Two months ago, I was introduced to a wickedly smart, uber-cool, wonderfully articulate, super-successful podcaster (top 2.5% globally!!) and top-tier media brain. She also makes hyper-expensive stilettos paired with off-the-rack sweats look really good. It is a joy to chat away for hours with Denise Griffitts. She is a great introduction by another super-slick-in-all-ways-and-my-PR-guiding-light-and-conscience-lady, Devon Blaine. Hmm. Interesting. Another cool lady I get to talk away with for hours, about, oh heck, ”the man on the moon.”

ACT 1

Take center-stage: Jim Tunney.

Well into the third hour of one of our chats, Denise took a moment to respond to a text message with a “back to you in a few”, to Jim Tunney, a good friend and client of Denise.

If you have ever been around football—the American kind— in any meaningful way, you’ve heard of Tunney: The Dean Of NFL Referees. He refereed more post-season, Super Bowls, NFC/AFC Championships, Pro Bowls and Monday Night football games than anybody in history. And a genuine leader and motivator of people, author, educator, high school principal, and philanthropist. And an all-around super-cool man. At 92 years young, nothing has changed about the man!

ACT 2

From far, far back-stage, enter me.

Some 5 decades ago (yes, FIVE), I was a kid, just a couple weeks-fresh-refugees in the U.S. I might have known 45 words in English, few polysyllabic, and several not socially acceptable. As soon as she found us, aunt Helen removed us from the cheap hooker motel downtown L.A. to a tiny apartment in West Hollywood. One she paid rent on until mother and father got their first minimum wage jobs. She immediately declared that I must be enrolled in school. Immediately!

Kids like me, the non-English speaking illiterate immigrants, typically ended up for a couple years in the hell of remedial English school at Hollywood High.

Rather… As you can read in PIMPS, Helen and I set off to a “regular” high-school. The hustle was simple: Helen would assert that I was woefully shy and that she would speak for me. So: Helen spoke and I did a lot of nodding. My only contribution: I lied about my education in the “old country”, thus skipping a year and a half of high-school. Why not? Was destined to flunk-out anyway. Thus, a good start to my ultimate career in marketing!

My first book in English was Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me. Took me three months to read that little book with a dictionary in hand. It took several more months for me to find out that the word “sonofabitch” did not mean a sofa.

A couple weeks into my tenure at Fairfax High School, with all those strange English-speaking people, standardized I.Q. tests were administered to all students.

Yes, that was before administering I.Q. tests was systemically racist, sexist, used to oppress the underprivileged, and generally just yucky form.

Regrettably, since those were written in English, I did not understand any of the instructions. Nor any of the questions on the test. Mimicking the other kids, I took to those massive pages with my little black pencil, with dispatched abandon. Might-as-well.

I created nice geometric patterns with all the little boxes I filled in. Kinda looked like a complex, lace paper cake-doily.

Soon thereafter, when the I.Q. scores were reported to the school, I was summoned to the principal’s office. I recall being met by the principal and an assistant principal. I recall those fine people wanting to see what “THAT” looked like, a high-school kid who scored a majestic I.Q. score of …. 69.

That, five decades ago, is when I met and exchanged, hmm, no words, with our fine Principal: Jim Tunney. He did not toss me out of his school. Perhaps he was utterly baffled.

So there. Who would have thunk I would come that far in my life! I understand that I am shortly going to be the proud owner of a Jim Tunney bobble-head doll.

Hold that for a moment, for the real punch-line. Here comes a veritable intellectual Rubik’s cube. Whoa. Might have given myself a brain-whiplash with that sentence. Forging ahead, a paradox wrapped in an oxymoron: how tiny can this massive universe be!

I posted that story on stevenjmanning.com, the blog site associated with my book, one early morning. Early THE SAME EVENING, my wife, Annie, and I sat down at the bar at a popular local restaurant: South Beverly Grill. Half way though our dinner, this man sat down next to Annie. They started chatting away. She relayed that he was a New Yorker, in LA for a couple days, and that he just wondered into the restaurant. Then: that he was in the direct response industry, as we both have been for decades.

And so I met Mark. I asked him a couple questions. He shared that he was the president of a data processing business in the direct response world. Since between Annie and I, we are likely to have heard of just about all of the relevant ones, he shared that he was president of ANCHOR COMPUTER in Farmingdale, NY.

So… The founder, owner, CEO of Anchor Computer, and Mark’s father, is Len Schenker, a business friend since I was 22 years old. We did some business together. And, the last time I talked to Len, it was one week earlier! We talked about something he read in my book! How is that for a double whammy! Two degrees of separation, squared!

If there is a life lesson here: if you want to hide, best hide in plain sight!

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