Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

I think you ought to face the fact, Howie, that you are a little bit out of touch with reality. I realize that you had a very hard time, learning that Annabelle had leukemia, and I can appreciate your going abroad where living was cheap so you could be with her for those three years, taking care of her. I can appreciate the fact that you are out of touch with the industry and that you are broke, but, old friend, three hundred thousand dollars isn’t exactly a pittance.

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment. I didn’t force you to get out. That was your decision. It shocked me that you actually wanted to leave. I thought at that time you were my best friend in all the world.

You left me holding the bag. Okay. I went ahead with the plans you didn’t want to live with. I stayed and fought it out, Howie. So now Ray-Fax has six hundred employees, and in the last fiscal year we made an after-tax net of a dollar seventy-seven per share on the five hundred eighty-eight thousand shares outstanding.

Where do you think a record like that comes from? From my sweat, old friend. From plugging away at it for seven years. I added the value. You had nothing to do with it.

You hit the sauce pretty hard the other night, Howie. I don’t know if that has become kind of a habit with you since Annabelle passed away, but I can tell you that it made communication pretty difficult.

You make it pretty rough for anybody to try to meet you even half way on this thing. You certainly didn’t leave me with any big fat desire to bring you back into the fold and play wet nurse until you can pull your own weight again.

If you want to come to the office and offer some kind of apology for your words and actions the other night, it might give us some kind of starting point from which we could...

No dice. Try it again.

Dear Howard. If there were just the two of us involved, like in the old days, then it would make things a lot simpler. But in view of the present setup your demands and your recriminations just do not make sense. As the chief executive officer and chairman of the Board of Directors of Ray-Fax, Incorporated, I am responsible to all the hundreds of stockholders of the corporation.

How can that affect a private stock option agreement between you and me? Because we are now in registration, coming out with additional shares of common and some convertible debentures with warrants attached to finance necessary expansion. I have provided the investment banking firm, as required by law, with all the facts in full disclosure. The investment bankers are now preparing a “red herring” which will have to be approved by the S.E.C. in every particular. In enumerating my personal holdings in Ray-Fax, I naturally included the option agreement on twenty thousand shares, along with the duration of that option and the purchase price.

Were I now to even attempt to alter any portion of that agreement, the investment bankers and the S.E.C. would want to know why I had not gone through with a legal stock purchase based upon a perfectly legitimate legal...

Now I think I know which way to go with it. This should do it. Lucy, I think this better go out registered mail, return receipt. And don’t use my private stationery. Use the company bond, and make an extra copy for Mike Shanniger.

10 January 1970

Mr. Howard J. Faxton Room 34 Holiday Inn

4840 By-Pass Highway

Weston, Ohio

Dear Howard,

I am glad you were able to stop by the other evening and say hello.

Ruth and I want to express again our belated sympathy to you on the loss of your wife, Annabelle.

This letter will serve as formal notification to you of my intent to purchase from you your holdings in Ray-Fax, Incorporated, represented by those shares now held in escrow by the legal firm of Finch, Dickinson and Shanniger, under the terms of our option contract agreement dated Sept. 16th, 1963.

I have instructed Mr. Michael Shanniger to act in my behalf in this matter and to deliver to you a certified check in the amount of $300,000, and then release the certificates for registration in my name.

I am sure Mr. Shanniger will be able to answer any questions you may have regarding this contractual transaction.

Ruth joins me in extending to you our best wishes, and we hope you will find agreeable and rewarding work in the very near future.

With warm personal regards,

D. Franklin Raymond

Chief Executive Officer

and

Chairman of the Board of Directors

My name is Mabel Turner. Mrs. Ralph Turner. I guess it is my fault the girl ever stayed here on the place. We have three hundred acres of apple trees. It is land my father and my grandfather used to own. We are just about midway between Watkins Glen and Ithaca. We raised three children here. They all went to Cornell, and they are all married and live farther away than I would like. But I am ever grateful we got them through college and out into the world before all this rioting and drugs started, before they all began to look alike in their funny clothes and long hair.

A few years ago we used to have an apple stand out front by the state road. But it was more nuisance than it was worth. My husband built it the way he builds everything, very strong and tight, out of the best materials.

When we decided to give up the apple stand, I said it might make a nice little cabin. My husband Ralph jacked it up and put it on a flatbed wagon and tractored it up through the west orchard and over the knoll and down to the bank of Cold Creek, to a pretty place I picked. He built a fieldstone foundation and put the apple stand on it.

We decided that there wasn’t much point in putting a lot of money in it. It was only eighteen feet long and ten feet wide. It has a shed roof. Ralph left the big shutters on, two of them, permanently propped up, and put sliding windows and screens in the two openings. He put some panel board on the studs on the inside and built a bunk bed, put blue asphalt tile on the floor, and built three steps up to the doorway in the end, and put another window in the other end. We did not want to go to the expense of plumbing. Ralph ran a power line from the house back there, enough to run some lights and a little pump to pull water from the creek into a little sink inside. You have to put a pail under the drain from the sink.

I fixed up a kitchen with a little kerosene stove and a little electric refrigerator that’s very old but has always worked well. Ralph built an outdoor privy over at the edge of the marsh about sixty feet back from the cabin. I put up curtains, and we had some things stored in the top of the barn that made pretty furniture when Ralph spray-painted it.

I had him put it on the south bank of the creek about forty feet east of the willow pool. The creek runs through a shallow valley. There are old apple trees there, too old to bear properly, but they were planted by my grandfather and we have not had the heart to cut them down and put in better stock. The creek is spring fed. There is a deep pool under the shade of three old willow trees. Even in August and September the water is icy. It is always in shade.

I swam there on the hottest days of summer when I was a little girl, and so did my mother. In May the little valley is full of the sweet smell of apple blossoms.

The girl came to the door of the main house in May, early May, two years ago. I saw her little red car in the driveway. An old car, I guess. Five or six years old. A foreign car. She had seen our sign about having a cabin to rent. There were Pennsylvania license plates on her car. She wore red pants and a shaggy gray sweater. She was a little bit of a thing, with long straight black hair that she kept pushing back.

I said it was empty and she wanted to look at it. She said it was just for herself. She seemed like a quiet, polite girl. I said it did not have modern conveniences, and she said that wasn’t too important to her. I wished Ralph had been there to say no. But he was at a meeting at Cornell, where they were talking about the newest thing in orchard sprays.