Years ago, while visiting my sister, one Sunday I went to church with her and her family. I remember the pastor delivering his thoughts about how many times in our lives we are faced with choices. Choices which cause us to make decisions as to what path in life we might choose to take and how such decisions or choices might influence the rest of our life, in fact our own destiny. He then shared a personal experience he and his wife had.

 

It began years prior, shortly after he and his wife had married and they were just getting started with his first position as a pastor of a small church. A friend whom he had known for many years brought a friend to his house one evening and asked if they could have a few moments of his time as they had a potential business proposition for him.

Both he and his wife listened intently to what the two businessmen were offering. It just so happened one of them had a recipe for a chip and they felt this was going to be a huge success because of a well thought out marketing plan they had developed. Back in those days, potato chips were common place but always packaged in large family sized bags. Part of their marketing strategy was going to include packaging their new chip (which was not a potato chip) in smaller individual sized bags thus making them convenient to put in lunches.

At the end of the meeting, the gentleman laid out their business plan and explained they needed a third partner. Each one of the proposed partners would be required to submit $1000.00 for an equal partnership which was the necessary capital required to successfully get the business off the ground.

At the end of the presentation both the pastor’s wife and the pastor told them they would need some time to think it over to which they agreed. A week later they met with the two gentlemen and informed them that after giving the matter great deliberation and looked for the answers in their faith, they had decided they would have to pass up the offer. While they did in fact have the money in their savings, they worried about so many things that any young family would; needing the savings for an emergency, possibly being transferred, let alone the possibility of the business failing. The risk just seemed too high.

Both the pastor and his wife lived a comfortable and happy life as they continued their commitment to their faith. Some years later the pastor decided to check in on his friend and invited him over for dinner. Having wondered for many years how things might have turned out had he and his wife taken part in the business venture, he asked how their business had faired. His friend explained that after successfully finding a third and equal partner, everything had gone as planned and had far exceeded even their wildest imagination. When he asked what the name of the company was his friend simply said, “Our company is called is Frito-Lay.”

As I sat listening to the pastor that day I couldn’t help but wonder if the pastor honestly had any regrets. He went on to explain many times in our lives we are faced with forks in the road and how many times we would question which path we should take. What might look like the right path at the time just possibly could lead to some place we might regret. Then again, who knows. I recall him trying to explain how many times he wondered had he become a successful and wealthy partner how it might have changed him or led him away from his faith and in doing so, what then of the paths of others in his flock that he felt he had helped over the years since.

 

Footnote:  C.E. Doolin entered a small San Antonio cafe and purchased a bag of corn chips. Mr. Doolin learned the corn chips manufacturer was eager to sell his small business, so he purchased the recipe, began making Fritos corn chips in his mother’s kitchen and sold them from his Model T Ford.

That same year, Herman W. Lay began his own potato chip business in Nashville by delivering snack foods. Not long after, Mr. Lay purchased the manufacturer and formed H.W. Lay & Company. The company became one of the largest snack food companies in the Southeast. In 1961, H.W. Lay & Company merged with the Frito Company, becoming Frito-Lay, Inc.

In 1965, Frito-Lay, Inc. merged with Pepsi-Cola to form PepsiCo.

It was 1974, and after two years of working at the US Department of Transportation, I was ready to quit my job and go to law school. I had applied to several schools on the East Coast, as well as UC Berkeley and two other California schools that I didn’t know much about. Those last three were the result of  my 1970 visit to Berkeley described in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and years of hearing songs like California Dreamin’ and the entire Beachboys catalogue.

After all the acceptances, rejections, and waiting lists had shaken out, I was trying to make up my mind between two law schools that were similar in size and status, Boston College and the University of California at Davis. Since I was living in Cambridge at the time, in a beautiful big old house on Cambridge Street, the easier path was to pick Boston College. My college boyfriend was halfway through a two-year stint at Oxford on a Marshall Fellowship, and had already been accepted at Harvard Law for his return the following year. So I could stay in my house, resume the relationship with my boyfriend, and keep hanging out with all my other friends while going to law school.

There WAS that lure of California though. And the UC Davis Women’s Caucus was extremely active and had been writing to me ever since I had first requested an application.

It was a tough choice, but after weighing all the competing considerations, I decided on Boston College, and had written the check to send in for my deposit. Before I got around to mailing it, I had a business trip to Washington, D.C. to meet with some transportation people there. Whenever I went to D.C. I stayed with my college roommate Kathy. That night at dinner we talked about my law school choices. Kathy was of the opinion that I should NOT go to Boston College and stay in my same Cambridge life (or my same rut, as she called it). This was the best time to go someplace new, and have some new adventures. Plus, as she reminded me, I was very competitive with my college BF, and if he was at Harvard while I was at BC, it would not be good for my self-esteem or our relationship.

So I ended up at UC Davis. I packed up all my belongings in my trusty Valiant (My 1966 Plymouth Valiant convertible) and drove across country to a place I had never seen before.

My first year in Davis I was miserable. The school was great — very supportive atmosphere, and 48% women in my class, at a time when most law schools were 5-10% women — but the town was the pits. I hadn’t looked at a map very closely, and I thought it was in the Bay Area, or at least a lot closer than it was — 80 miles to San Francisco, and sometimes as much as a two-hour drive with traffic. Davis had no decent restaurants, no culture, and nobody I knew. The entire telephone book was the size of the A’s in the Boston phone book. I had made a huge mistake. So I decided I would transfer to someplace — anyplace — “back East” at the end of first year.

I almost did too. But I went to Boston in June for the wedding of some college classmates and stayed for several days. In one year in California I HAD FORGOTTEN ABOUT HUMIDITY! Even though I had grown up in New Jersey, and had lived with humid summers all my life, the beautiful dry heat of Davis had changed me. I had been seduced by the weather. In fact, I had spent the entire spring quarter lying out on a ledge of the law school building suntanning in between classes, and had turned a beautiful shade of bronze, as you can see from the Featured Image. So I stayed in Davis for the rest of law school, and eventually moved only a few miles away, to Sacramento, where I have lived ever since.

Many, many times over the past forty years I have wondered how my life would have gone if I had picked Boston College instead of Davis. I imagine I would still be living in Cambridge, a city that I love very much, assuming I managed to buy a house at a time when they were affordable. I’m sure I would have worked in the public sector after law school, maybe even for the Attorney General’s Office like I did in California. I would have been able to spend more time with my mother and oldest sister, because of living on the same side of the country, which would have been nice, especially in my mother’s declining years.

I don’t think it would have worked out with my college BF, I’m pretty sure Kathy was right about that. Would I have met someone else? Would I have ever married or had children? For some reason I think the answer to that might be “no.” I might have stayed single, and done a lot of traveling whenever I felt like it, unconstrained by responsibilities to other people, like one of my Cambridge Street roommates has done. And now, forty years later and being (presumably) retired, maybe I would have taken over my mother’s house in Florida and started doing the snowbird commute between Cambridge and Delray Beach every year to avoid the cold winters.

This prompt asks for an alternative story, and I don’t have one, I just have questions and maybes. It’s too hard to imagine my life as a Boston lawyer. Maybe some day I will write a novel about my fictional Boston self.

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