by Ted Cruz
My new business model was simple: I was going to hire other kids to join me knocking on doors. I’d pay them $5 an hour, plus a small production bonus. And then I’d pocket the difference between the business costs and the commission we’d earn. I advertised, running an ad in the “Green Sheet” classifieds, and hired a couple of other kids.
My first two employees were brother and sister. And, sadly, my business model was not destined for success. Neither of them worked very hard. They would lackadaisically knock on doors, and they set up only a few leads. I kept paying them, but they were generating very little. By the end of the summer, I had broken even; the leads I had generated myself just paid for the hourly wages I had committed to my employees.
At one point their mother began yelling at me, “You’re working them too hard! It’s unreal how hard you’re making them work!”
“But they’re doing the same thing I’m doing,” I replied. “They’re knocking on doors on one side of the street. I’m on the other.”
She was furious that I would expect actual work from her children. It was a good lesson that not everyone shared the work ethic my parents had endeavored to teach me.
I guess it’s fair to say that I was always a driven individual—but that’s not to say I always went in the right direction. Sometimes I drove myself and others right into trouble. For example, in high school I was suspended from school for several days for going to a party, drinking, and smoking pot (something I experimented with as a teenager before wising up).
My father was convinced that I had just gotten in with bad kids who were leading me astray. My mother, on the other hand, held me firmly responsible for my own actions. “Apparently you don’t know your son very well,” she said. “I’m sure he was leading the effort for whatever happened.”
My best friend in high school lived two houses down from me. On the surface, Dwight Odelius and I could not have been any more different. He was an artiste, a gifted pianist and fiction writer who attended one of Houston’s magnet schools, the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. A year and a half older than me, Dwight had long, floppy hair, wore lots of black, and could ride a unicycle.
He was razor-smart, and something of a hippie. Although most of his friends were politically liberal, Dwight was not. He had been adopted at birth, by wonderful parents who gave Dwight a nurturing home, and so being pro-life to him was always very personal. He was immensely grateful that his very young birth mother had chosen to give him up for adoption, to allow him to live, rather than making another choice.
We both lived on a small lake on the outskirts of Houston, and Dwight and I would take our rowboat onto the lake at night to catch bullfrogs. Doing so is simple: You shine a light along the shore, and their eyes glisten in the light. As long as you keep the light locked on the eyes, the frog won’t move. And then you use a frog gigger (a long pole with a clamp on the end) to catch them.
We’d also mess with the occasional alligator, and once caught a live cottonmouth snake, which didn’t make Dwight’s dad very happy.
Dwight and I got into a fair amount of trouble. We set up secret intercoms connecting our houses, and we’d both sneak out late at night, push his car silently down his driveway, and head to parties, doing our very best to pick up girls. Sometimes we were successful, other times not so much. We’d also pull teenage pranks, including at Christmastime taking the lights from several neighborhood houses and then surreptitiously decorating another house with them.
Sometimes the consequences of my teenage hijinks were more serious. Sophomore year in high school, I went to spend the night at my friend David’s place. David’s family went to our church, and his parents really struggled to pay the bills. At night, the two of us used to sit in the dark living room of his apartment with a pellet gun and shoot the rats that would come out in the kitchen.
That evening, at about midnight, David and I snuck out the window to head to an arcade down the street. We hung out and played foosball until it closed at 2 a.m. At that point, we were standing in the parking lot debating what to do next when a car of four boys drove up. David and I were both fifteen, and all four of the boys were older, probably seventeen or eighteen. They were drunk, and I guess the two of us looked like easy prey.
The four of them jumped out of the car, walked up to us, and proceeded to beat the heck out of us. One of them bent my arm behind my back, slammed my head onto the back of a car, and began punching me repeatedly in the face. My shoulder was nearly dislocated, and one of my contact lenses ended up being knocked out of my eye, ending up somewhere on that car.
Fortunately, they were drunk enough that David and I were able to twist ourselves away. He ran in one direction and I ran in the other. I went to David’s house, and when he didn’t return, I ended up waking up David’s parents and telling them what happened.
David had run to my sister Miriam’s house a few blocks away. Miriam was my half sister, the eldest of my father’s two daughters from his first marriage. Miriam’s husband, Joe, was a difficult character who had spent much of his life in and out of jail. When David woke them up to tell them I was missing (he thought they had taken me and thrown me in the car), Joe got a shotgun and a baseball bat and took off in his car looking for me.
Things could have gotten ugly. Eventually David called home and talked to his parents, and everything was sorted out.
I spent the rest of that night at Miriam’s. The next day I walked over to my parents’ office, which was next door. When my father looked up he saw my black-and-blue face. “What happened?” he asked.
I recounted the tale. He thought about it a moment and said, “Well, I guess you learned your lesson.” And he looked down and went back to work.
My mom had a different reaction. She broke into tears, scared for what might have happened.
Between the two, my dad’s reaction was much easier to handle.
Midway through junior year, I transferred to Second Baptist High School, which had far more rigorous academic standards than Faith West. It was a small Christian school; my graduating class was just forty-three students.
In my senior year at Second Baptist, I again tested the authorities. Our school’s archrival was Northwest Academy. On the day of our homecoming, the basketball players at Northwest came to our school and stole our school flag.
Outraged, I assembled a group of three other students to avenge this wrong. We drove to Northwest Academy in my car, a 1978 green Ford Fairmont given to me by my grandfather. We called it the Green Bomb. And it was a wonderful car to give a teenage boy because it was basically a tank, a very large hunk of metal that got about ten miles to the gallon.
That night my buddies and I picked up thirty-six rolls of toilet paper, several cans of shaving cream, toothpaste, and baby shampoo and then we wrapped the entire building of Northwest Academy in toilet paper. With the shaving cream, we drew funny faces on each of the windows of the school bus. We even brought a thank-you card, which we signed in red lipstick with the words, “It’s not nice to steal,” and managed to make our way into the gym to leave it in the center of the basketball court. All in all, it was rather mild stuff as pranks went. Or so I thought.
When we were done, a number of janitors who were cleaning the place spotted us and began running after us. We jumped into the Green Bomb, and I took off driving like a bat out of hell, tires screeching, racing through the neighborhood as fast as I could. The janitors got in a car, too, and started chasing us and yelling out of their windows.
As it so happened, the car stereo was playing my friend Joel’s tape of “Ride of the Valkyries,” Wagner’s fast-paced theme. To have the anthem of Apocalypse Now playing during a car chase made things pretty surreal.
I then decided to shut off the lights to make it harder to follow us, which was really dumb because it was also now harder to see. At one point my car jumped a curb, landed on someone’s front lawn. and hit a fire hydrant. Now in a panic, I pulled out across these poor people’s fr
ont lawn, trenching it with my tires. I still couldn’t lose the car behind us.
Finally I came up with what I believed to be another clever plan. “Okay, we’re going to stop,” I told my nervous passengers. “When we stop, they’ll stop, too. Then when they get out to come after us, we’ll slam on the gas and take off again.”
Everyone seemed to think this was a good plan. So we stopped. As expected, the other car pulled up behind us. Then we waited. And waited some more. No one exited the other vehicle.
“What are they doing?” one of my friends asked.
Peering at them through my back window, I realized what a mistake I’d made. The janitors were writing down my license plate number. And then they left.
The next day I returned to my school. We had a big pep rally planned that day, and while all of the students were gathered, they made an announcement. I was to report to the principal’s office.
Principal Doss looked at me from across his desk. “Ted, do you drive a ’78 Ford Fairmont with license plate such-and-such?” He was using an old attorney’s trick—never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.
Everything he was doing was designed to intimidate me. But even then I wasn’t someone easily intimidated by those in authority. I also tried very hard to be honest.
“Yes, sir, I do,” I replied.
“Were you by any chance at Northwest Academy last night?” Another question whose answer he already knew.
“Yes, sir, I was.”
“Okay,” he said, leaning forward. “Tell me who was with you.”
There was no way I was ratting out my friends.
“I’m sorry, sir, I’m not going to do that,” I said. “I’ll admit to what I have done, and I’ll face the consequences, but I’m not going to give you the names of anyone else who was involved.”
He seemed to expect that response from me. “All right then,” he said. He then reached into the drawer of his desk and pulled out a letter that he had already typed and signed. The letter was addressed to Princeton University recommending that my admission to the college be rescinded.
This was an eye-opener for me. Just a few months before, I had been thrilled to be accepted to Princeton. For a boy whose father had washed dishes for fifty cents an hour, going to Princeton was a dream come true. No one in my family had ever imagined going to an Ivy League college. When I received my acceptance letter, I couldn’t believe I was going to get to go to the school where F. Scott Fitzgerald studied before writing The Great Gatsby and where George Kennan studied before writing the “Long Telegram,” which set our country on a course for winning the Cold War.
But now I was faced with an altogether different letter—one with the potential to keep me away from the school I had worked so hard to attend.
“Do you want me to send this letter?”
I answered truthfully, “No, sir, I do not.”
“Well then, tell me who was with you.”
I wasn’t sure if he was serious, but I wasn’t going to budge in any event. “Sir, I’ve already told you, I think it would be in poor character and contrary to my integrity to give you those names, and I’m not going to do so.”
He said, “Fine, then we’re calling your father.”
“Okay. Here’s his number.” I wrote it on a piece of paper.
He reached over to his telephone and dialed my dad, and described his version of what had transpired. Then he handed the phone to me.
“What’s going on?” my father asked. “Look, you’ve got three months left; just graduate from high school and go to college.”
I said, “He’s asking me to give the names of others who were involved in this. I won’t do it. It just isn’t right.”
My dad thought about that for a moment. I hoped he’d say the right thing, which, of course, he did. He said, “Well, stick to your guns, son. I’m proud of you.”
I told the principal I wasn’t going to change my mind, and that he could send that letter if he wanted to (although it occurred to me that Second Baptist would probably not really want to force the rescission of the first Ivy League acceptance in the school’s short history). He put the letter back in his desk and called in an assistant. “Go get Joel, Luke, and Patrick,” the other three boys who were with me.
Clearly, the principal already had his suspects. As it turned out, and I subsequently learned, one of the other three had confessed earlier to the basketball coach.
The whole effort in the principal’s office then was simply a power play to get me to buckle. He knew the answer to everything he’d asked me, but he was determined to have me rat out my fellow students to teach me a lesson.
When my three conspirators came into the office, the principal asked all of them if they were there with me. Each replied, “Yes.”
The principal then began to chew each of us out, for our immaturity and putting the school in a bad light. Our basketball coach was also in the room, watching.
“Coach, is there something you want to say?” the principal asked the coach, once he took a breath.
“Sure,” he replied.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said, looking intensely at the four of us. “But I’m sure glad you did,” he said laughing loudly. The principal just glared.
The saga ended with each of us going to the principal at Northwest Academy and offering effusive, over-the-top apologies. They were not entirely sincere.
My brushes with the authorities did not make things easier on my parents during what was a difficult time for them. My dad had been dealing with the slow unraveling of the company into which he and my mother had put their heart and soul since returning to Houston.
My parents’ company was supposed to bring together their unique skills to create a niche for themselves in the oil business. To search for pockets of oil, companies used dynamite to send out sound waves underground. Those waves bounced off various densities of rock below the surface and sent signals back to the surface, creating a chart of numbers that could be deciphered into a virtual map of vast underground terrain—showing where there were rocks and where there were pockets that might contain oil or natural gas. Often the data coming back were not easy to decipher, so my parents would run it through their customized computer programs and print out what looked like a slice of the earth. (Back then, it was all two-dimensional; today, 3-D seismic mapping is the industry norm.) A self-trained geophysicist, my dad analyzed these maps and assessed which pockets were potentially the most fruitful for exploration.
In the beginning they were quite successful. At its peak the company had had about twenty-five employees. And for a number of years, when oil prices were high and oil companies were flush with money and looking to expand, my parents’ company did well.
When business went well, my parents put their energy into church and Christian charities. My dad served on the board of the Star of Hope, a wonderful nonprofit that ministers to and cares for the homeless in Houston and helps them get back on their feet. He also served on the Texas board of the Religious Roundtable, a national organization that helped mobilize millions of people of faith to turn out and elect Ronald Reagan president in 1980.
Just a few years ago, I learned something new about that time. My dad was in town and I brought him to our church, First Baptist Church of Houston. After church, I was introducing him to several friends, and one of them, a deacon, recounted a story:
“Ted, I actually met your dad thirty years ago, although he probably doesn’t remember it. At the time, I was a young associate at a law firm, and he hired the firm to give him tax advice because he wanted to give away over fifty percent of what he was earning. It made a real impression on me.”
My dad had never told me that.
For a time, business was good. But then, in the late 1980s, circumstances beyond my parents’ control conspired against them. Ironically, President Reagan had an inadvertent hand in their company’s demise since one of the ways he won the Cold War was by strengtheni
ng the dollar, which caused the price of oil to plummet. As Reagan intended, this had a crippling impact on the Soviet Union, which depended on the sale of oil abroad to sustain its economy. But the policy also had a severe domestic impact, particularly in Texas, and most of all in Houston, which at that time was very much a one-industry town.
When oil collapsed from $30 a barrel to less than $10, the city was devastated. Whole skyscrapers were all but vacant. Clients that used to regularly hire my parents’ company for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, overnight went down to zero.
The oil business has always been cyclical, and so my parents tried to ride out the downturn. They tapped their personal savings and funneled it all into the company, but to no avail.
On one somber Monday morning, my dad was forced to lay off 19 of his 25 employees. These were people who had spouses and kids and mortgages. When Dad came home that night, he looked like he had been beaten with a two-by-four. I’ve never seen him so unhappy. What made matters even more poignant was that some of his employees were so loyal to him they refused to leave. They would say, “Raf, we’re not going anywhere. We’re staying here with you. We can make this work.” He had to argue with them. “Listen, you’ve got a wife. You’ve got kids. I don’t have the money to pay you. You have to go somewhere else to feed your children.”
Ultimately the company went broke and my parents went bankrupt. It was a full-bore disaster. Whatever other money my parents had had been invested in real estate, but when oil prices plummeted, so did Texas real estate prices. We lost our home and had to rent a smaller and cheaper place in the suburbs. To keep us afloat, my dad worked job to job—as a salesman, a financial planner, whoever was hiring. But my parents were in their fifties, which made it even harder for them to find jobs.
In my mother’s case, she was too experienced for most jobs she applied for. She ended up stripping almost everything off her résumé—even her Rice degree—so she could get hired in an entry-level job just to pay the bills. She had worked so hard in her life to achieve in a male-dominated business, and now she had to start all over again. Everything she had struggled to do for so many years was now a hindrance.
