#it was called like summer melon I wanted it but I didn’t have the cash

[milo-is-rambling]

Got home smoked a couple joints while drinking weed tea and then I think I’m gonna have a couple dabs later if I can get my brother to set up the rig

[mancavecloset]

The Waterpark, Part 2

Part 1

...

The four of us hadn’t been on the road more than an hour by the time I noticed Kyle and Josh had begun to read restaurant signs aloud as we passed them on the highway. The PB&J sandwiches, the chips, and the cookies were all ancient history by this point, and I got the sense that Kyle and Josh were itching to eat something else.

“I really want to make sure we have enough time in the park,” I said wearily, “But would y’all want to stop for… uh, well we already had breakfast, so… brunch?”

A chorus of “YES!” resounded from all angles of the car.

I rolled my eyes. I was used to putting a decent amount of food away during swim season, but these guys seemed to have hollow legs. I had been the least greedy when it came to the food, only eating a single PB&J, no chips, and just two cookies. Still, I wasn’t the least bit hungry, and frankly I was a bit surprised and turned on by the fact that it was only 10am and all of my friends were ravished despite sharing 11 sandwiches, 22 cookies, and a family size bag of chips between themselves.

“I do need to get gas soon,” I remarked. “Next exit with a gas station, we can stop for a quick bite.”

A few miles later, I pulled off and filled my tank. Josh graciously threw me some cash that covered about half of the gas money, and Kyle offered to cover my meal, with one caveat.

“… but dude, we have to go to Cracker Barrel,” Kyle remarked, pointing across the highway at its 50-foot tall sign.

“That’s not exactly fast,” I replied. But the quick reinforcement of support for the idea from Josh and Sam left me no choice.

“Fine,” I sighed, slightly annoyed that we would probably be pushing noon until we arrived at the waterpark. “Let’s make it quick though.”

---

We filed into the restaurant, Josh leading the way. I followed behind him, watching the ripples in his shoulders that jutted out from his tank top. My eyes wandered down to his muscular ass, which strained against his shorts. I slowed my pace, letting Sam also walk in front of me. Somehow, despite going to the gym far less frequently than Josh, and being a good 9” shorter than him, his ass looked even more impressive despite his baggy shorts, dancing as he walked like two tussling melons.

Kyle brought up the rear, and as he entered the dining area I once again caught his shirt riding up towards his bellybutton, showcasing his broadening stomach and wiggly love handles.

We sat down at the table and quickly looked at the menu. I wondered if I would get anything, but decided that since we were eating now, I might as well keep myself full so that we didn’t have to eat as soon as we got in the park.

I planned to order two eggs and some hashbrowns to go with my much-needed coffee, opting not to add any breakfast meats or toast, since I knew I’d never be able to finish them. My friends, however, seemed to have different plans.

“Dude I forgot how cheap the food is here!” Josh exclaimed excitedly.

“For real,” Sam chimed in.

Kyle, belly rolls resting inches from the edge of the table, nodded in agreement as he intently studied the menu. “Yeah, I can’t decide between the country boy platter or the pancake breakfast, so I might just get both since it’s so cheap. I can just heat up the leftovers tomorrow morning.”

I tried to mention that we had plenty of food packed and wasn’t sure there was a microwave, but Sam cut me off. “Oh shit, those both do look good. Smart.” I noticed him smirk just a tiny bit out of the corner of his mouth.

So Kyle ended up ordering two of the biggest meals that the restaurant had to offer, throwing in a side of bacon “for the table.” Josh ordered the country boy platter and also added a short stack of pancakes.

“I might as well carbo-load since we’re going to be running and hiking around the next two days, and I might sneak a workout in tonight anyways,” he reasoned.

We all rolled our eyes jokingly at him. So like Josh to bring up working out any chance he could. But Josh had a big appetite and fast metabolism, and he was probably right: the day at the waterpark combined with the hike we had planned tomorrow would probably erase a few thousand calories, not even accounting for this so-called “workout.”

Sam surprised me, also ordering the large, 1300-calorie platter. I figured he would have gone for something smaller since he had already had breakfast, two sandwiches, and a handful of cookies, but apparently he was also as ravenous as Josh and Kyle.

When I ordered my food, Kyle chided me. “Micah, just cause I’m paying for yours doesn’t mean you have to get the tiniest, cheapest thing on the menu.” He turned to the waitress, “He will also have a side of sausage.”

I lightly protested that I wasn’t hungry, but Kyle was having none of it.

“You came one slice short of beating Josh and I in the pizza eating contest at Cici’s, I know you’re hungrier than that.”

He was right about the contest, but he also failed to account that it had occurred in the winter, after an especially draining swim practice. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to make too big a show of not eating a lot, considering everyone else was pretty much pigging out.

I shrugged at the waitress and said, “I guess I’m having a side of sausage too.” I didn’t even bother asking her to hold the toast, figuring Kyle would badger me even further.

The meals came, and I nibbled on my hash browns and over medium eggs while taking in the sight of the three men across the table from me. They all attacked their food like it was the first thing they had eaten in 30 hours, when in reality it had been about 30 minutes.

Kyle’s two huge platters of food disappeared at a crazy rate. I noticed that as he ate through the pile of eggs, the mound of hash brown casserole, generous saucer of fried apples, slabs of country ham, two large golden biscuits topped with thick gravy, four pieces of toast, four thick dinner-plate size pancakes, and laughably small fruit cup, his stomach inched ever closer to the edge of the table. The plate of bacon, supposedly for said table, ended up consumed solely by Kyle as well. During it all, I watched his jiggly rolls dance under his shirt climb higher and closer as he shoveled forkful after forkful. As he neared empty-plate status, his shirt painted itself against the top arc of his belly, forming creases where his expanding belly rolls hugged against each other.

He started to slow down with about a third of the second platter remaining. By then, Josh had finished his food and patted his now slightly-distended abs in satisfaction. Sam seemed to have finished too, sipping intently on his coffee as he watched Kyle try to finish his immense meal. We all cheered him on, and when I mentioned that I wasn’t sure that the cabin had a microwave, it provided the fire he needed to power through the final remnants of the plate.

As he sat back in his chair, his jelly rolls morphed into a round arc, poking hilariously far out underneath his meaty moob-pecs and rounding down towards his straining belt. He reached down and loosened the belt a notch, leaving his pants button undone, which just gave his gut more room to expand outwards. He looked proud and stuffed.

“Fuck,” he said. “That was really good. Thank God I’m bulking.” He chuckled lightly. “Josh, I want to make sure I put this to good use, so maybe I’ll join you for that workout tonight.”

Josh nodded in agreement. Kyle stood up to go take a leak, and he had to brace himself on the table to do so. As he leaned forward, the gut rocked back and forth in his shirt like a cannonball on a sling. As he stood straight, it was clear just one belt notch looser was probably a temporary fix, as his belly poked out from below his shirt and formed a dramatic muffin top. His spare tire wrapped from one love handle to the other, hanging lowest in the center of his belly and covering about half of his belt buckle. The overhang was slight but undeniable, and made my cock leap in my underwear. As Kyle walked away toward the bathroom, his noticeably wider ass strained against the fabric of his incredibly tight olive khaki shorts.

Sam turned to me. “Micah, you really only halfway done? Wasn’t it you who wanted to get out of here quick?”

“I really wasn’t all that hungry.”

“Dude, if you never bulk, you’ll always be Lank,” Josh chimed in. Normally, the teasing remark would have bothered me enough to chow down more, but I was full.

“That may have worked in getting me to suffocate on pizza at Cicis, but I truly cannot eat more,” I said back. “I don’t know, I guess I don’t really get hungry while driving.” Or I’m not a huge human who lives in the gym and needs 8,000 calories a day to get ripped, I thought to myself.

“Not me,” Sam said, “I always get hungry on car rides.” He surprised me and asked if he could have the rest. “You know, since there might not be microwaves?”

“Go for it man,” I said, somewhat surprised, and pushed him my plate.

“Look at Sam-boy over here with the studly appetite. You’ve bulked up, haven’t you?” Josh goaded, reaching over and squeezing Sam’s bicep and shoulder.

“Yeah man, YogaFit has been really hitting the strength training stuff this summer and I mean, I guess I’m filling out finally,” Sam said confidently. The affirmation from his much-taller, muscular friend clearly boosting confidence.

“Better watch out, M, you’re going to be the only one of us that isn’t stacked soon,” Josh said, turning to me with a playful double-eyebrow raise.

I tried to hide how much the comment hurt. It sucked to see Josh slip back into his douchier self, but with Kyle in the bathroom, maybe he felt insecure. He knew Sam and I had grown closer this summer and that he and I had barely spoken. Without Kyle, we has kind of the odd man out. So I laughed it off.

Besides, I was still very aroused and very intrigued by how much Sam had been eating thus far. I began to notice how much he was filling out in the chest and shoulders. His biceps definitely did look more prominent, and even the muscles in his neck gave his once-boyish features a more manly look. Josh may have had a point about Sam getting bigger. Despite being a solid 6” taller than him and historically, about 30-35 lbs heavier, I surmised that with Sams newfound “man-body,” I probably only had about 15 lbs on him anymore. My eyes traveled down to a little belly poking against the fabric of his snug white shirt. Maybe only 10, I thought, cock stirring once more.

Still, the extra heft was probably a welcome sight for the slight-framed Sam. He had always had boyish facial features and had never really been able to put on weight, so filling out probably correlated with looking more grown-up. Regardless, he definitely had the start of a little belly on top of the new muscle, and I was interested in it.

Sam scooped up the last of my egg and sausage with a piece of my toast, and patted his tummy after his final bite. I made sure to walk behind him as I tried to determine if his recent ‘gains’ extended to his ass, but the baggy shorts made it tough to really gauge.

We cashed out and piled back into the car. A few miles into the drive, I checked my phone’s GPS.

“Good news – we’re just over a half-hour away!” I chirped excitedly. “We will be on a waterslide by noon!”

“Are we going to stop by the cabin first to drop the coolers off and change?” Kyle asked.

“Well check in isn’t until 4, and the coolers have plenty of ice, so we can just go straight into the park and then take a break when its time for check-in,” I answered. “And they have changing rooms in the park.”

“Oh ok sweet,” Kyle replied, going back to whatever game he was playing on his phone.

As I tapped my fingers to the beat of the alternative music playing loudly in the car, the circumstances of what I just told Kyle began to sink in. The first thing we’d be doing in the waterpark would be changing into our swim trunks. In the same room. The thought of the four of us naked together teased my dick into attention yet again. I was equally nervous and excited at the possibility of catching a glimpse of any of my friends in the changing room, especially after all the weight they each seemed to amass that summer.

At 11:30, we pulled out of dense forested road and into view of the waterpark’s entrance gates. Behind them, colorful waterslides covered the front side of the slope of a mountain, woven between bare spots of land – presumably ski paths for the winter months. We had arrived.

“Lets get wet boys!” Sam hollered from the back seat. We all let out a whoop in response and piled out of the car. We gathered our drawstring bags and marched through the parking lot, up to the park’s gates.

___

Because it was a weekday, the crowd was light, which was awesome because it meant no long waits for any of the slides. It was also awesome, because when we got into the changing area, we were the only four people in the entire room.

Josh led the pack into the room and turned right, into a row of benches and lockers that dead-ended about 20 feet in. Kyle and then Sam followed suit, which left me on the end of the row. Everyone kind of stared straight ahead into their lockers as we started to open our drawstring bags and pull out our swimsuits and towels. Out of the corner of my eye, I waited for someone to start changing, but realized I was the first. As I slid off my shorts and balled them up to throw into my bag, Josh spoke up.

“Woah guys, look at this!”

Everyone turned to see what Josh was talking about. There he stood, facing us, athletic shorts pulled halfway down his thighs. He was still wearing his Under Armour boxer briefs, but the fly was gaped open. His cock hung soft and thick through the fly, and flopped five or six inches below the opening to meet the waistband of his mid-thigh athletic shorts. Even soft, it was a big penis… borderline huge. It had definitely gotten bigger since the last time I’d seen it. Three years ago, Paisley had talked about it being north of seven inches hard, and that was back when his soft cock was smaller than I was seeing in front of me now. Hell, it was most of the way to seven inches even in its flaccid state. His expression turned upwards into an evil grin as he rocked his hips side to side, sending his dick flying around like an elephant trunk.

“Nice,” Sam deadpanned sarcastically, turning back to his locker. Kyle chuckled and then did the same.

I, on the other hand, found myself staring at the pendulous swing of Josh’s impressive cock for a second too long. A large central vein ran down the thick, smooth shaft, and his bulbous mushroom head hung low, flopping against the fabric of his athletic shorts.

When my gaze shifted upwards, I caught Josh’s eyes fixed back on mine. Still smirking, he bounced his eyebrows upward at me. Trying not to look guilty, I puffed air out my nose and rolled my eyes at him before turning back towards my locker. I tried to will my cock soft as I slipped off my underwear, settling for a half-chub that wasn’t entirely obvious. I quickly wriggled into my tangerine-colored swim trunks, not daring to steal more glances to my right. I was terrified of getting caught looking again.

As I slid my shorts and underwear into my bag, I heard Kyle making annoyed huffs and grunts to my right. Sam, who was midway through pulling off his athletic shorts, turned at the same time I did to ask what was wrong.

“These… fucking… shorts…” Kyle grumbled, trying to force the Velcro of his swim trunks to meet under his overhanging belly, which poked out from underneath his hiked-up shirt. The shirt was pulled up, perhaps for Kyle to see his shorts, a few inches above his belly button, where the round arc of his belly started to curve back towards his pecs. “… they must have shrunk when my mom washed them.”

“I don’t thi…” I started, but Josh cut me off.

“It’s all the GAINS man! Your glutes, your core, your lower back. Everything’s thicker now, man. Here, inhale your chest,” he said as he grabbed the two ends of waistband that constituted Kyle’s maroon floral swim trunks. The two Velcro strips were about 6 inches apart from each other, but they might as well have been a mile because there was no way they’d ever meet under current circumstances: separated by a long berth of overhanging gut. Still, Kyle did as he was told as Josh, now in just his boxer briefs and tank top, spun Kyle towards himself and tried to yank the two pieces of fabric together, chiseled arms rippling with exertion.

Kyle’s backside faced towards Sam and I as Josh tried to will the Velcro strips to meet below Kyle’s belly. What we saw was a good two or three inches of pure love handle spilling over the waistband of Kyle’s swim trunks, in every direction. Below the love handles sprouted a wide, jiggly butt that strained against the seams of the two-year-old swim trunks. Even Kyle’s meaty thighs filled out the pant holes nearly the whole way, where they finally opened up above his knees.

“Got it!” Josh exclaimed, pressing the two ends of the fly into eachother as Kyle still strained to suck in his gut. I was impressed that he managed to get it fastened at all, but his unlikely victory was quickly nullified as Kyle exhaled. The shorts flung back apart with a loud brrrrap, and Kyle’s exhaled gut crashed back down, splitting the Velcro fly once more.

“Fuck,” Kyle said.

“I have an idea,” Sam interjected, thrusting his loose athletic shorts to the ground and kicking them into his locker. This left just his powder blue Calvin boxers, and his bubbly ass jutted out from underneath their waistband, further than I’d ever seen.

I didn’t get to look long though, because Sam jumped over the bench and next to Josh. “You pull, I’ll tie,” Sam directed Josh. As Josh strained to pull Kyle’s shorts back together, Sam grabbed the laces, yanking them towards each other and weaving them across the other, before pulling the strings tight enough for Josh to marry up the Velcro. Sam double-knotted the laces and clapped one of Kyle’s love handles. “There ya go bud.”

The result was almost comical. Kyle’s swim trunks, which he had bought the summer after sophomore year when he weighed a trimmer 190 lbs, encased his lower body like a sausage. There wasn’t a free centimeter of space anywhere in the shorts. In the front, his exhalation lowered his overhanging gut to cover the entirety of the swim trunk’s laces. His meaty thighs pushed against every seam. Even his junk had no room; you could see his package pressed against the crotch of the floral trunks in a tennis-ball shaped arc. Kyle grumbled and turned around to put his remaining clothes in his locker, removing his shirt the rest of the way. The effects of the three-man effort to tie his swimsuit showed from behind as well, his love handles spilling comically far over the sides of his waist like a soft-serve ice cream cone. His globulous butt strained against the fabric holding it in - it looked like the seams were even starting to pull apart slightly where his fat, bubble ass mounded to its furthest arc. “I don’t know if I can go all day in these and still breathe… I guess they do sell swim trunks here,” he sighed, turning back around.

I sensed the slightest bit of shame in Kyle’s voice, almost as if he had begun to admit to himself that maybe his recent “bulk” had gotten a bit out of control. And a bit out of control was an understatement. Without his shirt on, Kyle’s fatty pecs rounded into muscular, fleshy tits, framed by a moderate smattering of light-brown chest hairs that thinned out as it traveled in a faint happy trail over his plump, fleshy belly. The “dad-bod” as we call it today was in full view, and he stood sturdier and much fatter than he had ever had before.

Josh seemed to have picked up on Kyle’s newfound shame as well. He reassured Kyle: “Dude, you’ve had those shorts since you were barely 16. You're a man now,” punching him playfully in the side. “You absolutely should get a new swimsuit that you haven’t had since you were just a kid. Man bodies aren’t built like boy’s bodies,” he said. Though Josh’s back was still turned to me, I was almost certain he darted his head in my direction as he said “boy’s bodies,” as I watched Kyle’s eyes briefly flick to my shirtless abdomen and back at Josh.

The validation from Josh (perhaps combined with seeing my “lanky” body) seemed to make him snap out of it, smiling sheepishly at first, but then proudly. “You’re right... and it’s bulking season anyways! Might as well have a proper swimsuit for it.” His stomach, looking massive above the suit’s skin-crushing tightness, jiggled in a downward arc towards his thighs as he swung his drawstring bag onto his now-bare back. “I’m gonna get us a spot along the deck chairs” he said, walking out of the locker room. He passed an incoming kid, skinny as a rail, who did a double-take at Kyle as he passed by, his big stomach swaying with each step at the kid’s eye level.

As I began to apply sunscreen, I turned my attention to Josh as he lowered his boxer briefs, big dick flopping out as he bent over to step out of them. I forced myself to steal only the quickest glances so as not to get caught staring, and it was all over too soon as Josh quickly yanked his blue and red-striped polo trunks up to his waist and stuffed his egg-sized balls and bratwurst-sized flaccid cock into the netting.

Sam, directly to the right of me, had been changing as well, quickly swapping his boxers for his trunks. I saw some bare skin out of the corner of my eye, but was too scared to fully turn my head as he was directly next to me. Sam wiggled his hips as he pulled the shorts up, and I realized he was struggling to pull the waistband up and over his bubble butt. This made me lust once again, thinking about the two bubble-cheeks exposed a few mere feet to my 4 oclock. Sam eventually got the shorts over his ass, but was now having some issues bringing the button of his pants together as well. Not nearly as dire a situation as Kyle’s trunks, but I stole a longer glance as he inhaled slightly and buttoned the trunks before exhaling his tummy, the slightest spare tire pressing into the waistband. They were snug alright, but as he turned around to leave, it was even clearer why Sam had struggled so much more to pull them on. His narrow waist curved nearly 90 degrees below the trunks’ waistband, jutting out to a proportionally enormous bubble ass. It pulled dramatically at the seat of his pastel-blue Nautica trunks as he walked out of the locker room. So much so, that the leg holes, which fell right above his knees last year, now ended much higher, at his mid-thigh. His ass swallowed the seam of the seat of his trunks, disappearing as his cantaloupe-shaped cheeks rubbed the material inward as he walked out of the locker room. I had to will my plumped dick from growing any further in my swimsuit as I dumped my sunscreen bottle into my drawstring and began to lock my locker.

Josh had apparently seen Sam struggle to get his suit on as well, because as Sam walked out of the locker room, Josh finished locking his locker, and turned to me. “Looks like you’re the only one that still actually fits in your suit, Lank,” he chuckled friendlily, pulling off his tank overhead by the back collar with rippling arms. His shirtlessness revealed two defined, bulging pecs, with perfect nickel-sized magenta nipples that sat atop an upside-down triangle of bulging traps, abs and obliques. His muscles were covered by the slightest layer of fat that only enhanced their size, creating a smooth silhouette like a marble statue. Deep “v” lines ran along the bottom of his six pack and pointed towards where his muscled torso met his polo swim trunks. The trunks were snug along his waist, and got even more snug on his upper legs, large quads and thighs filling out the upper part of the pantlegs. As a result, his package had nowhere to go but forward. If Kyle’s package created a tennis-ball shaped bulge, Josh’s girthy dick and huge balls formed a softball pressed up against the lower crotch of his trunks. He playfully turned his hips 180 to show his well-muscled ass straining against the swimsuit’s fabric, and I could see the outline of Josh’s sizable glutes.

“I guess you’re right” I half-smiled. “You and Kyle are both going to have to buy new suits I guess. For your... “man bodies,”” I air-quoted.

“Kyle needs a new suit so he can keep gorging himself without tearing through his pants,” Josh responded with a surprising glib acidity. “My man-body,” he said more playfully, melodramatically running his hands from his pecs to his abs to his hips, “looks pretty great in this tight suit, don’t you agree?” His facial expression changed from playful back to serious as his eyes met mine with surprising fire. As he finished the question, one of his hands moved from his hip to his immense package, giving it a light squeeze. I held his gaze, not really knowing what to say, focusing mostly on keeping my cock from getting any more chubbed than it already was. Perhaps three or four seconds passed, which felt like eternity due to the silence and unbroken eye contact, before Josh lowered his gaze, cracked a cheesy smile and clapped me on the back. “Let’s get out there and ride some water slides, Micah.”

I did my best to mirror his snap out of the awkward interaction. I smiled a half-sheepish, half relieved grin, and cheered, “finally! Let’s go!”

I followed him out of the locker room, shaking off the strange encounter and slipping my shades on. I smiled, knowing the day was young and I was about to spend the rest of it with my three shirtless friends in the hot sun and refreshing water.

...

part 3 to come.

[teshknowledgenotes]

THE GAMBLER – WILLIAM C REMPEL – NOTES

WHY?

Jay Vasantharajah recommended this book, I read his blog post about it and wanted to learn more.

THOUGHTS 

Crazy how far Kirk got in life financially, just by using leverage, loans and moving his money around avoiding bankruptcy and just being fearless taking out loan after loan and buying more profitable businesses.

Chapter 1

Kirk nurses a small charter air service through cycles of hard times after the war, until selling his company for a windfall fortune. But the gambler decided to bet it all on some kind of capitalist trifecta. Suddenly, he was on business news pages across the country risking huge sums in a puzzling range of eclectic markets. He called it “the leisure industry”.

On the West Coast he moved to control America's oldest commercial airline. In New York and Hollywood he waged a takeover battle for the faltering but fabled MGM Studios. In Las Vegas he built the world's biggest hotel – despite a secret campaign to stop him by rival Howard Hughes, the country's richest man. At the same time, Kirk snatched Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo casino out from under decades of mob control. He mad Elvis Presley a Vegas icon.

Overnight he was a major player in the movie, resorts, and gaming industries. Friends would call him a “deal junkie”, addicted to financial thrills, whether at a craps table or at the negotiating table. Two more times he would build the world's biggest hotel. In business as in gambling, Kirk believed there was no point in placing small bets.

In later years he would shake up the automobile industry with separate takeover bids for each of the Big Three carmakers.

There were no tycoons in Kirk's family tree. His immigrant father an illiterate farmer and fruit peddler, was in constant financial trouble. Kirk learned English and how to brawl growing up in Los Angeles. Eviction was a recurring family predicament. He said he studied in the school of hard knocks. It turned out to be an advanced course in survival and the value of trust, loyalty and hard work.

He avoided press interviews most of his life, making him appear reclusive. He hated being compared to the hermit like Howard Hughes, whom he otherwise admired. Kirk had a thriving social life with celebrity friends and business associates among them Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Tony Curtis. He was often noted in news and gossip columns attending charity and other public events. He double-dated with Cary Grant, and their families vacationed together.

Kirk was soft-spoken and understated with a paralyzing fear of public speaking. Kirk wanted his name on nothing – not on buildings, not on street signs, not even on his personal parking spot at MGM Studios. And Kirk never defaulted on a loan and always regarded his handshake as a binding contract.

Kirk travelled without an entourage. He carried his own bags and drove his own car, typically a Ford Taurus or Jeep Cherokee. He jogged the streets of Beverly Hills and walked to lunches without a bodyguard. He refused comps, personally paying for meals and rooms even at his own hotels. Once after a business trip to New York, Kirk was halfway to La Guardia Airport when he ordered his driver back into the city. He had forgotten to tip the maids at The Pierre Hotel.

He gave away millions to charity and to people in need on the strict condition that his gifts were kept secret. When his donations grew into the tens of millions, he formed a charitable foundation. It gave away more than a billion dollars, much of it to his ancestral homeland after a deadly earthquake. In Armenia, Kirk Kerkorian is regarded as one of the saints, but at his insistence there are no monuments to his lavish generosity.

“Never look back” Kirk liked to counsel. But in the end, he reflected on what mattered most in his life. It was neither his successes nor his disappointments. It was the thrill of the risk. “Life is a big craps game,” he told the Los Angeles Times “I've got to tell you, it's all been fun.”

Chapter 2: The Kid From The Weedpatch

The Kerkorian family's financial collapse and forced relocation to Los Angeles would be among the arliest and most unsettling memories of young Kerkor's life. It also ushered in prolonged periods of uncertainty that would extend more than a decade deep into the Great Depression. Missed rent payments and evictions, sometimes as often as every three months, repeatedly uprooted the family and made the boy a new kid in a new neighbourhood over and over again.

There were lessons to be learned from adapting and re-adapting to sudden changes, unfamiliar surroundings, and frequent disappointments. The bond growing from shared struggles and distress “us against the world” fostered fierce family loyalt and underscored the value of friendships over possessions.

But all the moves were also chances for Kerkor to reinvent himself. A first step was to Americanize his name. In the big city, Kerkor became Kirk. And the farm boy who arrived in Southern California speaking only Armenian had to learn English on the streets of Los Angeles.

By age nine Kirk was hawking the Evening Express on street corners, making about fifty cents a day and turning over pocketfuls of pennies to help support his family. His earliest experience with gambling was pitching pennies and bottle caps with fellow newsies.

Ahron tried to stay in the farm business as a produce broker. For a time he had his own fruit stand near what is now Universal Studios at the intersection of Ventura and Lankershim Boulevards. With another Armenian neighbour he started a produce-hauling business, trucking fruit to the city from the San Joaquin Valley over the Tehachapi Mountains. Kirk's older sibling, sometimes including sister Rose, drove the notoriously steep and winding Ridge Route over the mountains. The family enterprise ended after one summer growing season. The trucks were repossessed.

In his teen years Kirk came to regard his father as a heroic figure. Ahron was the man who had sailed to America in steerage, landed in California without a dime, built that million dollar agriculture empire and then lost it all, but who never stopped working hard and dreaming big. And he managed all the ups and downs despite the handicap of illiteracy, with what Kirk always regarded as “two strikes against him”

With perhaps a mix of pride and chagrin, he would later describe his father as “a big, rough man who didn't take anything from anybody” But Kirk and his father shared an important gambler's trait – a degree of comfort with risk.

One of Ahron's biggest scores came when he cornered the watermelon market in the Imperial Valley east of San Diego. Summer in that desert like area had been uncommonly cool and overcast. Watermelon farmers accustomed to sunny days with temperatures well over one hundred degrees feared cucumber sized crops and financial ruin. Many opted to cut their losses by suspending irrigation and saving on water costs.

Ahron saw opportunity. He scraped together every dollar from his fruit stand business and drove more than two hundred miles to El Centro. He had enough cash to get an audience with just about every farmer in the region. Few could resist. Ahron found as many takers as he had cash for buyouts.

As gambles go, it wasn't like Ahron was shooting craps or wagering on pure chance. He was betting on the weather, something familiar to the farmer from Weedpatch. His was a big risk, but a smart bet. When the sun finally came out in the Imperial Valley, Ahron ended up with truckloads of big, ripe melons in the midst of a region-wide watermelon shortage. His watermelon jackpot was an $18,000 profit, a twenty-first century equivalent of about $250,000.

Flush with cash, the family moved into a bigger house in a better neighbourhood just west of the University of Southern California. Ahron bought a new car, invested in new business opportunities, and saw his small fortune once again ebb steadily away. Frequent family moves resumed all too soon.

Kirk discovered early in those vagabond years that every new neighbourhood and every new schoolyard was likely to be his own personal testing ground. His shy nature and slender build made him an easy target for bullies. But he was also scrappy and determined never to back down, even when the odds and the sizes of his tormentors were against him. Kirk became something of a legend among pals after a beating he suffered one afternoon on his way home from school.

A kid had beaten him up four days in a row. What Kirk noticed, even in defeat, was that each time they fought, the bully was a little less aggressive. What the bully noticed, even in triumph, was that Kirk was getting to be a serious nuisance. For Kirk, the contest was a matter of honour. For the bully, it was increasingly a chore. He was losing heart. Finally, Kirk was the last boy standing. The bully gave up. The fights stopped and they wound up being best of buddies.

Public school held little interest for Kirk and in all the family moves he was falling behind other boys his age academically. He was a bright enough student, but he was bored by the repetition of math. One of his worst subject: geography. To Kirk the world was pretty small. He never travelled outside the two hundred mile stretch of California separating his Los Angeles home from his Fresno birthplace.

Chapter 4: Scraps, Craps, And John Wayne

With the war's end in sight by spring of 1945, the aviators of the RAF Ferry Command were increasingly aware that the end was also near for the extraordinary adventure they had ll shared for the most exciting two years that Kirk, for one, could ever have imagined.

Besides providing an enormous boost to the war effort, in particular Britain's domination of the air, another far-reaching contribution by the Ferry Command was the opening of new air routes for commercial aviation. The so-called polar route was tamed, and years ahead of it's time, thanks to the pioneering experiences of intrepid wartime aviators, Kirk Kerkorian among them.

In the end, many of the Ferry Command pilots lookd for ways to stick together after the war. Some shared dreams of starting their own airline. They would need seed money for such a venture.

Kirk, like several of his buddies, reached into his pocket to ante up a starter fund. The price to get into this game, one thousand dollars each.

Kirk returned to Los Angeles knowing only that he wanted to fly and that he had to be his own boss. In a matter of days, he set up a pilot training school at Vail Field in Montebello, a msall oil town just east of the city. He was a teacher again, specializing in helping licensed pilots obtain instrument ratings as required by commercial airlines.

The booming aviation business needed large numbers of instrument-rated commercial pilots, so Kirk's flight school roster was quickly filled. Within weeks the business was turning a reliable profit. But there was no excitement, no adrenaline rush. The teacher was bored with teaching.

Chapter 5: On A Wing And A Spare Tank

Kirk wanted his own airline his own fleet of planes, his own company. He watched pilots from the Pacific war zone combine fores to launch a cargo service named after their volunteer fighter unit, the Flying Tigers. A similar dream shared by his fellow RAF Ferry Command pilots never got off the ground. But Kirk was still dreaming.

One way he could build capital fast was in the surplus military plane market. The versatile twin-engineer C-47 “Gooney Bird” better known to civilians as the DC-3, was in especially big demand among new and expanding freight haulers from Alaska to South America. Fleets of planes coated in olive drab paint were parked all over Hawaii, stranded at war's end by a fuel range limiting them to island hopping or a maximum of five hundred miles.

Kirk had a plan. He bought seven of the planes stranded in Hawaii each worth at least double its purchase price if he could get it to the U.S. Mainland. And doubled again for any plane he ferried all the way down to Rio de Janeiro. He was figuring on profits that in 2018 dollars ranged from about $90,000 to $250,000 per plane. Kirk was back in ferrying business, this time as a broker of scrapped and surplus planes – gambling on the used aircraft market his own ability to fly just about anything with wings.

Now the only he had to do was get those short-range planes from Honolulu to San Francisco across twenty-four hundred miles of ocean.

Fall 1946, Honolulu, Hawaii. Kirk had paid $12000 for the first C-47 he intended to fly to the mainland. He had more than one customer already waiting. In fact, he had likely customers lined up from Hollywood to Rio to buy just about all hi surplus planes, sight unseen. And this on was a sight, with more than its share of dents and scuffs and that tired military drab paint job. But like the teenager who restored used cars, Kirk figured he could always give it a good steam cleaning and a fresh set of “newer” wheels. Far more critical was expanding the Gooney Bird's fuel range.

Kirk went on to deliver most of his surplus acquisitions personally and without drama. His partnership was with a Brazilian flier in Rio added to his international reputation an an aircraft trader. That is, until Kirk flew down to visit his money. Most of it had disappeared without proper accounting.

It was a hard lesson to learn about sloppy accounting and partnerships with strangers, and the drawbacks of conducting business by the seat of his pants. There wasn't enough cash left over in Brazil to fight about. Kirk walked out “Take it and shove it” he said and returned to California where he went into business with his best friend, his sister Rose Pechuls. She had recently divorced, ending a marriage in which her husband chafed at feeling inadequate compared to Rose's high regard for her brother Kirk.

When a small charter airline at Los Angeles Municipal Airport went on the market in 1947, Kirk and Rose bought it a three-plane fleet with a DC-3, a twin-engine Cessna, and a single engine Beechcraft. Kirk put up most of the $60,000 purchase price after borrowing $15000 from the Montebello branch of Bank Of America. Rose invested an additional $5000 and managed the office.

Chapter 7: Art Of The Junk Deal

Life in the nonscheduled airline business remained filled with uncertainties, many from federal regulations intended to protect competing commercial carriers. The Civil Aeronautics Board(CAB), which once encourage expansion of charter services, came under increasing pressure to crack down on their intrusions into profitable commercial routes.

Kirk figured his run of good luck wasn't going to last indefinitely. He started cashing in some of his chips. Over the next year and a half he sold off some of his biggest planes, including the Californian.

His $100,000 cattle scow went to Northeast Airlines for the remarkable price of $340,000 and that was without the used passenger seats. The inveterate scrap dealer sold those separately. That transaction produced a milestone for the thirty five year old entrepreneur. For the first time, Kirk's annual income broke $100,000. He also learned a lesson: pilots don't make big money, business men do.

With proceeds from his downsizing moves, Kirk was able to pay off his bank loans, buy out sister Rose's interest, and reorganize the company. Business operations were split into two ventures, the charter service and his used plane trade. The trimmed down airline could go dormant periodically, subject to the economy's ebb and flow of the shifting burdens of CAB regulation. But his used plane brokering and bartering business never closed, keeping Kirk especially happy and financially sound. We must've traded sixty planes in those days, he once estimated.

Chapter 8: Gambling On Gambling

A decade after the war, hotel and casino development in Las Vegas was still booming. Old Route 91, the Los Angeles-Las Vegas Highway was now called the Strip, where sprawling new resorts replaced barren sandlots. Seven busy casinos lit up black desert nights, and twice as many more were already in development. As University Of Nevada gaming historian David G. Schwartz described those heady days: “It looked like opening a successful Las Vegas casino was as easy as tripping and hitting the ground”

Everyone wanted in on action from Midwest mobsters to investment managers at the Teamsters Union pension fund, from real estate developers to car dealers, from actors like the Marx Brothers and Pat O'Brien to an aviator like Kirk Kerkorian.

As a gambler himself, Kirk knew better than most the fundamentals of a casino business model: customers come in all day and night to throw money at the owners. And they love doing it... win or lose. Kirk consistently lost more than he won yet visits to Vegas “the best times” of his life. “I was just overwhelmed by the excitement of the town”

He accumulate many friends among casino owners and managers. One of them was Marion Hicks, an energetic L.A. Real estate developer who built the El Cortez Hotel in downtown Las Vegas and then the Thunderbird on the Strip. During his many commutes with Kirk, Hicks had opportunities to share some of his hard earned wisdom.

Banks in the 1940's and 1950's did not make loans to casinos for anything least of all to fund shortfalls at the cashier's cage. To cover the huge payout, Hicks and Jones turned to Lansky, “the mob's accountant”. In return for a briefcase full of cash, Lansky extracted a significant share of casino ownership and a job for his brother. Jake Lanksy not only got an executive's title but also the casino's best place to park his black Cadillac, just outside the Thunderbird offices.

Hicks introduced his dancer to Kirk at the casino bar. They were very different. He was a financially comfortable divorce in his mid thirties, she was never married and barely ld enough to rink. He was intense but shy, she was an outgoing, confident performer with a touch of blunt spoken candor like Kirk's sister Rose. He was deeply tanned with black hair, she was pale and fair-haired. So, of course they fell in love. After a two year romance, Kirk took out a marriage license in Los Angeles County and set a wedding date. Kirk was thirty seven and Jean was twenty three.

As Kirk once again was feeling lucky in love, he tried to extend that streak into business, this time the gambling business. A surge in new casino openings promised to make 1955 the biggest year ever for Las Vegas expansion. Some friends were offering to let Kirk buy in to one of thew new ones, he could own a percentage of the Dunes.

Originally envisioned as the Middle Eastern themed Araby, the Dunes opened beneath a roof mounted and lighted thirty five foot fibre glass figure of a sultan. It was on prime property kitty-corner across the Strip from the Flamingo. It boasted the widest stage in town, room for forty chorus girls, and the country's biggest swimming pool. What it didn't have, apparently, was experienced casino management and seasoned resort staff.

The timing was unfortunate, too. Four other hotel casinos opened within a matter of weeks, with two more in advanced stages of development. There was a glut in the making. Life Magazine published a cover story questioning whether Las Vegas was growing too fast.

All the new resort operations struggled that summer. Still, Kirk submitted an application to state gaming regulators seeking approval to buy 3 percent of the Dunes. He was wiling to pay up to $150,000. He listed himself as an airplane dealer and easily passed regulatory review. After an investigation, Kirk was authorized to buy his first casino point (a one percentage share) for $50,000. But the business was too far gone to be salvaged by his late investment.

It's timing is everything this deal had nothing going for it. “They were in such bad shape” Kirk later conceded.

The Dunes managed to stay open (unlike some others), but it went through a rapid series of ownership changes that left Kirk's equity share absolutely worthless. The good news for Kirk was that he lost only $50,000. But it was a bitter lesson. “I learned then not to invest in a business I didn't run”

Chapter 10: A Crapshooter's Dream

Los Angeles Air Service had expanded to operate out of Burbank and Los Angeles and adopted a new name – Trans International Airlines (TIA), reflecting its more ambitious global intentions

Kirk's latest brainchild was a big, bold, and risky plan that could make or break his charter business stakes perversely big enough to excite the small business owner. With commercial airlines all switching their fleets to jetliners, Kirk wanted his to be the first supplemental service to own one. He wanted to buy a state-of-the-art four-engine jet-propelled DC-8. And for that he needed at least $5 million.

It turned out to be an especially difficult challenge to buy a perfectly fine prop plane on the glutted used plane market for a million to a million and a half. That was more easily in Tran International Airline's range. It net annually profits hovered around a quarter of a million dollars. But TIA's corporate value was far from sufficient to secure a loan in the stratospheric neighbourhood of $5 million.

Commercial banks were particularly leery  of edging out on any limb with supplemental air carriers for fear the CAB might abruptly change its rules and shut down a profitable route or service. Regulators had done just that to TIA's California-Hawaii service the year before.

Kirk was getting signals from just about everyone that he might be out of his league, that even if his idea was sound, it was not financially feasible given his limited resources. So, he was out meeting people, testing the market, shopping for cash, riding out to visit Harold Roth at his Long Island residence near Hewlett Bay Park with Charlie The Blade.

Roth owned a tool making firm ran an East Coast vending machine empire that sprawled to St.Louis, and made loans through a corporate entity called Valley Commercial Corporation. Some of those loans were shady, as were some of his friends and clientele. One of those Tourine a.k.a. The Blade, a.k.a. Charles White, Kirk's friendly and well connected Bookie.

In arranging the meeting with Kirk, Tourine made it clear to Roth what mattered most: “He's a very good friend of mine” The emphasis was less on business than on personal favours. “He's a very nice guy. I like him a lot” he told the vending machine executive. So Roth opened his door, shook hands with Kirk, and invited him to make his pitch.

The key to Kirk's grand plan was to go all in with TIA as a defense contractor. Since 1959 when the company landed its first government bid, ferrying U.S. Soldiers and their families to North Africa, military business had become a steady and reliable source of revenue. But that wouldn't last if TIA had to compete with jets moving troops and cargo twice as fast as his prop planes.

Kirk also reasoned that if his company was the first supplemental airline with jets, he could sew up all the government business he could possibly handle and take a giant leap ahead of his competitors.

It wasn't exactly a crap shoot, but it was a crapshooter's dream a big risk for a big payout. But Kirk wasn't taking a wild guess or betting on chance. He knew the business. He saw the expansion of U.S. Military bases in and around the Pacific. And he was confident that future demand for troops and cargo would translate into strong returns on investment.

Roth listened to Kirk's enthusiastic assessment. Tourine was right. Kirk was a very nice guy. But Roth wasn't sure Valley Commercial could handle such a big investment. And across the coffee table, Kirk wasn't sure he wanted anything to with Valley Commercial and whatever came with it.

Kirk headed back to California determined to defy the odds and parlay his numerous advantages with people he knew and trusted in the more traditional banking and aviation worlds.

It was the right move. Back home Kirk's reputation was gold plated. His track record running Trans International, or LAAS for nearly two decades was the envy of the aviation business. His credit was flawless. He had a loyal friend at the Bank Of America. And he had a smart, ambitious idea.

His first stop was Walter Sharp at the Bank of America branch in Montebello a Kerkorian fan since Kirk's Vail Field flight school days. Sharp said he would try to get his main office to go for a loan up to $2 million. It was no sure thing. It was an amount well beyond a branch manager's independent authorization.

With that request pending, Kirk drove out to Long Beach to look at a plane. He had learned that Douglas Aircraft Company was refurbishing a used jetliner, the very first DC-8 fuselage that came off the assembly line back in 1958. It was being upgraded with more powerful engines and reconfigure for passenger and cargo service as a Model 50 Jet Trader. Kirk wanted that plane.

He arranged to pitch his idea to Douglas executive Jackson R. McGowan, a familiar face to Kirk. They knew each other casually, having a negotiated a couple of DC-3 deals in the past when McGowan was a Douglas vice president for sales. He was now vice president and general manager of the entire aircraft division where DC-8's were built.

McGowan was skeptical. A supplemental air service paying five million for a jet? Was he serious? But he knew Kirk's reputation. He knew his credit history. He knew his track record. And Kirk's quiet, controlled excitement describing his plans for the Jet Trader made sense. It got McGowan excited, too. There was even an escape hatch, a Plan B. If government contracts were slow or failed to materialize, Kirk could lease the plane to a commercial carrier. The Douglas exec agreed with Kirk, it was a good bet. And he wanted a piece of it.

McGowan crafted a special deal for Fuselage No. 1, the upgraded Jet Trader. Kirk came up with some cash. Bank Of America came through with the loan of about $2 million. And Douglas Aircraft Company financed the balance, an unprecedented move at the same time of about three million dollars.

On his signature alone, Kirk had assumed a personal debt load of nearly five million dollars. Default would wipe out everything he had built. Failure would give him a taste of his father's desperation back in those final days at Weedpatch. But Kirk the gambling aviation executive was going all in.

The Jet Trader deal closed in June and Kirk moved quickly. He turned to Glenn A. Cramer, a sales executive at Lockheed and leading figure in the postwar charter business, and lured him over to TIA, making him the president of the company. Cramer's mandate was to keep the meter running on their DC-8, keep it making money.

The big jet's first steady work was flying high priority military loads from Travis Air Foce Base in Northern California to Guam. More contracts followed. And just like Kirk envisioned, TIA was scooping up the cream of new defense contracts. In its first partial year of operation, the Jet Trader was single handedly propelled TIA from earnings of a quarter million dollars to $1.1 million. The company's net value surged into the multi-millions of dollars.

Chapter 11: His First Million

Sherwood Harry Egbert, the president of Studebaker Corporation, had flown out from South Bend, Indiana, to make a deal. He was an athletic, six foot four man on a mission, and in a hurry, to save his company through diversification. Studebaker already had a stylish new car called the Avanti and new investments in makers of a commercial ice cream refrigerator and other small appliances. Now Egbert and the board wanted Tran International Airlines.

Egbert came prepared to make concessions. Kirk was a classic self-made entrepreneur who ran his own company. He wasn't going to relish having a boss. Egbert assured him that Studebaker wanted Kirk to continue running the air service. Kirk would be corporate vice president and the president of Trans International, a Studebaker subsidiary. Kirk's poker face disclosed nothing.

Egbert said that Kirk would receive more than 120,000 shares of Studebaker stock, then valued at about $8.25 per share. The deal would make Kirk a millionaire, at least on paper. Egbert agreed to a proviso that if stock prices sagged more shares would be added to guarantee Kirk's sale price at a floor no lower than $950,000. Studebaker also would compensate Kirk with additional annual shares for managing the operations.

Kirk had everything he wanted, plus his first million dollars and a new Avanti. The total deal was worth about $10 million.

After receiving nearly a million dollars in stock from Studebaker at the end of the year in 1962, Kirk turned around and invested most of that fresh income $960,00 on eighty acres of sand and brush. The property was a potentially prime location near the Dunes and across the strip from the Flamingo.

Jay Sarno the maestro behind upscale motel developments from Georgia to California, already had financing lined up through personal friendships with Teamsters Union now needed to win over Kirk Kerkorian, the Strip's newest landowner.

They met over dinner, Jay Sarno wanted to build the greatest hotel-casino in the world. Kirk was intrigued but unconvinced. His ill-fated Dunes investment had coincided with the end of a Las Vegas building boom that had remained stalled for nearly a decade. Not only was Sarno daring to end that development drought, but he also proposed to do so with an ultra luxury project that was unlike anything seen before on the Strip.

Kirk eventually agreed to final conditions. His long term lease would be subordinated to the Teamsters pension fund loan. Sarno and Jacobson would pay a relatively modest monthly lease of $15,000. Kirk would receive 15% of casino profits and have access to his own two bedroom suite in the new hotel.

It would seem that Kirk was violating his first rule of business, to invest only in ventures he controlled, but he was finally gambling again on the business of gambling.

PART II THE MAKING OF A BILLIONAIRE

Trans International Airlines now with a pair of DC-8 Jet Traders, two Constellations and assorted other planes in its relatively small fleet, was barely known outside the aviation industry. Still it was well run. Profits and revenue were steadily growing. And it paid its bills. In April 1965, TIA stock went on the market and investors yawned. It didn't move for weeks.

What fainlly started moving the stock were Kirk's Armenian connections. Kirk had already been getting a lot of press attention in the pages of Mason's California Courier. The airline owning Armenian may as well have owned a fleet of flying carpets. To the Courier's readers Kirk was an Armenian celebrity nearly on a par with J.C. Agajanian, the race car owner and designer whose team had two years earlier won it's third Indianapolis 500. The Armenian community invested in to TIA, in a matter of months, Kirk had paid off the $2 million bank loan iwth which he had bought back TIA from Studebaker. Kirk himself was now sitting on stock worth more than $66 million a vast fortune by any measure. And no on one was more surprised than he was.

Kirk was ready to take full control of his very own Vegas hotel and casino. He hadn't shared the news with anyone but his close friend Shoofey and his most intimate insiders. He asked Las Vegas sun publisher Hank Greenspun to take a ride around town with him. It became a tour of hotel building sites. The tour ended on Paradise Road by the convention center. Kirk was going to change the face of Las Vegas and he wanted his friend the newspaperman to know what was coming. A month laster the news was a headline: "$30 Million Vegas Hotel Near Convention Center"

According to published accounts, Kirk had paid $5 million cash for about sixty-five acres. He planned to break ground on the city's tallest high rise hotel project later in 1967. The casino would feature the largest gaming floor in Nevada. The hotel would have fifteen hundred guest rooms, making it the world's biggest at the time. Hotel guests would have access to an adjacent country club and eighteen-hole golf course then under development. And at $30 millions, Kirk's International Hotel would eclipse Caesars Palace. Kirk launched a tender offer in the morning. His bid: $35 each for a million shares of MGM Studios. His goal: management contro.

  What Kirk saw in a tired old MGM with its run of box office losers was something beyond the view of most investors. He saw hidden value. With a market price wallowing around $25 a share, investors were missing hundreds of millions in existing value, not even considering any turnaround potential. Kirk and Bautzer figured the company's actual value to be closer to $400 million or about $69 a share. What they saw was MGM's vast library of classic films, Gone With The Wind, Singin' In The Rain, The Wizard Of Oz. The company owned music publishers, a record company, overseas studios and tens of millions of dollars in real estate.

And there was the pricess cache of it's legendary name. For many, MGM spelled class, as in old Holywood glamour, gowns and tuxedos, klieg lights and red carpets. What was Leo The Lion worth? No one had ever imagined putting a price on the MGM logo. Not until Kirk Kerkorian.

Kirk would rely on a consortium of European banks to receive loans to make the MGM buy. MGM was Kirk's company to save. He controlled nearly 40% of MGM stock - 40% of Gone With The Wind, 40% of Leo the Lion.

  After getting various loans paid off, paid down or renegotiated, Kirk was once again building up cash reserves in 1971, topped by the summer sale of his last million shares of stock in International Leisure. Even MGM was accumulating cash rather than bleeding it, not so much from making movies as from moving real estate. The company sold off another piece of its back lot earlier in the year for $20 million. Movie production costs had been slashed. And the box office flop rate of recent film releases had been improved from 70 percent duds to 50 percent. Presiden Aubrey was predicting MGM's best revenue numbers in many years.

  Things looked sufficiently promising to Kirk that earlier in October he had convened a private meeting of his closest advisers and MGM executives for a strategic brainstorming session. How could the studio survive and thrive making movies in an entertainment market dominated by free consumer programs on television? How could its hedge its bets? Where could it go for a more reliable, steady, and growing stream of revenue?

Kirk had an idea: modified diversification of sorts. Combine the movie side of the entertainment business with the gaming side. This could be achieved if MGM borrowed about $75 million and built its own grand new Las Vegas hotel and casino. Fill it with movie memorabilia. Name the rooms, restaurants, and menu items after the stars. And call it the MGM Grand Hotel, after the 1933 classic Grand Hotel featuring Greta Garbo telling the world "I want to be alone" MGM, the film studio was going to build the hotel, own it, and operate it as a subsidiary. It would need stockholder approval, but that was never in doubt. Kirk owned 40% and was buying additional shares. MGM would take on debt for construction costs through debentures, interest bearing unsecured bonds. Unlike public offerings of stock, debenture funding would not dilute share values. The hotel would be ubilt on prime Strip-fronting property, sixteen acres already occupied on the then defunct Bonanza Hotel at the same intersection shared by Caesars Palace, the Dunes, and the Flamingo. Kirk owned the Bonanza, so MGM would pay him about $5 million, based on an independent appraisal. MGM would also purchase and adjacent twenty-six acres for $1.75 million making room for another big Kerkorian foorprint in Vegas gaming.

  The MGM Grand would be even bigger than Kirk's International Hotel. For the second time in a couple of years, he was launching construction of the world's biggest resort hotel, twenty six floors with more than two thousand rooms, a casino 140 years long with more than a thousand slot machines, ninety blackjack tables, and ten oversized craps tables, and trimmed with real imported Italian marble and genuine crystal chandeliers.

Kirk failed at gaining a major ownership of Columbia Pictures. The sale of Kirk's Columbia Pictures stock marked a rare caputaliation at that stage in his investing history. But iwas by no financial measure a failure. Kirk had purhcased the stock at an average price per share of $17.50. Columbia Pictures bought it back at a $20 markup for $37.50. Kirk's failure to take over the Columbia studio had resulted in a fifty net profit of $75.6 million. With all that cash in his pocket, he went shopping again for another movie studio.

[pizzahorse]

A gift requested by @redski

Description:  When a big, beautiful gem walks into The Big Donut, Lars is struck by Cupid's arrow.

To the outside observer or the oblivious vacationer, Beach City would appear as a small and calm beachside town. Nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary. Just a quiet place that, for some reason, nobody had moved to in several years. Of course, finding work was a challenge, and why struggle in a small town full of family owned businesses when you could live in the next town over, or bustling Empire City? Come to think of it, Beach City wasn't really much of a city. Perhaps the original founders had had delusions of grandeur that never came to fruition.

"LARS! SADIE!" Steven ran in the door of The Big Donut. Sadie looked up from where she was stocking behind the counter, and Lars woke up from where he was sleeping on the counter. Steven rushed to the front of the shop as he frequently did when he entered this establishment, slamming his hands down in front of Lars.

"I want you to meet the newest Crystal Gem!" He grinned wildly. Lars stood up with a disgusted noise at house loud and invasive of his personal space Steven had been. "Dun duh dah duh!"

"How many moms does this kid have?" Lars whispered to Sadie.

Behind Steven, a woman followed, the likes of which Lars had never seen. She was so tall she had to duck through the doorway, and when she stood up, Lars was surprised to find that she looked about a head taller than Steven's tallest mom. She glanced around the small shop, a disgruntled expression plastered on her face. Her mood seemed to match up perfectly opposite to that of Steven.

"This is Jasper!" The young half gem exclaimed.

Lars' eyes went wide as he gazed upon the huge, looming beauty that had just graced his place of employment. She was like no woman he'd ever seen. Towering, buff, with hands that looked like they could crush his head like it was a melon. There was something irresistible about her.

Sadie was unphased. She'd been working here for years, and in the more recent months she'd seen a lot more weird stuff happening in Beach City. It kind of all started after the first time Steven showed up to buy donuts. Maybe Ronaldo was right. Maybe there was more going on in Beach City than everyone was aware of. Not that it really mattered to her, so long as could keep her job. "Hey Jasper!" she offered a friendly smile.

The lanky boy next to her continued to not say anything, although he had started to stammer. Sadie pushed past him so she could attend to the customers. "What can I get for you two?" Lars' babbling was quickly getting on her nerves, so she turned around and gave him a swift punch in the arm. That seemed to snap the red head back to reality.

"What can we get for you?" He leaned over the counter in the same way he did when the cool kids came calling, trying to appear smooth and composed.

"I already asked that, Lars." Sadie said, through gritted teeth.

Steven had seen these antics many times before, so the lack of professionalism didn't bother him. "A dozen donuts, please!" He slapped down some cash excitedly.

Sadie turned and began to fill a box with assorted donuts. Lars continued to dreamily stare up at Jasper, who had joined Steven at the counter.

"So… come here often?" He asked.

"Nope!" Steven shook his head. "Jasper came from space. Her ship crash landed here, and then she got trapped in a gem fusion, and then she beat up Amethyst, but then-"

"Steven!" Lars rudely interrupted, glaring at him. "I wasn't talking to you! I was talking to..." He looked up, taking in the majesty of the perfect quartz gem once again. "...her." He sighed, becoming lost in Jasper's beauty as soon as his eyes averted to her again.

"DO NOT SPEAK TO THE QUARTZ CHILD IN THAT TONE!" Jasper slammed a fist on the counter. Lars was surprised it didn't crack under the force she seemed to have exerted.

Lars felt very frightened and very warm all at once. "I'm, uh, I'm very sorry ma'am." He tugged at his collar, afraid that that fist might be coming for his face next, and yet for some reason eager for her touch anyway.

"Ah, it's okay, Jasper! Lars is my friend. That's just how he jokes around." Steven said cheerily, gently tugging her fist off the countertop.

"Here you go, Steven." Sadie placed the box on the counter, shoving past Lars and his frightened stare.

"Thanks Sadie!" He snagged the box and headed over to one of the tables. Jasper gave Lars one last glare, before following silently behind.

Once they sat down, Jasper started quietly asking Steven questions about donuts and food and eating. He kept glancing over to Lars for the first several minutes, but seemed to eventually tire of it and focused on Steven's explanations.

Sadie sighed and started to clean up around the shop, but Lars stayed where he was. He couldn't believe that someone so gorgeous, so perfect, had just waltzed right into his place of work. Nothing interesting ever happened in Beach City, so what could have brought such a lovely, strapping lady to this dump of a place?

Steven. How did that kid get to be lucky enough to hang out with someone so alluring? It wasn't fair! Lars just had to get her phone number. Steven probably had it. Lars dreaded the thought of having to talk to that annoying kid, but he knew sacrifices sometimes had to be made in order to get the digits of a hot babe.

Lars watched intently as the giant woman started shoveling the dozen donuts into her mouth. Her long, fluffy, luscious hair cascaded past her shoulders. Lars wondered what it would be like to run his spindly fingers through it. Man, she had quite an appetite. Judging from her figure, she probably worked out. Maybe he would be able to watch her routine sometime.

When Jasper had finished, she swiped a hand across her face and let out a loud belch.

I like a lady that's not afraid to speak her mind. Lars thought.

Then she took the donut box between both hands and crushed it into a small round pile of cardboard.

God I wish that were me. He sighed dreamily, eyes still not leaving the huge orange woman still seated across from Steven.

Steven made a motion like he was shooting a basketball, and then Jasper took the wanded mess of the donut box and tossed it across the Big Donut and right into a trash can. He and Steven laughed at that for some reason, and then the pair high fived.

As they were getting up, Steven called out, "Bye Lars! Bye Sadie!"

"Bye Steven!" Sadie called back.

"Steven, WAIT!" Lars yelled out. Jasper had already made her exit, but Steven's hand still rested on the door.

"Yeah Lars?" He asked, confused.

Lars silently motioned for the boy to come closer. Steven glanced out the door towards Jasper, and Lars hissed, "Steven!" beginning to motion more fervently and with both hands.

Steven did as Lars indicated. "Can you get me that girls phone number?" He whispered when Steven was within earshot.

"I told you Lars, she came from space." The boy answered gleefully. "She doesn't have a phone. But you can call her at my house."

"She's staying with YOU?" Lars spluttered incredulously.

"Yep! And she's waiting for me. Catch you later, Lars!" He called back as he left The Big Donut.

Lars hopped up on the counter so he could sit down and process what he had just witnessed. A hot babe, the hottest babe in all the summers he'd spent in Beach City, was hanging out with Steven Universe. Not only that, but they appeared to be friends. She was staying at his house. She'd defended him- well, actually, she wouldn't be the first person to defend Steven from Lars himself. But that wasn't the point! Lars just had to find a way to get to know her. He had to find a way to get that bulky babe to hang off his arm. Well, he could probably hang off of hers with the muscles she was sporting.

"Wow." He breathed. "What a woman."

[mykatesingh-blog]

  Well, I’m finally back to my old self. Some of you know that we were about to purchase some land and old mobile home and it fell through. We should have stopped there but we had our house on the market and had committed to our realtor for six months. We tried our hand at another home, a loan, and lots of drives in the country to explore. We were disappointed over and over and the loan was not sufficient or the owner carry situations didn’t work out.

It was the confusion and vagueness of life that really took me down to the dark end of the street. It was that desire to have a new challenge and live somewhere better and not having a clear answer.  It was that raggedy hope that limped along to the next carnival booth to try at winning a prize only to lose big again and again.

But today I had a clear answer. NO. Not now. Or for a lonnnnnggg time. Get over it and get back to tending to this world lady!  So, no decent loan, no deal, no new home or land. Then other things happened to back it up. Bali’s only two employees are going to India for two months leaving him and the big boss to deal with the store alone leaving no time for a future move or home restore. And then the realtor for the last hope house never called back. Things have literally stopped moving forward.

I feel better. I do. I was getting downright depressed. I wanted to cry with frustration. Now I feel grounded and sanity is returning. Even the answer no is comforting sometimes.

I spent today cleaning a filthy house. I washed and scrubbed, I swept floors by hand, I turned up the music and brewed the coffee. Nothing like that coffee smell to signal the brain to start being productive. I put away piles of laundry. I feel so good right now that you would never know I was so wilted. I even laughed during a conversation on the phone.

Now I’m back to a plan. If we can’t get a good loan we will have to save cash. And I can save like a rock star. I love to get that notebook and pen out and write out our budget and then list all the ways we can save. Out comes the envelope for groceries.

  Bali manages a gas station down the street but it doesn’t pay much so we are considering selling the old car, getting something younger and hybrid and he can work Uber, Lyft or even delivery of some kind part-time in the city.

I can manage our money better by finding ways to take care of what we have, mend holes in our clothes, hand wash the stains out to preserve clothing better. I will work with a much smaller food budget. I can shop at WinCo, have us go back to a plant-based/whole food diet (I usually still feed the boys’ goats milk, fish, eggs…I’m not into them being veganish).

I have learned new tricks from Homestead Tessie on YouTube with going to food pantries after hours when they throw away the leftover food and produce and I would can and dehydrate all of it to stock my pantry. I would only take what was about to meet the garbage bin and not be taking from anyone in true need. I’m not ready to dumpster dive although I am glad others are doing it and helping curb that waste of good food.

We ate from our garden well this summer but not for long. I did put up 13 quarts of spaghetti sauce and may have more soon to put up. I have two bushels of butternut squash. The eggplant and zucchini are still producing but we went through the potatoes and onions fast. The melons didn’t do well and my corn is not coming up. We didn’t plant that smart and the viny plants took over not leaving much room for other foods. I also stopped gardening in my quest to move to greener pastures.

Now that my house is clean and organized I will work in the garden the next few days. I need to see what I can plant in August, harvest the old stuff, start seeds in my greenhouse, get back to my mini-farm. Eating from our neighbors’ nectarine tree (just what grew on our side) and our garden allowed me to have plenty of fresh, organic produce for a few weeks all free.

The Dollar Tree can even help stock the pantry. Oh, and I have a new homemade laundry soap recipe…all from Homestead Tessie. I don’t have many original ideas, I learn from others. I do the research. When I get into this mode I have so much fun learning new tricks and finding creative ways to make do or do without!

There are a few things you should know about me; first of all, I really want to live in a mobile home on some land. I love the forest and mountains and small, charming towns. I like everything lush and lovely but I have the obsession for an old mobile home that I can fix up like my very own dollhouse. I like challenges and old things. I like fixing things up. I enjoy being on a budget and I love nothing more than finding a fun vlog or blog about living a cozy life on pennies. I don’t know why. I shan’t ever be rich with this fascination. I would rather follow someone making a great life on a fixed income than someone finding riches.

I can’t speak for my family, but I don’t need much. I would like to travel later on when the boys are bigger and don’t act like feral puppies when we go out. I would surely lose them in some foreign country now with how they ran about.

I can’t get into coupons. Tried and never works for me. We eat simply and I cook from scratch. What the coupons are offered for are things we don’t use.

I love making everything from scratch and stocking my pantry. It’s becoming a hobby. Canning is a new thing for me as well and I love doing it.

I love all things homesteading as long as I don’t have to deal with animal husbandry (not that I don’t love animals but it’s a messy, poopy job) and I’m not the skilled woman with the knitting needles and sewer. I’m far from crafty but I have found you can transform an old piece of junk furniture with a can of spray paint. I like to browse Pinterest and find those simple crafty things an eight-year-old can do…then I know I might be up for the task. The smart way to find ways to use odd and old things…yes, Pinterest and see what others have done with say a broken metal rake or all the things you can do with old jars or shipping flats.

Since starting the writing of this blog yesterday, my husband gave me $179 in cash for groceries. I’ll get into the budget later but anything over $1000 paycheck is for groceries, dog food, and toiletries.

The family and I traveled over to WinCo and did some shopping. I hadn’t done a grocery shop in over a month. At the beginning of July, some generous soul sent us a $300 Winco card and I completely stocked my pantry with bulk ingredients. I have cooked from that supply, the garden, and maybe a few items from the store once a week such as a watermelon, baked chicken, milk…

I spent $125 on 6 bags of groceries last night. I have restocked my freezer with frozen veggies, my pantry with 10lb bags of rice, potatoes, rice, and plenty of fresh produce and extras to make good, healthy meals for 10 days plus extra supplies for the month. The trick is cutting out the meat and dairy. We did get a little yogurt for the boys but I can easily and inexpensively make homemade yogurt from now on.

The magic formula for feeding your family well on a small alotment is simply this:

All scratch cooking, buying bulk (check the price per pound because it doesn’t always save), stick to produce, grains, beans, potatoes, whole foods, everything in season, limit meat and dairy or cut it out, and no junk food.

So, off I go to look on Farmer’s Almanac to see what is ready to plant mid-August. I’ll go work out in the garden all day today since we are being blessed with the 80-degree weather after days of triple digits.  Planting your own produce section is another great money saver as well.

Have a great week!

      Time to buckle down and get creative with saving money. Well, I'm finally back to my old self. Some of you know that we were about to purchase some land and old mobile home and it fell through.

[traviswsoul]

Day 24 Oregon Dunes KOA to Beachside State Park 68 miles

July 22 6:30 time, 3,064 calories, 3,363' climbed, 10.5 avg mph The couple from Alberta who were on their way home from a Harley Davidson rally were up shortly after me.  He and I had a lot of great conversations about sailing, he was a big sailing enthusiast and also spent years at a time building models of famous old boats.  He would build everything down to the pulleys from scratch and by hand.  I could tell he was excited I was exited about his hobby and he was very proud to show me pictures of them and the beautiful cases he builds to display them when I asked.  You have to keep them covered, if they get dusty their ruined, they are way to fine and detailed to be cleaned. Their little pop up bed towed behind her tri-bike and was a really cool design, it was like a pop of camper but just the size of queen size bed when folded out and the entry expanded with nylon to make a vestibule you could stand in to get ready to climb in.  The only reiterated how much I love Canadians, at one point he was literally wearing a Canadian Tuxedo, denim pants and shirt, with his hat featuring an embroidery of a bald eagle backed by a waving american flag. Although I do not understand why the bald eagle is our symbol in USA because the only times I have seen one is in Canada.  In all the places I have traveled around the world I meet Canadians, they are simply the best travelers, always great ambassadors of where their from and appropriate adaptors of where they are.  When we said goodbye that  morning he shook my hand and said to me "you really added to our trip." I was honored, what a meaningful thing to say, full of honest expression, direct and not overly emotion, classic old man, whoever is his grandson is a lucky guy. On the road  by eight I was determined to make up some of the miles I lost backtracking the day before.  I rode through Lakeside, Winchester bay, over the Umpqua River at Gardiner, and into Dunes City before stopping after 30 miles.  Well actually I stopped once before at a little bakery because the draw bridge up ahead was raised and there was a line of traffic stopped through town up to the bakery so I dipped in and grabbed and Odwalla green juice and a mini loaf of Zucchini bread that I munched on all day.  The stop in Dunes City was to get cash because I remembered the call yesterday during the rain cover fiasco from the bank saying they were sending me a new debit card, the old one had been compromised and expect the new one in the mail in a few days, in Solana Beach, 1350 miles away.  So I got a wad of cash just in case, I still need to have a debit card send to Portland. Several things happened when I rolled into Florence, the first was the pot shop.  I was knowing full well I had a long way to ride and over the last few days was starting to feel strong muscle fatigue toward the end of long rides so I decided to stop and see if I could find a solution that wasn't anti inflammatory pills.  I walked out with a bottle of cannabis extract of CBD in coconut oil. 131 mg of CBD and only seven mg of THC. This I could take a half a ml of at lunch and ride through the end of the day with the pain, and it worked!  I rode a long, hard day and felt the best I have of any days after a 70 miler. Another thing that happened here was I was low on air, I rode through one RV park scoping the possibilities with no luck then I saw a tire shop.  I rode up and around along the bank of service entrances and saw one guy near me, we made eye contact, he had a numatic drill in his hand, and I asked him if I could get some air.  At a tire shop air is simply the force that allows all of their tools to work, so to ask for air, is well, like, asking for air, no big deal. He was more than nice about it! He said, "yeah but do you have the ..." and he hesitated right as I answered him before he had to finish with a resounding "yes" as I was parking my bike and retrieving what was needed.  I applied the air pump adaptor and we fell into the usual conversation about my trip.  "where you coming from?" "what?" "no way!" "how far you going" " you know that's against the wind don't ya?" Things brings me to a point I have observed for a long time, nod you're head if you agree, the guys that work at tire shops are the nicest most professional guy I come across in service roles. (here this turns into rant about the "good old days" and the confederate flag, see if you can follow along, its quite ridiculous) With his parted hair, pressed mechanic's shirt and handson smile this guy should have been in the start of some of romantic comedy as the local small town guy, he says his yes mam's and no mam's, meets the girl from out of town, they fall in love that summer but her daddy won't have it and rips her away from what her heart longs for. they correspond through letters until she runs away and they jump in his restored muscle car and ride off into the sunset, he treats her right, he doesn't become some depressed, self loathing, womanizing piece of shit, this is a love story!  Set in classic Ameriana with old cars, home town values, hard work and where you don't see it, but on the other side of the tracks is the happily segregated parts of town for the brown people, school and church and cemetery, like separate but equal... you know. The one where "it wasn't racist, that's just how it was" and some times they lynched people, and didn't go to jail for it, that kind of separate but equal.  The kind of unapologetic sentiment with which some southerners are protesting taking down statues of Robert E Lee across the south because it's "Their Heritage" Some parts of Germany don't keep the swastikas on their local flag because when you make some of the worst decisions as a population in modern history you tuck your tail and humbly ask if you can go on, you don't get to wave your fucking flag.  You don't get to keep your symbols and some fond memory of the good old days as if they weren't stained by the facts of life as experienced by the suppressed, abused and owned at that time. But it's taken until 2017 for white southerners to have to face the removal of the confederate flag from their flags, license plates and city centers and even that is being protested as violating the heritage and culture! Yes, Fuck Yes, we want to violate the heritage and culture so much that it is blatantly taught as insane and a deep black scare of how terrible we can be as a people.  We don't get to wash it away saying that's just how it was, fuck that, I really want to be sure I do my part to insure that the facts of the southern heritage do not get white washed and that children do not get taught that it was anything less than a monstrosity committed by none other than those children's very ancestors.  The Germans have done an amazing job owning up to the shit their forefathers did and we need to do the same and have a conersation in a way that does not distinguish one philosophy of evil as different from the other.  Why is the Holocaust known no well as the crime against humanity that it is but America can barely converse about the slavery that we build this nation upon.  I wont even start on the genocidal foundation we build with our treatment of the previous tenants of this land, but we don't really talk about that.  anyway, sorry for that, I just got distracted by imagining that classic Americana, it was quite disgraceful, but way off topic.... After I met that friendly mechanic and got air I stopped by Sand Masters in the same town, Florence.  Jack Smith told me to stop there because his friends own it, I wish I had know sooner, I would have loved to spend a half day there.  They rent sand boards to ride on the dunes, like snowboarding on the sand.  I've gotta go try that one day!  We visited a while then I was back on the road. The Yachats brewery was a great brewery, I had a big healthy falafel salad which I had  been missing, a good beer, a cup of salmon and smoked jalapeño chowder and flat melon kombuca.  It was all delicious but I was baffled why such a killer shop that did so many things so well didn't bother to do anything to carbonate their kombucha, it was great buch, the honeydew melon flavor couldn't have been done any better but it was flat as water.  I was so tired from the day already I could have fallen asleep there on the table I was at.  I had conversation with several people around me for a while and used my muscle roller until I finally worked up the energy to go.  By the time I did a thick fog had rolled in.  It was cold and misty riding to the campsite, so much so that I had water droplets on my lenses and it was dripping off my helmet.  Technically not my first ride in the rain but it still was wet riding home through that cloud.  When I checked in the ranger offered to stick me with the others or a secret spot he described as the little hobbit nook, it was tucked in some dense woods away from the hike and bike site, which was right on the road.  A tiny path took me past an old picnic table surrounded in over head plant growth to a small tent sized clearing where the back side had a narrow path right onto the beach.  By far the coolest camp site I've had yet.  I hung up my tent to dry a little because it was wet from the night before, then I showered, set up for the night and climbed in. I made an intricate system of lines in the ceiling of the tent in order to hang things to dry, the mist and dew outside wouldn't allow it to happen there so I had to improvise.

[newstfionline]

What happened when factory jobs moved from Warren, Ohio, to Juarez, Mexico

By Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 17, 2017

WARREN, OHIO, AND JUAREZ, MEXICO--Chris Wade reached into the darkness to silence his blaring alarm clock. It was 4:30 on a frigid winter morning in Warren, Ohio, and outside a fresh layer of snow blanketed the yard.

Thank God, Wade thought to himself. He would be able to get out his plow and make some quick cash.

Money never used to be a problem for Wade, 47, who owned a house with a pool back when he worked at Delphi Automotive, a parts manufacturer that for years was one of the biggest employers in this wooded stretch of northeastern Ohio. But 10 years after taking a buyout as part of Delphi’s ongoing shift of production out of the United States and into Mexico and China, the house and the pool were gone.

Berta Alicia Lopez, 54, is the new face of Delphi. On a recent chilly morning, she woke before sunrise on the outskirts of Juarez, Mexico, and caught an unheated bus that dropped her an hour away at the Delphi plant.

Lopez earns $1 an hour assembling cables and electronics that will eventually be installed into vehicles--the same work that Wade once did for $30 an hour. A farmer’s daughter who grew up in an impoverished stretch of rural Mexico, Lopez is proud to own a used Toyota sedan and a concrete block house.

She frequently thanks God for the work, even if it is in a town troubled by drug violence, even if she doesn’t see many possibilities for earning more or advancing.

The two workers live 1,800 miles and a border apart and have never met. But their stories embody the massive economic shift that has accompanied the rise of free trade.

In the United States, that shift has contributed to the loss of jobs that once helped workers buy homes, pay for health insurance and send children to college. In Mexico, it brought jobs--though they didn’t create the kind of broad, middle-class prosperity they once had in America.

President Trump has pledged to bring factory work back. But it may be too late to turn back the clock on the powerful forces shaping the lives of Wade and Lopez and two cities, one American and one Mexican, that remain inextricably linked by the geography of global economics.

To hear Trump tell it, free trade deals and globalization have produced clear winners and clear losers.

Delphi had been reducing its U.S. workforce for years before it moved most of its operations overseas in 2006.

“Every time I see a Delphi and I see companies leaving, that wall gets a little bit higher, and keeps going up,” Trump promised at a campaign rally in Ohio a few days before the election. “We are going to fight Delphi and other companies and say, ‘Don’t leave us, because there are going to be consequences.’”

He has pledged to tax imports from Mexico and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which eliminated most tariffs on the continent and, in Trump’s view, enriched Mexico at the expense of middle America.

But the real legacy of NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, is more complicated.

Nobody disputes that the loss of manufacturing has left a bruising mark in parts of the U.S., especially in places like the Rust Belt, where lower paying service industry jobs are increasingly replacing middle class factory positions. But many economists say changes in technology, along with competition with China, are more to blame than NAFTA.

The period of steepest decline in manufacturing jobs, which fell from 17 million to 11 million between 2000 and 2010, is substantially attributable to the free import of goods manufactured more cheaply in China and increasing reliance on machines to do the jobs humans once did, according to Gordon Hanson, an economist and trade expert at UC San Diego.

South of the border, free trade has indeed helped modernize Mexico by creating millions of jobs since the passage of NAFTA, boosting investment flow and helping to diversify the country’s manufacturing sector. Mexican workers now help build everything from Whirlpool washing machines to Bombardier jets.

But wages have remained low, so that Mexico remains attractive to manufacturers who might otherwise be tempted to locate in China or elsewhere in Asia. Since NAFTA went into effect, there has been no change in the number of Mexicans living below the poverty line--more than half.

Now, as Trump pushes companies to cancel plans for new factories in Mexico and vows to renegotiate trade deals, it appears more dramatic change is on the horizon.

His administration has proposed a 20% tax on imports from Mexico and other countries with which the U.S. has a trade deficit. Economists say the plan poses a serious threat to Mexico, which sends roughly 80% of its exports to the U.S., and whose peso has plummeted amid fears of what the Trump administration may do.

“It’s a new era,” Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, said in a recent speech, warning that if trade deals are opened up, everything--including Mexico’s cooperation with the U.S. on matters of immigration and security--will be up for negotiation.

Lopez is only vaguely aware of Trump--she’s too busy for politics.

Wade said he just wants things to go back to the way they were.

But even he sometimes wonders: “Is it too late?”

The snow kept falling, so Wade called up some buddies he works with and fired up his plow.

He sipped coffee from a thermos as he wove along a country lane through a landscape that looked like a Thomas Kinkade painting, with cornfields and churches and quaint clapboard houses all cloaked in white.

His first job was to clear the driveway of an industrial park that once belonged to Delphi.

“That’s when times was good,” Wade said in his raspy drawl. “That’s when I liked this place.”

Delphi began as Packard Electric, which started out in Warren in 1890 making light bulbs, but later branched out to auto parts. It became a division of General Motors in 1932, eventually expanding to include factories across the U.S.

The company’s factories in Warren paid middle class wages and helped build a prosperous city, with bustling streets lined with handsome brick buildings.

Both of Wade’s parents worked for Packard, earning enough to take the family on summer vacations and build a swimming pool in the backyard. Growing up, Wade heard stories at the dinner table each night about what had happened that day on the factory floor.

By then, Packard had started reducing its U.S. workforce by moving some of its operations to Mexico to take advantage of lower labor costs in cities such as Juarez, which was inviting foreign companies to build factories there while paying minimal taxes. The threat that more jobs could be shifted overseas forced union representatives in Ohio to make concessions in salaries and benefits.

Still, Wade’s brother and sister-in-law went to work at the Warren factory after high school and Wade figured he’d land there too.

By the time he did--in 1993, after a stint in the Navy that ended with a knee injury--the union workforce in Warren had dropped to less than 9,000, compared with 13,000 a decade earlier.

Still, Wade was happy with his life. He worked nights on the assembly line and cashed his paychecks every Thursday at the bar across the street. On days off, he went duck shooting with his chocolate Labrador, Hunter.

By the early 2000s, after Packard had been renamed Delphi Automotive Systems and spun off as a company independent of GM, Wade had the house and pool. His wife drove a brand new Trailblazer, and he drove a new Chevrolet pickup.

He had no idea what was coming.

Lopez grew up in Bermejillo, a dusty town in the state of Durango, where her stepfather spent his days in the sun, irrigating cotton and melon fields. Her mom had pulled her out of school when she was in fifth grade.

“Why study if you’re just going to work and have babies?” her mother told her.

Sure enough, by the time she was 17 she had a son, the first of her five children.

For centuries, people in Bermejillo made their living in the fields, and Lopez had little reason to think she would be any different.

But NAFTA made things hard on small Mexican farmers, who found themselves competing with imports from giant U.S. agribusinesses, many of which received healthy subsidies from the U.S. government. In places like Bermejillo, a generation of young people were suddenly out of work, and many headed north to the U.S.

Others went to frontier towns such as Juarez.

As NAFTA took effect, Juarez was transformed overnight from a desert oasis best known for its nightclubs and casinos into a sprawling grid of concrete industrial buildings intersected by dirt roads. The population grew faster than officials could build highways, schools and other infrastructure.

Migration to cities like Juarez also marked a cultural shift. Parents worked all day, and without extended family to look after them, children often found themselves alone. Drug cartels, whose power was growing, found easy recruits. As the city erupted into gang warfare, murders spiked, along with suicides and violence against women.

Lopez had been working in a cafe for $5 a week when a truck driver passing through town told her about new factory jobs up north. She arrived in Juarez in 1996 with her husband and five children. Her eldest son, then 16, who had not been able to find work in Durango, immediately found a job at a maquiladora, as they call the U.S. factories that had begun to proliferate along the Mexican side of the border.

So did Lopez, at Delphi, where on her first day she was so nervous she offered to clean the bathrooms instead of working on the floor.

“God helped me,” she recalled. “However good or bad, at least we had work.”

She took to factory life--gossiping with the other workers on breaks, earning the equivalent of a GED in classes offered after her shifts, making peace with living in a big city far from home. Then in 2001, her second eldest son committed suicide.

She was so despondent after his death that for the first time she stayed home from work. One of her managers at Delphi traveled to her neighborhood and gently persuaded her to return to the factory floor.

Lopez thought about returning to Durango, but she knew there would be no good jobs there. She resigned herself to the fact that the Delphi factory was probably the best place she’d ever work, and that Juarez was now her home.

“If I didn’t have the job, I wouldn’t eat,” she said.

Delphi had its own listing on the New York Stock Exchange, but its fortunes still rode on General Motors, its biggest customer. When the car company slumped in 2004, the transnational auto parts maker went into a tailspin.

The next year--amid an accounting fraud scandal in which the SEC fined several top executives--Delphi filed for bankruptcy.

Its board hired a new chief executive, Robert Miller, who complained that the company’s U.S. workers were overpaid, with labor costs triple that of other unionized auto suppliers.

In March 2006, Delphi announced it was closing or selling 21 of its 29 American plants, a move that eliminated more than 20,000 jobs, or about two-thirds of its total workforce. Operations were shipped to factories in China or Mexico, where Delphi now has about 70,000 employees working at factories in 20 cities.

Most of the plants in Warren remained open, but with a much smaller workforce. While Miller got a sendoff package that by one account was worth $35 million, workers were urged to take a buyout and warned that if they stayed, their wages would drop from an average of $29 an hour to $16.50.

On the day he walked away from Delphi with a buyout package worth $140,000, Wade was, as he put it, “fired up.” “The CEOs and the guys at the top make millions while everybody else can barely survive,” he said. “It’s not right.”

In Trumbull County, the former manufacturing and steel stronghold where Warren is located, the Delphi cuts felt like kicking a guy who was already down.

Wade’s post-Delphi years were not easy. Shortly after leaving the factory, he went through a divorce and narrowly avoided prison after being pulled over while drunk and with unlicensed guns in his car.

He had received his truck driver’s license, but the DUI eliminated that career plan. He earned a certification to sell insurance, but that didn’t pan out either.

He works in roofing now during the summer and plows snow in the winter. After a decade, he’s making about what he was when he worked at Delphi. But he doesn’t have the security of a pension, paid vacation or health insurance. If he had kept his job at Delphi, he would be just seven years from retirement.

Wade doesn’t want to hear about the Mexican workers who replaced him. He boils when he hears what low wages they get paid, and is equally angry about immigrants who work illegally in the U.S.

He liked that Trump called out Mexico on the issue. It was the kind of talk that helped persuade Wade, a lifelong Democrat and union member, to give Trump his vote. He was joined by many others in Trumbull County, which voted Republican for president for the first time since 1972.

Brian Lutz, shop steward with the union that once represented Wade, said he understands the anti-establishment anger.

“I hear all the time people who say why would I continue to vote for a Democrat when all the people I worked with are gone and the Democrats haven’t done what we sent them to do?” he said.

His union recently negotiated a contract that starts workers at $13 an hour. That’s about 10 times as much as Lopez takes home from the Delphi plant in Juarez today, two decades into her career there.

At the end of the shift in Juarez one recent afternoon, hundreds of workers streamed out of the Delphi factory toward the long line of white buses that take them home. Lopez climbed onto No. 6621, which headed east along the U.S. border, past dozens of other factories and a slew of big box stores.

It dropped Lopez in New Lands, a grid-like housing development that rises from the sand on the outskirts of the city. Overweight and suffering from diabetes, she shuffled past the Toyota in her driveway.

Trump’s warnings to companies to keep their business in America are already having an effect on the Mexican economy. Last month, after being criticized by Trump on Twitter, Ford announced it is canceling plans to build a new $1.6-billion factory in Mexico, opting instead to hire workers in Michigan.

Trump claimed credit, though the company said market demand was a bigger factor. The Mexico factory was designed to build small cars, but as gas prices have fallen, demand has shifted toward bigger models made in Michigan.

But some companies that produce goods in Mexico say there’s no going back to the U.S. That includes Delphi.

The company just announced a plan for more layoffs in Warren, where only 1,500 employees remain.

Speaking at Barclay’s Global Automotive Conference in New York in December, Delphi’s chief financial officer Joe Massaro explained what he thought would happen to Delphi under several Trump trade scenarios.

If Trump were to close the border with Mexico outright, “in less than a week, all the people who voted for him in Michigan and Ohio would be out of work,” Massaro argued, underscoring the fact that many factories in the U.S., including car makers in Detroit, depend on parts made in Mexico.

If the United States were to withdraw from NAFTA and start taxing imports from Mexico again, Delphi would continue doing business in Mexico, he said. The company would pass on the extra cost to its suppliers or to consumers, or would find a way to reduce its production costs--which could mean layoffs or salary cuts in Mexico.

What it all means for Lopez and her family, she is not sure.

Of her four children, three work in factories.

For the last couple of years, every spare peso has gone to pay the college tuition for her youngest son, Sergio, who is studying computer engineering. He dreams of starting a software company that can compete with U.S. firms.

He has watched his mom’s life, and wants to earn more than factory wages.

“It’s a lot of work for little money,” he said.

[gregandnickunplugged]

January 2

We got up early today so we'd have plenty of time to reach Shinjuku before our train to Hakuba departed. Nick left a bag at the hotel since I have one more day's reservation later, the same day he has to leave. Got a coffee at the station and another melon bread for breakfast while we waited on the platform. Our car was crowded mostly with other foreigners like us bound for Hakuba and the ski slopes, especially lots of Australians.

It's quite an experience to pass through the suburbs of Tokyo and to realize just how enormous the city is. Then you pass into the countryside and marvel at how green almost everything is. Of course, I can tell you from personal experience that the reason it's so pretty is that during the summer it never. stops. raining. Okay, maybe it does occasionally stop but when the average state is rain, the times when it isn't pouring don't stand out as much in the memory. The trip left us with four hours to kill, which I whittled away with a mix of Murakami and Mark Twian and occasionally trying to catch pictures of picturesque sights outside the window.

We arrived in Hakuba around 11:30; to my everlasting shock and horror the train was a whole two or three minutes late. What's this world coming to?! Actually getting to the hotel took quite a while as neither of us really felt like walking there from the station (it was close enough but slightly uphill over unfamiliar terrain and we've done lots of walking and have still more in store in Kyoto) and there were very few taxis. As we found out later, there's a bus terminal quite close to our hotel that has a regular service we could have made use of. File that one away for Wednesday. Our hotel is something of a step down from our last accommodations but almost anything would be. Still, it's comfortable enough and within walking distance of absolutely everywhere we might ever want to go. We took a shuttle to the slopes today but as we realized later, we needn't have bothered because we can walk from the hotel to the base in less time than it takes the shuttle to navigate the several intermediate stops at car parks and other hotels.

Such things aside, we had the easiest time ever renting skis at a place right next to the hotel (and we're not starved for options) and I got us a 'wow, you can actually speak Japanese' discount over the already reasonable rate for a two-day rental. We headed to the slopes in the redundant shuttle and picked up a two-day pass. We had the option of buying a half-day and consecutive full-day but as it turned out the price was the same to just buy a two-day. Oh, and for slopes with Olympic pedigree the price was extremely reasonable. If we had more time here we could get a pass to cover the entire Hakuba Valley region and it would still be a steal but we got tickets to just cover the Happo-One slopes. Timing-wise we didn't have too long on the slopes but better to get part of a day in, test out our rental gear and get a feel for the runs than not, right? We caught a quick bite at the mid-mountain rest area where the gondola drops you off (I think Nick was attracted to the Corona Terrace name) which wasn't anywhere near as good as what something like Squaw can offer but we'd had a long day so far and found the slope food to be perfectly satisfactory.

Our first run was... not entirely promising. There wasn't much active snowfall but the high winds on the peak were murder on visibility and the slope could charitably be described as icy. A more fair description would be 'icy, with patches of almost exposed dirt and deep moguls that had delusions that they were solid rock rather than snow'. So our legs were feeling it just a little bit after that run. Fortunately things got much better with the next couple runs on lower slopes where there was some more fresh(ish) snow, the moguls were a good deal forgiving and the winds greatly reduced. On one of those runs we were treated to the sight of a Japanese man with a very 80's hairstyle skiing in a tuxedo jacket, white gloves included. The lifts started closing at 3:40 and not being familiar with the slopes (and the lower parts of the mountain being kind of bare) we decided to take the gondola back down as well. Which seems to have been the popular option as there was quite a queue of people doing the same thing. Oh, and something noteworthy about the gondolas here: They're quite small, more like little pods that can seat four to six people (two to a bench comfortably, or three if you're very friendly) and the lift staff take your equipment from you when you board it and place it on the outside racks, then hand it back to you at the other end. Other fun things: The chairlifts don't slow down when they get close to the area where you board them like they usually do back home, so they tend to whack you in the back of the legs and force you to sit down unless you get the positioning just right. Also, the slope has a lift that runs two sets of chairs at once for a true 'quad' lift. I'll try to snap a picture tomorrow.

On our extremely easy walk back to the hotel we found a neat place called the Recovery Bar that we thought might be a good spot for dinner or at least a drink. We deposited our ski equipment at the hotel and finally checked into our room properly, as it hadn't been ready when we first arrived. This region is known for its hot springs so after a long day of travel and a bit of skiing (or boarding, in Nick's case) there was nothing for it but to find an onsen. I hadn't been to one since my trip with Joe immediately after graduating college, so more than ten years. There were plenty to choose from but the coolest was located in another hotel and when I called to inquire I found out that it's reserved for guests past 5 PM. Fortunately, there was another one close to us that wasn't attached to a hotel called Sato no Yu  After having to return to the hotel to pick up some more change (tickets were machine-vended, it didn't accept bills and we didn't have enough in coins) we finally went in. The experience was quite refreshing, though I suspect it's one Nick won't be keen on repeating tomorrow. Something about the 'traditional Japanese experience' not agreeing with his delicate modesty.

Afterwards we headed for the Recovery Bar to grab a bite to eat as their food menu looked really good. After finding a spot to sit (it was very crowded) Nick went to order only to find that they don't take cards and I'd left my larger bills back at the hotel when I went back to get more change for the onsen, thinking I wouldn't need it. So we left unable to order and while pondering our options we stopped at a sports bar that looked interesting, except that their food looked unimpressive so we decided to give it a pass even though it had live sports while the Recovery Bar didn't. We also found an izakaya at the hotel right next to ours that looked quite good but they were booked for the evening (we made reservations for tomorrow). The third try was clearly not the charm tonight, but it might be tomorrow. So we found an ATM at the bus terminal, grabbed some hard cash and headed back to our first choice. It was still booming (almost entirely with Aussies, who run the place in fact) but we managed to snag a corner booth to ourselves so it all worked out well in the end. Nick had a fancy hamburger, I had a fish burger and we both had a couple pints of Sapporo and a leisurely opportunity to talk and relax. After that we meandered back to our rooms, stopping at a couple of shops along the way. I suspect we'll sleep well tonight.