.

Tom's life story in a nutshell
.

The part-passenger, part-cargo Italian merchant ship m.v. Piave is crossing
the Red Sea, heading to the Indian Ocean, and my mother-to-be is having the
mother-of-all-seasickness-attacks. Deep inside her womb, the 2-month-old
fetus is steadfastly growing---oblivious to all that is going on aboard this
vessel, as it heads toward its destination of Mombasa, Kenya's lifeline port
on the Indian Ocean.

The journey had started in Zlin, Czechoslovakia. It was April 1939. Hitler's expanding Third Reich had already occupied and annexed the Czechoslovak lands. Dad was an employee of the Bata Shoe Company, based in Zlin, and
Bata was sending him and Mom to British East Africa, to help set up a new
shoe factory in Limuru, Kenya. They had taken the train from Zlin and made
their way south to the Mediterranean, via Vienna and Budapest, to the Italian
port of Trieste. There the m.v. Piave awaited them and some 30 additional passengers. But this was no pleasure cruise. The 7,000-ton vessel was
laden with war weapons, hidden inside barrels and destined for the Red Sea
ports of Italian Abyssinia in the lead-up to World War II.

Leaving Trieste on April 25, they sailed to Messina and Catania in Sicily,
across the Mediterranean to Egypt's Port Said, through the Suez Canal,
and into the Red Sea to unload the ship's cargo in Massawa and Assab
(ports in today's Eritrea). Next port of call was the British colony of Aden,
then south to Mogadishu, crossing the equator, and finally arriving in
Mombasa in early-June. That evening, invisible me and my expectant
parents took the 14-hour train journey to Kenya's capital, Nairobi, nestled
5,270 feet above sea level and a touch below the Equator. And there I
was born, just as the Thirties were fading into history.

Thus, the care label on my birthday suit reads: Made in Czechoslovakia;
Sole Importers: Muller & Partner, Nairobi, Kenya; Hand Wash Only; Lay
Flat to Dry. It should be obvious that travel is in my blood; for, even as an
unborn mortal, I had been transported, unwashed, through eleven countries.

Kenya grew on me and my childhood memories are as sweet as the ripened pawpaw fruit growing in our backyard. At home, we spoke Czech, English and Swahili.

It wasn't long before I was traveling again. World War II had ended and Bata was sending my father to Iran to establish a presence for the shoe company in that country. Dad did not want to go. He longed deeply to return to his native Czechoslovakia, but destiny had other plans:
he would endure an absence of 41 years from his native land. Now, we were leaving Kenya for good, and Cairo was our first destination on the way out of post-war, colonial Africa.

A month later, we landed in Baghdad and then we reached Tehran. So, in July 1946, we began anew in the land of roses and nightingales. I recall feeling the heaviness and melancholy of being a stranger in a nation so foreign to my boyish experience, and missing my native Africa. My seven-year-old sensibilities were shaken by the backwardness of this country, made even sharper by its contrast to civilized, British-ruled Kenya. Mother hated the land; I hated it; Dad came to love it. As it turned out, he and Mom ended up staying 30 years.

By 1948, Czechoslovakia had fallen to the Communists. Dad was ordered by the Czecho-slovak embassy in Tehran to hand over our passports and apply for the new, socialist issue. As a fearless conservative and staunch anticommunist, Dad would take none of that nonsense. A loss of our Czechoslovak citizenship was preferable to the idea that we would be expatriates of a communist state. So in 1950, he applied to the International Refugee Organization and officially we became refugees.

Being a refugee in Iran was not an ideal residency status. Our movements
were highly restricted and even our annual vacation trips to the Caspian
Sea, a four-hour drive north of Tehran, required police permits. Five years
on, we became Iranian citizens and the stateless refugee status became
a part of family history.

My two siblings and I attended the Tehran Community School, run by the
American Presbyterian Mission in Iran "for English-speaking children." It
was a continually reconstituted salad bowl of overseas and privileged
students---children of perpetually mobile foreign diplomats, American
military personnel, European contractors, White Russian emigres, the
Eurocentric and old-moneyed Persian upper crust, and Armenians and
Iraqi Jews striving to obtain a middle-class foothold for their offspring.
But the quality of my own, mostly American, teachers was spotty and the
teaching often mediocre. Nonetheless, they taught me to read, write and
count, and that's as good as it got in post-war Iran.

As I finished off Grade 10 (two years short of high school graduation), Dad decided it was time to ship young Thomas off to England to get a practical (read: technical) education, in order to groom him for a future as an industrialist. University was too esoteric for his way
of thinking. So, 1956 saw my arrival at London Academy, a private preparatory school for
the "O"-level certificate that allowed entry into a technical college. And, in 1957, that's
exactly where I landed: Bata Technical College, in East Tilbury, Essex---a breeding
ground for young Bata hopefuls who would one day turn their shoemaking expertise into
deferential and dutiful service to Thomas Bata's great and global fiefdom. I specialized in rubber technology, thus knew exactly how to produce rubber boots, hot water bottles,
garden hose and condoms. It didn't take me long to conclude that I wouldn't be a rubber technologist for the rest of my variety-driven life.

In 1959, I graduated from Bata college and was promptly assigned to full-time shift work
on the shoe production lines at the company's flagship factory in East Tilbury. This was
Bata's idea of on-the-job training, in preparation for an overseas posting, but felt more
like military boot camp. Those grueling hours, alternating weekly between day shift and
night shift and sweating in front of electrically-heated presses to make rubber-soled
slippers were not my idea of a challenging career---nor a well-paid job. I withstood this experiment in mental and physical brutality for exactly two months.

Then, I packed my meagre belongings and, with zero savings, said good-bye
to the Bata empire, and headed back to Iran. To my tearful, English girlfriend
at the East Tilbury train station, I promised I would be back in a year or two.
That promise was hopelessly shattered; I would not set foot again in East
Tilbury for 49 years. Five months later, I was swallowed up in a genuine boot
camp. As a 20-year-old Iranian national, there was no escaping two years of
military service in the Shah's army.

Of the 24 months spent as a lowly foot soldier in the Imperial Iranian Army,
only the first six were hell in the desert. Basic training meant being
subservient to sergeants with primitive notions of discipline, marching drills
in the punishing summer sun, eating sand with my stew at meal breaks
during target practice on the firing range, and teaching illiterate Iranian
soldiers how to read and write in Persian. But, for the remaining 18 months,
I was lucky to be plucked out of this situation by an astute American sergeant,
serving with the U.S. military advisory group in Iran, who needed my language
skills at the United States Armed Forces Officers' Open Mess---the posh
American Officers' Club in North Tehran.

Life after the army did not bring much freedom. As a rubber technologist, I couldn't find a job and
so I spent the next ten months playing bit parts in the Little Theatre of Tehran's English-language
stage productions, hoping that an employment opportunity would eventually surface somewhere.
It did---in the desert town of Ahwaz, in Iran's southern province of Khuzestan. There, I began work
as a paper-shuffling junior clerk for the organization that was building the huge Dez Dam, a
project that was modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority. Dad soon rescued me from this
dismal job by offering me the chance to run his own company in Tehran, while he was away
working in Europe for three years. Bata was no longer in his life. And that's how I went from
useless rubber technologist, to useful businessman, in the blink of an eye.

Iran in the 1960s was a delightful place to live and I came to love the land and its people. But
eight years later, I was traveling again. By now, I was married to a German from Düsseldorf and
we had a 6-month-old daughter, Monica, born in Tehran. Having lived 22 years in a land of hand-
woven rugs, rosewater-flavored ice cream, and loudspeaker-amplified calls to prayer wailing
from minarets, I was leaving Iran for good and emigrating to Canada. We arrived in Vancouver
on July 20, 1971, British Columbia's 100th birthday. Again I struggled to find a job. I ended up as
a traveling salesman peddling restaurant and hotel food-service equipment, and enrolled in the
Master of Business Administration degree program at Simon Fraser University. It was a three-
year, evening curriculum which meant I would be working by day and studying by night. It was
also a huge turning point in my life.

Upon graduation---and spurred on by my mentor, American professor
Dr. I. Robert Andrews---I decided that I was destined to be an academic.
In 1975, I was admitted to the doctoral program in the business school at
the University of British Columbia. And in 1982 I had my Ph.D. in hand.
Dad had died in Vancouver a month before my doctoral graduation
ceremony. By this time, I was an Assistant Professor at Concordia
University, in Montreal. Academic life seemed to suit me well; I loved the
teaching and I loved the research. My research specialty was consumer psychology and it opened up to me the whole gamut of human behavior.

Soon, I was exhibiting the qualities of so many academics in fields and
disciplines that are alive and progressive: these professors are godless,
rootless people. I had moved to Ontario's University of Guelph and soon
after, to McMaster University in Ontario. There, I stayed for nine years.

But the rootlessness remained deep-seated and ever present. Ontario's harsh winters were getting to my bones, sinews and soul: each November, I would
start that inescapable slide into a mild form of depression called Seasonal Affective Disorder. Six months of cold, grey, sunless winter each year were
making me long for kinder climes. That chance came to me, one November
day in 1993, while I was on sabbatical leave in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I spotted an ad for a professorial position at a university in Gold Coast,
Queensland, Australia. I applied for the position half-seriously, wondering
whether an academic post in such a faraway land would suit my experience
and temperament.

They asked me to fly down for the interview and I fell in love with Gold Coast.
Its location on the Pacific, close to the Tropic of Capricorn, reminded me of my childhood vacations in Malindi, Kenya on the enchanting Indian Ocean coast.
One month later, I received an offer of employment and that is how I ended up
at Griffith University's Gold Coast campus.

By now, I was divorced and in the second-hand-bachelor stage of life.
But the dating game was strange and unwieldy and I found it rather
frustrating and unpleasant. Throughout this period of uncharacteristic
desperation, I shied away from the dating agencies and left myself at
the mercy of random encounters.

Yet, one blind date had some interesting consequences and a
Japanese connection. Miyuki, whose first and family names translate
into Beautiful-snow-at-the-end-of-the-rice-paddy was a Japanese
expatriate residing in Gold Coast and making a living as a company
director in the commercial property management business. We dated
for a year, then I married her on the Iranian New Year's Day, March 21.
Our son Tommi von Manner Muller was born twelve days later, on the
ancient Iranian fete of Sizdah-be-Dar, the auspicious 13th day of the
Persian New Year.

Tommi is thirteen now and attending Grade 8 at A.B. Paterson College. Miyuki became an aged-care nurse, not so much to nurse me, but to dispense her boundless passion for helping others. Mom, at 92, lives in Vancouver, her amazing travels now a fading tribute to her far-reaching dreams as a young girl living in the British Mandate of Palestine, where my father had met her. Monica became a
lawyer, still lives in Vancouver and has a family of her own. And what became of
me? I retired from academic life in 2004 and now I obey what my genes have instructed: I indulge in hard-adventure travel and write about it later. Sometimes, I
am away from home for months at a time, exploring the Planet's most isolated
and interesting corners. Nurtured at the easy Equator, I now pine for the punishing Poles. They act as inescapable magnets pulling me to the Earth's extremities.

But I must close this life story by bringing it back to where it all began. In 1989, as
my 50th birthday approached, I retraced my parents' 1939 journey from Zlin, Czechoslovakia to Nairobi, Kenya. I could not find a cargo ship sailing to Africa from Trieste, but I did book a passage on a container ship sailing from Marseille. So, I started my nostalgic journey in Zlin (the Bata factories there are long gone, thanks
to the rampant globalization of manufacturing), made my way down to Vienna and
by train to Italy, boarded the cargo vessel in Marseille and sailed, past Sicily,
across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, and down the Red Sea. After making a stop in Djibouti, we continued south to Mombasa. There, I disembarked and took the 14-hour train ride to Nairobi. It was almost exactly the passage made
by my parents and unborn me, fifty years earlier. Only---this time---I was a paying passenger.

.