Howzit Howard

More on how bankruptcy works

Anthony Cannon asked for more information on how Chapter 11 works, as American Airlines enters that particular chapter of its history. I assume Mr. Cannon read the previous post and not just the first few words that appeared on Facebook, so I now offer some more info than that post contained.

When a company enters Chapter 11 with access to operating capital, hoarded or borrowed, it mostly runs normally, but the real CEO, who can approve or reject proposed actions by the company management, is the bankruptcy judge who takes the case.

Ordinarily the CEO of a company acts in the interests of the shareholders. When William Vanderbilt, the head of the New York Central Railway, was infamously quoted as saying "The public be damned," the full quote was, "The public be damned, I'm working for my shareholders."

In bankruptcy, the judge acts in the interests, not of the shareholders, but of the creditors. There are secured creditors, including lenders, and unsecured creditors, like vendors. Secured creditors are made whole first, if there is enough money. Unsecured creditors then get taken care of, if there is enough money. Creditors are taken care of after the IRS and the lawyers.

The single most important mechanism in reorganizing a company is renegotiating contracts. In Chapter 11 a company can break contracts, giving it leverage to redo them with better terms. A decade ago, John Adams took Hawaiian Airlines into bankruptcy for the express purpose of renegotiating its jet leases. It backfired for Adams, because the lease company persuaded the judge to replace Adams as CEO, but eventually the airline did get new terms.

Unsecured creditors often agree to take less than 100% of what they're owed, because if they sell goods or services to the company they want the company to survive and continue to be a customer.

It is not unusual for investors to acquire a company as it emerges from bankruptcy. They do it by buying the debt - paying actual creditors money to take ownership of their IOUs, so to speak, then they trade the debt for stock in the new company. Investors who specialize in this are called, and you're gonna love this, vulture capitalists.

Vulture capitalists bought Liberty House and flipped it to Macy's, if memory serves. John Monahan can correct me if I'm having a senior moment. In some cases vulture capitalists can be good for a struggling company, ruthlessly slashing costs and leaving the ultimate owner to come in as a white knight and rebuild a little.

Why American Airlines is not Aloha Airlines

American Airlines is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but will continues flying as usual. Nothing will change to its flight schedule that would not have changed anyway. American will not shut down abruptly as Aloha Airlines did in 2008.

The difference is that Aloha Airlines was dependent on cash infusions from its major shareholder, an investment group in Los Angeles headed by Ron Burkle. When secret negotiations for Aloha to be acquired by United Airlines fell through, Burkle saw no margin in continuing the financial support and cut off the spigot. Aloha had only hours to try to line up some other backing and was not able to find it in time. Aloha was shut down abruptly because every potential acquisition or partnership it sought required it to be an operating airline.

American has lost $10 billion in 10 years, and its biggest creditors are its bondholders, but it has hundreds of millions in cash, enough to maintain smooth operations under the supervision of a bankruptcy judge, who has powers no chief executive ever did. If a vendor suddenly says, no credit, credit up front, the judge can compel service. If the judge approves, the airline can back out of contracts, including labor agreements and the lease agreements on the older, gas-guzzling jets.

There was a round of major airline bankruptcies following 9-1-1, with United, Delta, Northwest and Continental, the four biggest carriers after American in those days, using receivership to renegotiate wages, pension and operating rules with their unions. American proudly avoided bankruptcy and was rewarded with the highest labor costs in the industry, even after negotiating concessionary contracts later. It filed for Chapter 11 after its pilots union rejected a contract offer and made it clear its pilots wanted cancellation of earlier concessions, not acceptance of new ones.

Hundreds of American Airlines employees live in Hawaii, most of them deadheading to work at bases on the mainland. They enjoyed higher wages than their brethren at rival airlines for the past tough years. Now they work for an airline which, like those other airlines before, will have the backing of a federal judge as it seeks a more competitive wage base. I hope their unions prepared them for this. 

They may be experts, but they're not experts on you

Amidst all the news reports about what a great Black Friday it was, seldom was heard a discouraging word until some woman who tracks retail stocks for Goldman Sachs declared that the cost of such strong sales could be slimmer profit margins, and a lot of online media picked this up because it was a new angle. And she's an expert, right?

Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that she is indeed an expert, that she knows the retail industries like few others, that she wasn't having a bad day when she did her analysis, wasn't misquoted, and is in fact right in saying that companies like Wal-Mart and Costco will be operating on much slimmer margins this holiday season, that this is what it is taking to stimulate sales.

The thing is, slimmer profit margins are bad if you hold Wal-Mart stock for the divideds, or have a contract to buy or sell Wal-Mart shares that will lose you money if Wal-Mart makes a smaller profit in the fourth quarter. And I'm sure this is what the Goldy analyst had in mind, because it's her job to suss things out from the perspective of how it affects corporate earnings.

But suppose you don't own a lot of stock in retailers, or they make up an insignificant part of your 401(k) portfolio. What about the effect on you as a consumer? Lower profit margins means lower prices for you. More Christmas bang for the buck. Surely that's a good thing for you.

What about the effect on the economy in general? If retailers, by cutting their profit margins, manage to generate significantly more sales, in an economy that is more than two-thirds consumer spending in good times and bad, that's a really good thing. It's an economic stimulus program beyond anything the government could hope to put together.

And to make those sales they need sales clerks. It's a jobs program!

Wall Street empkoys many genuine experts. But to get the most out of their expertise, it's important to remember where they're coming from. They usually look at everything from the standpoint of corporate earnings and share prices. That rarely accords with the big picture, or the view from your front door.

The mystique of Black Friday

There is an old joke about Southern politeness: Why do Southern woman never engage in orgies?

Too many thank-you notes.

Some of us like crowds and some of us don't. I'm not a crowd person. If you walk up to me to say something, I'm cool with that: it's just you and me. But I don't feel comfortable with the mental stimulus overload of being on a crowded dance floor or shopping when the mall is busy.

So I never took part in shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, and indeed never saw the phenomenon in person until last year when the station stationed me in front of an Iwilei big box store. This year, reporting live from the model train layout at Pearlridge Uptown, I saw Black Friday from the belly of the beast instead of the blacktop of Best Buy. Let me channel Margaret Mead for a minute and offer some observations.

I was expecting pointy-elbowed aunties. Maybe they were there at 9 p.m. Thursday when Toys-R-Us opened, or 10 p.m. when Wal-Mart did, or midnight when Macy's powered-up. At 4 a.m. when I rolled into the Pearlridge parking lot, a fresh wave of consumers was also arriving, possibly for the opening of both Starbucks and Sears that hour, and most of these shoppers were young.

Black Friday has become Facebook Friday. People texted and tweeted and posted crowd reports to their fb friends. The person in line in front of you might be your enemy, but Black Friday shopping has nevertheless become an intensely social experience.

There were scuffles all over the country - in San Fernando Valley, Calif., a woman pepper sprayed 20 people who stood between her and the electronics products she intended to buy. Hours later at this writing they had not figured out who she was. Hawaii shoppers seemed mostly civilized and even amiable, though I was mostly seeing people before they were fully caffeinated.

It was a date. I saw many, many twentysomething couples, mostly windowshopping as far as I could tell, the young men more interested in keeping their arms around the waists of their lovers than in actually buying anything. But I saw full shopping bags, too, and this was at 4 a.m. One woman showed me video she shot of a train of blue shopping carts as hundreds of shoppers were allowed into a toy store at opening.

Like APEC, where some poignant individual accounts of small business people turned out later not to accord with the big story, I would caution you against assuming that any single shopkeeper is experiencing what all the others are. One Pearlridge tenant told me off-camera that he was delighted to be unloading all his old inventory to make room for new stuff; another said his sales were slow and he was rethinking the whole early-hours business. I did get a general impression that most stores were getting more actual sales than they had dared hoped for, given the slow pace of recent consumer spending.

Holiday shopping creates thousands of temporary jobs at a time when the economy needs it, and, in case you didn't know, the vast majority of people who work full-time in retail, start as holiday help, which means some who get "temporary" work this season are actually getting permanent employment but don't know it yet. Economies improve when the same dollar is spent many times, and the people hired for holiday jobs have more money to spend on presents themselves. People who add to their credit card bills to buy Christmas for the keiki are collectively engaging in a better economic stimulus package than Washington could ever put together.

We will know in a few days how Black Friday and weekend sales were, but retailers will then wait to see how much of that momentum persists through Christmas, how much of a second Christmas season there is in the final week of the year when some people shop for the stuff they wanted that no one gave them, and, importantly, how much they have to cut margins to move their merchandise. In the meantime we have Black Friday the social event, more interesting, more social, more happy than I would have guessed; it is enjoyable to finally see why people do this.

Music Post: Classical music, two by two

One of the pleasures of classical music presentation on the radio is the segue, where the end of one piece of music is immediately followed by another, allowing you to consider what it is.

This week on my radio program I offer an intense degree of this experience by representing many of the greatest composers with two pieces apiece

The 5 a.m. half hour will feature pairs of pieces by Haydn, Ravel and Brahms while the 5:30 a.m. half hour will spotlight Elgar, Schubert and Bartok (who wrote a piece called "Game of Pairs" but that's not one of the pieces I'm playing this week.)

In the 6 a.m. half hour the featured composers will be Brubeck, Telemann, Mozart and Beethoven while the 6:30 a.m. half hour will sample Tchaikovsky, Handel, Keith Emerson and another composer whom I won't name now because he's the subject of "Trick Question."

Looking ahead, the following week will be an entire show based on themes or chord structures that go downward; the next two weeks will explore the meeting ground between jazz and classical; and the Christmas Eve show will be music from that 1500s and 1600s that sounds Christmassy because so many Christmas carols come from the same period. Then on New Year's Eve, living in the shadow of Beethoven, with such (mostly) excellent composers as von Weber, Spohr, Hummel, Clementi and Wolfl.

Howard's Day Off airs live Saturday mornings 5am-7am HST on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku (Maui) and KANO Hilo and streams on http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org . Max Cacas of Washington, D.C., founded the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook. 

The decline and fall of free time

My 92-year-old father, who lives with my sister and her family and still has his marbles, reads extensively and gets much of his news by watching CSPAN. His leisure allows him to study anything he wants in as much depth as he likes.

Aren't you jealous?

U.S. productivity has increased over the past generation, partly because of automation, but mostly because people are working longer hours. This has kept American companies competitive, at the cost of free time for the average American worker.

It has happened at different paces and in different ways depending on the profession. Managers began to lose their secretaries in the 1960s, learning to craft and correct their own memos and fill out their own expense reports, especially after the advent of the desktop computer.

As PCs became ubiquitous at home, people began doing work at home that used to keep them late at the office, which at first felt like an improvement, until they began spending more time on their home computers answering email and deleting spam because there wasn't time to do it at work.

If you worked for a small business - and small businesses create most of the new jobs - you probably didn't want to complain too much because the CEO was working even longer hours than the rest of you - the old image of the CEO with ample free time and assistants to do all the work was long ago replaced by the founder who sacrificed family life to build the business.

Even in some unionized professions where working hours are clearly spelled out, there have been changes. Housekeepers who are supposed to work eight hours will tell you that it takes longer to clean the contractually required number of rooms if you want to do it right.

Nurses are paid, and paid amply, for their double shifts, but who's to say how different their base pay would be if nurses were not able to factor in time-and-a-half (and more) to reckon what their actual wages would be. Maybe they would have held out for higher base pays and today would be making wages that were lower but still adequate, without burning out after years of taking extra shifts. (Would this have cost hospitals less or more? Training new nurses is costly.)

And then there are teachers, who had always put in unpaid extra hours on lesson plans and grading papers, who found push-back from parents when they wanted to be compensated for that, because parents were putting in their own unpaid extra hours without getting summers off. (Once upon a time teachers were mostly subsidized by high-earning spouses, but that has changed, too.)

Let's not forget that our working days have also been extended by the doubling of our population since the early 1960s - in Hawaii and on the mainland - leading to a world where the hour-long commute is commonplace and millions spend even longer commuting in order to afford a home with a yard for their keiki. If you live in Hawaii Kai, Mililani or Ewa you know exactly what I mean.

In 1975 when I went to work for an all-news radio station in the nation's capital, our airborne traffic reporter did four reports an hour and for the first report, at 7:15 a.m., traffic moved so rapidly that he often had no incidents to report. Today the all-news radio station in Washington, D.C., does traffic every 10 minutes, live, 24/7, and there are delays to report even in the middle of the night on holidays.

So it is that, by different paths, we have most of us arrived at the same pass, where we spend 10 to 16 hours a day working, or getting to and from work.

What are the results of this lack of free time?

I'm not sure it has necessarily hurt the family structure that much, since so many people who work extra hours work some of them at home. You might be working at your computer for three hours but you're free in that time to get up and find your wife to give her a hug, or mediate a dispute by the kids, or answer a homework question. Often we find ways for our new routines not to hurt our most important relationships.

But it is unquestionably true that we go to fewer movies, that concerts are no longer so well-attended as formerly, that we are less likely to pursue leisure activities that require us to go somewhere else for awhile. If you think this is not a widespread condition, ask yourself how much of your shopping you now do online. Do you remember when Internet experts said retailers would never be able to sell clothes online because of the fitting issue?

I would go to far as to suggest that this has been a significant drag on parts of the economy. We spend money renting movies instead of going to movies; we order books on Amazon instead of browsing at Barnes & Noble; what costly hobby have you neglected for lack of time?

How widespread is this condition? Consider those Target employees who did a petition drive against opening on Thanksgiving. Despite the sluggish economy, which caused many people to opine that Target employees should be glad they have a job to be called in to, the campaign has resonated with many, because for many Thanksgiving is one of few remaining days on which your employer dare not ask you to work.

There was a television commercial a few years ago in which a fellow is fishing in some remote place, and after casting his line he has an idea and calls a colleague at work. Leisure time is vital for human happiness and even has salutary effects for business, when business can afford to give it and when managers recognize the value of it.

Turkey and stuffing: perfect, and yet we fiddle with it

There is no meal I like better than turkey and stuffing. I wish Thanksgiving came one per fiscal quarter instead of once per year.

You can omit the sides and pies if you insist: for me it's all about the turkey, especially the dark meat, and the stuffing, especially if it's mostly made from bread without a lot of adulterations.

It frustrates me, as you've doubtless already sensed, when people fool with the perfection of turkey and stuffing. As a child I lodged complaints with the kitchen when my mother added lots of onion to the dressing - you can expect how the adult Howard responds to wild rice stuffing.

Bernadette has the advantage of being a gifted cook, and I therefore have the advantage of knowing that if she makes something I don't approve of, I'll probably like it anyway and eat my words.

I swallowed my objections the first year she made Turducken, the culinary Everest of Thanksgiving, with a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey.

She spent hours deboning the three birds - you leave only the leg bones of the turkey, to preserve the shape - and used a huge curved furniture upholstry needle to sew the birds into one savory mass.

Never argue with a chef holding an upholstry needle. I didn't have to learn this the hard way: I have a rich imagination.

It would take some time to think of any arena of human endeavor where I'm less enamored of innovation than in the area of turkey and stuffing; yet I must acknowledge that there is very little we do that is so human as innovation, which is to say, fiddling with things.

Artificial intelligence expert Douglas Hofstadter says creativity may be defined as taking something that already exists and changing it. By this definition, fiddling is the very essence of creativity, and much to be encouraged.

But if the result is wild rice stuffing, you can have mine.

 

 

 

How do you get your first job?

Gayle Faatea wrote, asking me to discuss the chicken-and-egg question, "How can you get a job that requires experience, if no one will hire you to get experience?"

I stumbled on the answer in my youth.

When I was 15 - this would have been 1968, a very exciting year for pop music - I wanted to be a disc jockey. I wrote to a weekend disc jockey at WFBR Baltimore - deliberately picking someone who I thought might not get a lot of fan mail - and asked if I could come in and watch him do the show some time. I can't say I hit it off with the guy, and his career advice was to go to college and get a degree before even attempting to break into radio. But even so it was sufficiently interesting for me to write a letter to a disc jockey at rival WCBM several months later and wrangle another tour. This time the guy in question, someone I actually admired, avoided me altogether and got someone else to show me around. He asked me how old I was and when I told him he said, "You'd better get moving then! Most jocks start in their teens. Go work for free someplace."

Work for free? For a second I resisted the idea. Then it occurred to me that working for free was cheaper than paying for college. I didn't intend to skip college; I just saw working for free at a radio station as a tuition-free way of adding to my education. But how to get in the door? I tried offering my service to a small cable TV operation just going on the air. That got me nowhere. Then, as a high school junior, I began cartooning for the high school paper, and developed contacts at the six other high schools in my hometown county. For my senior year I was elected editor of the paper - only because a more popular student won a scholarship involving world travel - and I hit on the air of offering to do high school news program for a local radio station for free in return for training for the station's first part-time disc jockey opening.

There were two stations in Annapolis, Md., that I listened to. One, WYRE, sound really good to a teen. The other, WNAV, was more for grown-ups. I decided to make my pitch to WNAV first, and if they showed me the door I would refine my pitch for WYRE. But the surprising answer from the program director at WNAV - I think his name was John Carlisle - was, "When can you start?" He had just joined the station after working in Iowa, where high school news and sports were important content for any radio station. "Kids control the radio in the house," he explained to me later. Two weeks after our first meeting I was on the air doing high school news, and regular news soon after that, all for free. Free is a good price for an employer. I learned how to do remote broadcasts, how to produce commercials, how to record and edit interviews, and how to improvise on the air when something went wrong.

The part-time disc jockey opening? I never got it. In 1970 stations were required to develop affirmative action programs, and the first opening WNAV had after I joined the staff was an African American who went on to have an excellent career in Washington, D.C. I quit in a huff - yes, quit my unpaid job! - but several months later I found paid work at WYRE doing local news. By then I had abandoned my disc jockey ambitions in favor of a career in news.

Every profession is different and some have practices of paid internships, but in a number of excellent trades Gayle's question correctly implies the prevailing Catch 22: you need experience, but no one will pay for the privilege of training you. My advice is, if you want to work in a business where this problem exists, make your own opportunity. Work a different job on the side - I held a clerical job one summer, worked at 7 Eleven for awhile, worked in a factory - while putting in some free hours learning the trade you really want. Think of it as another kind of college. Don't expect to get your first paying job at the same place where you're learning the ropes, though you might. Don't assume you'll succeed the first time; I didn't.

Many people know I'm a community college dropout, but I am not one of those people who thinks an education is a waste of time. I just got mine in an unorthodox way. Education is vital if you want to make real money one day. But virtually any unskilled job will buy time to obtain the free training that enables you to sidestep the chicken-and-egg thing. And any job, however menial, is an opportunity to learn how to work with co-workers and customers, which may be essential training for the job you really want.

 

Should businesses be compensated for APEC blockades?

Ernie Inada runs Clubhouse Honolulu, where Hard Rock Cafe used to be. He was expecting trade from APEC delegates and press because he's across the street from the Convention Center.

You can't cross the street to get from the Convention Center to the restaurant. You have to cross to the mauka side of Kapiolani, then cross Kalakaua, then recross Kapiolani. Not a lot of people do that, which is part of the reason why the Hard Rock Cafe isn't there any more. And you can't really see the restaurant from the front doors of the Convention Center.

But getting to the Clubhouse became more difficult when the Jersey barriers went up, so that someone from the Convention Center who knew about Ernie's place and wanted to go there would have had to walk across the canal, cross at Ala Wai Blvd., then walk back. Security personnel also decided to block the Kalakaua Ave. entrance to Ernie's parking lot. Ernie wound up laying people off.

Attendees Prevented from Entering Clubhouse: that's what APEC stood for, to Ernie Inada. So he's hired attorney John Carroll to sue someone. Carroll is inviting other businesses to contact him if they did badly and blame APEC restrictions on vehicular or pedestrian traffic.

Many people have reacted toggle-on or toggle-off to this. Either they think the business people are whining or they think the government owes them compensation. For me, possibly because I'm not a lawyer, it's more complicated than that.

Life is often unfair for the small business person. You invent something new and fresh, it starts selling, and then some big company that has more attorneys than you have employees blows you out of the water with something similar that has been altered just enough to drag out your copyright infringement lawsuit until your business tanks. Or you put up with construction work because a wider highway will bring you more business, and the minute it's done your landlord raises the rent and drives you away, leaving someone else to get the benefit.

Small shops and restaurants are buffeted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. There is a perfectly good restaurant across from Wal-Mart that gets few Wal-Mart employees because one of them got sick after eating there and told all his colleagues he got sick from eating there. The owner thought Wal-Mart moving in would be good for his business and the opposite turned out to be so, even though I personally patronize the restaurant and think it's a great place.

Waikiki restaurants have good weeks and bad weeks according to who's in town. And when they venture off the resort campus searching for a restaurant, who's to say where they'll end up? Todai is always busy, while the restaurant beneath it is rarely full, even though the restaurant beneath it, Sing-ha, is Chai's other restaurant and serves memorably good food.

Restaurants and shops around the Convention Center would be foolish to rely on Convention Center traffic because the Convention Center, like most convention centers in most places, is empty more than it's in use. If Ernie Inada thought his restaurant could survive solely on Convention Center traffic, he'd be an idiot.

Well, he's not an idiot. He never thought that. He just thought he'd get some of the very large group of people working out of the Convention Center. Thinking that was a reasonable hope, he prepared for it, but never got the bump, and he thinks the barricades were the cause.

When government takes property for a project in the public interest, it expects to pay reasonable compensation. So the question here may be, does the government owe Ernie something? If so, how much?

As a practical matter, it's hard to imagine a scenario in which the owners of nearby businesses can collect. Security decisions were made at the federal level, but some of their decisions were executed at the state or city level. What if they hadn't put up barriers, and demonstrators rioted and trashed the fence around the Clubhouse? Would there be a suit then?

And here's one last question. What if Ernie can't collect, but officials feel in their heart that he and his employees did actually get shafted? Is there anything anyone can do for the restaurant apart from a court context?

 

Music post: The truth about Mozart and Salieri

In the movie "Amadeus," Mozart tries to compose a requiem on a commission from masked stranger and dies trying. Salieri, on his deathbed and mad, years later, believes he killed Mozart, whom he resented for his casual talent, next to which his own skills were mediocre.

Mostly bunk, based on a play, based on a Rimsky-Korsakov opera, based on a Pushkin story, based on very little fact. Let's go through some key points one by one:

• Mozart was a giggling vulgar young man, and any sensible person would be appalled that such a fop could write sublime music. Not true. The evidence of vulgarity is to be found in Mozart's letters, but it is to be found in many letters in the German-speaking world of the 1700s. Mozart was of his time. He was capable of saying the things he said in the movie, but the other people in the room would more likely have been amused than scandalized.
• Salieri resented Mozart's talent and tried to undermine him at every turn. Not true, even though Mozart was prejudiced against Italians and thought Italians in Vienna banded together to control the music scene. Or anyway he said so in a letter to his dad. It reads more like venting than a heartfelt belief. Salieri, six years older than Mozart, was well-established in Vienna when Mozart got there and his music was justifiably appreciated.
• Salieri and Mozart became outright enemies. Salieri and Mozart were cordial to each other, not just polite, and indeed Salieri accompanied Mozart to the premiere of a Mozart opera. When Mozart died young leaving an impoverished wife and children, Salieri gave the kids free music lessons. Because Salieri was established, he could afford to be nice to Mozart, and he was. Because Salieri's music was good, he needn't have felt threatened by Mozart, and he didn't.
• A man in disguise commissioned the Requiem. Amazingly, this is mostly true. The commission was anonymous. But it didn't come from Salieri. There was a wealthy man in Vienna who was in the habit of passing over other composers' work as his own, and the Requiem was indeed presented as his work, but Mozart's style was unmistakable.
• Mozart didn't manage his money well, and he had a poor relationship with his father, but his marriage to Constanza was a loving and happy one. Partly true. The marriage does appear to have been happy, despite Mozart spending too freely when he had money. Mozart's relationship with his father was sometimes troubled but other times good, and the evidence of surviving letters is that there was real affection between them. When there was rancor, it seems to have come from Dad, who also micromanaged the life of his daughter Nannerl. But even at his worst, Leopold Mozart appears to have been acting in the best interests of his children as he viewed it.

On my radio show this Saturday morning I will play numerous works by Antonio Salieri to show that he was really quite a good composer. He not only outlived his younger friend Mozart by 34 years, living to 1825 when even Beethoven had but two more years in him, but Salieri lived to see his own music become entirely out of style, while Mozart was still venerated. If he bore any resentment or regret, it would have come in those late years, long after Mozart was gone.

Also featured on the show will be works by Leopold Mozart, who lived to 1787 but stopped composing long before to focus on the prodigal careers of his children, and such other contemporaries of Mozart as Ignaz Pleyel and Muzio Clementi. Pleyel is remembered mainly as a piano manufacturer while Clementi is remembered for his piano exercises, but both wrote some music worthy of hearing.

Howard's Day Off airs live Saturday mornings at 5am-7am HST on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku and KANO Hilo, and streams on http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org. Max Cacas of Washington D.C. founded the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook.