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Nonactuarial Pursuits of Casualty Actuaries
Fulfilling a Dream—One Park at a Time by Brian D. Haney
Time is a scarce commodity—perhaps the scarcest. More and more, I find myself trying to carve out time to actually "live" my life. You scrounge an afternoon here, a weekend there, a week at the beach in summer…sometimes you piece together so little time that you wonder if you will, in all your years, fit as much life into your life as you did in college. Don't you wish you could just take the summer off to see a baseball game in every major league park in the country? Well why don't you? At least one other CAS member has!
Yup. A certain ACAS spent the summer of 1996 visiting every major league stadium in the U.S. and hitting some minor tourist attractions along the way…like the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore.
As embarrassing as it is for your beloved writer to think that his college years contained more life than the forward slope of his mortality curve, it is worse to think that there is an ACAS who fit more into 60 days than I will eke out of my 40s.
In fact, not only has he "been there" and "done that" but he wrote a book about it so he would remember not to do it again (a strategy he seems to share with Monica Lewinsky). Should you read the book, which will be published shortly, you will learn in much greater detail than I can present here about a trip that is fairly atypical. But more on that later.
The idea for a trip to every baseball stadium is in the ACAS's own words "un-unique." In fact he ran into others doing the same thing while at a Giants game. People do it with some frequency, although doing the whole trip in a car is something only an actuary would do.
In 60 days, this actuary went 23,000 miles by car—a '94 Tercel nonetheless—and saw every park in the country, as well as four minor league parks. The first pitch was on May 25 at Camden Yards, and the last was at San Francisco's 3Com Park. In between, this ACAS camped out in the Black Hills of South Dakota and visited the annual motorcycle rally at Sturgis. He also saw Graceland, drove up California's Pacific Coast Highway, and went to Yellowstone. Basically a life's worth's of vacations in 60 days—with baseball in between.
It simply screams for a National Lampoon's Actuarial Vacation. Near as I can tell, no disaster befell him on his trip, other than his scientific evidence that for a long trip, no amount of tapes is enough, and that Shirley Jones in Oklahoma! is just as annoying the 18th time. Apparently, he reached pretty deep in his car cassette "rotation" on the long legs of the trip.
I asked him, "Why baseball?" He indicated that it was primarily because he is a baseball fanatic, but that this odyssey also allowed him to do a summer trip. I can see now that a trip to see a hockey game in every arena in North America might get a bit unpleasant. I suggested soccer might have been an alternative, but this ACAS thinks watching soccer is like watching paint dry…I forgave him his blasphemy.
Since this journey is something I'll probably never do, I thought this ACAS might have some words of wisdom to impart to us, the less adventurous. He didn't disappoint. In his own words (because they are better than any paraphrasing) he said: "Take risks and follow your fear; the things you're scared of are usually the ones that make you grow—and wear sunscreen."
Having made an undeniably extraordinary journey, the ACAS is now settling down to more mundane matters, like a career and a family; in fact, he's expecting his first child in January. If you want more details on his trip, they will be in his book published on fatbrain.com. Or you can ask Claude Penland yourself.
By the way, Claude is the internet manager at the recruiting firm, D.W. Simpson—even his job is non-actuarial.
We at The Actuarial Review congratulate Claude on his impending fatherhood and remind him that he owes us for leaving out his colorful comments about Cleveland fans! Oh…one last thing—Go Phillies!