Encounters with Greatness

On the Radars of the Remarkable
For years, I practiced a comfortable kind of self-delusion.  Whenever a giant of history crossed my path and spoke to me, I brushed it off as coincidence or error.
With Albert Shanker, I convinced myself I simply looked the part of someone important - wearing a jacket and tie to the Albert Shanker debate at Stanford in 1989.
In the "laid back" casual-dress California Bay Area, I was dressed like a New Yorker in business work attire for this important event, like Shanker was,
and perhaps that was enough to trigger his curiosity when he arrived at the large hall where we all waited for the doors to open to the debate hall, or so I thought.

I was wrong.

Albert Shanker arrived, and I saw and heard the hum and buzz of activity at the doors.  Albert Shanker - a titan reshaping the entire landscape of American education and politics -
entered, looked across the large waiting hall and walked directly over to me, and offered a warm greeting.

Surprised by the sheer gravitas of the man, totally not expecting it, and not having an agenda or pitch of my own
(just there to learn and see the debate), I stammered a simple tongue-tied "Hello!"

For the decades since, I felt it was just my respectful attire, which one would wear to such an event in New York City, that caught his attention.  It took a more objective analysis,
by those more knowledgeable than I am about the mechanics of the powerful, to realize the truth: men of Shanker's stature do not guess.  They have front men; they have briefers;

"They know exactly who is in the room," they have explained to me.

When Albert Shanker Arrived at Stanford for The Debate in 1989, He Walked Straight Across The Hall, Directly to Me, To Greet Me.

He didn't just guess I was a significant person at Stanford because I dressed like a professional; he knew exactly who I was and he came over to greet, acknowledge, and size me up.
This is the history of a life, my life, lived in the background of giants - not as a nameless face, but as a person noticed.
I shook Sacramento State University like an Earthquake in 1982 with my newsletters, and Limbaugh and his advisors changed course from sports and entertainment
to ferocious, mocking, and satirical attacks on the arrogant, bratty, hypocritical "intellectual elites" at the colleges and universities and media.

Re-informed, and re-thinking this particular puzzling incident in my life, which was always a bit of a mystery stored in my memory,
I now re-think many other similar events which I will share.  You will notice that most of these encounters, or close brushes, could be seen as coincidence, and so I did.
but there were quite a few, and they have added up over the years to amount to a weighty pattern.

One in particular, for example, was what happened with U.S. Senator Barbara boxer in Sacramento in about 2005, I have absolutely no doubt about AT ALL.
She singled me out and tried to frame me for bankruptcy fraud.  I caught on, exposed it, and it stopped.

But other encounters, such as with Tom Hayden at the California State Capitol in the 1990's or Mark Rudd at a library in Gallup, New Mexico in 2016.

These encounters were all with significant national leaders of some sort, but most were politicians.
There was an earlier encounter with Norman Mailer in 1973 when he spoke at Seton Hall University near my home in South Orange, NJ, that was clearly initiated by me
and caused by proximity.

But all the rest occurred after 1982, when I shook Sacramento State University like an earthquake, and I believe THAT's why Albert Shanker went out of his way to greet me
before his debate at Stanford in 1989.

I'll fill in more details over the upcoming weeks.