A Personal Note

I have three kids.

Well, not kids anymore.

The oldest is 36, and lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife Lynn and their two children. I have to bootleg some of our selections to him every so often when he runs out of bottles on his wine rack. He is founder and president of Fun Tours, a senior citizen travel tour compa­ny serving the Midwest. He has offered Rosemarie and I residual seats on the tours, but we have not taken him up on any of them yet. They do not go through too many vineyards!

The middle one lives in San Diego with her husband and two children. She is back in school at 32, breezing through law school. We told here she should have done this right after her undergraduate Princeton stint, but no, she has to do it the hard way: concomitant with raising a two year old and a 3 month old! It is a good thing she has a patient husband!

This personal note is more about Number 3. He just came aboard Wine of The Month Club.

He is 30, and has a business back­ground. A four year tour of duty at Xe­rox, pounding the halls of industry with a photocopier in his briefcase gave him an introduction into the “cruel world” savvy of buying and selling. Another four years as sales manager of Telcnomics added a computer dimension to his apprenticeship for this new job! If there is such a thing as a President and a Chairman of the Board in a sole proprietorship, he has assumed the former position, and I have moved into the latter title.

Youth can supervise day to day prob­lems much better! Things like UPS breakages, delivery shortages, shipper truck breakdowns, bounced checks and bad credit card numbers.

Age must be rewarded with the more sedate duties: long term projects like planning future club wine selections in less deadline-oriented environments, ex­tensive travel schedules to visit vineyards and wineries to make better deals, devel­oping new membership benefits and ex­pansion of wine selections! Don’t you agree?

So what does son number two do, as his first act of authority? He threatens his sister to cut off her freebie membership! I had to in­tervene! After all, he had one of those too, even when he was underage. He for­gets how prestigious it was being the son of a mail-order wine merchant while he was at USC. Some of the reject wines of our program arc quite good after all!

He started Jan 1, and is doing a super job. He has already involved Sandra, his wife. She is a CPA, and I am sure she will keep him harnessed. I have withdrawn from the warehouse office to my new of­fice in Julian, CA. It is being remodeled to house a fax machine and a modem for my Macintosh SE.

We did not even have to print new business cards. He has been using mine for several years. He is Paul too! In the past, whenever there was an exceptional trade wine-tasting, he would present my business card for his admission badge quite truthfully!

So now if you call the office,  ask for Paul Jr. He can handle most every­thing. Once in a while he might refer you to a (619) phone number for a matter he might delegate to Sr.

– P.K. Sr.