EXORDIUM BY WAYNE NIELSEN
W
elcome to Issue 99, our Finance & Legal edition.
Every year I am continually amazed with the significant depth and serious detail provided by our various authors; this finance and legal issue is certainly no exception.
My quest to see the world started in 1976 when I was 18 and a Senior at Guilford High School in Rockford, Illinois. The Comparative Poli Sci and Econ (COPOLECS) class had been developed by a somewhat peculiar teacher named Chuck, who every year would single handedly chaperone 20 or so kids during Easter break to the Soviet Union. Annually he would cajole the apprehensive parents into letting 2
him take their precious teenagers to a place rarely experienced by corn fed mid-westerners, Moscow and Leningrad, monetarily supported as a goodwill gesture by Mr. Brezhnev’s government. Chuck gave me a job in his ice cream store, so I could earn the money to go, and loaned me my first readings from Milton Friedman and Solzhenitsyn. So, we went and survived and experienced some incredible memories and learned untold numbers of lessons, then graduated, and in my case moved away and rarely looked back. The first real job I ever had after college brought me a lot to Europe, and the best boss I ever had, Rex Ramsden, brought me and my now family next to Southampton in the early 90s, and let me travel across
the continent and into the Middle East and even parts of Asia. And since that time added a couple more continents and even the Arctic.
My friend and colleague, Charlie, was in town this week and he told me about his quest to the USSR as a guest of Mr. Khrushchev some years earlier than me. He and I traded long ago stories for quite a few minutes; he, too, was significantly impacted by the opportunity. Having grown up in Saudi Arabia as an oil kid he had plenty of cool travel opportunities. Charlie still travels for our work, as well as regularly teaches physics to kids in a high school his daughter graduated from several years ago; he still goes back and supports the Parent Teacher Organization and teaches what he can.