When he moved out of the farmhouse and into an apartment at Fresno State, he declined to go home on the weekends like most of his friends. They would come back on Sunday night to find him shivering in a room without electricity, under a blanket, studying by candlelight. He purged his need for sleep and maternal love while fixating on careers that would take him far from the Central Valley—golf pro, at first, then actor, finally attorney. From that day forward, he aced every test, impressing his professors and ultimately earning himself an acceptance letter from UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law, then the most prestigious public university in the country, and a universe away from home. Another switch.
Kingsburg, heralded by a water tower welded into a giant Swedish teakettle, is now a town of some ten thousand. Despite the inevitable additions of Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Starbucks, the modest Swedish enclave has retained much of its 1950s charm. Polka music serenades mostly empty sidewalks downtown. Cookie-cutter horses and maps of Sweden, from which most of the original settlers hailed, decorate the sides of two-story buildings. Churches are ubiquitous. The locals chat with strangers about that “something in the water” that brought them back, or how, if the Sun-Maid factory had just been built a little farther south, “the Burg” would be the raisin capital of the world rather than its football rival Selma, just to the north. By the time he left for law school, Hillblom had internalized its core values of modesty, frugality, and, above all, hard work, more than most, but if he carried any nostalgia for his childhood home at all, that would remain hidden. He maintained his job at the cannery, loading peaches at night, into his first few weeks at Boalt Hall, but only because he was unwilling to lose his seniority. Helen picked him up in the morning, drove him to school, then drove him back after his last class as he slept in the car. But when the canning season ended, his mother and Kingsburg faded from memory. He would return only a few times over the next couple of years before abandoning both for nearly a quarter century.
At Boalt Hall, he flipped yet another switch. He let his hair grow out, traded the contact lenses for a pair of frames that dominated his small features, and swapped polo shirts and khakis for bell-bottoms and tight T-shirts. Like most young men his age, by the time he reached the marijuana- and tear gas–infused East Bay air, he was ready to be seduced by sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, but there were more pressing items on his agenda than the diversions of youth.
“He was odd-looking and odd-sounding,” recalls Steven Kroll, rolling a joint from a jar of homegrown weed. Kroll became Hillblom’s first friend outside of the Central Valley and would fill a number of important roles in Hillblom’s life, the first of which as his study partner in law school. “Larry had a twang.” He smiles. “Country hick is what you might think, which is what I was but I didn’t look it. . . .” A long inhale. “Larry and I were birds of a feather,” Kroll continues. “He was a wonderfully odd bird.”
Today Kroll resembles the actor Kirk Douglas. The only clues to his counterculture past are a mane of white hair pulled back into a ponytail and a “Legalize It!” flag that flickers over the front door of his home overlooking northern Lake Tahoe. In the fall of 1967, when he returned to Berkeley after a long hiatus in Europe and Africa, avoiding the draft in grand style—hitchhiking, cutting a record album and, ultimately, marrying a pretty Afrikaner named Joy—Kroll was a compact young man with a cute face framed by a thin beard and a passion for social justice. He had been raised in even more modest circumstances than Hillblom had; his elementary school was only one room. But there was an exoticism to him, a result both of his Jewish heritage and his world travels, that his friend lacked. Hillblom had not yet been outside the state of California. A shared sense of fearlessness that cemented the friendship. Hillblom had run for president of the cannery union, a quixotic quest to be sure but also an important protest against the old men who he thought ran the show for their own benefit more than for the workers like himself. Kroll had been an activist since the fifth grade, when he’d protested his school’s policy of throwing away uneaten lunches rather than donating them to a food bank.
What struck Kroll immediately, as it would so many others, was Hillblom’s physical oddness, which made his confidence that much more disarming. “He said he had had a car crash and you could see bumps in his forehead,” Kroll recalls. “He told me he had a metal plate from a bad car accident and his face did look like it could have been reconstructed. He had an odd baby face.” More idiosyncratic than his appearance were Hillblom’s many tics. Parting his already parted hair with his pinkie and constantly shaking his legs are the two that his friends mention the most, but he was also germophobic. For a time, he carried his own bottles of Lysol and ketchup everywhere.
But most unusual of all was Hillblom’s take on politics. Berkeley was then ground zero of virtually every countercultural scene, from the antiwar movement to the free speech movement to the percolating feminist and gay rights movements. Kroll’s brother, a Berkeley undergrad, had been arrested for occupying the administration building a couple of years before, and Kroll himself would file a lawsuit on behalf of the student body when Governor Ronald Reagan took to the airwaves to chastise the students as a bunch of spoiled brats and their professors as a pack of overindulgent parents. Larry, however, found the notion of political activism beside the point—if mildly amusing. In endless debates that simmered from the library to Kroll’s tiny house a few blocks from campus, Hillblom dismissed the tens of thousands of Americans being killed in Vietnam as irrelevant when compared to the number of those who died in highway accidents every year. He blasted sit-ins as a waste of time. But the brunt of his ridicule was reserved for the muses of the antiwar movement, Joan Baez and Jane Fonda. “Who cares what an actress thinks?” he would taunt Kroll and his fellow liberals. Right or wrong did not matter to the young man who still smelled of peaches. What counted was success. To achieve their goals, Hillblom chided, the anti-whatever activists would need to put down their guitars and their flowers and pick up the Little Red Book, the bible of the man that Hillblom considered the master of manipulation: the brutal Chinese dictator Mao Tse-tung.
“What he liked, I don’t know,” Kroll sighs, as an Italian speedboat attached to a water-skier slices across the glassy water beyond his deck. “You could say that perhaps he liked Chairman Mao’s cold analysis and power, as an observer of history. He was always fascinated by power, as who wouldn’t be? Kissinger always said it was an aphrodisiac.” Hillblom seemed to embrace anyone’s thinking as long as it was revolutionary. When he decided, unsuccessfully, to run for student president, he borrowed a slogan from the Black Panthers: Burn, Baby, Burn! “I think”—Kroll smiles—“he wanted to put forward that his answer was blow it up and start again, but he was talking more about beginning again than literally blowing something up. He was saying that the system was broke. How could anybody say that was wrong?”
But Hillblom’s campaign for student president went nowhere, mainly because he was a terrible public speaker, incapable of holding even his own attention for more than a few minutes before branching off on a tangent—and then another, and another, until any vestige of the original argument was irretrievable. He was far more successful at being subversive in the classroom, where, sitting near the back of the room, he could throw off the entire class with a non sequitur. At Boalt, many classes were conducted as Socratic dialogues; students were respected as much as their professors. Hillblom’s ideas veered so far from the mainstream, however, that he seemed to be reading from a different set of books. His corporations professor frequently kept the inscrutable farm boy after class to try to reason with him, even if Hillblom’s unconventional thinking—and his stubbornness—made this impossible. For their part, his fellow students rolled their eyes as they waited for the discussion to veer back toward the familiar.
“They were interested in making money and pleasing their parents and being out there,” Kroll recalls of their classmates with a sniff, “but they didn’t really want to b
e at law school. Larry and I adored reading cases for what they said and what they didn’t say, and the beauty of their logic. What made us special is that you couldn’t ask us what kind of law we were interested in. We were interested in the law itself, as a way of thinking.”
Kroll may have questioned his classmates’ motives, but he won enough of their votes to become class president. And Kroll’s grades earned him a place in the Order of the Coif, meaning that he was technically a notch above Hillblom academically. But when they studied at the library together, it was Hillblom, not Kroll, who would stroll over to the legendary professor Stefan Riesenfeld, a Holocaust survivor known for his legal tomes, and chat with him as though they were equals. As for grades and honor societies, Hillblom simply could not be bothered—being judged on such standards was beneath him. “It was always the argument that counted,” Kroll remembers, “not the particular legal principle. He saw all the facets of the problem.”
Hillblom did not dwell on hypotheticals; he had to work, too. By his second year, he’d accepted a full-time job as a courier for a small Los Angeles firm called MPA—short for Michaels, Poe & Associates. The firm’s active partner, David Poe, was a former insurance man who had convinced his employer to fly him back and forth between offices to deliver important documents rather than use the post office, which was notoriously slow and unreliable. Poe had started a fledgling courier operation serving the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Honolulu. Hillblom’s route was Oakland to LAX and back. Every afternoon, after class, he would drive around the Bay Area to pick up documents from insurance companies, law firms, and banks. He then stuffed the documents into suitcases, boarded a Western Airlines 727 to Los Angeles, and handed them off to another courier, who would give him bags to take back north. Hillblom studied on the plane, slept in the airport, and boarded the early flight to Oakland, arriving at Berkeley just in time for class. The schedule explained his disheveled appearance in morning classes—and, sometimes, his absence—but it had two huge advantages: since he was willing to crash at Kroll’s house or in his car on the weekends, Hillblom didn’t have to spend money on an apartment; and he met a lot of pretty young stewardesses and secretaries.
Kroll had a job too, slinging hash at Si’s Charbroiler on Ashby Avenue, Berkeley’s main drag. They both lived on caffeine and speed, rarely getting more then a few hours’ sleep. Hillblom appeared to be a nomad, his possessions fitting snugly inside a backpack, his hair perpetually dirty, his clothes always stained and frequently torn. For a while, he dyed his hair blond and he constantly fussed over both his weight and his beard, which he would trim whenever a pair of scissors ended up in his hands. He refused to buy a wardrobe befitting a law student because he had no intention of joining a law firm. With a prestigious degree in sight, Hillblom silently flipped another switch, set his sights on another goal unbeknownst even to his closest friend. By the time that Kroll assembled his small family for their move to Honolulu, where he had accepted an associate position in a corporate law firm after graduation, Hillblom would vanish amid the East Bay’s fog. The rumor was that he was sleeping in his car and foraging meals from a Dumpster.
Two
The Courier
Larry was the unbusiest guy I ever met. He would sleep a lot and watch TV a lot, but he was very laid-back. Larry taught me one great thing: that you could ignore 99 percent of problems and that they would eventually go away.
—Steven Kroll
He reappeared in the summer, materializing from a warm South Pacific trade wind at the front door of Kroll’s condominium because he needed a place to crash. Hillblom returned on a regular basis, first sleeping on Kroll’s patio; later, when Kroll’s parents, Max and Blanche, moved to Hawaii after a stint in the Peace Corps, Hillblom claimed their living room couch.
In 1969, no city in the world was as sexy as Honolulu, the sun-drenched paradise where Elvis Presley had played the ukulele in Blue Hawaii, and where Jack Lord now hurtled across rooftops in a tight blue suit, behind the badge belonging to Detective Steve McGarrett, the coolest character on television’s hottest series, Hawaii Five-O. Celebrities poured in to tape guest appearances, sip fruity cocktails out of coconut shells at Trader Vic’s, and be seen at Henry J. Kaiser’s Hawaiian Village Hotel. Shirtless young men dotted the surfline; tanned girls in bikinis awaited them on the beach under a perpetual sun. Within a year, brand-new Pan Am and United 747 jumbo jets stocked with prime rib and champagne would descend on the island’s gleaming new outdoor airport every few hours, as would Presley’s personal jet. The teenage Hillblom’s idol shimmied “Burning Love” at the International Center in a white-and-gold jumpsuit—a performance that would be relayed via satellite around the world. That such a place existed under the American flag defied belief.
MPA was his ticket there. But flying the company’s Oakland-Honolulu route, which he’d been unable to do during the school year, opened up more than the South Pacific. Secretaries who had turned the gangly courier down for dinner in San Francisco now jumped at the chance to spend a weekend in Honolulu. If Hillblom was traveling with enough documents, MPA bought two tickets rather than one, and he had an instant date. But Hillblom’s weekend trysts didn’t always pan out. Plenty of other couriers wanted to explore the land of Aloha. That he would have far more luck if he owned the company himself was obvious, but he had no experience starting a business and only a few thousand dollars left in the bank. More daunting, no major law firm or insurance company was likely to hand over their most important documents to a twenty-five-year-old in tight jeans and a torn Creedence Clearwater Revival T-shirt who slept in his car and was frequently jacked up on methamphetamines.
Yet Hillblom was not as out of synch with the corporate world as his appearance suggested. A year before, as tear gas from the antiwar protests had seeped into the hall where Hillblom and Kroll had taken their final exams, the rest of America was swinging back to the right. At the same moment that hippies were making their last stand in People’s Park and amid the muddy fields of Woodstock, Time magazine was declaring the resurgence of what it called “Middle Americans,” who could pass for today’s Tea Partiers. “They feared,” wrote Time’s editors, “that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over—the liberals, the radicals, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them. No one celebrated them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. . . . But in 1969, they began to assert themselves. They were ‘discovered’ first by politicians and the press, and then they started to discover themselves . . . in a murmurous and pervasive discontent, they sought to reclaim their culture.” The Middle Americans’ game-changing accomplishment had been the election of Richard Nixon to the White House the previous November. Hillblom, according to his friends, admired Nixon, though it’s doubtful that he actually took the time to vote for him. Nixon’s pro-business, pro-trade, antiunion conservatism dovetailed nicely with Hillblom’s emerging worldview. The young law school graduate could have had no idea that his new president’s penchant for cronyism would soon present a formidable challenge to his own ambitions.
If DHL’s official corporate history is to believed—and we really have no choice here, since only two men were there and both are long gone—the company was conceived during a chance encounter in a grocery store parking lot between Hillblom and MPA’s salesman, a silver-haired, gray-suited fifty-eight-year-old bon vivant named Adrian Dalsey. Dalsey was the opposite of Hillblom—an impeccably groomed smooth talker who lived in a suburb northeast of San Francisco with his loyal wife of thirty years; by his mid-fifties, the silver fox had spent enough money on other women that none remained for his and Marge’s golden years. Hillblom’s conservative politics and his work ethic should have endeared him to a man of Dalsey’s generation, but he lacked the older man’s finesse, meaning that their encounter was probably more intense than respectful. Customers who happened to push their shopping carts by that fateful meeting might have mistaken them for a wealthy father tole
rating a relentless son.
But they eventually agreed that their boss, Mr. Poe, had left a lot of low-hanging fruit unpicked. Insurers were not the only ones with time-sensitive documents. There was tremendous value to be captured if, for example, a shipping company could forward its bills of lading to customs in advance of a ship’s arrival, saving days or even weeks in port. Ditto for banks, which could only begin collecting interest on deposits once the original canceled check was received by the Federal Reserve, or for a law firm that needed a physical signature in order to effect a contract. Sending these documents via the postal service might take two weeks, if they reached their destination at all. At a time of double-digit interest rates and looming postal strikes, both men knew that the market for a fast, reliable courier service was huge—and growing. They understood that their skills complemented one another almost perfectly. And they disliked each other immensely.
“Larry and Dalsey had a visible acrimony,” Kroll tells me. “Dalsey liked to snipe and he had this, he was a bit unctuous, he had this—it wasn’t a lisp, but an impediment—speech pattern that was distinctive and a little bit patrician. He was a distinguished-looking guy, a ladies’ man, and thought himself so. He used to snipe at Larry in a scornful, patronizing way, and it annoyed you. So here you have these two people, with totally different worldviews and different functions within the company, at loggerheads, creating the nascent IBM—unknowingly.” Kroll pauses for a moment and smiles. “Or maybe not.”
King Larry Page 3
