opinionated, straightforward, and classically beautiful (in my completely unbiased opinion).
After graduation Dad and Mom moved to Cleveland, where Dad was hired as a college trainee in a machine tool company, Warner and Swasey. Within about a year it became clear to him that his heart wasn’t in it, and he began to review his options.
Some fortunate family connections helped him on a new path. My mom’s grandfather, William Coates Foresman, and her grand-uncle, Hugh A. Foresman, had been founding partners in 1896 of the Scott Foresman publishing company in Chicago, which specialized in educational materials (most people know them as the publisher of the “Dick and Jane” basic readers). My mom’s family still owned a one-third stake in the privately held company, but no family members actually worked there any longer. After some inquiries Dad was offered an entry-level sales job with the publisher where, in spite of his connections, he’d again have to earn his wings.
His initial territory was northern Ohio, but within a couple of years and after he wore out a lot of shoe leather, his sales territory moved to the Chicago suburbs of Cook County, where he sold and promoted school-books and teaching materials.
While selling and marketing weren’t in his background, he took to these things readily, absorbing all he could of their key concepts. Dad came to understand that there is no good substitute for meeting with your customers face-to-face. Besides, he was, and is, a gregarious guy—he loves meeting people and has an easy, gracious way with those to whom he’s just been introduced. He traveled extensively, meeting with hundreds of teachers, principals, and school staff members. The company was an educational innovator, producing newsletters for teachers all across the country that focused not on Scott Foresman products, but on the latest trends and techniques in education. The concept behind this was to act as a real resource for teachers with the hope that, long-term, educators would be more likely to turn to Scott Foresman when it came time to purchase classroom materials. A favorite maxim of the company’s president was “a good book seldom mentioned is soon forgotten”—a motto that Dad would adapt years later, substituting the word “wine” for “book.” Indeed, much of what he learned in this period would reverberate decades down the line when he transferred a lot of his marketing smarts regarding selling textbooks to the art of selling Cabernet Sauvignon.
In the summer months when schools were closed, Dad had extra time on his hands, which always drives him a little batty. One year before he and Mom had kids, he decided he wanted to work outdoors, get his hands dirty, and feel the wind in his hair. So he drove out to western Illinois and stopped at a farm. When the farmer came out, Dad said that he wanted to work. He told the guy, “You don’t even have to pay me.” The farmer probably thought he had a kook in his driveway, but eventually saw that my dad was sincere. For the next five or six weeks the city boy from Chicago built up some calluses tossing bales of hay onto the back of a truck.
(I think a lot of people at some time in their lives must develop a craving to get outside and get dirt under their fingernails. Many summers later a successful attorney from San Francisco asked Dad if he could do the very same thing at the winery.)
In spite of Dad occasionally disappearing into farmland, things were going well on the home front. My parent’s first baby was my sister Libby. Two years later my brother Bill came into the picture. I was born in 1955, and finally our youngest brother, Brad, joined us in 1960. By this time we lived on Oak Street in Hinsdale, Illinois, in a three-story Victorian with a big screened-in porch and a sloping green lawn.
We enjoyed a noisy, rambunctious life with snowball fights in winter and coasting our bikes down the lawn in spring and summer. My memories are filled with water fights, sleepovers, ping-pong on the front porch, catching fireflies, and watching Dad and his friends practice chip shots and knock back gin and tonics on the lawn. There were always one or two black labs in the mix.
Shafer family home on Oak Street in Hinsdale, Illinois.
During the school year, we benefited from Dad’s career, which bridged education and salesmanship. In the bedroom I shared with my brothers, Dad created a system of sliding blackboards. In the evenings, we would “play school” with him. With chalk in hand he would make up fast-action math and word games that were such fun we had no idea he was teaching us key concepts and ideas.
By the early 1970s, after two decades of applying himself full-bore at Scott Foresman, Dad had worked his way to the office of Vice President of Long-Range Planning. He took the “long range” part of the title seriously and advocated that the company invest in experimental educational tools, such as video and other technology that were barely out of the starting gate. His proposals were apparently viewed as a bit radical and became mired in subcommittees, meetings with consultants, endless cost-benefit analyses, and countless other tools the corporate world uses to kill ideas. Working in that top-floor office, which sounded impressive, had turned as gray and uninspiring as the old machine tool job in Cleveland.
Around this time Dad read a newspaper story that struck a chord. It said that if you were going to embark on a second career you needed to start by the age of fifty. The wheels started turning.
Soon afterward he read an intriguing investors’ report from Bank of America called “Outlook for the California Wine Industry.” The document laid out a compelling case for the future of wine in the Golden State in just twelve pages, beginning with its opening paragraph, “The strongest growth in wine markets ever recorded will occur during the next ten years. Annual U.S. consumption will approach 400 million gallons by 1980 …”2 (The actual consumption in 1980 was, in fact, even higher than predicted at 480 million gallons.)3
The report cited a number of factors that would contribute to this unprecedented rise. One was the anticipated growth in disposable income and the fact that 40 million new young adults, who favored wine, would reach drinking age during the 1970s. They weren’t calling us the baby boomers yet, but our numbers were already reverberating throughout the business world.
A change of fortune was already being felt in Napa Valley, where in the five years from 1964 to 1969 the value of the annual grape harvest had soared from $2.9 million to $8 million.4 Other areas of the state were doing well too, as my dad would learn.
Several dots connected for him, including that itch to work outside. Mind you, his agricultural background until then had only included tossing hay bales and growing flowers in our backyard. The other element that ate at him was the idea of being his own boss. No matter how hard he worked or cut his own path at Scott Foresman, he was still there as the result of family connections, and it seemed that every long-range proposal he put on the table was getting torpedoed. A move into the wine business would be a venture purely of his own creation. It would sink or swim based on his ideas, drive, and resourcefulness.
At some point in 1970 Dad started reading everything he could find on winemaking and grape growing. In early 1972 he flew to California and scouted vineyard property in Edna Valley, Monterey, and Santa Maria. At one point he was chatting with an old-timer who owned a roadside winery outside of Gilroy. When the man learned that Dad was interested in the wine business, he said, “Well if you’re interested in wine, what’re you doing here? There’s nothing happening here. You need to be up in Napa.”
Dad eventually did make his way north to Napa Valley, where he worked with real estate agent Jim Warren (whose stepfather, it turned out, was the Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren). They toured quite a number of sites Dad found unpromising. Most were located in the center of the Valley with deep fertile soils, drawing lots of moisture from the
