WhimsyLand

Junie and I were in the local liquor store and I spotted a case of Jordan Cabernet Sauvignon.  It occurred to me that the last time I ever saw that much Jordan in one place was at Big John's house, a couple of cases dwarfed by hundreds of cases of Bordeaux, all in basement of his large Ladue home.  How they got there is quite a story.  I was Director of Technology, based in Belgium and one of my responsibilities was computerizing the recently acquired copper foundry in Bilbao.  Big John was on the board of the copper conglomerate and the badass American CEO of the company's U.S. foundry near Alton, IL.  John had slowly acquired power within the family-owned company and had moved his young American honchos into management positions of the Bilbao plant.  The plant itself was an old, sprawling collection of brick structures housing furnaces and holding tanks for molten copper.  I remember noting that fully 20% of the shift that collected for the company-supplied mid-day meal had eye patches, prosthetic limbs, horrible burn scars and other evidence of long tenure at a plant that OSHA wouldn't have stepped foot in.  The Bilbao operation also had a tankhouse and a commercial section.  The tankhouse was basically an Olympic pool of conductive fluid in which thousand-pound copper plates were turned into 99.9% copper sheets by electrolysis.  The commercial operation was run by Kenny, a wild-eyed Illinois boy who was one of John's favorites and spoke a smattering of Spanish at breakneck speed.  He ran a crew of 15 women who called all over Spain buying copper scrap for smelting in the foundry:  mountains of water meters, door knobs, old plumbing, and even a 20-foot high pile of old Ethiopian pennies.  Commercial was also responsible for shipping the hundreds of tons of slag, the lava-like black tailings from the smelting/refining process, in barges from Spain to Illinois, where it was then sold to be used in highways and for sand-blasting.  John had instructed him to shave a penny from every pound of copper purchased to stash away in cash for buying wine.  Every month or two, Kenny would make the run from Bilbao to Bordeaux in the company panel truck and buy up 20 or 30 cases of the best vintages.  Kenny showed me, with no little display of pride, the heavy-duty wooden box that he had designed that would store exactly 20 cases of wine.  When the Bilbao plant had a shipment of slag ready, Kenny would put between 5 and 10 wooden boxes of wine at the bottom of the barge, and then have 100 tons of slag dumped on top of it.  After 4 weeks on the Atlantic, and up the Mississippi, plant personnel in Illinois would remove the slag and deliver the wine carriers to John's house.  It was some of the slickest larceny I saw that year:  the company paid for the wine and shipping cost and the Fed didn't even get import duties on the vino. 

I've gotten through about a quarter of BAP 2006, and Junie and I are comparing notes.  More on that tomorrow.