June 6, 1974

June 6…)

Gm readers,

I was going to post a 700-word deconstruction of the bizarre happenings in Comex gold open interest this morning but when I typed the date June 6… I was transported to a time in June 1974. And I let it flow. Gold will go where it will go whatever I say this morning.

Fifty years ago, I left the Savoy Hotel in London at 7 AM and flew in a private plane with my father to Normandy for the 30th anniversary of D Day. It was an exceptionally beautiful spring day; the kind of day in England that supersedes all ill will and gushes with praise for its rarity. However, I and my father got stinking drunk in the American Bar the night before and I was puking in a plastic bag when we were flying over the channel en-route Caen.

I won’t say there was no love in my family for the children but there were very few emotive gestures. We are WASPs. I shook hands with my father for as long as I can remember and there was always a chilly distance between us that honestly, I liked. This father son trip was the first time in my life that I had several long conversations with him about personal honor, the war, battle, death and life.

When a son is starved for attention from a father and an officer, on a day commemorating the valiant sacrifices of soldiers and his friends, the sense of adoration I felt was indescribable. He was in a wheel-chair then and as I wheeled him to the ceremonies the aura of pride and reverence was overwhelming. He sipped gin from a silver flask in his breast pocket and offered it to me, but I said no.

A limo took us from the airport in Caen to tour the area in the morning and we planned to fly back to London in the late afternoon but on a whim, he wanted to go to Paris. And he was determined to do it despite no flights or manageable trains, so we drove several hours and arrived at the Hotel Vendome, a 5 star hotel across the street from the Ritz, without any reservations around 8 PM.

They were booked but they offered us a twin bed atelier on the top floor with a single tiny window and a ceiling so low I had to stoop to walk across the floor. I got a bottle of Courvoisier from the bar, a pack of Senior Service and two glasses and asked the concierge to book us two tickets to NY York from Orly in the morning.

I don’t think we slept more than an hour or two and during those hours of conversation I learned everything about my family, our money, my grandfather, my aunt Jane who was a rebel, his days at Princeton, his girlfriends, my mother and why they divorced in 1953. All of it.

When we arrived at JFK my cousin met us with a Carey Car and went with my father to the Lowell Hotel in the city. I flew to Tucson, Arizona.

Several years later I got a phone call from the island of Saba in the Dutch Windward Islands in the Caribbean from the local cab driver, Bobby Every. He said I should get down there right away because my father was “…in bad shape. Man”…

I left immediately, flew to St Maarten then Saba, collected him from a hut on a hillside in sweltering heat eating a half-cooked chicken and drinking gin. Life! I got him into the Presbyterian Hospital where he stayed for a couple of weeks, and we spent the next few years rooming together in Gramercy Park. But that got old for both of us. I had my career on the Comex, and he spent his final days in Tuscany with a valet where he died in his sleep in 1987.

RIP, sir.

Thank you friends, for allowing me these memories today, June 6, 2024. I would not have had the pleasure of remembering them if I hadn’t written them.

JJ