Burger Belles-Lettres

McDonald's Restaurants is one of the few real-life businesses I mention in my novels and I give them lip service only to add realism to my stories, not as an endorsement.

Back in 1983 or 1984 — I can't remember the exact year — I wrote a letter to McDonald's Corporation defending their business practices against a public onslaught that, in my opinion, was spearheaded by a handful of opportunistic, avaricious people with lawyers on retainer and competitors trying to hone their own competitive edge by slinging mud. As if that ever works.

Anyway, I felt that the very heart of the American entrepreneurial spirit was under attack. In the subsequent letter I wrote to McDonald's Corporate Office I told them that "McDonald's was as much an American Institution as Sears & Roebuck" and I meant every word of it.

Well, later that year, McDonald's ran a TV commercial featuring veteran actor John Houseman telling the public that McDonald's may very well be "an American Institution". I was flattered but also a little put off by the fact that McDonald's never gave me credit for saying that first. What they did give me were two fifty-cent coupons toward their sandwiches.

I still eat at McDonald's every now and then but I don't write letters of support or praise to any American businesses anymore. If I like what they sell, I just buy their products like everyone else.

Pearl Harbor Day Milestone

Today, December 7th 2005, I finished my fifth novel, Deeds of Destiny, a story about the myth of free will and the reality of cosmically-orchestrated life events. This book is dedicated to my father, John Ed Casher, who died in 1995.

Ghost of a Chance

I used to wonder what would have happened if I had not turned down the job offer from Time Magazine in 1978. It wasn't much off an offer, just being a stringer. A stringer is a writer who does on-call reporting without his or her name appearing on the story. It's the proverbial "foot in the door" and who knows what might have happened to me afterward?

At the time, I was living in a studio apartment on the tenth floor of The Howell House on Peachtree Street NW in Atlanta, Georgia, a half a block from the famous Fox Theater. Time Magazine's Atlanta Bureau Chief, Rudolph Rauch III, had called my answering service a few days after I'd met with him without an appointment at his office at the Time Magazine Atlanta Bureau Headquarters in one of the Gaslight Towers.

I called him back and he offered me the job. I accepted his gracious offer and made a quick trip to Pennsylvania where I'd flown to tell my family the news and to see my four-year-old son who had been living with his mother since our divorce. He didn't even know who I was and I'd only been gone a couple of months. That did it for me.

I flew back to Atlanta where I called Rudolph Rauch III and told him I wouldn't be able to take the stringer job after all. Then I packed my bags for Pennsylvania for the last time. Mr. Rauch probably thought I was crazy or something after the way I'd so brazenly pitched myself and my writing ability to him. But, I had my priorities, and making my writing career the biggest reason for my being alive wasn't my top priority.

When I look back on my missed opportunity to write for Time Magazine, I see myself trapped in a roving wormhole that opened briefly to spit me back out before it haphazardly attached itself again to another point in the space-time continuum. Trying to remember it as anything else would be a fruitless search for a past that never existed.