and floorplan:
The main rectangle was about 24 by 18 feet. The kitchen was added on, possibly in the ’50s, a few steps below the rest of the house, conforming to the slope of the land. Sunny and spacious, it was the only pleasant room in the house. Before it was added, the little passage on the right must have been the kitchenette. When I lived there it was just wasted space. Note also the wasted space in the hall. Dead ends both ways, not formed into closets.
In the 1940 census the house was owned and occupied by a husband and wife about 50 years old, plus the wife’s 80-year-old mother. The husband is listed as “interior decorator”, which seems to have meant “painter”.
Even if the back kitchen was already added then, I can’t imagine three people in such a small space! But living alone was EXTREMELY rare in 1940. After skimming lots of pages, I’d estimate that only 5% of dwelling units had a single occupant. Most of those seem to be single-room apts, i.e. hotel rooms labeled as apts. Nearly absolute rule: A residence with more than one room housed more than one person.
In the 1950 census the same couple was living there, but the mother-in-law was gone. The husband described himself as “painter”, perhaps because “interior decorator” had acquired a special meaning by then.
Polistra's Mill 