Serendipity!
THE INCREDIBLE POWER OF SERENDIPTY!
Highlights of an Uncommon Life!
By Boye Lafayette De Mente
Here Are 10 Key Points Made by This Amazon Book:
1] I was the second person to introduce the Japanese zōri, thonged flip-flops, into the United States, in 1952 when attending the American Institute for Foreign Trade [later THUNDERBIRD– the School of Global Management] in Glendale, Arizona. Another guy in Philadelphia who had also spent time in Japan was also importing and selling them. I went back to Tokyo in 1953, went to Zōri makers in the Asakusa district and tried to buy them in bulk. They refused, saying it was too much trouble. Six years later and another ex-GI named Bob Dunham who still lived in Tokyo was exporting 200,000 zōri a year from Japan. They are now in use all over the world.
2] In the early 1950’s when I was in the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo I asked the famous British foreign correspondent Hessel Tiltman if I should go home or remain in Tokyo. He said: “Go Home! Japan will never amount to anything.” By the mid-1960’s Japan was the second largest economy in the world.
3] In 1957 I joined Australian Ben Carling on a converted amphibious jeep called HALF-SAFE, and went from Tokyo to Anchorage, Alaska via the North Sea, a voyage that took four months. Shortly thereafter I went back to Tokyo.
4] In the spring of 1959 I wrote my first book on Japan. Japanese Manners & Ethics in Business. In 1962 I wrote my second book on Japan, Bachelor’s Japan. The same year I published The Tourist & the Real Japan. The same year my fourth book on Japan, How to Do Business in Japan, was published.
5] Back in Phoenix in 1967 I got a phone call from a guy named Jerry Evenson who had started a weekly entertainment magazine called Bachelor’s BEAT. He hired me as the editor of the newspaper. A few months later a guy named Larry Flynt showed up at my BEAT office. He said he was looking for dancers to appear in his chain of nightclubs in Ohio. He was the most intelligent, most erudite person I had ever met.
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6] After a two-hour conversation he asked Jerry Evenson for a franchise to publish the BEAT in Ohio, and got it. When I went home that evening I told my wife I had just met a man who could be president of the United States if he chose to go after it.
7] Some weeks later Flynt called me and asked me to come to Ohio and teach him and his staff how to publish a weekly newspaper. I did and spent three days with them. He called the new magazine HUSTLER, after his chain of go-go clubs…and copied the famous PLAYBOY magazine with its photos of nude girls.
8] The content of the magazine made it an instant success, resulting in Flynt become famous and rich.
9] THE ‘NEW TIMES’ STORY
In the early 1970’s my younger brother met several students at Arizona State University who told him they wanted to start a newspaper. He suggested that they come to see me at my house. The group, headed by Michael Lacy, showed up a few days later. We talked for about three hours. Finally, one of them asked what they should call the newspaper. Based on the theme we had been discussing I suggested NEW TIMES! They loved it.
10] By the early 1980’s Lacy and his group had turned the newspaper into the largest chain of entertainment weeklies in the U.S., becoming multi-millionaires and buying the famous VILLAGE VOICE in New York.
If you want to read more about my experiences with Larry Flynt, and they are far-out, get a copy of my Amazon book, THE INCREDIBLE POWER OF SERENDIPITY!
[In the meantime, Lacy and his group having been making the news, charged with tuning the back page of the newspaper into a pimp page for men looking for sex partners.]
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