No brag, just fact.

Before I discovered drugs, alcohol, women, and gambling, I was quite the math whiz. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe my scores on the New York State Regents exams were 100% on Algebra, 97 in geometry and 92 in trigonometry, a test which most of my homeroom class - the advanced group, known as “honors” which completed three years of HS math in two - failed and had to retake in order to pass into Junior year.

Back in 1967-68 we didn’t have calculators. Most of us bright fellows knew how to use a slide rule and could do fractions and percentages in our heads. That’s a far cry from the abject dunces, face-planted into smartphones, unable to make change without the aid of electronics, which pass for students, workers, and future leaders of the free world.

It’s not that booze, women, horse racing, and weed clouded my thinking very much; they served as distractions from the reality of numbers which swirled around my brain in constant motion. My fascination with Pythagorean theory and isosceles triangles gave way to more exigent pursuits in the coming of age as the Christian Brothers of Ireland were forced to slow our gang down as upperclassmen. We were subjected to courses called Math 4 and Calculus, neither of which found suitable instructors at Bishop Kearney High School.

Between tennis practice, purposely singing poorly at the spring musical auditions, rotten instructors, short skirts, and the anti-war movement, many of us lost interest, not on our savings, mind you, which were moot, but in mathematics as science and an eventual career pursuit. Some became chemists and lawyers, but, a lot of guys who couldn’t cut it in math became engineers and architects. Some of the smarter guys considered them inferior, but, those fellows went on to make a lot more money than the math idealists. So much for morals, dreams, and dialectical imperatives. They were replaced with pragmatism, herd instinct, and mortgages on two-story houses fronted by picket fences.

My ability to crunch numbers like a beaver on a maple sapling ultimately led me to the business world, writing for a living and publishing. Seriously, making a life out of being an accountant held limited appeal. As a thinker and ponderer steeped in ancient numerological conceptualism, the business world seemed the perfect fit for my runaway imagination and so, as I had had some success as an author and journalist, I ended up deeply entrenched in print media.

Having to learn most of it on the fly, it soon became apparent to me that success in any field, and especially the newspaper business, was more a function of knowing the numbers than being witty, wise, or wonderful with words, though those skillsets were certainly helpful.

I created advertising rate charts that subtly undercut the competition, produced reasonable profits and didn’t break the budgets of my sponsors. Crusading for honest circulation figures, I shut down numerous scam artists in the burgeoning desktop publishing realm and made a solid living. Understanding that success in media was equally about dollars and cents, column inches and postal rates as taut headlines and flowery prose, I turned a one-page 8 1/2 x 11-inch daily newsletter into the most popular weekly newspaper in Rochester, New York in less than two years.

Sadly, various events overtook my enterprise in the early 90s, but I returned some years later, internet-enabled, and have been operating Downtown Magazine online for much longer than the print predecessor, 26 years as opposed to nine. There are numbers again. They define our lives.

As we take this journey into all things numerical, one thing I must point out: Don’t believe the “old age” or “declining years” hogwash. Though I’m past 70 years of age, mentally and spiritually I’m currently 23 and will turn 27 in January. While I may get around to things a bit slower than I used to, my solutions are more circumspect, derived from knowledge only experience can endow. If I had thought about it when I was 45 or 50, I should have been buying baseball cards. Have you seen the prices?

It is my pleasure to convey the numbers on the pages that follow and my sincere hope that they will affect people in positive ways.

-- Fearless Rick

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