I gotta go down on Monday and visit my friend [Name]. [Name] is a native of Moscow. And the story on [Name] is that his parents, his father was an engineering professor and his mother was an economics professor at a university in Moscow. And as a young boy, they thought that he should learn how to speak English. So he had taken English classes.
And when he went through school, and he finished getting his doctorate degree in engineering, he wanted to go to an English — to get a job in an English-speaking country. And somewhere, he found a directory and he wrote letters to everybody in that directory in, I think, Australia, New Zealand, England, and the United States, of course. And I received one of those letters. And I was involved in selling my product all over the world and the Russian market looked like it was just going to be — start becoming available to the world. And so, I wrote him and answered his letter and said, “Hey, if you ever come to the United States, I sure would be interested in talking to you.”
And I got a letter back from him saying, well, he wasn’t — wouldn’t be able to come to the United States unless he had an invitation. And, you know, that he would need an invitation from me to be able to come to the United States. So I wrote back to him and said, “Well, I’m gonna be at a trade show in Warsaw, Poland. And if you could come over to Warsaw, Poland, we could maybe work something out.” So, I went to the trade show in Warsaw and [Name] came over there to visit me. And we made a deal that I was going to pick up his cost of coming to — he was gonna meet me in Paris, at a trade show in Paris. And then after the Paris show, he could accompany me to the United States, and he would attend a trade show in the United States and he would be living with me at my home. And after, he’d have a six months tourist visa, in effect an invitation to visit the trade show in Las Vegas.
So that’s what we did, he — I picked up his airline ticket and came to Paris. Got him another ticket into the US and he lived with me for, what the agreement was was six months. So after about four months I said, “Well, [Name], we gotta take a look at getting you a return ticket to Moscow.” And he says, “No, I don’t wanna go back to Moscow.” So then fortunately, with him having — and his working on his doctorate degree, had some articles that were published in an international magazine and we got him declared an exceptional person and he got permission to work in the United States. So that’s the story on [Name]. So he’s been like an adopted son to me.