Dagny Two Point Oh

Coletta Anne Cannon and I met in Lakewood Park on Labor Day, 1969. A decade ago, when she turned 50, I sent her a card and we talked on the phone.  “Considering how close we are in age,” I said, “it is hard to understand what your parents were so mad about.”  She replied, “The fact that when I was 16, you were 20.”  We dated for two more years, mostly under the radar. When she turned 18, she moved in. A couple of weeks later, we flew to Chicago, and got married, and returned to work the next morning.  On May 15, 1972, we moved to Lansing to be with Linda and Morris Tannehill, authors of The Market for Liberty.

Magnificat High School Prom 1971

Coletta read Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and other Rand works before we married. When we met, revolution was in the air.  The old road was rapidly fading.  Atlas Shrugged was already non-fiction in the 70s.  From the Nixon Wage and Price Freeze, to the loss in Vietnam, and the resignation of Nixon, followed by economic stagnation coupled with inflation (“stagflation”) that sent precious metals prices soaring, we expected the end of civilization as we knew it.  The Iranian Hostage Crises capped the decade.  And, then came Reagan.  It was not perfect, but it made a difference.  In the mean time, Coletta and I followed separate paths. 

I never loved her more than the moment when I watched an 18-year old girl close a business deal with a man twice her age.  She set up his publishing business. 

 

My present wife and I threw a party for ourselves
when we completed our bachelor degrees in 2008.
We invited all of our friends. 

She had started after high school printing on a tabletop Multilith for an insurance company.  After we moved to Lansing she worked in quick print shops before going into business for herself.  That was when we separated and divorced.  I wanted to move out west and picked Las Cruces, New Mexico.  She stayed in Lansing.  We both remarried.  But we remained friends over the years.  And she called on me to do computer projects for her. 

She had moved to Pittsburgh when I returned the favor by recommending her to crack a tough nut for a Coin World newspaper when we were changing the database formats for Trends pricing.  As a leader in the Quark Xpress national user group, she knew about the Ferengi before I did.  Here in Austin last year, when our local Filemaker club brought in a guest speaker, I dropped Coletta’s name and got a nod.

 

With a regulation
Taggart Transcontinental shirt
from an admirer on her 60th birthday.

Most people cannot imagine what kind of relationship Dagny, Francisco, Hank, and John could have had after the end of the book.  We can.  It is easy when people are rational and realistic, and adhere to values that enhance their lives. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACT

Start the Presses

Objectified

The Genius of Design

City Air Makes You Free

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World

The First Dagny

We met in the student lounge through a friend of hers.  Another friend of mine from Young Americans for Freedom had handed me Anthem as we passed between algebra classes. After I read it, I gave it to Jan. 

  

Prom Night 1967

 In 1966, Janet M. Matyas was my high school sweetheart.  She was a year younger than I, and in the “major work” program of Cleveland Public Schools for gifted and talented students.  (I was not. I went to summer school to catch up.)  She played the violin.  After Anthem, we went on to read all of the existing books. I subscribed to the Objectivist Newsletter and took the “Basic Principles” class.  Several of our friends also had read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.  High school romances are transient; and I changed schools the following year.

Cleveland as seen from Lakewood

For that year, we had the steel mills and trains, a high rise apartment for viewing the city from the lake and some penthouse parties (though no Penthouse Legends) with our friends.  At a spring dance that year, we were there with everyone else and happy to be on a date, but oddly enough, the band played "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" which is in 6/8, and we danced it as a waltz -- not a big deal, but, when we were done, we looked around to find the floor empty, except for us.

Winton Place is the tallest. At the left in front is
Edgewater Towers where we lived
(but not where I grew up).

Janet and I cringed at the classical architecture of the banks.  We had great universities, corporations dedicated to electrical research, and John D. Rockefeller as the model of the hometown boy who made good.  Riding into downtown on the Rapid, we entered beneath the Terminal Tower, staring hard and deep into the many tunnels into which other train tracks disappeared.  The Terminal had a concourse with a tobacco shop.

 

It does not get more romantic than this.

About 1989, we found each other through FidoNet.  We exchanged a few letters. The last I heard from her was in 1996. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Anthem as a Graphic Novel

Atlas Shrugged Opening Show

The Influence of Ayn Rand's Objectvism

Autobiography of a Worker

Metaphysics and Politics

"The gray cotton, which was neither quite fog nor clouds, hung in sloppy wads between sky and mountains, making the sky look like an old mattress spilling its stuffings down the sides of the peaks.  A crusted snow covered the ground, belonging neither to winter nor to spring. An icy moisture hung in the air, and she felt an icy pinprick once in a while, which was neither raindrop nor snowflake. The weather seemed unwilling to take a stand and hung noncommittably to some sort of road's middle; Board of Directors weather, she thought." -- Atlas Shrugged, page 486.

“All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. ...  Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth."  -- John Galt's Speech.