It always strikes me as something of an irony that the brightest holidays of the year fall in the deepest part of the darkest season. They come when the days are the shortest, the clouds the thickest, the weather (at least in Chicago), the worst. And yet it is at precisely this time when we celebrate the happier human emotions of family, love, and charity and somewhat arbitrarily declare a "new" year.

Last month I attended a meeting in Mexico City sponsored by CIATEQ, a quasi-governmental organization in Mexico, which has as one of its aims the encouragement of the growth of the gear industry in Mexico. The purpose of the meeting was to provide a catalyst among the attendees to form a Mexican equivalent of AGMA and to encourage an alliance with AGMA. Joe Franklin, the Executive Director of AGMA, Bill Boggess, the President, Vice-President Ray Haley, and I were among the few Americans at the meeting.

"Opportunity is the start of great enterprises." said the Greet statesman Demosthenes, and what was true 2300 years ago is no less true now. Plenty of opportunities which can grow into great - and successful - enterprises are waiting for us right now if we only have the foresight to take advantage of them.

About the time we were midst of planning the editorial content for this issue of Gear Technology, we, like everyone else in the metro area, found ourselves diverted by the Great Chicago Flood. For a week, it seemed to be all we thought about. Then the tunnels dried out, the stores reopened, and we all went back to work.

It's a buyer's market these days on solutions for our country's economic problems. Everybody with access to a t.v. camera or a publisher is telling us what we need to do. Usually their solution involves either buying their book or tape or electing them to office.

Of timing is crucial in the successful implementation of good ideas, then now is the time to reinstate a good idea that fell into disfavor in the mid-1980s. Now is the time to include the investment tax credit as part of whatever inevitable tax structure tinkering is going to take place during this election year.

Next year will be the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' famous "discovery" of America. Poor Columbus has fallen on hard times of late, what with revisionist historians smacking their lips over his more notable failures and reminding us that American natives have a vastly different point of view on this Great American Success Story. But before we relegate the Great Navigator to the scrap heap of trashed-over heros, let's take one last look at some of the positive lessons to be learned from the Columbus experience - ones that could be instructive to our current situation in the American gear industry.

A few months ago at the AGMA management seminar, I was surprised by the feverish note taking that went on at a presentation on marketing. The sight reminded me that while many of us in the gear industry are good engineers, designers, and mangers, we are often not as familiar - or comfortable - with less concrete concepts, such as marketing.

October is the time. Detroit is the place. AGMA Gear Expo '91 is the event. Cobo Center in downtown Detroit is where you will want to be in October if you have any interest in gear products, manufacturing, or research.

Pride. Awe. Relief. Admiration. These were some of the emotions with which I, like most Americans, greeted the end of the Persian Gulf War. I was proud of our country for saying it would do a job and then doing it with a minimum of loss and a maximum of effectiveness; I was awed by the terrifying efficiency of our weapons and relieved that our casualties were so light; and I was filled with admiration at the skill with which one of the most complex logistical military operations of the century was carried out.