The Colonel and the Barracuda

When I joined A. in 1991, one of the regional field managers was Jack C., a retired army intelligence colonel who could have been held up as the definition of a curmudgeon (one in a line of men I've worked with and for). He would come in at 8 a.m., read the night's status reports and then terrorize his office managers until noon. After that, you were likely to find him snoozing in his chair while the other two field managers were still pushing their boulders up the hill. But he could get more done in that half day than most could in several.

The story goes that the Colonel's good wife was nicknamed "the Barracuda", much like Rumpole's "She Who Must Be Obeyed". When he had retired from active service, and had been hanging around the house too long for either's taste, he began to re-organize the kitchen and pantry. "Colonel, "says the Barracuda, pulling out the classifieds and stabbing one finger on a small help wanted advertisement, "A. needs clerks. You're going down there today and getting yourself a job!"

Of course, he stayed a clerk for a week or so. Within six months, he was supervising 10 television field offices from his command chair in Laurel, MD and threatening the quiet lives of all staff geeks... like me. Jack was the one who, when I brought him an analysis of cost trends in his departments, grunted and barked out, "Kelly, I want to thank you for your uninformed initiative."

One day, right after Jack had retired for second time, he called me and asked me to stop by his house, where he and the Barracuda were packing their things for a move down to the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. I had absolutely no idea what he wanted, and it was with a little fear that showed up for inspection.

"Well, Kelly," he says -- and he could always make me feel I was back at Baltimore Polytechnic in his consistent reductionism of my name name -- "I have some things here that I picked up when we were stationed in Japan." He pulled out a number of dusty frames with caked glass and flaking, browned backing paper. On investigation, they turned out to be Japanese prints, both on paper and on silk. Jack had noticed the ukiyo-e print that hung (and hangs) in my office (see my first blog entry), and felt I was the right person to hold on to these souvenirs of a different time and a different place in his life.

After some time in the attic, Lisa framed several for me -- the 3 warrior prints shown on this entry. In the next entry, I'll show the other three, which languished in the basement until just recently.