Replies to post #107111 on Mohacsy's Safe Portfolio Member Forum

[Elroy Jetson]

I've not experienced Marta Becket's Opera.

But my parents both liked "unusual attractions" in California, so I can't believe I hadn't been taken there. When we'd visit a historic California spot it was never complete until visited the gold rush era cemetery to read the tombstones. I think I've been to every small rural town that exists in this state. And if they could get Porter Wagner and his friends on the radio while we were driving they were really happy because it reminded them of being stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma when they were first married.

When we picked my Dad up in a rural town when we were on the way to a weekend, so he didn't have to first come back to San Francisco, he was inevitably in an animated conversation with some hobo or similar on a park bench when we got there.

I later discovered many at Chevron urged others new to a project area to eat or stay at some of the worst or most bizarre places on offer, including "Tony's Garden Spot" outside El Centro CA, a restaurant operated by a clinically depressed man who decorated his restaurant with far too many photos of his dead wife. And of course The Madonna Inn just outside San Louis Obsipo with what they call "110 individually-themed rooms" https://www.madonnainn.com/viewrooms - I went to see it but I always stayed at the Avila Bay Inn.

In the Reno area to deal with the Bureau of Land Management I liked staying at the now closed Harrahs casino in Reno where the staff was incredibly kind, rates were pretty cheap and food was terrific. One of our geologists in geothermal exploration was appointed to review expense accounts and wondered why I didn't stay at the slightly less costly "Fernley Motel". At first I couldn't tell if he was serious, but he was because that's where "we" were drilling wells. I explained that I dealt with the BLM close to Harrahs and the airport. He really wanted me to share the geologist's life in a Fernley Motel 6.

[Elroy Jetson]

No unusual experience beats our "Winning the lottery", a morbid concept a large group of Chevron employees developed one evening when we discussed the fact that we were all on fare too many flights each week for there not to be an eventual fatality. Flying was less safe in the 1980s. Someone pointed out our life insurance paid out triple "if we died on company business", and that became winning the lottery.

I had left Chevron and was working in Los Angeles when my former attorney Sue called me up and share the news that our friend and associate Jocelyn Kemp, the head of Governmental Affairs, had won the lottery on PSA Flight 1771 which had nose-dived into a hillside outside Morro Bay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1771

She subsequently informed me this flight also included another associate, Herb Shuyton, the head of Environmental Affairs, and our Chevron CEO Bob Sylla we'd spent a lot of time with - and some other guy from the El Segundo Refinery we hadn't traveled with. I was glad not to be doing that job any more. Winning the lottery wasn't that funny when it actually happened.

[dexprs]

Congratulations on a successful marriage, Eric.