[Leica] Mark Rabiner and That City of Lost Wages

[glehrer at san.rr.com (Jerry Lehrer)]

Marc,

You may be right about a lot of things, but not about retirement areas.  
I find that the best place is La Jolla , California.
Beautiful climate, great people.  No parking meters!  Super restaurants. 
Very low property taxes.(Proposition 13).

Only one Leica dealer though, who won't let me try my Leica lenses on 
their M8.  ("It would disturb the future buyer of that
M8 that someone had tried a half dozen lenses on his purchase")  But I 
only brought 4 lenses, all originally bought there.

Jerry



marc James Small wrote:
>
>
> Years back, I knew Albuquerque and Sante Fe and Taos fairly neatly.  
> Neat towns, though the best eatery back then was Rod's Steak House up 
> in Williams, Arizona, a grand place for the provision of barely-raw 
> beef and, back then, there were no eels on the menu.  That was back in 
> the Longago.  The last time I was in Taos was in the early 1970's and 
> I no sooner parked my car and walked to the curb (kerb, for the 
> purists!) than I met a classmate of mine from Washington & Lee 
> University back in Virginia.  Go figure:  it is a desperately small 
> universe, and I keep expecting to meet Mark Rabiner doing an early 
> afternoon stroll around my neighborhood down here in the exurbs of 
> Richmond, Virgnia.
>
> But LOST WAGES?  Gads.  My father worked his way through college at 
> the University of Nevada, Reno, by dealing black-jack at Harold's 
> Club.  I was raised at an early age with two principles in mind:
>
> a)      Never gamble.  The house always wins.  (You Mac guys are 
> probably deprived of this wonderous accessory, but those of who use 
> IBM Windows gear get an inbuilt Solitaire program -- Klondike, for 
> those who are specialists, and, yes, I wish they gave us Canfield, a 
> more subtle game, especially if you play it double-decked.  Play a 
> thousand games and keep a game-by-game score.  The house always 
> wins.)  (For that matter, I am probably the only person surviving to 
> have shaken the hands of both Harold Smith, Sr., and Harold Smith, 
> Jr., and also of Mr Shippley, the founder of the GIA for whom Eric 
> Welch now works, though I did so at a rather tender age.)
>
> b)      Avoid Las Vegas.  It is all glitter and not much else.  Hell, 
> they are doing the Annual Zeiss Historica Society meet there, and I 
> shall be absent, and cheerfully so.  For the most of you who are 
> fervernt left-wingers, the folks you love to hate, Neal Boortz and 
> Hannady and Limbaugh all love Lost Wages.  I do not.
>
> My wife and I are arguing over our final retirement home.  I want to 
> retire to somewhere around Flagstaff, Arizona, a town with no 
> humidity, a bit of snow, and with a University nearby.  My wife wants 
> to set up a Bed and Breakfast in Maine.  Go figure.  She won't retire 
> for another decade or more, but I'm already applying Vaseline to my 
> camera lenses:  those N'or Easters do a mighty job at piling up the 
> saline against optical surfaces.
>
> <he grins:  we might still get to Flagstaff!  I'd be happy to be 
> parked beside Rod's Steak House, but that is a different matter.>
>
> Marc
>
>