Byte Me by Marv Dealy
Blame this Column on Greg
My fellow columnier (who says it has to be columnist?) Greg Kristapovich, wearing his “Man on the Street” baseball cap, cornered me at the ungodly hour of 6:45 a.m. the other morning and shoved a microphone in my face while asking if I’d put up my Christmas tree. I assumed from the age of the recording equipment he was using it wasn’t going to pick up a signal so I told him “Hell no” and to my surprise read my response in the next issue of this Fridays fish wrap.
Greg had popped into our weekly meeting of Toastmasters (come visit if you’d like to improve your public speaking skills) at Papa’s New Roost, and plied us all with the same question, in addition to wanting to know if we’d started our Christmas shopping yet; I was able to answer in the negative in both instances. This column came about after looking at the “about me” line that ran with my photo, combined with a brief conversation I had with Greg about how the name of my company Throckmorten Enterprises came to be. Greg urged me to share with you patient readers the skinny on what my day jobs really are, how Throckmorten came about and how there is really no mystery planet headed our way to crash headlong into us in December 2012…so this is all Greg’s fault.
Okay, nothing about the mysterious planet.
I started Throckmorten Enterprises, which everyone calls Throck, nearly twenty-two years ago in San Francisco. In those days, it specialized in print media and graphics jobs, a fancy way of saying I got to sit at a picnic table in the parks of the Berkeley Hills with my dogs, an early cell phone and an early Mac laptop coordinating jobs for large and medium size companies that included the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and various Silicon Valley giants.
These jobs often had something to do with the marketing folks for these groups, who were always trying to incent their sales people to do ever more, reasoning that sales is a game of “what have you done for me lately?” These incentive programs were fun to work on, involved lots of design, printing and the like, and resulted in fun (we thought) programs for the salespeople who would hopefully schlep more of the stuff that someone somewhere wanted schlepped.
Other fun projects were the year-end gifts that large customers of big companies received. One year, I helped Macworld Magazine put out a very expensive greeting card to their advertisers that said (more or less) we feel sort of bad about how many trees we kill per issue, so we’re sending you this really fancy, custom paper greeting card to tell you that rather than the case of wine you’d normally get from us, we’ve spent the money buying a plot of forest and dedicating it to all of you. Really. The card featured a picture of a dead leaf, floating in the water, all reproduced in exquisite black on white on very expensive, hand-made, deckle-edged paper. The message itself sort of floated on a piece of tissue-like paper that had been printed so it looked like the message was handwritten with pencil. Really.
When I first moved to San Francisco, I lived right on the cable car line, but the longer I lived in the area the further I found myself wanting to be from the damn clang, clang, clang of the bell. It came to be that I felt the same way about the Bay Area’s fog, and one thing led to the other and Throck and I moved to Tuolumne County in 1995.
But back to how we came up with the name Throckmorten – Ron DeLacy wrote on the front page of the business section in the Modesto Bee under the headline “Oddly Named Firm Thrives” that I came up with the name while drinking beer with my then secretary. That’s not correct – I was drinking beer with my then business partner. We came up with the first part “Throck” with only a six pack or two, but realized that to have a name that would sound good when the secretary – who had a rollicking Cockney accent – answered the phone, we needed a suffix.
More beer, and we added “morten” having the good sense not to spell it like the salt people. Actually that’s not true, after that much beer we weren’t thinking about that at all, we just knew we’d invented a word that sounded good. Throckmorten. The secretary left two weeks later with her no-good boyfriend for the Oregon coast and we never saw her again.
Of course, we hadn’t invented a new word – there is a city, we’ve learned over the years, named Throckmorton in Texas, populated by all sorts of little Throckmortons who send us invitations each year to the annual reunion and Texas bbq. One year I should really attend.
There’s a Throckmorton Ave. that runs, among other places, by the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, California. There was of course Throckmorton Philharmonic Gildersleeve, a regular on the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show. As my shop in Big Oak Flat is smack on Highway 120, zillions of tourists each year drive right by on the way to Yosemite Park. Seeing our sign on the roof, not a few stop in to ask if we’re related to the Mrs. Throckmorton they had in grade school, and one tourist couple from England stopped by to tell us the best Throckmorten joke ever, involving a cross-dressing English butler.
These days, a big chunk of Throck’s sales come from working with a large Silicon Valley company helping them to produce webinars (that’s a seminar taken out of the comfortable room at the hotel and squeezed onto your computer screen). Another chunk of our sales come from commercial website development and maintenance for among others the City of Sutter Creek, California. A tiny little portion of our sales, but most of the walk-ins, telephone calls and problems come from repairing computers for locals, be they Apple or Wintel machines.
In addition to being Throck’s managing partner, I’ve been writing technology-related columns ever since we quit using wet clay to reproduce newspapers and went to paper – no, seriously. This has piled up over time to some 800 columns in all, and that total increases by about 65 a year.
About three years ago, we decided to start the Yosemite Gazette, a quarterly covering history and stories in the Yosemite region, and I am both the editor and publisher of that quarterly, as well as sometimes writer, photographer and layout guy. Someday it’d be nice to have more help.
Apparently not being busy enough, about two years ago we started ThrockWISP, a wireless Internet service provider of which I’m the chairman of the board, which to date has concentrated on hooking up folks in the La Grange/Don Pedro area, as well as Coulterville, as other existing companies were just flat ignoring them. We’re working on expanding our service to other ignored areas, who knows, maybe one near you soon – stay tuned.
Email questions to Marv at: marv.dealy@throck.com.
Marv Dealy founded Throckmorten Enterprises in San Francisco in 1988 and moved the company to Big Oak Flat in 1996. Open Monday through Friday, 9-ish to 5-ish (209 962-7308). The company provides technical support for a large Silicon Valley company’s webinars, as well as providing professional website design, and computer and network maintenance. The company also publishes the Yosemite Gazette.
