Going Through Nashville!

Another person who influenced me in the middle 90’s was someone I actually met in person, Francis McInerney.
1994 was a seminal year for me. Having worked as a sales representative for Scott, Foresman, an elementary and secondary textbook publisher now part of Pearson, I was assigned to attend a national convention in Boston. I decided to leave a few days early and spend a couple of days in New York City before going on to my assignment in Boston. I love Broadway Musicals and Museums-and of course NYC is the capital of both, not to mention finance and what is novae and chic. My flight arrangements were with American Airlines. As most people in Texas know, unless you fly Southwest Airlines, everyone goes through Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport. In fact, people in San Antonio always say, “if you want to go anywhere, even to heaven, you have to go through D/FW”. This trip however had me flying to Nashville, changing planes and then going on to La Guardia. When I boarded the plane in Nashville for NYC, I noticed I was sitting next to a very well dressed man speaking on the airline phone provided for passengers. When he hung up, I commented to him I had heard how expensive it was to call from those phones. He said, “not while you are still on the ground” In those days there were only car phones not mobile phones as we know them today, which meant you could only use them while you were in your car. I mentioned I was working on a paper on the telecommunications industry in Mexico for a graduate class in economics.

That exchange precipitated a discussion which lasted all the way to NYC which changed my perspective and refocused what I had learned up to that time. More importantly, it reinforced my recognition of a deficiency in my social studies training which I already knew existed but had done very little about that shortcoming-little to no economics background. I really do not believe in epiphanies, however, this lead to a change in how I viewed the world around me.