My wife and I hosted a barbecue this past Saturday.
It was a gentle affair – 3 couples, 4 babies, small talk and some burgers.
It was the name of the recipe for the burgers I prepared that actually began a larger conversation about the six degrees of separation and how we’re all tied together.
I’ll get to the significance of that in a moment.
But first, the burger recipe is this:
2 lbs lean ground beef
1 egg
Paula Dean’s garlic salt blend
1 cup of diced onion
Ω cup of red table wine
Mix ingredients together. Makes about 8 patties.
Enjoy with a cabernet like Olema or Bridgman.
It’s a simple recipe, really.
But they taste out of this world.
That’s why I call them, ìAwesome Burgersî.
And I first made them back in May, 1992. In NYC.
I had just moved there to work at JWT as an art director and was staying with a young couple whilst I searched for an apartment.
The wife of the young couple was also the little sister of one Warren Spector, former big (bad) decision maker at Bear Sterns.
In ’92, he was a rising star at Bear Sterns. He came to the dinner I prepared that late-May evening at their small Sutton Place apartment.
Unfortunately, the beta test for my burgers didn’t go so well.
He wasn’t impressed and in short order, had to run off to meet his boss, Jimmy Caine, for an evening of bridge.
Warren thanked me for my efforts and joked that he hoped my ad career turned-out a little better than the burgers did (still TBD).
I didn’t really like the guy and couldn’t say why except maybe that I’ve never taken to Wall Street types.
Then he was gone and I never heard of or from him again.
Until the Fall of 2007.
His name and face popped-up on CNBC one morning in October of that fateful year.
Turns out his cooking wasn’t that stellar either. Cooking of the books, that is. His department apparently had been running rogue ops that hid huge, risky loans that were being bundled in with good mortgage loans.
They were called, subprime loans.
Years of doing this had put Bear Sterns on a dangerous, slippery slope and down they came.
Spector was lucky.
They fired him before he hit the bottom of the hill and the indictments came down that saw several of his underlings go to prison. He got a golden parachute somewhere in the neighborhood of $35 million bucks.
Now, here’s where that connectivity thing comes inÖ
Bear Sterns is widely thought of as Ground Zero for the subprime loan mess.
Those loans infected the global economy and moreover, cost me my job.
How?
Because banks tightened credit as foreclosures rose.
People who normally would refinance and use some of that money to buy, say, a Chevy Silverado could no longer afford to do so.
As Silverados piled up at dealerships, profits fell sharply and subsequently, ad budgets began to get slashed.
Slashed ad budgets meant agency trimmings and the reshuffling of “resources”…
We’re all familiar with the rest of the story, because most of us are those “resources” on the other side of the glass right now.
However, there is a bright spot in the telling of this story;
Had I not grown tired of the likes of Spector and his Wall Street cronies, I probably wouldn’t have left NYC for Detroit.
And that would mean I wouldn’t have met my wife at the agency we were both at in Detroit.
Which, in turn, would sadly mean we wouldn’t have had the beautiful baby boy we now have.
Nor the barbecue this past Saturday that began the conversation of connectivity in the first place.
We’re all wired together.
Even without the Internet.
Hmm. JPMorganChase bought out Bear Sterns. And I worked on JPMorganChase. See? All connected.
