I said, “By the way, dear, I tried to open that last night and couldn’t. Have you changed the combination?”
She was hauling papers out and did not turn. “Didn’t I tell you? The patrol asked me to change it after that burglar scare last week.”
“Oh. You’d better give me the new numbers or some night I’ll have to phone one of you at a ghastly hour.”
“Certainly.” She closed the safe and put a folder on the table we used for conferences.
Miles cleared his throat and said, “Let’s get started.”
I answered, “Okay. Darling, if this is a formal meeting, I guess you had better make pothooks . . . Uh, Wednesday, November eighteenth, 1970, 9:20 P.M., all stockholders present-put our names down-D. B. Davis, chairman of the board and presiding. Any old business?”
There wasn’t any. “Okay, Miles, it’s your show. Any new business?”
Miles cleared his throat. “I want to review the firm’s policies, present a program for the future, and have the board consider a financing proposal.”
“Financing? Don’t be silly. We’re in the black and doing better every month. What’s the matter, Miles? Dissatisfied with your drawing account? We could boost it.”
“We wouldn’t stay in the black under the new program. We need a broader capital structure.”
“What new program?”
“Please, Dan. I’ve gone to the trouble of writing it up in detail. Let Belle read it to us.”
“Well. . . okay.”
Skipping the gobbledegook-like all lawyers, Miles was fond of polysyllables-Miles wanted to do three things: (a) take Flexible Frank away from me, hand it over to a production-engineering team, and get it on the market without delay; (-but I stopped it at that point.) “No!”
“Wait a minute, Dan. As president and general manager, I’m certainly entitled to present my ideas in an orderly manner. Save your comments. Let Belle finish reading.”
“Well…all right. But the answer is still `no.'”
Point (b) was in effect that we should quit frittering around as a one-horse outfit. We had a big thing, as big as the automobile had been, and we were in at the start; therefore we should at once expand and set up organization for nationwide and world-wide selling and distribution, with production to match.
I started drumming on the table. I could just see myself as chief engineer of an outfit like that. They probably wouldn’t even let me have a drafting table and if I picked up a soldering gun, the union would pull a strike. I might as well have stayed in the Army and tried to make general.
But I didn’t interrupt. Point (c) was that we couldn’t do this on pennies; it would take millions. Mannix Enterprises would put up the doughÄwhat it amounted to was that we would sell out to Mannix, lock, stock, and Flexible Frank, and become a daughter corporation. Miles would stay on as division manager and I would stay on as chief research engineer, but the free old days would be gone; we’d both be hired hands.
“Is that all?” I said.
“Mmm. . . yes. Let’s discuss it and take a vote.”
“There ought to be something in there granting us the right to sit in front of the cabin at night and sing spirituals.”
“This is no joke, Dan. This is how it’s got to be.”
“I wasn’t joking. A slave needs privileges to keep him quiet. Okay, is it my turn?”
“Go ahead.”
I put up a counterproposal, one that had been growing in my mind. I wanted us to get out of production. Jake Schmidt, our production shop master, was a good man; nevertheless I was forever being jerked out of a warm creative fog to straighten out bugs in production-which is like being dumped out of a warm bed into ice water. This was the real reason why I had been doing so much night work and staying away from the shop in the daytime. With more war-surplus buildings being moved in and a night shift contemplated I could see the time coming when I would get no peace to create, even though we turned down this utterly unpalatable plan to rub shoulders with General Motors and Consolidated. I certainly was not twins; I couldn’t be both inventor and production manager.