Dennis Lee’s Unbelievable Journey – Part 2: His Early Entrepreneurial Experiences

Idealism and the East Coast was a difficult fit.

When Dennis hobnobbed with the Eastern Oligarchy, his heroic tendencies saw him make a deathbed pledge to an aristocratic woman to protect her daughter and her inheritance from her estranged father. Dennis had the choice of either adopting or marrying her, and he chose marriage. At about the same time, he lost his job at Sears and pursued his Utopian visions by starting a home-improvement company with his brother and a master craftsman. Dennis began learning about the entrepreneurial world the hard way, with some botched jobs and scrambling to survive.

He was just getting his head above water when the Oil Crisis hit. The 1973-1974 Oil Crisis ended the Postwar Boom, which is humanity’s most prosperous era, although it was largely confined to the West, especially the USA. Construction companies folded across the USA during that crisis, and his supplier illegally repossessed the materials from the site of Dennis’s job, which put him out of business. A deposit from the customer where the supplies were seized was canceled, and suddenly Dennis’s bank account was overdrawn and checks began bouncing. He had an infant daughter who was born prematurely and who never left the hospital during her short life, the ordeal ended his marriage, and he got intentionally bad legal advice and pled guilty to fraud because those checks bounced. His business failed, his marriage ended, and his daughter died all around the same time. When Dennis discovered how his attorney had deceived him, Dennis tried to withdraw his plea, but the court refused and that guilty plea haunts Dennis to this day.

In the aftermath of that disaster, Dennis went into a room for days and essentially did automatic writing (a form of channeling) and came out with a business plan for an idealist business that would give the consumer a voice in the marketplace. He named it United Community Services (“UCS”). New Jersey was not exactly the best place to start an idealistic business. There were mobsters in every town, looking to muscle in on businesses. Dennis founded UCS with nothing other than his talent. He soon began making waves and the Mob began trying to muscle in. He threw a mobster down a stairwell and survived a hit attempt in a way that he earned the Mob’s respect, and they left him alone (at least the Jersey Mob), being the culture of honor that it is. It was not just the Mob, but his business associates soon tried to steal the business, which was the first of many times.

During the middle of his UCS effort he met an idealistic young woman, Alison, who soon became his wife. They lived in the back of their office for months, Dennis suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and could not walk, they literally starved, and other hardships. It was during those days when Dennis had something like a “Road to Damascus” experience. While a child, his mother took him to many fire-and-brimstone Sunday sermons during their migrant farmworker lives, but Dennis did not believe in it. That voice in his head I think began the process, but one day while debating Utopian ideas, he was overcome with the idea that the people could not govern themselves and they needed something like a “benevolent dictator,” and he realized that the Bible was true. From that moment onward he became a fanatical, literalist, Christian. That is not my trip, but I can see how it happened with Dennis, and Alison, a Jew, went along with it. Soon they were traveling to Israel, with accompanying paranormal events. Dennis had the zeal of a new Christian, but his idealistic business was failing and he tried to give it to Pat Robertson. Dennis had quite a vision for his company, and Robertson invested in the company before his attorneys thought that Dennis’s program looked like a pyramid scheme (it wasn’t), and pulled out. That was the end of UCS. The year was around 1976 or 1977, I believe.

Before the Oil Crisis, energy conservation was not much of a concept in the USA. Homes were not insulated and their heating systems were not very efficient. And why would they be, when energy was so cheap? Gasoline was about 30 cents a gallon (which was really worth about $30,000 a gallon, as far as the benefit that humanity received). Americans suddenly began to understand the virtues of energy conservation, and people began insulating their homes. Foam insulation was a cheap way to insulate a home, and Dennis got involved.

At the time, the foam-insulation business was at the craftsman stage. The installer was a man with a hose, bucket, and foam mix. With a setup like that, there was no quality control. Poorly mixed foam (urea-formaldehyde) could off-gas and harm the residents. Dennis’s genius came through again. He soon devised a method to industrialize the process, with computer-mixed foam that was injected into a home’s walls with a “battlewagon” that could insulate a neighborhood in a day. Dennis always thought big like that. The problem with thinking big like that was that soon, here came the Mob once again, his business partners continually tried to steal the business, and the fiberglass insulation interests felt threatened, and Dennis got his first taste of organized suppression from energy interests, and a newspaper called him the “con man of the year.” They came at him from all directions, to steal or suppress it. Just after some mobsters muscled in, and just before they were going to break his legs, Dennis became paralyzed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome. They were destitute, with a new baby, and Dennis was treated at a VA hospital because of his veteran’s status. But the VA staff nearly killed Dennis three times through their negligence and Dennis is paraplegic to this day because of it. The VA killed my father in-law through its negligence. The VA is the hospital of last resort for veterans.

When Dennis had recovered enough so that he could get around by wheelchair, he tried getting back into the energy conservation business. Dennis mounted a mall show with energy-conservation equipment, and as a favor to a friend he had an exhibit of a solar system. Dennis considered solar systems to be scams (they largely were), and put that solar system in a dark corner. One man became interested in that system and kept pestering Dennis about it. Dennis tried to interest the man in other energy technologies, but the man kept coming back and wanting to talk about that system. The year was 1980, I believe.

Finally, Dennis had enough and asked the man if he was willing to pay $12,000 for it (half of my father’s annual salary a few years earlier), hoping that that would send him away. The man replied that if it worked like he thought it would, he would. That got Dennis’s attention. It was like no other solar system on Earth, and the next chapter of Dennis’s life began to unfold. Dennis had no idea what he was in for.