_After moving back to Michigan in 1968, for the year it took to regain resident status and the right to lower tuition rates, I worked in the Ann Arbor branch of Household Finance, the country's largest consumer small loan lender. One of the orientation films featured a segment how the company expected - not hoped, but "expected" - its employees would attend church - not mosque or synagogue or none-of-the-above, but a "Christian" church (preferably one of the Protestant denominations) - regularly. The film showed a white father of a white family, everyone smiling and smartly dressed in their Sunday-best suits and dresses, leaving the church services, stopping to chat briefly with the white pastor, as the entire flock of white parishioners also departed the building. By the way, at the time, this Chicago-based company, had branch offices that encircled Detroit, but no black employees; though we most assuredly did make very high interest loans to the black residents in the area.

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_However I was born in a Detroit hospital, my parents took me home to their apartment in all-white Dearborn. From the age of three until I joined the Army in 1964, I grew up in Allen Park, one of the 100% ivory-white suburbs that surrounded, like a bleached white noose, the Motor City. Perhaps it was the United States in the 50s, but WASP conformity was the sought standard. Individuality was a socially aberrant affectation. Suffice it to say I have my entire life, especially as a teenager, I have bucked any and all rules. ("You had better have a damned legitimate reason, or I'm crossing your line." The secretaries who worked at Lapham Elementary, Allen Park Junior High and Allen Park High School knew my name exceptionally well; I spent as much time in the principal's office as I did in class. "I've got your 'don't-do-this-and-don't-do-that rules' right here.")

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_The Army was culture shock, but from a highly positive perspective. Prior to June 22, 1964 I'd never even shaken the hand of a Negro. But all of a sudden I was being told what to do by Negro sergeants and officers, by Hispanic sergeants and officers. Basic infantry and advanced-infantry training were equal-opportunity insult the 'cruits' parentage verbal assault fests. (Oh, the sexual depravities my mother had engaged, and with the lowest of beasts and dogs, according to the drill sergeants.) Through the three years of my enlistment I shared an entire host of experiences with young men from every walk and race and ethnicity, but not economic background; eg Dick Cheney, George Bush, et al. We sweated together. We walked the line together. We bunked in the same barracks. We played poker together. We drank together. We whored together.

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_And a far-too-many-some bled and died together. Although I never detected its manifestation, surely there were soldiers who continued to believe that Charlie's or Joe-Chink's rounds and mines and booby-traps selected according to race and ethnicity.

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_The return to the stultifying corporate culture of Household Finance and the social culture of Southeast Michigan ultimately proved more than I could any longer bear. May 6, 1972, for the first time since passing under it on a troop ship headed across the Pacific, my eyes caught sight of the magnificent beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge.

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_Following graduation from Cal State-Hayward, I moved to Santa Clara.

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_Literally and figuratively, permit me to tell you where I'm coming from. San Jose, California's third most populous city and, geographically, its largest, is located at the very south end of San Francisco Bay. "Silicon Valley," from east to west, consists of the following communities: Milpitas, San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and, as it is the home of Oracle, Redwood City in San Mateo County. Cupertino, the home of Apple, is adjacent of and due south of Sunnyvale. Among the high-tech companies composing the silicon part of Silicon Valley are NASA-Ames Research, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, McAfee, Netflix, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Yahoo, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Adobe, Cisco, and perhaps a couple dozen others whose names escape me presently.

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_At the time, I owned a real estate appraisal company; E. Tubbs & Associates. My very first appraiser employee was Dayo English, an African-American fellow. My second and fourth appraiser employees were African-American women. So-called minorities eventually comprised half my employees. All I gave a damn about was whether an employee could effectively articulate a complete report than any other appraiser or appraisal organization in the country; city or region or state were too limiting for my high standards. That was all that mattered to me: whether to quickness of service, whether to the arms-length professional regard to the property owner, whether to a thorough and accurate representation of the circumstances extant, was the conduct of the appraiser equal to or superior to that of anyone else in the US, and was the report, for every imaginable index standard, equal to or better than what anyone else in the United States could submit? If it wasn't, I didn't want you on my staff.

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