My Real Memoir

I’d tried fame, but my brief brushes with fame had left me penniless. Now it seemed, unless I did something quick, I’d also be loveless. My girlfriend Dar had expressed doubts about Us. The solution? Rent an apartment and live blissfully together, proving that Us was meant to be. Except–oh, yeah–I was penniless. And landlords tended to prefer money to love. Once again…

Enter Dad. He and I were both restless entrepreneurs, bent on carving our own paths to success. But our means of measuring success were different. Being a child of the Great Depression, Dad’s measure was money. Being a child of the Baby Boom, my measure was love.

Could you have both?

Momandad had just come back, refreshed from sipping margaritas and paragliding in Mexico during the only vacation they would ever take. Aware of my conundrum, Dad saw a way to fix it. After years of searching, he’d found a franchise to invest in. A company called Sensormatic had patented electronic sales tags that promised to save stores billions of dollars lost to theft. And Dad had just bought the franchise for San Diego County.

A Macy’s department store there had agreed to test the system, but complained it was going off constantly while the store was closed! They demanded Sensormatic’s customer engineer Dell Finch remove it. But before he did, Dell asked to see the nighttime surveillance footage (which they never reviewed). And there on tape was the night cleaning crew waving at the cameras and laughing at the Sensormatic alarms as they carried thousands of dollars-worth of clothing out of the store!

Right after Dad bought the franchise, Macy’s signed a major deal with Sensormatic, so Dell needed another customer engineer ASAP, someone who could install systems and sweet-talk store managers. Dad said, “Dell, meet my son. He knows zilch about electronics, but he’s got a college degree in sweet-talk!”

Dell agreed, and started teaching me the electronics. Which I never really understood. When friends asked if I was acting for a living, I told them, yes, I was “playing the part of an electronics engineer.”

 My first solo installation was for a boutique in Santa Monica, California. The store was empty, and the sixty-something manager had nothing better to do than chat while I stripped wires and prayed nothing caught fire. Mid-chat, however, she spotted a man on the Promenade and said, “I know him!”

Half an hour later she came back in, bursting to tell me about her encounter with “a clever guy” she’d gone to high school with fifty years earlier! “I teased him,” she said, ‘Not working, huh? Are you independently wealthy?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Really? How?’

“‘I invented the parking meter.'”

The summer after clever guy graduated from high school, he and a buddy had noticed a parking cop ticketing a car. Minutes later they spotted a wind-up alarm clock in a five-and-dime window, and said in unison, “What if we put one of those in front of every parking space?” So they bought the alarm clock, tore it apart, figured out how to set it off with a coin drop, and patented it! By the time they were in thier 20s, they’d married their childhood sweethearts and retired wealthy.

And now I was the clever guy, I thought. I was making a fortune ($600 a month!) and living with the girl I loved. Maybe I could have both…

Love and money!

My Real Memoir is a series. To read the next one, click here.