Category: life

Uncle Cecil, the Apple King

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This weekend is Apple Day in Paintsville, Kentucky. Officially, it’s the Kentucky Apple Festival, but everyone calls it Apple Day.
 
It’s basically a county fair. There’s a carnival and a parade and a lot of food, like apple pie, caramel apples and apple butter. There aren’t really a lot of orchards in Johnson County, but there are a few, and every year, the farmer with the best apples is proclaimed the Apple King.
 
When I was 8 years old, my Great Uncle Cecil was Apple King because of his Minerva apples.
 
Cecil was Granny’s brother. He and Aunt Minerva never had kids, but people adopted them as surrogate grandparents. They lived in a log house they built themselves on a small farm up a hollow near a place called Meally.
 
They bickered a lot. Minerva was a little hard of hearing, and Cecil sort of mumbled. He’d say something, she wouldn’t understand him, so he’d say it louder and louder until she understood or accused him of yelling at her, but they loved each other deeply.
 
Cecil was kind of a hacker in the DIY-sense of the word. He loved taking things apart and seeing how they worked and trying to make them do things they weren’t meant to do. He tinkered with old radios and model trains, and he tinkered with his apple trees.
 
I don’t know a lot about horticulture, but he would take stems from one kind of apple tree and graft them onto another one, and after many years, he came up with a hybrid he called the Minerva apple.

Minerva apples were yellow and big and perfect — crisp, not mushy, and a little more sweet than tart. When he finally entered the Minerva apple in the Apple Day contest, the other farmers didn’t have a chance.

I don’t remember the last time I had a Minerva apple. As he and Minerva got older, Cecil let his orchard go, and, one year, there simply weren’t any more.
 
Minerva passed away in 1995, and Cecil died in 1999. I went to see him a few months before he died. He was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and watching CNN on the little TV in the corner. We were making small talk, and I asked how he came up with the Minerva apple. 

He grinned but wouldn’t tell me, because, really, those apples were always just Minerva’s apples.

Saying no, the right way

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Walt Disney, C.V. Wood, who helped develop Disneyland, and Harrison "Buzz" Price

I learned the other day that Harrison “Buzz” Price passed away about a year ago. He was 89.

You probably don’t know the name, but Walt Disney did.

Disney dreamed up the modern theme park, but Harrison Price was a numbers man. He studied the data and told Disney where he should build it.

That’s how I met Harrison Price. I used to work in newspapers, and when I worked at the paper in Orlando, he was always gracious and patient when I called him with questions about amusement parks in general or Disney in particular.

When he was in his early 80s (and only semi-retired), he wrote a book called Walt’s Revolution: By the Numbers, about his career and what he called “rollercoaster math,” the math of the attractions business. We finally met when he came to town to promote the book, and he was even nicer in person than he had been on the phone.

Walt’s Revolution is a fascinating book, both as history and as a look at how that business operates. Of course, I’ll never try to build a theme park, but there’s one lesson in the book I’ll always remember:

Don’t say no.

Instead, say, “Yes, if….”

“Walt liked this language,” Price said in the book.

“No, because…” is the language of a deal killer. “Yes, if…” may mean the same thing, but Harrison Price called it “the approach of the deal maker.”

“Creative people thrive on ‘Yes, if,'” he said.

This is a great lesson, and it’s been a tough one to learn.

It’s usually easier to say no, but things usually turn out better when you turn it around and think it through and answer, “Yes, if….”

You don’t need the same number of chocolate chip and oatmeal-raisin cookies, ever

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I was at a conference the other day, and mid-afternoon, they brought in a tray of cookies with a long row of chocolate chip cookies and about the same number of oatmeal-raisin cookies.

When the break was over, there weren’t any chocolate chip cookies, but there were still plenty of oatmeal-raisin cookies.

This is because no one likes oatmeal-raisin cookies. OK, some people like oatmeal-raisin cookies, but, given a choice, most people would pick something else.

Cookie trays don’t lie.

You’d think meeting planners would notice this, too, but, as a group, they’re oblivious to the fact chocolate chip cookies go a lot faster than the oatmeal-raisins.

Putting an equal number of chocolate chip and oatmeal-raisin cookies on a tray is like leaving the tails on shrimp when you’re putting them in a pasta dish. It’s something everyone does, but shouldn’t, because it’s stupid.

(No one’s going to grab a shrimp from the shrimp fra diavolo. They’re going to spear it with a fork, along with a twirl of noodles and sauce.)

I’m not sure how we can stop the madness, but I have an idea.

If you’re at a conference or church social or a PTA meeting, and someone brings in a cookie try with an equal number of chocolate chip and oatmeal-raisin cookies, say this:

“THAT’S JUST STUPID. YOU KNOW THOSE OATMEAL-RAISIN COOKIES ARE JUST GOING TO SIT THERE, RIGHT? DO YOU REALLY HAVE ENOUGH MONEY IN YOUR BUDGET TO BUY COOKIES NO ONE’S GOING TO EAT?”

Hopefully, eventually, people will get the message.