I

n 1979 I was looking to make a career change. Since graduating from Wheaton North High School in the top five percent of my class and dropping out of college after a fruitless year, I had been employed as a janitor at a bakery and a Volkswagen dealership, a shipping clerk at the Theosophical Publishing House, a groundskeeper at the Theosophical Society, a stockroom clerk at a small electronics plant, a purchasing agent at the same plant, a purchasing agent at a small factory where the owner threw hammers at you when he was angry (yes, we called him Thor), a life insurance agent, and a call center rep selling subscriptions to the Chicago Tribune (aka “The World’s Greatest Newspaper”).

In the evenings and on weekends I was writing and performing sketch comedy with three of my siblings as the Luchs Brothers (formerly Chinaman’s Chance, until we became good enough to use our real names). My passion project in the world of regional comedy had led to several creative opportunities that had changed my life. A Midwestern underground newspaper called the Prairie Sun invited the Luchs Brothers to write a weekly humor column. The editor, Bill Knight, gave us complete freedom and ten dollars a column, the former being far more important than the latter. Even then I had some idea just how unusual and valuable that editorial empowerment was.

With four of us to share the writing, each of only had to come up with one column per month. We could have been topical, like most humor writers then and now. Instead, we chose the much more challenging path of writing literary humor meant to be perennial in the vein of the New Yorker and the early National Lampoon. The column eventually led to a book and many other things, but that’s another story. What’s relevant to this tale is that it taught me to write. The Prairie Sun then let me write concert and film reviews as well, which led to the opportunity to write book reviews for another regional paper whose name will go to the grave with me for reasons that are nobody else’s business. Most of my reviews were of books published by Little, Brown & Company, because they were the only major publishing house that would send me books to review. Anything else I reviewed I had to buy myself.

One book published by Little, Brown & Co. that I reviewed was The Track to Bralgu, a collection of short stories by B. Wongar, an Australian aborigine writing under a pseudonym for political reasons. It was a very fine book and I gave it a strong recommendation. As far as I can tell the book sank like a stone in this country, unnoticed by anyone except me, though it launched B. Wongar’s career in Australia. The reason this little review in a little regional paper matters to this account is that it landed me my first full-time job as a writer and editor.

The magazine that hired me was a new one called Plate World, a trade publication designed to boost the sales and appreciation for collector’s plates. What are collector’s plates? you might well ask, seeing as they have almost disappeared from public consciousness. For a brief, precious time, they were a way for people with limited means and no knowledge of art to have something nice to hang on the wall. The people who bought collector’s plates could not afford a real painting, not even a bad one, nor did they have the taste to buy and frame prints by Van Gogh or Monet. In other words, the buyers of collector’s plates were simply honest, hard-working Americans trying to beautify their homes. Plate World was their magazine. Most of them had no idea that both the magazine and the industry it celebrated had been created out of whole cloth by one of the most ingenious hucksters ever to grace our shores, J. Roderick MacArthur of the prominent MacArthur family.

All watchers of PBS are familiar with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, “a catalyst for change.” Well, J. Roderick, aka Rod, was John D.’s son, not by Catherine T. but by John D.’s first wife, the former Louise Ingalls. Is your head spinning like a collector’s plate yet? Despite being born into wealth, Rod was a self-made man in every way that mattered, and one of life’s truly colorful characters. He worked for the Associated Press in Mexico and served with the French army in the ambulance corps during World War II, helping liberate the country so the French could finally take their hands down.

He met his wife there too, Christiane L’Entendart, whom he married in 1947 when he was 27 years old. I never heard him call her anything but “Chri-Chri,” his affectionate nickname for her. Their marriage was very French, very continental in the sense that, while he truly adored her, he also considered it his duty to dally with anything in a dress. Over the years a number of employees had reportedly found him in flagrante in the company elevator with one female or another. I’m happy to say I never had the pleasure myself.

Rod started out in his father’s insurance business but, I suspect, grew restive at the limited opportunities for boondoggling offered in that staid industry. An independent entrepreneur at heart, he noticed the rapidly growing popularity of collector’s plates, and intuited that someone with a vision could unify that market and reap rich rewards in the process. He founded the Bradford Exchange to do just that in 1973.

It was a brainchild worthy of P. T. Barnum. When you control ninety percent of a market, as Bradford eventually did, it is not hard to rig and manipulate the entity purporting to objectively measure the worth of various products in that market. In other words, the Bradford Exchange had a lot in common with the New York Stock Exchange, of which it was a brilliant parody. John T. had provided some backing for the venture. In 1975, seemingly jealous of his son’s successful idea, he seized control of the company and locked up all of the inventory in its Northbrook warehouse just outside of Chicago. Rod did not take that lying down. He organized an expedition to raid the warehouse in the dead of night. He reestablished the business on his own and in so doing earned his father’s enmity and estrangement, along with his grudging respect.

By 1979 Rod realized that a thriving market should have a publication of record. He created Plate World magazine and hired Don DeMicheal as editor and publisher. DeMicheal had edited the top jazz magazine DownBeat during some of its best years. He was also a jazz drummer and vibraphonist of some note, working with Chuck Hedges and Art Hodes, among many others. With Rod’s approval, and after they had both read my review of The Track to Bralgu, Don hired me as associate editor of Plate World.

It was my first job as a writer and editor, and I was thrilled to get it because I had no formal qualifications. I didn’t care that the subject was collector’s plates. I would’ve been happy to write about bubonic plague or wire-haired schnauzers, two things I despise. My real education began the minute Don brought me aboard and sent back my first story with dozens of red marks on every page. He taught me more about writing and editing than any course I ever took or anyone else I ever knew.

Our staff was small. In addition to Don and myself, there was the office manager Vivienne, a gargoyle of uncertain age with a voice like a bullfrog and a face like wet cement; the business manager Marvin, a very smart and funny guy who became a friend; the art director Michael, a veteran of bombing missions in Vietnam who clearly suffered from PTSD; and Jackie, the vivacious administrative assistant who managed to conduct simultaneous affairs with myself, Marvin, and a college professor of hers who was more than twice her age. She kept these other relationships compartmentalized and I didn’t learn of them until sometime later. In addition to being our business manager, Marvin was Bradford’s spy in the house of love, reporting on the inner workings of Plate World to our corporate manager named Tony, who reported directly to Rod.

When I describe the world of collector’s plates as “incredibly sexy,” I am referring both to the company culture established at the Bradford Exchange by J. Roderick MacArthur, and to the collector’s plate industry itself, which of course included all kinds of people, but also, it seemed to me, a preponderance of individuals who might fit equally well at Playboy magazine. Everybody was sleeping with everybody else. Everyone who was married was cheating and getting divorced, and everyone who was divorced was running wild.

As for me, Jackie was my office romance, but there were others. The job entailed national and international travel, which led to some odd situations indeed. A trip to Atlantic City to cover a plate convention is, in the words of Steely Dan, “etched upon my mind.” For starters, I won $500 at blackjack and was ejected bodily from a casino for card counting, one of the greatest honors of my life. A ravishing brunette who had been playing at the same table followed me outside, we had some drinks, and she spent the night in my room. I was not card counting at the time, but a gentleman never tells.

On another occasion I was in Fort Lauderdale interviewing Herschell Gordon Lewis, best known as the director of 2,000 Maniacs and other cult films much admired by Sam Raimi and Quentin Tarantino. Lewis would return to filmmaking later. At the time, however, he ran a marketing consulting company and was an expert on collector’s plates. Throughout the evening, he and his wife Margo, a stunning brunette, plied me with martinis. (You may have gleaned that I have a weakness for brunettes, but in my defense I will say I am equally partial to redheads and in an emergency have even occasionally deigned to notice a blonde.) At some point Herschell suggested I join them in their hot tub. I knew exactly what he meant but pretended not to and protested weakly that I had no bathing suit. Margo batted her smoldering eyelashes and said, “You won’t need one.” This had about the same impact on me as the special effects in the Irwin Allen disaster picture Earthquake. My god she was gorgeous!

I barely escaped with my nonexistent virtue intact because, to paraphrase Woody Allen, I could never get naked with a man of my gender. More’s the pity. And to add to my shame, I felt I had let the Bradford team down. J. Roderick MacArthur would’ve jumped into that hot tub in a second.

I got to meet a number of celebrities who had become associated with collector’s plates. Some impressed me as human beings, others did not.

One who did was Red Skelton who, when I interviewed him in 1981, was just about the last survivor of the golden age of comedy, the generation that had traversed the whole modern world of entertainment, from vaudeville to radio to films to television. Being in my twenties and still involved in comedy myself, I felt I had been summoned to Mount Olympus to meet one of the gods. After telling one of my comedy friends about it (okay, let’s not be coy, it was Emo Phillips), we began a tradition of ending every one of our phone calls to each other with the line that Skelton used to end his television programs, “May gawd bless!” I was not terribly taken with his corny clown paintings, of which he turned out at least 1,000 in his lifetime. But I left his Palm Springs home convinced of his utter sincerity in trying to honor the world of comedy with these very personal works. I also learned that he earned up to $2.5 million dollars per year from his artwork, more than he had ever made in Hollywood. And I was frankly amazed to discover he also wrote thousands of songs and other musical compositions, many of them licensed by Muzak, the famous “elevator music” company.

Skelton lived not very far from German-born actress Elke Sommer, another star who dabbled in art, some of which landed on collector’s plates. While she made many, many films, for me her greatest on-screen achievement was playing the female lead opposite Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther sequel A Shot in the Dark, still one of the funniest movies ever made. She was proud of her paintings and rightly so; I thought they were quite good, actually. However, my main motive in securing an interview was to get a peek at the artist at work, because she famously liked to paint in the nude.

Supposedly she would paint beside her backyard swimming pool—the fence was unusually high—and then at the end of the day she would dive into the pool and wash off any splashes of paint left on her person. Naturally, as a student of the artistic process, I was eager to observe this ritual firsthand. Regrettably, it was not to be. I asked the question as politely as I could about five different ways, until Elke finally said, “Kurt, you’re a nice boy with a nice German name, but this is simply not going to happen.” I left her home a sadder and wiser man regarding the ways of women and the ways of art.

One of my last assignments for Plate World was to cover a reception being given for Shirley Temple Black to publicize a series of collector’s plates bearing her image from her time as America’s best-known child star. This was at a meeting room in a Los Angeles hotel, I can’t recall which one, sometime in the summer of 1981. I had no idea what to expect. I was quite familiar with her films, including those she made as she transitioned to more adult roles, such as The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (1947), with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. But I knew next to nothing about what she had been up to since retiring from film acting around 1950.

The room was filled with people, all of them wanting to say hello, introduce themselves to her or have their pictures taken with her. I got her attention by offering to buy her a drink. As we stepped over to the bar she said, reading my mind, “Please, not a Shirley Temple. Way too sweet. Make it a martini.” We spent the next two hours sipping our drinks and deeply engrossed in a conversation that wandered to all four corners of the earth. I shamelessly monopolized her, as she did me, both of us happily ignoring the reason we were supposed to be there. Those were two of the most fascinating, unforgettable hours of my life, and it is no exaggeration to say that they changed me, as I now suspect she meant them to do. She was someone who wanted to make a difference, if possible, to every person she met.

She talked a little about her work in television after leaving films, and about raising her first daughter after leaving her first husband, the abusive alcoholic actor John Agar. She was still completely in love with her second husband, Charles Alden Black, the father of her son and her other daughter. What she wanted to discuss more than anything, though, was books, ideas and the state of the world. The first thing she wanted to know was, what was the last book I had read? I believe my answer is what caused her to give me two hours of her time. I told her I was reading everything by Graham Greene, and mentioned two novels set in Africa, The Heart of the Matter (1948) and A Burnt-Out Case (1960). That’s when I learned she had recently spent four years as the U.S. Ambassador to Ghana. I later found out that she got the post because Henry Kissinger had overheard her discussing South West Africa at a cocktail party, and was stunned by her level of knowledge.

“Graham Greene is a brilliant writer,” she said, “but he’s awfully anti-American.”

“Can you blame him?” I said. My political philosophy at the time was amorphous, albeit generally leftward.

“Yes!” she said. “Who is he to equate our national sins with those of the Soviet Union? We don’t have gulags. Haven’t you read Solzhenitsyn?”

“I’ve read One Day in Life of Ivan Denisovich,” I said. My parents had owned it.

“That’s good,” she said. “But you’ve got to read The Gulag Archipelago. That’ll set you straight.”

All I could do was nod. This was embarrassing. I was supposed to be the writer, the reader, but Shirley Temple was revealing large gaps in my knowledge. Who was interviewing who? By that time I didn’t care. I was too fascinated by this incredibly intelligent, well-read woman. Who, by the way, was still very beautiful at age 53. She showed absolutely no trace of ever having been a child star. She was no emotional train wreck like Judy Garland and so many others. She was so completely self-possessed and yet so focused on things outside herself, things she felt mattered.

“What do you know about economics?” she said.

At that point I simply had to laugh, and she did too.

“It’s becoming clear to me that I am somewhat uninformed,” I said, “but I have actually read The Communist Manifesto by Mr. Marx and The Wealth of Nations by Mr. Smith.”

“And?” she said.

“Well,” I said, “the part where Smith goes on about the Corn Laws for seventy pages nearly put me to sleep, but he does make a pretty good case for capitalism. What surprised me about Marx is that he admits capitalism works. I wonder how many of his followers know he said that? He just predicts that it will be overtaken by socialism, which he says is even more wonderful, and then the state will wither away, and we’ll all be in heaven. Except the state never seems to wither away, does it?”

“It does not,” she said. “I was in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968 when the Soviets sent ten thousand tanks in. I’ve seen with my own eyes how the state does not wither away.”

Neither of us knew it at the time of our conversation, but she would later serve as U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992 after the fall of the Iron Curtain. She told me of seeing a woman protester shot down in the street in 1968 by Russian soldiers, a sight she would never forget. Then she returned to the present.

“Everything you know about economics is hundreds of years old,” she said. “You need to read the Austrian economists. Start with Hayek and Mises. The Road to Serfdom by Hayek is a book everyone should read.”

I promised I would. I would’ve promised anything to keep that conversation going. Our time together was up, however. I realized we hadn’t even finished our drinks. The thing is, I kept my promise. I read that book and many more exploring all sides of the capitalism versus socialism debate.

One result was that a year later I took a job with the human rights arm of a religious relief organization working in the Soviet bloc. I spent the next six years publicizing the plight of prisoners of conscience suffering in Soviet gulags, working to free them, support their families and help them all emigrate. I traveled and met with them in Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Siberia (technically part of Russia but practically a separate country), East Germany, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan and Uzbekistan, harassed and spied on by the KGB every step of the way. (Later I twice visited communist China, but that was to adopt my two daughters.) I continued to study the failures of socialism, and also the foundations of our own freedoms, now more precious to me than ever.

Eventually Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, and things loosened up. He released many—though not all—political prisoners. The Iron Curtain collapsed in 1989, and I moved on to other pursuits. I now regret that I never dropped a note to Shirley Temple letting her know the impact our lone conversation had made on me. I’m sure she would have appreciated knowing that there was one person, at least, who didn’t feel that her rendition of her signature child star song, “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” was her greatest accomplishment in life.