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Do I Know What I Know? I Don’t Know
Here’s how I remember it.
In late 1988, I was living in Charlotte with my new wife, and I hated my job selling VCRs in a department store. Young and naive, I had vague thoughts about finding a better job “in business” — you know, wearing a tie and working in an office — so I started an aimless job hunt, scattering applications around and reading the classifieds.
At one point, I visited the office of an employment agency, hoping that their experts would be able to match my experience and skills to a job opening. Problem was, I didn’t have any experience or skills. Before the department store, my only job had been six summers working at the Carowinds theme park. So I was pleasantly surprised when the agency said they’d found an opportunity for me and would set up a meeting.
Days later, dressed in a cheap suit, I found myself sitting in a hotel conference room with a middle-aged businessman named Anderson, along with two or three other people he’d already signed on for his project. He had a vision: a new theme park, themed entirely around strawberries. He showed me a map of the site he had in mind, near Florence, S.C., and explained why his idea couldn’t miss. He needed someone to be the manager of his rides department, and my background at Carowinds apparently made me qualified.
At one point he asked me what kind of salary I would expect after we were in business. I’d never done better than just above minimum wage, and I didn’t even have a good sense of what annual salaries were. I remembered hearing a few years earlier that someone I knew had landed a job making $21,000 a year straight out of college, so I ambitiously named $30,000 as my figure. Anderson smiled and said, “Well, I hope we can do a little better than that.” Wow.
And so I joined the team. Anderson asked me to work up some numbers estimating the staffing needs for his park’s rides department. My only relevant experience was in making out rotation schedules for a crew of ten or fifteen, but I tried to scale this up and did my best to guess at how many employees would be required to operate the number of rides he had in mind.
Throughout all of this, I had misgivings. The whole idea, to me, seemed questionable: a theme park devoted to strawberries? Apart from Anderson’s thoughts about the location, I’d seen no evidence of anything real going on: no investors, no zoning applications, no business plan. I did not suspect Anderson of any dishonesty, but I didn’t see enough to convince me that this was really going to go anywhere.
But the biggest red flag I saw was the fact that Anderson had chosen me to manage his rides department. It was like the Groucho quote: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.” I knew how unqualified I was, and I knew that I was completely bluffing my way through the planning work that Anderson had asked me to do. I knew that I wouldn’t have hired me. The fact that he was willing to do so, at a generous starting salary, gave me little confidence.
And so, after a few more meetings (all in this same hotel conference room), I asked the employment agency to tell Anderson that I was no longer interested. I never heard another word about it.
—
Over the years, occasionally something would make me think about that experience. And the more time passed, the more inexplicable the whole thing started to seem. It really didn’t make any sense.
It didn’t help that my memory tends to be poor, and so there were a lot of details I couldn’t account for. Who were the other people in those meetings? I must have been introduced to them, but I can’t tell you any of their names, their backgrounds, or even what their roles were in this new enterprise. For that matter, I couldn’t tell you anything about our intrepid leader: who was this guy Anderson? Was I right to doubt him? (The theme park never happened, but there could be a lot of reasons for that.)
Gradually, I started to wonder if I was even remembering the events accurately. I tend to be a packrat, but I don’t have any physical evidence of any of it: no meeting notes, no memos, not even any of the staffing calculations I remember scribbling on a legal pad. Could I be sure that any of it actually happened? If a lawyer were to cross-examine me, I had an uneasy feeling the story would fall apart.
Here’s what I find fascinating: that’s actually the case for a lot of experiences we all remember, and indeed for history in general. There’s a whole branch of philosophy — epistemology — that asks how we know what we know. History tries to uncover the objective truth about the past, but it has to contend with all sorts of distortions. First-hand accounts are biased, or even intentionally false, and memories are unreliable. Written records are spotty and incomplete, and there’s often a very blurry line between mythology and history. We correlate with physical evidence where we can, and we try to triangulate on the truth, but we can never be asbolutely certain.
But a society is shaped by what it remembers about its past. It almost doesn’t matter whether the Trojan War actually happened, because Homer’s account of it is far more influential than anything we can actually know about the real history. Like it or not, we are always curating and editing the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the best we can do is to be aware of this.
—
In fact, I am confident that my experience with Mr. Anderson did actually happen, even if I can’t be sure of so many of the details. I started keeping a journal in early 1989, just in time for it to include a single relevant passage:
I need to call Mary Ellen at Accurate Personnel and tell her I’m no longer interested in Mr. Anderson. I kind of dread doing it, but I’m supposed to be at a meeting with him Friday night so he needs to know before then.
And some Google searching reveals that there was, in fact, a corporation with the right name, and with a CEO named Anderson, supposedly in the amusement-park business. (Astoundingly, I see that this corporation was not officially dissolved until 2011. Was he trying to make a go of it all this time?) This is just enough evidence to convince me that I did not, at least, make the whole thing up.
But it’s nonetheless interesting for me to ponder: are there other stories I believe about myself that didn’t actually happen? Stories that became part of who I am? And does it matter?
What about you? Do you have memories that don’t seem quite believable, or that can’t be squared with the facts?
Published in General
I have a vivid memory of effortlessly sailing a catamaran by myself around a large lake in northern Indiana when I was about 20 years old. Given my lack of any previous exposure to boats or lakes I find this very improbable, but I was visiting a friend who had a lake place and he had taken me out on this boat that weekend. I think the source of this memory must have been a dream after the day of boating – thus the sense of this activity being “effortless”. The actual me I think would have been too cautious to try something like this on my own – but I’m not positive that this did not happen.
Another very interesting, well written post, BXO! I’ve had things like that happen. But what comes to mind first was having it happen in the other direction: someone has clear memories of me that don’t match mine.
Tom Pollock was head of Universal Pictures. He was one of the biggest of big shots on the board of the American Film Institute. In 2006, years after I left AFI, I was invited back for a history get-together, and I mentioned to Pollock that I knew Charles Lippincott and Charles Weber, two of his buddies from the Star Wars days (Pollock had been Lucas’ lawyer and negotiator; Pollock wrote George’s Star Wars deal.)
To everyone’s amazement, especially mine, Tom said, “Oh, sure, I remember. You and Charlie–” and he proceeded to tell a charming little anecdote about something that he and I supposedly did in Hollywood back in 1975. The meeting moved on. I didn’t contradict him–hey, it’s Tom Pollock–but that couldn’t have been me. My guess is I got pasted into his memory in place of someone I reminded him of, some other young, short, east coast wisecracking gentile.
Peter Robinson on a past Ricochet Podcast once told a story of someone from the Reagan Administration who claimed to have supported the “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech although the actual record including notes made in that person’s own handwriting proved that he didn’t.
The thing is, even if the corporation wasn’t officially dissolved until 2011, he may have stopped paying for any employees long before then.
I have a vivid memory of going to Niagara Falls as a child and watching the water cascade over the edge at one of the viewpoints on the US side. My parents told me recently that they never took me to Niagara Falls.
It’s quite unsettling.
Oh, I’d be surprised if he ever had any employees. There was no payroll yet at the point when I was involved, just a guy with some ideas and a handful of people willing to work with him on it. For all I know, the guy could have been living in his car.
I don’t know what ongoing costs there are in being CEO of a corporation that exists only on paper, doesn’t do anything, and has no assets. It might just be that he just didn’t get around to dissolving it until 2011.
Could it be you had seen a different waterfall and then later came to believe it was Niagra?
Unless maybe it was something you’d just seen in a movie, and then came to believe it happened to you.
Could you possibly have visited Niagra Falls with some other relative?
In the mid-Seventies, a friend of mine and I went to see the Grateful Dead. My friend was in no shape to drive home, so I took the wheel. I remember it well, the big green Plymouth convertible. It’s the only time I ever drove it. But there’s a problem I’ve never resolved about this memory. The one year he had that car was the one year the Dead didn’t come to the New York area.
Possibly.
Pretty sure this isn’t it.
No, we eliminated that possibility.
I remember being in a boat with a beautiful woman, approaching Niagara falls. Gunshots were fired. It ended well, I don’t think we went over the edge.
Insufficiently cinematic memories get fixed in post.
Hopefully you weren’t a pantomime horse in that.
Great story! But, who’s George?
George Lucas. Pollock’s unique deal didn’t give Lucas an unusually big share of potential profits, nor did he get a high basic salary. But what Tom got is what George wanted: sequel rights and merchandising. These had never been big negotiating points, and Fox shrugged and agreed.
I had a similar “memory” about visiting Mt. Rushmore. Mercifully my parents (and older brother) disabused me of the memory some years ago. Although not entirely mercifully—they still laugh at me about it.
I have a story about this, but it’s not about me. It’s about my brother. Here’s the story as he told it to me.
As family background, I’m the oldest, my brother is 2 years younger, and our sister is 2 years younger than him. In high school, she ran away from home. My parents were aghast. We got word that she was living in a small apartment with a couple of teenage boys, near Fourth Avenue in Tucson (a funky art district).
It didn’t last long, and she was ready to come home, but wouldn’t let my parents go to get her. So I drove down to the apartment with my brother. We walked up to the door, knocked, and our sister answered. I said simply, “let’s go.” She didn’t say a word, and came with us. End of story.
Except that’s my brother’s version.
At the time, I was at college outside of Los Angeles. I vividly remember talking to my parents on the phone, from school in California, about the fact that my sister had run away from home. I was not there.
But my brother claimed, years later, that I was there, and that I was the one who had “rescued” our sister, so to speak.
My interpretation is that going to pick up our sister was a very stressful event for my brother, who was only 16 or 17 at the time. I think that in his mind, he imagined that his big brother was there, taking care of it. But he actually did it himself.
A related story from my sister is pretty funny, too. My parents had no understanding of why she would have run away, and thought that she was a crazy teenage girl. She explained, to me, that she had watched the typical teenage conflicts between my parents, on the one hand, and my brother and I, on the other. She resolved that as soon as Dad issued his usual ultimatum — something like “while you’re living under my roof, you’ll follow my rules” — she would call his bluff. He did it, and she left. She wasn’t crazy about it at all, and actually found a place to stay.
The explanation is obvious. Alien abduction.
They must have liked you, to take you to Niagara. :)
About the OP . . .
Mr. Anderson? Really?
Somehow, I hear Hugo Weaving’s voice saying that name.
Absolutely! I still find it unbelieveable the US Navy let me drive a $500M nuclear submarine . . .
I have 6 younger brothers. Our memories of shared pivotal events rarely match. In some cases the memories are diametrically opposed. It has been a source of unresolved conflict for decades.
!!!
Never a dull moment at Schmidt family Thanksgiving, I’m sure.
Slowly you turned . . .
You will have to ask the sisters-in-law about that.
Florence eventually got a buccee’s