A Life Well Lived

The Family

Chapter 1

When we were in Paris a few weeks ago you, Susan, asked a lot of questions about your family which made me realize that there was a lot that you, Bill and Diana don't know about your relatives. A discussion of the family is about as good a way as any to start this book.

First of all, let's narrow the field. I will be discussing only the Lyte and Pendleton relatives and will not be discussing Margie's side of the family. She is the one who is qualified to deal with the subject of her Swingley and Goessi ancestors who included some extremely distinguished individuals such as major founder of the Protestant movement.

Compared to my knowledge of the Pendletons, I know relatively little about the Lyte side of the family other than, of course, my father.

The Lyte family is a very distinguished one with a background going back to William the Conqueror. Although I never particularly cared about genealogy, both my father and you, Bill, have had a deep interest in this subject and developed a detailed understanding of the Lyte family background so I won't go into things like ancestors buried in Westminster Abbey, a manor house in the town of Lytes Cary which is now in the National Trust, etc..... Bill can fill you in on these subjects.

My earliest and practically only recollection of Grandfather and Grandmother Lyte is in the little town of Denison, Texas. Denison is a small town on the main railroad line, the Missouri-Kansas and Texas Line, from St. Louis south to Texas. Father Lyte, as he was called, was a locomotive engineer on this line. He was a huge man - about 6'6" and 300 pounds - and somewhat uneducated and bombastic according to my father who didn't care much for him, I think. He died of a stroke in the early 1930's at about age 50.

Mother Lyte, my dad's mother, was a rather plain stout woman with a wonderful sense of humor. I remember seeing her on only a few occasions.

The Lytes had five children. My father, William Francis Lyte, was the oldest and was born in Atoka, Oklahoma about 1900. There were three sisters and a brother who, in the aggregate, I have seen about ten times in my whole life. My father was not very close to any of his family even though, for a period in the 1930's we lived very near to some of them.

My father was a great man and one of the two greatest influences in my life other than, of course, your beautiful mother. He came from a poor family and left home at about age sixteen to go to New York City where he got a job as a bank teller. Times were tough and I remember him telling me how, on a Monday morning before payday that afternoon, he had only a nickel and had to choose between buying a breakfast roll or walking twenty blocks to work. He worked in New York for a year but figured that he would never get anywhere without an education and so returned to Oklahoma.

He enrolled in the University of Oklahoma and earned his tuition and board, as a night watchman in a local mortuary. While at the University he was the cartoonist for the local college humor magazine, "The Sooner." He left O. U. after two years—his money ran out—to go to work for L. G. Balfour Company.

Balfour was a national firm selling pins, mugs, crests, and similar items primarily to college fraternities and sororities. My father had a personality which led to his immediate success in selling these items. On one sales call to a sorority at Southern Methodist University in Dallas he met my mother; they eloped shortly thereafter.

I was born in Dallas in early 1928 and my brother Phil was born eighteen months later. The family moved to Kansas City soon after that when my father got a promotion with Balfour. I don't remember anything about the year or two we all spent in Kansas City.

My parents took a six months vacation trip around the world, returning after World War II had started in 1939. During this trip Dad had made some very high-level Japanese business contacts. On his return to America he put together a venture to sell asphalt to Manchuria and had arranged a monopoly position in Manchuria through these contacts. There were to be twelve ships a year sent to Manchuria from California at a profit of one million dollars per ship and Dad had a 25 percent ownership of the deal. However, only one ship was ever sent because Roosevelt instituted an embargo on oil products to Japan.

During and after this disappointing interlude my father also sold asphalt for a company called Petrol Corporation which was owned by a very prominent local oil man, Ed Pauley. In about 1940 an opportunity came up to buy a small refinery in Santa Maria, California and Dad, along with the Bell Oil interests purchased this refinery. He had a 25 percent interest. The plant processed a low gravity crude oil with a very high percent of asphalt. This plant produced most of the asphalt used on military airfields in the South Pacific during World War II. It was very profitable but, after the war ended, apparently arguments arose among the refinery owners and they sold the plant to Union Oil.

At that point Dad made an arrangement with the company he stayed with for the rest of his life, namely Douglas Oil Company. He agreed to market asphalt for Douglas on a commission basis. Douglas was at that point a very marginal operation with no oil production, very few low-quality gas stations, and only a small tea-kettle of a refinery in Paramount, California. My father proved to be the catalyst that improved Douglas tremendously by his super salesmanship of their only major product, asphalt. Of all the major West Coast oil companies only Standard Oil of California outsold Douglas in asphalt; his success enabled Douglas to acquire oil reserves and marketing outlets. Douglas was acquired in about 1960 by Conoco at a per-share price about 50 times higher than when Dad joined Douglas. In my opinion, a major part of this success was due to him.

My father's health was not good for much of his life, following a sickly early childhood. He smoked three packs of Camels a day which later caused severe emphysema. He really didn't take care of himself. He said that his idea of exercise was drinking a martini in a heavy chair glass. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He died at age 59 of a heart attack at the London Airport where he had gone to attend a Directors' meeting of the International Asphalt Institute.

His funeral was held at Forest Lawn where there are two chapels for such events; one holds 500 people and one holds 1,200. I asked for the smaller chapel but was told that it was not available so I took the larger one, not expecting it to be filled. The day of the funeral was very cold and rainy. To my surprise the chapel was completely filled and there were another 400 or so people outside in the rain. He had a great multitude of friends and, even forty years after his death, I am still button-holed by some old-time acquaintances who insist on telling me what a wonderful person he was. I always agree with them. It is a great heritage.

As a transition to the Pendletons let me next discuss someone who was both a Lyte and a Pendleton, namely my brother Phillip Francis Lyte.

Phil and I were never really close. He was only eighteen months younger and we were very competitive; we fought a lot. He was about 5'10" (Pendleton height) and he wasn't going to get much taller. He matured much earlier than I did. He was very handsome and really appealed to the ladies in high school. He was only an average student which caused some friction since I always got A's.

He was accidentally killed in 1947 while cleaning his shotgun. He had lent this gun to a friend who had forgotten to take a shell out of the chamber—we never told the friend. Although I was shocked and sad, his death did not affect me deeply. It almost killed my mother, however.

Now let's move on to the Pendletons.

The head of the Pendleton Clan was my grandfather, William Frederick Pendleton. His friends called him Fred and his grandchildren called him Daddy Fred. I was named after him. He had a number of younger brothers and sisters, the only one germane to this dissertation being his younger brother George Pendleton whom we all called Uncle Dutch.

He was twenty years younger than Daddy Fred. When their father died, Daddy Fred and Mamie (see below) took Dutch into their home and raised him as a son. Thus Dutch was almost like an uncle to us, and his son—also George—was like a cousin to us.

Daddy Fred was extremely prominent in Texas and throughout the Southwest. He was a dominant figure in the cottonseed oil business and was in great part responsible for the development of margarine, which is derived from cottonseed oil. He had granite-like integrity, a becoming modesty, and was widely respected. Some of his closest friends were prominent Texas people such as Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Tom Connally, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. He was a great man. He died of prostate cancer in about 1943.

Daddy Fred was married to Mamie Keller, whom we all referred to as Mamie. No one was called Grandpa or Grandma in that part of the Pendleton family.

Mamie was very loving and somewhat dominated by Daddy Fred, I think. Her hot button was religion, and while we were staying with them in the middle 1930's, the entire Sunday program was Sunday School, Church, and Vespers. I still remember her very long blessings at large family gatherings; these covered Methodist missionaries in Africa, downtrodden people in Korea, starving Armenians, and the like. She observed the Sabbath religiously, and I recall one time where she could only be lured to a Sunday movie by her two mischievous sons (see below) because she was told that it was a travelogue. The movie was "Road to Morocco" starring Bob Hope.

Mamie was a good woman and a major factor in raising a good family. She died in the early 1980's.

Daddy Fred and Mamie had six children. The oldest of these was Louise, followed by Bernice, Irene, Norma (my mother), and then the two boys, Hugh and Alfred.

The Pendletons were very well known in Texas society, and apparently Aunt Louise was the queen of the ball. She married a prominent lawyer, John MacDonald, in a very elegant wedding that was regarded as one of the high points of the Dallas social season.

Uncle John was an attorney who had a very distinguished career but died early. He was the Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives and barely missed being elected Governor of Oklahoma. He was, I believe, also a high-ranking officer in the Oklahoma National Guard. He died suddenly at about age fifty after being greatly saddened by the death of their oldest son Norman.

Aunt Louise was a very proper and formal lady. She lived through a great deal of sadness and was very strong. She and my mother were extremely close, and she was with my parents in England when my father died. She died of Alzheimer Disease just a few years ago in her 90's.

The MacDonalds had three children: Norman, Malcolm, and John. Norman died at about age thirteen of cancer at our home in California.

Malcolm (we call him Mickey) was a West Pointer with a distinguished military career (e.g., Silver Star in Korea) before he left the Army as a Colonel to pursue a civilian career. He is now retired and lives with his wife Patty in Arkansas. He and I have been very close all these years.

My cousin John pursued a musical career. For many years he was conductor of the Akron Symphony but is now retired and lives in the Akron, Ohio area. He and I are about the same age and were quite close when we were growing up. We traveled all over South America together in the late 1940's.

The second sister, Bernice, married a school teacher, Requa Bell, who later became Superintendent of Schools in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. Requa had a lot of Indian blood and was quite stern and humorless. My dad called him Chief Irontail. Aunt Bernice was also a school teacher after her graduation from SMU until she married Uncle Requa. Both died in the 1980's.

The Bells had two children, Bill and Margaret Ann, who goes by the name Peggy. Bill has some severe emotional problems caused by combat experienced in World War II. He lives somewhere in the East and is estranged from Peggy and the rest of the family. Peggy married Jim Trimble, a doctor (now retired), and lives in Florida. I haven't seen Bill in sixty years, but I talk with Peggy fairly often—we are good friends.

Aunt Louise, Aunt Bernie, and my mother were very similar in appearance, with stocky figures, black hair, and similar temperaments. My Uncle Alf referred to them as the Pendleton covey. Totally different was my Aunt Irene, who everyone called Honey.

Honey had fiery red hair like Daddy Fred and was a real rebel. She had extraordinary musical skills and probably could have been successful professionally as a concert violinist. She married Bryan Nolen, who was a bluff, Germanic architect with a heart of gold. They had no children but were practically parents to me when my parents took their trip around the world in 1939. They lived outside of Oklahoma City. Both died a number of years ago.

Hugh was the fifth child and oldest son. He was picked to succeed Daddy Fred in the cottonseed oil business but elected to be a small-town businessman in Mexia, Texas. He was somewhat humorless like his sisters but a man of great integrity. He died in the middle of the 1980's, but his widow, Bobbie, is still alive. Both she and their only child, Anne, still live in Mexia. Anne is a retired school teacher who never married. I see them occasionally at family gatherings.

The youngest member of the Pendleton children is one of my favorites, Uncle Alf. He inherited Daddy Fred's red hair but is the only one of the six children with a great sense of humor. He, as well as Hugh, went to Texas A & M, where the Pendleton name is very prominent; Daddy Fred was the co-founder of the Ross Volunteers, the major honor society at the school. Alf spent most of his life working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a cotton expert but is now retired and lives in Dallas. He has been widowed twice. His only son, Fred Pendleton, also lives in Dallas and is married with one son. Fred and I are very good friends and talk fairly often.

I should also mention my second cousin, George Pendleton, because we saw a lot of each other in the early years. George's father, Uncle Dutch, and Daddy Fred were brothers, and Daddy Fred and Mamie raised Uncle Dutch when his parents died. George Pendleton has been an extremely successful oil operator and lives in Dallas. He is a good guy.

Finally, we come to my mother, Norma Pendleton Lyte. Words that come to mind when describing her are proper, perfectionist, absolute integrity, and fairness offset by such adjectives as humorless. You knew her so well that there is no need to write a long dissertation about her. A few significant points will suffice.

Nana grew up in an environment of relative wealth and prominence. I am told that she was very popular, got the best grades, and went to the best parties with the most desirable beaus. She did, however, elope with a poor traveling salesman, my father, which took her out of this way of life at that time. Parenthetically, Daddy Fred adored my father and once said that this marriage was one of the best things that ever happened to the family.

In the early years, she was an excellent and very active mother to Phil and me—PTA activities, Cub Den Mother, and the like. All this changed dramatically when Phil was killed since this really devastated her. She drew into her shell and very rarely left her house, preferring to spend her days in bed reading books on philosophy, the meaning of life, etc.

She adored the three of you although she was not above some favoritism toward you, Bill. However, in matters such as inheritances, she was absolutely fair—it would have been against her nature to be otherwise.

She died rather suddenly from cancer about ten years ago, after very painful suffering for several weeks. She was ready to go. The night before she died, she told me that she had had a dream where she was running through a field of beautiful flowers like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music; in this dream, there was no pain, and she was very happy.

At Nana's memorial service in the San Marino Community Church, your beautiful and talented mother gave the most touching eulogy that I have ever heard.

Now that your family has been properly identified, let's move on to other matters.

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Early Years

Chapter 2

I was born in Dallas, Texas on February 3rd, 1928. My brother Phil was born there about eighteen months later. For the first three years our family lived with Daddy Fred and Mamie in a huge house they had on Abbott Street in Dallas. This was while my father was doing a lot of traveling, selling L. G. Balfour fraternity pins and jewelry at various colleges and universities all over the Southwest. I have no recollection of my first three years there nor of the following two years we lived in Kansas City when Dad had been sent by Balfour as a promotion.

In about 1933 my father left Balfour and we moved to Durant, Oklahoma, where as discussed earlier, there was a business opportunity with my uncle, John MacDonald. Durant was a town of about 8,000 people located almost at the Texas border. Its claim to fame was that it was the peanut capital of Bryan County. Everyone needs something to brag about. It was at the depth of the Depression, and we apparently had very little money, but this fact never crossed my mind. My brother and I had a marvelous time playing games like kick-the-can with our MacDonald cousins and George Pendleton and fishing and swimming in the creeks in this rural community. I also attended the first grade here and still remember the name of my teacher, Mrs. Severance.

Several years later we moved to Oklahoma City where my father had taken a job with Anderson Prichard Oil Company. I hated to leave all our friends and relatives in Durant, and I don't remember Oklahoma City as being a very pleasant place to live. It was bleak and windswept, and fine red dust would filter into our house under the doorsills and window ledges. This was at the height of the Dust Bowl. There were several tornados that came near, and I was glad when we left. In fact, we left on very short notice to move to California in 1936. I think that the move was quick because Dad had made a huge amount of money and wanted to avoid Oklahoma income taxes.

I do remember going to a very fine elementary school in Oklahoma City, and what I learned there in math and spelling stood me in very good stead in school in California. I also remember that there were three boys in my class named Fred, so we were referred to as Fred, Freddy, and Frederick. I was Frederick. Apparently, the name was quite popular at that time; our marvelous son-in-law Bruce tells me that he even had a dog named Fred.

When we arrived in California in 1936, we bought a house on Melville Drive in San Marino while it was still under construction. My mother lived there for the next fifty years. At that time, the area was semi-rural, and our house was the only one east of San Marino Avenue; the rest of the area was orange groves. We had wonderful times in those early years throwing oranges and having dirt clod fights.

After about a year, my parents took an extended five-month trip around the world, and I was sent to stay with my Aunt Honey and her husband Bryan Nolen. My brother was sent to live with Aunt Louise in Durant. The Nolens lived in a suburban community outside Oklahoma City, where each of the homes was on about five acres surrounded by lots of woods and lakes.

This visit was one of the really fun times of my life. I went on possum hunts with the colored farmhands who were nice enough to tolerate me, picked bushels of wild hog plums for Honey to make jam and jelly with, and trapped rabbits for the table. I can still make a mean rabbit trap. It was all great fun.

I entered Huntington School in about the fourth grade and, in part because of excellent training in Oklahoma City, immediately became a top student. I was also one of the best athletes in the class and, as I remember, was quite popular since I was elected to various class offices through following years. These were very good years for me, but they ended rather abruptly when our class graduated from Huntington in the eighth grade and moved to South Pasadena-San Marino Junior High School in South Pasadena.

The move to South Pasadena was traumatic in two ways. The Junior High School encompassed the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, and so our San Marino contingent entered after most of the students, all from South Pasadena, had been classmates there for the two previous years. Cliques had already been formed and relationships established by the time the new kids on the block arrived. It was pretty humbling, particularly since we had been accustomed to being the big shots at Huntington. Compounding this situation for me personally was the fact that I matured perhaps two years later than the typical ninth grader. This is not an uncommon situation in the Lyte family since my father and my cousin David also had this happen to them. However, if one is shorter and skinnier than his classmates and less mature, he is not going to be the best athlete, date the cutest girls, or rank high in the class pecking order.

After one year at Junior High, we moved two blocks to the Senior High School to finish out the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. Here I continued to excel in grades and started to mature. I did very well academically in high school and, with two exceptions, got all A's every year even though I didn't work particularly hard. I think some of this success can be attributed to the old saying, "him as has gets." In other words, a teacher might see a straight A record and be reluctant to give the student a lower grade even if the student deserves it. I remember one class I had in spherical trigonometry where my work probably deserved a "C," but the teacher, Miss Steele, gave me a "B-" and told me that she had given me the benefit of the doubt because she didn't want to spoil my record.

I was widely considered a brain and was well liked, but more was needed. One of the most prestigious areas in high school is that of being a good athlete and the student who won block "S" letterman sweaters was admired. In my senior year, I decided to try out for the tennis team, which had won the championship of Southern California the previous year. Winning a letter on that tennis team would be a very big deal. I made the team and got a letter even though I was not very good—I did it by sheer determination through returning every ball that was hit at me in a match. Finally, the opponent would get frustrated and lose his composure or desire, and I would win. I played for South Pasadena in all five Foothill League matches and won every time. Sometimes after a match, I would go home so exhausted from running after balls to return that I could barely make it up the stairs to my room.

It should be remembered that most of my time in high school was during World War II. Consequently, even civilians were involved in some aspects of that conflict. I was an Air Raid Warden with a steel helmet painted white which I loved. The vacant lot next to our Melville Drive home was developed by me as a major victory garden. We grew squash, beans, beets, cauliflower, carrots—you name it. We also grew swiss chard to feed the large number of rabbits we raised for food; meat was in scarce supply during that period, and we could sell all the rabbit meat we wanted to neighbors and friends for 40 cents per pound. When I killed the rabbits—perhaps twenty per week on the average—I saved the skins and prepared them on stretchers. These I sold for one dollar each.

During one wartime summer I worked at the Douglas Oil refinery in Paramount as a day laborer. My job was to fill paper containers with a special type of asphalt which would then be shipped to the Pacific to be used in surfacing new or existing airfields to prepare them for combat use. My pay was about $1 per hour.

Our class was fortunate in that we were, by one year, too young to get involved in World War II. I did have several visits during the war years to the main Army induction center in Los Angeles to take physicals, but the draft ended before we graduated.

I graduated in June, 1946, ranking as perhaps one of the top four or five in a class of 250 students. College came next and is discussed in the following chapter.

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College Days

Chapter 3

I entered Stanford in the fall of 1946. I had really never given much thought in high school as to which University I wanted to go to. I had, in fact, leaned naively towards USC because my father had taken me to many of their football games over the years. However, my parents had a much greater appreciation of the comparative academic attributes of the two schools than I did, and they insisted that I choose Stanford. I did.

Back then, Stanford was relatively easy to get into. I had never even questioned whether I would be admitted. About twenty-five of my South Pasadena classmates were also admitted. This would probably not be the case today. The tuition then was $225 per quarter. This certainly would not be the case today—now it's about twenty times that, I am told.

The 1946 entering class was a really mixed bag. There were twenty-five-year-old veterans returning from the war together with green eighteen-year-olds like myself. All freshmen were required to live their first year in Encina Hall, a campus dormitory which could accommodate 600 students. It was a pretty wild place, although I was lucky in getting good roommates assigned to me. An adjacent room in the same wing of the hall housed your future Uncle Bob; that is where I met him.

The first thing that really surprised me at Stanford was that I had to really study to get good grades. In high school, I had merely coasted through and still got straight A's. I decided at that point that there were other things that the University could offer other than a Phi Beta Kappa key, however, and so this situation didn't really bother me.

In the early spring, Swingley mentioned that he had a younger sister who was a sophomore in a girls' school in San Francisco. She would be interested in dating a Stanford man, and I told him that I would like to meet her. A date was arranged, but just at that time my brother was killed, and so our meeting was postponed. A few weeks later, we rescheduled our date and I met her.

I drove to her home in San Francisco to pick her up. I had even bought a new dinner jacket because the event we were going to was a formal dinner dance. I think I even had a couple of orchids for her, big spender that I was. As I entered her home, she came down the stairway wearing a white gown and that radiant smile you all know so well. She was breathtaking! (She still is.) After that first date, I became a fairly regular commuter to San Francisco for the next two years.

The end of my freshman year, as discussed elsewhere, I spent traveling all around South America with my cousin John MacDonald. Upon my return to Stanford that fall, I moved into the Kappa Sigma fraternity house, which I had joined the previous spring. The fraternity system at Stanford was good in that it did not have the snobbishness and exclusiveness found on many campuses at the time, particularly in some of the larger schools like USC and Cal.

My sophomore year was fairly routine, although I began to explore new academic subjects such as poker playing. I became pretty good at poker and estimate that I netted perhaps $3,000–$4,000 during my years at the Kappa Sigma house, where we generally conducted seminars on the subject. At the end of this year, I got a very interesting job in New Mexico through my father and his relationship to a local contractor, A. M. Spencer. My assignment was to operate by myself what was called a Barber-Greene Mixer, which prepared a mixture of asphalt, sand, and gravel for use in asphalt surfaces such as highways. This mixer was installed on a hillside about 30 miles north of Santa Fe and about two miles from the gates of Los Alamos—where the atomic bomb was created. Although the war had been over almost a year, the work going on behind those gates was still highly secret. We shipped our road mix to Los Alamos, but we never knew what was going on there. I lived at a hotel in Santa Fe and had to be at work by 6 a.m. I would return to my hotel, the very elegant La Fonda, about dinner time, with my coveralls splattered with asphalt drops and rock dust. Finally, the hotel management asked me to come in the back way. They apparently felt that I detracted somewhat from the ambience of the main lobby.

Margie arrived at Stanford at the beginning of my junior year and was an instant hit. Your mother had a very distinguished career at the University. She was a Cum Laude graduate, Vice President of her class, a cheerleader, the yearbook Queen, an editor of the humor magazine, just to mention a few honors. We didn't date too much that year because, with her charm and beauty, she was always booked weeks ahead. We did see each other in Europe on several occasions that next summer; this is discussed elsewhere in this narrative.

I didn't burn up the league grade-wise at Stanford - I was in about the middle of the class. However, I did have a notable academic achievement during my junior year. There was a course called Business Law conducted by a very distinguished law professor named Running. There were about 300 students in the class, and Running didn't believe in grading on the curve; he gave only five A's for the course, and I got one of them. A follow-up course, Business Law II, was also conducted by Running on the same basis, and I again got one of the few A's given. Everyone needs a little something to brag about.

At the end of my junior year, two fraternity brothers and I went to Europe. This trip is discussed elsewhere in this narrative, including my dates with your beautiful mother over there.

In about 1948, the Berlin Airlift situation erupted in Europe, and a lot of us at Stanford became worried that we might end up in the services if we didn't do something. Consequently, many of us joined the California National Guard. My service there consisted of a two-hour meeting every Monday night at the Redwood City Arsenal, where we mainly listened to some bored regular soldier reading the Articles of War to us. We got paid $2.50 for each meeting. The top rank I made was private. We also attended a week-long camp at Camp Roberts where we honed our military skills. In my case, I became trained in the art of loading 40-millimeter shells into Bofors anti-aircraft guns mounted on a half-track. (This skill has very little commercial application in civilian life.) However, after several years, many of us tired of this and applied for, and received, Honorable Discharges from the Guard. Parenthetically, our Stanford comrades who did not get out at that time were all activated and sent to Korea when the North Korean invasion occurred in 1951. I avoided being called in at that time because I was enrolled in the Stanford Graduate Business School and had a student deferment.

In summary, my entire military career consisted of defending the Redwood City Arsenal every Monday night. I must have been doing something right because no one ever conquered it.

I graduated in June of 1950. In contrast with your mother, who later graduated "Cum Laude," I graduated "Cum Diploma." My father said that he was going to frame this diploma and put it over the mantlepiece since it was the most expensive thing in the house.

I was admitted to the Stanford Graduate Business School in September 1950. I was never concerned about being admitted, but I doubt if I would be admitted today. The competition today to get in is fierce; then, it wasn't.

I did alright in Biz School—mainly B's with an occasional A or C and one D in Cost Accounting. This latter grade no doubt cost me a distinguished career with Price Waterhouse.

I lived off-campus at a private home owned by a lady improbably named Mrs. Pickles. I ate at the fraternity except on Sunday nights when John Ehrlichman, a fellow Kappa Sig, and I always went out to dinner together. The fraternity did not serve Sunday dinners.

The really big and delightful news in my first year of Biz School was the engagement and subsequent marriage in June 1951 to your magnificent mother. We were married in the Stanford Church in a very elegant wedding, which probably caused her father to ask for the wedding license to put on his mantlepiece.

In September of 1951, we set up housekeeping at a very nice apartment on Yale Street in Palo Alto. She finished her senior year and received an AB in Political Sciences; I got an MBA from the Biz School.

The next step was to find a job. This is discussed in the next chapter.

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Work History Overview

Chapter 4

It may be helpful to see a brief summary of my work history as a frame of reference for later extensive discussions. Here it is.

After graduating with an MBA from Stanford in 1952, I was employed by Richfield Oil Company in Los Angeles as a trainee in their Manufacturing (i.e., refining) Department. I spent a year in the refinery on a training program and then returned to the main office as an Operations Analyst. I left Richfield in 1954 to go to work for Stanford Research Institute.

At Stanford Research Institute, I was employed initially in 1954 as an Analyst in the Los Angeles Office. In 1957, I was appointed Manager of Land and Energy Economics for Southern California. In 1959, I left SRI to join the management consulting firm of Booz, Allen & Hamilton.

At Booz Allen, my original title in 1959 was Consultant, and I worked out of the Los Angeles Office of BAH. In 1961, I was promoted to the position of Associate of the firm. I left BAH in 1963 to found North Andros Development Company in the Bahamas.

In 1963, I became co-founder and part owner of this land development company for a 7,500-acre property on Andros Island in the Bahamas. I was President and CEO of this company until 1968 when we sold it. I continued to live in Southern California but commuted regularly to the Bahamas.

In 1968, I was employed by Retlaw Enterprises, the personal holding company of the Walt Disney family, as Vice President for Corporate Development. A year later, I was appointed Vice President and General Manager of Retlaw. I left Retlaw in 1971 to found Lyte and Company.

In 1971, I became founder and Managing Partner of Lyte and Company, a partnership with Tom Duddleson. Ten years later, I bought out Duddleson and changed the company to a corporation, Lyte Enterprises, Inc. In this form, the operation continues to this day. I am President, and your mother is Executive Vice President.

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Richfield

Chapter 5

After I got out of Stanford Business School, my first job was with Richfield Oil Company in Los Angeles. It was as a trainee, and they paid me $311 per month, which was in about the 90th percentile of the salaries received by all Biz School graduates of my class. Bear in mind that this was 47 years ago, and bread cost ten cents a loaf.

It was a very good job. A little background will illustrate why. In about 1929, Richfield went into receivership. This was caused not by the depression but by several of the top Richfield officers embezzling money from the company. From that time until just after the end of World War II, practically no one had been hired, and the management was aging. Someone in top management had the idea that they should attempt to develop new young managers to succeed existing managers down the line. Accordingly, they developed a one-man trainee program to develop such talent over a one-year period, and I was hired to be the second trainee.

I followed the first selection, a Harvard Business School graduate named Henry Corey, who had spent the previous year on this program. During my year, I spent time at the Long Beach refinery learning about refining petroleum products and tests, pipeline and marine terminal operations, and the like. I spent about three hours a day driving back and forth to the refinery from our home in Arcadia; the workday started at 7 a.m. At the downtown office, I became acquainted with various control and accounting procedures, industry data sources, and the like. Two nights a week, I went to classes at Los Angeles State extension school to learn about oil exploration, drilling, and production practices. I worked hard and took lots of notes.

During the entire period, there was an old Richfield hand assigned entirely to me to optimize my training. He had worked in the oil industry since the early 1900s, and it was fascinating to hear him talk about his early experiences. This training was augmented by the generous help given me by some of my friends at the home office, particularly Roy Cheney and Henry Corey. Roy gave me an understanding of hydrocarbon chemistry, which was immensely helpful.

When I finished the program, another man from the Wharton School of Business succeeded me, and I was assigned to a two-man office at the downtown headquarters. I was given the title of Operations Analyst and a raise to $425 per month. My job was to analyze special projects for the refining department. The atmosphere here was somewhat hostile since many of the people I worked with had spent twenty-five years getting to the same level that Henry and I had achieved in one year. There was also a lot of resentment at first, among some top-ranking Richfield managers who had to fight their way up from the bottom. This included my immediate boss, Ken Kelly, who had started as a bookkeeper at Richfield in the 1920s. He was a good guy but never felt comfortable with all this "book-learning."

Eventually, four of us were trained under this special program, which really was an outstanding one. All were MBAs from Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton. The problem was that, once we were through the program, Richfield didn't know what to do with us. Their concept was to put us on the shelf until we were needed down the line. We all chafed at this and eventually left Richfield for better jobs.

At one point, we toyed facetiously with the idea of suggesting to our bosses that the company age gasoline for a year before selling it so that they could advertise "there's no fuel like an old fuel." We thought better of it, however.

In 1954, I received a phone call from a friend who I had met skiing while in college. His name was John Shallenberger. He invited me to have lunch with him at the California Club, which I readily accepted since it marked a definite price and quality improvement over the sandwich I usually picked up at the Yorkshire Grill. At lunch, John told me that he had recently been appointed Assistant Director of the newly formed Stanford Research Institute and asked me if I was interested in going to work for SRI. I told him that I would certainly be willing to talk about it, and subsequently, they offered me a job in their L.A. office starting at $525 per month. I told the Personnel Director at Richfield, Bill Shuster, that I was considering taking this job because I would make more money, and he became very disturbed. The training program had been his pet project, and he, I am sure, didn't want to see one of his graduates leave. He offered me a higher position in the Economics Division of the Treasury Department at $525 per month, and so I told him I would take it and reject the SRI offer.

The next day, I wrote a letter to SRI telling them that I was staying at Richfield and left this letter with Margie to be mailed. Shuster called and asked if I had rejected the SRI offer, and I told him I had. He then told me that there were some procedural problems in getting my salary raised to $525 per month and that it would take several months to work its way through the bureaucracy at Richfield. I regarded this as very bad faith, and so I called Margie and told her not to mail the letter to SRI. I then called SRI and told them I was accepting their offer. As you can imagine, the people at Richfield were not happy with this.

In spite of this rather unhappy separation from Richfield, I have warm feelings about my time there. I received an almost unique education in the oil business and made many friends, some of whom I still see today.

However, it was time to move on to Stanford Research Institute; this was in 1954.

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Stanford Research Institute

Chapter 6

When I went to work for SRI, I was somewhat of a fair-haired boy because of Shallenberger's sponsorship; the top brass was watching me. Fortunately, my first project went very well, and the client was highly pleased. This stood me in good stead with my bosses when I got into trouble on the next one, a study for Disney.

As background for this study, the Manager of the Los Angeles Office of SRI had been a very charming con man named C.V. Wood. He was in charge when the original Disney assignment—the site selection—was booked, although the actual work on this assignment was done by Harrison Price, the Assistant Manager in Los Angeles. Price did a magnificent job, but Wood managed to take the credit—so much so that Walt Disney hired Wood to be his Vice President in charge of getting Disneyland built. Price then succeeded Wood as Manager of SRI in Los Angeles, and Price was the one who actually hired me.

Initially, Disneyland was drawing only about 25,000 daily attendees, and so there was quite a lot of unused land at the park, which ultimately would be used for parking. Wood had the idea that Disneyland should build a Sports Arena on that vacant land and engaged SRI to do an economic feasibility study. That job was assigned to me. I am sure that Wood and some of his very questionable friends had personal financial motives, and all they wanted was a nice red-bound report saying how profitable a sports arena would be at Disneyland.

I undertook this study with the rather naive assumption that Wood really wanted correct answers rather than a rigged report. My basic finding was that sports arenas can be advantageous to the communities in which they are built (hotel receipts, etc.), but not for a private operator unless this operator controls enough events (e.g., basketball or hockey teams) to keep the facility filled about 70 percent of the year. I duly wrote a negative report on this project, and Wood was furious. He told Price that, unless I was fired, Disneyland would never give SRI another assignment.

Price, however, agreed with my report and refused to fire me. Since Disneyland was really SRI's bread and butter in Southern California, this took a lot of guts, and I will always admire Price for this action. Oddly enough, it was only about two weeks before Wood gave SRI another assignment; he needed SRI!

Over the five years I was with the Institute, I participated in a large number of projects such as market studies, plant locations, underwriting reports for financial institutions, feasibility studies, and the like.

By 1959 I had reached the top of the SRI salary range, which was rather unrealistically tied to that of Stanford professors. I was recruited by Booz Allen & Hamilton, where I would be paid considerably more, and so I decided to move on. SRI was one of the most stimulating and pleasant places I ever worked, and I still see a number of friends I worked with there.

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Booz, Allen & Hamilton

Chapter 7

I was recruited for this firm by John Church, the Business Manager of Booz Allen; John and I had become acquainted playing low-stakes social poker. I was offered a job at a significantly higher salary than at SRI, and my SRI work rendered me well-suited to do the kind of assignments done by Booz Allen.

The atmosphere at Booz Allen was very different from SRI. Whereas SRI had been very collegial with almost an academic approach, that at Booz Allen was very impersonal, business-like, and somewhat, I think, cut-throat. The type of project work differed markedly also. At SRI we examined a situation and wrote a report on it, usually leaving implementation of the findings to the client. At Booz Allen we often implemented our recommendations and, in certain cases, ended up actually providing interim management for the client.

The work was tremendously interesting and challenging, and I did well at it. My title upon being employed was Consultant, but after two years, I was promoted to Associate of the firm. This is the step just below being made Partner and usually takes about five years to achieve.

I left BAH in 1963 to found North Andros Development Company in the Bahamas.

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Andros

Chapter 8

During the period from 1963 through 1968 I was involved in the development of a major property on Andros Island in the Bahamas. As a first step in this narrative I will describe the Bahamas, Andros, and our specific development.

The Bahamas are a group of islands about 150-200 miles east of Miami. The main population center is Nassau which is located on New Providence Island. Nassau, with a population at that time of about 90,000 people had been the headquarters in the 1700's of pirates such as Blackbeard. Another 90,000 people lived on the hundreds of other islands which were locally referred to as the Out Islands. Most Bahamians were black or mulatto, but there was practically no racial prejudice since there had been very little impact of slavery in the Bahamas; the British banned the slave trade and slavery in all their Colonies in 1832.

Andros Island is the largest island in the Bahamas, stretching about 70 miles in length and 15 miles in width. Planes flying from Miami to Nassau flew directly over the Northern tip of Andros where our property was located; Nassau was only 25 miles away.

We formed North Andros Development Company ("Nadco") in early 1963 with me as President and Chief Operating Officer. I had complete authority to run the operation and Frank and Jim Kirst completely backed me up and provided financing for the programs we carried out.

Life in the Bahamas was not all hard work and problems. Nassau was one of the glamour spots of the world with many interesting and well-known people coming through the City in the winter. Through Sir Harold Christie I met people, such as A & P heir Huntington Hartford and Princess Margaret of England. We also had the use of Sir Harold's 100 foot cabin cruiser, the "Lazy Jean" which he had bought from Lord Beaverbrook. Sean Connery and the "Thunderball" movie cast were there and I got fairly well acquainted with Connery and one of the producers named Cubby Broccoli. The Beatles were also there about the same time making a movie. I did not meet them but I did get an autographed photo for the three of you. Since this photo was an early one with their page boy bangs and since they gave out only two autographed photos during their stay in the Bahamas, I suspect that your photo might be fairly valuable. I have no idea where it is.

Thus Andros ended on a somewhat sour note although I accomplished a lot, had a lot of fun, and made some significant money. I have no regrets, however, it was a great experience.

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Retlaw

Chapter 9

After we sold the Bahamian operation I was contacted by an Executive Search firm which was looking for someone to manage Doris Day's investments. This contact led to my being hired for this job but I could not begin it until I had satisfied my work-out responsibilities associated with the sale of the Andros property. During this three month interim period I was contacted by Harrison Price who had set up his own highly successful consulting company called Economics Research Associates. One of his major clients was a company called Retlaw ("Walter" spelled backwards) which was the personal holding company of the Walt Disney family.

Retlaw had grown from a tiny beginning in the early 1950's into a very substantial company by 1968. Walt Disney had died several years earlier and Price had been given the assignment of finding someone to manage Retlaw's properties which included among other things, the name Walt Disney. That job was offered to me and, after exiting gracefully from the obligation to Doris Day, I took it. My title was Vice President of Corporate Development.

Palmdale was Big Casino for Retlaw. About two weeks after I began work there I learned that Lockheed was planning to build a major facility at Plant 42 in Palmdale for production of their 1011 passenger jet. I also learned that there were 773 undeveloped acres on the airfield runway immediately adjacent to this new planned plant; this acreage was for sale at $8.8 million or about $11,400 per acre. There was some reluctance by Cottrell and Mickey to buy this property but I was able to convince Miller and Retlaw purchased the property two days later. I was able to tie up the property with only a $25,000 option payment until Lockheed announced their 1011 plant about two weeks later. Retlaw thus owned the only major undeveloped parcel of airport frontage at what was going to be a major airport. At that time land prices in the area tripled and quadrupled overnight and I was a hero. In fact I was appointed Vice President and General Manager of Retlaw at that point.

The jury was out only one day and came back with an award to Retlaw of about $20 million including interest. This was the highest award ever given up to that time in a condemnation case. Retlaw would eventually make about $9 million on a $2 million investment after paying legal costs and the mortgage on the property. Because it was a condemnation award there were no capital gains taxes.

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On My Own

Chapter 10

After I left Retlaw I started my own business in 1972. Originally it was called Lyte and Company, an equal partnership between myself and Tom Duddleson. Tom was a wonderful person but he was not very productive in generating revenue for Lyte and Company. Eventually I bought him out and incorporated the company as Lyte Enterprises with Margie and me as sole owners.

The company started off strongly, due in good part to the cash flow generated by my consulting work for Retlaw on the Palmdale property. During the 26 years the company has been in business there have been some major successes, one substantial loser, and a few major disappointments and might-have-beens in the projects we have undertaken.

The work I did at Irwindale from 1976 through 1988 certainly merits some discussion. It all started when Mike Montgomery, who I had worked with previously in political matters, asked me to meet with the City Manager and several Councilmen of the City of Irwindale. I did so and was asked to give an opinion as to the industrial development possibilities of Irwindale since they were considering forming a Community Redevelopment Agency ("CRA") to foster industrial development of the area.

My Irwindale experience was a massive success and the Irwindale CRA became the most financially successful one in Southern California.

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Other Activities

Chapter 11

Other than work and travel, my other non-family activities can be categorized as either community activities or political activities.

I don't like to get involved in community activities because often they are a waste of time, involving committee meetings, public hearings, and the like over matters that are generally not very important. However, on four occasions I have been involved at a significant level in community projects: the Boy Scouts of America, the Army-Navy football game at the Rose Bowl, St. Luke Hospital in Pasadena, and the USC School of Medicine Board of Councilors.

My political activities over the years certainly have been more extensive. My first real experience in politics came in about the middle 60's when my high school friend, John Rousselot, became a Congressman. He asked me to help raise money for his re-election campaigns.

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Foreign Travel

Chapter 12

I have traveled a great deal during my life. A lot of this was domestic travel, particularly while I was in the consulting business with Stanford Research and Booz, Allen & Hamilton. There was also a great deal of routine travel to the Bahamas during the 1963 to 1968 period when I had my Andros Island operation.

My first foreign trip of any real consequence was taken during the summer of 1948 with my cousin John MacDonald. It was basically a Central and South American tour which covered Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, all the Guianas, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba. The trip took about three months.

In 1951 I found a new traveling companion, namely your fabulous and beautiful mother. Our trip was to Hawaii on our honeymoon in 1951.

In the fall of 1969 we resumed our foreign travels in earnest. Over the years we visited London, Paris, Athens, Istanbul, Vienna, Budapest, Copenhagen, Beirut, Rome, Cyprus, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Teheran, Cairo, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Stockholm, Helsinki, Bangkok, Burma, India, Nepal, China, and Tibet.

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Friends

Chapter 13

Throughout the years there have been a lot of good friends. I have been very lucky.

Bob Swingley, my brother-in-law, tops the list. A person of highest integrity and ethics, he introduced your mother to me when I was a freshman at Stanford. Without this introduction where would you three be?

Many of my good friends come from my days at Stanford: Fred Vogeler, Bill Gates, Stu Brand, Frank Satko, Doug Daegling, Gordon Luce, and Claude Rosenberg.

I have many very good friends from the five years I spent at Stanford Research Institute: Harrison Price, Fred Good, Jim Lee, Herb Holley, Jim Forbes, Ed Perkins, and Sid Yates. We were a close-knit group.

This pretty well completes an inventory of close friends that I have been fortunate enough to develop over more than fifty years. In total these are a lot of friends but they have been developed over a lot of years too.

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Principles

Chapter 14

In concluding this tome I am setting out some special principles which I have tried to follow over the past seventy-one years. They may be worth considering.

First of all, be a positive thinker. If you think you can accomplish a goal you may or may not succeed. If, however, you don't think you can accomplish the goal, it is a mortal cinch that you won't succeed. I think that I inherited this approach from my father.

A corollary to this is to avoid negative thinking. Throughout life there will be discouraging or unpleasant happenings and you can of course draw lessons from these to avoid their repetition. However, after you do this, don't dwell on them.

Second: think big. Don't be afraid to tackle a project because you think it is too large. My father once told me that it is just as easy to sell fifty tank cars of asphalt as one necktie on the street.

Third: keep your perspective. The world is only a minuscule part of a vast universe and you are only three people out of almost six billion people in this world. Make sure that you take full advantage of the privileges that you have. First of all, you live in the United States. We're more fortunate than 95 percent of the world's inhabitants.

Fourth: keep trying. Teddy Roosevelt said it better than I:

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and may fail again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither victory nor defeat."

Finally: choose your criteria for evaluating people carefully. You should be evaluating people on the really important things, such as character and decency rather than on relatively unimportant things such as having a lot of money or real or perceived social standing. My father had an excellent guideline: put yourself in the other fellow's shoes.

Most important, do not compromise your integrity. Over the years I have had a lot of instances where it would have been, for example, much easier to bow to pressure to go along, but I didn't do it and took a lot of heat as a consequence. However, it should be understood that integrity is, in the overall picture, the only thing that you have to offer the world, and once this is lost it can't be regained.

I close this volume now that I have run out of homilies. You three are the greatest and most wonderful kids I can imagine. I am very proud of you.

I will update this narration with a sequel I will write in 2028.

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