February, 1979. I got a phone call at my apartment on Broadway Drive in Portland from my friend Richard Parker, who was in graduate school in San Francisco.

“Hi, Paul.”

“Hi, Richard.”

“You still looking for a job in San Francisco?”

“Sure. What have you got?”

“Over winter break, I visited my high school buddy Jimmy Alkon in Manhattan.”

“Who’s he?” I asked.

“He’s the managing editor of a trade newspaper called Computer Systems News. They need a west coast person in San Jose. Would you be interested?”

“Sure.”

“He seemed in a hurry to fill the post. Call him.”

“Send me a résumé and clips,” Alkon said. He gave them to his editor, Al Perlman.

Perlman took my resume in to Gerry Leeds, the owner and founder of CMP Publications, which then published CSN.

“I’d like to hire him,” Al said. “His clips look good, and Jim Alkon vouches for him.”

“This guy has had five jobs in five years. He’s a gypsy. He’ll never last,” Leeds says. Perlman hires me anyway. I last most of 22 years. (Fact of the matter is, at the time Al hired me, I hoped to get on at the Chronicle or Examiner [SF daily newspapers] within six months, or maybe Business Week. Thank goodness, both of those fall through. If any of them had come through, I would certainly have not spent the last seven years working at home.)

A week later, Perlman calls me. “Hi, Paul. You look great on paper. Normally I’d come out to SF and talk to you myself, but we’re just getting this paper off the ground, and I don’t have time to fly out.”

“OK, what do you want me to do?”

“We can’t really afford to fly you to Long Island right now either. Our publisher, Tom Cooper, is on a business trip out there. Can you go have breakfast with him at Fisherman’s Wharf on Saturday?”

“Sure,” I said. “Just give me the details.

“Can you drive me into San Francisco for a job interview Saturday morning?” I asked Vicki.

 “I’d be happy to,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to go in and spend some time with Melody anyway. This gives me a good excuse.” I flew down from Portland Friday night.

Cooper and his family are just finishing breakfast at the Fisherman’s Wharf Holiday Inn when I arrive.

After we have talked for a while, Cooper says, “You seem all right to me, especially for a reporter.”

“Could I get a leased car from the company? I don’t own a car.”

“No, we only do that for sales people,” he said.

“Can you pay me $25,000 a year salary ($73,000 in 2016 dollars)? I’m making $23,000 at the Journal.”

 “We’re prepared to offer $23,000, with a raise after six months,” he said.

“Deal,” I said. Six months later, when the raise comes through, Al Perlman tells me, “You are one of the most expensive new hires CMP ever made on the editorial side. You are also the only editor ever hired by a publisher, as opposed to another editor.” I am employee 100. When I am laid off 22 years later, there are 1,000 employees at CMP. Fourteen years after that, it disappeared.

Eighteen months later, CMP becomes my longest employer ever. I am at Comdex and mention this fact to Gerry Leeds, who tells me the story about telling Al I wouldn’t last. Then, he sends a bottle of champagne to the table where Al, Mike Perkowski and I are having breakfast.

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I was working for ISN and CSN, which were both biweekly at the time; I was the only reporter with weekly deadlines. Also, I was spending three days a week in San Jose, while living 50 miles north in Orinda. It  became untenable.

I prepared a flip chart (no Powerpoint back then) and flew to Long Island to make my case to Tom Cooper, the publisher of both newspapers. I walked into his office with the flipchart. As I was placing it on the stand, he said “Whatever it is, you can have it if you don’t show me the flipchart.”

“I’d like to work for ISN only and do so from home.”

“What do you need”

“A company phone line and a fax machine.”  (back then fax machines were rotating drums that required an attendant at both ends to send/receive one page at a time)

“You got it,” Cooper said.

Perlman was upset that I picked ISN. He said, “You’re doing it because Jim Moran is an easier editor.” That was partly true. My relationship with Al was never the same, and compounded when I turned down Open Systems Today. I never found out why Mike Azzara started cutting me at the same time.