Thomas H. Greco, Jr. was born on 9th October 1936. I first met Tom in Zurich shortly before his fiftieth birthday in September 1986. He looked to be in his late thirties at the time. Indeed it was not until a few weeks before 9/11 when we were holidaying together in the English West Country that I discovered his true age. Until then I had assumed anybody looking as trim and fit would be 40 something in the 90s and hit 50 around 2000.

My first memory of becoming intellectually conscious of the shifting nature of Age and Olding during the course of my lifetime was when I started taking myself seriously as a writer. I follow Aristotle’s maxim that ‘to learn how to do anything do it’. But now I became forensic in my approach to the World of Letters.

I had always realized that a novel must have a beginning, an end and a voice (first person or narrator). I am not a Creative Writing Course person…my ambitions are to be self-taught. But having discovered Beginning, End and Voice I then discovered that novelists hide much more than they reveal. A few fleeting episodes is the reader’s lot.

In a New York interview in the 1930s Hilaire Belloc remarked…to the surprise of many of his contempories...that P.G. Wodehouse was the best writer of his generation. Belloc may have had one eye on his American hosts as Wodehouse was very big in the States at the time...famous as a lyricist on Broadway. But such high praise was enough for me. Before starting Creaky Tales I curled up with Wodehouse in general and Psmith in particular.

Writers like Wodehouse…and Dickens…produced much of their early output for the weeklies with several of their best books written as serials. Far from being a problem this regular production under deadline pressures seems to have been a tremendous boon.

Delivering a thousand words a day for my daily weblog this year provides a similar discipline. Once acquired the skill can be applied to other situations. My Pug Due Diligence was rewarded with pages of notes and complete sections copied verbatim by hand into my Writer’s Journal. Wodehouse letters to an old friend and fellow writer are masterpieces about the writer’s craft and profession.

As part of my apprenticeship I also revisited the novelists of my youth like Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, John Buchan and Nevil Shute where I discovered that J.M. Barrie had weaved his magic spell on Tom and myself… not the full Peter Pan of perpetual youth but the trick of slowing down the Olding.

Both of us look like reaching the age of Shute’s retired heroes twenty five years late…in our mid-70s instead of our early-50s. To make our mark upon the world we have the 50-years between 25 and 75 whereas they had the 40 years between 15 and 55.

This new male reality about work and age has practical consequences. I no longer hand my male friends a 60th birthday card but buy them a 40th card and tell them they have a classic choice…Double or Quits. Eighty is the new Four Score Years and Ten…with a healthy ninth decade a Life Bonus. Good if you’re lucky enough to get it.

Four years ago Tom Greco sent me an update of his work priorities for 2003 which were ‘demystifying money, banking and finance by showing how flaws in the existing structures cause so much unnecessary suffering’. His method would be ‘through further research, writing, teaching and speaking; through collaborative activities involving the design and implementation of new exchange mechanisms at the local, regional, and global levels; and by promoting cooperative non-exploitative approaches to finance and economics’.

Like all good guys Tom works from a post-office box under an Ownwork label...Community Information Resource Center in Tucson Arizona.

One of Tom Greco’s projects was a new website called ReinventingMoney.com to provide ‘access to the best ideas and information sources for transcending the limitations and dysfunctions of conventional money and banking structures’.

My contribution to the website will be the digital text of Usury And The Church Of England by the Rev. Henry Swabey promised for Tom’s seventieth birthday and posted to my History of Usury blogsite in readiness for its reinventing money weblink.

Sabey’s thirteen available chapters are: I. Scriptures; II. Early Church; III. Medieval Church; IV. Church of England; V. Church Mints; VI. Just and Stable Price; VII. Pannus Mihi Panis; VIII. Usury Legalized; IX. Final Protest: X. Usury Moralized; XI. 18th Century; XII. After Waterloo; XIII. Recovery.

In 1989 I arranged for the 16-year old daughter of a Swedish colleague to 'edit and supervise' the production of The Rise & Fall of the Swedish Green Party (1982-1997). One thing this involved was spending a day in the Assembly Rooms on Glastonbury High Street putting together pages on the ‘good enterprises supported by William Shepherd’ which began with the J.B.Priestley quote ‘The merchant did as much as the scholar to bring in the New Age’ and included five pages describing ‘some of William Shepherd’s good companions and their endeavours’.

One page has extracts from my 1986 pamphlet on Ayn Rand’s writings in Atlas Shrugged about Money as the Source of All Virtue. It ends: ‘For news of the North Atlantic Economic Forum, information on the Alternative Economist Grapevine and course readings and advice on the theoretical and practical work underway throughout the world on Money, Debt, Usury and Currency contact Thomas H. Greco, Jr.

It was good advice back in 1989…and it is even better advice in the fall of 2006. Happy Birthday Tom. America is blessed by Americans like you. Have a good one!