After retrieving our gear we drove straight home. I still had two weeks off work but we couldn't afford to go anywhere so we spent the time together at home. To understand the next foolish thing I did to wreck our lives I need to give a little back story. As soon as I became a Christian I decided to do something about the whole world hunger thing. I read that the United States grew enough grain to feed the world, except we feed most of that grain to cows so we can eat hamburgers. For this reason I became a partial vegetarian. Not a full vegetarian because my beef was with cows. (Pun intended.) I didn't eat pork because pigs were inefficient, but cows were the big problem. Chickens were okay because there's a high feed to meat return. I ate fish. Wild meat was good too because a deer doesn't steal flour from the starving babies in Africa, but I'd never hunted so we didn't have any wild meat.

At the time Mary and I met I hadn't eaten beef or pork in over a year. Mary joined my diet, but it was more to support me. I knew her heart wasn't into it and I think she cheated. I am sure she had an Arby's roast beef sandwich when I wasn't watching. The point is, I was into the whole feed the world thing. With two weeks off work and nothing to do...well, other than what newly married couples do...I had some time to think. It didn't take me long to come to the conclusion that it was time for me to end world hunger. It sounds silly now, but I was serious then. I gave CBN my notice, worked two weeks, so we had exactly two weeks pay when we struck out on our own. I called our non-profit venture the Christian Coordination Center. The name came from my bright idea of a centralized source for ministries with a shared objective. I had never done anything to prepare me for something like this. The CBN driving job was the most sophisticated work I had done. I had never had my own business or worked for myself in any way. Yet I believed I could do this. If Mary had any doubts she kept them to herself. From the beginning she encouraged me to go for it.

The only resource we had was that I knew many important people. I started small with a local concert to raise money. I brought together several of the local Christian bands, advertised on CBN's radio station and held the concert on a field using a borrowed flatbed truck for a stage. It went well, but we needed more to feed the world. It needed to go bigger.

A month earlier I had met Jerry Lucas through my job. Jerry had been a star player for Ohio State who went on to become a professional player with the New York Knicks. He'd retired from basketball, but had written a memory technique book that was currently on the New York Times best seller list. His appearance on CBN was in part to promote his book and memory seminars. In passing he told me he'd like to do a seminar in the Tidewater area. With this in mind I called Jerry. I wasn't surprised when he agreed to let me sponsor a seminar in Norfolk. He had a date open a month out so I took it. I had no idea these things were usually planned a year in advance so I didn't know I couldn't put it together in a month. Not knowing I couldn't do it, I pulled it off. The venue was at the Scope convention center in Norfolk. The details elude me now, but we did well enough that Jerry was excited.
A week before the seminar everything was going so well that Jerry asked me if I was interested in another tight date. Five weeks. I jumped on it. This one I set up in New Orleans. After paying Jerry his share of the gate I had to put a large deposit on the Riverside Convention Center (I think that was the name of the venue) in New Orleans and started advertising. Three weeks before the New Orleans seminar, Jerry told me he'd forgotten a previous commitment at Ohio State on the same day as the New Orleans seminar. Ironic a memory expert would forget. His thing at Ohio State was in the morning and my thing in New Orleans was in the evening, so I asked if he could do both if I could get him there. He said sure, but he'd already checked the airlines and there wasn't a flight that would work. Leave it to me, I said.
Another person I knew was Mary Crowley. Mrs. Crowley owned American Home Products. When she flew to CBN it was on her new Gulfstream II, the best private jet on the market at the time. When she took me on board for a tour I told her I wanted one, to which she replied, "then earn it". Needing a jet, I called her. She wasn't home in Dallas, but attending an annual company seminar in western North Carolina. A place so reclusive they didn't have phones. Her office did give me the address.

My Mary and I drove our patched up Maverick to North Carolina to borrow Mary Crowley's Gulfstream. The place was further away than I thought so we arrived late. The venue was ultra expensive. Too inexperienced to realize I was way out of my league, I parked our bondo covered Ford amid luxury cars and went inside. Somehow I manage to talk someone out of Mrs. Crowley's suite number, so Mary and I went up to her rooms and knocked. Mrs. Crowley was gracious. She fed us a wonderful meal and listened to my sad story. When I was finished she picked up the house phone (no outside lines) called her pilot and asked him to come over with his flight bag. After I explained the particulars to the pilot, Mrs. Crowley asked, "Can you make that flight in the G-II." He sat down and did the numbers. Mrs. Crowley told me that if it can be done I can have the jet. I asked how much that would cost and she said "Too much", so it would be her treat. When the pilot looked up he shook his head. Can't be done, he said. The distance could be covered, but we couldn't get through New Orleans air space in time.

Mary felt bad for us knowing we were going to lose everything on the failed venture, so she wrote me a check for a thousand dollars to help. She said, "I hate investing in something that's already failed. Hunt me down again when you've got a potential winner." I should have taken her up on that offer, but never did.

The Christian Coordination Center never recovered from this loss. It took me awhile to recover too. By this time Mary announced that we were pregnant, for which we were both elated. Soon after this we moved to eastern Ohio, to be closer to her family. Mary's mom was the head OB Nurse at Warren (Ohio) General Hospital and she wanted to have our child there. I took a sales job at an industrial hardware store that didn't work out too well. Next I got a sales job at a large wholesale florist on the south side of Cleveland, so we moved to the college town of Oberlin to be closer to work. I didn't know anything about flowers, plants, or floral supplies, but I could sell anything and did well. It went great until the manager split up the accounts of a salesman who'd left. One of the accounts I was given was for the Krishna Group, which I considered a cult. I asked that he give the account to someone else, but everyone was complaining about their new accounts so he told me I had to service that account. I refused so he fired me, effective immediately. He wrote me a check for what I was owed and added a small severance.

The next day (August 1977, still 20 years old) I showed up at my former employer with a business license and a wholesaler's tax reseller ID number (they only sold wholesale). The owner laughed at my boldness, but accepted me as a customer. I used his severance money to buy supplies, then Mary and I spent all week putting together dish gardens, which is an assortment of small plants, arranged and planted inside a decorative ceramic container. Sounds strange, I know, but they were popular at the time. My previous florist customers always asked for dish gardens, so I believed they would sell well. My motto, "Find a need then fill it." We made them and sold them...to all my old clients with the big company. When I went back for more supplies my old boss confronted me. They sold dish gardens too so he didn't like the fact that I was competing with him by buying raw material from him, then selling to his customers after I'd met them as his salesman. He considered it a conflict of interest. I said, "Sue me. Then we can talk about firing me in violation of my religious freedom." He said we'll call it even and told the salesman to fill my order.

We did so well that Mary and I built a greenhouse. Most of the greenhouse came from a defunct greenhouse that I salvaged (with permission). Glass was expensive so I covered it with heavy plastic. I built the entire thing without the benefit of a ruler or square. It wasn't pretty but it worked just fine. Mary worked as a waitress at a Perkins restaurant two miles from home. She was so pretty and likeable that she did well enough on tips that we lived on her income and reinvested the greenhouse's income back into the business. With a greenhouse as a resource we bought a van and trailer and began making trips to Apopka Florida, "the greenhouse capital of the world" to buy tropical plants super cheap. After two weeks acclimating in our greenhouse, I'd sell those plant to florist in the lucrative Cleveland market. It was all going well.

In the spring of 1978, when Mary was heavy with our soon to be first born, I made a promising inventory investment in a large stock of cacti from a greenhouse grower in Tennessee. I say investment because cactus plants had become a hot item in Cleveland area florist but were difficult to find in quantity. All I had to do was hold them till winter, through which time they would produce tens of thousands of sellable small cacti, and I could make a large profit. For this reason maintaining the greenhouse became a critical responsibility.

The night of April 28, 1977, Mary went into labor. We had better than an hour's drive to her mother's hospital, but she laid in bed silently, performing the Lamaze breathing techniques we had both learned from classes on natural child birth. For the first few hours of her first labor my wife sat in bed and suffered silently while I slept beside her. I mention this because it reveals much of who she really is. Mary has the look of the angel, but she's as tough as an MMA fighter. When she did wake me up I fell out of bed and ran into the wall. I've often said I never panic, but when my wife told me she was in labor I totally panicked. Mary told me to relax, that she'd been in labor for several hours which didn't help me at all. It was two in the morning when we drove through Richfield, Ohio, a village known for enforcing its 25 mph zone. When I passed a Richfield cop doing nearly 100 mph I pulled over before he stopped me, and ran towards his car like a crazy man, screaming my wife was having a baby. I was so panicked the cop didn't doubt my story. He calmly said, "Then why'd you stop?" I looked dumbfounded so he waved me off and said, "Go." That's how panicked I was.