Cache Valley is a Wonderful Place

Well, Cache Valley is a wonderful place; there's no getting around that. I have to add, however, that Cache Valley is also a region of the United States of America in which I was once kicked out of a Radio Shack store and was told never to return. It was 1976 or thereabouts and I was in my 6h year of the four year electrical engineering program at USU. I needed electronic parts for my senior project and this new Radio Shack store had just opened up in Logan. I was a frequent customer, and the proprietor would light up to see me, as well he should, seeing as I was helping him to the tune of most of my income toward his boat payments. There was just this one little irritant though. Apparently, the Radio Shack corporate headquarters at that time had as an important component of the business plan to obtain the addresses of the customers. This was a big deal to them it seemed. It wasn’t just the Logan Radio Shack but I also encountered this in a Provo Radio Shack radio and also at a Salt Lake Radio Shack store. I’m glad to report that Radio Shack stores don’t do this anymore, possibly because they’ve found better ways to mine your personal information, but back then, you’d go to the cashier to ring up the items and the cashier would ask for your address. I have to admit that I never witnessed that anyone else ever had any problem with this, but it rubbed me the wrong way somehow. Give out my address? That's like personal. Don't you know that I have issues about matters personal, many many issues? See, I was a nerd at that time. So I got to where I’d just say, “Uh, I don’t wish to give out my address.” Well, this did not go down well with the proprietor of the only Radio Shack store in Cache Valley at that time at all. On one occasion, he said with a very sudden dramatic change from friendly to unfriendly, I thought, “Oh come on, now, I just need your address for my records.” That seemed to me an utterly crazy a way to treat a customer, especially a devoted regular. What? Isn’t it good enough that I’m patronizing your store? This is how you treat a customer, by making him feel less significant than the paltry value of his personal information to miners of personal information? So I dug in my heels at that point but I swear I didn’t mouth off to him in any way. He just blew up at that point and told me to leave his store and never darken his door again. So there’s irony for you. Me, electronics nerd of all electronics nerds, kicked out of Radio Shack. And for what? Refusing to surrender a bit of private information? I was stunned. I was speechless.

It was kind of silly little thing, but I tell you; this took the wind out my sails for awhile. I wondered over the years what that was all about. What sort of business plan was that? Course I don't have a Harvard business degree or nothin, but I sort of would have thought that a sound business plan for mining electronics nerds would be to provide maybe the one small haven within the entire universe where a socially challenged electroncics nerd could feel welcome and at ease or even a valued member of society. Course, yes, this is from the perspective of not having a business degree from Harvard.

I finally got over this experience enough to where I stepped foot in a Radio Shack just recently - not that one from the 70s which is long gone but another one - to buy a solar panel for my son’s science fair project, "The Smart Grid of Tomorrow o o o o o!!!" and was relieved to find that they’d dropped the practice of mining addresses at least openly. That was a relief not to have to deal with being kicked out of Radio Shack again. In some ways, I’m convinced, society is getting better.

I sent an email to my family to share these experiences with them, expecting maybe a little sympathy or maybe some smart remark about my long hair and beard of 1970s, but my brother provided an unexpected whole different perspective on the matter. He wrote back:

“Charlie, you may have touched on notoriety in your escapades in Radio Shack, and it does bear on the address question. See, back in 1985 Mark Hofmann of Salamander Letter fame set out two bombs that killed two people, then he accidentally set one off in his face just outside the LDS World Headquarters and the cops put it together that he was the very culprit. His bombs used tilt switches from Radio Shack and he had given them an alias, which was the same alias he'd used to forge Mormon historical documents. So the forgeries and the bombings were tied together. As a matter of fact, the tilt switches were bought in a Logan Radio Shack so it's just possible they were bought in the very store you got kicked out of.”

There’s a kick in the pants for you. You know what I was building with my parts from Radio Shack? A differential thermostat for a solar hot water system, and I got kicked out largely, I suspect, for the crime of looking like Jesus. He was building his implements of mayhem and I bet he was served with a smile and come back real soon. And why? Because he was a brilliant forger of respectability.

At the same time, though, this caused me for the first time to see things from the perspective of the proprietor of the electronics store. If I owned an electronics store and a socially challenged guy like I was then came in and when asked his address refused, in all fairness, alarm bells might have gone off. Had I seen Mark Hoffman, I too probably would have seen a respectable person not realizing that it was a forgery.

So what have we learned here? We must learn something from this, or I just weep. Lesson one, guys who dress nicely and who hob nob with church goers aren’t always the nice guys in reality. Lesson two, it’s so easy for people to misread each other. But mainly, what I take from this is the tragedy that just a few disturbed weird people cause us perfectly normal weird people to be viewed with fear and suspicion.