It was with a heavy heart that I boarded a plane for Los Angeles a few years ago to attend a funeral for Bob, the former scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 108.

The event brought a convocation of ex-scouts from up and down the West coast, and said much about our age.

Bob, 85, called me two weeks before to tell me his CAT scan had just revealed advanced metastatic lung cancer. I said ?Congratulations Bob, you just made your life span.?

It was our last conversation.

He spent only a week in bed, and then was gone. As a samurai warrior might have said, it was a good death. Some thought it was the smoking he quit 20 years ago.

Others speculated that it was his close work with uranium. I chalked it up to a half century of breathing the air in Los Angeles.

Bob originally hailed from Bloomfield, New Jersey. After WWII, every East coast college was jammed with returning vets on the GI bill. So he enrolled in a small, well-regarded engineering school in New Mexico in a remote place called Alamogordo.

His first job after graduation was testing V2 rockets newly captured from the Germans at the White Sands Missile Test Range. He graduated to designing ignition systems for atomic bombs. A boom in defense spending during the fifties swept him up to the Greater Los Angeles area.

Scouts I last saw at age 13 or 14 were now 60, while the surviving dads were well into their 80?s. Everyone was in great shape, those endless miles lugging heavy packs over High Sierra passes obviously yielding lifetime benefits.

Hybrid cars lined both sides of the street. A tag along guest called out for a cigarette and a hush came over a crowd numbering over 100.

Apparently, some things stuck. It was a real cycle of life weekend. While the elders spoke about blood pressure and golf handicaps, the next generation of scouts played in the back yard, or picked lemons off a ripening tree.

Bob was the guy who taught me how to ski, cast for rainbow trout in mountain lakes, transmit Morse code, and survive in the wilderness. He used to scrawl schematic diagrams for simple radios and binary computers on a piece of paper, usually built around a single tube or transistor.

I would run off to Radio Shack to buy WWII surplus parts for pennies by the pound, and spend long nights attempting to decode impossibly fast Navy ship to ship transmissions. He was also the man who pinned an Eagle Scout badge on my uniform in front of beaming parents when I turned 15.

While in the neighborhood, I thought I would drive by the house in which I grew up, once a modest 1,800 square foot ranch style home to a happy family of nine. I was horrified to find that it had been torn down, and the majestic maple tree that I planted 40 years ago had been removed.

In its place was a giant, 6,000 square foot marble and granite monstrosity under construction for a wealthy family from China.

Profits from the enormous China-America trade have been pouring into my home town from the Middle Kingdom for the last decade, and mine was one of the last houses to go.

When I was class president of the high school here, there were 3,000 white kids, and one Chinese. Today those numbers are reversed. Such is the price of globalization.

I guess you really can?t go home again.

At the request of the family, I assisted in the liquidation of his portfolio. Bob had been an avid reader of the Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader since its inception, and he had attended my Los Angeles lunches.

It seems he listened well. There was Apple (AAPL) in all its glory at a cost of $21. I laughed to myself. The master had become the student and the student had become the master.

Like I said, it was a real circle of life weekend.

 

The Mad Hedge Fund Trader at Age 11

It was one of those phone calls you dread getting.

On Saturday morning, I recognized the area code as coming from my hometown in Los Angeles where I grew up. It was my old friend, Jim, who I went to high school with.

He asked me if I was sitting down.

I answered, ?Yes.?

His brother, Robert, had just retired after a 33-year career with the City of Los Angeles as a programmer.

An avid banjo player and lover of blue grass music, he had bought a new RV and planned to start his retirement touring the summer music festivals in Alaska.

He made it as far as Madera, California on CA Highway 99, where he and his wife Elise were killed in a crash.

It was difficult for the California Highway Patrol to piece together what happened, as all of the participants in the accident were killed and there were no witnesses. Nearby residents reported hearing a loud explosion at 10PM.

All they could do was speculate.

Maybe a truck driver fell asleep and rear-ended the RV, driving both vehicles into a giant eucalyptus tree. The RV?s LP tanks ruptured and exploded in a ball or flame, killing everyone.

Or maybe the RV was passing the truck, and unfamiliar with driving a long vehicle they pulled back into the lane too soon, clipping the truck. We will never know.

Rob and Elise leave behind two children. Devon, 23, was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada and no one knew where she was.

I offered to go look for her, as I know the trail well. But I was told that friends were waiting at her next food drop in Independence, CA to tell her that both parents had died.

Her 19-year-old brother was about to join the Marine Corps. I was about to start calling some generals at the Pentagon to get him a good assignment.

Both bodies were burned beyond recognition. It took a CHP detective 10 days to trace the VIN to the next of kin.

The coroner is awaiting dental records before releasing what little remains there are. A memorial service won?t be held until September. There is nothing to bury.

Robert, Dave, John and I were the technology nerds of our days in high school. We built the rockets, shorted out the school power, and set the speed bumps on fire.

There was that night with the case of Ripple which I will never forget.

Robert?s father was the Scoutmaster of our Boy Scout troop (click here for his story, ?The Passing of a Great Man?).

After graduation, we stayed close.

Dave became a resort manager, and died in a mountain climbing accident in Utah in the 1980?s. John, who spent a career as a scientist at the Los Alamos Nuclear labs in New Mexico, is undergoing cancer treatment at UCSF. Now, Robert is gone.

That leaves me as the last man standing of the original four.

To say that I lived a wild and reckless life would be an understatement.

I have been shot, stabbed, broken my neck, and caught almost every disease known to man. I?ve crashed three planes and three more cars. There are whole countries I can?t go back to. Insurance companies hate me.

And I?m still at it. I?m climbing the Matterhorn in Switzerland again next month.

Yet here I am in perfect health, with my 120/75 blood pressure, my resting heart rate of 45, about to walk out the door for another ten mile backpack.

It was Robert, who played it safe, never left town, and was about to collect on a rock solid government pension, who ended up dying a violent death.

Go figure.

It is all proof that you have to live each day of your life as if it is your last, live life like a Mad man, and hope that the check to the undertaker bounces.

For a live TV report of the crash, please click here at http://abc30.com/news/3-people-are-dead-following-a-fiery-crash-in-madera/1356741/?

I?m out the door, headed to the mountains once again.

David and Robert in 1968

On a recent trip to my lakefront estate at Lake Tahoe, I stopped off at the state capital, Sacramento, to look in on my old friend, Governor Jerry Brown.

It is crucial that readers across the country, and indeed, around the world, know what Jerry is thinking. California has always been a ?pathfinder? state, and what starts here is often adopted across the country. This little chat could be a hint of what?s headed your way.

As I bounded up the steps of the marble capitol building, the first thing I noticed was the absence of the previous governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger?s, smoking tent.

The "governator" had it erected on the lawn so he could enjoy long puffs on his stogies and not be in violation of the state ban on indoor smoking. After all, this was in the state that invented the anti-smoking movement.

I have trod a very long path with Jerry Brown. His dad, then Governor Pat Brown, ordered teargas dropped on me from a helicopter while I was at a Berkeley anti-war march nearly half a century ago.

He was Secretary of State while I attended the University of California, often going head to head against then governor Ronald Reagan.

I was living in Asia during his first two terms as governor from 1975-83, when his girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt, called him the ?moonbeam governor?, a nickname he has yet to live down.

Warning: don?t call him that to his face. He hates it.

I ran into him at the Democratic convention in New York in 1980 when he mounted his second run for the presidency. After he retired and was considered a political has-been, I bumped into Jerry once again when he studied Zen Buddhism in Japan.

In 1999, he was elected mayor of Oakland, a mostly black Bay Area slum near bankruptcy, which many considered ungovernable. He did a spectacular job, fighting corruption, rebuilding the school system, and sparking an economic renaissance. It was like he had nothing left to lose.

To the amazement of many, Jerry ran and won a third term as governor in 2011, taking over the wreckage left by the disastrous reign of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has been raising eyebrows nationally ever since.

He immediately launched a crash campaign to raise taxes and cut spending. His Proposition 30 succeeded at the polls, raising sales taxes for everyone and boosting income taxes on those earning more than $500,000.

The Golden State now has the highest combined federal and state taxes in the country, at 51.5%, and more for millionaires. The proceeds of the tax hike are solely dedicated to increasing $6 billion in spending on education.

State leaders learned a long time ago that people will pay a premium to live here. They pay double for housing, so why not double taxes? The sunshine has monetary value.

As I explain to guests at my strategy luncheons, high earners don?t mind paying an extra dollar in tax when it means they can make an extra $10, or $100, in profits at their high tech companies.

That has been the case with a technology industry here that has been booming almost non-stop since WWII. That is, as long as the money isn?t wasted. Most consider more money for education a laudable use of funds, as it trains a more useful workforce for their own investments.

Brown originally studied at a seminary school to become a catholic priest. To this day, he frequently quotes from the Bible, and he gave my own Latin a real workout. Citing Luke, Chapter 12, verse 48 with regards to the sharing of the tax burden, ?to those who are given much, much is required.? The seven-year sunset provision for the new income tax also comes from the ?seven years of plenty?, found in the Old Testament.

He argues that this is only fair, since the top 1% of state earners have seen their income increase by 165% since 1980, while the bottom 80% have seen an 8% drop. The top 1% took 10% of state incomes in the seventies. Now it is 22%.

To say Jerry is iconoclastic is a disservice to the word. He is a combative 77 year old who says what he thinks at the drop of a hat, no matter whom it offends, be they friend or foe.

He is a mix that is all too rare in this country, a flaming liberal on social issues, while an ironclad conservative on fiscal matters. There used to be a lot of those. Now they are rare.

He is a staunch advocate for the environment. He appointed the first gay judge in the US. He is about to deliver the toughest anti-gun legislation in the country. He has been a lifelong cheerleader for the alternative energy industry.

Brown has also completed the most ambitious cuts in social spending in the state?s history, including grants for the disabled, child welfare, and Medical. Some 40,000 non-violent inmates were released from prisons into probation to save money.

The University of California saw its budget cut by a massive 25%. State employment was chopped by 50,000, and some 50 redundant state boards were eliminated.

Jerry told me that the state?s problems were caused by two bubbles; the internet in 2000, and the indiscriminate mortgage lending that followed.

That created a budget deficit that ballooned to $27 billion by the time he returned to office, which cut the California?s credit rating to the lowest of the 50 states.

In a short 18 months, Brown balanced the budget, and state debt is now rapidly seeing upgrades, reducing borrowing costs.

The governor says that the spending cuts have been very tough to swallow. Even the carpet in his office is falling apart, and he confesses to eating day old tuna sandwiches.

On the tax front, he says that ?when you have more in the cookie jar, you have more cookies to give.?

Jerry says his goals as governor were threefold. He eliminated false accounting gimmicks, which shuffled the state?s financial problems under that well-worn carpet, where they festered.

He only implemented new taxes if people voted for them. And he returned decision making to cities and counties on schools, because the entities closest to problems have the best ability to solve them, a policy he calls ?realignment?.

Decentralization and devolution of power to local authorities isn?t something you hear about from liberals very often.

He points out that the big growth in state spending didn?t arise from some idealistic social agenda. Three strikes laws mandating extremely long sentences caused an explosive growth of the prison system, which expanded from 3% to 11.5% of the state budget since the seventies. ?

An aging population is also prompting a substantial increase in medical spending. These two items alone account for the entire increase in state spending for the past 40 years on a GDP adjusted basis.

I asked Jerry what he thought about the efforts by other tax-free states, particularly Texas, to lure business away. He erupted into a tirade.

He argued passionately there was absolutely no evidence that people moved to avoid taxes, which amount to only a few thousand dollars a year for millionaires.

The economy here is booming. The best and the brightest minds in the world are pouring into the most creative and innovative place on the planet.

There have been 500,000 private sector jobs created during his current tenure. Exports are up 17%. The state draws 50% of global venture capital investment, and files for four times more patents than runner up New York. The one-ton truck now driving around Mars was built in Pasadena.

My obvious last question had to be ?what?s next? for the energetic governor. Might his tax raising, spending cutting habits have a national audience?

?Do I have more offices in mind? I?m not telling,? he answered, with a twinkle in his eye. That is a lot to say for someone who has already held every high office in his home state.

I got a call from my car telling me it was time to get moving if we were going to make it over Donner Pass before it iced up. I said, ?see you next time? to Jerry. There always seems to be a next time with Jerry.

 

?What a Long, Strange Trip It?s Been.?