My name is Ian Stock, and these are my memoirs. No surprises there!
I am a child of postwar England, born in Buckinghamshire, just west of London, while fruit was still being rationed by the government, and raised in the suburbs of Cardiff, Bristol, Birmingham and Bucks. Here is a peek at those years:
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- Dad, Jim (they called him Ticker at school) Stock, graduated from Slough Grammar School in 1943, the year he turned 18, and promptly joined the army. There was a war on. Almost everybody did. This was his early uniform.
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- Mum, Cath née Smith, also joined the army, in her case the ATS, in 1944. She was seventeen years old, and had just lost her father. Her mother had died years before, and so she was an orphan in a world at war. This photo was taken in 1941.
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- My kid sister Sue was about two years younger and we had no other siblings. Here we are in around 1962, I think in the back garden of Skelcher Road in Shirley, just outside Birmingham.
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- Our little family moved several times, following dad as he advanced up the corporate ladder. Here he is on our left at a TGWU (think Teamsters) dinner in Birmingham during his years with RHM.
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- We ended up, much to mum and dad’s satisfaction, in a four-bedroom detached home in the charming Thameside town of Marlow. Here we are in front of dad’s roses in 1969 with Aunty Nana, the woman who helped look after mum when her mother died.
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- The high point of our little family’s life together was, for me, the evening of Boxing Day 1964, when the four of us saw the Beatles live in concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. What a mum and dad!
These first 18 years of my life in the Stock family are elaborated in If I Only Knew, the first volume of these memoirs.
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I had the amazing good fortune to be educated at UC Berkeley in California and Yale Law School in Connecticut, after dropping out of Imperial College in London in a prolonged hippy fervor. Those were fruitful and enlightening years, the thrill of a time of hope, peace and love, the joy of a free-wheeling American liberal arts education, and the discovery of one of the great modern socio-political experiments, the US Constitution.
I traveled extensively, mostly in Canada and the US, before restarting my formal education. A variety of jobs funded these travels: my favorite was lorry driver. Other jobs helped fund the education itself. These years, from 1970 through 1983, will hopefully be the subject of the second volume of these memoirs, at times in progress.
In the meantime, here’s a sample:
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- Early 1973 found me delivering caravans all over the UK: built in sleeping accommodation far from home!
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- During all three years at Berkeley I drove these shuttle buses for what was for me an amazing hourly rate at the time. It started at $4.27 an hour in 1976, when this was taken, and was over $6 by the time I left.
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- With my hero and adviser, Charles Muscatine, at my Berkeley graduation in 1979. I found the polyester suit for the occasion at a local JC Penney’s.
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I am married to Lisa, she with the incredibly infectious smile! Our amazing wedding, overlooking Emerald Bay in Lake Tahoe, was relatively recent, as was the ensuing honeymoon, spent dodging the pandemic on a road trip around the western US States. If you’re interested, a few of the stories are here.
Here we are, in front of our ten guests (pandemic maximum) and the minister, who doubled as our photographer. It’s a beautiful spot, isn’t it?
It only took Lisa two or three weeks to organize the wedding, which included obtaining the license, arranging for the minister, deciding on a location (I did help there!) and getting herself and me dressed appropriately. Part of what made it amazing was avoiding the complicated buildup, and most of the complicated politics, that weddings often entail. The guest list was limited by law, and by the dual natural disasters afflicting California at the time, the pandemic and numerous enormous wildfires.
We were able to focus on what counted.
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I ‘m embarrassed to admit to three failed marriages. Failure nowadays seems to mean that each did not last indefinitely. But each also meant a lot, was a lot of fun for years, and created growth and insight, not just for me. Then of course the shit hit the fan!
I met Susan Blanc in Marlow, when she was an American waitress in the Wimpy Bar on the High Street and I was a long distance lorry driver stopping in for an occasional burger and milk shake. We were together for about five years.
Sunshine Britton and I met in San Francisco while studying to prepare for the New York State Bar exam together after law school. The roughly ten years we spent together, 1983 through 1992-3, will hopefully be the subject of the third volume of these memoirs.
Marie-Helene Berhaut was the office manager at my law firm in Paris when I arrived there, and after we connected years later we spent over fifteen years together. Those years are the subject of the fourth volume of these memoirs, Nous les Zinzins!
It does feel odd putting them together, but here are my three prior wedding days:
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- Susan and I were married in Wycombe Registry Office, where this photo was taken, in 1975. She was 19 and I was 22. We knew we were too young. A couple of weeks later, we moved back to California together.
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- Sunshine’s and my reception at home on West 14th Street in Manhattan. It was January 1986, and we were lawyers in love: can you tell?! A year later, we moved to Paris together.
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- Marie-Helene and I married in May 1997, another Registry Office wedding, about a month before we moved to California together. The reception was held in our home, La Bellanderie. This photo was taken there.
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My children.
Sunshine gave me two sons. Nick was born in New York City in July 1986, about six months before we moved to Paris, and Arlo was born in Paris in October 1989 during the week of the Loma Prieta earthquake.
Marie Helene gave me two sons. Charlie was born in Brittany in August 1995, a year after we got together, and Alex was born in Santa Cruz in January 1998, seven months after we moved there.
For over fifteen years, I raised Marie-Helene’s two children from the prior bed (“le lit antérieur,” as the French so endearingly put it!) Daphne was born in Brittany in August 1987, making her almost exactly a year younger than Nick, and Alban was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in September 1989, making him three weeks older than Arlo.
They are all over these memoirs, and here’s a foretaste:
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- Nick and Tom in early 1991 in Sunshine’s and my Paris apartment.
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- Charlie and Alex during a vacation visit to Disney World in 2000.
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- Daphne and Alban in Quiberon (Brittany) in 1996, during a visit to their grandfather with our whole blended family.
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- Alex, Daphne and Charles at Thanksgiving in 2006.
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- Alban and Tom with everything but their heads buried in the sand, Capitola Beach 2004.
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- Nick fooling around with Charlie and Alex in the living room, 2007
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I exercised my profession of corporate lawyer in New York City (for four years), Paris (for ten) and Silicon Valley (for twenty plus). I worked for three law firms, in-house for three corporations and independently under my own shingle, the latter for about half the time, or seventeen of those years.
I retired at the end of 2018, although my professional website remains: www.startupalacarte.com.
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- Fooling around with Jim Blakey, my first (and best) law firm mentor, at Kronish Lieb in Manhattan. KL was my first law firm, and this was taken in early 1987. That firm became the New York office of Cooley LLP.
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- John Fore and Andy Hirsch, two friends at tech powerhouse Wilson Sonsini in Palo Alto in 2000. Very interesting deal flow, with its corollary of a whole lot of billable hours.
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- At NextSpace in 2012. Coworking came to Santa Cruz in 2008, and being part of a working community including engineers, designers et. al. makes practicing law much more enjoyable. Jeremy Neuner took this one.
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The last volume of these memoirs is a blog, here called somewhat hopefully “Aging Gracefully,” which I started after moving out of the zinzins family home in 2010. It’s just a series of diary entries, still chronicling my families and me.
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Feel free to explore!
Here are a few suggestions, a sampling of what’s in here:
from my boyhood: a personal take on Beatlemania; a miserable year at boarding school; and a hippy thumbing across Canada;
from our blended family: the children fooling around; our summer home in Brittany; halloween; and a one-page summary of our family history; and
in more recent years: a little adventure in the Sierra Nevada; some modest internet detective work; and, if you want too much information, there’s always Dating After 60!