Personal memoir recounting a family lawsuit over a stock dividend and consulting work

operations in Japan, where the new terminal at Kawasaki could theoretically obviate the older and clumsier one in Tokyo Harbor. I realized that plant-closing might be unthinkable in Japan, but thought that something good might come of the idea. Sometime a little later came my lawsuit against my father. It isn’t my happiest memory. There had been a stock dividend years before, when I was still in school. We had treated it a certain way on the books. | read the law as saying it should have been treated another way. The law was probably on my side, and common sense on my father’s. Judge Peery wisely found a way to make common sense win in the end. Meanwhile I had accused my father of nothing worse than oversight. My visits to Sutton Place, now with Ann and the boys, went the same as before. The lawsuit seldom came up and was discussed in easy terms when it did. | suggested to him, for example, that he might want to settle with my stepmother Teddy in case there could be claims by the estate of my late half-brother Timmy. He did. Somehow we got through the lawsuit without bad blood. One would not have guessed so much was at stake. The stock dividend had been a huge one. What | learned from my father, then most of all, was perspective. He believed in an even keel. Zeno the Stoic, not the Eleatic, would have met his match. The lawsuit lasted from 1966 through 1971. In hindsight, thank gosh he won. If I had, tax consequences would have been ugly all around. Again I had learned a lesson, and again there were no hard feelings either way. I continued to do consulting jobs for him throughout the lawsuit and after. I charged expenses, but no fee. And I didn’t pad expenses. If ] had, you can believe he would have seen it. ] stayed in a single room in the best hotels, ate three squares a day, and paid for anything else myself. | was trying to make the point that I didn’t want to be paid. Neither had my father at Spartan during the war. The idea was for me to be of use. I was paid like everyone else when working for my father full-time, but never on consulting jobs. Those now came once or twice a year, and lasted for a week or two each. Composing was still on the back burner. I was keen on physics, economics, human origins and Chapter 1: Recollections 1/06/16 8 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010924