brought his moods with him after work, which my father generally didn’t. That cost him his sunny young wife. I somehow gota pass. I could understand him, and I was
my father’s son.
My advice in the end was that my father should sell. Meanwhile I was taking an interest in economics again. Business was about rate of return. Spartan’s was
negative. What was the benchmark? | did a little study.
It is easy to see that return tends to even out from one company or industry to the next. We pour investment into high-return prospects, and unintentionally drive that high return down toward the norm by expanding the capital denominator. I didn’t know that Robert Turgot had written the same in 1766. But what struck me was the impression that return, net of inflation, seemed to revert to a norm over time. Why were interest rates, averaged over business cycles, about the same then as in Dante’s time or Julius Ceasar’s? Why should human impatience be a steady norm? That puzzle nagged me for about a quarter century until I found the answer. Another decade or two would pass before I learned that Sir William Petty had found
it in the seventeenth century.
I went home in 1961 to study harmony and counterpoint at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I had found time to compose a few things at the house at Mina Saud with a piano | had bought in Kuwait. They included an a cappella (unaccompanied) choral setting of Tennyson’s “All Along the Valley”, and something to which I later fit Emily Dickenson’s poem “Beauty Crowds Me” in my song cycle “The White Election”. The composer Charles Haubiel published “All Along the Valley” in his Composers’ Press in Los Angeles in 1959. The one change he suggested, an unexpected D flat major resolution, is the best touch in the piece. I had noticed
copies in music shops in Tulsa. So it seemed about time to develop that interest too,
and the conservatory back home seemed the logical place.
Chapter 1: Recollections 1/06/16 5
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