Mild-mannered Science Teacher

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night with a great idea,

only to forget it completely in the morning? Not Reggie Lee; he traveled

to the other side of the world on a middle-of-the-night idea. Lying in

bed one night in California in 1992, he realized there was no product

(short of a piece of the Berlin Wall) to commemorate the end of the

Cold War. United States citizens had survived forty years of Thermo-

nuclear Anxiety, believing they were only moments from being vaporized,

and now Russia, the great archenemy, was dismantling their nuclear

missiles. Lee could buy Russian missile scrape, melt it down and use

it to make refrigerator magnets. What could be more appropriate than a

Cold War Souvenir to stick on your Frigidaire?

For twenty fours years, Lee and his wife Sharon have alternated

between teaching at schools in California, and international schools in

Australia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Peru. Wherever they are, the Lees

spend their vacation visiting the countries next door, sometimes traveling

first class and other times overland by local bus or train as they did

through Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and Nepal.

Back in California, after his midnight idea, Lee got on the phone to

the Washington DC On-Site Inspection Agency to find out how to go about

buying Russian missile scrap. The agency gave him all the clearances he

needed. By coincidence, Sharon happened to be teaching French to the

daughter of a Russian paper manufacturer, Gorgy Axelrod. Lee wrote, asking

Axelrod to be his liaison, and bought himself a ticket to Moscow. Once

there he traveled to Novgorod, south of St. Petersburg, where the missiles

were being torn down. Lee bought one ton of scrap, which yielded four

hundred pounds of aluminum once it had been melted down to extract the

titanium and other exotic metals used in the missile for strength.

The next step was to stamp the medallions. Lee hired the services of

Linenenameler, a Russian firm that for years had produced propaganda

pins for the Communists and was now quite low on business. After a few

arguments about the design on the face of the medal (Lee wanted the old

Russian flag, they wanted the new one, he wanted the Cold War cross, they

said no religious symbols), they agreed to imprint just the Cold War Star

and Cold War campaign medallion. Business was so bad in Russia that Lee

had to pay the firm 50% up front before it could begin work.

Lee found Russia throwing open its doors to world business (foreign

entrepreneurs were pouring into the country, all with boxes of Scotch

whiskey and US luxury items to open doors and close deals), but smothering

it with heavy bureaucracy. When Lee made money transfers to his liaison,

Axelrod had to immediately hand carry the money to another bank because

the Mafia in the first bank would begin to extort from anyone with a high

bank balance. On the plane home, Lee sat next to a Wal-Mart executive who

had unloaded his merchandise from the ship, pushed it through St. Petersburg

customs, shipped it by train to Moscow, only to be paralyzed by the Mafia

of Moscow city customs. He had given up on Russia, and was abandoning

eighty forty-ton containers in Moscow.

But Lee hung in there to get his eight thousand medals shipped to the

US. Other ideas were bubbling in his head. Thinking of swords beaten

into plowshares, he had an artist design a garden trowel, with a sword

hilt for the handle, to made from the scrap metal. "What could be more

ironic starting your American spring garden with a trowel made from a

Russian missile?", he asks. "It would be one missile that made it to

the American soil."