What I Learned from The Quiet Cowboy, The Great Chicago Fire and the Even Greater Recovery and Tim Leuliette Went to Business School... at Ford Motor Company

Dramatic Pause. A dramatic pause says something without saying anything at all.

Dramatic Pause is a go-to for podcasters, presidents, and radio voiceovers. It makes you look really smart, even if you're not. Feet deserve a go-to like that. Like Hey Dude Shoes.

Light, comfy, good to go to. So you're in the garage working on your car, and you need the valves you bought last week. You look in the cabinets, and on the shelves. But the parts are never in the right place. eBay Motors has the car parts you need. Over 122 million of them all in one place, and all at the right prices.

Find parts for everything from your classic coupe to your brand new truck at eBayMotors.com. Let's ride. Vanguard is owned by our investors, so we all sit on the same side of the table. As an advisor, you look out for your clients.

We look out for both of you. That's the value of ownership. Visit vanguard.com and discover ownership. Fund shareholders own the funds that own Vanguard.

Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we love hearing from you, our listeners. Send your stories to OurAmericanStories.com. They're some of our favorites. Today we're going to hear from author J.D.

Winninger. He'll be sharing part of a story he wrote called The Quiet Cowboy. I met Mr. John at our church.

Quiet fellow, he'd sit by himself near the back. He would only speak when spoken to, and I made it a point to seek him out each Sunday morning for about a month to spend a couple of minutes sharing with him. One morning, noticing the brand on the vest, he quizzically looked at me. You got a ranch? When I affirmed I indeed had a small ranch, his eyes lit up. I grew up in Picton over by Como. Smiling, I replied, I didn't know that. That's great cattle country over there and good hay, too.

With a broad smile, he looked up. My daddy brothers and me worked in them hay fields 14 hours a day years ago. Oh, whee, that was hard work, but hard work makes you healthy.

I'd make almost $30 a day. From there, the Roots of Friendship crew. As we grew more comfortable with one another, I invited him to Life Group. He shared he didn't drive, and he wasn't comfortable walking the streets after dark. I promised we'd carry him home, and he agreed to join us. When I learned where my new friend John lived, it broke my heart. It seemed prejudice and persecution displaced him, and he was most grateful that a nearby church offered him a dry place to sleep and others a shower now and again.

With no bathroom facilities and winter coming on, God placed a burden on my family's heart to do more. It took some convincing him, but Mr. John is the newest resident at our Cross W Ranch. As I'm getting to know my ranch foreman better each day, I'm learning more from him than he is from me. With the nod of his head, he states, matter of fact, we're burning daylight.

As he sits down beside me, I think to myself, this fella doesn't talk much, but he sure is a good worker. After early morning chores, feeding, watering, and herd checks, he glances my way. Time to feed them critters, and off we go to feed Bubba and the barn kitties. Following the pat on the head and straightening Bubba's rugs, it's time for our breakfast. He pours his coffee in silence. How do you want your eggs, Mr. John?

Scramble, please. A brief reply is his usual response. Oh, sometimes he'll talk your ear off. I was a pretty good dairyman in my youth.

I could work a hundred foot straight A, a type of dairy barn, by myself, before sunrise. He isn't bragging, but remembering his strong work ethic as a young man. That same spirit flows through him today, tempered with age and seasoning, wisdom from a lifetime of lessons. He's quick to remind me. I wasn't always responsible, though.

I quit my dairy job, not because I didn't love working with them old cows, but because it wasn't fair to them or my boss. They deserve someone more responsible than I became. I thought, I wish we could all be that honest with ourselves. He's cleaned up the old bunkhouse, and he's made himself a great apartment. Mr. John is an answer to prayers to help around the house. I've never seen the barn, garage, workshop, and bunkhouse so sparkling and clean.

Neither is my Miss Diane, much to my chagrin. Together, we tackle all the chores that need doing around the ranch. I love his work ethic, attention to detail, and can-do attitude.

It's been years since being blessed to work with a self-starter who not only thinks for themselves, but does every task with skill, precision, and professionalism. Our cattle and other livestock adjusted to him quickly, as he exhibits the same calm, easygoing nature I handle them with. When I glance over to check on him while we're doing separate tasks, I see a mixture of joy and satisfaction on his face. When we're not working, he keeps to himself. On sunny days, I'll find him sitting outside in the sun, reflecting upon life. At other times, I find him listening to music, reading his Bible, or reviewing his Sunday school lesson. He wanders out to the barn or a pasture to check on things every afternoon. I find him out there, offering a treat to Maverick the bull or visiting the donkeys. There's such a peace about him when he's outside in God's country, as he likes to call it.

I can't tell you how many times he has said, I never dreamed I could ever do this again. When you find him sitting alone or with the animals, he seems to look into the distance, pensive, contemplative, as if he's reconciling his life. I sometimes wonder if he's thinking about the past, thanking God for the present, or wondering about the future. Perhaps it's all those things, but John is quick to tell you.

There's a reason the rearview mirror is so small and the front window is so big. Watching him hold a newborn calf, cradle its head in his hands as he reaches down to nuzzle its nose and softly talk to it, his gentle soul is on full display. Surely, God is redeeming his years. Since hiring on here at the Cross W, Mr. John has not only made my life easier, he's brought an infectious, childlike joy of discovery into our every day. The way he fusses over Miss D and spends time with Bandit the cat and her litter of kittens, he expresses his gentle heart in so many ways. To see his smile and hear his ooh-wee when I gave him his own wrench business card and apparel with our brand on it was priceless.

In his usual laconic manner, he clutched the shirts and muttered, I reckon I'm riding for the brand now. He is a tremendous help to me, brings joy into our home, and God's blessings keep pouring in. As is often the case, I suppose, the mentor can end up being the one who learns the most. And a beautiful job on the production by Madison Darracott and a special thanks to J.D. Winninger sharing the story of Mr. John, aka The Quiet Cowboy. The fella doesn't talk too much, J.D.

said of Mr. John, but he sure is a worker. By the way, to read more of this story and others, go to jdwininger.com. The story of The Quiet Cowboy, here on Our American Stories. Here at Our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told.

But we can't do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love our stories and America like we do, please go to our American stories dot com and click the donate button. Give a little.

Give a lot. Help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our American stories dot com. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year. And UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare annual enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.

It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit uhcmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare.

Helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop. But for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot.

And I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. Doing household chores can already be time consuming and tedious. And there's nothing more daunting than facing piles and piles of laundry that need to be done.

I mean, that can be overwhelming for anyone. So if you want to get those larger laundry loads done right and get back to your life, try all free clear mega packs. All free clear mega packs are bigger packs with two times the cleaning ingredients, compared to a regular pack so that you can tackle any laundry load without the worry. All free clear mega packs are also 100% free of perfumes and dyes and they're gentle on skin, which is great for any family's sensitive skin needs, which my family, we definitely have sensitive skin. So the next time the whole family gets home from long vacation or you get the kids back from summer camp or whatever the situation is that's caused this big pile of dirty clothes, just know that all free clear mega packs, they have your back.

Purchase all free clear mega packs today and conquer any laundry load for all fabric types. Music This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories and we tell a lot of stories about our nation's past. And this one next, well, it's a story, well, part of a story that you know, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. But the more interesting story, which is the Great Chicago Recovery. Experts agree on where that fire started back in 1871, a little under two miles from downtown Chicago just to the southwest.

But how it started remains an open question. And so we bring you Tim Samuelson, the cultural historian of the city of Chicago, to tell us about this area and dive into the mythology of how the Chicago Fire got started. It was an area of small shacks and cottages of largely Irish immigrants. The fire itself began in the barn of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary. For the scale of Mrs. O'Leary and her existence in the neighborhood, she was an entrepreneurial business woman. There was more than one cow in the barn and she had a modest but substantial business. And of course the thing that's amazing is that for years people told the story about her at night milking the cow, the cow kicking over a lantern, setting the barn afire, and then high winds and dry conditions go and burn down a significant part of the city. Well, if you have a dairy business, you don't milk your cows at night. In fact, usually at the time the fire started and we're talking about, oh, maybe about a quarter to nine in the evening, you're likely asleep in your house because you have to get up early to milk those cows. And again, there's multiple cows in the barn.

So it makes for kind of an interesting, ironic thing that poor Mrs. O'Leary gets fingered. But where did the fire start? You bet it started in their barn. And ironically, what didn't burn in the great Chicago fire, the O'Leary's house.

It made it through just fine. But the fire took off on a path that would go to the northeast, jumps the Chicago River, headed right for downtown Chicago, which was a fairly built-up metropolis by 1871 with substantial buildings built out of stone, brick and iron fronts. Many people talk about downtown Chicago being largely wood buildings.

That's another myth that kind of needs to get solved. The buildings of Chicago were of size and substantial architectural character and quality comparable to other cities of that era. But when you have the conditions of dry conditions, high winds, those stone walls will crumble.

A dignified front made out of cast iron would melt like butter. And it wasn't the case of one building setting fire to another. It was the case of such an intense heat that things would just spontaneously combust. Let's talk a little bit about Chicago and what caused the fire in terms of Chicago's growth. Because in 1840, Chicago was basically a small midwestern town.

I wouldn't even call it a city. Talk about the growth, the meteoric growth from 1840 to 1870 that set the conditions under which a fire like this could have even happened. Let's go back to, let's say, the 1830s or the 1840s. What was here?

Not much. In fact, if you were here in 1830, people argue about how many, but it might be 50 to 100 people. The buildings are just little shacks along this meandering little river off of Lake Michigan. But it was the perfectly located swampy backwater because as a country is at that point starting to grow west, Chicago was the strategic location located on the chain of the Great Lakes that connects to the waterways of the east. And everything and everyone heading west would funnel through Chicago.

So Chicago is the perfect place for anyone or anything to get anywhere. So you go from a mud hole in 1830 with just a handful of people, you start to get a few thousands of people in the 1840s, modest little buildings. By 1870, you have a major metropolis of over 300,000 people. It becomes a headquarters of commerce and manufacturing.

It was a place that when you had the combination of the waterways meeting the rails, you could bring raw materials in, transform them into something else with a large labor force, and ship them out conveniently anywhere in not only the country, but in the world. Let's talk about the night of the fire. How long did it rage?

How much of the city did it consume? And what did the fire spare? The evening of the fire on October 8, 1871, was in the center of a really tough drought.

The winds were really dry. So the fire does break out in the barn of the O'Leary family. There is some bungling on the part of how the fire was reported that delayed firefighters in getting to the fire to extinguish it. However, the conditions were such that with the wood buildings that surrounded the O'Leary barn, the high winds and the dry conditions, it probably can be said that the fire was almost unstoppable from the start. The fire races through the wood buildings of this immigrant neighborhood less than two miles southwest of downtown Chicago, and then carries through in kind of a wedge. And while the fire didn't destroy the whole city, but it took out its whole central business district heart. The imposing stone, iron, and brick buildings of down Chicago were totally consumed. There were wood details in downtown Chicago in terms of ornamental mansard roofs, wood paving blocks, but for the most part, the buildings were fairly substantial.

But the interiors are largely made out of wood. The total heat totally combusts. So the fire starts, let's say, a quarter to eight in the evening. And you have, by one o'clock in the morning, it is burning downtown Chicago. And there is the courthouse right in the central square that is basically in flames. And then it races across the main part of the Chicago River, burns out a significant part of the north side of Chicago, burning out to almost a triangular wedge that would be on the north side, almost near Fort Mav and Clark Street today. But all the city didn't burn. The south side of Chicago that was a significant part of the city was hardly touched at all. The west side of Chicago, which was also a significant part of Chicago, was hardly touched at all except for that wedge that burned from the start of the fire at the O'Leary barn. And also there were areas of the north side and the farther reaches of the north side and to the west that didn't burn at all. Chicago was able to recover fairly quickly after the fire because the one thing that the fire could not destroy was Chicago's perfect location that made the city thrive to begin with. And you could get anything you wanted to rebuild the city by the same waterways, the same rail lines coming into the city that could still deliver the goods for the city to thrive. And there were substantial parts of the city that were untouched by the fire where the businesses that once had their offices in downtown Chicago could take temporary quarters. So you had businessmen who had, you know, elegant offices in downtown Chicago. The ruins were still smoking and they were making arrangements to get quarters in old boarding houses south of downtown Chicago and re-establish their business and get to work rebuilding the destroyed city. Didn't take long. Didn't take long indeed. When we come back we'll find out how this all happened.

We continue with Tim Samuelson here on Our American Story. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year and UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare annual enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.

It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit UHCmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop, but for small business insurance I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot and I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. Doing household chores can already be time consuming and tedious, and there's nothing more daunting than facing piles and piles of laundry that need to be done. I mean, that can be overwhelming for anyone. So, if you want to get those larger laundry loads done right and get back to your life, try All-Free Clear Mega Packs. All-Free Clear Mega Packs are bigger packs with two times the cleaning ingredients compared to a regular pack so that you can tackle any laundry load without the worry. All-Free Clear Mega Packs are also 100% free of perfumes and dyes and they're gentle on skin, which is great for any family's sensitive skin needs. Which my family, we definitely have sensitive skin. So, the next time the whole family gets home from long vacation or you get the kids back from summer camp or whatever the situation is that's caused this big pile of dirty clothes, just know that All-Free Clear Mega Packs, they have your back.

Purchase All-Free Clear Mega Packs today and conquer any laundry load for all fabric types. And we continue here with our American stories and the story of the Great Chicago Fire and more importantly, the Great Chicago Recovery and we're talking to cultural historian and the guy who knows just about all there is to know about Chicago, Tim Samuelson. Let's talk about the damage caused by the fire and the extraordinary recovery.

We had 100,000 people who were homeless, 17,000 buildings were destroyed and 300 people were killed. Tim, how did the people of Chicago, their spirit, play into this city's recovery? I can let you in on a little secret about Chicago that's not often talked about and it's something that I think is a matter of pride, is that for all of its growth and prosperity, Chicago is still a tough little can-do Midwestern town in spirit. And so people who came to Chicago came here with the idea of making a buck.

The people who came to Chicago in its early growth were the outsiders who didn't fit in to old established societies. So Chicago quickly became a place that was like undaunted by any kind of challenge that you could imagine. They could build anything and there was the incentive to do it.

There was nobody to tell you not to try a new way of doing things. And what wound up happening is these new way of doing things that sometimes the people out east kind of laughed and sneered at wound up changing the standard way people did things. So this was an innovative hub. So now you've got the central part of the city, a smoking ruin, a large part of the north side, people homeless. People just rolled up their sleeves and got together and worked to build things as quickly as possible. One of the first buildings built in the downtown area, and the downtown was still smoking in rubble, is William Kerfoot, who was a real estate man. Builds a wooden shack, which he called the first building in the burned district. And he had a sign on it, hand painted, that said, all gone but wife, children, and energy.

That's the Chicago spirit. And it wasn't long before, even into early 1872 and just months after the fire, new buildings were rising that replaced the old ones. Ironically, the size and the scale of those buildings wasn't that much different from the ones that were there before.

But then there's an unusual phenomena. Now people came for the new opportunities after the fire. Chicago grew in a scale like it had never before. The downtown area, which was largely confined into a small geographic area, defined by the features that gave Chicago growth. The lake on one side, the river on two sides, rail yards to the south, didn't give a lot of room for development of new office space. Many cities can grow sideways.

Chicago couldn't do that. The downtown, after the fire, was built up with all these elegant four and five story buildings. They didn't have elevators for the most part. But Chicago was proud of these wonderful second empire stone fronts. Chicago was reborn. They would talk glowingly of these new buildings that arose in 1872, 1873. There was even a big depression and they kept on building. But by the 1880s, these same buildings that Chicago was so proud of as a symbol of an all new city were too small for all the businesses that wanted to be there. These same buildings were being knocked down within 15 years.

15 year old buildings were being called old and obsolete. And these innovative Chicagoans raided the toolbox of the industrial revolution, goaded by the real estate people and the landowners to make buildings taller. And taking things like metal framing, perfecting elevators into these amazing high speed vehicles of vertical traffic, Chicago creates the skyscraper. The first skyscrapers arise in the mid 1880s on the site of buildings that only, you know, 15 years before people were saying were so wonderful and modern. So the fire actually set in motion a series of chain reactions that made Chicago not only rebuilt, but even regenerate itself over and over again to make it the city that it is today. And indeed, the population in 1871 was 300,000. It jumped to 500,000 in 1880. And by 1890, it catapulted past the 1 million mark, a triple increase from the great Chicago fire.

That's it's unimaginable today, Tim, that something like this could be done. Nobody could believe the growth of the city and the old cities of the east shook their heads in disbelief. In fact, they would kind of look how to disparage the city in some kind of, and looked at things like its architecture as some kind of raw, crude kind of work. It was often a simplified architecture that was very direct in the expression of material. This is the birth of modern architecture. It was happening here, the birth of a skyscraper happened here. It didn't happen out east where cities could grow sideways. And in population, Chicago not only grew in terms of people arriving in Chicago after the fire, but it began in the 1880s to aggressively annex adjoining towns, making that part of Chicago itself. So you have this behemoth of a city in terms of population and growing geographic size by 1890. And much to the surprise and perhaps anger of the old established cities of the east, when it was decided to have a world's exposition on the event of the 400th anniversary of Columbus' landing in the Americas, cities out east thought they had it buttoned up.

Who got it? Chicago. And the world's Columbian exposition showed Chicago not only as a city that had suddenly grown up in the place of smokestacks and stockyards, but a city of culture and achievement that was there before the world.

Indeed, the Chicago School of Architecture and so much more in art and music. I want to read one thing to you, a final point and get your reaction. It is from British novelist and journalist Mary Ann Hardy, and she was an international writer who wrote about the recovery. We expected to find traces of ugliness and deformity everywhere, crippled buildings and lame, limping streets running along forlorn, crooked conditions, waiting for a time to restore their vigor and build up their beauty anew. But Phoenix-like, the city has risen from the ashes grander and statelier than ever.

Talk about that. It's absolutely true that Chicago had reinvented itself and it's unusual to have the center of a large metropolis suddenly built anew from scratch all at once. A typical downtown of an American city would consist of buildings of different scale and quality from a long timeline of their history. Here was something that not only is rising from the ashes all at once, new and modern, but the matter of pride. People are trying to show the world that it was indestructible that there was a quality to these buildings and so you looked at it, it wasn't just some place built out of necessity or makeshift quarters. These were elegant, modern buildings and it occupied the whole of downtown and also of the areas that were in the path of the fire. And you've been listening to Tim Samuelson and he's the cultural historian of the city of Chicago and he's right about the quality of the buildings, but all of that, it all represented the quality of the people and the quality of those old Midwestern values.

The story of the great Chicago recovery here on Our American Stories. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year and UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare annual enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.

It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit UHCmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop, but for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot and I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. Doing household chores can already be time consuming and tedious, and there's nothing more daunting than facing piles and piles of laundry that need to be done. I mean, that can be overwhelming for anyone. So if you want to get those larger laundry loads done right and get back to your life, try All-Free Clear Mega Packs. All-Free Clear Mega Packs are bigger packs with two times the cleaning ingredients compared to a regular pack so that you can tackle any laundry load without the worry. All-Free Clear Mega Packs are also 100% free of perfumes and dyes and they're gentle on skin, which is great for any family's sensitive skin needs. Which my family, we definitely have sensitive skin. So the next time the whole family gets home from long vacation or you get the kids back from summer camp or whatever the situation is that's caused this big pile of dirty clothes, just know that All-Free Clear Mega Packs, they have your back.

Purchase All-Free Clear Mega Packs today and conquer any laundry load for all fabric types. And we continue with our American stories. Tim Luliet has been on our show before. Here's Robbie with the story. Tim Luliet started his career at Ford Motor Company, where he caught the eye of Lee Iacocca, the man responsible for the development of the Ford Mustang and Ford Pinto, who has been named the 18th greatest American CEO of all time.

I came across Lee Iacocca at a very young age. You saw what I was doing. Moved me from engineering to sort of the product planning activity. Product planning was one of the greatest educations I've ever had in my life.

Every Friday they have a part one and a part two. You would have five minutes to present your proposal to management and they'd be walking. There may be 30, 40 of these lined up in styling.

Could be as much as a change in the color of the grill to a whole car or anything in between. And you had five minutes to sort of make your stand, make your position known, and things would then work their way up through the process. But you were dealing with senior management. I would sit there and go in and sometimes go to work on a Monday and not come home until like Thursday. I mean, you'd sleep at your desk.

It was an intense place. About 50% of all the vice presidents and executives at Ford had come through product planning. There was only 80 of us in product planning. You'd sit up and, you know, an executive would walk in and you'd say, My proposal is as follows. The variable cost is X.

The capital cost is Y. Our marketing plan is Z. And this is what our competitive reaction is going to be.

We anticipate and we recommend approval. And you'd have to have your story down. And your variable cost better be right.

Your capital better be right. So you'd be working through that. And then next Friday it'd be another set of things that you'd be working on. So that was driven by business analysis and your ability to present the elevator speech.

Conveying to an executive a task, an objective in a short enough manner that all the critical factors were translated. I remember once, this is the middle of 73-74 OPEC 1, the energy crisis. And I'm over there and powertrain planning is now a critical thing.

What engines we're going to use, how do we make emissions with those engines, what vehicles are going to be in. And so I'm writing a paper and presenting it and he ended up going to Iacocca and Ford. Henry Ford II. He was the CEO of Ford Motor Company and the son of the Henry Ford. I'm 23 years old and the paper had to do with an overdrive transmission, bringing back overdrive.

Today all that means is a gear that's less than one to one so that your engine can run very low RPM when you're on the highway. It was $250 million and I put this thing on three pieces of paper and a couple exhibits and all this and all that. And Henry Ford said, if you're only going to spend $250 million, why can't it be on one piece of paper? I mean that was the whole, that's what Ford focused, is that the discipline of getting the fluff out and getting to the facts so you can make a decision quickly.

And you know, if you're only going to spend $250 million, why can't you do it on one piece of paper? It kind of followed me through the rest of my life. And so Ford's kind of a business school in many respects. You know, you get the philosophy and the concepts when you're in college.

This is the real world. We're out there trying to understand if gas was not available, how are we going to sell cars? If gas was going to triple in price, which it did back when I started, gasoline was 30 cents a gallon.

When it went to a dollar, dollar and a half a gallon, back then, that's the same today as like $8 to $9 a gallon, I mean in real terms. The world changed and here we were with all that capital investment in big things, heavy cars, big engines. All of us, the 70 people and the executive management of the company, we were putting our pants on one leg at a time and doing the best we could to save Ford Motor Company back then.

Because Ford Motor Company, General Motors, all were fearing bankruptcy back then, which had been a much brutal thing to do back in the 70s because the world stopped. And it wasn't somebody else that's going to take care of this problem. You were now in a position to be part of that group that had to come up with a solution. It wasn't a college test.

This was the real thing. And your job was at risk. And you learned. I've morphed out of corporations to a large degree now and do things on my own.

I've had a lot of entrepreneurial things and one of our daughters, Stacy, has got her own business. And I always told her, I said, you know, there are going to be times like that. And I said, how do you know whether you're a Trumpanoo or not? You'll know some Thursday night when you have payroll on Friday morning and at dinnertime on Thursday night, you still don't know yet how you're going to cover it. But you will figure out a way by Friday morning. That's life. You either can do it or you can't.

You can get into that game and play it or you can't. And so that's why Ford was such a great graduate program for me. And not only that, they paid me.

It was great. I didn't have to go pay them. And then the other thing at Ford is we would have to, if we made these big presentations, you would duplicate them. And you would number them 1A, 1B.

And the building we presented them in was like a mile and a half from the glasshouse. But you would put these two packages in separate cars and they would head separate routes. So in case one car got an accident, the other car would still make it. Now, in my whole time at Ford, the other car never did make it.

I mean, you had two young flag planners going Mach 6 down the road as fast as they could to make sure they were the car that was there. But anyway, I was carrying backup books to a meeting with Iacocca. And again, I was at a level that had been moved into planning.

He knew who I was. But I wasn't yet of a sufficient grade to be able to attend that meeting. But I had the books for the meeting. I had assembled the books for the meeting.

And my job was to take them in there, get them distributed, and get out of the room. And so the meeting was in styling. And I was leaving.

A guy was driving the car over. And as we were heading from our building, Building 3, over to styling, Iacocca's car was fairly far ahead of ours. And Iacocca had a rule. And that was when he got in the room, the door was shut, the meeting started, and that was it. There was no smoking except for him.

He had a cigar. But when the door shut, the door shut. And he's ahead of us. And I got the books for the meeting. And we're trying to work our way through traffic. And he pulls up the styling. And he jots up the stairs.

And he goes into the building room. And I get out of the car. And I'm carrying these two satchels and these books. And I'm running as hard as I can.

These satchels are quite heavy. And I burst through the door. And I'm running down the hallway. He can't hear me because he's about 50 feet in front of me. And he kind of slows down.

And I'm kind of, he knows what I've got. And he gets about five feet from the door. And he runs in and slams the door.

And I'm sitting there in the hallway knowing that I have probably just lost my career with these two satchels full of books. And he opens the door, looks out, and says, scared you, didn't I? So it was a little, he was a, yeah, he was an interesting guy. Iacocca saved Chrysler.

Iacocca put products in that made Ford. He was brash. He was loud. He was a loud dresser. And he smoked those cigars wherever he went, even where you were not supposed to. But he saved companies, created jobs, and made products that America loved. Steve Jobs is not a guy that you probably would have wanted as a neighbor. But no, we all appreciate what he created. So everyone's got assets and liabilities. But no one here is, the only perfect person on this planet we crucified 2,000 years ago. Everybody else has got baggage.

Including Tim. He would have an impressive career overseeing the Jeep Cherokee team at 29 years old. And leading and turning around several different automotive companies. At his last turnaround with Vistion, he saved the company from bankruptcy, rescued tens of thousands of jobs, and quadrupled their stock price. But to avoid paying him the exit package he was due, Vistion looked into his life to see if he had any flaws that would let them out of it.

And they found things that had happened before he had come to faith. Was I involved in porn? Yeah.

Did I do all that stuff? No. But this may sound curd or crazy. It doesn't bother me in the least. I don't think about it.

They had motivations for which they'll have to answer to later. But it doesn't take away from the fact that there's things I did that I'm repented for and I'm sorry for. But it's interesting that our life hasn't changed.

I still probably get one job out for a week and I'm 70 years old. And our faith is unchallenged. We've all sinned, some worse than others. It's a comeuppance, yeah. But I don't live for yesterday, I live for tomorrow. And I wonder, you know, what can I do?

What can I help? It's sad in some respects, I guess, but the point is for the people that matter to me in my life, and for the people that know me, how many friends did I lose through this process? None. I'm very blessed because they know me, I guess. And great job on the piece. A thanks to Alex and Robbie for their great work. And thanks to Tim Luliet for sharing his stories about working for legend. Tim Luliet's story, the story of working for Lee Iacocca and so much more, and his faith walk to hear on our American story.