Life stories: 2001

 New home, for now [Previous ¦ Next]

My first year at "the Institute" or ESRI is a real rush. I find out why the speedy hiring, I had a petroleum show (the PUG or Petroleum User Group) to manage mid-February, with my boss' micro-management irking me as much as that in Dallas, the more things change... On the other hand that summer my first international show (the UC or User Conference) is also a real shock, as my boss cut me totally loose and I hosted almost a hundred petrol-heads among almost ten thousand geo enthusiasts - I knew that Esri co-founders Jack & Laura Dangermond had an almost cult following, but there I got it full on. I learned through our back neighbour - part of the terrible three with Jack and former petrol manager whose passing prompted my hiring - that Jack had a miserly youth (he shared ice cream cones wit hhis brother now running Dangermond Nurseries just up the road from Esri, next to Nader Auto Cars from yes, you guessed it, Ralph Nader's family) despite the fact they own a good part of the land, he was real trouble in school so much so that they sent him to Harvard just to get him out of town (that would put him @ Harvard Graphics Lab that lead to early computer mapping, and the rest as they say is history), and the he and Laura belonged to religious cult once (when asked a difficult question, Jack would bow his head and ruffle his hair, a latent reaction from days when he protected himself thusly when books were actually thrown at him). But that had a lasting effect on his company Esri - a tightly held private corporation with no shareholders, thus no-one knows its actual value, so don't believe any valuation - which they ran as their extensive family... at ~ 2,500 hirees then they considered to have that many children of sorts, and the 10,000 UC attendees their extended family. And Esri had truly a sound business model: software sales paid for R&D (meaning that as sales went up&down then software releases were simply brought up or delayed), maintenance revenue paid for salaries and infrastructure (this was rock solid after almost 40 yrs so that employment was super secure... so much so that sales people worked for salary sans commission), voila!

So come September we find ourselves a nice place 36 Hastings Street, as the house we kept five years in Calgary had appreciated enough, to give us a healthy down payment on a house here. I lay halfway up the north-facing hillside that was basically Redlands (the valley had the freeway from Palm Springs to LA), the mountains to the north were opposite straight up to Dripping Springs, Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead (a vertiginous drive straight up 9,000 feet to The Rim of the World, so called because when the valley was filled with smoke, mist of fog then standing along the ridge looked like you were at the rim of the world), and the next valley to the south had the railway and the remaining orange groves. The hillside itself used to be orange groves too, the odd garden showed remnant like our neighbours, and street ran along strike as their gutters were original irrigation ditches, and the streets straight uphill were original cart tracks to service the groves. You see families from Chicago and Montreal owned most of these, came down in the salubrious winter months and for the fall harvest, but left a skeleton staff of Chicanos to manage the orchards in the oppressive summer - oppressive that is before the days of air-conditioning. We learned that Orange county developed around two forms of a/c: cars in the fifties so that people didn't suffocate during traffic jams along the interstates to LA (yes even back then, that's why automatics were also introduced, so you could drive traffic jams without killing you clutch or developing varicose veins), and offices and homes so that that entire area could be opened up to offices that rapidly took over orchards - after the military industry left largely post-WWII (though bases still abound and it significant part of the economy, for ex. Iraqi invasion was staged from Camp Pendleton near San Diego, and troops were shipped via private charters from the airfield near Moreno Valley just south of Redlands) the entire area was taken over by secondary sector like insurance and finances, as the balmy climate attracted hordes from the cold & damp East Coast and blustery tornado-prone Mid West, and now a/c removed the last impediment of hottish summers.

We were however out-of-step with everyone it seemed: we went down to the beach in the winters that were both mild and clear skies while everyone went skiing in the mountains; and everyone went to the beach summers when the fog didn't lift till early afternoon and we went to the mountains where the air was cool & crisp. It was less than an hour down to Laguna Beach on a tollway, and the nearby Crystal Cove State Park (see 2015 update below) was our favourite hangout. In fact next to it was an old village of abandoned huts built during the Depression as people could live cheaply there of fishing, same as they did in Apple Valley above Yucaipa just next to Redlands: both uphill and along the coast the summers were bearable in the pre-a/c days. The California coast in fact has a 5 - 10 mile wide strip where the perennial coastal breezes (and fog) keep the temperature reasonable all year long, thus LA is very pleasant all year round but sais strip is called millionaires' alley as everyone want to live there and the pressure on real-estate makes that inside London look like nothing (and London is a small bubble w prices double the rest of the country, as everyone on earth wants to invest there, esp. new Chinese, Mid-eastern and Russian money). Out of step was also our desire to buy a car w manual gears, mostly because of the mountain roads (automatics didn't downshift at that time, to provide engine braking) and fuel consumption (even tho prices were half that in England), plus we didn't plan to live on freeways (see LA freeways below). That's a serious decision to only have one car, meaning that we didn't go to, say, 'the scene' in LA - neither did we in Texas or England it seems -and I walked to work until I bought a scooter to save myself time esp. in the summer heat. Sandra couldn't work again, so while we had Petra in Dallas, she went back to do an MA in Sociology at Cal State San Bernardino... Can you believe that the main street next to us extended down and across the valley to become the 30 turning parallel to the valley straight to San Bernardino? Now how handy is that! Little did we know, however, that it has good sides - I upgraded my ageing PC using CSUSB computer store and student discount - and bad ones - Sandra's distraction with studies while I was on the road had two effects: I reduced my overseas travel that proved to be the beginning of the end at ESRI for me, and Sandra didn't have attention - even tho she was studying mediation she excelled in - to, say, support me in my difficulties at ESRI that were all psych - perceptual but would lead to my ousting.

This was all well and good until a beautiful sunny & crisp morning in New York, yes, 9/11. While it didn't affect us then&then, except for the outpouring of jingoistic patriotism in a state where the military are still important, little did we know that was to be the beginning of the end, coincidentally and totally unrelated with similar if smaller 7/7 events in 2005 London.

LA freeways... : automatics and air-con(ditioning) were driven by So. Cal. freeway needs: stop&go traffic already in the 50s wore out clutches and joints; the intermittently largest parking lots in the world was subject to punishing heat summertimes! That is because it's at the seaward opening of a large E-W valley starting at  San Gorgonio (aka. Banning) Pass near Palm Springs: it constrains traffic to a handful of parallel freeways, which offer no respite of alternate routes in the case of a mishap or tie-up;  radial patterns in, say, Dallas or Houston allowed to move over to another branch in those cases. Also locals who spend time shuttling to work, shop or entertainment are called freeway flyers: we were privileged to have relatively stable jobs and local schools that avoided moving around for then driving to either as, say, Dallasites and Houstonians did.

2015 update: Crystal Cove village has indeed been restored in a private - government partnership program that turned half of the houses into swanky B&Bs crystalcovebeachcottages.com]

2016 Update: This site was retired in 2006 upon our return from California to England, as was now my next gen. website www.zolnai.ca.