The Bryan twins, Mike and Bob, won the Wimbledon Tennis Doubles Championship Saturday. They now hold every Grand Slam Doubles title simultaneously, plus the Olympic Gold Medal won in London in 2012. Mike and Bob Bryan have been winning at doubles since they won a 10 and under tournament when they were 6. At 35 they have won 91 professional events and the NCAA title when they were at Stanford. They own 15 Grand Slam Doubles titles. They have to be considered the greatest doubles team in the history of the sport. The Bryan twins are not just twins, they are…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Sometimes we get a week in the news that compels me to write about it, even if I’d rather talk about the Blackhawks, the NBA, or what a great year it is for the tree fruit crop. Edward Snowden, a real life Terminal Man, can’t seem to get out of the Moscow Airport, but he’s causing a heartburn epidemic in Washington by exposing widespread collection of data on just about everybody everywhere. It makes it hard for Obama to complain about Chinese spying and theft of intellectual property when the NSA is gathering data on you and me and every…
“What goes around, comes around.” It’s a dumb cliché, but it’s what I am seeing in the screw machine business today. The cyclicality of business is playing out as the auto industry in North America pushes toward the magical 16 million units a year mark. Thank god for the F-150, now the “best selling car or truck in America.” Tradesmen are buying, businesses are buying, even Aunt Millie is buying a vehicle today, and most of them are put together in North America with millions of perfectly turned components also made here. Add a revival in home building and all…
Bernie Sahlins died over the weekend at 90. He was co-founder of Second City, Chicago’s famous comedy club, and is known for propagating great comedians like Gilda Radnor, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live. Sahlins was a close friend of a cousin of mine, Sheldon Patinkin (yes, Mandy Patinkin is also a cousin). When I read Bernie Sahlins’ obituary I realized a link between improvisational comedy and what I do for a living. The improv comic takes a word, a situation, a hint, and builds a sketch on it. If he or she is a Belushi or…
Father’s Day is coming up June 16, but what if you don’t have a Father to connect with anymore? My suggestion is to reach out to another man you respect, someone you’ve learned from, who has gone out of his way for you. Write him a card, give him a hat (doesn’t have to be a fedora), bake him a loaf of bread (yes, I’ve done that), take him to lunch — a hot dog will do fine. Men are people, too. I learned a lot from my Dad, but I’ve also searched for mentors who came from a different…
1) I find the trend of women and men choosing to produce and raise children without a partner to be disturbing. It’s tough on everybody. It impoverishes families and makes parents less upwardly mobile in the workforce because they are deflected by the enormous burdens of child rearing. I know that many men abdicate parenting and I find that appalling, but the apparent planning by many women to be the primary parent is an upsetting trend in America. 2) Doubling down on the single parent trend, I find the huge percentage of American children being raised by grandmothers to be…
Every month I get an emailed catalog from DelMonico Hatter, promoting their stylish hats — Borsalino, Stetson, Kangol — the best brands. Ernest DelMonico, who runs the firm, is a third generation hatter from New Haven, Connecticut, and his merchandise is first rate. I once bought a black Kangol cap from them to go with my navy and tan ones. Frankly, I rarely wear a hat. Only when I dress up and put on the navy cashmere topcoat I bought twenty years ago do I wear a Kangol. I’m a hood or baseball cap guy. But I do love DelMonico’s…
This is an unpaid, unprompted shout-out to the Precision Machined Products Association’s (PMPA) Listserve. Every day, members jump on the association’s email forum with technical problems they encounter. It’s esoteric inside baseball stuff generally, far above my pay grade, yet invariably several folks quickly offer their unique experience in solving the tough machining challenges and other shop issues that come up for people living in cubicles of doubt. A single company could never aggregate a fraction of the knowledge located in the heads of members of this small trade association. One thing that makes the Listserve work so well is…
I’ve closely studied two recent auctions of screw machines and ancillary equipment – Anderson Fittings in Chicago and MTTM in the Twin Cities last week – for indications of market strength and customer preferences. This is not just “inside baseball” for people in the trade. These auctions, which from all appearances were actually honest sales with no observable price pumping (I tend to be cynical about this stuff), tell a clear story about the turned parts market, at least for the multi-spindle niche. The buyers generally do not need more capacity. They have more than enough spindles turning. At the Anderson auction,…
Tim Haendle was pleased with himself when I talked to him Wednesday. He had bought 100 carbide inserts – used of course – for a hundred bucks at a Hoff Online Auctions Internet sale of a screw machine shop in St. Paul, Minnesota. He’ll regrind them for use on one of the 22 National Acmes he runs in his shop, buried in a forest in Mendocino County, 125 miles north of San Francisco. Tim is a customer of Graff-Pinkert, of sorts. He is a rugged individualist determined to live life and do business his own way. I never make any…