We took a picture of Ron in a pith helmet once. He really was suited for it. He wore these Captain Spaulding the Great Adventurer khaki docker type shorts too. He was like the last of the great white hunters. His world gets smaller every day.
Ron was a guy I judged color for, did data entry for, and basically acted as Women’s Opinion Consultant. In dark-rimmed squared glasses, he ran a T-shirt printing business and was perhaps the plainest, most Average White Dadlike, skinniest, most bland conformist I’ve ever been around in my life. His taste drove me to despair. But there was a core of good in there.
He had prejudices that leaked out of every corner of his conversations, about all kinds of people, and yet, that seemed to be just baggage from a super-white upbringing amid “NICE” people. He could be the most paranoid near-racist in one statement, and straight afterward, sponsor a Cambodian woman for a green card to work in his shop, and buy her Christmas presents. And actually mean it. He was the Walnut Creek American Guy. He was oblivious to his flaws, and as innocent as he was impossible.
Walnut Creek is a place where you smile while tippy-toeing. A place where you have NICE neighbors, who tell you exactly how high your hedge should be, or your roof, and ask you politely to remove the tree limbs from the tree of yours that’s growing on their side of the fence and then everything’s hunky-dory again. Until someone calls their lawyer. Ron was the kind who’d never let it get that far, heavens no, he believed in all things in moderation.
I redid his arcane database, which frightened me. It was still on a green screen CRT with white courier type. He feared losing valuable data so much that he refused to buy commercial databasese that might not cover the same fields he wanted covered on his ancient computer. He got confused by cutting and pasting being much the same as copying and pasting when I tried to describe what a buffer field was. He was not a luddite, he would swear, he just believed in moderation. But besides typing I had other duties.
Too cheap to buy a lawyer (which was probably why he lasted so long in Walnut Creek), I was to research contracts and create some for him. Here he preferred risking his whole legal commitment with vendors like The Discovery Channel on the expertise of a legal secretary/artist. That was a wierd, fun goose chase of a project for a while.
But mostly I gave opinions.
“What do you think of this teal rather than this midnight blue?,” was his kind of question for me. It was obvious to me each time that the result was a hair’s breadth of difference from a sales point of view. When there was an actual sale-ability issue, I’d tell it like it was, and it would make no difference to him.
He would solicit opinions from us all, screen printers and trained artists alike, agonize over it for two days, and come back to make the same damn artless decision of his own anyway every time. In the Amadeus of the world of color, pieces frequently had “too many notes!” for him.
He would agonize over artistic content level, shapes and print-detail and quality, and then he’d choose to print some lame artist who cribbed everything she knew from Matisse and tweaked it to look Jamaican. Why? Because he knew there was buzz around her in the cheap office-art world and it would SELL.
He wasn’t all nerdiness: His most redeeming statement was about the Talking Heads: “Who told them they could break up!!!???!!!” he demanded.
To his highest credit, along with Penny the Cambodian refugee, who packed shirts, he hired and maintained Steve the screen printer and some nights, gave him rides home. Steve needed everything he ever received from anyone.
Long after we left off working for him, my friends and I didn’t hear from Ron after a while. We heard his daughter was in the hospital a long time, so long that it took all the money and he sold his Walnut Creek house for a lesser one. I think his T-shirt business became unfeasible and he closed it.
I wonder about him still. I think of him when I hear “Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the African Explorer…” since he was both Captain and Margaret DuMont to me.
Maybe some day when David Byrne is totally unrecognizable, we’ll find Ron again in the crowd. In his NewAge T-shirts and damned awful shorts, singing Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?.
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