What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars

by Jim Paul

  We went to a few more parties before deciding that we were going to join the Kappas Sigs. Little did we know that we weren’t supposed to be the ones deciding. This is how green I was: I walked down to the hall phone in Kincaid Hall, called the Kappa Sig house and literally asked for the president of the chapter, Herschel Robinson. Herschel got on the phone, and I said, “Herschel? This is Jim Paul.” Now Herschel Robinson didn’t know Jim Paul or Jim Hersha from Adam’s off ox. “My buddy Jim Hersha and I are going through rush and, frankly, we’re a little tired of going to all these parties — the Delts, the Sigma Nus, the Sig Eps, the SAEs. We’ve kind of had it. We’d like to come over to the house and pick up our pledge pins.” We went over to the house and, unbelievably, they gave us pledge pins. Now that I know how it is supposed to work, I can’t believe we got away with that. We had the chutzpah to invite ourselves to be Kappa Sigs instead of them inviting us. We simply didn’t know any better. We were breaking the rules and didn’t even know it.

  Is Gin a Drink or a Card Game?

  When you join a fraternity, they make you do goofy stuff. It’s a rite of passage thing. They make you shine shoes, clean windows, take out the garbage; just nickel and dime harassment stuff. One day I was at the house sitting on the floor shining shoes and two actives, Johnny Cox and Pat Greer, were playing gin. In the middle of one of their games, Greer had to go somewhere. Johnny Cox looked over and said,

  “Hey, pledge. Do you know anything about gin?”

  “I know that if you drink as much of it as I did last night, your head hurts the next day.”

  “No, you idiot. The card game. Do you know how to play gin?”

  “No sir, I don’t. But I’ve always wanted to learn.”

  Now remember, I learned how to play cards at Summit Hills Country Club when I was ten years old. I’d been playing gin for eight years.

  “Well, stop that shoe shining shit and come over here.”

  So, I went over to the table and he said, “All right, we’re going to play gin. And understand, pledge, that you play gin for money.”

  “Yes sir, I understand that. But I don’t have any money. I mean I really don’t have any money.”

  The truth of the matter was, I didn’t have any money. But I also wasn’t that worried that I didn’t have any money.

  Cox said, “I understand that. I understand. We’ll make it very, very cheap. You still have to play for money, but we won’t play for any real money. We’ll only play for 5 cents a point.”

  If you don’t know anything about playing gin, you wouldn’t know that 5 cents a point is real money. A nickel a point, $1 a box, $5 a game, means you’re probably playing somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 to $15 a game. That isn’t cheap. A game to 150 points might take 10 hands, 15 hands tops. Somebody’s going to get to 150 about every 20 or 30 minutes. So, now you’re playing at a rate of about $30 an hour. Now that is real money.

  Cox explained the rules and told me how the score is kept and so on. Then he dealt out the cards. I would gin, and I’d ask, ‘‘I’m sorry sir, I’ve forgotten. What do I do again when I don’t have a discard? When they all match?” And he’d go crazy. “Just lay ’em down pledge. Okay. Okay. You win.” He really didn’t think I knew a thing about what was going on.

  We played for seventeen hours before he said, “That’s it! I quit!” I won $612, which in 1962 was a whole lot of money. Tuition was $81 a semester, so $612 was big money. He didn’t have $612 but he gave me $50 and owed me the rest. For the remainder of my pledge-year I didn’t have to shine any more shoes, clean garbage cans or anything. He’d get other pledges to shine the shoes, and then I would credit him 25 cents a pair. Whenever the other actives wanted me to do something, I’d say, “Fine, write it down. Johnny, I’m supposed to clean the garbage cans. What do you think that’s worth? Two dollars? Okay, fine, subtract two dollars.” Somebody else would have to do the garbage cans and I’d sit in there and play gin with Cox. That was another lesson in working smart instead of working hard.

  Not having to do any more grunt work as a pledge sort of set me apart from the other pledges. I was also beginning to think of myself as a little different from most people; I succeeded at just about anything I did. I had followed the rules of the game in freshman English and succeeded. Then I had unknowingly broken the rules for entering a fraternity but still succeeded. I was a little different.

  Very Little Class

  I was beginning to think of myself as a little better than other people. I had a whole semester when I didn’t even buy a book and rarely went to class. I’d get up around 10 a.m. and go to The Grille in the Student Union building. That’s where everybody went between classes. I’d sit and socialize, play hearts (another card game), talk to the women, make dates and read The Kentucky Colonel, the school newspaper.

  We not only met girls and made dates at The Grille, some of us met our wives-to-be there. I broke the rules and still succeeded in that arena, too. When I met Pat, I was dating two other girls, Sandra and Debbie, on a regular basis. I had just finished reading Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck. The main character in the book is a guy named Danny. He and his friends are poor and lived up in the hills outside of Monterey, California. One of the themes of the book is that people can rationalize anything. For example, when a friend comes into some money, Danny steals it and rationalizes that he’s actually doing the friend a favor by stealing it. “If I don’t take the money away from my friend, he is going to use it to buy some wine, get drunk and maybe even burn his house down. It’s just awful that he has this money. To be his friend, I need to steal the money from him and save him from himself.”

  I liked this book so much that I bought three more copies and gave one to Pat, one to Sandra and one to Debbie. That was a mistake — a big mistake. Even though they were in different sororities, they used to meet in The Grille with a few other girls and have lunch. And one fateful day, all three girls were sitting there with the same damn book: “Gee, it’s interesting you’re reading that book.” “Yeah, the guy I’m going with gave it to me.” “Oh, really?” “Me, too.” “Me, too.” “ Who might that be?” Little did I know that when it came to dealing with women, you shouldn’t use the same modus operandi if you are going to go out with more than one of them at the same time. Why? Because women talk to each other, and if they find out you’re treating each of them the same way, none will feel special and all of them will dump you. Luckily for me, Pat didn’t dump me.

  I just had this knack for doing things the “wrong” way but still succeeding. My first fraternity roommate was a guy by the name of Jim Dillon. He skipped a lot of classes too, but he flunked out. Almost anybody who ran around with me flunked out. Hersha flunked out. Dillon flunked out. Dirken flunked out. A lot of people flunked out. But I didn’t flunk out. This just reinforced my view that I was a little different and somehow a little better than everyone else. A few other guys tried to live with Dillon and me, but nobody could handle it. The reason they couldn’t live with us is that we didn’t do what students are supposed to do: go to school. We’d stay up all night, drink beer and talk. After we took our dates home we’d get back to the room around 11 p.m. and then we’d sit and talk and drink beer until early in the morning. Well, you can’t really stay up until 3 a.m. and make an 8 a.m. class. So we didn’t go to class very often.

  Teachers don’t like it when you don’t go to class. And if you don’t ever go, sooner or later you’re going to have a problem. The first semester I lived in the fraternity house I ended up making every grade Kentucky had: A, B, C, D, E (E was an F at Kentucky), W (withdraw) and I (incomplete). I got them all.

  Even though I rarely went to economics class, I made an A in the course. I understood it. The professor would talk about marginal propensity to consume and I’d say to myself, “I get it. That’s a concept I can understand.” I could look at those supply and demand curves and say, “Yeah, okay, I understand that. That makes sense. Okay, we’re going to move sup
ply here . . . yep, price will go down . . . yep, I understand.” I didn’t even own an economics book. I literally borrowed a book the night before the economics final, sat down and read the whole book for the first time. I went in and made an A because I understood it. I can remember taking the test thinking, “Okay, that question . . . he’s talking about marginal . . . I can see it . . . okay, the chart looks like this . . . it’s on the left side of the page . . . it should be somewhere around page 250 and what does it say?” I could remember exactly where it was, what it looked like and what it said, and then I just wrote it down. I’m not claiming to have a photographic memory, but for that class I did. The professor hated it because I rarely went to class and I always made As on his tests. It really ticked him off. I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing, but I still did well in school.

  I made the B in History and the C, D and E in I can’t remember what, and I made the W in Philosophy. W is withdraw from the class with no grade and it’s beautiful because you don’t get a bad grade. It’s like you didn’t even sign up for the course. God only knows why I signed up for Philosophy. I hated it! It made no sense to me at all. It was all left field stuff: “I think, therefore I am.” Who cares? It was like baseball to me: not very practical, so I had no problem withdrawing from Philosophy.

  A Glimpse of the Future(s)

  My incomplete course that semester was statistics. Although I liked the professor, Dr. Christian, I didn’t like statistics; it was too hard. One day Doc Christian called me and said, “There’s a friend of mine over here that you need to meet. I think you’d like what he does for a living. You’re suited for this game.” The old friend was Horace “Jack” Salmon, a UK graduate and the sales manager of a regional commodity futures specialty brokerage firm in Louisville, Kentucky.

  I didn’t expect to know what he was talking about. I didn’t know futures from past participles, but I respected Dr. Christian and thought, “Who knows? Maybe I’ll like what Jack Salmon does for a living.” So I went over to Christian’s office to meet Salmon. Jack sat there and talked about soybean prices going up and going down, weather, Japan, acreage, yields, the excitement of the markets and how you either make a lot of money or you lose a lot. The money thing got my attention.

  “You can make money doing this?”

  “You can make a lot of money.”

  Oops! That’s what I wanted to do: make a lot of money. When people asked me what I was going to do when I got out of school, my answer was, “Make a lot of money.” “Well, what are you going to do?” ‘‘I’m going to be in business.” I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I never thought about what I was going to do; it wasn’t what you did for a living, it was how much you got paid for it.

  Out of School

  I finally graduated in August 1965. Yes, August. I had to go to summer school to pass second semester freshman accounting. I hated accounting. Accounting to me was “find the missing nickel” bullshit. My attitude was: “I don’t care where the nickel is. Pay someone to find it. Better yet, I’ll give you a nickel. Just stop asking me to find the one that’s missing.” In August 1965 the war in Southeast Asia was rolling. I had signed up for ROTC in 1961 when I was a freshman and Vietnam was just starting. I figured that if it grew, I’d rather go as an officer than as a grunt. I had tried grunt and didn’t like it. Officer was better. Officer was like a member of the country club; grunt was the guy who carried the bag. I knew I’d rather be the one telling the guy where to put the mortar than the guy carrying the mortar, so I signed up for Air Force ROTC. Then a friend told me that I could always go to Officer’s Candidate School (OCS) once I had my college degree. Why should I do four years of this Mickey Mouse ROTC stuff when I could do six months of OCS later, and only if I had to? So I quit ROTC. That was a mistake — big mistake. True, OCS was only six months but there were four more months of intensive training before you got in. And those ten months made ROTC look like a picnic.

  After graduation I went on a couple of interviews but couldn’t get a job offer. I was so 1-A nobody would hire me. (1-A was the draft board’s term for being prime draft material.) It was obvious the only job offer I was going to get was to serve my country. There was nothing wrong with me; I wasn’t flat-footed, I had 20/20 vision and I wasn’t married. The draft was in full force and this was after the lottery so they were taking everybody. If you were 1-A, you were going — unless you came up with something really tricky.

  Since I couldn’t get a real job, I had to move back in with my parents and try to get a part time job while I dealt with getting into OCS. I went down to The White Horse, a very nice dinner club where I had worked when I was in high school. I introduced myself to the owner, which was kind of audacious for a former bus boy. But, once again, I didn’t know any better. I said to the owner, “Okay, here’s my problem. I’m going to go into the military sooner or later, but in the meantime I’d like a job. I don’t want to be a bus boy. I’m 22 years old and a college graduate, so I don’t want to be a bus boy. I really don’t want to be a waiter either. I think I’d like to be a bartender.” To my surprise he said, “Okay.”

  I promise you, there is another society out there in America that is asleep right now. This society is made up of the “night people.” It’s people who work as waiters, waitresses and all the other people that serve the entertainment and restaurant industry. They don’t live in the daytime; they live at night. Within the night people’s society, a bartender is very high on the totem pole. It’s the same as being a doctor or a lawyer with day people. With night people, the head bartender at the right restaurant is right up there near the top. Within the night people’s society, the head bartender at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York is a dude. All the waitresses, waiters and bus boys think he’s neat. The only guy cooler than the head bartender is the maitre d’. So if you’re the number two bartender, you’re not far off the top. This was like being a Charlie Robkey among the night people. All of a sudden I found myself, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, very high up in the night people’s society. I had thirty-year old waitresses who thought I was cute, and when they found out that I was going away to war, “Ohhhhhh.”

  You’re in the Army Now

  Meanwhile I was having a problem getting into OCS, and the draft board was closing in. Why the problem? Well, because I had two misdemeanors on my record, both of which were related to spring breaks in Florida. One misdemeanor was for using a hotel’s wooden deck chairs as firewood for a bonfire on the beach in Daytona. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.) The other was for breaking into an outdoor display case in Ft. Lauderdale to try to steal a mounted sailfish to take back to the frat house. (I can’t even recall if that seemed like a good idea at the time.)

  So, when I tried to get into OCS and a question on the application form asked: “Have you ever been arrested?” I had to put “Yes.” To get into OCS, I had to go to Washington. My father knew a federal judge and Pat’s father was best friends with a congressman from Tennessee. So I went to Washington and met with the judge and the congressman. The federal judge was nice to put on the application, but it was the congressman who got the job done. This is when I learned that having hooks works. Knowing the right person to get something done will get it done. He said to me, “You sure you don’t want to be in the Navy? The Navy owes me big. I could do the Navy real easy.” (The deal was: in the Army’s college option OCS when you graduated and got commissioned, you only had to serve two years. The Navy was three; the Air Force was four. I was very interested in doing this in as short a time as possible.) I said, “No sir, I really want to be in the Army.” The congressman just picked up the phone, called the Army and bingo — I got in the Army OCS. Now that’s what I call having hooks.

  Basic training and OCS are a lot like the pledge games in the fraternity. They test you by giving you things to do in impossibly short time frames. They do it to see what happens to you when you get stressed out. That’s the game: “Let’s give this guy an im
possible situation and see what happens.” It’s like weeding out students with freshman English. If you don’t know it’s a game and how to play it, you will stress out. Their game plan is to get as many people as possible to quit in as short a time as possible. If you’re focusing on this thing like it’s really serious, then the training is very stressful. If you’re focusing on it like: “This is a game and all these clowns are doing is trying to drive me crazy,” it isn’t hard. I had no problem with it. It was difficult in the sense that it was physically demanding, but it wasn’t hard psychologically. I knew it was a game, and I understood their rules and their motivation.

  The top 20% in the class were invited to stay at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland to be instructors for the new Ordinance OCS Program. Being an instructor is a great way to learn public speaking, because you’re in front of a bunch of officer candidates who have to be there and you outrank them. You don’t have to be worried that they’re going be unhappy with the job you’re doing. You’re the Lieutenant, and they’re the candidates. You’re in total control. So if they make one wrong move, you shoot them. Since then I’ve spoken to audiences of fifty or more people over a hundred times and I love it.

  After I graduated from OCS and became an OCS instructor, I had to go through Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) school. The first day of MOS school, a general came in and talked about the course. Then he said that at the end of the course they would recognize an Honor Graduate based on the highest academic standing and the highest this and the highest that.