The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 89: Armed For Love

Episode Date: January 3, 2018

Looking for love in the classifieds can lead to explosive consequences. 

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results may vary. This is the way I heard it. The arms dealer was lonesome and looking for a little companionship. He might have turned to e-harmonie or match.com, but back then, dating sites were not an option. So the arms dealer looked for love the old-fashioned way. He ran a classified ad in the local newspaper. Good news for Teddy Roosevelt. The ad was short and to the point. Wealthy, highly educated elderly gentleman seeks lady of mature age versed in languages as secretary and supervisor of household.

The ad didn't mention that he was really looking for a wife, or that his inventions had killed tens of thousands of people. Good news for Jimmy Carter. The arms dealer was soon overwhelmed with hundreds of resumes, and no efficient way of sorting through them.

He might have turned to ZipRecruiter or Monster, but back then, job sites were not an option. So the arms dealer did it the old-fashioned way. He interviewed the applicants face-to-face. Good news for Winston Churchill. The process dragged on for weeks, and the arms dealer grew discouraged. While all of the candidates were qualified, none possessed the spark he was really looking for.

But then Bertha walked in, and that was good news for Barack Obama. Bertha was lovely, cultured, and able to converse in several languages. In their first meeting, they discussed history and philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. They learned they enjoyed the same foods, the same songs, and most of all, the same love of the written word. Bertha shared her desire to write a novel of lasting importance and confess that she had applied for the job simply because she thought his wantad was perfectly written. The arms dealer was flattered and offered her the job. Bertha accepted, which was good news for Ernest Hemingway.

However, she didn't mention that she was engaged to another man, nor did she disclose her commitment to the anti-war movement sweeping the country. And so it came to pass that a dedicated pacifist wound up working for a lonely inventor who manufactured and sold weapons of mass destruction. And that was good news for Albert Einstein. Today, of course, such a thing would never happen. Today, you can check someone's Facebook profile to see if they're a pacifist before you hire them.

You can Google your prospective boss to see if he's a war profiteer before you agree to become his secretary. Today, we can avoid the people we disagree with because social media tells us everything about everybody long before we meet them. But social media was not around back then. Good news for William Faulkner. Thus, by the time Bertha learned her boss was an arms dealer, she had already grown to like him. So she listened politely as he shared his belief that mankind was evil and the best hope

for the future of the species was to arm good men with the most powerful weapons available. Likewise, when the arms dealer realized Bertha was deeply opposed to all forms of violence, he was already smitten. So he didn't unfriend her. He listened, as she shared her belief that mankind was basically good and that war could only be ended if all men laid down their arms. Point is, Bertha and the arms dealer didn't learn about their differences until they got a chance to like each other. And even though those differences destroyed any hope of a romance, they didn't destroy their friendship. In fact, when Bertha left her job with the arms dealer to marry her fiancé, the two vowed to stay in touch.

Not on AOL or Yahoo email hadn't been invented yet. So Bertha and the arms dealer did it the old-fashioned way. They wrote letters, hundreds of thoughtful letters in which they continued their debate over the nature of humanity. In one letter, Bertha wrote, Surely you must know the consequences of your success is nothing but death. To which he replied, death is inevitable, but freedom is reserved only for those willing to die. In another letter, the arms dealer wrote, Inform me, Bertha, convince me that kindness alone can somehow prevail over evil,

and I will do something great for your cause. Well, Bertha tried, but nothing she wrote could persuade the arms dealer that weapons were the enemy of peace. But then, in the wake of his brother's sudden death, a curious thing happened. A French newspaper printed a headline that read, The merchant of death is dead. The journalist had seen the victim's last name and mistakenly assumed the famous arms dealer had died, not his brother. But it wasn't the mistake at stake. that gave the arms dealer pause.

It was the jubilant tone of the headline and the article that followed. This was the opening Bertha needed. Don't you see, she said, for generations to come, you will be remembered as the merchant of death. Is that really what you want? Shortly thereafter, Bertha wrote a book

called Lay Down Your Arms. And it was indeed a novel of lasting importance, not just because it was translator, into 12 languages and read by millions, but because it was read by a very specific arms dealer who had grown increasingly concerned with his legacy. How big an impression did Bertha's book make on her former employer? Well, his family would probably say a pretty big one, especially when they opened his will in 1896 and learned that the $31 million fortune they expected to inherit, had been redirected to a trust.

Today, 120 years after his death, that trust has continued to grow, and so far nearly a billion dollars has been awarded in his name to hundreds of lucky individuals. Good news for the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela, for Yasser Arafat and Shimon Perez, for Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. good news as well for the incomprehensible Bob Dylan and hundreds of other recipients who would no doubt look with disapproval upon the source of their benefactor's great wealth. But that was then. Today, the man who transformed the battlefield with an invention called dynamite is remembered not as the merchant of death, but rather as a humanitarian who made the world a less explosive place. And that was very good news for his former secretary, the patient pacifist who answered a wantad, carefully written by a lonesome man, looking for a little companionship.

For her persistence, her friendship, and her novel of lasting importance, Bertha von Suttern, was awarded one of the prizes she inspired, the prize for peace, named, of course, for her former boss, the arms dealer, whose love she could not return, but whose legacy she was happy to help redeem. Alfred Nobel. Anyway, that's the way I heard it. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Granger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays.

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