But they never took me seriously enough. Instead, Marsh got into financial trouble and had to be sold.
The sale of Marsh was a loss for the entire city.
So, if being made fun of it to be the sum total of my social role, the results may not be good.
While Marsh's attitude toward me wasn’t, of course, the entire cause of their problems, some of the incidents that helped me to understand their attitude were rather striking. One Village Pantry commercial, for example, was a 30-second remake of Doctor Detroit. A young hero, fortified by Village Pantry doughnuts, successfully eludes a gang, which is pursuing him. This commercial was well made, and one of the things that struck me was that the lead gangster was Japanese.
These events were hard to interpret. I concluded that business isn’t just a matter of market economics, but of personal dealings and of dealings between companies. With big companies the resulting events may be hard for an outsider to figure out.
Was that Julie Kavner (the voice of “Marge” on The Simpsons), working at a Village Pantry near my house? It certainly looked like her and sounded like her, but the logical reason for that apparition--which probably had something to do with me--wasn’t easy to understand.
She was interested in food and we discussed relative merits of canned salmon and canned mackerel.
After the sale of Marsh in 2006, a new configuration emerged in Indianapolis regarding grocery stores. People in Indianapolis paid attention--because everyone needs food. The new configuration inspired me to renew my efforts to promote my work on food biochemistry. My efforts have had considerable effect on certain companies. The reader may click at left to view a discussion of the subject.
Now, police have a difficult job, and most of them perform admirably. It isn’t my intention here to criticize Indianapolis police officers as much as higher-ups who make policy. When I lived in Chicago, I didn’t have as good an opinion of the police there as I've generally had of the Indianapolis police.
While there’s certainly less police corruption in Indianapolis than in Chicago, the “Doctor Detroit syndrome” may have had its effect in both cities. Some time after Doctor Detroit had been released, there was found to be a serious problem of innocent people in Chicago being convicted of major crimes.
That, too, followed the plot of the movie, but not in a comedic vein: innocent people were on death row.
I’ve always been happy to talk to the police and to give them any information I may have, but if the police are being instructed to regard me as a joke, they may not find my information credible.
I think there was an effort to implicate me in the 1979 Burger Chef murders, a crime which I think emanated from Chicago.
Although that effort to implicate me didn’t get far, the police of both cities may have missed an opportunity to obtain useful information from me at that time. Thus, in policing as well as in business, there can be unfortunate consequences from "too much funny stuff."
After that horrendous crime, the Burger Chef chain was sold to a Japanese company, which now operates it under the name of Hardee’s.
During the period 1978-83, when I spent a good deal of time in Chicago, I often stayed at the "economically-priced" Tokyo Hotel, slightly north of the loop. Some of the patrons were a bit on the rough side. The later Village Pantry commercial with the Japanese gangster reminded me of that, and also suggested that perhaps some of my friends at the Marsh commercial-making factory knew something that I didn't.
I’ve never been particularly interested, even in Italian gangster lore, let alone Japanese. But my experiences have led me to think that a common movie idea--of a rather intricate, though not necessarily corrupt, interrelationship between organized crime and some police elements--is accurate: the war against crime is often fought at close quarters.
In 2006 my feeling was that various people, some in official positions, were playing games with me. In doing so they were skirting the law, to say the very least. And the shootings in my building occurred because those games got out of control.
Here’s how shooting incident played out: After Michael McCormick had left our building, a black gentleman named “Mike” moved into Michael's former unit--next to mine. At first I thought it might have been Michael again, with a disguise, because Mike had light pigmentation and his weight, height, and age were similar to Michael’s. But, whether it was Michael or Mike on the scene, the harassment that I’d been experiencing continued.
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