Watch that Rat Hole

Chapter 1--The Assignment

“Watch that rat hole.”

The speaker is my new boss, Gurney Breckenfeld. As assistant managing editor of HOUSE & HOME Magazine, Gurney runs the best news operation in the housing business. The date is Friday, February 3, 1961–two weeks after John F. Kennedy's inauguration as the 35th President of the United States brings Camelot to Washington. It is my first full day in H&H’s Rockefeller Center offices.

Gurney’s “rat hole” is journalese shorthand for a “beat,” a topic to be covered intensively and mined for future stories. Just as City Hall and Police Headquarters are in earlier times my “beats”–my rat holes--Gurney is now giving me a new beat.

I pay attention.

The “rat hole” in question that February day refers to real estate investment trusts, entities then-freshly minted in the halls of Congress. Gurney’s instruction does not imply that REITs are “rats” but makes REITs the prize actors on the stage on which I must concentrate attention, my beat, my Rat Hole. And by extension that Rat Hole can be any imaginable topic that you, dear reader, choose as focus for your life.

My boss and I contemplate for a few minutes the import of this legislation, signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower the previous September 14 as a rider to a bill extending, of all things, a cigar tax. True then and now, the Feds get their money anywhere they can find it. Such are the bizarre workings of the sausage factory we call Congress.

The question before us is whether these new REITs would or could bring new mortgage money to merchant homebuilders and materials suppliers across the land, because they, our loyal subscribers and advertisers, are always on the lookout for fresh flush lenders. At that moment the only real news is that pronunciation of the “REIT” acronym is already diverging into two camps--the one-syllable “Reeeeets” is already favored while the phonetically pure two-syllable “Ree--its” wins highbrow adherents. “Reeeeets” wins!

Gurney’s command to “Watch that Rat Hole” is accompanied by a whimsical smile and slight uplift of the pen in his left hand, as if cueing the tenors in a choir, a purely involuntary gesture reflecting Gurney’s long tenure in an amateur Gilbert & Sullivan troupe. Gurney strikes an imposing presence, standing perhaps six feet or more, neither heavy nor thin, his hair already lightly spackled with gray although he is only ten years older than I, and blessed with a wry boyish smile that fascinates women and lifts the curse from any tart comment.

Thus it transpires that, on that day and forevermore in my mind, REITs become, in journalese, a Rat Hole–a potential news source on which a reporter or editor or writer camps, like a ravenous cat, until from the rat hole emerges a “rat”--i.e., a story idea, often depending upon the writer’s contacts, creativity, or chutzpah. That day I understand my assignment is to keep a lookout for any news relating to REITs and bring any specific story idea back to Gurney. The entire discussion lasts a scant two minutes.

Gurney’s assignment lasts a lifetime.

The “Rat Hole” watch becomes an animating force in my life, signifying the elusive pot of gold at rainbow’s end, the search for personal perfection that drives any and all of us to continual discovery and self-improvement, to deeper understanding of personal motives, and ultimately to our highest possible achievement. Watching that “Rat Hole” is why Columbus sailed the ocean blue, why Cortez sought El Dorado, why John Glenn became America’s first astronaut, why Neil Armstrong took that “one small step for man, one giant footstep for mankind,” why authors dream of writing the great American novel, and why most of us strive for perfection in whatever pursuit turns us on. Watching the “Rat Hole” becomes the eternal thirst for adventure and personal achievement and recognition keeping us from “taking life easy.”

For out of my Rat Hole marches a new industry, the real estate investment trusts or REITs. Over the years and decades since the REITs overturn old notions of how commercial real estate is owned and financed, capture the attention of investors in the United States and around the globe, and bring new modes of real estate investing to Wall Street. They incite, from my vantage point, the REIT revolution both in real estate and the stock market. And all from one innocuous Rat Hole.

At this point I should introduce myself and detail how I arrive at this propitious moment. My name is Ken Campbell--Kenneth Dale Campbell on my birth certificate, if you must know--but I prefer the punchier version. I arrive at that brief moment in Gurney Breckenfeld’s office at the intersection of two turning points in personal and professional life.

On a personal level on that February Friday in 1961, I am a 31-year-old father struggling to put food on my family’s table. Professionally I am a Manhattan newcomer freshly arrived from the hinterlands and that Manhattan office encounter with Gurney Breckenfeld marks a personal pinnacle, given a pedigree of hard scrabble beginnings.

Once I learn, some months earlier, of Time Inc. founder Henry Luce’s soft spot for architecture and Breckenfeld’s cachet as a no-prisoners newsman, I set out to land a job with either Time’s Arch Forum or H&H, above all other journals. After many false starts and painful rejections, this coveted job offer arrives (Chapter 5—The March).

My first assignment for H&H is to join Gurney and the H&H staff in covering the sprawling homebuilder’s convention in Chicago’s McCormick Place. That done and now back in our Manhattan offices, it is time to sit in Gurney’s office for our initial news conference, a time to learn more about each other, a time to dole out assignments and set deadlines for a rookie writer (me), with me pretending this was just another ordinary day at the office. Gurney’s 19th floor office in the Time--Life Building in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan commands a sweeping view westward over the Hudson River and onward to New Jersey, where the George Washington Bridge peeks into view at the right. Gurney’s office is unadorned and tiny, perhaps no more than eight or ten feet wide and fifteen feet deep, not at all what one might expect.

Worse, Gurney’s filing system leaves precious little space for even a side chair for an outsider (me). Gurney’s filing system can only be described as a gravity-defying architectural marvel--multiple piles of press releases, cables, query replies from correspondents, newspapers, notebooks, and unedited proof sheets, all stacked three or four feet high, some piles teetering precariously askew, spilling from desk onto an extra small table. In Gurney, the “file pile” mode of desk management finds its champion of champions. I learn in subsequent weeks that Gurney, and only Gurney, can retrieve any piece of paper he desires, at any time, from this unruly paper warehouse. For him, and for him alone, the “system” works.

For me, all this clutter matters not one whit. For me, this meeting signals heady career advancement, my first day in the rarefied atmosphere high in a Manhattan skyscraper in the editorial offices of a magazine published by Time Inc., the feared but envied publishing house created by Henry Luce. It makes scant difference to me that the magazine for which I toil this day is HOUSE & HOME, a low-watt monthly trade pub with barely over 100,000 readers instead of glamorous million-circulation titles like the breezily iconoclastic weekly Time or the stuffily academic monthly Fortune. This is New York, New York, center of the publishing universe, the big time compared with Columbus, Ohio, where I polish my skills for nearly ten years.

I have arrived.

Watch out, world!