1998

                                                                                                        November 27, 1998


Dear Family & Friends,

Suzanne and I will have been married 25 years this December – which must mean that I have heard about 24 times my sisters’ story about how to get to our wedding during the height of the energy crisis (no gas sold on weekends) the three of them and their husbands had to squeeze into a ’65 Mustang for the long trek from Skaneateles to Albany and back. It was an interesting time to get married – we had to take a jammed Greyhound bus for our Honeymoon trip to Montreal and I got to sit with a bunch of convicts who were returning to prison from work release assignment (there is some kind of symbolism there I’m sure.)

The summer before we got married we attended a 25th anniversary party for Suzanne’s parents (this summer we arranged a smaller party for their 50th anniversary.) I remember thinking that they had been married a really long time, but now I know differently. In our first twenty-five years we have lived in Rochester (6 months until I graduated from business school), Hyde Park (three years while Suzanne worked for Schiff Hardin (law firm partner) for sixteen years and Amoco for nearly six years now. I worked for U. S. Gypsum for 13 years, one year searching for a business to buy and now ten years running Engine Supply, Inc. with my partner and brother-in-law Tom. Along the way we had three children, Stephen (14), Nicole (11) and Christie (9). Five houses, four jobs, three kids – it has gone by in a flash.


As previously reported Suzanne is an attorney for Amoco Corporation. Faced with the impossible challenge of trying to compete as a mere $30 billion corporation, Amoco has agreed to merge with British Petroleum, a UK based oil company with $70 billion of revenues. This year Suzanne traveled to Beijing (twice), London, Hong Kong (twice) ad Zhuhai (twice). Part of the savings to justify merger will be that now they can send her to even more countries. Why don’t these oil companies ever have operations in Paris or Rome?


I tried this year to get more input from the kids so that they would have less to complain about after I sent the letter out. I gave them a questionnaire to fill out, but that resulted in a series of “I don’t knows,” or “okay,” so I resorted to personal interviews which gave me a variety of bored expressions to go with the same responses. But at least I tried.


Stephen is fourteen and is an 8th grader at Chute Middle School. Last year I reported that he was 5’6” tall, weighed 130 pounds and won the 100 meter race at Field Day. This year he is 5’6” and weighs 155 pounds and he won the 220 meter race at Field Day. I figure by the time he graduates from high school he will be the world’s fastest 5’6” sumo wrestler miler.


He continues to play soccer and chess and has a near-perfect academic record. I asked him again this year what he thought of the girls in his school but he said, “no comment.” I am not sure what that means, but I decided that if I need more I can use the same notoriously unreliable sources that my parents used – Sisters.


This summer he spent a week canoeing in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota with his church group while I took his two sisters to Arizona for the week. Suzanne thoroughly enjoyed both trips.


Nicole (“I just want a puppy”) is a 5th grader at Walker School. This year I started a new allowance concept in which I credited the kids’ allowance to an account that I maintain on the computer and I pay them 3% interest per month. We call it the Bank of Len and the objective was that I didn’t have to come up with cash every week and that the kids would see their interest mounting rapidly and be encouraged to save their money. When they need cash for something they take it out of the cash box and mark a withdrawl. If they get cash from a birthday or Christmas they can deposit that as well. I am not sure how this happened, but as I recapped the year, Stephen and Christie had about one hundred dollars and Nicole has over six hundred dollars. She’s like a cash vacuum cleaner. I was wondering if she might not be selling some of her Mom’s QVC jewelry (just the overstock) at school, but she swears she is not. Anyway, I keep reminding her of all the good things that we are doing for her now, so that maybe she will remember us in our twilight years.


Nicole is a good student and a great soccer player who has developed an interest in basketball. She is artistic and I guess you could say she has an “artistic” temperament. I have a nice collection of angry notes that she left for her Mom, which I rescued before her Mom had a chance to see them.


Christie (“Are we ever going to get a dog?”) is a 3rd grader at Walker School. In my questionnaire I asked the kids to “comment on Stephen, Nicole and Christie…” Christie wrote, “I like ME…” Well that’s a start. Christie is making progress in school this year – paying attention – sometimes 50 to 60 percent of the time – unless the stuff is really boring. We had told her teacher that we had stopped her from bringing in distracting items like Beanie Babies, but she told us that sometimes Christie gets distracted, “studying a scratch on her hand or her eraser.”


At Christie’s insistence we did buy two hamsters last year. They both died, but we bought two more. One of them died and we replaced it. Now we have eight, and that is after three more died and three were given away. We know keep them all in separate cages. I am sure there is an important life lesson they will take away from this year of the Hamster. I am not looking forward to eight more hamster funerals (we are running out of space in the garden.)


Christie is a good student too, despite our teasing her. She is a great friend and even when she is really, really annoying, it is hard to be angry with her (unless you are Nicole.) She plays soccer and, like her sister, is also very artistic. She still insists that when she grows up she wants my job at Engine Supply selling engines. She thinks it is more fun than being a lawyer, even though I remind her often that I am WORKING when I am away in Phoenix.


Well, it time to see if I can get this letter through the censors. It was a lot easier before everyone could read. They usually cut out most of my really good material.


We hope you all have a safe and joyful Holiday season.

Len, Suzanne, Stephen, Nicole & Christie



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