We found a house in Lancaster, another fixer-upper (a theme of ours). It was in an older but nice neighborhood. We later learned from the neighbors that it had been a drug house with the former owners imprisoned. (So much for disclosure.) With Kathy 8+ months pregnant, the timing wasn't ideal, but we moved the week before school started so the kids wouldn't be "the new kid" for the entire year. Jacob, our fifth and final son, (sixth child) was born two weeks later. Kathy was unloading boxes, and I was in the backyard setting some things up. An elderly neighbor across our back ally came over and started a conversation. She mentioned some family history she was working on and asked me if I knew anything about mine. I answered, “We are members of the Church, too.” She lighted up and went inside to call our new bishop to tell of this family that had just moved in and that the mother was 8+ months pregnant and unpacking. Within an hour, fifteen people from the new ward started showing up to help Kathy. Kathy’s role changed from putting things away to watching them work and telling them where things should go. Beds were put together and made ready for nighttime. The house was quickly made ready to live in. We are forever grateful to our neighbor and our new friends at church. Our home in Lancaster is one of our favorites in terms of its potential. Because of my demanding work schedule, we did not get to finish the fix-up, but to this day, we can’t help but wonder what we could have done here. It had a tree in the front yard that became known as "the family tree” because everyone climbed up and hung out in it. (Note the above picture.)
The neighbor who had called our bishop was elderly and was barely making ends meet. Her husband and his retirement income were long gone. On our first Christmas there, we decided to make her the target of a Christmas ding-dong game. The kids were all in on this and were not being found out. On the first of December, we left a Christmas tree and stood it on her front porch. Then everyone hid, watched her look around, and finally brought the tree inside. Each following night, new tree decorations were left until Christmas Day. During the following testimony meeting at church, she thanked the anonymous people who had treated her well. It was all we could do to keep the kids from jumping up and revealing our secret. But we think she really knew. We couldn't let her generosity to us go unrewarded.
As previously mentioned, Kathy wanted to have the same doctor deliver two babies in a row (a first). She decided to keep her doctor, located in Redlands after we moved to Lancaster. So, when Kathy went into labor, I had to drive 83 miles from Lancaster to Redlands through a deserted desert road for her delivery. Remember that Kathy has a combined total of 12 hours of labor for all six kids. Added to that, there was a terrible storm that came through that night, causing flooding. We made it to the Redlands hospital only to discover that her doctor was not on call that evening. So, labor stopped, and we went to a hotel until he returned to duty at 6 in the morning. At 6, Kathy started labor again, and we went to the hospital for delivery. Jacob, the sixth and final child, was born a few minutes after arriving at the hospital. I'm impressed with Kathy's willpower that stopped her labor until her doctor could deliver.
During our time in Lancaster, Kathy faced an interesting educational problem. We had a second-grade son who was having difficulty learning to read. They began talking to us in November about holding him back a year. This did not sit well with Kathy. She argued that they had decided in November that he wouldn't be able to read well enough by May. That was premature. Secondly, if they held him back a year, why would teaching him the same way next year help him to read better? He needed a different method of teaching now. Kathy proposed that she take him every day during their reading time. We only lived three houses from the school, so he was sent home daily while the class had reading time. Kathy found he was interested in motorcycles so she started buying motorcycle magazines as part of his reading studies. Once, they were reading a story, and he declared, "I can write a better story than this." So Kathy challenged him to do so. He dictated the story, and Kathy became his scribe. They polished it up and added illustrations. They put a bound book together. Later in the year, there was a school story-writing competition. Kathy entered his book. At first, the judges pulled his book out of the competition because, as they said, this book couldn't have been written by a second grader. You can imagine Kathy's reaction. But at the end of the year, he was reading at grade level and moved on with the other kids in his class. Kathy still had her teaching magic.
My new employer had serious problems, and I was brought in with others to join a turnaround team. The owners had gone on a buying binge and had purchased a string of concrete and construction materials companies from Tehachapi in the north to Palm Springs in the south. The accounting staff couldn’t keep up with the rapid purchases, and record-keeping functions fell apart. The company did $30 million a year in business and didn’t know their cash balance or even what they owned. I was new to working as a senior executive and made several mistakes that muddied things further. The covenant with the bank that had made the required loans demanded annual audited financial statements or the loans would be pulled and company assets repossessed. There was no way the financials would survive an audit when I came aboard. We convinced the bank to work with us while things came together, which took nearly three years. The bank monitored closely and required frequent progress reports. We were installing an accounting system that could handle our many locations. I oversaw its installation by a local expert. I learned quickly and developed a plan to comply with the bank's temporary demands and bring the company into compliance with the audit requirements.
I had a difficult situation in front of me. With over a hundred employees' jobs at stake, the company might not survive if I did not do my job correctly. I decided to commit everything to make this happen. I worked 70-hour workweeks. I was always at work, so my interactions with the family were minimal. After three years of this, Kathy informed me she wanted to go away for a period to evaluate our future together. Since I had spent the past three years totally uncommitted to the family, she wondered if I was committed enough to remain in our family's future. One company owner had a condominium in Palm Springs where she went to stay. I was given time off as needed to work through this and then stayed home to watch the kids while she went to Palm Springs. I discovered that I did not know my family anymore. After a few weeks, Kathy told met she was ready for me to talk things through. Kathy’s mother stayed with the kids as I went to Palm Springs. After some intense discussions, we decided to put our best effort into moving ahead together. We went to family counseling. We learned to communicate about things while they are still small rather than waiting for a crisis. This period changed the whole future of our relationship. And after some time, we became best friends. During this period, I should have worked fewer hours and spent more time with my family. And I should have spent more time developing my spiritual self. And I would have been more receptive to the guidance from the Holy Ghost. I have since learned that personal revelation is a powerful business tool. If I had worked less, better prepared myself spiritually, and followed the guidance of the Spirit, the company’s problems would have been solved sooner. I've learned that God is smarter than I am and that He is always willing to help me.
In time, we discovered a new way to handle conflicts. We discovered that we don't necessarily have to make decisions right now. They can wait for the right answers to come. When there is a conflict, the discussion usually begins with something like, "When you do ___, it makes me feel ___." And we begin by trying to understand each other's position on the issue. We learned to keep talking until we both agreed on the solution. Sometimes, we don't easily come up with a solution that we both agree on. We typically start off with our own differing strong opinions. But we soon realize that it's not about "giving in." As we kept talking, we discovered new options we hadn't considered before. Eventually an option surfaces that satisfies both of us. This new idea wouldn't have come if someone had just "given in" weeks before. And we both walk away believing we won. But this process can take weeks or months to find the real solution. The wait is always worth it. Even after 50 years of marriage, we still encounter issues that must be resolved. (Believe it or not, sometimes it involves spending on project cars.)
The SR71 Blackbirds were housed at Air Force Plant 42 in Lancaster. Often, while the kids were out playing soccer, a Blackbird would fly over low while landing, and the soccer games stopped while we all watched this awesome plane land. One time, when the space shuttle landed at Edwards AFB, Kathy took the kids out of school to go into the desert outside Edwards AFB to watch this historic event. She went out where it was crowded and the view distant because of other onlookers. But they got to watch it land. They then wrote reports, and the day was counted as a field trip for school. Unknown to Kathy, a coworker of mine had connections at EAFB. That morning at work, he invited me to a VIP location where we could watch the shuttle land a few feet away. He also gave me a tour of various aircraft there, including the B1b bomber (from inside the plane). Kathy wasn't happy when she got home and learned what I had been doing. No cell phone yet, so I couldn't invite her to join me.
It took three years, but we successfully finished an audit, and the bank took all restrictions off the company. In 1990 the owners sold the company to a billion-dollar European construction materials company. As the new owners came on board, they decided to eliminate local accounting. And they replaced the past owner-managers with the buyer's own staff. They offered me a position in the Bay area, but I declined. The new owners soon questioned the legitimacy of the purchase agreement. They were convinced that the previous owners, who I had worked for, had deceived them by falsely valuating the company. The buyer contacted me, asking me to review the sale. For some reason, they trusted me even though I was a part of the outgoing management. They hired me to review the books and purchase contracts and to provide them with the details of the due diligence efforts related to the sale. After careful scrutiny, I proved to them that there was no intentional deception, although some of the accounts receivable were old and proved difficult to collect. But there was no effort to hide that fact. While doing my review, an employee approached me with an issue that concerned her. She had a DMV annual license renewal for a cement mixer that wasn’t in the yard and had never been sold. I took this to one of the former owners, who had become a personal friend and mentor, and taught me how to approach forensic accounting. I believed the newly appointed general manager had taken it to a local dealer, sold it, and kept the money. I asked myself what possible legitimate explanations he could give for the missing mixer if he were confronted. I then went about disproving each possible legitimate answer. I did this until the only possibility left was that the mixer had been stolen. I put my case together and presented it to the company management at a remote location. I also discovered many more missing assets that he had stolen. They accepted my presentation and fired the manager. He could be violent, and Kathy and I feared his showing up at our home to retaliate. The violence never happened, and we were safe.
When my work was done with the company, I consulted with a local construction company that had purchased a new accounting system. The company’s accounting-related staff had some difficult personalities, and the original installation consultants quit mid-project before the system ran. I took on the accounting system problems and got it working and the accounting staff trained. They had a permanent position available to me, but I did not want to work with the personalities. Once up and running, I left them to do some other consulting work. After a while, my work began drying up. We were without income, but bills continued to come in. I applied for all jobs that I was remotely qualified for, mostly ads from the LA Times and a few recruiters.
There was an interesting man for whom I did consulting work. He had started his construction company years before out of his garage. From the beginning, one other man was with him as his estimator and project manager. As he found his niche, his company grew rapidly. When I worked with him he was netting more than a million dollars annually. But his lifestyle quit expanding decades earlier. He drove an 8-year-old Suburban. He lived in the house he bought decades before. I am sure his neighbors had no idea of his wealth. He used his crews during downtime to build apartment buildings that would become his retirement income. The man who started with him became his chief estimator. The employee had a large family and never quite got things together to buy his own home. He was given the assignment to oversee the construction of a house by a downtime crew. The work was to be top-of-the-line. When construction was completed, the owner gave the estimator the house. The owner was one of those guys who was always in the background helping someone in need.
We challenged a family in our ward to a scripture chase from seminary scriptures. Both families prepared for weeks. For three-year-old Jacob, we marked his scriptures with pictures so he could find them. He even won on a couple of scriptures. Both families prepared well, and it was a tough contest, but the final judgment was that we had won. It was a fun family experience.
In my job search, an offer was made by a firm in Orange County, California, that hit all my checklist items. I told them I would let them know in the morning. During the night, I could not sleep and grew more and more restless. My mind became more and more in turmoil. I then realized that I was receiving a Godly prompting that I needed to decline the job offer. The employer increased the offer further, but I still declined. The Lord had another direction for us. One would think that the right job was days away. Months later, we were out of money and stored food and required help from the Church bishop’s storehouse. I was even running out of money to send out resumes. My last resume and stamp went to a construction firm in Fresno, California. I met with the owners and received a job offer. They moved us to Fresno, but the family stayed behind for several months until the Lancaster house was sold. The new employer put me in a furnished apartment until the family could catch up. We bought a house in Fresno. When the new employer hired me, they bought a brand-new car for my business and personal use, but I had not received a paycheck yet. So, we went to pick up our last food order from the storehouse with a brand-new car. My lesson here is to not pass judgment. You never know someone's circumstances.