It all started at the age of eight with my paper route. Each day the three paperboys from our little town, Howdy, Roy and I would sit in front of my aunt’s grocery store chewing double bubble bubble gum, or dipping a one cent pretzel rod in a ten cent Coke while we waited for two trucks to drop off our papers.  One contained the Connellsville Daily Courier, the other had The Uniontown Evening Standard and the Pittsburgh Press.  The trucks drove by like NASCAR racers and the tightly wrapped bundles of papers would come flying out of the back and hit somewhere in the muddy front of Aunt Mildred’s property. Usually the Uniontown and Pittsburgh papers arrived early.

I’d count the papers carefully to make sure that they hadn’t short- changed me.  If they did, my parents would have to sacrifice their paper for one of my other customers.  Then, I’d count them again (until my fingers were black from the ink),  to see if they gave me any extra papers that I could try to sell.   That didn’t happen often, but when it did, I could make some extra money and recruit new customers.

My take home pay was $.015 (one and a half cents) for the Pittsburgh Press and $.02 (two cents) for the Uniontown paper.   My total profit was about $1.00 a day and $2.50 on Sundays.  On Sundays I’d deliver 50 papers from a red metal wagon with white metal sides.   Sections of the Sunday papers came on different days, and, on Sunday morning we’d put them together into one big fat newspaper. Eight dollars and fifty cents a week was ENORMOUS MONEY for a kid in the late 50’s and early 60’s.

Eight dollars and fifty cents in 1950’s money is worth about $70 now.  Think of it.  Seventy dollars a week in spending money! Heck, I could buy shoes, a shirt, socks, and dress pants for about two weeks’ worth of work. I spent most of my money on clothes.  My second addiction, however, was building plastic models of airplanes, rocket ships, boats, and cars.  My room was filled with models.

I really liked most of my customers. Generally, they were sweet people.  Of course some weren’t.  At least six of my customers tried to stiff me every week. They would hide when I came to collect the 42 cents that they owed me.  It was great practice for my future, losses from accounts receivable. It used to take me one and a half hours to deliver about 45 papers every day. Because of my paper route and my love of music,  I developed the discipline to live on a schedule.  I used to deliver those papers, go home and practice my drums or trumpet, take a nap, do homework, eat dinner, practice more, and then stay up to watch the Johnny Carson, alone every night.

Sometimes life on my paper route was cluttered with complications, challenging personalities, and, every type of weather, ferocious dogs, slippery sidewalks, and the occasional town bully.  But all of this was like an amazing internship for what would become my adult life.  As I went from playing drums to trumpet, to becoming a band director, to arts center director, to tourism president, to hospital administrator, to founder of a research institute, and now to entrepreneur, those days of my youth have served me well.

I still buy my own clothes, interact with the good and the bad personalities, the rip-off artists, and the kind, loving, gentle people who only want to make life better. Because of my paper route, I understand that I was given an amazing opportunity to learn, to grow and to get a head start on adulthood.    Some days, as I watch my grandchildren on their I’s (I Phones, I Pads, I Touches, I Pods), I just feel a little sad that they don’t deliver newspapers.

If you’ve ever seen the television series, Mad Men, you can begin to get the flavor of the environment back in the 60’s. Cigarettes were so glamorized that we literally lived in a haze of blue smoke. Movie theaters, restaurants, hospitals and the schools had areas where the employees smoked all the time. 

One of the most offensive photographs I had ever seen that depicted the acceptance of smoking most vividly at that time was a picture of a female neonatal physician holding an extremely tiny premature baby in one hand and her smoking cigarette in the other.

It was interesting to me that smoking had been seen as detrimental to health beginning in the late 50’s and early 60’s, but all of my relatives kept on smoking. My Dad, Uncle Bill and Aunt Mildred all fell victims to tobacco in their late fifties or early sixties, but the carnage continued and still continues today.

When Big Tobacco got science involved, we began to see chemicals and additives that made us addicted. In fact, one study showed that quitting cigarettes was more challenging than stopping heroin.

The real irony is that we all know the horrible side effects of smoking cigarettes, yet more than 20% of us still smoke in the United States, and nearly 30% of Europeans still smoke. 1.1 billion people are still smoking internationally.

Now, however, we are seeing that the lessons learned from marketing, countering scientific evidence, and adding addictive ingredients and cancer causing substances has been passed over to our food industry.

We’re predictably acting in exactly the same way. We’re ignoring the facts and ignoring our brains and consuming manufactured foods that are as bad for us as those enhanced cigarettes, and we’re doing it by the billions worldwide.

After deep consideration and much consultation on this matter, I’ve decided that it’s not the lack of education that’s the problem. It’s not the lack of intelligence. It’s not even the lack of exposure to the truth that is causing this. I truly believe that we, as a species, are Meatheads!

One of my bosses used to describe people like this, “They get up in the morning and go through the motions; go to the bathroom, brush their teeth, shower, grab coffee, go to work. No thinking. When they get to work, they open their skulls, remove their brains, and place them on a hook until the end of the work day.”

M-E-A-T-H-E-A-D-S

What’s it gonna take to get us to wake up and smell the chemicals? Seriously, there are hundreds, even thousands of untested additives being placed in our manufactured food, and we just go on eating it like sheep being led to, well, to hospitals. Most of the work that we did in cancer research was related to genetics, but 75+% of the cancers that we saw were related to the environment.

Why is it okay for industries to purposely poison us and produce marketing campaigns to entice us to consume the poisons that they are putting into our foods? People went crazy when the unregulated Chinese doggie treats killed their pets, but everyone keeps eating our make-believe foods.

In California they must post this sign on the windows of certain fast food restaurants: Warning “Chemicals Known in the State of California to cause cancer, or birth defects, or other reproductive harm may be present in food or beverages sold or served here.”

WE’RE MEATHEADS!

As the World Congress on Cardiology, I observed 70% of the physicians in the room smoking. One physician stood in front of a Power Point presentation with a cigarette in his left hand as he pointed to Moscow, Kiev and Belgrade. He exclaimed, “Number one in heart attacks, Moscow. Number two, Kiev, and number three in heart attacks, Belgrade.” Then he took a long drag on his cigarettes and said, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

WE’RE MEATHEADS!