About the Author: More than you'll likely want to know about Frank Villani
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Since I’ve been presumptive enough to write a book suggesting how you can rid your life of parasitic politicians and the 90% of government you don’t need, you are entitled to know who I am and what my qualifications are for writing such a book.
If this were to be a typical publishing blurb, it would read like this:
Frank Villani was born in New York City in 1931. While he attended college for far too many years, he is a relatively self-educated man. He has been ruminating about things political throughout his fifty-year career as a manufacturers’ representative. He recently decided to put his ruminations on how to remove politicians into a book. This book of ruminations is the compilation of these ruminations and where he has also learned how not to overuse a word like ruminations.
A number of research foundations and think tanks have considered asking Mr. Villani to join their group, but most have thought better of it and withdrawn their offers.
Obviously, this does not tell you nearly enough to put in perspective the ideas my book has presented for your consideration. Here, therefore, is a much more complete biography to assuage your curiosity and my vanity.
My resume summary is as follows:
College degrees: None
Honorary degrees: None
Prestigious jobs: None
Honorific committees: None
Respected appointments: None
Please note that I do not intend to demean the accomplishments of my life by noting the lack of formal certificates. Those who know me are aware that neither my ego nor my accomplishments need formal acknowledgement.
I never served in the military. Born in 1931 in New York City, I was too young to be called for World War II, and although eligible for Korea, I was never called to serve. To this day, I am still chagrined that I did not volunteer for Korean service as I should have.
My mother, Helen, was a coal miner’s daughter from Scranton, Pennsylvania who escaped the coal fields by joining the women’s Navy with her sister, Anna. They typed their way through World War I in the Philadelphia Navy Yards. She met my father through a mutual acquaintance in Philadelphia. In the days before welfare and “public” education, coal miners’ daughters learned to read, love great literature, and play the piano with great skill.
My early childhood was in the pre-penicillin, pre-technology medical age, and I was a sickly child, catching every disease available to me. Although my mother was a very protective and concerned parent, I was an ungrateful child, never realizing until well into my middle age what immense sacrifices my parents made for my sister and me.
My father, Jules Gulliamo, was an Italian immigrant with half a grammar school education, who came to America alone as a young teenager. He came to escape World War I and the paucity that awaited the youngest son of a peasant Italian farm family. He began American life as a busboy in a Philadelphia hotel and rose to managing the restaurant operations at the Plaza Hotel in New York City prior to its acquisition by Donald Trump. (Thank God – he would have hated Donald Trump.) He died in the prime of his life in 1955 at the age of 55 after a very short illness from brain cancer. The one profound loss of my life is that I never knew my father, for when I was a child, my father worked 12-16 hours a day to provide for my sister and me and to pay for the medical bills that allowed our survival. My parents loved and cared enough for me to send me (again at great financial sacrifice) to a good Catholic grammar school and one of the finest Catholic high schools in New York City, All Hallows. I was at best an undistinguished student. I suspect it’s because I considered it an affront to my intelligence to have to actually study. I think I would rather flunk than have to admit I couldn’t master any subject by just being exposed to it.
During the summers, in the days before air conditioning when the cities’ hotels virtually shut down, I worked with my father in the resort beach clubs on Long Island. Even though I was in the same building as my father we seldom saw each other, as we routinely worked very hard, 12- and often 18-hour days throughout the whole of the summer.
Each summer from freshman year on, I’d work as bus boy, waiter, cook, bartender, vegetable peeler or whatever. I lived in a small barrack, right on the beach 25 yards from the breaking surf, with all the other employees. My fellow employees were either Italian immigrants, recently off the boat or co-op students from Cornell’s Hotel Management School . All of the latter were recently returned WWII veterans some 10 or more years older than me. What an education and what fun that was!
Although I had no idea what I wanted to do in life, I knew I did not want to be a busboy. After my last summer, I enrolled at Fordham Business school in downtown NYC shooting for a BA. I simultaneously worked part time at a tony Wall Street Law Firm, Whitman, Ransom, Coulson and Goetz, located at 40 Wall Street right across from the NY Stock Exchange. I was a Law Person Friday doing everything from delivering the mail to looking up case law. God help me but corporate law was booooorrrriiinnngggg. Studying accounting at Fordham was even worse; not surprisingly, I flunked out after two years.
I was most fortunate, in that General Motors then had its international headquarters near the Plaza Hotel. Many of their executives dined there where I’m sure my father lamented to them about his dissolute son. One of them was even kind enough to recommend me, sight unseen, to a school that General Motors then ran in Flint, Michigan: General Motors Institute (GMI) – a very tough five-year engineering college. The school still exists as Kettering University, no longer owned by GM, but now funded by a consortium of corporations and other universities.
My father, desperate not to see his son turn into a bum, pulled some strings and got me enrolled at this then relatively new school GM had then set up to be their “West Point”, so to speak. GMI, located in Flint, Michigan, was a co-op school, requiring one to be sponsored by one of the GM divisions. Fortunately for me, Hydra-Matic was then an almost brand-new division – since they weren’t too fussy, they sponsored me.
GMI was an exceedingly tough engineering school, but working in the Hydra-Matic factory was a terrific new experience. I had never even been in a factory before then, and it was a ball. I did very well in my work time but very badly in my study time. My poor high school work came back to haunt me.
By the time I realized that Poly Nominal was not one of the town girls, I was so far behind that I was swimming in a whirlpool just to keep from drowning. But drown I did; GMI kicked me out after two years. During my freshman year, I did meet a local girl and during my second year, we got married. Being good Catholics, we celebrated our first anniversary and the simultaneous birth of the first of our six children.
At the time I “left” GMI, I was co-oping in Hydra-Matic’s engineering department. I managed to talk my way from student status to full time tech status. I found another school in Detroit, Lawrence Institute of Technology, where I could continue my “studies” in evening classes. (I ended up going there for seven or so years and never graduating). I really enjoyed and was good at all of the engineering studies, but I could never master higher math and obviously that won’t work in getting an engineering degree.
I worked at GM for a year or so and then decided that I wanted to work for a”smaller” company and so got employed at “The Fords” (as we say in Detroit).
I ended up as a designer on automatic transmissions (I was Mr. Gear trains and clutch packs). I shortly realized that Ford was no less bureaucratic than GM. I was lured away by an ad in the paper for engineers to work on aircraft hydraulic systems for a company then called Vickers (now swallowed up into the Eaton Corp.)
What fun that was. I got to hang around with test pilots and be around all those new fighter planes like the F-101, 102, 104, 105, 106 the RA5C, the KC 135 tanker and B-52 bomber. I couldn’t believe they paid me to do that job.
Unfortunately, Vickers lost the B-52 business. The B-52 was BIG business – eight engines per airplane times two 3000PSI pumps and untold valves per engine times lots of B-52s plus spares equals one big loss of business. I got laid off. “Damn,” I said to myself, “I’m never going to allow that to happen to me again.”
I began casting about for a way to become self-employed, and providentially ran into a manufacturer’s agent whose brain I picked. I learned that this is a business that one could start with no capital, or so I thought. By then we had several children, so “no capital” was most alluring. I began by typing letters to potential manufacturers each evening, telling them how wonderful I was going to be. (This was before copy machines, computers, or word processors had been invented. Long-distance phone calls were made person-to-person and letters typed peck by peck.) Some seemingly thousands of letters later, two or three manufacturers decided they had nothing to lose by hiring a totally inexperienced, flunked-out engineer to sell their products on straight commission. Once begun, I “knew” I would be very prosperous in two or three weeks at most. Talk about naïve!
It took me two years before I made even a small buck. I supported my growing family by selling encyclopedias door to door in the evenings. Finally I got some valves and fuel control components designed into the General Electric J-79 engine and swivel joints and valves into the McDonald F-4s. Now I was in the bucks.
Fortunately, as the aircraft business began to decline with the end of the Korean War, the semiconductor was discovered and I converted my organization from hydraulic and fuel controls into electronic and electromechanical components. I/we represented companies such as The Lee Co.; PIC Design, a division of Benrus Watch; Licon, a division of Illinois Tool Works; Bourns and the Zero Division of the Halliburton Corporation (yes, that Halliburton Co.) as well as several early semiconductor companies now demised.
I became successful as a manufacturer’s representative and we enjoyed a very prosperous, good suburban life. I enjoyed my family immensely.
Shortly thereafter, I became a BIG TIME entrepreneur with not only a rep company and a distribution company but a manufacturing company too. Before I knew it, I was guaranteeing $1,000,000 loans for expansions. I finally realized that I really wasn’t comfortable doing this, so I traded my shares of the ownership for complete ownership of the manufacturing company. Now I are a manufacturer.
Undercapitalized!!! Man – I had no idea of how much capital it took to run a manufacturing company – what’s an accounts receivable? What difference does it make when we get paid? Dumb, dumb, dumb!!! I was a great salesman but a lousy manager. I got the sales up to several million dollars when the poopoo finally hit the blades.
Our biggest customer was Burroughs (now Unisys) and their prompt payments, 10 days typically, kept us afloat. One day, a credit crunch hit the world and 10 days became 15 and then 30 till finally it was 75 or even 120 days, and voila, goodbye.
I then began a year or so of seeing how much scotch I could drink in an evening, about a fifth as I remember. Before long, not only my manufacturing company but my marriage was gone too.
The dissolution of my marriage was a prolonged and devastating experience that left me with newly found “respect” for the absurdity and imperiousness of our legal system and the havoc and bitterness it causes in families already in distress.
After a brief, interim marriage with a lovely, young lady almost 20 years my junior, during which I spent most evenings with a bottle of scotch, I finally decided enough was enough and it was time to begin life again. Thanks to a loan from an old customer, I was able to start up a new rep firm in the mid ‘70s.
By then, diodes and discrete transistors were passé; integrated circuits were the thing. I build the new company selling for companies such as Panasonic Semiconductor, Mitsubishi Semiconductors, Linear Technologies, Litton, Kyocera and that wonderful French company, Thompson Semiconductor, who were licensees of Motorola. We sold primarily to the very pleasant to deal with BIG THREE AUTO COMPANIES (what fun).
About then, I met my current wife, Leslie, and we married. Leslie is/was a full time artist, one of the few who is good enough and prolific enough to make a good living from her work. Not only was/is the marriage fine, but I was really lucky in my business. After about a decade in this “new” rep company, several engineers who were my customers broke away from and were sponsored by Ford to lead Ford into semiconductor nirvana. They arranged to get financing from the Michigan State Employees Pension Fund, and they bought my company as the core semiconductor products for their venture.
Now I was really rich!
For a couple of years anyway.
Ford was fickle, the semiconductor business even more fickly and nirvana never came. The company and my retirement pay out went poof.
Never knowing when to quit and using the partial payout I had received as capital, I started another rep company, this time selling very, very high performance computer systems in applications such as a refinery control system, MRI and CAT imaging systems, nuclear reactor back-up systems and robotic vision systems. We represented companies such as Digital Equipment, Matrox, Sony, and such. Great fun and quite profitable too.
As you likely know, the electronics/computer business is a highly volatile one with huge technology swings often requiring a business to completely recast itself to meet the next wave. During my almost 50 years as a rep, I caught several technology waves on the upside and was able to sell these successful companies to their employees and retire a very rich man only to have the next wave reverse the fortunes of my former employees.
In this time and unbeknownst to me, Intel and Microsoft finally got their stuff together and the $5000 to $50,000 systems we were selling became $2500 to $10,000 systems. I faced a decision to transform my business into a distributorship from a rep company, as rep companies don’t belong in commodity businesses, as there is no margin for them. I saw myself hocking the house again and going into debt again, and I finally said, “quit, you dummy.” I did, but not without a crushing blow to my ego. I closed down the company and retired.
After about a year and a half of retirement, I got BORED – BORED – BORED, and the stock market had tanked as well. In order to relieve my boredom and refresh our retirement accounts, I started another rep company and also decided to finish this book about politicians I started more than a decade ago.
Had I elected to stay in the auto companies as an engineer, I’d likely be anonymously retired.
I’m glad I chose the freedom and excitement of being my own boss for over 50 years even though I never got rich in the process. It was a very gratifying life however.
As you can see, I have no particular qualifications to speak on economic, political, or governmental matters. I offer my comments and ideas to you and ask you to judge them on their merits.