In the days following Melissa’s disappearance, Bain Capital — whose partners and founders included Mitt Romney — all but shut down as the firm mobilized its resources to assist in the efforts to find Robert Gay’s daughter. As the New York Times reported at the time: As the days went by and her parents, Robert and Lynette Gay, grew more and more frantic, they finally told Mr. Gay’s partners at the private equity-investment firm Bain Capital. A few hours later, executives of the Boston-based firm were on the shuttle to New York for a huge volunteer effort, harnessing corporate manpower throughout the city and immersing professional baby boomers in a youth party culture many knew nothing about.

“These are investment bankers, lawyers and accountants, many of whom are out there in jackets and ties and wool suits trying to talk to kids with spiked hair and nose rings who are young enough to be our kids,” said Marc B. Wolpow, a managing director at Bain Capital, who was helping coordinate the effort. “We basically learned this thing overnight. You’d be amazed.”

Bain Capital’s partners closed down the firm and drew on friendships and connections to find volunteers for the search. R.R. Donnelly, the firm’s printer, printed more than 300,000 fliers bearing Ms. Gay’s picture and last known whereabouts. Duane Reade, a drugstore chain in which Bain Capital is an investor, had clerks at 52 stores insert fliers in shopping bags. Price Waterhouse, which does the firm’s accounting, sent nearly 100 volunteers to distribute the posters, and Goldman Sachs, Bankers Trust and Morgan Stanley dispatched more than 60 people.

Command centers to dispatch volunteers and get in touch with the press were set up at the Marriott Hotel at La Guardia Airport, the Donnelly offices and the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. Volunteers with cellular phones fanned out to clubs like the Limelight and the Tunnel, the Lollapolooza concert at Downing Stadium on Randalls Island, parties in Tompkins Square and Central Park, to Madison Square Garden and the Port Authority Terminal. News accounts of the time made mention of the role Mitt Romney and other partners at Bain Capital played in helping to find their managing director’s daughter. The Boston Globe, for example, reported that: When Bain Capital Inc. executives learned the 14-year-old daughter of a business partner was missing, they responded by closing the Boston company’s office and flew about 50 employees to New York City to look for the girl themselves.

Yesterday, in their first day of searching, they pounded the pavement, plastered the city with 200,000 fliers and quizzed teen-agers at concerts and parks.

But as of late last night, Melissa Gay was still nowhere to be found.

“Our children are what life is all about,” said W. Mitt Romney, founder and managing partner of Bain Capital. “Everything else takes a back seat.”

But Bob Gay just couldn’t sit back and watch.

[H]e walked the streets of Manhattan looking for his blonde daughter, who was last seen wearing a blue or red-striped shirt and baggy tan pants.

Gay, who has worked for Bain for eight years, kept his ordeal to himself, confiding only in Romney.

But Romney decided to tell the other 11 managing directors, and they decided that finding a missing daughter was more important than operating a $1 billion investment firm.

The executives decided not only to give their time but their money, paying all expenses for the search for the fifth of Gay’s seven children.

That night, 16 employees flew to New York, turned a function room of the Laguardia Marriott Hotel into a “war room,” and got printing giant R.R. Donnelly to print 200,000 fliers with a color picture of Melissa. They also hired a private investigator and set up an 800-number hot line.

Another 40 employees caught an early morning shuttle yesterday, and later were joined by about 250 colleagues from other Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs, Price Waterhouse and Bankers Trust.

“Most of us have children,” said Stephen Pagliuca, 44, a Bain managing director with four children. “That’s the most important thing in our lives. It wasn’t even a question. We just decided to do it.” Melissa was eventually found six days after she disappeared due to a tip obtained when a teenaged boy who saw one of the televised “Help us find Melissa” appeals called 911: A Connecticut teen-ager who was missing for six days after she took a train to New York City was reunited with her family after the police found her at a New Jersey home where she was staying.

Melissa Gay, 14, met her parents, Robert and Lynette, at the police station in Montville, N.J., at 2:30 A.M. and returned home to Ridgefield, Conn.

We haven’t really talked to her yet,” Mr. Gay said from the Pierre Hotel. “We just gave her hugs and brought her home.”

Mr. Gay, a partner in the private investment firm Bain Capital, launched a huge search with the help of business partners to help locate his daughter, whom the family had not heard from since [the previous] Saturday.

Melissa left her parents’ home that day, took a train to New York and never returned after attending a rave concert on Randalls Island. While at the concert, her father said, she took the drug Ecstasy and then “wandered the city.” During her wandering, her father said, she met a young man who took her to his parents’ home in Towaco, N.J.

The young man, whose name was not released, kept her in the home without his parents’ knowledge, the police said. Officers went to the home in response to several telephone calls, but the police would not give further details. The Montville police said no charges would be filed. In a followup article several months later, the Globe noted that Bain Capital’s partners had selected their search efforts on Melissa’s behalf as their top accomplishment of 1996: Last week, the partners of Boston’s Bain Capital Inc. drew up their annual list of accomplishments: Number one was the week they spent last July combing Manhattan in search of Melissa Gay, the missing 14-year-old daughter of one of the partners.

“It really overshadowed everything we did from a money standpoint,” said Mitt Romney, the Bain Capital founder who won the 1994 Massachusetts Republican Senate nomination partly on his reputation as a venture capital wiz. “The days and nights spent looking for Missy Gay were more valuable than some financial home runs that made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I mean, money is just money.”

The 15 Bain Capital partners chartered a plane to New York to search for the missing youngster among the thousands of abandoned children and runaways who congregate in Manhattan.

They didn’t find her themselves. She turned up in Montville, N.J. The Associated Press reported at the time that she was dazed from a disorienting dose of a drug taken at a rock concert.

Now back in school and fully recovered, Melissa and her parents are doing well, Romney said.

The partners, however, are still taking stock of their visit to the dark corners of New York, putting up posters and talking to runaways outside seedy nightclubs and peep shows. Romney said he can’t escape some of the images he carries with him from his week in the New York underworld.

“It was a shocker,” he said. “The number of lost souls was astounding.”

Romney said one partner still talks about a runaway he spoke with in search of information about Melissa.

“The girl asked, ‘Why are you looking for her?’ and he said, ‘Because her parents miss her,’” Romney said. “She replied, ‘I wish my parents missed me like that.’” In a 2002 Globe article, Robert Gay credited Mitt Romney with being instrumental in organizing the search for his daughter: In 1996, [Romney] helped Bain Capital partner Robert Gay find his 14-year-old daughter, who had disappeared after sneaking away to attend a rave in New York City. Gay, who had called Romney after several days away from the office, was flabbergasted when Romney hatched a plan to find her.

“It was the most amazing thing, and I’ll never forget this to the day I die,” Gay says. “What he did was literally close down an entire business. He basically galvanized an entire industry that just doesn’t do this, and got them all on the streets for 48 hours.”

With the Bain partners he brought from Boston and investment bankers they knew in New York, Romney set up elaborate search parties, mapping out territories of New York City and turning to a public relations firm for help. Within days, they’d been featured on TV news, and the teenager who had taken her home to Montauk, N.Y. — where she was shivering through detox after a massive dose of ecstasy — called hoping for a reward. Doctors told Gay she might not have lived another day.

“I’m not sure we would have gotten her back without him,” Gay says of Romney.

Verify it for yourself at Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/politics/romney/search.asp

THIS IS TRULY THOUGHT PROVOKING.

There was a chemistry professor in a large college that had some exchange students in the class.

One day while the class was in the lab, the professor noticed one young man, an exchange student, who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt. The professor asked the young man what was the matter.

The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country’s government and install a new communist regime.

In the midst of his story, he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked: “Do you know how to catch wild pigs?”

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line.

The young man said that it was no joke. “You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground.”

The pigs find it and begin to come every day to eat the free corn.”

“When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming.”

“When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence.”

“They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side.”

“The pigs, which are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat that free corn again.”

“You then slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd. Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom.”

“They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn.”

“They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.”

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening in America .

The government keeps pushing us toward Communism/Socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tax exemptions, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc.

While we continually lose our freedoms, just a little at a time.

One should always remember two truths:

There is no such thing as a free lunch and you can never hire someone to provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.

If you see that all of this wonderful government ‘help’ is a problem confronting the future of democracy in America , you might want to send this on to your friends.

If you think the free ride is essential to your way of life, then you will probably delete this email.

But God help you when the gate slams shut!

1. Name the five wealthiest people in the world.

2. Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.

3. Name the last five winners of the Miss America.

4. Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.

5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and actress.

6. Name the last decade’s worth of World Series winners.

How did you do?

The point is, none of us remember the headliners of yesterday. These are no second-rate achievers. They are the best in their fields. But the applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners.

Here’s another quiz. See how you do on this one:

1. List a few teachers who aided your journey through school.

2. Name three friends who have helped you through a difficult time.

3. Name five people who have taught you something worthwhile.

4. Think of a few people who have made you feel appreciated and special.

5. Think of five people you enjoy spending time with.

The lesson:

The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones that care .

The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.”

The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”

She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.

But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.

But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Remember: Don’t make old People mad. We don’t like being old in the first place, so it doesn’t take much to piss us off.

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart-ass young person.

Mr. Hope and Change wants to create a nation humbled; humiliated, casting-aside capitalism and individual freedoms for one where we the people are government controlled. This would be a system that genuflects mediocrity, steals personal aspiration and opportunity, and punishes those who strive to succeed.

A gallon of regular gasoline the day Obama was inaugurated was $1.79 on average in the U.S. Today that price is $3.59, a 100.6% increase. The number of food stamp recipients has risen since Obama took office from 31,983,716 to 43,200,878, a 35.1% jump. Long term unemployment soared 146.2% during the same 34 month period from 2,600,000 to 6,400,000. Staggering hope and change isn’t it?

American citizens living in poverty have risen 9.5% from 39,800,000 to 43,600,000, and the number of unemployed has jumped almost 25% from 11,616,000 to 14,485,000 as of August 31, 2011. The number of unemployed blacks has risen from 12.6% at the end of George Bush’s term to 15.8% today, a 25.4% increase, and finally, our national debt is up 43.2% from 10.627 trillion to 15,022 trillion.

Keep these figures in mind as we recount the number of firsts for this presidency:

First President to refuse to show a valid birth certificate.

First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.

First President to have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.

First President to preside over a cut to the credit rating of the United States.

First President to violate the War Powers Act.

First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

First President to defy a Federal Judges court order to cease implementing the Health Care Reform Law.

First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.

First President to spend a trillion dollars on shovel-ready jobs and later admit there was no such thing as shovel-ready jobs.

First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.

First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.

First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.

First President to demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.

First President to terminate America’s ability to put a man in space.

First President to encourage racial discrimination and intimidation at polling places.

First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.

First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.

First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly speak-out on the reasons for their rate increases.

First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state they are allowed to locate a factory.

First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).

First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.

First President to fire an inspector general of Ameri-corps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.

First President to appoint 45 Czars to replace elected officials in his office.

First President to golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office.

First President to hide his medical, educational and travel records.

First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.

First President to coddle American enemies while alienating Americas allies.

First President to go on multiple global apology tours.

First President to go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends, paid for by the taxpayer.

First President to refuse to wear the U.S. Flag lapel pin.

First President to have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.

First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000.00 a year at taxpayer expense.

First President to repeat the Holy Qur’an tells us, and openly admit the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.

Remember that 34 months of Obama we the people have accumulated national debt at a rate more than 27 times as fast as during the rest of our nation’s entire history, as the Obama’s plan their next extravagant vacation to the Indonesian Island nation of Bali.

Hope and change anyone?

* sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Wall Street Journal, Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Dept of Labor, Standard & Poors/Case-Shiller, Federal Reserve, US Treasury, Heritage Foundation.

“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.” John Adams 1826