TERMINATION MAN is the story of Craig Walker, a management consultant who specializes in “removing” problem employees through entrapment and techniques of “social engineering”.
TERMINATION MAN is fiction, but it is based on my experience in the automotive industry. The novel’s premise also has a basis in HR practices.
“Managing out” is a common corporate HR practice. When an employee is “managed out”, her situation is made so unpleasant or unsustainable that she will effectively fire herself, and voluntarily resign. This saves the company hassle and expense on multiple levels.
TERMINATION MAN is an embellishment of the managing out practice, of course. But the principle exists, and all HR professionals are familiar with it.
Another thing to remember: corporate HR is not your friend. Corporate HR does not represent you. Corporate HR represents your employer, the company.
This doesn’t mean that corporate HR reps are automatically sinister, venal, etc. (Most are not.) But you should never forget who pays their salaries. (Hint: not you.)
As I write these words, meteorologists throughout the country are predicting a nationwide, historic snowstorm. I hope they’re wrong!
Of course, for American adults around my age—especially if they grew up east of the Mississippi—there are two childhood winters that stand out in memory: those are the back-to-back “blizzard winters” in the mid-1970s: the winter of 1976 to 1977, and the winter of 1977 to 1978.
The winter of 1976 to 1977
The winter of 1976 to 1977 was the winter of record-breaking, pipe-bursting, river-freezing cold. Here in Cincinnati, there were three straight days of record cold in January 1977, in which the temperature stayed below minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit the whole time.
The Ohio River froze solid—for the first time since 1958, and only the thirteenth time on record. In the Cincinnati media archives, there are photos of people walking across the Ohio River, and even driving across the ice that month. The freezing of the Ohio was quite a novelty, much talked about on the local news. One of my older friends has told me about driving his car across the Ohio River that winter on a dare. He was then nineteen years old, and he’s now in his sixties. So he obviously made it across.
January of 1977 was also a snowy one. Cincinnati had 30.3 inches of snow that year. (The usual figure for Cincinnati in January is six inches.)
Photo: Kenton County LibraryPhoto: Kenton County LibraryBeechmont Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio (personal photo)
The winter of 1977 to 1978
The following winter of 1977 to 1978 was just as bad, with almost as much cold, and even more snow. On January 25, 1978, one of the worst blizzards in U.S. history pummeled Cincinnati with almost seven inches of snow. There were already fourteen on the ground.
I remember the night of January 25, 1978 well. I played forward on our fourth-grade basketball team. That night we had a game at a rival Catholic school in the area, Guardian Angels. I remember walking outside at halftime with other members of my team. The air was not exceptionally cold yet by January standards. (It would soon plummet below zero degrees.) But there was a strange fog in the air. I think we all had the feeling that something momentous was imminent. On the way home from the game, the snow began. By morning, it was a whiteout.
Winter landscapes of the memory
At the age of eight or nine, one doesn’t have much life experience to draw upon. I could sense, though, that those two winters were worse than the handful of winters I could recall before. During those two winters, the outside air always seemed to be bitterly cold. Furnaces ran constantly. Fireplaces crackled nonstop. The ground was always snow-covered.
Many people are depressed by snow and cold weather, and winter in general. Not me. I will confess that some of my happiest childhood memories are winter ones, in fact.
I was particularly close to my maternal grandparents. During those blizzard years of the 1970s, they lived just down the street from us. When school was canceled due to inclement weather, I got to pass the day with my grandfather, who had recently retired. We spent a lot of time together in those years. I’m grateful for all the snow.
The cyclical nature of winter weather
It has been my observation that bad and mild winters tend to alternate in cycles. From the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, the winters were harsh, with record cold and snow.
The winter of 1981 to 1982 was cold. The Cincinnati Bengals went to the Super Bowl that year. On January 10, 1982, the Bengals won a key home game against the San Diego Chargers. The air temperature at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium on game day was minus nine degrees, with wind chills down to 35 below. That game has gone down in NFL history as the “Freezer Bowl”.
I was in the eighth grade in 1981-1982, and going through a (brief, in retrospect) rebellious adolescent phase. This included hanging out with an edgier crowd, and embracing a short-lived fascination with smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol.
Even in 1982, smoking and drinking weren’t acceptable pursuits for eighth graders. But hiding these illicit activities from adult authority figures was half the fun. I have many memories of shivering outside that bitter January, as I sipped a furtive drink of whiskey, or smoked a Marlboro. Even today, when I happen to smell someone else’s newly opened pack of cigarettes, or taste an alcoholic beverage, I’m transported back to that brutally cold winter of 1981 to 1982.
The last bad winter I remember from that larger cycle was the winter of 1983 to 1984. That winter brought record cold and snow to the entire United States, including Florida and Texas. As I recall, there was a lot of anxiety about the citrus crop that year, and skyrocketing prices of orange juice.
Over Christmas break in December 1983, my parents decided to embark on a rare family trip to Florida. When we reached Macon, Georgia, it was 4 degrees, with 23 degrees forecast for our destination in the Sunshine State. After spending a night shivering in a Macon hotel room with an inadequate heater, my parents decided to cut our losses. We headed home the next morning. We could freeze in Ohio for free, after all.
But the weather is no more constant than anything else in this world. That cycle of severe winters, from 1976 to 1984, transitioned into a milder pattern over subsequent years. The winters of 1984-1985 and 1985-1986 weren’t exactly balmy; but they weren’t severe, either. Throughout my last two years of high school, classes were rarely canceled due to weather. This was fine with me, because I generally enjoyed high school more than grade school.
And during my college years, spanning the winters of 1986 to 1987 through 1990 to 1991, the winters in Cincinnati were notably mild. I did not go away for college; I lived with my parents and commuted to two local schools. I did not miss a single class due to bad winter weather throughout my entire college career.
That mild cycle continued through the early 1990s, only to go the other way again in the middle of the decade. The winter of 1995 to 1996 was an especially bad one for the entire Midwest, resulting in a rare shutdown of the University of Cincinnati in January of ’96. By this time, I was a working adult in my mid-twenties.
The winter of 1995 to 1996 drew comparisons in the media to the blizzard winters of the mid-1970s. I remember scoffing when I heard this. Having been a kid during those fabled winters of the 1970s, I never took the comparison seriously.
But then, everything seems to happen on a larger scale when you’re a kid…even the weather.
December 31st marked not only the end of 2025, but also the end of MTV (1981 – 2025).
As I explain in the video below, I was one of MTV’s young fans back in the early 1980s.
MTV was a brilliant mechanism for content marketing. Suburban teens like me would discover new bands on MTV. Then we would go to the local mall and purchase the albums.
I discovered many of my favorite bands on MTV, including Def Leppard.
Using various phone apps, many parents now track the movements of their progeny from minute-to-minute. Some parents even track the movements of their adult children. One of my friends can tell you, at any minute of the day, where his two children are. My friend’s children are 26 and 30 years old.
I won’t mince words here. I find all of this geo-tracking to be a little neurotic, not to mention claustrophobic for those who must endure it.
It was different for those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, of course. At most hours of the day, our parents didn’t know exactly where we were. Oh, sure, they might have had some ideas, in the same way that I know Russia is to the east of me, and Argentina is to the far south. But don’t ask me to give you air travel coordinates. Suburban parents in the 1970s and 1980s relied on similar guesstimates regarding their children’s whereabouts.
During the summer months especially, we took full advantage of this location anonymity. The one thing most every Gen X kid had was a bike. And a bike was a license to travel distances your parents never would have approved of. Some of us planned long quests that would have been worthy of a JRR Tolkien novel like The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.
The motivation for these unauthorized trips was often some kind of contraband: alcohol, cigarettes, or firecrackers. Sometimes it was just the thrill of seeing how far your ten speed would carry you in a single June or July morning.
Among adolescent boys, the motivations were often of an amorous inclination. I turned 13 in the summer of 1981. One of my neighborhood friends—I’ll call him Glen—had somehow initiated a running phone conversation with three girls who lived in a neighborhood far from where we lived. Somehow three of us—Glen, me, and one other boy—started talking to the girls, always via landline (the only communication option in those days) and always from Glen’s house.
The girls sounded both pretty and friendly. The girls said they wanted to meet us, but we would have to go to them. And so we planned a bicycle trip to their neighborhood.
Did we ask our parents’ permission? Of course not.
We set off on our bikes one morning around nine a.m. Being randy young males, we eagerly speculated about what might happen at our destination.
When we arrived nearly two hours later, however, the girls were nowhere to be found. Forty-five years after the fact, I’m not sure exactly what happened. We either had the wrong address, or we were duped. Disappointed, we rode back as a particularly hot afternoon settled in.
The lesson I learned from this was: if it seems too good to be true, a little too convenient, then it probably is too good to be true.
But that is the kind of life lesson that you can’t learn on a computer, and certainly not on social media. I’m grateful that I came of age when free-range childhood was still a thing. To grow up without geo-tracking was both a privilege and a blessing.
I was ten or eleven years old when I discovered John Dennis Fitzgerald’s (1906–1988) semi-autobiographical series of children’s books, The Great Brain. The books are set at the end of the 1800s in Utah. The eponymous “Great Brain” is a fictionalized version of the author’s older brother.
I’m not sure why I started reading these books back in…1979, it must have been. Probably my mom was familiar with them (?)
Anyway, I recall getting my hands on the first one, and reading the rest in quick succession. Seven books were then available. (The original series was published between 1967 and 1976. A final book, based on Fitzgerald’s notes, was published in 1995, seven years after the author’s death.)
I skimmed through the first few pages of The Great Brain using Amazon’s preview function. I found myself being drawn into the story once again—more than 45 years after my initial reading.
My TBR list is already too long, and children’s fiction has never been my thing as an adult. I must say, though, I would not mind reading The Great Brain books again, or at least one or two of them. This really was—and is—youth fiction at its best. Far better than the much overrated Harry Potter novels, I dare say.
I’m late to this party. I didn’t realize that yet another television adaptation of Stephen King’s It was in the works. So now I know.
Forgive me if I skip this one. I love Stephen King’s books. (Or well, I love many of them, anyway.) But I read It for the first time as an 18-year-old in 1986. (I purchased one of the original hardcovers at the Waldenbooks in my local mall.)
I reread the book once in the 1990s. I’ve seen two screen adaptations already.
I always preferred King’s shorter, tighter books, anyway. For me, It marked the point where every Stephen King book was no longer a guaranteed page-turner.
But that really isn’t the point. This story has been in my brain for almost 40 years now. I understand that Hollywood prefers stories with prequalified demand (i.e., decades-old franchises). But there comes a time when I want something new.
No disrespect intended toward Mr. King. It was entertaining, the first—even the second—time around. But do I need yet another tour through the mythical town of Derry? Of all the teenage experiences I’d like to relive at the ripe old age of 57, this book doesn’t rank very high on the list.
This happened 27 years before I was born. But I grew up hearing about it from my grandparents, who were members of the World War II generation.
In 2025, the living ranks of those who remember this as news are growing thin. But for me (largely because of my grandparents), December 7 will always have a special significance.
And this Pearl Harbor Day, like the first one, falls on a Sunday.
Tuesday was Veteran’s Day here in the USA. Many GenXers, myself included, had grandparents of the World War II generation.
My maternal grandfather was born in 1921 and enlisted in the US Navy in December 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor. In the video below, I relate some of the stories he used to tell me.
In the spring of 1981, my seventh-grade English teacher assigned our class “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, a short story by James Thurber.
The eponymous lead character is a middle-age man who has gone into a trance in his day-to-day life. Walter Mitty is married, but there is no spark between him and his wife. (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was published in 1939, before the advent of no-fault divorce.) The story’s sparse 2,000-odd words don’t tell us much more about the details of Mitty’s circumstances, but we can easily imagine him as a low- or mid-level administrative employee in an office somewhere.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) theatrical release poster
To escape the dullness of his actual life, Walter Mitty retreats into various daydreams. He is alternately a US Navy hydroplane captain, a bomber pilot, and a brilliant surgeon. Mitty’s daydreams of a more glorious existence are inevitably interrupted when someone—often his wife—scolds him for zoning out.
I was twelve years old when I read this story for the first time. I remember enjoying some of the imagery of the story. But as a seventh-grader, I simply could not get my arms around the ennui and resignation that often accompanies middle age. I had not yet been on the planet for thirteen years. Everything was still new to me.
I recently reread Thurber’s story at the age of 57. What a difference 45 years can make, in the way one interprets a work of fiction.
I wouldn’t describe myself as a Walter Mitty. I don’t daydream about flying a navy hydroplane while I’m driving a car, as Mitty does. But at the age of 57, I do understand how a person can become disconnected from the larger world.
American society is forever fixated on the future, and that naturally tends toward a youth obsession. Once you reach a certain age, you tend to fall off society’s radar. People are much more interested in what younger folks are doing.
The flip side of that is that you, in turn, are much less interested in what most other people are talking about. This doesn’t necessarily lead to constant daydreaming. But it does lead to a sense that you are not as fully a part of this world as you once were.
This process might be unavoidable, and it might not be completely unhealthy, either, for aging individuals or for society at-large. Society would never change if the concerns of the same cohort of people forever dominated the zeitgeist. For the individual, gradually losing touch with the world—even in late middle age—might be viewed as an advance preparation for leaving the world entirely.
Anyway, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” has apparently struck a chord with a lot of people since it was first published. The story was made into a movie in 1947, and then again at 2013.
I vaguely remember the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Introduced in 1980, this little device was manufactured and marketed by the Tandy Corporation/Radio Shack. (Every shopping mall in the 1980s had a Radio Shack.) Science fiction author Isaac Asimov appeared in a series of marketing spots for the gadget.
1980 Radio Shack ad featuring the TRS-80 Pocket Computer and Isaac Asimov
I didn’t own a TRS-80 Pocket Computer, however. The MSRP was $169.95. In present-day money, that’s about $670—the cost of a base-model iPhone.
And of course, the TRS-80 Pocket Computer had a minimal functionality when compared to an iPhone. It couldn’t make phone calls, play music, or take photos. It couldn’t surf the Internet—which didn’t yet exist, anyway.
The TRS-80 Pocket Computer was programmable in BASIC (which couldn’t do much for the average consumer). Other than that, it was basically a glorified pocket calculator.
Herein lies an important realization about 1980s tech: it was very expensive, and it didn’t do much. Even if you could afford it, you usually concluded that you could do without it.
How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts
Or…
Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?
The big idea
I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.
The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.
I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.
Headless Horsemen from around the world
While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.
In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.
Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen wasbeheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.
Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.
But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s.
The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)
I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.
Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!
The Spirit of ’76
Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.
Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?
I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.
Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.
Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:
“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”
“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”
I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.
If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.
***
Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.
It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…
Whenever I go to Japan, a book haul is always near the top of my to-do list. Japanese-language books are not impossible to acquire in the United States; but it’s seldom as convenient as placing an order on Amazon.
This title would loosely translate as History of the Showa Era that Citizens Don’t Know.
As the cover image suggests, there are numerous chapters about the Japanese Imperial Navy and World War II.
One of the many rewards of learning a foreign language well is that your potential reading list will be vastly expanded. Some of my favorite books are Japanese-language titles.
Last night I went out for a walk in my neighborhood around 7 pm. (We’ve had an unseasonably warm spell here in the Cincinnati area.) I didn’t take into account how quickly the dusk settles in this late in the year. I was only halfway out when it suddenly became very…well, dark.
I therefore walked back to my house in the dark. The houses around me were festooned with various Halloween decorations: skulls, black cats, and even some cool Halloween projector lights.
I love Halloween. For me, Halloween is the time when we mortals come to terms with two constants of human existence: a.) the unknown, and b.) the inevitability of death.
The celebration of Halloween is an act of acceptance. Our lives will always contain tragedy, dissatisfactions, and uncertainty. But we cannot allow ourselves to paralyzed by fear…or by sadness.
Halloween is a time when we laugh at death, and embrace our mortality.
A few years ago, I wrote a Halloween novel called 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN. This nostalgic, coming-of-age horror tale is set on Halloween night, 1980. Check it out here.
If you want to maintain your abilities in a foreign language, you have to use the language regularly. And one of the best ways to practice a foreign language is by reading.
Forget the “apps”—read an old-fashioned book.
(Note: Yes, certain apps can be helpful when you are first learning a language. I’m not anti-app. But once you’re proficient, real-world materials will help you make the most progress. If you’ve been studying a language for years, you should be well beyond the Duolingo stage.)
I first read Pet Sematary—in English—in 1984. Back then, the book was new to all readers, and widely billed as, “the novel that scared Stephen King while he was writing it.”
Like The Dead Zone, which I recently discussed, I remembered the basic plot line and main characters of Pet Sematary. But I have forgotten enough to make the book entertaining the second time around. Also, when I first read this novel, I was a teenager. I’m now in my mid-50s. That makes a big difference.
What about the Spanish?
I sometimes get tongue-tied when chatting in Spanish, but my reading and aural comprehension abilities are quite high. I can read just about any modern text in Spanish, with only an occasional reference to a dictionary.
Lest this strike you as braggadocio, I will also point out that I had my first exposure to Spanish as a high school student more than 40 years ago. I took one year of intermediate Spanish in college. I used Spanish on the job during frequent trips to Mexico in the 1990s and 2000s.
My Spanish is good, by the standard gringo yardstick, and it should be, after all this time. I’m not a language-learning virtuoso, by any means. But I am a dedicated language learner, and one who has been at it for a number of years now.
I was just turning 15 when Risky Business—the movie that launched Tom Cruise’s acting career—hit the theaters in August 1983. I was too young to get into an R-rated movie without an adult; and this wasn’t a film that either of my parents would have been interested in seeing with me.
I neglected to see Risky Business for more than 40 years, partly because I was put off by the much-played clip of Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear. Call me homophobic if you’d like; but that isn’t the way to get me to see a movie. And there were just so many other movies to see.
I finally got around to watching Risky Business a few days ago. (Better late than never!) The movie was quite well done for a film that was originally conceived as a throwaway flick for Reagan-era young adults. (Moreover, despite the ubiquity of that clip with Tom Cruise in his underwear, that scene is a minuscule portion of the 95-minute movie.) Continue reading “‘Risky Business’: an entertaining film that would never get made today”
