Ayn Rand Killed Sears.

From Salon, this essay I have reproduced here, a fascinating look at the practical effects of the Russian emigre's half baked economic theories. There is a bizarre thought process in this country that seems designed for lemmings. When a theory is put about by business or political leaders far too many people uncritically get on the bandwagon, hitching their hopes to the theories promoted by the cutlure of celebrity. Ayn Rand, a rather dry Russian atheist came to the US fleeing the early Soviet massacre of what there was of a Russian economy and applied her anti-communist ideals to a style of writing that is as clunky and hard to read as it is profoundly selfish in its theoretical economic proposals. Kick government to the curb and every man woman and child for themselves. In Rand's world government regulation kills commerce. In real life government regulation levels the playing field and protects consumers, but protecting the people of this country takes wealth away from the wealthy, sooo...As we see in this essay practicing what Rand preaches is garbage economics in the real world, just as the Soviet five year plans were in her time. Moderation in all things is no longer fashionable but as we can see here it should be:

                                                 

Eddie Lampert, the legendary hedge fund manager, was once hailed as the “Steve Jobs of the investment world” and the second coming of Warren Buffett. These days, he claims the number 2 spot on Forbes’ list of America’s worst CEOs. He has destroyed Sears, the iconic retail giant founded in 1886, which used to be known as the place “Where America Shops.”

America now avoids Sears at all costs, thanks largely to Mr. Lampert and his love of twisted economic logic.

A bit of background: Lampert cut his teeth on Wall Street at the risk-arbitrage desk of Goldman Sachs under Robert Rubin, who later became U.S. Treasury Secretary and now serves as vice chairman at Citigroup. In 1988, Lampert founded ESL Investments and joined the billionaire’s club at age 41. He rose to fame in the early 2000s for seizing control of Kmart during bankruptcy and then using it to take over Sears. Along the way he was kidnapped and deposited on a motel toilet in handcuffs for nearly 40 hours, and lived to tell the tale. Lampert is known for his touchiness and odd habits, such as conducting meetings from a bare bones room to Sears executives forced to tune in by videoconference. He hates flying.

You might say that Lampert is the distillation of the fervent market worship and wrong-headed economic approaches that came to dominate the U.S. in the 1980s and have yet to run their fatal course. He adores Ayn Rand, and is reported to have given out copies of Atlas Shrugged during an ESL annual dinner. Lampert is also a fan of Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian economist beloved by conservatives and libertarians. As a Robert Rubin protégé, he absorbed the lessons of a man whose discredited economic focus on budget deficits ended up starving the country’s infrastructure, education and alternative energy.

Looking at what Lampert has done to Sears, we can see what happens when the lessons of his mentors are actually applied in the real world. It isn’t pretty.

1. Myth: Bigger is better

William Lazonick, an expert on the American business corporation, has written about the rise of the conglomerate movement of the 1960s. At the time, shareholders were clamoring for rapid growth, so they pushed for big mergers and acquisitions. Once-successful firms were pressured to move away from their core businesses, often to terrible effects.  In an email to me, Lazonick noted that “the ideology was that a good manager could manage anything, and that all the central office needed was performance statistics so that it could ‘manage by the numbers’.” This foolishness “imploded,” as Lazonick put it, in the 1970s.

Evidently Lampert didn’t get the memo. In the 1980s, as deregulation got the casino games rolling on Wall Street, mergers and acquisition fever once again took hold. This time around, mergers more often involved acquisitions in the same industry, like Bristol Meyers’ acquisition of Squibb. Two new terms entered the American vocabulary, the “hostile takeover” and the “corporate raider.” Oliver Stone made a movie about this episode called Wall Street.

Some refer to Lampert as a corporate raider. He prefers the term “active investor.” It must be admitted that Lampert wasn’t only interested in stripping the assets of his retail giant to make a fortune off it right away. He thought he could increase profits, too. After making a nice wad of cash from Kmart by selling off the valuable real estate sitting under dozens of stores, shutting down 600 stores and laying off tens of thousands of workers in the name of cost-cutting and thereby jacking up the stock price, he got bigger ideas. He would use Kmart to take over another ginormous retailer, Sears.

What background did Lampert have in retail? None at all. But never mind that. He was a Wall Street genius, and he would make this thing work by harnessing the power of data and numbers and letting the invisible hand of the market guide his Franken-company to glory. He even hired Paul DePodesta, the statistician of “Moneyball” fame, to advise him. When Kmart acquired Sears, the new company, Sears Holdings, became one of the largest retailers in the U.S., and Lampert became its CEO. He took on the Herculean task of integrating two vastly complex companies. And he brought on a guy that knew all about restaurants and nothing about retail to help him, Aylwin Lewis, former president of YUM! Brands.

Reactions ranged from surprise to predictions of doom. Mark Tatge atForbes called him “Crazy Eddie” and decided that he must be planning to liquidate the whole shebang, perhaps slowly, by dumping stores (Sears owns a ton of valuable real estate) and using the money to do stock buybacks (more on that later) that would further enrich him.

It turns out that contrary to Lampert’s notion, you actually do need to know something about a business in order to manage it well. There’s really no substitute for industry-specific experience. And bigger is not always better — a gigantic corporation can be too unwieldy and complex to thrive, especially when your management philosophy is derived from a writer of bad novels.

Sears and Kmart are now on well on their way to becoming vaporized as brands.

2. Myth: Self-interest is the greatest virtue

The neoclassical economic paradigm is built upon the idea a human being is little more than a globule of self-interest. It teaches that the market economy is populated by rational individuals whose selfishness is constrained only by expediency. Ayn Rand was an enthusiastic proponent of this idea in extreme form, and her celebration of it can be found in The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, published in 1964, which explains, among other things, the destructiveness of altruism and the virtue of acting solely in your own self-interest.

At Sears, Lampert set out to create the Ayn Rand model of a giant firm. The company got a radical restructuring. It was something that had been tried at giant industrial conglomerates like GE, but never with a retailer.

First, Lampert broke the company into over 30 individual units, each with its own management, and each measured separately for profit and loss. Acting in their individual self-interest, they would be forced to compete with each other and thereby generate higher profits.

What actually happened is that units began to behave something like the cutthroat city-states of Italy around the time Machiavelli was penning his guide to rule-by-selfishness. As Mina Kimes has reported in Bloomberg Businessweek, they went to war with each other.

It got crazy. Executives started undermining other units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance. They began to focus solely on the economic performance of their unit at the expense of the overall Sears brand.  One unit, Kenmore, started selling the products of other companies and placed them more prominently that Sears’ own products. Units competed for ad space in Sears’ circulars, and since the unit with the most money got the most ad space, one Mother’s Day circular ended up being released featuring a mini bike for boys on its cover. Units were no longer incentivized to make sacrifices, like offering discounts, to get shoppers into the store.

Sears became a miserable place to work, rife with infighting and screaming matches. Employees focused solely on making money in their own unit ceased to have any loyalty the company or stake in its survival. Eddie Lampert taunted employees by posting under a fake name on the company’s internal social network.

What Lampert failed to see is that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. They like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals.  Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself.

In 2012, Lampert bought a $40 million home on Indian Creek Island, near Miami, just around the time he decided to sell 1,200 Sears stores and close an additional 173. That same year, Sears Holding was named the sixth worst place in America to work by AOL Jobs.

3. Myth: Greed always wins

In the 1980s, a noxious business philosophy developed that said that shareholders were the only true stakeholders in a company, because they made the investments and bore the risk. Forget about the investments and risks born by taxpayer and the people that work for a company. They didn’t matter. A company had no responsibility to anybody but the shareholder.

As a result, executives started using this justification for various kinds of hustles designed to line their pockets. They got very adept at the game of buying back their own stock in a way designed to inflate earnings per share and hide weaknesses.

In 1977, 95 percent of distributions to shareholders came in the form of dividend payments.  Today, more than half of the cash returned to shareholders of S&P 500 companies comes from buybacks instead of dividends.

Fortune magazine, in a story about what happens when Wall Street jumps into the retail business, reports that under Lampert, Sears has gone on a stock buyback spree. Between 2005 and 2011, he took what was once the company’s strong cash flow and spent $6.1 billion of it on stock buybacks. During the same time period, only $3.6 billion was spent at Sears on capital improvements. Lampert told investors that upgrades and new stores were not an “efficient” use of capital. Neither was paying workers decently. In fact, Sears workers are paid so badly that they have taken to the streets to protest.

So when you walk into a Sears store today, you find a sad, dingy scene with scuffed floors and chipped paint. Tense-looking workers hover over merchandise scattered onto ugly display tables. Hardly makes you want to buy a microwave.

A handy chart on Yahoo Finance show that buybacks reached a high just about the time that Sears’ sales went into the toilet. Stock buybacks are really just an effort to manipulate stock prices, and they don’t help a company’s long-term health. They divert money away from the things that a company needs to have to succeed, like decent salaries for workers and investments in new products and services. Wonder why Apple is no longer making anything interesting? Why its retail workers get paid squat? Check out what they’ve been doing with stock buybacks.

Lampert’s buyback scheme has raked in a pile of money for him and his early investors, but it’s also flushing the company down the drain. Hoovering cash out of any firm, especially a retailer that needs appealing stores and strong advertising, will eventually crush sales.

And so it has. Sears has lost half its value in five years.

Conclusion:  The lessons of Crazy Eddie seem so obvious that a bunch kids running a lemonade stand could understand them. You have to know something about the business you’re running, especially a big one. Success requires cooperation rather than constant competition. Greed is ultimately destructive.

The invisible hand of the market appears to have attempted to slap Lampert upside the head to teach him these things. But he remains committed to his nonsense, and the real losers are all the hard-working people who have lost their jobs, and the potential loss to the American economy of two revered brands.

It’s probably a good thing Ayn Rand never tried to run a business.

Sunset Over Key West Harbor

The Top, what was once my preferred sunset perch at the top of  La Concha is gone. But thanks to my friend Gary I have discovered his preferred perch to watch the sun go down.

 It is not apparently widely known or much appreciated so he asked me not to disclose the exact location.

He and his charming family enjoy this spot when they come to spend their summers in Key West. I too liked it very much, as did my wife who plans to return with her new Kermit chair.

 This pictures are for Gary and family making the long drive back home to Middle Earth for another year.

 And for their dog Pig left home to enjoy the solitude of a house sitter.

While we were enjoying the view some poor boaters were being inspected by the Coastguard seen above as a speck of blue light between the Sunset and Christmas Tree Islands.

Good spot Gary and thank you. It was a splendid evening.

Bryan Dillon Has A Plan

I am not all clear why Cheyenne has suddenly found joy once again on a backwoods walk through North Cudjoe Key, but she did and even though I had little hope she might stretch her legs one hot morning, she surprised me.

We passed the long abandoned house on the edges of civilization, and as we did a voice called out from the road in the distance, warning me to beware of horseflies. "Better living through chemistry," I replied, grateful for the spray that keeps all manner of biting insects away. In conversation later with the man in the white shirt he was well protected by his clothes from flying bites but they sure landed on his face did those horseflies.

Bryan it turns out works for the Monroe County Mosquito Control District whose employees wander around putting out traps to check on populations and Bryan was carrying a long handled scoop to "check the tides" which I assured him were probably still there...I've walked to the wet and muddy  end of the trail some distance north and to my surprise Cheyenne took the left turn at the fork and headed in that direction so I fell in with the long legged Bryan and we got to talking as Cheyenne stumped off ahead.

Bryan is a man with a plan and he seems to have skills that could make it work if only he get anyone to listen, which to me is the dubious part. Apparently he spent nine months in the Middle east with Special Forces doing something called logistical support which involved in part feeding starving local populations. He remarked how one time a crowd surged round his truck and tried to pile on and tip it over so desperate were they to get to the food. "Starving people do strange things," he said as he explained his plan to help local people unable to help themselves.

On one point we were in total agreement, which is to say the idea of closing the homeless shelter just pushes the people out into the streets of the city where no one wants to see or deal with them. Bryan's idea would be to convert the Easter Seals building on Stock Island into a shelter and facility to assist those in need. His version of running it would be along military lines with ID cards, and jobs to keep the people busy. He is a great believer in Noni a tropical fruits said by its supporters to cure all manner of ailments and Bryan takes a triple jigger shot of the stuff every morning for breakfast. He seems fit and active and doing fine on the stuff, so whether its that his genes or his outdoor lifestyle...who knows.

It seems like a  great idea to do something about an issue that drives housed residents of Key West crazy with irritation. Yet I see a couple of flies lurking in the ointment of his enthusiasm. He has spoken to county Sheriff Ramsay, a man not much known for his support for social programs, unlike his much admired predecessor Sheriff Roth."He's a hard man," Bryan smiled not at all put out by initial failure to convince. He said he had an appointment with city mayor Craig Cates, who has himself proposed a shelter for the homeless in this style and who has been roundly abused for suggesting "coddling" the homeless. One can hardly imagine gobs of support for the intense cheerful man from Mosquito Control. I wondered if Bryan might have contacted Steve Braddock the minister whose efforts to help the homeless have led him up a dead end in consultations with lawmakers. Perhaps fortunately that's one avenue Bryan hasn't followed. It could dent his optimism.

I suppose when you have seen people in the throes of starvation being driven to do the impossible may not seem so hard but as he talked I found myself wishing him well. I think his idea is actually a good one, a humane one, and sensibly based on his own actual knowledge of how to do these complex operations. I particularly liked his idea of approaching the hospital for the use of a dedicated nurse, the idea being treating people at the shelter would actually save the hospital money on indigent admissions. He knows how to be persuasive I guess.

The other big fly in the ointment came at the beginning of the walk we shared, when he announced rather happily that he has only three more years in his job before he retires to Ohio to raise mules. I thought at first he was joking but he wasn't. It hurts my brain to think of being in the Keys while simultaneously looking forward to livestock rearing in a snowy climate. I guess I know where I want to live. On that note though there is at some level a self defeating tone to any project with an open ended commitment from a man with a very short time line ahead.

 Still we had a pleasant walk with a kind man and an air of brief cheerful optimism descended over north Cudjoe Key for a while.  All of which was enough to exhaust my Labrador.

 For some reason she likes to sleep on hard surfaces with her forehead pressed against an object. I don't argue with her and my best efforts to improve her comfort meet with failure. She, like Bryan, knows her mind.

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The End Of Boca Chica

I have written from time to time over the past seven years about one of the more pleasant waterfront stretches in these islands that really don't have beaches worth talking about. Boca Chica Beach it turns out is just one more threat to the flyers of the mightiest military machine on Earth and it must go.

It seems these spindly shade trees threaten the ability of military aircraft to land safely on the vast spacious runway of neighboring Boca Chica Naval Air Base. You'd think that these last few trees left here on public land would be allowed to remain but it seems Regulations require then to be chopped down.

It puts me in mind of those rules that forbid us, perhaps not much longer, from using iPads during the take off period in commercial airliners. It always seemed to me that if that was all it might take to crash a plane and create a stir, we were doomed. It turns out you can't crash a Boeing with an iPad - shocked?- and now we will soon be allowed to make phone calls on flights thus giving me one more reason to hate getting in a plane. Do you even remember why you can't carry shampoo on a plane or why you must remove your shoes? That's because you live in a world terrorized by a bunch of medieval religious nutters who think death is the best way to live. I say screw 'em, no one gets out alive in the end anyway, and let's live our lives with the greatest joy we can. Which of itself is hard enough, never mind allowing madmen to make us craven.

So when mere mortals wonder why their beachside refuge must be torn down, anonymous pipes up in the Voice column of the Citizen:

I welcome those beachgoers to sit in the pilots' seats on a moonlit evening. With a driving rain and 30 knot crosswind and those sacred trees suddenly pop up in your windscreen and your concentration is on trying to land safely for you and your crew, you let me know how valuable those trees feel then. When your butt stops puckering, go down to the end of the runway and give those precious hardwoods a hug. These men and women are in those aircrafts protecting us on a daily basis. Give them all and any tools needed to do their job safely. Go buy an acre of woods up north, put some sand around the trees, and thank those young pilots for your ability to do so.

Freedom buys you this:

I wonder at the old route that Highway One took back before Al Qaeda had this country by the balls. If you turn off the modern Highway One at Rockland Key you will discover the truck entrance to the Boca Chica Navy Base. The direct route was the original path of the public highway that ran through the base. Nowadays such openness is beyond imagining.

So when they say the trees must go, and they will, as ludicrous as it sounds, because they pose a threat to freedom you will know that freedom wrecked this modest remaining stretch of public beach. On the other hand when the Key West City Commission caved to the Truman Annex Master Property Owner's Association and agreed to allow them to close Southard Street, a public thoroughfare, with a gate it was the Navy that stepped in and told TAMPOA that freedom required the street to be open twenty four hours, so TAMPOA meekly yielded, removed the gate and stopped bullying the city. Thus what the Navy giveth, occasionally the Navy taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Navy.

I miss the good old days when self confidence, obliviousness perhaps ruled our collective thinking. I suppose it's gone forever, and fear replaces the openness and cheerful optimism of the post World War Two era when anything seemed possible, and even desirable. One could buy an airline ticket on a whim and climb aboard without being treated like a terrorist. The assumption was positive, not negative about human intentions. Nowadays everyone is guilty until proven otherwise and I don't think it's the attitude that made America great.

So the trees must go, to protect freedom, and the barren wasteland their departure will leave behind will be the perfect symbol of the modern notion of what it is to be free: it is a wasteland devoid of beauty, surplus, debate or consideration. It is the negative freedom of a world without joy or trust or hope. It is just a tree, useless, not magnificent, perhaps not even beautiful, but surely no threat to national security in a rational world?

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Spiderman And The Famous Film Maker

To see a man lounging on a park bench, taking his ease in a public park on some of the most expensive real estate in waterfront Florida, is no great surprise. A chicken scuttling away in a public space is no big thing either in this city of contrasts. I wasn't even sure why I took the picture, a reflex perhaps. I photograph therefore I am.

Cheyenne crossed paths with a couple of dogs as we crossed the park under a 92 degree sun but she ignored them as she does and meandered her own way, nose down into the dog park. Cheyenne is not a social animal but she loves to smell the trails left by other dogs so while I took my place in the shade she wandered back and forth checking the invisible trails.

The county owns this land and wants to reorganize it, move the street inland, expand the beach, shrink the area devoted to dogs and thus improve the place. The waters off the beach were foaming white in the strong southeast wind, it was hot, a perfect summer afternoon under a burning white sun. I saw a gaggle of rental scooters and wondered at the parking style.

That's the part I like about my life, working at night on long shifts...some days you get to stand in the same spot for a while. Your dog lays next to you in the shade being companionable and together you watch the world go by. In Key West it cycles and jogs and strolls along the beach as it goes by. This is island time for me.

Then I saw the crazy results of the removal of all the trees at Higgs Beach, and what a bloody shambles it is now. There used to be a stand of casuarina trees, much disliked in some quarters as non native trees and therefore fit for removal. Which is all well and good but, Good Lord the place looks devastated!

As you can see in this picture below the trees on the left were quite bushy and shady and to replace them with cement poles and tarps seems not  quite right to me. The problem was that a branch snapped and that act of nature created a liability panic as the place has been transformed into a children's playground and the trees naturally had to go. Tree cutting is quite the sport around here for some reason.

Here's another file image from my blog which may explain why the area was fenced off and the pavilions reserved for adults accompanied by children. They had previously been rather taken over as a hang out by homeless populations and the paper was filled with complaints about their drunken brawling. I thought the children's play area was a nice solution to the whole problem; then they hacked down the trees.

Well, aside from all that history of tree cutting it was a lovely day and Cheyenne led me through the park sniffing here and there and I found myself quite taken by the view. Here we have the three basic colors of life in the Keys, blue white and green.

Which is when my deeply guarded secret came out. The dude on the ground hailed me and asked most politely if I was famous. I naturally burst out laughing, "God forbid," I said, enjoying the joke a great deal. But he insisted I looked like a famous film maker, not me I said and he winked conspiratorially so I suppose my secret is safe. "Can I make you famous, " I said back and they posed for my picture, him and Spiderman up above. "It's a hammock chair," he said and I told him I was familiar with them but not eight feet in the air. He insisted it was perfectly comfortable, of which I had no doubt. "How do you get in?" I asked the lanky youth. "Easy" he said reaching up for the bar overhead, which he no doubt meant well but I couldn't see myself doing acrobatics to get in a chair. I left him dangling in his own web, unable to convince them I wasn't a famous film maker. "Keep making those movies!" they called after me cheerfully.

I was once accused of being a snitch, not far from here. It was more than a decade ago before I actually did start working at the police department when I used to bring Emma here and walked her through the park, long before the dog park was installed. The homeless guys in an encampment got quite aggressive and yelled at me accusing me of being a spy for the cops. I was actually a boat captain at the time and even today when I'm not dispatching I'm an anonymous civilian which is the way I like it. I was quite taken aback when the thugs started yelling at me and my Labrador, threatening us for spying on them for some unknown reason.. So I walked into their encampment and confronted them. That freaked them out a  fair bit as I refused to back down and demanded to know what they meant.Middle class suburbanites aren't supposed to stand up to their bullying but I disliked the idea that only hobos and bums could use these lovely facilities so I made a point of enjoying the park no matter what. They looked sheepish and after that they left me alone to walk my dog. I'd much rather be accused of being a film maker so I guess I have come along a bit at Higgs Beach since those days, and the bum population has been culled too, and good riddance to those aggressive bullies.  

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Goodbye Hairy Potter

I am fond of pointing out I don't have an artistic bone in my body, and I fear to say it out loud but my wife doesn't either, so when she found herself taking pottery classes to encourage her students I wondered what was happening. She was discovering one of the nicest people, a great artist widely recognized yet completely unassuming and kind. She struggled to make a -bowl? -plate? - ashtray, perhaps, alongside her bad luck students and though she never did become an artist (unlike some of her students) she did learn to revere the man who gave freely and willingly of his time.

She burst into tears upon reading of Jay Gogin's untimely death.

Such was the effect of a thoroughly decent man who loved pottery and his wife and his job at Florida Keys Community College. The president of that institution made the requisite nice noises about the full time professor's passing but I am ready to bet the iconoclast who preferred potting to college politics will not be replaced. Gogin had a full time job in the part time world of academia subscribed to by the President of the college and he took full advantage of his fortunate full time position to teach and share his untidy passion that constantly burst its banks. He was not a faculty member, he was a teacher and I can say this, if he made my wife believe she could pott, ever so briefly, he was endowed with that rare spark that made him unique. The world would be a better place if there were more Hairy Potters and fewer conventional mannequins going through the motions.

I never did pott with the hairy potter, and quite likely he could have given me the confidence and joy my laughing wife got from rubbing mud with the great man. But I do get to enjoy his work every evening when I go to work, and his public art is celebrated, not on my minor blog, but on the city's Art in Public Places page:

From the Key West Citizen this glowing acknowledgement. Key West seems poorly set to encourage roots here for future artists in paradise like the great Jay Gogin who touched so many hearts.

Artist Jay Gogin, Key West's 'Original Hairy Potter,' dies

BY TERRY SCHMIDA Citizen Staff
tschmida@keysnews.com

Jay Gogin, who put the Florida Keys Community College Ceramics Department on the map with his "Mud Pi" fundraising dinners, has fired his final kiln.

The self-proclaimed "Original Hairy Potter" died Thursday at the Lower Keys Medical Center after suffering from liver and kidney failure for about a week.

He was 57.

Gogin coined his own nickname as a self-deprecating homage to his trademark lengthy beard and hair.

The amiable instructor harbored a lifelong passion for Raku ware pottery -- a yen he enthusiastically shared with generations of FKCC students during his near quarter-century professorship there. Gogin's slightly eccentric, yet genial disposition over time transformed him into one of the town's larger-than-life characters.

Visiting district school students of all ages also benefitted from Gogin's knowledge and fervor for teaching. This was particularly true during the trying, post-Hurricane Wilma period in 2005 when the college opened its doors, and instructional budget, to students of low-lying area schools dealt a devastating blow by the storm.

Gogin's easy smile and friendly demeanor were a comforting and familiar presence at gallery openings and other artistic happenings around Key West, where he was regarded as a prolific, generous and influential figure by his colleagues and fellow travelers in the town's creative community.

During a pinch pot-making session with Poinciana Elementary School students in 2005, the ceramics maestro happily noted the number of familiar faces in the room.

"Several have parents or even grandparents who have worked with me here," Gogin said at the time. "They're having a blast with it and so am I."

In 1997, Gogin and his wife, Robin, founded "Mud-Pi," a casual college ceramics club/faux fraternity. The next year, the inaugural "Mud-Pi" dinner was held at the Gogins' Key West home. These legendary gatherings became an annual tradition with patrons carrying off the attractive, hand-made bowls in which their meals were served. The proceeds were used to help fund educational trips to the ancient Japanese pottery village of Tokaname, another of Gogin's exciting initiatives.

In time the Japanese visits became a kind of ceramics cultural exchange program, bringing many students from the Land of the Rising Sun to the United States -- often for the first time.

In 2000, the Gogins renewed their marital vows in Japan.

"When the [Japanese] students come [to Key West] they love it, although it's a real shock for most of them who haven't traveled outside of Asia," Gogin said in a 2001 interview. "Women especially find that they have more freedoms here."

Before long, the Gogins were bringing "The Wind From Key West," actually an elaborate "Mud-Paella" dinner, to Tokaname, where Gogin also made many friends. There, too, diners were left with ceramic souvenirs from the visiting Key Westers.

Gogin was born Jan. 14, 1957, in Pewaukee, Wis. For a time he attended a seminary, considering a career in the priesthood, before happening upon ceramic art.

His career in pottery took off at the age of nine when he defiantly created his first piece to prove to his skeptical parents that his lengthy hair wouldn't prevent him from becoming a potter.

As a young man, Gogin began showing his work at small Midwestern art festivals, where his unique, Zen-inspired technique quickly gained him a following. Soon this translated into international gallery exhibits and sales. His ceramic masterpieces can be found in numerous public and private collections throughout the U.S. and in more than a dozen other countries.

Gogin met his wife at the yacht club in Stevens Point, Wis., in 1982. Together they moved to Key West in 1990, where Gogin began teaching a ceramics course at FKCC. The class and its teacher were an instant hit, and the program soon expanded to include ceramics for beginners, Raku, wheel throwing, ceramic mural design, and Japanese wood-firing.

At the center of it all was Gogin's immense talent and natural ability as an instructor. He hosted visiting artists from around the globe, began leading cultural and educational trips to Europe, and organized numerous workshops, exhibits and fundraisers

Along with the overseas excursions, the Gogins and "Mud-Pi" set out to enhance the awareness and appreciation of ceramic art in the community. Dozens of intricately crafted ceramic sculptures, pots, wall murals and water fountain urns were created, which helped shape the zeitgeist of the FKCC campus.

Similar works can be found around the Keys at locations as varied as the Key West Public Safety Building and the Kathy's Hope Serenity Garden at the nonprofit Samuel's House. Gogin even crafted custom beer tankards for the members of a social club he helped create at Finnigan's Wake pub.

Two years ago, longtime FKCC supporter -- and Gogin student -- Michael Dively showed his appreciation of Gogin's inspiration by ponying up a $25,000 endowment to establish the "Jay Gogin Excellence in Visual Arts Award" at the college.

Each spring, in perpetuity, a promising FKCC student artist will receive $1,000.

"I still remember with fondness my ceramic classes at FKCC," said Dively, a former Michigan legislator and college professor. "This award recognizes Jay's creativity, energy and commitment to his students -- and the impact Jay's artistic creations have made at the college and around Key West."

Another of Gogin's students, Thivo Foster, who now lives and works in Miami Beach, was heartbroken at the news of his passing.

"Twenty years ago my husband and I were always in the Keys as snowbirds," said Foster, who specializes in Nerikomi pottery, another Japanese ceramic discipline. "One year, I signed up in ceramics classes at FKCC, where I met Jay Gogin. I joined his 'Mud-Pi' and continued to support it while we were back home in Cleveland. We moved to Key West, instead of California as planned, thanks to Jay and the ceramics department in FKCC. From then until now, Jay is always in my admiration as a wonderful artist and a best friend who was always there when needed. Jay Gogin's passing is a big loss to [the] community and the FKCC students."

FKCC President Jonathan Gueverra on Saturday released the following statement:

"The word legend is often overused or misused when we describe certain individuals. To say that Jay is a legend is no exaggeration. His finest qualities extend beyond his artistic and creative abilities. Jay's kindness, his generosity and his willingness to share and to serve simply because these were the right things to do will never be forgotten. Through his artistic expression we will all continue to benefit.

"On behalf of the entire FKCC community I say thank you to Jay Gogin for his almost 25 years of service. I especially want to thank his wife, Robin, who is equally generous and allowed the rest of us to be a part of their lives."

Gogin is survived by his wife Robin, two brothers, Glenn and Greg, and his mother, Glorida.

A celebration of Gogin's life will be announced at a later date.

tschmida@keysnews.com

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