Maynard and me

Maynard G. Krebs, pictured above, was the sidekick character in The Many Loves of Doby Gillis, the 1959-63 CBS TV series. Dwayne Hickman starred in the title role, and Bob Denver, later of Gilligan’s Island fame, played Dobie’s eccentric friend, Maynard. The character was created for TV and wasn’t in the Max Schulman books the series was based upon. Maynard wore a scruffy goatee, a stretched out gray sweatshirt, dirty low cut white Converse sneakers, and jeans.

Maynard was the show’s Shakespearian fool. Dobie created elaborate schemes trying to get some girl to notice him, and Maynard would say “Why don’t you just ask her out?” Dobie would ignore that advice and laugh track hilarity followed.

In one of the show’s repeated bits, whenever Maynard heard the word “work,”  his eyes would bug out, and he would say in Bob Denver’s squeaky high voice “Work?” and then attempt to make himself scarce. Dobie would talk him down from his anti-work panic and the show would go on.

If you google Maynard G. Kreps, he is referred to as “America’s first hipster.” He wasn’t a hipster; he was a Beatnik. San Francisco Chronical  writer Herb Caen coined this term for the Beat Generation Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, etc. Beatniks rejected consumerist capitalism, loved off-beat poetry, bebop and jazz. Caen added the Russian “nik” to mock their leftist views and characterized the beats as shiftless and lazy.

I loved Maynard. I was twelve and desperately trying to hold onto my boyhood. I hated school homework. I rebelled at household chores. My father despaired that I would ever learn to work. He found me jobs mowing neighbors lawns, and caddying for him and his golf buddies. I was a fan of Maynard, but not a fan of work. I wanted to play.

I did eventually learn to work. The first job I found for myself, soda jerk at Howard Johnsons, taught me who you worked with could make any job seem like play. Then I discovered acting and worked hard in a play. Eventually, I found myself in consulting, working 100 hour weeks and feeling my work had “purpose.”

But I always had a love-hate relationship with work. When I wanted to annoy my boss I‘d say:

“I figured out what I don’t like about my job.”

“Oh, really, what?”

“Workin’!”

Classic Maynard.

Noahpinion: Yes, we still have to work

A friend recently introduced me to Noah Smith’s blog Noahpinion. Noah calls himself an economic blogger, but don’t let the econ-bit put you off; his smart writing might start with economics, but veers into public policy, and philosophy, all in a fun, easy to read style. Noah’s recent post Yes, we still have to work, starts with some news about an experiment with Universal Basic Income (UBI), which found that even at $1000 a month 2% of workers in the study stopped working.  He posits that “a welfare program that causes a significant number of people to stop working entirely is unlikely to pass any reasonable cost-benefit analysis.”

Along the way Noah examines the same trope that produced the Maynard G. Krebs character, “kids today are lazy.” He rejects this idea with data, but this idea floats around a lot. Are GenZ  and Millennials “lazy?” Do they want the “whole world just handed to them?” I’m tempted to agree until I remember this is exactly what the Greatest Generation said about Baby Boomers and so I am inclined to believe that this is just something the Old say about the Young.

Smith debunks David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs that says certain jobs are useless, noting that work satisfaction is rising. Noah presents valuable jobs lost (like economic bloggers) in an argument credited in a footnote to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here’s the original:

“These tales of impending doom allowed the Golgafrinchans to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The story was that they would build three Ark ships. Into the A ship would go all the leaders, scientists and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made things and did things, and the B Ark would hold everyone else, such as hairdressers and telephone sanitisers. They sent the B ship off first, but of course, the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.”

(Who says the Internet isn’t amazing? Imagine digging out my copy of HGttG to find this?)

Noah ultimately concludes that UBI is unlikely to be good public policy.

“Human labor is still incredibly valuable, and figuring out how to make human workers more capable is still how most value is created. And for that reason, we should focus policy on rewarding human labor more, and be wary of economic philosophies that claim that most human beings would be better off as glorified pets.”

His post rejects a no-human-work I Robot world and promotes the “a job is dignity” argument that Joe Biden’s father instilled in him. I have been unemployed and don’t remember it as joyful, but I’m still Maynard enough not to buy the absolute sanctity of work.

I do believe in work choice  ̶  not surprising for someone who was self-employed for 23 years. We all work for ourselves. If we choose to sell our labor to “the Man,” we ought to recognize the trade-off.

Some have the luck and luxury of finding purpose in work. Several times during my consulting career, alignment between work and purpose made work seem like play. The “I can’t believe they pay me to do this” euphoria was caused by important work, good people to work with, and achieving results for a grateful client. Those conditions didn’t always exist, but did more often than one might think.

I also got paid more as I rose. I liked that. Pearl Bailey said “Honey, I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and I can tell you rich is better.”

What part of retired didn’t you understand?

I never made rich.  I did stop asking for a “debt-free existence” every birthday. I got to retire, after waiting till seventy to take Social Security,  and downsizing from a house to a condo. I am grateful. I have friends my age who are still working, unenthusiastically.

I also have friends who can’t imagine why anyone would retire. Some offer me project work and are shocked when I turn it down.

“What part of retired didn’t you understand?”

“What do you do every day?”

“I write. . . a lot.”

Billie says ‘You’re still working; you’re just not getting paid for it.”

She’s right.

“Work?”

“I seek dead people”

My wife is an amateur genealogist. She spends her retirement researching her extended, extended family. She is a detail person, a puzzler, a rigorous researcher, and a writer. She uses all her skills pursuing records of her long dead relatives.

Giving gifts to support her passion is a challenge. I’ve considered books, but it’s like buying Sculpture for Dummies for Michaelangelo. I’ve settled on tee shirts and coffee mugs with dumb genealogy jokes, which, like telling consultant jokes to consultants, must get old.

Genealogy is history taken personally

Billie’s favorite TV show is Dr. Henry Gates’ Finding Your Roots on PBS. I sometimes join her watching celebrities reactions to unknown family stories. Children of immigrants learn their ancestors sacrifices; descendants of slaves, understand their horrific past in a visceral way.  Family stories touch us deeply.

At dinner, Billie sometimes overflows with a story:

“I can’t believe what this woman went through. In a twelve year period, she lost six children and had four who lived. Then her husband died. She married his brother and then two of their children died. Then they moved from Pennsylvania to Iowa. It was the early 1800s. Did they pack a wagon or walk?”

Or she’ll be frustrated with a puzzle she can’t work out:

“There’s no record of a Robert being born. He doesn’t show up in the 1850 census. He is nowhere in marriage records, but here’s his grave, death date 1864.”

Later, when she solves the mystery, she is like a six-year-old girl in a princess dress. “You won’t believe this. . . “

Side benefits for me

Billie did some research for my family reunion. I was amazed. For example, I’d thought both sides of my family immigrated in the late nineteen century. My mother’s and my father’s family actually arrived in the mid-1700s. I was hooked, not Billie-level, but intrigued.

She bought me an Ancestry.com membership and two DNA tests; I learned more. My mother’s grandfather was in the Confederate Army. My father’s grandfather and his brother, mustered into the Union Army of Indiana on the same day. These Blues and Grays were in different battles, but if either hadn’t survived I wouldn’t be here.

My DNA tests show 1% Cherokee DNA and a little snooping on Ancestry found that my great, great grandmother was the daughter of Chief Thomas and a white woman. Chief Thomas survived the “Trail of Tears” and died in Oklahoma.

My father’s family always steadfastly maintained they were English, but they were from west of the Rhine river, at various times German, French or Swiss land. I also have 3% Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, probably from that line, but I am unsure where. . . yet.

My paternal great, great, great, grandfather moved his family twelve miles from Hagerstown, Maryland to Franklin County Pennsylvania. Before then my last name was spelled variously Koller, Köller, Kohler. After the move it was spelled Culler.

Family stories

There is family lore that my father’s family were Huguenots, French Protestants, persecuted in their local area. Perhaps they were followers of John Calvin unwelcome in Catholic Alsace, Northwest Switzerland, or the Rhineland. Or was the persecution in Hagerstown, a German Catholic area, before they moved to the English dominated Pennsylvania? Or both?

Perhaps the most famous story I know of tracking ancestry from family lore is Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976).  Haley, a writer  (The Biography of Malcolm X) and screenwriter (Superfly),  heard stories about his ancestor, young Kunta Kinte captured next to a kuambe belongo (river), brought to Maryland and sold as a slave. Haley used family stories, language and cultural traditions to track his family history long before Ancestry.com and Family Tree DNA. The Roots television miniseries opened Americans eyes to the horrors of slavery and the importance of oral tradition.

“I finally found you, you old African!” he exclaims in the final scene. Haley travelled to Gambia and found a shaman who had memorized members of the tribe. Before written language this is how genealogy, and all history, was recorded. Now we depend on family bibles, government records, family lore and maybe one genealogy “nut.”

Family records

Billie is her family’s generation recorder. She writes histories and distributes them to relatives who express gratitude, but rarely read them. It is an endless, thankless task.

I gave her a tee shirt:

“My work is done. I found everyone in my family tree and all my records are documented,    (said no genealogist ever).”

Occasionally, she vents about the sloppiness of some of her fellow researchers.

“How is it possible to record a person as the mother of another person, when the birth certificate shows she was born after her supposed child?.”

You can guess who manages our home records.

Learning from our history

How has genealogy enlightened me?

I was surprised that my father’s stories collapsed generations. The “four Culler brothers who immigrated to America and moved to Indianna” were four generations from the immigrants.

I asked Billie what she had learned. She replied, “that I am a grand amalgam of many people, who all lived lives while the history we read about – the founding of the country, the Civil War, the Depression – was happening around them. I am, we all are, a combination of all those people.”

“And yet,” I said, “we are each unique. We all get a slice of available DNA so my sister’s reflects my father’s side and I favor my mother’s Scots-Irish.

My family history, includes people who stayed in one place and those who moved families hundreds of miles in buckboards. There are families who prospered, and some who lost everything. There are stories of heartache and resilience. And, as Billie said, I’m connected to all of them.

Billie and I each discovered an ancestor family living in William Penn’s Philadelphia who may have been friends, a previously unknown connection between us. Perhaps if everyone studied genealogy we’d know we are all connected more than we imagine – each a unique leaf in the family tree of humankind.