FINDING
a job is good; finding 86 of them is just
NUTS!
by Mark Manning
INTRODUCTION
If you are reading this in a bound book, the title is already out-dated. “Author” is now job number eighty-seven! Oh this isn’t my first writing, not by a long shot! But until authoring became a paying job, it could not be on my list.
No, this is not a joke or exaggeration for effect. At last count, as I write, I have been gainfully employed in eighty-six different jobs. ( A simple listing appears in the Appendix of this book.)
I say “at last count,” because it appears obvious I’m not finished! With any luck at all, following book publication, I will at last try to fulfill a long-held desire to become a free-lance speaker and will hire myself out to schools or other groups where I might be able to talk openly with youngsters about their own futures. Job # 88! Should this come to pass, as I travel to new venues to give my talk I will merely use hash-marks to keep up with the continuing numbers, keeping all talks under the single job listing of “Motivational Speaker” in my list. So this might end my continuous tally of different jobs but I may be fortunate enough to have hundreds of hash-marks to show that the job I really wanted was a good goal.
If that comment about “really wanted” gives you insight into my mind, I welcome you to meander through the mental maelstrom of a job freak. There definitely were jobs along the way which I really did not want but which, in a sense, I could not deny. One of these unwanted positions kept me ensconced for over eight years, which should give instant pause; how could eighty-six jobs be covered in a work life of just over fifty years without involving a change in employment one or more times through each of those years? It all seems rather insurmountable to me as I look back on it, but the fact remains that I worked all those jobs and earned, in small and large amounts, enough to get by.
ONE
In The Beginning
My first job was well established by the time I heard the man say, “You can be anything you want to be.” At the time, I was sure only that I did not want to be in newspaper circulation as a lifetime career, though I had been quite successful at it for over two years. Better ways to earn money had already presented themselves. But let’s back up just a bit.
Within two months of my family’s move to a small Indiana Indiana nineteen fifty-seven .
Now I must stop here to remind the reader that I have set out to focus on income-producing work only in my listing of eighty-six jobs. To my knowledge, having consulted my considerable memory in depth on the subject, I had at no time prior to the job mentioned above, handled any money. Quite literally, I doubt that any money at all had ever passed through my hands. It’s possible I had carried a nickel or a dime on a rare occasion for some required school purchase; I simply cannot recall such an occasion.
To get a little better grip on all this, I need to take one more step backward before leaping forward into job mania. Being the ninth of ten children born to parents of extremely modest means, I was not much aware of financial matters. It was extremely rare for me to even witness the exchange of money. But the lack of involvement with dollars and cents, and particularly the lack of income, does not mean I was unfamiliar with work.
Before my dad found a traditional job and moved the family to the little town, I was reasonably adept at gardening and farm chores. I was not yet, in those very early years, as capable nor as responsible as my older brothers, but I was fairly good at milking cows, gathering eggs from the chicken house, and feeding the livestock. Besides this work, which naturally fell to us farm children in turn as we grew up, there were other skills being learned. Each of us became somewhat proficient at handling tools, first seeing how they were used in projects our dad was doing. He would usually direct us a little to do minor work on his projects. He taught us the rudiments of using tools, but we picked them up ourselves to use in such endeavors as making our own toys. I recall heading out often to an old shed where we had a few ancient tools. This shed was a more-or-less open affair with three rough walls and a typically leaky roof that kept out enough of the frequent summer rains as to allow me to stay with a project even during a downpour. The “tools” were a few aged, worn, rusted and dull handsaws and some other items in a similar condition, hammers, screwdrivers, chisels and the like. We even had a workable drill, which at that time was a labor-intensive arrangement called a “brace & bit.” The drilling was difficult and slow. No power from any source other than man-power (kid-power, in my case) was available. In fact, until I was perhaps seven years old, there was no electricity brought to our old farmhouse. Had there been such a marvel of electrical power readily available, no thought for such a thing as a power tool would have been suggested. Expensive! Bringing light into the home was the only use our family would have seen as an advantage to having a power line strung from the county road.
The handsaw was a subject introduced earlier because it became one of the most notable tools for my purposes. Somehow along my way to age six I had been introduced to the concept of guns – mostly the six-guns of western movie popularity. Of course, no such movie had yet been viewed by me or anyone else in my family that I knew of, so I must assume I had been privileged to see something of an early television western while visiting relatives who were “rich” enough to own a television set. At any rate, the gun idea as a part of child’s play became an instant success. The last four of our family make-up happened to be boys, so our gravitation to games of “cowboys and Indians” was about as natural as gravity itself. Later this morphed into “cops and robbers” and other slants on the theme, but always, the gun reigned supreme.
Problem was, there was nothing similar to a hand gun available anywhere on our small farm. It would be years before the madness of cap-guns and other similar sophisticated toys became standard fare even for kids in well-off families. For us poor children on the farm, the advent of toy guns simply would never reach into our milieu. For us, it was make-do as best we could. Picking up a stick that had a reasonable curve or branched off “handle” quickly allowed a youngster the use of a six-gun. A big hoo-rah for ingenuity; no comment here regarding my view on the ultimate effect of the gun craze.
My personal creativity perhaps first raised its head here. I made my own guns. There seemed always to be available around an old farm any number of pieces of wood. Old strips of shiplap lumber or small bits of cut-off ends from some long-ago project were lying around rotting. I quickly seized upon the chance to copy the shape, admittedly very crudely, of the six-gun as I had seen or imagined it. Using an old dull handsaw that lay on a decrepit work-bench in the marginal shed, I began to fashion a gun that was to be instantly envied by my brothers. Soon I was responsible for creating more of these marvelous toys to make it fair for all of us to play the games with similarly advanced weaponry. Most of our earlier toys I had learned to make by watching older brothers who constructed crude bows and arrows. That soon became just the bow. It took a very short time, even for uneducated kids, to see the problem of having unguided wooden missiles launched willy-nilly into the air. Besides, procuring a piece of string or anything to make a bow actually shoot was never easy. Then after guns became involved, we generally agreed to fake the use of actual arrows anyway to promote a fair fight; the guns allowed only pretend shots (with those woefully inadequate mouth sounds) and phantom bullets.
Advances in the gun business were eventually made, though I am quite sure some older sibling first showed me the new ideas. My newer designs began to incorporate the best shapes to allow the use of rubber ammo. Back then, even on a farm where autos were scarce, it seemed that old inner-tubes (look that one up if you were born since the advent of tubeless tires) could be found in some scrap heap. These tubes were perfect raw material for a kid who needed to improve his gun. Using an old tube, avoiding any badly worn spot so as to insure strength, one could cut across the tube, severing it completely, then cut again along the same cut end but about one-half inch in, and voila! A rubber band was formed – one that could stretch perhaps to three times its inert length – and when arranged properly on a newly designed “gun,” could be shot as far as twenty feet or so with surprising accuracy. By the age of nine or ten, I was particularly adept at making these guns and ammo.
So even though my very early “career” in weapons manufacturing was an unpaid occupation, some quasi engineering tidbits I gained there were valuable in my plodding progress through life.
***
Other Work Experience “Before the Beginning”
Plumbing and waste water treatment presented me with opportunities I might have taken advantage of later in life but didn’t to any real profitable degree. I was perhaps seven years old when my dad decided we had lived long enough with no modern facilities. He was always a do-it-yourself type but he was typically quite reluctant to get at it. Once he came to a stance on some need or desired improvement for the family, he seemed to know how to go about doing it. What he didn’t know by any training, he took on as though he knew by right of birth. Some of the projects he eventually attacked were, I suppose, put off only until he ran across some knowledge of the subject; he gleaned this information usually through osmosis. Being a good listener, he would learn of the way to do some installation by hearing what problems someone else had to solve. I’m confident that is how he came to some knowledge of septic systems. And he waited to begin this project until our rented farmhouse had somehow procured electricity.
All I can readily recall about the septic installation is that one morning Dad called us all out to some distance behind the old farmhouse and saw to it that two decent shovels were put into action. As hours turned into days, we boys – and probably my one sister who was still living at the family domain – took turns digging, and the huge hole in the ground grew deeper. At some point only the bigger boys could still manage to toss the shovel loads up and out of the hole, so I was not much involved then. My two teen-aged brothers at the time carried the weight. Then, as I vaguely recall, some friend or neighbor (Dad always had a way of getting people to help out with things he couldn’t personally accomplish) brought a large metal tank on the flat bed of an old truck and several people pulled it off the truck to wrestle it into the large hole. A trench then had to be dug to connect some kind of pipe to the area under the side of the house where Dad had made an exit hole. At long last, the tank was connected to the house by way of the pipe, and the new job for us all was to push dirt back into the hole and cover the tank. Here the smaller boys were back in business because there was no need to toss dirt up. It was easy going for us little guys, including as I recall, my younger brother who was perhaps five years old.
Next came all the inside work which I think my dad pretty well handled, perhaps with good help from the older boys again. We never knew where our dad had managed to come up with the money or whether he might have bartered in some way to get an old clacking water pump. I remember it ran with a slapping belt on pulley wheels and it was plugged into the recently installed electrical outlet. This was, I am quite sure, the first automated home device I had witnessed first-hand. The pump would jump into action when the holding tank emptied to a certain level, and as a little kid, I was always jumping in surprise when it happened.
The startling noise it created was well worth the intrusion in our lives because now we had, instead of an old hand pump standing on a pipe in the kitchen, a faucet that simply turned on and brought water flowing steadily into the sink or into a pail or coffee pot. (I’m sure we kept the old pump in tact as a back-up.) The new contraption was a true amazement. And now instead of a scary, dark walk on cold wintry nights outside and down a well-worn path to an outhouse, we could stay inside the – admittedly still cold – house that now had a small room converted into something called a “bathroom.”
I marveled at how this intricate system functioned, and I learned a little about the workings of plumbing in a home, both in observing the installation and in seeing the fairly frequent repairs that had to be made. The whole thing however never beckoned to me to become educated and masterful in the respectable plumbing industry. Have I used the touch of training received in that long-ago experience? Certainly, but not as a way of earning a living except as a sideline to some other job. And I absolutely earned no remuneration for my efforts at age seven or eight when we all as a family pulled together as each could contribute.
Electrical knowledge came along in much the same way. It was probably only months earlier that this strange new invisible wonder had reached our house to begin illuminating a few rooms into which Dad saw fit to extend the wiring. Kerosene lamps began to disappear.
What I don’t know about electricity is shocking. Actually that’s the reason I did not quickly learn much about it; we young kids had been frightened into proper respect for that wire and what it carried. A man helping Dad with some wiring problem managed to touch a bare wire with a pair of pliers and was knocked backward off the ladder. The hard hit on the ground was probably good for him, perhaps saving his life. An event such as this happened to a friend of mine on the college campus many years later, and the medical personnel handling him told him that internal signs would indicate he had died instantly from the shock but was conversely jolted back to life by hitting the ground. I guess for amateurs, the moral is: don’t mess with electrical wires unless you’re on a ladder.
The minimal amount of education I’ve received in electrical matters has mostly been, as I’ve said about my dad’s training, through osmosis, at least in my early learning. Over many years of fixing this or that appliance or wall outlet, generally reading some guidelines in manuals or do-it-yourself books, I have managed to work with electricity in spite of my original fears. Yes, I have gotten that occasional “bite” from touching a bare wire; I’ve simply made it a point to never work on any wire carrying more than the basic household current. The professionals can handle that high-powered stuff! But electrical knowledge has helped me on several occasions and I have, in fact, earned some of my living in the field. This will be covered later.
***
Fast forward again to age twelve and to actual paying propositions. The news route I took over in nineteen fifty-seven was not a cash-cow. It was, as you may recall, the first time for me to handle any money in any way, so any amount was a fortune to me. Looking back, I would guess that no student my age, whom I knew at that time, earned as much as I did. Of course, many friends had more coin in the pocket than I had, but it was due to parents and allowances. My folks had very little income and I never heard of such a thing as an allowance until years later. “Allowance” in my case was the fact my parents simply allowed me to earn what I could in whatever way I could find to earn it. This was very liberating and empowering to me.
As to the earnings from the paper route, I ate up most of it. My family didn’t frequent restaurants, and I probably had never partaken of food outside a home environment before moving to that small town. Now I found myself once a week after finishing my collection day on the route, flush with several dollars, roughly thirty percent of it mine to spend. I grew to relish those days and would responsibly count out the money to cover my bill to the publisher, add about a dollar that I would put away at home for my personal savings, then head for the little restaurant two blocks from home. There I would blow sometimes more than a dollar on a meal of hamburger, fries and a drink. It was kept under a buck when I ordered a cherry Coke; it passed the dollar amount when I splurged and got a milkshake.
And I learned to tip the wait staff at this time. Exactly how I learned about this custom escapes me now. In that era it was not so common as today and there certainly was no percentage delineated or expected. The act was simply a nicety performed by thoughtful customers, and I suppose I observed someone I respected in the community leaving something on the table. Once when I left something like a quarter on the table at that little drive-in/eat-in place, Elsie, the proprietor and only “waitress,” accosted me with a warmness belied by a gruff exterior. “You don’t need to be leaving me your hard-earned money, young man,” she adjured. “Tips are usually just for the hired help. I own the joint!” A nuance that was perhaps advanced social grasp for a twelve-year-old, but something I have always remembered. It doesn’t mean I don’t tip owners and managers, but the little inside knowledge she gave me has meant that for fifty years I have generally tended to leave even more to “the hired help.”
***
The “living wage” I had begun to enjoy, both for the restaurant food and the little savings I was amassing, inspired me to think bigger. What if I had even more papers to deliver?
My paperboy career had already gotten some praise and had been recognized in late summer when after adding some ten or more subscriptions to my tiny route of about sixty homes, I was rewarded. The South Bend Tribune Company sent me with several other “big producers” from other towns to see a professional baseball game in Chicago Comiskey Park Chicago
Later that same year when the high-school boy carrying the Michigan City News Dispatch in our little town decided to give up the job, I found out about it and asked for the route. “You already have one. Are you sure you want to switch?” was his query. I told him that indeed, I had the biggest route in town already, so I surely could pick up a smaller one and do both. I guess this was not a common practice because he said he would pass this on to his boss but didn’t think the paper would go along with it. The boss interviewed me that week and said he had no problem with it as long as I could keep up. He knew my reputation already with the bigger paper and hoped I would succeed with his as well. I did. And I began to earn more money! In time I would take on yet a third, the Vidette Messenger from Valparaiso , Indiana
TWO
Cocky Entrepreneur
Relax! There isn’t enough space in a reasonably sized book to give details on eight-six jobs. Besides, I’m not patient enough to write them all; I simply need to give some of the highlights in my accounting for half a century of employment. Especially do I think it important to cover more thoroughly those first jobs I held in my teens.
Back to that line in the introduction, “… really wanted.” That first paying job I ever had, the newspaper route, came to me; I had not thought of looking for a job at age twelve. This set a trend in motion, and over the years I seemed to follow it, admittedly somewhat blindly. On a few occasions I rejected jobs that came to me, but for the most part, I saw offers as progress. If I recall correctly, I actually applied for roughly ten percent of the jobs I have held.
Interestingly, my second paying job (you see, I’m counting the three paper routes as one job – so I could actually break it down by number of employers and be even more ridiculous!) came to me also without my seeking it. But as usual, I set out to expand on it soon. During my second summer in the little town, between my seventh and eight grade school years, a lawn-mowing job somehow was offered me by an elderly man who had a mower but no desire to push it. And strangely enough for the era, it was a motorized rotary mower, not one of those old reel-type push mowers with the blade powered by the pusher. This was still before the later popular self-propelled mower, so the machine had to be pushed to gain forward movement, but with a motor turning the blade, the work was greatly reduced from that required with the earlier type I described – the manual type we had at our own house.
After finishing this first lawn, a rather large area in both front and back of the home, the man approved of my work with a smile and a three-dollar remuneration. I could hardly believe it. It took trudging around town with newspapers every day in early morning – including Sundays when the papers were twice as heavy – for almost as long each day as it took to mow this lawn. And the profit from that whole week’s work on the best route was no more than four or five dollars! I was instantly impressed with this earning power I had not realized before. Very soon I found a yard looking in need of care and spoke to the homeowner who was also older and had only the old reel-type mower. He appreciated my energetic request for the mowing job and was clearly glad to give up the task. Glad enough that he was willing to pay me two dollars for the work, and this was a small lawn compared to the first one I had done.
After struggling through this job once, taking longer than I had for the bigger lawn because on this one I was using the difficult old machine, I was not sure this was going to be worth the effort, but I wanted the extra income. A solution came to mind in a day or two. I knocked on the door of my first customer and proposed a plan: I would mow his large lawn anytime he wanted, and do it for only two dollars if he would allow me to come and take his mower to do other jobs around town. He smiled in that same way he had with satisfaction over my treatment of his lawn and said my idea seemed quite workable. I’m sure he saw me as a bit brash, but he was genial.
Soon I had contracted with four other homeowners, asking two dollars for work on the smaller lawns and three dollars for the large ones. And I had the nerve to ask them to let me set a schedule so I could keep everyone properly covered. This step allowed me to build my lawn mowing business strongly through the late summer and during the process, unloading some of the less profitable, more labor-intensive newspaper routes. Two of them went to two boys in town before school began that fall, and the last one, the smallest of the three routes, I was able to handle through the next winter. This was an evening paper, so it was less difficult than early morning routes, and this one had no Sunday paper. I felt a huge load lifted.
Keeping the last of the paper routes also helped me continue earning money through the winter when no lawn mowing work was available. Then I sprang upon an idea for subsidizing my reduced income. I called upon my lawn customers right after the first deep snowfall, between Thanksgiving and Christmas of that year, and offered to shovel their walks and driveways for a small fee. They almost all settled on the idea, again relieved not to have to do this hard work themselves, and the fee would be the same it had been for mowing the lawn. But no schedule could be made for this work. We had to just go by the size of the storms and the most urgent needs were put first. Having set up this plan I went to work, laboring with the various odd shovels owned by the clients. I made some quick income that first week. I then went to the local lumber yard and used some of my earnings to buy myself a slick new snow shovel, thereby easing the future jobs while not having to borrow the customers’ tools. This also allowed me to advertise, as it were, by carrying my snow shovel high on the shoulder as I went through the town. Often I was hired on the spot by someone in a momentary situation such as having a car stuck in the snow. [It occurs to me today that I should have thought to paint “For Hire” upside-down on the back of my shovel so it would be a moving sign.]
That winter, following the holidays and on one rare day when the highway was dry and free of snow, I talked my dad into driving me to Michigan City nineteen fifty-nine ). I vaguely recall a price of $22.95 for this twenty-inch wide rotary mower at “Wards.” Again, it was not the self-propelled type, but it was a bargain. Besides, I was strong and had made good use of the similar mower the previous summer. Now when spring grew warm and grass began to shoot upward long before school was over, I was ready to re-launch my mowing career, which I did in the closing weeks of my eighth grade school year. And I unloaded my last paper route as soon as possible so I could begin the summer going strong and adding new customers to my lawn business.
Not to belabor the point, I feel I should mention again here that each of the tasks I took on for customers I serviced, either in lawn mowing or in snow removal, represented a “job” in its own right; however, my count for listing paying jobs to this point is three: paper delivery; lawn mowing; snow removal. And I was now fourteen years old.
Check out the improved profit margin I now enjoyed. When I was delivering papers, I typically collected around twelve to eighteen dollars each week from the total customer base per route. My profit was 30% for an average of about five dollars. That first winter of my new job, after a capital investment of four dollars ($4) for the new shovel, I managed to earn typically from sixteen to twenty dollars after each big snow. There were lots of those in northern Indiana
So by the time I started freshman year at the local high school in September of nineteen fifty-nine , I was a successful entrepreneur. It would be some years before I knew the term.
At this time also, I was suddenly the kid with a few coins in his pocket. I didn’t make a lot of noise about it though because I had need of strategic use of the money. Of course I spent still more down at Elsie’s drive-in, now that I had more cash in hand and always felt deserving of a cold beverage after a hot lawn-mowing job. However, I don’t think I was ever a spendthrift. I saved my money, still small enough in quantity to keep in an old cigar box at home. But a new trend now developed. Dressing better for school.
During my years on the farm, including my first five-and-one-half years of schooling, I had been perhaps as well off as other farm kids, although I doubt it. I say that because each spring when other students were wearing decent shoes, I was going to school in the one pair I had gotten the previous September. These needed, by around late April, to be enhanced by pieces of cardboard cut to fit inside, keeping my feet from direct contact with the ground through sizeable holes. The constantly slushy ground in that region as the snow melted in spring, caused the cardboard to be soaked early in the day and my socks naturally also were soaked all through the school day. Each evening I was on the hunt again for some kind of liner. The best idea would have been to cut cardboard liners and wrap them in foil to prevent the soaking, however, aluminum foil was another of those unaffordable items at our farm.
Shoes were not the only lack then. As I recall, each of the school-age boys in my family received in the fall, one sturdy pair of shoes and one pair of bibbed overalls – in later years we could opt for regular blue jeans – in a package from Sears. I imagine there were socks and underwear in that annual shipment also. Shirts, however, were not included. My mother was a kind of wizard in keeping a home even under the most dire conditions, and ours appeared to be fairly dire. The reason it was in the fall of the year when that package came was not only because school was beginning, but directly related to the one time of year a bit of money came onto the scene. Some of the crops from the small acreage we farmed would sell at this time and my folks could pay for the frugal order from Sears. But shirts for all of us had been made at home, and quite as well constructed as most “store-bought” garments, by my self-taught seamstress mother.
Perhaps you’ve heard of “Depression era” clothing. Well, my family lived a carry-over life from the Great Depression. Even though I was born near the end of World War II, I grew up until the mid nineteen fifties wearing sack cloth. This is not the material mentioned in the Old Testament, but a reasonably nice cotton fabric that came to us on the farm in the form of flour or feed sacks. During the depression’s worst years, many millions of people couldn’t afford clothing, shoes, etc., and in fact, most products ceased to be made as they were not selling. Later, during the war, they were still not available to the public because of the need for clothing the troops. There are pictures on websites today showing the novelty of the homemade clothing during the Depression, made from the fabric thoughtfully done in print patterns for such reuse. Companies selling these print-fabric sacks were not merely being thoughtful, however. It was a smart marketing idea that arose when it was discovered mothers were using any material they could find to clothe their children. If a woman liked a certain print on the sacks, those flours or ground grains sold better than others.
My mother could do precious little shopping for these, so she merely used whatever found its way to our farm. I’m sure Dad used his considerable charm and people-skills to pick up a few of these cotton sacks from others who were not as destitute and therefore not planning to make their own clothes.
When I said “wizard,” I was only slightly exaggerating. By the time I came along, as ninth child and sixth son, Mom was extremely adept at this home-style seamstress work. She would call me into the big kitchen where she had her old treadle-type Singer sewing machine set up, tell me to face away from her and stand still, and I would feel the touch of her hands on my shoulders. I knew from having watched her with my brothers that she was now holding a single side of the feed sack and was deciding where to place pins to fit my new size. From very little more than this one move, perhaps only measuring an arm, she went to work and I could hear the bulky scissors rapidly clip and then the machine whir as she pedaled and fed the fabric through. In about an hour, as I remember it, she was having me try on the shirt so she could make any final adjustments if necessary. They were not often necessary.
***
My own newfound “wealth” from my several jobs by the end of the fifties allowed me to begin to dress in a way similar to other students. I could now head into LaPorte or one of the other cities around us in late summer and buy myself “Ivy League” pants and shirts. For less than ten dollars, I could have a whole new outfit, sometimes including a new pair of blue jeans that ran about $2.50. And for some reason, I became almost feminine in my desire to have interesting shoes. Cowboy boots even showed up on my feet at one point – not a recognizable footwear in Indiana
Years later while in college in Texas
THREE
Mystery Man
I must at this juncture introduce someone whose name I can not confirm. He had something to do with the multiplicity of interests and endeavors my life has encompassed.
His first two names were “Raymond Fernando.” His surname, sounding perhaps Italian, began with “M” and ran for several syllables, then was followed by a “Jr.” That’s as far as I can reasonably take it here in writing, although I can make stabs at it in conversation. This man, who was perhaps forty years old at the time he touched my life, would be around ninety or so today. It would be wonderful to find him (I have tried) and compare notes vis-Ã -vis what he meant to get across and what I took from it.
It was an assembly held during my first high school year, or so I recall. This man was brought in by our school administrator as a motivational speaker, perhaps the only such speaker or such event related to my high school years. If there were others, then his impression was even stronger because it made me forget the rest.
Listening to Raymond was somehow at once comforting and unnerving. When he said to the group of about one hundred less-than-attentive and even less interested students, “You can be anything you want to be,” I heard it but wasn’t aware at the time of any purchase his words gained in my psyche. How many other students got something from the talk, I cannot guess. Perhaps three decades later, I tried to remind a former classmate of this strange man and his singular mission to our little school. The friend could not recall the name or event at all. At times I have wondered if this man might have been a product of my own fertile imagination.
Whether real or imagined, the words have never been far from my thoughts. The idea has been a contributor to my easy willingness to say, “Take this job and shove it,” a line which I have never actually uttered, but quite literally felt when any work became uncomfortable or undesirable to me. I was never trapped in a job because it never occurred to me that I could not improve my situation. Unfortunately, it has also meant that little continuity has accompanied my work life. Today, as a man of retirement age living among hundreds of retirees in a small senior community, I am the misfit who must continue working.
I’m going to guess – and this is just a wildly plausible stab at reality from my personal observations – that about one percent of all workers are folks who somehow knew at a very early age what it was they liked to do, and they were able to establish themselves in this work, making a living out of it. A tiny percentage of that already small group would be the Tiger Woods type, introduced to something as a toddler and grown into it, getting more and more competent while appreciating the opportunity as they grew. I recently caught a televised report on a young lady who said as very young girl that she wanted to someday be a doctor and she wanted to be a dancer. These ambitious ideas are great for very young kids because for many years, nothing says they can’t do at least one of them. This lady, Rupa Marya, is today a doctor who works in a hospital for six months each year and goes on tour as a singer, not a dancer, for the other six months. She could probably retire from either career by the time she reaches forty. Most do not get into something as a career the way those few, perhaps prodigy types, have done. Most people find employment through guesswork, trial-and-error and caprice.
I have always held respect for those who could go every day to a job, like it or not, and finally after twenty-five, thirty(or more) years in one occupation, retire. These folks seem to own the label of “successful.” Through many earning years they prepare for retirement and upon reaching that plateau, have ample fortune to carry them through many years of relaxation, hobbies, travel, etc., seemingly with not a care in the world. They typically also have homes that have been paid off, or nearly so, and they deserve respect. However, I have always marveled at their perseverance and wondered how they did it. Yes, some few have been lucky enough to have found work early in life that satisfied, perhaps inspired, certainly was adequate for their needs, and they maybe never felt the dread of heading out each day for thirty years. Probably the much larger part of the steady workforce has been made up of people who are doing that “quiet desperation” thing. I have personally heard the stories of many a dissatisfied employee, in many different types of work, who simply felt trapped. Not happy but having no likelihood of improvement. Their whole focus had to be on getting through the required years to that day of retirement, and their entire strength was needed to endure.
When I say I respect many of these folks, I must also admit I am mystified by them. How can anyone endure years of unhappy, unfulfilling activity just for that hoped-for day of relief? Sadly, many don’t quite make it alive to that day, and many – including some I’ve known very well – have made it to retirement but enjoyed precious few days of the new, ostensibly sought-after lifestyle. These include some whose minds could not adjust to the new leisure, the lack of daily regimentation, causing them to go a little batty and to drive mates in that direction; it also includes those whose bodies could not adjust, causing heart attacks, strokes and death.
Now that I am of retirement age, my only reason for not stopping work is the lack of financial wherewithal. Social Security income in my case is entirely too meager and my own savings are even less impressive. No pension plan of any kind exists for me. So it is obvious I will continue to work, perhaps amassing yet greater numbers of jobs; but I have a simple philosophy about this: I lived fully and experienced much more variety of living during my earning years than many people will ever enjoy in retirement. I also took lots of time for golf and other leisure activities. And I did it while my faculties were all in pretty good working (and playing) condition.
Would I have been happy to have reached my current age with a more traditional approach and to retire as a more “normal” person? Possibly. But I was not one of those souls who found enough interest or fulfillment in any single employment to make “normal” happen. And I have no regrets about walking away from dissatisfying work.
One obvious subject then needs to be discussed. It is being discussed right here; it is the reason I am writing this book. The subject: Could I have found fulfilling work and lived a life of more systematic accomplishment as opposed to gleaning a cumulative sense of fulfillment from the many pastures I grazed along the way? Frankly, I believe that scenario might have been possible. Perhaps my story and admissions of failings may help others to fail less.
Returning to an earlier comment about satisfying work, I stated that some folks were lucky enough to find it early in life. I believe there is another way besides luck. There could be a process that provides an outcome of having young adults settled into gainful and meaningful employment, happy to go to work each day and pointed in a direction of accomplishment. Raymond M. Jr., the motivator who reached me fifty years ago, was a vital part of that process, but in my case, something more was needed. Wisdom. Teen-agers don’t have it! Energy, excitability, imagination – these and many other attributes are there in young people, though tapping into these reservoirs can sometimes be difficult. But there is no reservoir of wisdom in young people. Incredible intellect and some logic might be there, but wisdom, by its very definition, is a developing attribute that absolutely needs time.
My pre-school aged grandson today appears to have a far greater intellectual capacity than I possess. But is he “smarter than Grandpa?” Well, technically, using the word “smarter” in it’s sense of having the potential to grasp higher learning, yes. He is probably smarter. But the simple fact is, he cannot as yet lay claim to having as much acquired knowledge as I have. At what point will his store of knowledge surpass mine? Fortunately for me, total knowledge store is not easily quantifiable and the question may never be answered. I will most likely choose a moment when I believe it to be the case. Maybe soon! However, even if we could actually look at a graph or meter and easily make that judgment, there will be no way he or any other brilliant youngster will pass me or any other reasonably intelligent elderly person in the wisdom department until at least a few decades of living have accrued to the youth.
So logically, there is a need for assistance from someone or perhaps several people of a more advanced age if a young person, even an extremely bright one, is to make the best choices for his or her future. Since wisdom is “making the best use of knowledge and experience…,” someone who has gained that experience needs to be there to offer aid to a person who has simply not seen enough seasons as yet to gain it for himself. What Raymond M. Jr. did for me was amazing and wonderful; it just stopped short. What I needed desperately was his kind of wise council at my disposal through the ensuing few years. I wasn’t even wise enough to go looking for the council, hence a personal vacuum formed. Older, wiser people need to know it is their responsibility to step up. Waiting for a bright and confident young person (or a confused bright person who masks the confusion with bluster) to ask for decision-making help is a horrible mistake. Yet it’s one of the most common mistakes older people make. We seniors can so easily be cowed by the sheer force of youthful energy and zeal, as well as staggered by technological and other advancements our young people soak up today, that we are timid about stepping up to help. Big mistake! Youth needs help, whether or not a youthful person knows it.
Raymond truly inspired me to be less limited in my aspirations and thinking, but he couldn’t be there to guide me around some of the crazies of suddenly seeing the open road of life before me and having no map in my hands. Others who could have helped were educators and relatives who were older and might have shared their experiences, their wisdom, with me. They were not needed to make my decisions for me but to assist in forming the questions so I could ponder them and answer them for myself.
Example: As I was finishing my last years of high school, I had made it clear I was not planning to go to college. I registered for a “General” course instead of the Academic or “College Preparatory” classes. Vaguely I seem to recall that one of my teachers (and I’m not sure I actually recall this) asked me what I might do after high school. Once I revealed (to whomever, and in this or other conversations) that I might go into the Army, there was nothing discussed beyond this point. Why?! Someone who gave a damn about me might easily have asked more questions: “What do you think the Army will do for you?” “What would you like to learn while in the Military that will help you later in life?” “Do you see the military as a career?” “Do you feel it’s in you to aim a weapon and fire it at another human?” These are just samples of some questions I could have used. In my case, thinking back on my psyche at that time, I honestly believe all of these questions would have received an “I don’t know!” answer from the youthful me. That being the case, the wise questioner at the time might have asked further: “Is there anything you can easily see yourself doing in the military? Perhaps sailing on a ship would suit you better than marching with a rifle. Do you think the Navy or Coast Guard might be a better fit than the Infantry?” Most likely I would have quickly answered in the negative here because I had a fear of deep water. The next logical question could have been, “Would you perhaps like to fly planes? Might the Air Force be a good place to learn something beneficial?” To this kind of question, I would have responded positively. I may not have experienced an instant leap at the idea, but I can imagine I would have looked into the prospect carefully, maybe with enthusiasm.
Here is what astounds me about that time in my young life: No such discussions took place! I was not wise enough to know the proper questions to ask myself nor even wise enough to seek out those who did know them. My lone reason for thinking Army first was the fact that several brothers and other relatives had been in the Army. Why? I didn’t even think to ask this question then either. I can now surmise that they were in that branch of service because in several cases they were drafted and most likely had taken no initiative to head off the inevitable by talking with any other branch. Strangely, my eldest brother who was going on twenty years in an Army career by that time, never sat down with me for five minutes to give me his take on the good points and the bad points of the Army, from his point of view. At least he had a view! His view was through many years of experience and knowledge that certainly gave him “Army wisdom.” I cannot fathom why he didn’t bother to share this with me. Was I such a hard-headed upstart who was so brash and self-centered at age seventeen or eighteen that my own brother who was a Major in the Army felt reticent to approach me? I doubt it. I just think we humans fail our youth by habit and lack of consideration. And we may fear giving bad advice.
If I had been wise enough (remember, youth is unable to actually be wise), I would have approached my one brother-in-law with whom I had always particularly enjoyed chatting about the universe and such when I was between the ages of about eight and fifteen. He had spent a tour in the Air Force, not as a pilot but working on planes as a crewman. He would happily have talked with me at length about the enlistment prospect, had I gone to him. Why did he not come to me at some point during my last two years of high school and ask what I might be planning? Maybe I was that unapproachable after all.
***
Dear Reader, if you are now a high school student, allow me to suggest something here to stand in for wisdom: advice. I advise you right now to start looking for your sounding boards. I almost said, your mentors, but that may not be what you need. Yet no matter how little you might need mentoring, you absolutely need sounding boards. These are simply people who are older and can help you form the questions you need to ask to find your life’s answers.
Here’s the beauty of going to others instead of waiting for others to come to you. First, if you wait for someone else to make the move, you may suffer what I did in having a frightful lack of concerned folks to step forward. Second, if you make the move, you get to choose who will help you. Parents are your first and most important available counselors because they care for you most. However, you may not find it easy to converse with them on some personal thoughts. That being the case, don’t beat yourself up over not seeking their advice; choose others. Your parents who love you will be at first a little hurt you didn’t come to them, but ultimately will be so glad you sought advice from someone. If you’re lucky enough to have grandparents, they are the very best stand-ins for parents. In some areas of life, they have even more knowledge than parents and they obviously have more life experience; they were there to give life and guidance to that generation who brought you into the world. And grandparents are normally not shy to show their unconditional love in straight talk. They may embarrass you with straight talk, but you’ll get over it.
If you prefer to go to someone outside your own family, there are very few limits. Surely you know and respect an educator in your own circle of acquaintances. If not, educators anywhere who share your language will also be pleased you asked and will give unselfishly of their wisdom. So would many others. As I said, we seniors are a bit cautious about sticking our noses into the affairs of young people, but if we are asked for input, we have it for you! And we tend to ask questions rather than strictly give advice. This is definitely best for you because you are just looking for ways to see your own situation and potential from perspectives you cannot yet manage. The views you can get on life by talking with more experienced people, really equate to something like the view of the galaxies gained by astronomers using telescopes rather than just the naked eye. Be bold; walk into a senior center and sit down with a stranger. Glean what you can from any one person, then talk to others.
Sounding boards – wise people who can listen and be open with you – are an absolute need in your life. If you don’t yet see this point, read the rest of this gnarly narrative!
FOUR
Aliens, Fluoroscopes and Going South
Covered next are two new jobs in this first part of my working life prior to my sixteenth birthday.
A truck, hauling a few high school boys I knew, stopped in front of my house one morning and one of the guys asked if I wanted to ride along. This was in the summer of fifty-nine. I asked where they were headed. “Out to Cy’s place to de-tassel corn,” was the come-back. [Yes, in Indiana
It was a long day, a hot one, and I actually earned four dollars! I also nearly wrecked my hands before one of the older boys went to the barn and brought out an old pair of gloves I could borrow. He told me I may want to buy myself a good pair of gloves, especially if I wanted to help with the hay-baling come fall. I bought the gloves the next day.
But the work on the farm was sporadic, with enough work for the larger gang available only when various crops came to harvest. Berries needed picking fairly early in summer, and big crews were needed to get them all in before they started falling to the ground, or before birds and insects got many of them. Tomatoes needed picking later, string beans and English peas too, and still later the squash, melons, cucumbers, etc. At least it was somewhat in that order – all before the big fall harvest was done by the tractor-pulled combines and corn pickers, after which the clean-up of the fields had to be done by shocking corn and baling hay; that’s when the big crews were needed again. Some of the boys would skip a day of school here and there in the fall to work on the farm.
I had known since I was five years old that this work was hard. I also knew I had to pace myself and do lots of straightening up while picking berries, tomatoes, etc., or else my back would give out. It was to be many years before I started having such severe back pains and spasms that I would be out of commission for any physical activity for a day or two at a time. Still, not until I was forty-six years old and after scores of chiropractic treatments, did I finally have an X-ray done on my lower back. We found out my back was one of those odd ones, about one in one hundred thousand, that is mal-formed and contains a sixth lumbar vertebra. That’s one extra. And it’s one that was never going to act in the same way its northern neighbors function; it was always going to surprise me at times when I least expected by catching me in the midst of some simple move and locking me into the shape of a modified “7.” In the last decade or more, since my early fifties, I have kept a walking stick or cane handy in case of a sudden need of support, and on occasion, I must resort to crutches which I also keep in a closet. [Yes, for the UFOlogists reading this, my malady is one of the “signs” used in identifying a space alien. My wife and I often bring up this point because when we got together, each of us revealed to the other that this extra vertebra is present. We share the oddity and merrily await the Mother-Ship together.]
So from those early years of work during high school, even though I was fairly strong, I was aware I should never go into some of the more physically demanding jobs. I didn’t know the medical reason for it, but I knew the pain. The reference to knowing about it when I was five related to working in the melon patch along with my siblings and parents. After a short time of bending in the required position to use a hoe for cultivating the vines, I would need to stop and stand straight for a bit. After several of these temporary relief moves, I had to stop completely and lie down on my back to get past the pain. Older siblings constantly complained that I was being allowed to be lazy in the field. It was a little embarrassing as I grew up and my younger brother soon could turn out more steady work in the garden and fields than I could. He was always more durable, as I think all my brothers (and maybe sisters!) were.
***
The last job to discuss here before a major change in my life came along, is the world of the pin-setter. People even close to my own age are always surprised to hear this bit of arcane history. Those born since around nineteen sixty virtually doubt my veracity and accept my tales as creative entertainment.
During the late summer of nineteen fifty-nine , I was approached by a friend in my class whose father operated the bowling alley. Now I need to describe this. One would not recognize that building as a bowling alley, and I can’t say now whether there was even a sign displayed to bring people in. It was more of a word-of-mouth business. An ancient brick building at the far end of Main Street Railroad Street Main Street Main Street
My classmate, Les, was telling me that sometimes his dad needed to hire boys to set pins because it was too busy for him (Les) to handle it full-time. Having no idea what this meant, I asked one afternoon if I could come in with him to see how it worked. [Years later, I figured out why Les really wanted me to learn how to do his evening work. He was secretly a devout student and as it turned out, a genius. He has been a nuclear physicist for decades now.]
We entered the outside door and descended the steps to the “bowling alley” level. There we turned sharply left and walked down a very narrow strip along the left side of lane #1. I was new to the concept of bowling, so I was totally unaware of the strange set-up. There were three more lanes of shiny wood and the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 were prominently displayed on the wall at the far end. When we reached the end of this walkway there was a narrow door painted black like the wall so I didn’t notice it until Les opened it. We ducked into an area very mysterious to me. We were there prior to business opening for the evening, so he had the chance to show me through and explain things. It was pretty simple. He pointed out that no pins were on the spots because they weren’t to be put down until time to start a game. I listened intently, having no clue as to what the game was.
Les reached over to a metal rack and picked up an oddly shaped piece of wood, painted white and having two red rings around its “neck.” I noticed all ten of these “pins” as he called them, that were on this rack were slanted with their bottoms away from us, so the small tops could easily be gripped. “You’ve never bowled, have you?” he asked. I said I had not, so he said “These are the pins the player tries to knock down. There are ten of them that fit directly on those spots on the floor. The player gets two shots to knock them all down. After one ball is rolled, there usually are some pins still standing but a bunch will be knocked down and some of them will be back here where we’re standing. So will the ball.” He saw I was getting the drift, so he continued: “The job is to pick up the pins that are down and put them as fast as you can up into the rack here. Then pick up the ball and set it on this high point
“Okay, I said. Seems easy enough. What next?”
“Next,” he tells me, “is to jump up here before the ball gets back to the player because he’s going to roll it again. It’s pretty heavy; you don’t want to ever get in the way.”
Now I looked at him in a different way, quizzically I suppose, because he said. “It’s simple. Come on with me and I’ll show you. First,” and he tossed that one pin back in it’s cup on the rack then grabbed a bar that ran across the back of the whole rack, “We’ll set up all the pins.” He pushed the bar down. Being a short fourteen-year-old, as was I, he had to make a bit of a jump toward the rack in this effort to push the bar down. With that little method of throwing his weight into it, he was able to put the rack down fairly quickly – and loudly! As the rack stopped when the bottoms of the pins were near the floor, he continued pushing the bar, and to my surprise, released the ten pins which all slid smoothly through the openings in the rack. When he released it, the bar came up, then the whole rack followed. Sitting neatly under the rack now were all ten pins, right on the spots painted there.
He told me to go through the little opening between lanes one and two and do the next rack. I did, but I was unimpressive in my prowess. Les laughed and said, “Ya shoulda seen me when I first did it. I think I was ten. Didn’t think I’d ever get it down.” We both laughed and he said I should climb over the higher protecting wall between lanes two and three so I could put down the other racks. I did lane number three – easier than the first one I’d tried; then number four, still easier.
With me now in tow again, Les headed back out the door and to the front of the alley. He showed me how to pick out a ball from the up-front storage racks, and we each took one over to lanes one and two. He said “Here she goes,” and rolled the ball mightily down the first lane. I was quite impressed because most of the pins went down. He said, “Now you try it.”
My first roll ever with one of these heavy balls was a really strange experience. And the ball found its way to the gutter within a few feet. We went back to get two more balls and tried again. In a few minutes, by choosing quite a number of bowling balls, many of which had finger holes impossible for me to reach, we managed to knock down most all of the pins in all four lanes. As we returned to the back room, Les explained that I would now learn how to pick them up, but this would not be a normal kind of pick-up because ordinarily there would be only one ball in each pit at the end of the lane. But it worked to train me because by the time we had re-racked the pins, leaving the racks up and ready for lowering later, we were ready to send all the balls back forward. I enjoyed that part far more than would seem logical, but I figure now it was probably the novelty of it and the fact it had a kind of sporty feel but mixed with mechanics. The ball return was a simple matter of using gravity but giving it a little help with a push off the high point
So much for detail; this is how far technology in bowling had taken us, at least in this little town, by the late fifties. I went to work there that very night, earning ten cents a game to do this pick-up and re-racking of pins and returning the balls to the players. Les handled lanes three and four while I took care of one and two. As we worked, he gave me tips on how to make it as easy as possible and before the evening was over, I felt proficient. I also collected my dollar and twenty cents for a little over two hours of work and felt gratified to learn something really new and different. The players paid only thirty-five cents per game, so I didn’t feel under-paid. The house had to make it’s nut.
My pin-setting career lasted for over a year, ending sometime in late nineteen sixty when a strapping fellow of about thirty who rolled the ball almost like a fast-pitch in softball, decided to take an extra shot at the last pin he’d left at the end of the game. Somehow I hadn’t expected him to pick up a house ball and hurl it while I was cleaning up pins and hadn’t sent his own ball back as yet. Plus, the game was over! When he heard the loud shout of pain and saw me go down, he ran full-out down the lane, slid like he was going into second base, avoiding hitting his head on the raised rack. He scooped me up from the pit and struggled to get his body and mine out from under the rack, ran back up the lane and carried me out of the building and for two blocks, running uphill, all the way to the doctor’s home and office. Doc Hetman checked me over and determined no bones were broken but predicted I’d be in pain for a few days. He gave me something for the immediate pain and a few tablets to take home, along with a tall Seven-up. Tom, the powerful bowler who was thankful he hadn’t crippled me, then carried me the next three blocks to deliver me to my home and apologize to my mother as he set me down gently on a chair. No long-term damage; I was good as new in about a week. Plus, I had gotten to see my own leg bones on a strange machine called a fluoroscope. Cool!
***
Fifteen years of age seems a bit young to have a life-changing event (and I’m not talking about being knocked around by a bowling ball), but I had one in early nineteen sixty-one.
My sister, eight years my senior, had returned with her two children and Army officer husband after his two-year stint in the Philippines Augusta , GA Fort Gordon
So, a job not counted because I wasn’t officially employed, was that of a “Manny” at the ripe old age of fifteen. It went probably even better than we might have expected, and I spent a delightful six months in Georgia, hearing for the first time a truly southern accent and learning about many other things. I also turned sixteen in late February, and got my driver’s license there in Georgia Indiana
Now for all of you who were born this side of about nineteen seventy, the term might be confusing. For many years now, an automatic shift has been the “standard” in the auto industry. The formerly “standard” shift required a driver to manually shift through the three, four or five gears in the way many truckers still have to do it with a lot more gears beyond five. A few autos can still be purchased with this manual shift, but almost no driver learns in a driver’s ed program today how to handle these. That car I learned on in nineteen sixty-one was probably one of the last standard shifts used in regular school driver training, but the art was good for me to know. It was also extremely difficult to get the hang of it there in the latter half of my training, especially because of the hilly streets in Augusta Georgia
The bigger part of my life-changing event was the surprise part. And the surprise itself was related to “bigger.” It seemed as if the Georgia Indiana
Had I stayed in Georgia Indiana
FIVE
My Favorite Communist
Let’s get back to jobs; it’s why we are here.
Upon returning to Indiana and my little town in the summer of nineteen sixty-one, I was suddenly without work. This could not last long; I needed to earn my keep. My lawn mowing business had been picked up by the two or three fellows I had recommended to my customers before I left town, the same boys who had also taken on the snow removal work during that winter. Now I needed to look elsewhere.
Some years before my family settled in Westville, a Russian family visiting from Chicago had discovered a small, serene lake about two miles west of town and had bought a large piece of property near it, particularly surrounding the east side of the lake. By the time I showed up in fifty-seven, they had converted their land into a summer resort that attracted hundreds of families out from Chicago Indiana
My most urgent job there was to help get autos parked in an orderly fashion. This was no simple task because no well-formed arrangement of painted white lines had yet been done. People pulling into the parking area would tend to leave their cars just anywhere without being directed to a spot that would keep some sense of order and ease of departure. Irene’s elderly Russian father who spoke broken English was the money changer. He accepted the fifty-cent parking fee at the gate, then waved them through to one of us attendants. We had to try to ascertain a general idea of how long they might want to stay at the resort that day, then park those full-day visitors in the more remote part of the lot so as to keep the area with the most arrival/departure activity as accessible as possible. When all of our crew of about six or eight boys got too busy elsewhere, or got distracted by trying to flirt with the bathing beauties on the beach, someone would without fail park in some hap-hazard manner that blocked others or took too much space. This always resulted in a thorough cursing in Russian from Fiodot, both for the customer trying to figure out what he was being told to do, and for the next one of us boys who returned to the parking area.
The job was great for me if not very lucrative. It was the first time I had gotten to deal with crowds and to have a lot of variety in the work requirements. Of course, it was no pleasure to be the one whose turn it was to pour lime on the feces under the outhouses, but somebody had to do it several times a day when it was particularly hot or the stench would become unbearable.
It was lots more fun to be on the crew of two or three who had to don jeans and tennis shoes as well as a long-sleeved shirt to go out into the lake to pull lily pads. About every four days in summer, the new pads would grow so much as to infringe upon the best swimming area straight out from the beach, so Harvey would tell some of us to go on lily pad duty as soon as we got to work. Even though it was a bona-fide job to do, and not easy work, it involved a bit of swim-like activity. And even though we needed the clothing to prevent lots of scrapes and cuts from the tough vegetation as well as to keep leaches in that mucky area from attaching themselves to us, lily pad duty was one of the good jobs. From that position, out in the water, we were cool as the sun grew hotter, we looked like heroes to the gathering crowd who wanted those pads out of there, and we got to watch the arriving girls put down their towels and strip down to bathing suits.
And there were other learning opportunities! The very few words in Russian I can still remember today were learned during some of those mornings before the parking lot traffic picked up when old Fiodot, who was about eighty or so at the time, would gruffly and tenderly teach me words because I wanted to learn. I should have taken it much further, but a boy of sixteen has his limitations. The feisty old Comrade who pretended to be annoyed would have given all the time and instruction I asked for. To my shame, I simply stopped asking.
As August drew to a close and I helped to prepare the lakeside resort for weekend-only visitors, reducing the number of required maintenance duties for the few remaining warm days and the fewer required services to the vastly reduced crowds, I hated to see summer end. And it was again time to look for work.
I now had purchased my own car. The choice was as unorthodox as had been the cowboy boots a year earlier. I talked my dad into trading in a fifty-five Ford (one of the cheaper models) to help me buy a nineteen fifty-seven NSU Prinz. No, I hadn’t either! And I believe the brand disappeared entirely from production shortly thereafter. It was just an incredibly cute little red thing with two bucket seats and a rag top. A five-speed shifter arm was about six inches long and was mounted on the floor. The engine, what little there was of an engine, was in the rear of the car. It sounded more like a toy than transportation. And as impractical as it surely was, I enjoyed it tremendously over the next two years. I would volunteer for any trip to get anything my folks might need so I could run around in my silly little roadster. Dad had virtually stopped driving by this point, almost at age sixty-two and not always feeling well. Pneumonia had hit him pretty hard at some point along there. I believe he still had his job as a cold storage meat-cutter at a local hospital, which he left when he retired that winter. If I recall correctly, he also kept an aging Pontiac
After school started in September, I one day drove my little Prinz less than a mile from home out to the south edge of town and stopped at the flourishing truck stop. I found Bill, the owner and manager, in the restaurant that day. I asked if he had need of any help during the hours I was not in classes. I said I had washed dishes two years before at the old restaurant a mile west of there, and I could do lots of things. Bill asked if I could pump gas. I said I was sure I could do it once I was given the chance to try. He gave me the chance; I had a job that night.
The gas jockey position turned out to be a bigger job than I expected. And more hours. It started out as an evening job after school, from four o’clock to ten at night. I liked the work and Bill saw that I paid attention to detail. I also got along easily with the tired and sometimes cranky truckers who came in to fuel up. After getting acquainted with some of these regulars who drove that stretch of highway weekly, I began learning more about their needs. I got them to show me how to best service their rigs while letting the hundred gallons or more of diesel fuel pump into the tanks. One of them gave me a tire mallet and showed me exactly how to use it and what sound to listen for as I bounced it off each of the eighteen wheels. There was never any need to use a tire gauge until a guy heard that certain sound that meant a tire was a little low. Another fellow gave me a great squeegee, with a longer handle and better rubber than the one Bill had supplied for the employees. It made washing the windshields a lot easier. I showed it to Bill and donated it to the cause so the other employees could use it too.
Somewhere along about the winter holidays, the night shift man quit. Before looking for a replacement, Bill asked me if I knew anyone who might want the job. I told him I did. He balked at that saying I needed my sleep so I could stay awake in school. I explained to him that I was not a heavy sleeper and told him I had stopped in there at times after midnight . The former man had often been asleep in the chair with his feet on the door of the little shed. The traffic was pretty sparse on the highways during the winter, and the old stove in the shed would allow me to stay warm and catch all the winks I needed during the night. With my feet propped against the door, I couldn’t be robbed without somebody waking me, but I would wager I would awake the moment a truck rolled into the drive. If he didn’t mind, I’d like to try it.
So, until the following spring when traffic picked up again and Bill found a new attendant, I went to school from eight to three, to work from four in the afternoon to six the next morning and back to school after another brief nap at home and time to wash up and dress. Weekends I took Saturday night twelve-hour shifts and another guy took the Sunday night shift. A third fellow took the day shifts. This worked better than Bill could have hoped for, and I made better money than I had made anywhere in a while. Plus, I learned how to change and repair truck tires which paid a handsome extra amount and Bill didn’t want a cut of that. He said it was good for business and I deserved every dime. It was hard work but gratifying. Yes, my schooling suffered a bit, but remember, I was not interested in furthering my education. My re-thinking on that subject came much later.
***
Come summer of sixty-two, as school was winding down and I was preparing to work with Bill on my schedule, I was also thinking of making time for working back at the lake resort. I saw no reason I couldn’t do both jobs if I set up the schedules well. Before we got that far, two things happened: Bill told me he was about to retire and was selling the business to a large company who would put in a regular new building and several pumps. The old truck stop as we knew it would cease to exist. Coincidentally, a fellow in town I met, named Woody, told me he had opened a new travel trailer sales lot near Michigan City
The summer whizzed by as I learned a little about travel trailers and a lot about repairing this thin-wall type of construction, both in RVs and in mobile homes. I also enjoyed traveling by repair van all over Indiana Illinois Michigan
When I dropped in at the lake resort after committing my weekdays to Woody’s RV lot, Harvey
So I was pretty busy and glad to have plenty of work. The income was not great on either job but the work was steady and I knew I was learning yet more for possible future benefit.
***
Heading back to school for my final year, I brought my time with Harvey, Irene and Fiodot to an end, regretfully, and arranged with Woody to work at the RV lot now on weekends. I actually devoted myself more to school during that year than previously, but that did not mean I had changed my mind yet about going on to higher education. I almost let a recruiter talk me into signing up for a trade school for the following year, but at the end, not having any idea what trade I might want to enter, I said “No” to spending my hard-earned money with no particular goal in mind.
In May of nineteen sixty-three, I was graduated with the simplest of diplomas, with “General” printed right in there as a course of study. Three days later I was an alum without a clue. On Monday after my graduation, and following the big shin-dig our little town throws each year that invites all past alumni of the school, I was lost. Did I want to go back out to the lake and get my fun job back? Harvey
I spent time with my buddies and found they were not sharing my feelings. Most of the friends I had made in this little town were college-bound. The one friend who was more like me was already starting to work for a local contractor. He was an apprentice to a cement finisher; this was hard work but Dan was strong and steady. I thought about this kind of work and almost suffered pain at just the thought. If there’s a job that requires a strong back, working with concrete, especially as the guy who leans constantly forward from the knees and reaches to make those final smoothing strokes, might be the ultimate. I didn’t cry in front of Dan but I felt like it. He was gainfully employed and already building a future; I was completely disoriented.
Incredibly, Dan then spoke up and said he still planned to go to the Army and would continue his apprenticeship someday after coming home. He and I had talked at length back in the spring about the new plan being offered by Army recruiters. The Buddy Plan. The deal it offered was simply that friends who enlisted together could stay together, at least for a good part of their enlistment. They would be sent to the same boot camp and promised that from there they would go together to their first assignment. Dan and I had said we would join up together, and we already planned to begin that enlistment in about September, thinking ahead about eight weeks during a season more comfortable than either summer or winter in the Midwest . We figured we would surely be sent to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri
No more feeling disoriented! If Dan was still on board with our military plan, I could pick up any kind of job that might fall into my lap because it would end in a very few months. I might even go back to the lake and hang out with a fun job until September.
For whatever reason I now can’t recall, I still turned away from the resort and found a job at the latest new business to open in our community – a distribution center for a giant schoolbook printing company. And my job there was a mindless repetitive activity of packing boxes with the books some other worker stacked in front of me on a table. But it was okay that the job could not excite me for the long haul, because it wouldn’t have to occupy me very long. I wouldn’t mind walking away from a job like this.
A postcard from Dan arrived in August. He loved his work in cement and more than that, he loved his boss’s daughter. He was going to marry and stay in our hometown. “Good luck,” he wrote.
SIX
No Vision, No Compass
Already I have stated that I will begin to hit only the highlights because no way would a book make it to press with details covering eighty-six jobs. I need to stay at least with the chronological listing through the next few jobs but will skim through most of these. However, the previous chapter led us to a personal crisis, and the way I came out of that crisis explains a great deal. It also leads to the introduction of the longest employment I ever had.
If you have been reading this and assuming all my jobs were menial and/or part-time and many running concurrently, you are wrong. To get eighty-six jobs into roughly fifty years, one would surely have no single job last more than a few months. Wrong. I had an eight-year career right after college. I also had a career of twenty-plus years, but that was as an actor and did, in fact, require that other jobs be woven into the mix in order to make a living. Acting is a way of life, and for many like me, those who kept trying but never hit the big time, various ways to “support the habit” had to be acquired. The “habit” was auditioning! This will be discussed later.
The postcard from my friend, letting me know he was not going to go with me to enlist after all, threw me emotionally back to that day just after graduation but to about the tenth power. The feeling of that vacuum is indescribable. This probably gives you a hint as to my lack of emotional development at age eighteen. I was completely comfortable with the idea of going off to the Army but only if I had a good friend with me. Now without the friend, I was bewildered, befuddled, lost. My future was no more easily pictured at that moment than it might have been if I had been told to think about it at the age of three.
All this is divulged here because I need you to know how my mental make-up led me in an unlikely, previously inconceivable direction. And I do this for those who might be in similar straits even while reading this report. As I write, the world news is filled with reporting on a twenty-three year old terrorist who tried to blow up a plane with three-hundred people on board. This young man was from a good background but had apparently stepped into that kind of personal vacuum I have described. He was easily “radicalized” by religious fanatics and was willing to commit suicide and mass murder for his new cause. I repeat my admonition: Go find your sounding boards! Talk it out. Ask yourself questions and if you can’t think of the questions, get someone else to ask them. Then answer them for yourself.
Please understand; I wasn’t suddenly thrust into depression or some funk over missing out on a career opportunity. The plan to go into the Army had never been a long-term plan for my future. I actually recognized my own immaturity. The Army venture was the solid short-term plan that I felt sure would allow me to mature enough to make other plans, assuming I didn’t lose my life in southeast Asia. (This was during the huge build-up of the war in Viet Nam
Someone, actually some thing, some group, some “ism” stepped forward. The pain that had seized my addled mind was being offered a tonic. A soothing, accepting entity stepped in to fill the void. The soft purring came from the throat of an assertive fundamentalist religion and was easily delivered to me on a warmly personal level by my own well-intentioned family.
Two of my brothers, the two a little older than I, who happened to be working at the same company along with me, were giving notice to our boss that they would be away for almost two weeks in September. They had thoughtfully asked me if I might want to join them on their “vacation” to an exotic island in the Atlantic . This was not a simple vacation; my family were not the kind of people who jaunted off to islands to spend frivolous time lounging on beaches. These members of my family who were headed to an island were going to attend a “commanded assembly” involving many hours per day of sitting in church services under a huge tent. It was the “Feast of Tabernacles” referenced in the Old Testament, and the date was ironclad, set by the Hebrew calendar. My mother and three of my siblings along with their mates were devoted to a fundamentalist church that followed these arcane traditions. They out-worshipped the Hebrews!
So the completely befuddled teen who was suddenly no longer on his way to boot-camp in September of nineteen sixty-three, no longer setting out to see what greater things might be on some distant horizon, was offered another direction as an alternative. He was invited to visit a beautiful island off the coast of Georgia
***
My two brothers were excellent employees and although the boss was not inclined at all to approve their time off, he soon realized these dedicated employees were even more dedicated church goers. They were going no matter what he said. When he suddenly asked them whether the third brother was also going, they said he would have to ask me. He called me in to ask that question on a day I had been thinking of the delightful getaway this could be, so I answered, “Of course. It’s a church event my family always attends.” And as easily as that, my indecision allowed me to make a life change while deciding nothing. It was no big deal that I could show disdain for yet another job; I could always get a better one. This one had been chosen anyway with the intent of ditching it for the Army.
My acquiescence on the invitation proffered by my brothers was the beginning of my complete immersion in something I would never have chosen had I sought council of others – any others but these brothers, that is. Even others in my family, since two thirds of my nine siblings eschewed this fundamentalism, would have helped me steer clear. But again, I sought no advice; I went on a vacation! And while on vacation, enjoying the atmosphere of a warm, exotic place, I also met some truly nice people, some of whom were my age and struggling with similar young adult issues. On about the third day of enjoying the island breezes, I walked along with some of these new acquaintances to see what they did in that big tent. That evening during some highly charged sermon, while sitting among thousands of the faithful and between two new friends, listening to the fervent appeal of a powerful evangelist who was near the very top of the church’s hierarchy, “I saw the light.”
That emotional event soared beyond anything I had ever experienced, with the possible exception of the puppy-love giddiness I had felt seven years earlier when I first saw a pretty little blond girl who was three years behind me in school. [Seeing her at any time over the next six years in the same school, I was always dumb-struck. Thirty years later I had the nerve to tell her how I felt. And I still feel it!] Following the religious festival, I left Jekyll Island , Georgia
Returning to northern Indiana Ohio Cincinnati , Ohio
***
I place a transition break here to point out that a reader could easily begin to get confusing vibes from my comments. It may appear that I am expressing total negativity about the steps I took in this religious direction, but that assessment would not properly cover the subject. A great deal about that religious era of my life, which lasted a total of thirteen years, was extremely positive.
For example, my way of meeting the world around me adjusted dramatically and for the better. My future, including my life of today, needed some kind of personal foundation that I had not been building for myself. Particularly is this true about speaking and communicating. Over many years, I have made most of my living in fields directly related to this communication ability. Would I ever have attained any proficiency in speaking without the church experience? Hard question to answer, but I would have to say, “Doubtful.”
Why doubtful? Back in my last year of high school, my English instructor announced early in the second semester that the next grading period was going to center on speech. He proceeded to assign days for each class member to present a speech to the class. I spoke up that I had registered for English, not for speech. He pointed out authoritatively that since our small school could not offer a speech class, his obligation as a teacher in a related field was to introduce us to public speaking. I said it wasn’t for me, so “No, thanks.” He said I would speak when it came my turn.
I disagreed. I sat without involvement for weeks as others suffered through the rigors of standing in front of the room, struggling to speak. Some few were capable; others were dismally lacking in vocal and presentation talent. I felt for them. The day came for my speech and when my name was called, I announced that I would pass. The instructor was livid that I had the nerve to rebel in front of the class. I stated flatly that I had told him in the beginning of the discussion I would not speak. I added that I was never going to be a teacher, preacher or politician, so I had no need to ever give a speech. He said he would have to fail me for that part of the course. I verbally pushed back at him (in front of surprised classmates), virtually forcing him to admit that I was an excellent English student. I then boldly dared him, saying he should think twice about failing a straight “A” English student after having arbitrarily vacated the whole English curriculum under protest. In a speech class, I told him, I could be failed for not complying. Here it was he who had failed; he failed to stay within the course of study.
The “F” I received on my report card never made it home. The principal, who knew how head-strong both the teacher and I were, intervened and got the grade changed to a “D.” But he said I may one day regret not having made an effort to speak.
So I obviously had some personal strengths and no fear of bucking the system, which might have worked well for me as I entered future new territories without speech training. However, I very likely had a profound fear of speaking in a formal situation. Certainly this was borne out two years later when I was put into the same position, this time with the “fear of God” now in firm control. My knees knocked and I suffered cold sweats, but I was required to learn to speak in my first year at the church-owned college I attended. By the end of that first year, I was an enthusiastic speaker seeking opportunities to use my new talent. This played a large part in college life in the beginning of my second year when I became class president.
My point here is that my step into the mysterious, heavy-handed, narrow and judgmental world of religious fundamentalism might easily have injected more positives into my life than it did negatives. The most obvious positive was this new-found ability and desire to speak. And no negatives need be discussed at this time since my goal is to narrate simply the way things went and the jobs that resulted. The vast and unanswerable questions about what might have been are not profitable to address here.
The one giant negative I do need to address does not take aim at any outside force. The negative was internal; it was the profound way in which I failed myself. In the last few decades I have learned to deal with life’s decisions from a position of strength, taking charge and taking responsibility for my choices. That entry I made into religion at age eighteen was a prime example of pathetic weakness. I merely fell into something like a net that was neatly placed under me by an organization and its devoted followers. While I have no regrets that I received support and acceptance from considerate people back then, I am overwhelmingly glad I grew into my own capacities and climbed out of the net when I was thirty-one years old.
***
The trek from the age of eighteen to age thirty-one, in this job narrative, went as follows: Leaving Ohio within three months, after my old Mercury gave out, I limped back to the home of my folks who were now living with my older brother in northern Indiana Chesterton , Indiana Michigan City
***
In the summer of sixty-four, I was told authoritatively by a high-ranking evangelist in the church that I should attend the church college. He handed me an application. They were opening a new campus (a third one for that growing sect) in the coming fall in the pinewoods of east Texas. This visiting minister was to be a dean at the new campus and he made it clear that I would be a desirable candidate for admission there. He also said I would be able to work in any one of a number of jobs on the campus to help myself through school. I applied. A minister had advised me; in the strict teachings of that group, I could reasonably do nothing but comply.
***
A sleek fifty-nine Pontiac Bonneville, which I had purchased while making good money at the steel mill job, now became a kind of detriment. It would not make sense to take a car, and its payment book, to my new location – a college campus where a I would be earning a minimal income and walking to classes. As I drove to work one morning a month prior to packing up for college, an inexperienced driver pulled onto the highway in front of me while I was approaching his crossroad position, traveling at the speed limit of sixty-five mph. Sparing you the details, allow me to say the results were mostly positive. Particularly the financial part. The insurance company paid me more for the totaled car than I had originally paid for it, and now I didn’t need to figure out what to do next. Plus, I was only scratched. No one else was badly injured either, so no-harm, no-foul.
***
In school in Texas
SEVEN
Many Are Called but Few Wake Up!
My human “superiors,” working under the purportedly infallible guidance of their God, had told me I had been called forth to serve. It may now seem odd that I was not even considering that this assignment would come after school. But I had gone for a Bachelor of Arts degree, and even though “Theology” was part of the degree requirement, I had registered under the “Communication” program. I loved the speaking and hoped to continue doing it, but somehow the concept of being an actual minister had not settled on me. Yes, the directors had sent me to Minnesota
***
Preach I did, essentially every week and often more than once per week, beginning as an assistant to a pastor in Amarillo , Texas Wichita Falls , Texas Abilene , Texas Lawton , Oklahoma
About a year after moving us to Wichita Falls Fort Worth , Texas
The best thing that happened for me job-wise through it all was, again, the speaking education and opportunities. The speaking I did was not “public” by any means, but it was lots of speaking, weekly at least, for eight years. And it was a chance to talk to groups of the size many public speakers never reach. I became a regular pick, one of half-dozen or so out of all the pastors attending, to deliver sermons at the annual meetings – at that Feast of Tabernacles mentioned earlier. And the crowds grew in number. By the time I became a speaker for these conventions in the early seventies, in Tampa Bay Arena and in our own “big-top” tent set up for these meetings on the campus in east Texas, the crowds were at times over fifteen thousand strong. And I was also chosen to handle all eight days, sixteen meetings minimum, as emcee/song leader. Not many people I’ve met can say they have led groups of fifteen thousand people in singing! It was a heady time, even though I was practicing (required) the utmost humility.
My eighth year in the ministry was spent in a new assignment as pastor of a group in northwest Indiana Chicago Chicago South Church Illinois Fort Worth Chicago
The rank religious politics along with many personal factors were telling me to get the frock outa Dodge. I finally came to my senses and decided to take over control of my own life, for the first time as an adult really. I had been a much more productive and independent soul when I was fifteen! Now I felt the need to walk away from the morass of misguided guidance and declare my independence. I did so on July 4, 1976 . Our national Bi-centennial.
So my single job of longest duration, even though I was seldom left in any single place long enough to allow any grass to grow, was a total fluke. It not only was a job for which I had not applied, it was a job I did not personally desire, a job I grew to despise. It was a job I had proclaimed years earlier I would never do, and in my estimation today, a job that really does not need to be done. By anyone. Still, many things I learned along the way have been extremely beneficial to my real life that finally began to develop after I turned thirty-one years of age. And I definitely live a life without regrets. One who lives from-hand-to-mouth had best be more than just “ambidextrous,” as a playwright script gave us; he’d better be able to learn from any source at his disposal and apply that learning to living.
***
Having procured from the church directors a promise of interim income for a period of time, somewhat in lieu of any real time off or sabbatical that many ministers were given, I had the time to go about finding a new career. My first thought was real estate. I had always thought this might be a good career for a person with a modicum of people skills, financial savvy and a self-starter mentality.
I went immediately to Indianapolis Indiana Indiana
While I believe I was right in my selection of real estate practice as a likely good career, I found after a few months I simply did not enjoy the job. The most poignant reason was the feeling that I was almost still in the ministry. As an agent, my time was never really my own because any phone call had to be treated like gold (treated like God himself calling when I had pastoral duties). And to be successful, I was told, I needed to “farm” a community. That means move into a neighborhood and become the go-to guy for everyone in the area, for just about everything! Become involved in all community activities; be the coach of little league, the scout master or assistant, the volunteer for anything that might come up. Join every civic organization or club possible. Attend the “best” neighborhood church! That one stopped me cold; I could not bring myself to set foot inside any church of any brand, not to mention the crude connotation of a “best” church. [This kind of thinking is covered extensively in a different book.] The real estate business is basically quite honorable, it just wasn’t the career for me at that time.
I applied for a job (novel concept!) from a newspaper ad. National Sales Recruiter was the title, and I thought immediately this sounded good. I loved travel and I understood people well enough to read them reasonably well, so why not? The company was a slam-bam direct sales firm based in Indianapolis and they needed sales people in cities all over the country, with the exception, for some unnamed reason, of the far West. Denver Albuquerque
This company’s recruiters – I found I was to become the second for the company and there would be two more at some point – were scheduled by a secretary to go into four cities per week and hold small meetings in hotels (usually near the airport) with applicants responding to a pre-placed ad. The ad was also handled by the booking secretary and coordinated with the schedule of flights out of Indianapolis very early each Monday morning that would get the recruiter to his first city of the week sometime around ten o’clock that morning. No sooner would he get checked into the hotel, in a studio suite where possible with a Murphy Bed in the wall to allow for maximum space to seat guests, than those guests began to arrive. At times, due to brief delays in the flights or traffic snarls from the airport, the recruiter arrived to check in as people were sitting in or milling about in the lobby awaiting this fellow for an interview. Sometimes one would be standing at the desk in a suit, holding a classified section and pointing to the ad for the hotel clerk to understand what folks were doing there. When I saw this happening I would typically shout, “Sorry everybody. Timing doesn’t always work just as we would like. Give me a few minutes to get the room ready and I will be down to invite you to the interview.” This was always a comfortable ice-breaker.
Great job! I fell into it with ease and got into natural rhythms with airlines, hotels, courtesy vans, cabs – all the usual trappings of the traveling businessman’s milieu. Four different cities every week were my “territory” and I returned home each Thursday night. And it was during these trips that I took opportunities to check out the sights and interesting features of American cities, from Omaha Orlando Pittsburgh Providence Austin Albany
On the daily job, the interviews themselves were perfectly suited to my psyche; I met and spoke to a small group, typically, in late morning and another in mid-afternoon. I spoke on the overview of the sales opportunity for twenty minutes to the entire group, then released anyone who simply was not interested at that point. Anyone who stayed with me filled out a very short application form and had a chance to talk with me individually for just a few minutes, then left. I always had plenty of time for myself, in relaxed lunches at the hotel and in long evenings to spend as I saw fit. I learned to revel in my personal time, especially as mentioned above.
The last instruction I gave each applicant was to call me on Friday at the toll-free number provided, and I would give my decision as to whether the individual could join us. Those who did call were almost all hired because the key element was simply whether they had enough interest after sleeping on it to call me back. Besides, in the cruel world of direct sales, the general attitude by management is an old expression: “Hire them in masses, train them in classes; if they don’t sell, kick them out on their asses.” This was quite literally stated in a management meeting I attended before beginning my travels. Personally, I still tried to find quality people with potential, and these I encouraged a bit more to come onboard.
Those who were hired actually were brought in to the company headquarters and trained, accompanied by a team leader and trained further in their home cities, then turned loose to make the sales. Only a small percentage succeeded much, as is again, the general rule in direct sales. Those who did well for themselves also provided me with more income. My bonus was a percentage of their sales volume after I brought them to the company.
It was an outstanding job for me for almost two years. I would definitely have stayed with it much longer, but the company, I was to learn on an unforeseen day, had a way of keeping itself on a budget. When active recruiters built up substantial bonuses, they were simply dropped “due to re-structuring” (worded to keep out of lawsuits), and new ones were easily found. My personal bonus had surpassed my salary because of strong salespeople I had hired who continued to sell. Other recruiters were also getting a decent bonus built up, so our crew of four was let go in a “massive re-structuring.”
***
Being back in Indianapolis
EIGHT
Curtain Calls are More Fun
That intro to acting in early nineteen seventy-nine was a small teaser. The trouper group was run on a shoestring and on a low-energy pace that meant it was months between a one-night gig at a country club somewhere in the Midwest and another one-nighter at a yacht club in some other part of the region. The pay for each actor in these performances was typically fifty bucks, which barely covered expenses, but the experience was priceless.
To get serious about making ends meet, I returned to something of a “real world” by trying various employments. Pinkerton had an ad in the paper and I accepted work for several weeks as a night watchman. Hated it, and it paid dismally low wages. I applied for a special driver’s license and signed on with the Yellow Cab company, driving a taxi from the airport to anywhere in Indianapolis Indiana Kentucky Tennessee
Later, during one of my acting jobs, I met a man who owned an advertising agency. He offered me the chance to work with him in selling radio and television ads locally in Indianapolis
I did only moderately well in this effort of selling merchants on the idea of retaining an agency, but I loved the chance to design ads for print with a few clients, then to write and record radio ads for others. I even had a chance to create a rate-sheet/brochure for the local PBS television station. There was a lot of stuff happening, and I was into it with excitement; it simply was minimally rewarding on the financial side. The boss told me I gave away too much, especially of my valuable time.
As much as I enjoyed hitting the stage in the little occasional one-night performances with the trouper group, I had not thought of this as any way to make a living. As with my early years of looking around for a career, my vision was not very broad. I missed a lot! Fortunately, others didn’t miss as much, and as usual, something was brought to me. An acquaintance, the friend of a friend of mine who had seen me in a small one-night show, told me I ought to come along with him to an audition at the local dinner theater. I did and enjoyed watching John read for a part. He was a noted local talent who also showed up frequently in Hollywood films that were shot in the Midwest . He happened to be a favorite of the owner of the dinner theater who was also directing the upcoming play.
Following John’s audition, the director asked me to come up and read a part. I at first declined saying I was there just to observe. Randy said he needed to have new people come in now and then and he’d heard good things about me. (Quite a surprise.) He insisted I read for the play. I did so and was cast as one of five characters in a powerful drama that was being put on. Interestingly, I was to play the brother of the character part given to John.
We ran for two weeks and the dinner theater did a brisk business because of great publicity and the immense popularity John and the other three actors enjoyed in the area. I was for the first time introduced to repeating performances on the same stage, and my acting suddenly was being critiqued. Reviews for the play were outstanding. My personal reviews were not overwhelming but nothing negative was written about my performance. Bravo!
Backstage, following an evening’s work, I was greeted and congratulated by a strikingly well-dressed lady who asked if I had an agent as yet. I frankly told her I had no idea what an agent would do or why I might want one. She gave me her card and asked me to stop by soon.
The next day, I had an agent. Once she explained how the general business of acting worked and what other things I might do beyond the occasional play, I was in. A few days later I landed my first TV commercial after auditioning at the talent agency office, and from there things got pretty busy. I had to leave other forms of income-producing efforts behind so I could be at the ready for auditions any day, and my calendar began to fill up.
By the end of that year, nineteen seventy-nine, though I was not rolling in money, I was happily bouncing from an audition here or there to commercial shoot at a local production company or TV station; perhaps next day I would head for Cincinnati or Chicago to be an on-camera spokesman for an industrial video; later in the week I might squeeze in another audition where possible, then spend a day at a local department store being photographed in a three-piece suit. Or underwear. That’s right, the agent even got me into modeling, which I would never have thought of on my own. This part of the performing business became important to my income for quite a few years.
Following that initial spurt of many small jobs and a few that offered some promise of bigger things to come, I still fell back into such a dry spell for several weeks that I mentioned my plight to a new casual friend who had politely asked how things were going. He had seen my photos often in newspaper ads and caught a television commercial or two, so he assumed my life was a whirlwind of successful activity. When I told him the problem was simply that what he was seeing now had been produced months earlier, that it had not paid handsomely at the time and not much new work had come along since then, he understood. He said he wasn’t too familiar with the television side of things, but he had been around the modeling business a little when his wife had dabbled in it, and he knew income from that was sporadic at best. He then asked if I might like to work in sales with his company. He said that as long as I could maintain some level of new business activity, he would not object to my taking time for auditions and doing any acting or modeling jobs. He said it would be good for his business; he grasped the phenomenon that when a salesman shows up at the door wearing a face that someone might recognize from television or newspapers, it usually means an automatic intro as though this person is a known, therefore trusted, individual. The product I was selling was a pegboard accounting system and my customer base was almost entirely medical offices. And yes, more often than not these receptionists and managers realized they had seen me “somewhere.”
So for the next year, things sailed along very nicely with enough steady income from the sales job to keep my family reasonably comfortable, and enough work through the talent agency to keep me excited and learning more about the actor’s world. And in that world, I was painfully aware that very little continuity could be expected from a business that rejects dozens of people for every one it can accept. Yet the proverbial bug had bitten me and I wanted very much to continue with acting.
Out of the blue, my boss informed me one day that he was going to accept a better position with a bigger company; he said his replacement who was coming to the local office was a fellow who probably would work with me in the same way and let me do all the side work I wanted. For about a month, this was the case. Then the new manager suddenly couldn’t allow my split interests any longer. He said he wanted my full strength focused on building a higher sales volume, so he gave me an ultimatum. I said, “You seriously think I would quit what I love doing in order to work longer hours here? Thanks, but no, thanks.”
***
So once again, I struggled to earn enough to get by, but I certainly loved what I was doing, when I was doing it.
A fellow thespian who had co-starred with me in a frequently repeated road show had also been one of my customers when I was selling accounting systems. Not a doctor, but a jeweler, he had needed some improvement in his business bookkeeping and liked the idea of the pegboard checking, journal-keeping, etc. that I was selling. I had called on him at his store in a local mall about two months previous to my giving up the sales job, and he had purchased one of my accounting systems. He called me one day and asked if I still worked with the accounting firm, and I said I was sorry, that I would put him in touch with the fellow who picked up my client list. “No, no,” he said quickly. “I just wanted to know whether you were working anywhere other than acting, because I hoped you might consider working here in the store.”
Now I was a jeweler. Not really, I know. I had the chance to become an actual gemologist and a jeweler had I devoted my life to it, but for now, I was working in a jewelry store dealing with customers at the retail counter. A few months later, I was given the chance to open a small kiosk, giving the store a presence on another level in the mall, selling some of the less exclusive jewelry from our stock. Still, I had the latitude to help people design their own pieces and could get almost anything done for the customer by our downstairs gold smith. I learned a good deal about diamond values, insofar as shape, color, clarity, weight, etc., and thoroughly enjoyed working with this high-end commodity. I can’t say I enjoyed very much working inside in a retail situation (except during the cold Indiana winter); I have never cared much for confined spaces over long hours, other than several thousands of hours of driving. The inside of a vehicle may be a small confined space, but the open spaces outside the windshield have always treated my senses well.
During that late summer of nineteen eighty-one, my wife and I, after twelve years, two sons, many household moves and untold psychological strains, decided to divorce. It was completely amicable and we shared an attorney who charged us fifty bucks to sit in our living room to complete the legal forms together. He then filed the papers with the court and in sixty days, we were divorced. Total cost: fifty dollars and incalculable emotional capital. That emotional side of it was, as usual in divorce cases, shared by our sons at ages eleven and nine. I am one of the fortunate fathers who never had to lose the devotion of and close ties to my children, a result of the magnanimous attitude and actions of their mother.
When I looked into apartments to find myself a small place to live on my own, the manager of a huge complex I visited asked me if I wanted to work for her. Asking what job might be available, expecting it to be painting or some other physical labor I might not want because of my bad back, I was surprised to hear the need was for a social director. After discussing the parameters of this job, and finding I could have a studio apartment as part of the remuneration, I accepted. That very day, I took my soon-to-be ex-wife who had begun looking for work, to the jewelry store to talk with my friend the manager. I informed him simultaneously that I was accepting a new job and I was recommending this strong and resourceful woman as my replacement at the store. He expressed mixed feelings of surprise, relief and more surprise, perhaps mixed with others I could not read, but the result of our meeting was a quick acceptance of the situation. This lady was an instant success and a fine asset to the jewelry store, taking over my little kiosk immediately. I don’t recall how long she stayed with that job, but she was substantially launched into her new “singlehood” that day.
As for my own new social director job, doing something I always did more as a natural out-growth of my personality, education and experience, things looked up quickly. I fell into easy banter with management and residents alike, and began to make an impact on the life-style of that enormous apartment community. I established a kind of “attitude adjustment hour” for residents arriving home from work each day. I wrote and produced radio commercials for the complex, and used my own voice. The clubhouse bar began to enjoy its first real activity as I mixed various juices and other concoctions, as well as serving beer and wine. I don’t list “bartender” as a distinct job only because I was never a “mixologist,” and this minimal service was just woven into my real job of helping folks get acquainted, to socialize.
Specialty service was what I enjoyed most. These apartment buildings all surrounded a man-made serpentine lake, which I found inviting for social activity. I convinced management to let me procure a modest pontoon party boat, and from the deck of this boat, on most weekends and all holidays, I served my mixes and little snacks. I motored around to each of the several docks with their benches and umbrellas where I pulled alongside and stayed only long enough to dispense goodies and good cheer. Some few residents would occasionally get on the boat with me and make a round to help me serve others, hence accomplishing the socializing I was trying to promote. I also put out a monthly calendar with creative ideas, both those I would be trying to do and those others might want to consider. Many of us had fun with this zaniness.
Alas, nothing great lasts very long. What’s the old ironic expression, “No good deed goes unpunished,” isn’t that it? Well, this job which seemed a natural for me was to have a life of less than six months when the ownership sold to a conglomerate. The new management saw my social budget as impractical. I confess, I felt the same way, but as long as the concept was being carried out, I was glad to be the social animal handling it.
***
In nineteen eighty-two, the combined businesses of modeling and acting picked up somewhat, allowing me to relax and not press for another side job. Besides doing more frequent ads for Blocks, the well-known local department store, I was also being sent out on some runway modeling gigs and a good number of print modeling photo shoots. Several regional commercials also came my way that year, along with some film work.
The biggest production I was involved in was a new recruiting film for the U.S. Army, and we shot the scenes mostly in a make-shift soundstage at Fort Benjamin Harrison, near Indianapolis
By the fall of eighty-two, work in Indianapolis New York City Indianapolis
Much of interest was done, seen and experienced in NYC, but these were not directly helpful to me in earning a living, so do not fit in this manuscript.
NINE
Supporting My Habit
The year nineteen eighty-three back in Indiana Midwest market except at times in Chicago
A local Indianapolis Atlanta Indianapolis Cincinnati Louisville Indianapolis
This comedy audition went very well, leaving the production team laughing and rather surprised, I think. So they cast me in the pilot, in the character of “Boots Malloy,” a firefighter with a twist. We, I think it was a cast of six, shot the episode there at the local production facility and began the wait for news that we were to make a trip to Atlanta Prescott , Arizona Hollywood experience. Interestingly, and to give a little insight into film making and the messy business of property pilfering, the pilot we produced was shopped around to networks and was turned down. “No one sees it as a likely winner,” was the way my crest-fallen (and broke) producer gave us the news. About two years later, a network weekly drama hit the airwaves which featured Robert Stack as narrator and essentially mimicked the entire concept of our production. You may recall some of the shows during the several seasons this popular series ran, and perhaps you’ll even remember the title. If not, try finding it above in our original title. Think what you will.]
Turning to some personal enjoyment in the introduction of another job, I recall with pleasure the summer of nineteen eighty-three as I re-joined some friends who had helped me establish an Indianapolis
During this time, I decided to put out the word that I would gladly sing for weddings, basically for friends or their acquaintances. This was something I had been doing since back in college, but never considered it as an income producer. Somewhere along the way, I had been forced to accept a bill stuffed into my hand by a pleased father of the bride. Having broken the ice in the area of accepting payment for this modest talent, I saw it now as a reasonable thing to do. However, rather than advertise blatantly, I simply let others pass the word. Sometimes folks who attended a wedding where I performed would seek me out through that channel. And the singing, as always, was my pleasure to do; if no payment was offered, none was sought. I accepted remuneration easily and with sincere appreciation when it came, but I would not place a price on the performance. A C-note here and there has helped me significantly along the way.
Similarly, when acquaintances found out over the years that I was pretty handy with any number of things, I picked up a few dollars – in amounts that would be insignificant if it weren’t for the dire need an actor suffers at times. Again, I didn’t typically “charge” for many of my little efforts for people I happened to know, but they often insisted I accept pay. Then, as usual, others seeing my work would contact me, in which cases I gave bids on the jobs. I was surprised at how creative I could be with something as “simple” as laying brick, flagstone or other material in a patio.
Designing something that could help beautify a home and perhaps help it sell, became another pleasure I could enjoy with or without remuneration. It would be interesting to know how much I have actually been paid for these and other odd jobs over my lifetime, but there would be absolutely no way to remember or chase down such unimportant information.
***
I will skip by some other helpful jobs I picked up during this year of eighty-three, and you’re welcome to catch the drift by reading the appendix. One reason I said earlier that the year was much like the year prior, is the fact that I ran out of much to do late in the year and by December I had again made an attempt to improve my chances for talent work by moving to a big city. This time it was Chicago Rush Street Dearborn Avenue Indianapolis
Business in Chicago Indianapolis Chicago
Jumping ahead of the story, after moving to Arizona in the fall of nineteen eighty-four (I just couldn’t take another winter in the frigid cold), I got a call from my Chicago agent saying I had been selected from my video, without having been to any audition, to be in a national commercial for a new flashlight. Most of us in the talent business long for these “nationals” because they pay so much better than any local or regional commercial spots. This one also provided my invitation to join the Screen Actors Guild.
So I flew back to Chicago Windy City Arizona Chicago
Be that as it may, the commercial got produced and I was pleased at how much it paid me for the shoot and then how many times I was paid over the ensuing two years for the many times it got aired – somewhere. Personally, I never saw it.
Back to the story flow to cover an important aspect of my career: a new wrinkle was introduced that meant Chicago McCormick Place
But even products that are going to find their way into unexciting manufacturing contexts and go un-noticed in their typical usage, still need to be marketed in a way that gets the best view and draws attention. The client’s demonstration space (the booth) at the show was basically covered by a thick slab of UHMW Polymer, ten feet wide by twelve feet front-to back, and upon this white slab, in a specially-designed costume in bright company colors, skated a lovely blonde lass with former Olympic team experience. She made tiny circles, swirls and tight spins on this fake ice that allowed her to move gracefully and charmingly. And her skates seemed to glide across the surface with barely any sign of scoring the product.
I would step to the front of the space, just off the “ice,” before each of three demonstrations per hour. As Anita glided from a space behind a curtain at the back of the “rink” to begin swirling around on the small slab, it was my job to act as a kind of carnival barker, rounding up people who were milling about the two or three nearest aisles and get them to stand near enough to watch the performance. These industrial trade shows being attended mostly by males and our skater being young, cute and dressed rather fetchingly, as figure-skaters always are, this first part of my job was pretty easy. Then as she skated around, making it look easier than it was, my job was to deliver (by shouting over general noise that threatened to drown me out) a great deal of technical information about the polymer’s chemical resistance, abrasion resistance, low co-efficient of friction, etc. to the crowds of people who were quite reasonably surprised to see skating without ice. This plastics-industry product was still in the early presentation stage and its extensive useful range was still being developed, some new processes even being suggested by potential manufacturing customers there at the show.
This trade show live presentation work was a new and important part of my personal performance repertoire, and for many years it was to keep me in walking-around money. I worked about six or seven shows over the years for this original client, losing Anita at one point and gaining Teresa, who was a yet smaller and more vivacious “tiny dancer” on the ever-improving “ice.”
From the connections made in that first experience, more trade show openings arose, allowing me to pick up more than thirty show dates in the next decade. There is a whole industry behind these shows, the creative minds who sell concepts and design the sets, the set display manufacturing, the logistics, shipping, hiring of extra people to help in the final staging, then finding and hiring those such as I to stand up on the stage to speak and the skaters or other action performers to make a show of it. It’s an industry I came to appreciate.
***
Back to my own logistics, allow me to explain a major change of venue. After taking a lengthy and beautiful trip in late nineteen eighty-four that included visiting some of the awesome sights of Utah and other southwestern areas, the lady in my life at that time and I decided to pull out of Indiana’s snow-ridden winters and try some new kind of living. We put the house in Indianapolis Cottonwood , Arizona
Within weeks of renting a house near Cottonwood , closing on the house in Indiana Arizona Chicago
During the following year, nineteen eighty-five, I continued returning to the Midwest for these jobs in live marketing, and my sons began a general travel routine of their own, coming to see me in Arizona three times each year. They loved coming to the warmth, especially at each winter holiday time and for one long weekend in spring. They learned to deal with the excessive warmth during the summer visits. Both my teen-aged sons were great company and seemed to be as excited as I was to visit the Grand Canyon , national parks in Utah Arizona
The boys also helped me, and hopefully learned a bit, in building a new home. I was privileged to design a home and contract out the many parts of the construction. But to finish some of the interior, including cutting and laying Saltillo Tile, and the landscaping, including a meandering rock “creek” running diagonally across the front yard, my sons and stepson all worked beside me and felt proud of our accomplishment.
That year of hiking on trails, basking in sun and beauty, and building our own new home was a glorious time for me. I was forty and felt very much the old adage that life was ready to begin. In many ways, it did begin for me then, but it was an extension of the old life with a slide into an all new venture. And it did not include living happily ever after in Cottonwood .
TEN
High Seas and Higher Hopes
Nineteen eighty-six was something of a watershed year for me, yet I cannot site a particular sea change event nor can I list lots of new jobs. I may have done more individual jobs than any year previous, but they were pretty much repetitions of job types, so I am not going to “pad” the list here by making them appear to be all new work. I did begin to branch into various specialties in the performance field during this and the following two years, but I will simply leave these variations to the appendix listing. If anyone wonders why I might refer to “Host” in several different ways, it is a significant line drawn between different types of hosting. Many game show hosts have never hosted a beauty pageant; many convention emcees have never hosted an awards show, etc. These require some variations in the handling of the jobs, so I do list these as separate types of employment.
The single biggest adventure added to my world in eighty-six was my first ocean cruise. Calling a classy vacation in a floating hotel an adventure may sound overdone to some, but remember that my rejection of anything like a Navy career was due to a profound fear of deep water. By forty-one years of age, it was time, and I convinced myself so, to overcome childhood fears by facing them down.
In this case, I was on a cruise around French Polynesia (Tahiti ) for two weeks, allowing time for photographers to get lots of great pictures of the ship and ten of us models frolicking in the surf at various beautiful beaches. That’s right, this was a job also, and quite different from any other modeling jobs I had experienced. However, it also does not merit a separate position on my listing because it was just another modeling gig. Models pose for cameras; the location, clothing or product is virtually unimportant. In fact, list entry #39, “Model,” covers an enormous range in types of modeling done. For example, in nineteen eighty-one I walked a runway wearing thousands of dollars’ worth of fine threads for a fashion show, earning fifty bucks an hour, and within days of this job, I was hired to “model” a one-piece toilet. This modeling job (called “product modeling”) involved holding the item up and smiling for hours of photographic magic to be applied, pretending the toilet was practically weightless. (It wasn’t porcelain, but it also wasn’t weightless!) My back shouted at me for days after that gig, but I was paid more than one hundred dollars an hour for the job. For modeling in the cruise brochure, my pay was the two weeks of fun in the south seas. That’s another good reason not to list it as a paying job. I couldn’t put fun in the bank, but boy, did I enjoy that pleasure break on the ocean, thousands of miles in the direction of Australia
What made the year of nineteen eighty-six so special over-all was the fact I had made a significant step personally to change my life, having moved to the desert Southwest in late eighty-four and allowing time for hiking the Arizona outback while giving my outlook in all the different performing opportunities time to refresh. Much of the rebuilding of my career had to do with my decision in late eighty-five to make the drive for two hours each way from my new home in the quiet town of Cottonwood Arizona Phoenix Phoenix Chicago Las Vegas Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport
As an aside here, not adding numbers to my list but merely pointing out that my already listed paying jobs were continuing in a new place with a new outlook in the new year of eighty-six, I offer the following: In that calendar year I worked in modeling for fashion; modeling for new housing developments; local television commercials; national commercials; tradeshows (several four-day jobs); theater in Phoenix; films shot in Arizona; radio commercials; industrial videos; television pilots for game and variety shows; and probably some work I cannot now recall. At times I auditioned for three different producers in a single day, and on the very unusual day, I was even able to accomplish two different jobs – something that is not typical and is a bit hazardous. One never can be sure a “shoot” or “session” in any of these fields will not go beyond the predicted time allotted, so a major taboo in the industry is double booking. Again, I had great agents to make this kind of thing work on the rare occasion my services were called upon by more than one producer at a time.
Did I mention I appreciated the two relaxed weeks in Tahiti late in eighty-six?
Also during that year, I began working with the local board of Screen Actors Guild to try to strengthen our contracts for the Arizona Arizona Hollywood flight” taking place in the movie business. Of course we were all glad to have the chance to work in films, but part of the reason those producers came to Arizona California California Arizona
So once again, a huge effort and a big part of my working life in the performing industry goes un-mentioned here as a “paying job,” because there was no direct payment to me. However, I spent a reasonably large portion of my available time helping in the effort to see others and eventually myself profit from our push for improvement. Added to this, I was at one point asked to take on the editing of the local SAG branch monthly newsletter. My interest in writing and a general desire to do all I could reasonably do for my colleagues made this an offer I did not want to turn down. This was a year of giving extra time and taking responsibility that was certainly an honor to perform, but it was not rewarding in the area of direct monetary remuneration. I hope my efforts were beneficial.
***
Probably I could have relaxed and enjoyed those good times in Phoenix Phoenix Hollywood
In late eighty-seven, following some successful forays into film and television while staying tied to Arizona California Hollywood Chicago Hollywood
My reason for not remembering is simple; that was my one and only time to be in that agency office, other than to drop off a stack of glossy photos as requested. Yes, they signed me to a contract and I was “off and running” in my new film and television career. Beginning soon after I joined the agency and running into summer of eighty-eight, I was getting auditions fairly frequently and picking up the occasional bit part, expecting to go big-time any day. An appearance lasting about twenty seconds on General Hospital Santa Barbara
Much was going on in my world and I was feeling positive. I rented a second apartment, this one in Burbank Santa Barbara Phoenix Phoenix Burbank Phoenix Hollywood Arizona Phoenix Hollywood California
But by mid nineteen eighty-eight, instead of a break, I went broke. The problem, as is so often the case in life, was with the timing. Had I been in this desirable position in almost any other year, the whole thing would likely have worked out. In that particular year, one of those unhappy necessities in business, a strike, was to bring the entertainment world almost to a full stop. Those who were well established in their particular part of the industry were able to wait it out. Others of us bit the dust!
Before the end of eighty-eight, the strike having lasted several months already, some businesses, and therefore quite a number of individuals, were devastated. Delivered to my apartment community office one day was a package of all my photos along with a thoughtful letter from the agency partner managing the west coast office of Jefferson-Ellis. She said she was sorry they were unable to stay afloat but she was sure I would soon be represented by some other agent lucky enough to get me, and she was confident my career would blossom when the writers all went back to work.
Timing! It wasn’t “in the cards for me,” as they say. The sweet predictions about my career did not come to pass. I was not even able to pick up a new agent affiliation, even though by early eighty-nine after the writers’ strike ended and work resumed, I was cast in a film after auditioning through my Arizona Hollywood agent. Not so. Perhaps I just wasn’t that good in my part.
By mid eighty-nine, I had given up my Burbank apartment (the fellow Arizona actor who shared the Burbank apartment had also been forced to throw in the towel, so we got out of our lease) and moved back to live and work in Arizona. This time though, I shared an apartment with my older son who had moved to Scottsdale Indiana
ELEVEN
I Had A Hammer
Maintenance man? Oh, yeah. With an offer to live rent-free plus earn some cash – and include an agreement that anytime an audition might come up I could leave the complex without advance notice – the job of apartment maintenance was a natural. This allowed me to return to Hollywood
One of the apartments was configured in such a way as to inspire a more dramatic change, so I removed part of a wall between kitchen and living room, tearing out plaster and moving some wiring around, and built a pass-through bar arrangement. This required more of my carpentry and finishing skills, so I enjoyed the turn-around of this unit more than most.
The complex was an aging set of four buildings, about a city block up the hill from the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Blvd. and only two blocks from the old Chinese Theater – once, and again today, known as “Grauman’s” but called “Mann’s” at the time I was there. I often walked down the street to watch the tourists try putting their feet and hands into the celebrities’ prints left there in cement in front of the world-famous theater. The occasional unveiling of a star on this part of Hollywood Blvd.
There were sixty units in the buildings I handled (most were small studios) and the general turnover in tenant population was at a rate of one every four to six weeks. My responsibility at the time a unit became vacant was mainly to clean up after the former tenant, getting the apartment ready for professional painters to make it look fresh and new. Before doing anything though, I would assess the unit’s rent-worthiness as it stood, and if I felt it could be improved in a special way as mentioned above, I called in the manager so I could make my suggestions known. If she agreed but needed to hold the line on costs, I would adjust my grand design as needed and figure out how to make improvements on the cheap.
But the typical apartment needed little more than paint. Following the spray that covered all in a refreshingly off-white “lace” finish, my work was usually to change out all the electrical outlets and switches, putting on new plates over these so everything appeared new, repairing or replacing fans or other fixtures, updating light tubes and ballasts, etc. Any big repairs or changes required in electrical wiring or plumbing was done by professionals to whom I had access and could call if the need exceeded my simple “handyman” capabilities.
One advantage of being a maintenance manager, a little “extra” that is not immediately apparent to the casual observer, involves that first step of “cleaning up after the tenant.” The commodity that more than any other was left behind by harried individuals trying to get packed and moved in a hurry, was books. Probably because books are heavy, people tend to decide that those they have already read are no longer needed. Many were simply left on shelves or scattered among the trash so often left everywhere.
Being a lover of books, I was happy to be the first into a vacated apartment, and I had the right to decide what was trash and what was treasure. Most of the books fell under the “treasure” heading. The best – that is, those I personally liked – went straight to my own shelves after being cleaned up as well as possible. The others that were intact and not defaced too badly went into containers that I kept handy just for this purpose. After completing my other requirements of the clean-up and hauling trash out to the dumpster, I would load the containers into my old van and take them to one of three used bookstores I had scoped out in the Hollywood area. There I could trade in all these books at a straight up deal of three to one – of course, keeping paperbacks and hardbacks separate. If I had sixty hardback books to leave at the store, I could take twenty off their shelves for myself. Win/win/win, in my estimation.
Before leaving the discussion of this unusually interesting maintenance occupation, I must say there was the infrequent down side that didn’t seem to offer a “win,” but a stench. My work one day was to open an apartment for legal and medical authorities who were called by the manager to remove the corpse of an elderly man who had lived in his little studio for some thirty years. The clean-up there was more substantial than any other I have ever experienced. Finding no family to claim either the body or any of the man’s belongings, my duty was to handle it all – except the body, of course. The vast majority of the mess in the apartment was outright trash, and in this case, surprisingly, those odds and ends usually found to be reusable in some fashion, were also trash. The fellow had smoked excessively in his studio for all those three decades plus, and he had apparently heated spicy foods on a hot-plate as a regular habit. Added to the cumulative aroma from all this and unidentifiable smells probably from medicines and bodily wastes, was the putrid smell of decay from his own cancerous body left unnoticed for possibly two weeks. This last, and particularly overwhelming, olfactory attack was what finally prompted a neighbor to report something amiss. Removal of the odor was impossible. I tried to save one of his books, a rare volume I had not seen before and thought may be a valuable find. No dice! The stench was simply too much to bring to my own lair or take anywhere but to the incinerator.
Bringing the apartment itself back to a habitable condition was a real challenge. Four or five different cleaning methods had to be used, in succession. Fumigation was part of the process, and on some of the surfaces stained beyond identity, I actually tried lie and other chemicals. Bleaches, ammonia solutions and various harsh astringents were used to finally get the interior ready for more common cleaning with pine scented soaps, etc. At long last, and after much dedicated application of elbow grease and novel cleaning methods, the place was ready for the painters. We opted to allow the first coat of stain-preventing primer to dry thoroughly, about three days, as I seem to recall, then applied a heavier spray of a second sealer coat. Two days after that we finally sprayed it all with a quality paint and then waited. Leaving windows open for the next week, I continued to check in on the place for odors every day. Each time I felt a smell was a little too noticeable, I sprayed all around with air fresheners. Baking soda was also left out in various places from early in the cleaning process until we considered things were back to some normalcy.
The day before we rented the studio out again, I went inside, having left it closed up for a few days to check the effectiveness of our cleaning. The smell was still there. Oh, it was much diminished, and we hoped that for those who had not known to expect it, perhaps not really detectable. To me, it was never to be forgotten. Today, twenty years later, I can easily remember that smell specifically.
All in all, the work there in maintenance was a very successful part of my crazy history of employments. Especially was it effective in allowing me to pursue my acting career because of the proximity to studios and general Hollywood activity. Apparently my acting skills were the only questionable matter because with several opportunities to make some kind of splash in the industry, my “big break” never materialized. I kept imagining my day would come as did Harrison Ford’s after he spent years doing handyman work, hanging in there to wait for the right audition. He was probably a better carpenter than I, from rumors I picked up on, and I believe the evidence is clear he was a better actor.
During this year, because I turned forty-five that February, I met the age requirement for a celebrity “senior” softball league in the neighborhood. Some actual well-known folks such as Happy Days producer Garry Marshall and long-time character actor Frank Campanella were part of this league that played weekly in a Studio City park, within view of Universal Studios. Apparently these gentlemen, along with a few of lesser fame but equal desire to still be “boys of summer,” enjoyed a fairly competitive slow-pitch game. They had elected to drop the minimum age at least five years below most senior league requirements, thereby allowing “young punks” like me to join the action. Though Garry was significantly older than I and wore substantial braces on his battered knees, he loved the competition provided by fellows my age who could still run well. I thoroughly enjoyed the time there on the ball field and developed a few casual friendships over that summer. To this day, on the wall with various other memorabilia, there are my plaques for batting and fielding earned in that league. Many friendly contacts were made there, however they never netted me any kind of score in the film or television business. Still it was a summer and a year that for many reasons I find unforgettable.
***
By the end of that year, as usual it seemed around the holidays, even auditions had dried up. So had some of my enthusiasm and personal aspirations. Dejectedly, I walked away from Hollywood Las Vegas
Arriving there in December, I found Las Vegas Arizona Las Vegas
Little will be recorded here regarding Ann who could be the subject of a separate book. So often I wish I had done more to maintain the friendship because we have lost contact in the last decade. She had become a good friend a few years previously when she was brought in to be the “rescue” manager of my favorite restaurant in Phoenix Nashville , Tennessee Nashville
At some point, during the years while I was otherwise engaged, Ann had managed to get herself moved to Las Vegas Phoenix Hollywood relief and warmly (her nature) invited me to throw my belongings into the van and get myself to Las Vegas
You, dear reader, may never have wondered what life is like for the thousands of entertainers in our society who never get that break that would vault them to success and/or notoriety. My story may not be typical, but I would venture a guess that it is not far removed from the story you might get from most of them. We are somewhat tortured and wayward souls.
As to my new work, the next paying job was thanks to Ann. Restaurant managers are constantly keeping up with many requirements other than food preparation and service. The physical property itself can be a headache in the day-to-day upkeep needs. Knowing I was a reasonably capable handyman, she hired me to take care of all things property-oriented for the restaurant. With no need to put me on the employee payroll, she simply had me turn in an hourly breakdown of time spent in physical work. Now instead of hiring an expensive tradesman for each of the small repairs needed from time to time, she had me available to keep up with everything. I repaired tables, chairs, booths; I repainted scratched walls, patched the occasional crack in the stucco, changed light bulbs, repaired shorted out wiring, adjusted (pre-set) thermostat controls, in both heaters and water heaters, mowed the grass around the building, kept all trash removed – you name it, whatever was needed, I did it. Or at least I tried to do it. As with the apartment buildings, for anything that required skills beyond my capability (particularly for code regulations), we called in the professionals.
This was a happy time for me, not only relieving me of the torture of rejection in the acting world, but allowing me to do simple things I enjoyed doing and helping my friend at the same time.
Within months of my move to Las Vegas East Bay California Pleasanton
The beauty of the long drive across Nevada, through the capitol, Carson City, past Reno and Lake Tahoe, through the high Sierras and on into the East Bay area was surpassed only by the quaint beauty of the little town we were to call “home.”
TWELVE
Blatant Name-Dropping
“Pleasanton
We located the restaurant rather easily once we arrived in the area. It sat only a block from the freeway just off what was at the time the main exit to the town. We parked and went inside to have a margarita and scope out the place. Pretty much like the restaurant back in Las Vegas
We drove on through the six or eight blocks of nostalgic Americana
After circumnavigating the town for two to three hours that first day, Ann and I returned to the old hotel and went inside to enjoy a happy hour, sitting in the lobby on tufted chairs near the stone fireplace. We were both so taken with the place, both inside and outside this ancient building, that we felt we were privileged to be brought here to work and live. We also agreed that we simply had to find housing within walking distance of this hotel and the rest of the quaint old downtown. The extremities of the town were already beginning to look crowded and the new houses cheapened by the sheer need to build them quickly and close together. “Old Town
Ann strongly considered purchasing a home here, and had one of those awesome and picturesque Victorians within two blocks of old Main Street
I was elated about finding this house by the creek. Often during that summer when I was not in any hurry, I would exit the back gate from the yard and find my way along the water’s edge, choosing careful steps among the downed tree limbs and vegetation, stepping on large rocks in the shallows here and there, making the trek to the old hotel. This was my small homage to the history of the place, my approach by way of the natural terrain and avoiding streets, sidewalks and other people. Then I heartily cheered myself by patronizing the hotel pub, enjoying a beverage brewed from those great old natural plants of barley and hops.
***
Late in summer of this year, nineteen ninety-one, I grew restless again and thought it may be time for me to seek something more resembling a career. Yes, there was still enough work at the restaurant to keep me somewhat busy, if not highly paid, and on the living expense front, my friend refused to allow me to pay any rent. She also enjoyed cooking now and then at home for us both, and naturally we always ate free at the job, so my expenses were virtually nil. Added to this financial advantage during that summer, another manager for the same chain asked me to spend time each week at his restaurant a few miles away, keeping up on all the little property needs I had been handling for Ann’s unit. This provided a little more income. Still, my curiosity about making a better living was piqued. Ann was completely understanding and said I could continue the current arrangement while checking out other employment.
Through an acquaintance, a frequent customer at the restaurant, I learned that the Toyota
***
Whether I made much of an effort to find it, I cannot recall, but somehow I became aware of a newspaper ad. American Airlines was advertising in the San Francisco Oakland Dallas San Francisco
Amazed and excited, I prepared myself to fly off to the world of flight. I packed my meager belongings and placed them, all except my needed travel clothes, in my trusty old van which Ann said could stay at her place for the time being; she would take me to the airport.
Then I received another phone call.
The back-story first: My friend Kevin in Burbank
While I had been in Hollywood
At times I doubted Kevin’s capacity to go as far as he saw himself going, but I never doubted his energy nor his bold actions. He had told me a few months earlier that he was about to sign a contract with Mickey Dolenz, famous singer/song writer with The Monkees, who now wanted to re-make his career in film and television. Soon after that, Kevin told me he was now Mickey’s manager, and invited me to a party he was throwing for the singer’s birthday. It turned out the party was actually on a night between Mickey’s birthday and my own, the two being about a week apart. [I think he is eight days younger.]
I met and visited a good bit with Mickey that evening, because when Kevin introduced us, having found out my birthday had just passed, he said it was now a joint birthday party and we would plan to make it an annual event. He also told Mickey that someday he hoped to have me in his stable of actors. All this sounded to me like so much hot air, but of course, he was giving Mickey the feeling he was in the company of someone to be reckoned with, and I admit, the ego stroking felt good. Mickey went along with it all as though it seemed perfectly normal to him and he seemed to treat me as an equal. Kevin had a way of working with people and their psychological needs. Mickey’s daughter Ami was also there that evening and I thoroughly enjoyed talking with her. She was a fine young actress. She had broken into TV in General Hospital
[ An interesting aside here: On that day back in eighty-eight when I played a minor part in General Hospital, before leaving the set at midday as more members of the regular cast were arriving, I caught a glimpse of the young Kristi Malandro – later Kristina Wagner – who had found success very early on this “soap.” Approaching her with a smile, I said I had been hoping to get to see her before I left. She took on a less-than-friendly expression asking pointedly, “Are you the one who parked in my spot?” I said I would not do such a thing, and reminded her that I was someone who had helped her, at her request, to learn her way around a TV commercial set only about six years earlier. She seemed then to vaguely recall our time of working together when she was a raw teen actor in Indianapolis
Back now to the phone call in late ninety-one. It had been more than two years since I had met Mickey at “our” party. The annual party may well have gone on as Kevin planned, but my having been thrust from the actor’s Garden of Eden by dint of the strike also meant I was not in the inner circle. I wasn’t even in Hollywood
Out of the blue, if you’ll pardon the pun, two days before I was to get on a plane for a free ride to Dallas Hollywood
Mickey asked if we could get together to flesh out some of the skeleton concept. He said it was something he thought he could get his teeth into and he expected to readily find backers to produce it. Could I possibly meet with him on Wednesday?
Sure I could! I called American Airlines and said I had some commitments I needed to finish up and perhaps I could talk with them again some time. I was making a feeble effort to keep a door open just a tiny crack in case I needed to try again. But in all seriousness, this Hollywood break was one of those a person must take when the call comes. The calls are all too rare. And this one fairly sparkled with promise.
My old green camper van, “Kermit,” was already packed and with a little luck it would make the four hundred miles back to the Los Angeles
The van made it to Burbank Hollywood
This was our only meeting on the subject, ever. Mickey thoughtfully phoned me about three months later and was downcast over his inability to round up support for the concept. He earnestly hoped I could find a way to go forward with it through some other means. He sounded dismally let down and I appreciated his candor as well as his compassion for me over the stillborn project.
What Mickey could not know, and I would not have wanted him to know, was that while he could now go about looking at other projects and dabbling in any number of other endeavors, I was destitute. I had no royalties coming in from years of music writing and production; I had only infrequent checks for a few dollars – and literally one for nine cents from Screen Actors Guild for a one-time use of the General Hospital
[Mickey and I saw each other one more time but chatted for only a few moments after the wedding of Kevin and his bride. Mickey sang there with a band, including a great personal rendition of his hit song, “I’m A Believer.” I had officiated at the ceremony.]
***
Doing the infrequent wedding ceremony, or wedding singing, was not going to make me a living. On the other hand, it didn’t have to; I had landed a new job!
While awaiting Mickey’s call, expecting him to say the exact opposite of what he said, and expecting to have to drop everything to go to work with the new show, I was nonetheless in need of employment for the interim. A friend from my earlier days in Hollywood
Chuck had been in the Secret Service back during the Ford and Carter administrations. Following several other employments, mostly touching on law enforcement, he ended up in Los Angeles Hermosa Beach
Now in late ninety-one, I was back in the area and Chuck was able to be more than just curious about my job situation; he could be helpful. He offered me a job. He had very recently landed a contract to handle the crowd-control (security) at the Universal Amphitheater. Their main business at the time was in rock concerts, and often there would be a need for well over one hundred “guards” to make sure the crowds were accommodated and order was maintained. The vast majority of these part-time guards would be young men and women who needed to be signed up, tested for knowledge of state security guard requirements (from a California guide book), finger-printed and then kept organized as to hours of availability and followed up by being paid for their hours actually on duty at the theater, the hours tabulated in fifteen minute increments. Chuck needed someone nearer the age of himself and his brother Bill who had begun the process, so he could depend on some of these particulars being handled consistently.
I could do the job. My mature stature was actually an asset! I obtained my own Guard Card first and then got into the business of helping hire many others for Blackthorn Security, Chuck’s newly formed company.
THIRTEEN
More Names; More Droppings
Working for my friend Chuck proved to be one of the more interesting jobs of my life, and certainly that period of almost two years was most memorable. By virtue of being back in the entertainment capitol, I automatically re-launched my auditioning efforts and Chuck almost insisted I keep this alive. He always believed in my talent and wanted to see my career get on track at last. He was excited about the plans for the new TV show and my chance to work with Mickey Dolenz, but he again was aware of the ups and downs we all suffer in the business and did not want me to put all my future hopes in that single potential success. Such a sage man was my friend Chuck.
Barbara Cameron became my new agent for film and television. She is the mother of two industry notables, already successful child actors Kirk and Candice, who were well known in individual TV series. Barbara decided, I guess, it was time to begin handling her kids’ careers, and as a new agent, she had openings for others to join her growing agency. She thought she could get me some auditions for parts similar to those her friend Alan Thicke played. I cannot recall how I was put into contact with her, but I now assume it was through Kevin who still had me under a management contract. Barbara did get me a few auditions during nineteen ninety-two, but again, nothing came through very well for me, or I was not right for most of the parts for which I read. I worked on a few sketches for late night shows which I never saw on the air. One of these entries was a briefly broadcast show called “Rick Dees Into The Night.” I enjoyed the comedic endeavor but the opportunity it afforded me had no staying power.
While all this was happening and Chuck was paying me as much as possible to help him handle the crowd-control work at Universal Amphitheater, I still wasn’t back into the kind of income that allowed me to find a new apartment. In much the way Ann had done for me for several months, Chuck now provided me a place to hang. It was quite different here, however, because “Chuck’s Place” was a beachfront condo that was rather small. My “room” was actually the living room where I camped out, choosing to sleep on the couch or the floor; some nights I shared the floor and room with one or more other friends who happened by. Other nights, when Chuck wanted privacy, I slept in my camper parked somewhere considered safe.
Chuck and I shared a disinterest in growing up or appearing to grow old. Both in our late forties, we laughed, sang (he was fairly accomplished on the guitar and had written a number of quite sophisticated songs), drank and partied energetically. We walked down the beach often to the Redondo Beach Pier where we engaged in syncopation. (This refers to a great old comic line defining syncopation as “irregular progression from bar-to-bar”!) I capitalized “Place” in the previous paragraph because of the delightful memory of this bachelor pad and how free-and-easy life was there. On the big windows facing the surf (the condo backed up to a low wall separating us from an asphalt walkway running along a beautiful stretch of beach), Chuck had hung two neon signs. One read “Chuck’s Place” and the other, “Lady’s Room Inside.” We were wild and crazy guys open to possibilities.
Chuck settled into a new marriage a couple of years after this episode and today is the very dedicated father of two teen-aged sons, his first offspring, born when he was in his fifties. Chuck and I talk on occasion and he still wants to know whether I am going to be in any new films or television shows. He can’t fathom my desire to sit at a keyboard and write books. He sent me a CD, recently produced with the help of some friends, which has eighteen of his original songs, sung and accompanied by himself. One of the songs actually had strings and back-up female voice added, and it is fine music. He continues to impress me.
***
By the spring of nineteen ninety-three, as an aging “rocker” (with no musical talent to speak of), I had rocked on long enough that I was beginning to wear down a bit. Once more, the Hollywood scene and my miniscule success at exploiting it, had gotten to me. It was no longer enough that I could hang out at the beach or that I could be at all the concerts at Universal. I was just beginning to loose interest in much of the crazy life in the world of Los Angeles
Through most of ninety-two, the concerts in which I had helped to keep order and civility were real rock concerts of the type enjoyed more by my sons. They both worked with us, in fact, to handle crowds for some of the more “edgy” groups such as “Ministry,” “The Beastie Boys” and “Pearl Tempe , Arizona
Fortunately for my ears, the concert bookings began to soften with acts such as Brian Adams, Prince, Glen Frey and Kenny G. Things continued to calm down with the booking of the Country Music Awards night and later, The Judds and others. It was quite pleasant for me to visit backstage and hear the easy-going personal exchanges taking place between Reba McEntire and Clint Black, as well as Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. Others at this level of celebrity are often withdrawn when they’re not on the stage. It was great visiting when they felt relaxed.
I had the privilege of chatting with Ashley Judd near the stage on a night when her sister and mother performed. Ashley had just begun to try acting and I had caught her performance in an episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation. She accepted compliments with a shy smile and wasn’t at all sure I was correct in my assurance that she would become a huge success. I was correct!
My personal favorite, bringing his show to the Amphitheater in early ninety-three, was James Taylor, the epitome of laid-back entertainer and in my own dealings with him, the most humble and considerate of any big name star I’d met.
***
But stars had worn me out a little by this juncture, and I had not seen literal stars clearly for a long time. The constant haze and light pollution over the Los Angeles Basin
A letter arrived in March. It was from my good friend from high school, the fellow who had been president of my graduating class in sixty-three. He was encouraging me to plan to attend our thirtieth reunion that coming June back in Indiana
Chuck told me to enjoy my trip and I could pick up where I left off, whenever I got back. I said it may be quite a while this time, because I needed a big change.
At some time a few months before this, my son Scott and I had procured another apartment together, strangely enough, in the same building in Burbank
My way of making a basic living was not being completely vacated. For months, my calendar had been arranged to do a trade show at the Javitz Center New York City California New York New York
Two items had to be dealt with, and they posed no problem. First, as much as I had always loved my camper van for those starry nights and incredible sleep, it was groaning in the throes of age and wear. Kermit was not up to a six or eight thousand mile trip, and my budget was not up to replacing the engine. Neither was my mechanical skill up to the task of keeping her running by constant repairs. I sold my exhausted van – a type no longer being built but popular as a refurbished resale – for enough to buy a later-model sedan at auction and have some cash left over. I then requested of my trade show employer, Beckman Instruments, that rather than a plane ticket, they might pay mileage costs in a reasonable amount befitting the situation. They happily did so, making my trip across country a slight boon to my finances rather than a difficulty. So at the end of May, I said “So long, California
My take-off was to me, better than flying. I was virtually flying in my feeling of freedom from cares and troubles that had dogged me in recent years. I felt sure that whatever lay ahead was going to be as fulfilling as anything that may have come along if I’d stayed in Burbank Arizona Burbank Colorado River .
***
Here are some reasons for my lightness of being as I left yet another job and headed to wherever life might take me, at age forty-eight!
Over the previous three years, though I had done various menial jobs, my best income was actually coming from companies such as Beckman Instruments. This is a large company manufacturing medical diagnostic equipment, headquartered in Brea , California
For my work with Beckman and other similar types of shows, my talent agent in Orange County
The freedom I felt in May of ninety-three had to do with not only the likelihood I would not starve because I had some trade shows scheduled in advance, it also came from the following: I had arranged a national toll-free phone message service so anyone could make a free call to leave me a message and I could check into it from anywhere in the country; I obtained a phone credit card allowing me to call anywhere without having to put coins in a pay phone (this was before cellular was widely available); my agent in Orange County, California was using my audition video to book me for more trade shows even as I traveled to perform those already booked; my Phoenix agent was doing the same but emphasizing commercial and industrial work as well as modeling; my future was open to re-settling into any major market where I might simply feel comfortable.
Here’s a perfect example of how the above arrangement worked:
Between my class reunion in Indiana New York Florida Kennedy Space Center
Leaving the cape area, I checked my message service and found a call from my Phoenix Agent, Ruth Leighton. A job was mine if I could make it in time. I called her back and found that a Phoenix Atlanta Georgia Atlanta
Driving much of the night, stopping to nap now and then to avoid dangerous fatigue, I arrived at Atlanta six o’clock flight and picked up my pre-paid round-trip ticket to Phoenix nine o’clock . We wrapped the shoot at five that afternoon and the producer took me back to the airport, checked me into an airport hotel, paid my tab in advance and asked them to add charges for any food I might want. All I needed was sleep, practically. Enjoying a restful night there, I caught the shuttle to the Delta terminal early in the morning and was on my return flight to Atlanta seven o’clock Phoenix
Late that afternoon, after less than thirty-six hours away, I was back in my car and leaving the Atlanta New York
In a very general way, this kind of hit-and-miss employment continued for the ensuing few years. The most notable single assignment was in July of ninety-six when Beckman sent me to the U.K.
FOURTEEN
Back To a Future
The most recent fifteen years have been, for me, the fastest, in terms of how time seems to pick up speed. So I will handle this narrative in a speedier fashion as well.
“Time flies when you’re having fun,” I believe is the wording of an old axiom. And though I cannot claim that the entire fifteen year stretch has been all fun, I will admit that it has whizzed past almost as though I walked out of mud and onto firm ground back in ninety-four. At some point the terra firma under my feet became even smoother and I put on skates!
In the matter of landing new jobs, I even picked up a little speed as well. And while this has been interesting work, I have for the last few years berated myself for nearing the age of retirement and having no ability to retire. The self-flagellation is due to my desire to treat a very special lady much better and to travel the world as we both long to do.
***
I did reach my high school class reunion in ninety-three and it was very enjoyable. But the lightness of spirit and the cavalier attitude I had taken regarding a future that was going to unfold as it may, took the weirdest possible turn. Instead of mere lightness, I seemed to lift above terra firma entirely and begin to walk on air. Maybe a bad mix of metaphors, but my ebullience was because I got my first glimpse in thirty years of the beautiful blonde I mentioned early in this writing. She had been an eye-catching girl at the age of nine (and I was almost twelve) when I first saw her in nineteen fifty-seven ; she was now a gorgeous lady in her mid-forties, and I was just as smitten as at the original meeting. All my intended meandering around the country without itinerary now took on a much different tone. Wherever I might travel, my eventual destination would be back to her in the hope that she would somehow eventually share her life with me.
My work in trade shows continued through that year, following New York Orlando New Orleans San Antonio Arizona California Indiana
My work during this cold winter was minimal, having nothing in any of my fields of interest available in this region. [A fun little job of filling in for a few hours a week for a friend from Zimbabwe
I had previously had in the back of my head an idea that by cold weather time, I might wander toward Miami , Florida Dallas , Texas Chicago Chicago Michigan city Chicago Michigan city Indianapolis
Of the four or five total parts for which I auditioned during this winter and early spring of ninety-four, I worked only a three-day modeling job in Indianapolis
My next totally new kind of job came in April of ninety-four. I had decided that it didn’t matter what I had to do, I was staying near my lady in the event things could finally work out for us. One day it occurred to me that I might convince her to live with me after her divorce was final, if I had some actual semblance of a home for this to happen. She ran a hair salon in Westville and would need to be near enough to keep the business going, at least for a while.
About ten miles or so to the east was a tiny village called Kingsbury, and another mile east of there, along the highway, was a mobile home park. I drove in and stopped at the office to inquire about rentals, not expecting much in a park so small. Don, the gruff-sounding manager, said he had nothing currently empty except one home in need of repair; I could check back in a month maybe. I asked what kind of repairs were needed and he looked surprised. “Why,” he asked. “Are you interested in doing the repairs?” I told him I might be if I felt the job was within my capabilities. He showed me the home which needed a little structural support replaced underneath, some new flooring and minor repairs, which I said I could handle if it would allow me to rent the unit. Deal! As it turned out, I repaired this mobile, moved in rent-free for two months and became Don’s yard man and fix-it guy. Plus, any time he had a mobile to move or skirting to install, he took me along as his helper and I pocketed a little cash for these jobs.
So on the twelfth of June, nineteen ninety-four, I brought “home” the girl of my dreams. We lived happily in that comfortable mobile through the summer while she continued working at her shop and looking for a buyer for the business. We had determined to head to California Indiana Muncie , Indiana California
In November, following many turns in fortune and some timely financial help from a most considerate brother and sister-in-law, we were able to move to an apartment in Costa Mesa, California. This was nicely situated within twenty miles of these helpful family members, it was near the ocean, and within two miles of one of my agents of several years, Marian Berzon. More work through her office seemed very likely and I soon began to audition again. But in five months, no real work came my way. My new bride was wondering if I might try some new line of work that was more predictable. I thought it over, around my fiftieth birthday.
A nephew of mine called me around this time and told me of the newest and most exciting leap in entertainment technology. It involved the future of television sets that would be equipped with something called “high definition.” I had never heard of this in early ninety-five, and my interest was piqued. He then told me of a new company just forming to compete with cable and the already established satellite television. The new company was to be called “The Dish Network,” and this entry into the television reception game was to produce the most high-tech devices manufactured to date. It was also to be sold only by network marketing – multi-level, in other words.
Having long been aware of, and turned off by, the MLM concept, I told Dave no thanks. He assured me that he wanted my involvement not as a recruit for the multi-level sales team but as a spokesman to help him inform the public about HD TV. My job would be to speak to groups he would arrange for me, and his part was to sell the Dish Network to all these folks who were going to flock to HD.
Seeing it in retrospect, this was another of those near-misses for me in business. The concept was completely correct in theory. Today, most of us have the HD television sets, and those who don’t are bound to get there. The Dish has become one of the major players in all of television signal reception, just as was predicted.
The problem at the time was essentially a single greedy individual, as I came to understand it. As I was told the “inside story,” the man who held the purse strings for the new start-up company apparently absconded with eight million bucks and was never found. The Dish had sales people lined up and building their networks, some few actually selling already. But delivery and follow-through were almost impossible. The major lack of funds everyone in the new business now faced also meant no groups were being supplied for me to do the paid spokesman role. And to take on this new role, I had moved my lovely lady again, this time to California San Jose
***
As luck would have it, when my wife and I had scoped out a place to live where I could be close to my work (!), I had driven her around a few places not far from San Jose Pleasanton
Here we were, prepared to get my “more predictable” business underway, and the bottom had fallen out of the whole plan. Of necessity, I did what I knew best: I drove into San Francisco
Much as it was in the Phoenix San Francisco Indianapolis
Interestingly, I do not know whether that show ever got any air time. I watched for it during the next year, but never caught it on TV.
We managed to stay afloat in our little place in Pleasanton San Jose Hollywood
She joined me again on a different set that year, filming in Candlestick Park
Other odds and ends of employment came along to help pay the bills. My wife took a job managing a book store while I dabbled in retail around the holidays and picked up some minor construction jobs, mostly in building back yard decks. We also spent considerable time that year in volunteering at a non-profit thrift store, mostly handling book display, building shelving in the store as well as storage shelves in their basement.
By spring of ninety-six, I was looking at other possibilities when one balmy day I walked three blocks from our apartment to indulge myself in fantasy and nostalgia by visiting a classic car salesroom. One car from nineteen-fourteen was there along with many vehicles from the era up through the forties and even more from the fifties – the beauties I remembered fondly from my childhood. The owner of the business, when hearing I was “just dreaming,” asked if I might want to help sell these cars. I asked a few questions and next day, I was working in the classic auto business.
Not going into detail, I will merely say that this was over-all one of my most satisfying jobs, in many ways. Still today I wonder at times whether I perhaps could go back to this work, but I believe it would require doing it as the owner and manager of a business. The man I worked for back then was quite capable of turning a buck, but some of the methods turned my stomach. I stayed with it as long as I could handle the stress (purely from the morality angle), and used my pre-scheduled tradeshow and required trip to Europe that summer as my time to clean the slate.
My next all new employment was the following fall in Mesa , Arizona Pleasanton
***
Our move to Arizona Arizona State Indiana Scottsdale
Naturally, even as I tried hard to make something good happen in that RV sales job which I had taken as a stop-gap measure, I still wanted to find better employment. But first, I checked back in with The Leighton Agency to let them know I was in the area and available for some work whenever I fit their audition profiles. This resulted in some much-needed income and for me, was pure delight. One of the most memorable of those few talent jobs that “winter” season (temperatures drop to the sixties in the Phoenix Arizona Chicago
FIFTEEN
Great Drives and Drivers
The “in some ways worse” comment about the RV sales business had to do with the particular sales company I joined, the largest dealership in Arizona
Naturally, since there was no way to prove that all these coincidental shortages from three sales persons’ checks were not “mistakes,” I could do nothing but follow the system and await my corrected commission. It seemed obvious to me that a huge company that had an unwritten, ergo unprovable, “skimming protocol” in place would make huge amounts of money to pad the pockets of top management. Companies such as Enron some years later showed the magnified example of this kind of corruption, but I was sure I was seeing a version of this in miniature at the time I was being required to deal with the problem that was huge to me. Simply consider the possibilities for the company: If a sales rep doesn’t pay close attention, especially if he has been paid what he expected for a few sales before one gets shorted, he can easily miss a ten percent “mistake” on a given sale and not bother to fill out forms to get the correction. This money may never leave the company account. But even if all the shorted amounts eventually were discovered and had to be properly disbursed, consider the many thousands of dollars held for weeks in the company account, drawing interest and looking good for the over-all corporate financial status.
My next check was a repeat performance and again I had to fill out forms and wait. While waiting, I one day had a chance to be in the presence of the company owner, the man whose name was on the many dealerships around Arizona
***
Leaving that miserable atmosphere of the RV lot in Mesa
A company in non-emergency medical transport was headquartered within walking distance of our house in Scottsdale
The job required taking CPR training and carrying a card to prove it. It also required handling wheelchairs and gurneys for the occasional non-ambulatory customer. But not all of my daily assignments put me into a mini-van with a ramp or a long van with double rear doors and tie-downs on the floor; several days a week I merely drove a regular passenger car. Many riders were folks who needed to simply go to an out-patient clinic or to a dialysis center. Some needed to visit pharmacies, and others asked that a driver pick up pre-paid prescriptions at the pharmacy and deliver them to a home address. These were some of the various duties I took on as a driver. These transport contracts being usually with the state, it also meant I might have to take a patient quite a distance. I recall two such occasions when I was told by radio dispatch to return to the shop to trade whatever vehicle I was driving at the time for an economy car. One call was for a trip east, beyond Globe, Arizona Lake Havasu
But by far the most unusual part of this employment was a night-time schedule I assumed after I had driven for this company a few weeks and had proven that I would be punctual and responsible. The supervisor asked me if I could handle night driving and on a broken-up basis, which meant sleep had to be kept to one-hour naps or arranged as a total day/night switch if I preferred. I said it was no problem and all would work out as the job progressed.
The new assignment was to handle the somewhat clandestine rides given to “wafers” in the midst of becoming computer chips. Don’t ask me to describe a wafer because I was never allowed to see one. All I know about them is that “wafer” is the industrial term used for an early stage in the development of a micro-chip. It surprised me tremendously to find out that my new night-time driving job was a secret mission set up to diminish the likelihood of industrial espionage and theft. The name of the computer chip maker, as well as the company I drove for, must be left unmentioned here. That’s an effort to protect any current drivers from undue harm by having the specifics exposed. And I am quite seriously not kidding.
My nighttime trips were at three scheduled starting times and each round trip lasted a little under two hours. I ended each trip at my home and got an hour’s sleep, then headed back to make the similar trip again. My first stop on each round was at a major chip producer’s facility, entering through an nondescript, guarded security gate and backing up to a dock near an unmarked door. I could then do nothing but wait, and the pointedly visible security personal preferred that I stay in the van, until workers in “clean suits” brought large carts loaded with sealed plastic containers from the “clean room” and loaded them into my van. They signaled me to leave when all the bins had been neatly stacked in the van and the company’s own lock placed on the door. I was never allowed access to the cargo area unless it was empty.
As I drove away from the dock, a call was made by the authorized person in the plant to his/her counterpart at the company’s off-site extension, my destination a few miles away, and the time of my departure was recorded at both ends. I had three pre-measured routes available to me to get from one plant to the other. Each route took within seconds of the set “allowed” time for me to make the trip, and it was my responsibility to be alert to possible traffic problems on any one route so I could avoid any delay. Any trip not completed in the prescribed time resulted in a call to my dispatcher who immediately radioed me to ask if all was in order. It always was, over a period of three months on this job, and every radio call I ever got came as I was within a minute of driving into the plant’s gate.
After my van was parked at the second plant, with similar precautions in place, the clean-suited technicians there would bring out a load of containers to be returned to the main plant. After their exchange of the two loads, they would re-lock the van door and signal me to leave, and those security phone calls were made again to start the clock on my drive. Once these returned containers were safely delivered to plant number one and offloaded, again the signal was given and I was free to head home.
The explanation for these maneuvers, amid all the security and secrecy, was given to me briefly as the need to avoid leaks from employees in any plant, leaks of information that might give a competing chip maker some advantage. The employees in each of the two plants, between which I shuttled the containers, were kept ignorant of the technological steps taken in the opposite plant to turn the wafers into chips.
Apparently I lucked out by never having been detected as one of those secret movers of valuable products by night. I read about a van driver in another state being killed because the contents of his van – micro-chip materials – were the object of pirates. My friend Chuck, former secret service professional, had probably been in no more danger as a gun-toting agent guarding presidents than I was in carrying out secret deliveries to elude industrial thievery.
***
In the summer of ninety-seven, I finally managed to land a job in a field so close to my heart that I felt I would settle in to stay for good. Golf had been in my blood for thirty years, and I happened to catch an employment ad for something called a “club fitter.” Upon calling about, and then interviewing for this job, I was completely intrigued. It turned out to be a sales job, which didn’t scare me at all, but on a whole new platform. The company had recently formed in Scottsdale
Another professional, at the time a teaching pro who had given up a steady job at one of the Phoenix
Going further into the fitting process, the piece de resistance was the handling of the club that should be “just right” for the client. If I did my measurements well and didn’t rush or cut corners of the equations, I could walk to the exact slot in the sample trailer nearby and, from a display of more than one hundred clubs, pull the best one to try out. All those numbers came together on the chart to tell me precisely what club the measured individual should be able to use with success. Using the bucket of balls I had procured for this, the potential customer would proceed to take strokes using the “right” club I had put in his hands. Lo and behold, the ball usually flew to spots never reached before by this golfer, and he needed none of the strained effort he had experienced with his old clubs. Sale
However, it didn’t work that way every time. That’s the sales biz. Practically every person I ever fitted would admit that the new club seemed wonderful and probably would help improve his or her game. However, only about five percent of these folks could bring themselves to order on the spot a set of irons that ran about four hundred dollars and/or woods that cost one hundred and twenty-five to two hundred each. I did sell some sets and always got great feed-back whenever I saw these golfers again back out on the driving range.
As wonderful as this whole concept was and as happy as we made a few people, there was no apparent way to keep the sales pace rapid enough to make a living. I found myself out of the business by the end of the year, and the company closed about two years later. Too bad.
Incidentally, one of those happy fitted-club owners is yours truly, and another is my son. We were able to procure sets of clubs that match our particular measurements, and a dozen years later, we are hitting the ball with these better than we could with other clubs. Just think about the logic. When steel golf club manufacturers came along in the nineteen forties and fifties, in order to mass-produce clubs they needed some kind of standard to go by for shaft length, grip, lie angle, loft – all the variables used in a club’s manufacture. They naturally chose to build things that measured to the nearest dimensions of the wooden-shafted custom clubs made for Ben Hogan, the winningest professional of the day. Mr. Hogan truly had a great swing, but how could most of us millions of golfers who stand, on average, three to six inches taller than Ben, ever hope to swing the same club and make the same contact he did? He was five feet, seven inches in height. That alone should mean something even to the casual observer.
One of those I fitted and who bought my clubs was a former professional football kicker I recognized from television. He stood six feet, two inches and was very strong. My custom clubs helped him tremendously to smooth out his swing. A former NBA star I fitted was six feet, nine in height. Imagine him trying to swing a Hogan-standard club! (I watched him try and it wasn’t pretty.) That would be akin to most of us trying to play with clubs made purposely short for children ten to twelve years of age. My supervisor, the pro who taught me the fitting method, came out to help me with this one. We had to calculate a little off the chart, but we built the man what he needed. As I recall, the set we made for the basketball player had shafts five inches longer than off-the-shelf clubs of standard length. (Mine are one and one-half inches longer than standard, and I am just under six feet tall.) The clubs made for the basketball player had very special shafts that could not be obtained, at least at that time, except through this kind of total custom fitting and manufacturing. That “giant” gentleman may be able to play for many years longer due to alleviating the former need to bend over so far that each swing would kink up his body. I imagine he is also enjoying the game a good deal more.
My reason for leaving the golf club fitting and sales job was all about need for income. The obvious lack of steady sales had begun to concern me, even though I loved what I was doing. One day I measured a fellow who instantly ordered a set of clubs, the fullest set we could make for him including a newly developed Titanium driver that alone cost three hundred dollars. When I had completed his order form, savoring the thought of making over two hundred bucks on this sale, he asked me if I might want to come and see what his company did. Maybe I would want to sell for him and make more money.
The next evening after closing down my fitting station at the driving range, I dropped by the travel sales office where my new customer had directed me. I walked in to see about ten couples being ushered into a meeting room and shortly after that, a young fellow got up to speak to the group. He showed these people in about thirty minutes how they could travel the world at greatly reduced fares if they bought into the business. When the event ended, after these folks spent as much time with individual sales reps as they had in hearing the presentation, four of the couples had bought the package. The manager came over to me and said, “The salesman on each of those deals pockets anywhere from three to eight hundred dollars. Interested?”
I reluctantly gave notice at the golf club company and began one week later at the travel sales office. Within another two days, I talked my shy wife into going along to see what went on, and she was asked to sit with a couple as a greeter – someone to chat with the folks about almost anything as a warm-up to the presentation. During this same “wave,” a term used to indicate a group having arrived at one of the scheduled event times, the manager asked me if I could go into another room and handle an overflow that evening. Three couples were brought into that room and I simply talked to them about international travel, using as many examples and as much of the jargon as I could remember from the few other presentations I had been able to witness. I used the large white board behind me to put up figures I had seen the other man use, even though I was clumsy at it that first time.
When the evening ended, the manager informed my wife and me that together we had earned close to a thousand dollars. Two of the three couples in my room had bought the package and I was well remunerated for having given the talk. One of those couples, and one of those who had purchased in the main room filled with a dozen couples, were folks my wife had greeted. She was paid a percentage for her part in the sales process. My wife immediately gave up a retail job that had been working her pretty hard, and became a full-time greeter at the travel company. I became both greeter and presenter, smoothing out my delivery as quickly as possible and earning steady pay.
Over the course of the next eighteen months, we found working together was terrific for our particular psyches – we had done lots of volunteer work together, but this was a new thing for us as employment goes – and for the first time in our life together, we enjoyed a decent income. Our lives began to be a little easier, less stressful and more lighthearted. And we spent more time at better restaurants!
I managed to put a little strain on us both when I tried in ninety-eight to help a nephew get a new business off the ground. A different nephew from the one handling the venture three years earlier and a totally different type of business. This nephew had stumbled upon a chance to sell lumber reclaimed from abandoned barns all over the southeastern part of the country, barns that traditionally had been used to dry tobacco. Now that they were out of use, many were falling down and owners were happy to sell them or give them away to get them cleared out. A mill in North Carolina laid claim to a label that included the words “wood” and “tobacco,” and this old lumber was being cleaned up and re-cut, most of it in tongue & groove lumber for flooring. Bob took on the sales of this beautiful wood but was struggling to get all the required physical work done, and the marketing seemed overwhelming. I took a leave of absence from the travel sales, leaving my wife to continue working in Scottsdale Indiana Chicago Arizona
In June of nineteen ninety-nine, we got a call from the owner of the travel sales company, the man who had founded the business but had not previously opened an office in his own home town of Palm Springs, California. He asked the two of us to come over to talk with him about our future with the company. During this meeting he offered to bring us on as closers in his new salesroom which was set to open in July in the same business complex where his personal office and the company’s main travel office were located. Along with closing sales, I was to become the assistant sales manager, at a comfortable override income, and would be the primary speaker for sales presentations – at another override. This worked. My income was now expanded by the chance to earn direct sales commissions plus a percentage of all sales made during any meeting in which I did the presentation, and then an extra percentage of total sales due to my management agreement. And my wife quickly became our top sales rep.
By the end of nineteen ninety-nine, we were partying like it was – well, 1999!
SIXTEEN
Lights, Camera, Craziness
Just after the holidays at the turn of the century, the gnarly old gentleman who was owner, founder and brains of the travel sales company, died. The company went to his son who tried not to be gnarly, but seemed to also try not to be smart. When my wife and I returned from an out-of-state trip in the late April of 2000, we were told the doors would close on our sales office in one week.
Living in a nice home, enjoying the large swimming pool which is almost a prerequisite to life in the desert, we had expenses and we also dreamed of continuing the comfortable life. But the money flow was choked off; the successful sales business died with the old man. We tried, by teaming with several of the former group of sales reps in our deceased company, to make some new configuration work. Various business licensing, credit acceptance issues and marketing difficulties shut us down. We recycled our program and came out with a new and improved sales company which made small, faltering starts, a few sales, but due to overwhelming marketing woes this one also could not get off the ground.
My wife and I were able to receive decent unemployment income for a time, and as this subsistence allowance was running out, I picked up some needed funds working back in the industry I knew best: video production. Another company in the travel industry hired me to write and host a company video to be used as a Point of Purchase promotion. I linked up with a one-man production house I had worked with in Phoenix Chicago
I tried two or three other sales jobs over the next year and did some more small videos to help pay the rent. The rent had been much reduced when we vacated our nice home in Palm Springs Palm Springs
***
In September of 2001, only two weeks after the “nine-eleven” attacks, I sold my video services to a company based in the desert but covering California Arizona
When I wrapped up the video, the company owner, a workaholic in his eighties, asked if I might become his protégé and learn all aspects of the business, helping him now and preparing for later management. I said I would be pleased to become more involved, and very soon this man had me driving him to weekly and monthly meetings of many types, introducing me as his eyes and ears in the industry. In a few months, I was going alone to many of these meetings as he preferred to stay more in the office and he seemed to trust me to speak for him. We stayed in very close phone contact on all possible subjects of interest and all questions of how we were relating to the world of Underground Engineering.
My job here became several jobs as my knowledge evolved. I had learned quite a lot of detail, while producing the video, about how the company worked with civil engineers to maintain safety of underground utility lines. Now that John had turned over to me the attendance at Green Book committee meetings, I quickly learned a good deal more. The Green Book is itself an evolving guide for civil engineers, city planners, inspectors and vendors – our company was a vendor hired to use a vacuum process to carefully uncover and map utility lines – and the Green Book committee consisted of people from all these interests and more. My concourse with engineers of all stripes helped me to learn how they wanted contracts with our company handled, and I became involved more with these contracts than with day-to-day activity of our crews in the field. As part of this progression, I took on the basic handling of a huge new client, the Los Angeles Unified School District
But other matters were always pressing as well. John appreciated my talent for presentation and used me as his marketing manager. In fact, this was one of three business cards I carried under his logos. All trade shows were under my purview, although he continued to be actively involved with his amazing energy and more amazing mental acuity. Hand-outs at these trade shows were a specialty I created, putting our company info onto miniature CDs cut to a business card size. John found these gimmicks impressive. I also took a show of my own, a separately produced PowerPoint presentation, to go into engineering offices wherever I could get myself invited to pitch our company’s capabilities to groups of civil engineers.
***
Robotics played a huge part in our multifaceted company portfolio, although the robots were all but stilled by the time I joined the firm. There’s no way to cover much of the subject in a small space here (some punchy CDs I created did a good job covering the robots as an adjunct business venture), but it is important for the reader to know that under all cities and towns are many miles of sewer lines as well as other intricate systems for water, electricity and gas. The underground infrastructure is truly a complex system that requires tremendous engineering involvement and constant innovation. Swiss engineers took a novel approach to sewer repair and maintenance in the latter part of the twentieth century: robots.
John had found out about these robots sometime in the nineties and he ran into a bargain deal to buy four of them along with their control vehicles. When I came onboard with his company, most of the robots were in disrepair and the parts for them were, if available at all, quite expensive. They also could not be properly repaired without the original Swiss engineering input, and the time it took to deal with this over-seas knowledge and parts transfer just added to the problematic upkeep of these robots. One of the employees had learned how to handle the basics of operating these highly sensitive and expensive gadgets, and he was not prone to careful handling of the robots themselves. He was somewhat creative in tinkering and doing “make-do” repairs, but this also promoted the deterioration of the product. Add to this, he seemed to “drive” the robots as though he were operating heavy equipment but having to do it with “joy sticks” and using cameras to watch the action. Using the robots was probably something of a video game to him, which made him seem to play at getting results from them. He also tended to haul the robots out of a sewer directly into the truck, often leaving them covered with whatever was on them externally, and rarely opening up the casings to clean inside and assure the working parts were protected from detrimental residue and rust.
All this is to say that these robots, which should have been extremely busy helping repair sewers and increase company income, were practically dormant. Two were operational as I recall in late 2001, and by the middle of the next year, these were almost unusable. Some of the repairs that were still ongoing with these last two were being done in a substandard way and caused more trouble than the whole operation was worth. Some of the work also became substandard. In fact, money had to be returned to some municipalities due to poor or incomplete work.
Because this leads to my next serious job, I need to explain a bit more in detail. The method used by the Swiss to repair a crack or hole in a sewer line was a robotically applied epoxy patch. This epoxy was formulated to the exact specifications of the robot manufacturer, hence it had to be ordered and imported from Switzerland
By far the greatest call for our company’s robots was not for the repair of holes but for the improvement of sewer systems. There are holes that are actually cut in a newly laid or newly lined main sewer pipe. These are for the connection of “laterals.” The actual lateral is the pipe from a building that runs laterally to the main line; the hole cut to accommodate the connection ends up being lumped into the generic term of “lateral.” These holes are required for the connection, but immediately after the lateral line is put into the hole, therefore “connected” to the main line, that hole which had to be large enough to accept the end of the small pipe now has open space left around it. This today is the biggest problem engineers deal with in sewer systems. If these many thousands of holes are left with only small spaces around the lateral pipes, sewer leaks contaminate the ground water. When ground water is high, it leaks the other way, into the sewers, losing valuable clean water while creating a massive overflow into treatment centers. “Sealing the laterals” discussions were constantly held and often practically heated during the Green Book committee sessions.
Our Swiss robots (and possibly two other companies’ Swiss robots – there were not yet any American-made robots doing this in the early twenty-first century, to my knowledge) could do this lateral sealing job, but the problems described above were the bane of the industry. It often took three or four days to do the lateral sealing work needed to follow-up a single day’s work of installing a new liner in a main line. Therefore, city managers and their civil engineers who planned large areas for sewer improvements and upgrades were always stymied in their projected time commitments for completing projects. Add to the estimated timetable the likelihood our robots would be out of commission for sometimes long periods due to waiting for repairs, and you can see why city managers went bald!
In early 2004, I hit upon a concept for improving the lateral sealing process. This idea would require a considerable adaptation of the epoxy formula, but more than that, would require a new type of application fitting attached to the robotic arm. During the time my idea was forming, I met at one of the committee meetings a man who specialized in application of epoxy. His efforts, to this point, had been spent in sealing the walls of manholes using his own epoxy formula. His special epoxy eased his job because it acted in a predictable way every time, with the mix controlled by running the two components through pressure hoses to be mixed at a point near its application area, and it was sprayed on the wall the way paint is sprayed. Heat was also part of his innovative delivery system. We talked at length and shared some “What if” ideas.
This man worked from his home in Las Vegas California
A friend of mine, a very bright “techie,” agreed to become my silent partner who could sign on with me to form a Nevada-based LLC, and with no investment whatever, be available at some point to join me full-time if and when things developed for the new lateral sealing endeavor. Before an anticipated time when I would have the new process perfected, John would work to get the robots up and running to prepare for the heavy business that was sure to develop.
My partner and I named our company “Magabond” and dreamed of great success that would change our lives. We assumed we could someday buy homes in Las Vegas and kick back with lots of golf and other fun after our Magabond process had paid off handsomely.
Next I negotiated a very reasonable Research & Development contract with John. He understood very well how much business could be brought in with a process such as I described. He also was aware that his robots represented about one third of all the active underground robot teams at the time. More were to come, no doubt, but John knew that if his main robots were converted to use in the new process which could seal laterals at five-to-ten times the speed of any current method in use, his company would be the one in demand. He would soon be able to buy new and more efficient robots, both Swiss and perhaps American-produced, to expand this business as far as he might desire. And he would finish his career with a legacy of being a problem solver for municipalities everywhere. So I was given a contract for one year at the base income I had received as an office manager/marketing manager for the previous year. My work was to be completely self-directed but I was to conduct scheduled monthly progress reports.
My promise to John was to have a workable system operational by the end of my contract year, but I stated that it would likely happen short of that time. The R & D contract also called for the patents on the new process to belong to my company, Magabond, but John’s company would become the exclusive licensee for a period of five years. He knew that by this time, he would have been well reimbursed for the costs of my research contract because his company would have the head start on being the only high-speed sealer of laterals. After five years from his first successful use of the process, my company could sell the system to any other robotic company who came calling.
I must wrap this up quickly, so I will do so by simply saying that the epoxy endeavor was perhaps the nearest of all my near-misses in life, and it was one of the more painful. After enough experimenting with make-shift nozzles and chemical formulas, working with the epoxy spray equipment in Las Vegas
It was never revealed to me why things went off the rails in the fourth month. John made a terse phone call one day to say he could no longer afford to support my product development work and that my contract was being terminated. He had not been paying me enough that I had any extra cash of my own to continue with the research, pay companies to develop new products to my specs and bring the whole process to patent stage. My joint venture partner was in nominally better financial condition than I was, but he also could not afford to cover ongoing costs. I went to two separate large companies in the underground industry, one of which had experimented with its own robots; neither was prepared to pick up my development contract. The whole creative concept simply, and quietly, died for lack of interest.
Today, six years down the line from that miserable train-wreck caused by industrial shortsightedness, I would venture to say that the sealing problem with laterals has not been solved satisfactorily and that my process would still be the answer for municipalities. It also would present a financial bonanza for any company operating robots in sewer pipes. But I found no company or individual ready to step up when I was able to talk the talk and demonstrate my new process and its potential, so I left the industry entirely. Again, I needed to find work.
SEVENTEEN
Just Keep on Going
Having to go back to receiving unemployment insurance was a far cry from what I had pictured only weeks before. The large home with a pool in Las Vegas
No home, in fact, was my sudden predicament. My wife and I had really settled in at this village in the foothills below Mount San Gorgonio. We loved the chance to golf more often than we had ever been able to do elsewhere, and we felt this climate and general location fit us better than any other we had encountered in our first ten years together. It would be a great place to retire one day. We had approached our landlord about purchasing the home while I was gainfully employed with at least two years employment on the books with one company. (This is an important point when applying for a mortgage.) The man did not want to sell the house, hoping his brother might want to move to the area upon retirement. So even though we were still just tenants, the house felt like our home, but suddenly, within a month after I lost my steady employment, the house was for sale. Again, no clear answer came when I asked why the sale was so necessary, and so quickly, after the years when the home was not available for us to buy. Now my problem was, obviously, I could not qualify for a new mortgage.
I bring up the home situation here because it directly bears on my next employment. The job search did not reveal a multitude of opportunities for me, a man almost sixty years old in 2004, but a few possibilities presented themselves. Still, the sudden housing problem brought a new perspective to my search. Could we even stay in our environs or were we to perhaps have to relocate for a new job? We already knew we would have to move out of the home we had enjoyed. It occurred to me that if a job in apartment management that included a residence were available (shades of my earlier living arrangements with apartment maintenance, but now unwilling to settle for maintenance work), maybe we should consider it. We also thought it might be better to look farther north to be near three of our offspring and a hoped-for grandchild. So my search widened.
We did indeed, look into apartment management as a team, and were offered an old and somewhat beaten-down complex near a college campus in Santa Rosa , California San Francisco
Back in our home vicinity, we looked into management as a team for self-storage properties. My reason for looking into this was again the residence inclusion provision. Without having to deal with residents but only people’s stored junk, we reasoned, the responsibilities would be far less distasteful. One company responded to my online contact and soon we met an area manager who immediately, between shaking hands in the parking lot and entering the restaurant, offered us the job. He later asked us to drive thirty miles to look at the property that was soon to be without managers. He had told the departing couple we would be coming by and they should show us the apartment as well as the storage units. Without going into the condition of the place, I will just say that even if it had been cleaned and freshly painted, the apartment was smaller than studios I had rented in the past, although this had a bedroom separate from the poorly designed kitchen. All-in-all, a depressing place to try to call “home.”
When accepting us as new employees, the loquacious area manager had said he would give us the choice of starting as resident managers on a property or as relief managers, paid hourly. The amount offered for resident management, when broken down, was not much improved over the ridiculous figures we had discussed at the apartment job in Santa Rosa
The solution to the employment problem did not solve the housing problem. But in the delightful way we have often been fortunate, an acquaintance in our village, about two blocks away, offered us the rental of her home after her move in two weeks. We took the new rental and moved up the street in the fall of 2004.
***
Working for storage properties had more twists and turns than I had ever imagined. Some of the work was hard, some just routine, and all of it under the pressure of corporate management to make the most money possible from their investment. This is basically true of all business, I am aware, but somehow the thought of watching over a property covered by rows of garage-like units where most renters left items for months or years at a time almost unforgotten, never seemed like other businesses. A complete book could easily be written about the inside story of storage property management. I may just write such a book one day.
As it developed, I worked, for a few days at some and for months at others, but eventually worked on each and every one of the twelve properties under the area manager’s purview. At several of these, my wife and I worked together with her handling the office while I worked the grounds, cleaning up after former managers and preparing to turn over a clean and smoothly-operating business to newly hired resident managers. At many of the other properties, I cleaned vacated units, assisted with auctions after debts were left unpaid, drove a moving truck to assist move-ins, etc. At times I had to work the office as well, with knowledge of the computer software and handling bank deposits, etc. – a job I would not wish on any outdoor kind of guy. Especially did I bristle and bite my tongue (sometimes a little too late) when corporate office personnel would interrupt me in the midst of my work of filling out new rental forms or taking payments from customers at the counter, calling to ask for information they could have figured out from their internal access to the networked computers.
After eight months at this crazy job and with my wife now doing well with the typically inside work, which she handled with much more equanimity, I determined she could do just as well without having me around. We were not going to, no matter how often asked to do so, take over a single property and move there. And since this was the case, we seldom were sent anymore to the same property because the company policy was to make relief managers work alone on the week-in, week-out routine. This meant she might be sent to San Bernardino Palm Springs
Having turned sixty years of age that spring, I thought in 2005 that I was poised for great things in this new sales business. Dealing with people at least sixty-two years of age meant that I could speak to them in a way perhaps a younger person would not, thereby increasing my chance to help them set up a program to give them a financial windfall, of sorts. I liked the concept very much and was confident it would be well received by seniors living near me in the little senior village as well as other thousands nearby. Not so. Just finding those who had any interest in taking some tax-free cash out of their home equity was difficult. Mailers were sent out by the thousands by the company that hired and trained me, but almost no responses came. By my own work of placing brochures in business all around the desert cities, I netted about ten calls, only three of which became sales of the reverse mortgage product. Another four came to me by way of my personal fliers I printed and handed out near my home. So in a two year period, during which I had to bow to poverty and go on-call to the storage company again and do both jobs part-time, I earned only a few thousand bucks in the mortgage business.
As 2006 was drawing to a close, I was making a sporadic living and experiencing an overwhelming desire to begin writing a book. This desire had attacked me many times before, but now I was old enough to give it more serious thought. I realized that my sixty-second birthday was coming in February and I could take early retirement which meant social security income, though not much would be forthcoming, could supplement my other incomes and I could be semi-retired. So I got the bright idea of going for my California
So it worked! Well, to a point it worked. With the storage property manager happy to call me when he needed to cover something unexpected, I picked up days here and there. At times I even got to accompany my wife to her job of handling the office while I worked on the physical property, cleaning or driving a truck for the day. At other times I declined the day’s work offered at a property because I was busy with a real estate client. And through it all, beginning in March, the check came each month from the social security folks to pay our rent. That’s how much I drew. And during it all, I developed my manuscript. (Not this manuscript but a nonfiction based in philosophy – not yet published.)
Two hurdles arose. First, I was soon informed that I could not continue sales of reverse mortgages after starting to actively sell real estate. There was some kind of concern about conflict of interest. Too bad because the interests seem to dove-tail perfectly. Okay, so no more pursuit of reverse mortgage; it had not paid me that well anyway. The second hurdle was the high one, the one no one could foresee or clear on the run. My first month in the sale of real estate became also the first month in many years that sales failed to increase. From that month and for at least another three years, home sales declined, as soon also did home prices which continued to drop steadily. In California
Timing again! Pretty similar to my decision to go to Hollywood
Late in 2007, I was finally able to sell one of the two homes for my friends, but only because I knew about reverse mortgage. Of course, I had to find someone else to handle that side so we could progress on the real estate side and get the home sale completed. Nice to finally get this done, but my personal income of a little over three thousand dollars for ten months of work did not bode well for my new career.
Then the problem of the other listing. This house had been rented and when the tenant left it empty, there was a great deal of work needed to get it ready to sell. When discussing the need to get the home refurbished, including the surprising need to rebuild the master bath which had apparently been soaked for quite some time by constantly spraying hot water from a pipe connection under the bath tub, the owners asked for my suggestions. I told them I could set about making all the repairs myself and if I ran into insurmountable problems, we could then figure out how best to handle the situation.
It took a number of weeks, and I did hire a local painter, cheap, to do the major part of refreshing the interior. My wife pitched in on her days off and with her help, the kitchen took on a whole new look. But the master bath now had a total redesign including a large stall shower with glass doors, the arrangement fitting nicely where I had torn out the original garden tub and all the rotted flooring. I had to learn how to work with a plastic pipe called CPVC which was the pipe typically used in these manufactured homes we have in the village. I enjoyed the opportunity to learn something new, and some of what I already knew got tested a bit.
Eventually the home was prepared to sell but nothing was selling by then and the owners asked me to lease it if possible. Another new job which I had not sought but which I thought I could handle. I’m not sure whether the toughest part was dealing with potential renters who gave me all kinds of stories, sometimes making appointments and not keeping them, etc., or perhaps dealing with weeds! Naturally the weeds grew fast all summer and autumn in this unattended yard, and even though it was gravel covered and “low maintenance,” there were constant new weeds to pull. Leasing agent to the rescue! Anything needing to be done was my job. So after finally getting renters in there and feeling relaxed for a time, I had to tackle other problems that came up – because after all, I was the agent. Then at the end of their one year lease term, they gave two weeks’ notice and vacated.
This time, after handling a few of the basic needs for my friends, I strongly suggested they turn over the whole leasing matter, upkeep and all, to a bona-fide leasing company. By this time I was too busy and too disinterested in starting the process over again.
***
So we come to the end, the point at which I have described my latest new job. But it certainly will not be the “last” job, as in, the very end of all my new jobs, because I am definitely not through working yet. I actually have returned to re-employments in travel sales, real estate, and now once again, in reverse mortgages. Before I can hopefully retire in my seventies, more than five years away, I expect I will repeat the practice of one or more of these professions again.
However, I do strongly desire to have two more new and very special jobs. It would be a shame to end my long list of employments with remodeling and leasing when two jobs dear to me have not yet been realized. First, I want to get this book, or any one of the four I have now completed, into print. As soon as one sells, I can list job number eighty-seven. And though it would be fairly satisfying to end with that title of “Author” and be done with the job seeking madness, I still hope for one more.
The man who stoked fires of opportunity for me and gave me the feeling nothing should be thought of as impossible, deserves to be remembered and honored. I’d like to handle the role Raymond M. Jr. fulfilled for me, an inspiration to budding young professionals who have no idea what profession they might find desirable. I’d love to stand before assemblies of youthful and rambunctious people who are as directionless as I was in high school, and to say to them, “You can be anything you want to be.” It is my fond desire to go for that ultimate job of inspiring at least one person to seek something out there beyond the mundane or the expected. I want to help anyone who will accept my help, to assist a young person to find the one or even the two or three great opportunities that will bring fulfillment, happiness and prosperity. I want to say to all who will listen, “Though you can be anything you want to be, you may not wish to try everything. You do not need to find eighty-six jobs in your lifetime!”
HIND SIGHT
In reading back over this manuscript, I see that at times I come off as a real jerk; at times I have made myself out to be a loser; sometimes I appear to think myself a genius; other times I moan about missed opportunities; often I admit to being a lucky stiff who manages somehow to get through life with my humor in tact.
Most of these impressions the reader might pick up are strictly a result of my inability to clearly communicate. However the part about being a lucky stiff is pretty true.
***
A common question asked of senior citizens has to do with whether one might do things differently “if you had it all to do over again.” To this, I would have to say, “Yes, at least to a point.”
Perhaps I emphasized enough, perhaps too much, that humans in their late teens do not yet possess wisdom. I suppose I wish I had possessed a little – or at least had possessed whatever was in the make-up of the bright people who went to school with me and who went on to higher education. Of course, as I write this, I give credit to parents, teachers and other guides or persons of influence who helped those young friends of mine and most other young people to make better decisions. Even the unusual student who enters high school with a desire to maintain a high GPA and prepare for further education is not typically an island of self-motivation, completely on his own in making these commendable commitments to his future. Somewhere, someone of influence, perhaps during the student’s earliest childhood, made a strong and positive impression about education on that young person.
Whether my friend Les, the genius who escaped drudgery in his dad’s bowling alley by teaching me how to do his job, was a totally self-motivated “smart guy,” I cannot say. Perhaps his father, mother, uncle or some other person influenced him at an early age and helped him to grasp some important concepts of education. Maybe he discovered on his own at some point that he could understand things most of his unmotivated buddies (especially including yours truly) could not. I suspect this phenomenon does come about on a rare occasion, particularly for those who truly are of genius level intellect.
But more typical of youth is the motivation by impressions they pick up along the way, whether or not they are actually advised or led into some desire for education by some influential older person. They may plan for future self-improvement for a wide variety of reasons. My own son who put himself through college, working night jobs and stretching his degree program out over six years or more so he could manage it, did so for reasons he has never totally revealed to me. I am extremely pleased he went for the education in spite of his dad’s inability to help with expenses. And I selfishly take at least partial credit, right here right now, for his determination to do so. He may want to correct me on this point after reading my words, but I doubt I would be convinced I am completely wrong. Admittedly, my desire to feel a sense of positive involvement here is a father’s hope that some of his efforts were beneficial during a life of many blundering missteps.
This son of mine, I believe it was when he was nine years old, was hanging around me one afternoon as I crawled under my old Buick to make some kind of repair. Hopefully I showed him what I was doing to give him some little help in his own growing curiosity about life around him – including exhaust pipe clamps or whatever I was handling. This I cannot recall clearly, but I do remember something else very well: his decision to play professional baseball. He told me that day that he was going to someday be a New York Yankee.
This young boy did not like school and had made it clear more than once that he had no desire to attend school any more than absolutely necessary. He definitely was not going to go to college. (Boy, did I feel that stab of guilt!) All he really had learned to love by this time in his young life was baseball. I had been a manager of one of his earliest Little League teams, and quite frankly, he was a promising young player. He seemed to have that special desire requisite for success in sports, and he was overcoming the fear of standing up to the plate with a strong hurler on the mound. He also had a good eye for the deep fly ball and rarely missed a catch.
When he announced to me that day his decision to become a Yankee, I listened with interest, and I let him know his goal was commendable. I said I would be proud of him and pleased to attend his games when he became a professional player. Then I asked him if he knew how ball players got to the level of becoming New York Yankees. No, he had no real idea of the process involved. I calmly explained the progressions through Little League, maybe Babe Ruth League, then to middle school athletics, moving from middle to high school and the continual need to excel and stay focused through each new level. He understood. He had confidence he could do this.
Then I asked him if he had heard of baseball “scouts.” No, at age nine he had not heard of these folks. I explained their function and let him know that they were absolutely required in the baseball world to find those new players who could make it to the professional level and who might become stars for the teams that hired them – such as the Yankees. He grasped this need to impress a scout enough to be invited to a team’s try-outs.
At last I had to lower the awful boom on his young mind and take the chance of crushing his dreams. Of course I did it as cautiously as possible but I did not shy away from the truth. I told him there were many thousands of high schools in our country. That news seemed to settle on him with some surprise but understanding. Then I asked if he thought it would be possible for a team scout to get to a game at each and every high school to check out all the possible prospects. He didn’t see how this could be possible. I agreed. Then I told him that most high school players, even the very most outstanding athletes, were still not ready physically or mentally to make that jump to the professional ranks. He took all this in thoughtfully as I watched the wheels turning. When I thought he was ready, I asked him where he thought the scouts would be required to spend their time and where they had the best chance to find really capable players. It took his mouth quite a long time to actually form the words, but he looked at me with almost a pained expression and asked, “In college?” I confirmed his own logical conclusion to the manner in which one may achieve success in baseball. He looked crestfallen, but he walked away from our talk with a new grasp of things. Often following that day, he spoke of future possibilities, and now and then the subject of college wove its way into the mix.
Interestingly, and sadly for the father too but surely not as painfully as for the son, things did not go the way we always hoped they would. His physical growth (lack of) practically mirrored my own, and circumstances placed him in a huge middle school. He also experienced a foot malady of some kind that hampered his running. These factors almost killed any chance of his becoming a star at an early age, which destroyed his own confidence that he could ever make the grade. He saw the equally massive high school he would attend later and knew the numbers of highly accomplished ball players entering there each year would mean it would be next to impossible for him to catch up even if his body grew up. He expected to get that growth spurt I told him about that would likely bring him somewhere close to my height, but it could easily be delayed as mine was until the age of sixteen.
Still – and yes, I have a point here – this young man who previously disdained education and had no other reason to consider college other than as a road to baseball fame, now after feeling there was no hope for a career in baseball, was still pre-disposed to go on to college. He may have come upon a new and stronger reason later because he was willing to struggle through it all, spending extra years to do so and paying off student loans for many years afterward, but he got that degree. Do I think our little talk in the carport when he was nine played a part in his goal of attending college and his determination to do it no matter what it took? Yes, I do.
***
What might I have done differently in my own life?
Obviously, back in nineteen sixty-three, many different possibilities were ahead of me as I completed high school. If some pre-disposition to attend college had developed, that would have presented a new set of possibilities. If some helpful person with some wisdom had talked seriously with me, had happened upon the magical words to reach me when I was floundering in school, that may have made all the difference. Lots of “ifs” can be pondered, and we’ve all heard the old expression, “Hind sight is 20/20.” Well, it ain’t so! It would be impossible to state unequivocally that any one “road not taken” in my past would have been the one “right” road. In fact, I feel grateful for a good many right roads I have traveled.
Not one to live with regrets, I will state that two possible moments in my fleeting life were perhaps more pivotal and could have resulted in better outcomes. The first of these, as I hope was made clear early on, was the moment I went, without clear, rational thought and without enough council, into an era of living outside my own control. Though positive points came from that time, I still will say that the giving of my strengths over to an “infallible program,” the giving of my life to be totally directed by a belief system, was a sad miscarriage of justice to my own psyche and potential.
The second, which I have not yet mentioned, was the “moment” I walked away from that life, at the age of thirty-one, and was still not capable of using clear thought or the logical focus that should have been within my power. The following then, is the only venture into “What-if land” I will allow myself.
One, and only one, opportunity that escaped my notice many years ago, now seems so logical as to defy my grasp as to how I missed it. Many near misses for success have already been covered in the book, but what I want to mention here is a “far” miss. I had never even considered the possibility of a profession that today seems a natural for my younger self. Why did I not become a firefighter?
Sure, many little boys (and a few girls too) will say, “Someday I wanna be a fireman.” (Firewoman? Firegirl? Firelady? – or simply firefighter.) All but the tiniest minority of these ever really approach the subject as adults when they become serious about careers. Strangely, though I did not think about the firefighting career when finishing high school, which would have been a perfectly reasonable occupation for me then, I was given a second giant opening to fall upon the idea but still did not trip to it.
Upon leaving my years in the ministry, when I thought of possible occupations to pursue, the real estate idea was all encompassing for me. I cannot say why. At thirty-one years of age, I had a world of opportunities open to me; I was still acceptable even to the military. A few months later when I knew my life was not going to be in real estate, I still had all those same possibilities to consider. But I entirely missed the thought of firefighting.
Here’s what is so odd about this “far miss.” While I was working on my transition from the ministry to real estate, my family had moved back to Texas Fort Worth Indianapolis
But it was what I did, and during the interim I needed a place to stay in Indianapolis
On the occasions when I happened to pass by the station where he was assigned, he would typically be out in the driveway with his coworkers, sometimes washing the fire trucks or doing other clean-up work. The place was always spotless. At times he would be sitting with his buddies just inside the station house playing cards or they might be tossing a football or softball out on the lawn. To my memory, the atmosphere around the station, as I have noticed at fire stations everywhere, was clean, attractive and respectable. And I have noticed that with extremely rare exception, firefighters are themselves treated with the utmost respect. They are even admired and at times, adored, even by the general public.
I can guess, looking back on that time, that there were two possible explanations for my total disregard for a firefighting career, for virtually not even seeing it as a potential career. First was my own “advanced” age. I was already thirty-one; no self-respecting man of that mature age and having a college education would think of jumping onto a red truck and heading off with other grown-up boys to play with fire. (I am wildly stabbing at how I might have reasoned at the time. And I probably assumed I possessed wisdom by then!)
The other, maybe less psychological but more profound reason, was my friend himself. He was every bit the grown-up kid who didn’t seem to be in a serious job. What’s more, it was clear he was not up to the job anyway, and for all I knew, he could have been typical.
When I returned to the house late one night, there was no house. It had burned to the ground, the brickwork having caved in on the charred frame. Left standing were the iron frame of a bed I had purchased for my rented room and the brick fireplace that had been a strong feature of the family room. That was it. Lying in the fireplace was a log of perhaps thirty inches in length and at least fifteen inches in width. A neighbor who was milling about even on that cold winter’s night, told me my friend was taken to an area hospital. I knew the place and headed there immediately to check on his condition.
The crazy man was lying in bed with wrappings on hands, face and ears. His head was covered in treated gauze as well and I could tell his hair was gone. He had no eyebrows. But he was his jaunty self, laughing with visitors who had arrived ahead of me. He retold the story from the top when the others asked him to share it with me.
He had enjoyed a successful dinner date and was thrilled to bring his lady home for a nightcap. He had the wine poured and the lady seated on the couch, then decided to make a romantic fire in the fireplace. Finding only large logs in the garage and no kindling, he went for it anyway. He worked for a while at getting a tiny flame to begin, using a rolled up newspaper underneath, then lost his patience. He headed back to the garage, brought in a can of Coleman fuel and squeezed a healthy stream onto the log.
He said the woman had started for the door apparently early (yuk, yuk – he was laughing; I was thinking that the girl was smarter than the fireman), because she was there to push him out and face down into the snow, which according to the doctor was the reason he might be able to keep most of his face, even with scars.
So years later, when I asked myself why I had never thought of becoming a firefighter, this hospital scene and my goofy friend’s nutty laughter came back clearly.
Discounting this one man, firefighters are usually level-headed, at least about the dangers of fire. And it seems to me, the danger of actually being hurt in a fire, or having dear ones hurt, is much diminished by the training itself. The occupation could be quite desirable. Had I become a part of a fire department when I was that strong young man of thirty-one, I could today be retired for three years with a wonderful benefit package. And I would have been in great physical condition at retirement due to the on-going training and requirements of the job.
But more than this, I might have gone back to school part-time and earned higher degrees. I could have studied while on duty at the station while others horsed around. Perhaps I would have gotten involved in volunteer work, speaking here and there on fire prevention. I might later have written books, maybe in philosophy or other areas of my imagined doctorates. As I say, there are always “What ifs” in life.
Playing with “what if” is fine as long as it’s kept in control as a mind game. For me, the reality of what is quickly overwhelms the curiosity of what might have been. Why? If I had taken any of the other roads open to me at age eighteen, I would never have met the young lady who became the mother of my two fine sons. Had these two boys never been a part of my life, I would, of course, not be able to miss them. But they are in my life and have for many years brought great joy to me. Since I can’t imagine my life without them, I pull myself up short whenever I might veer close to that precipice of regret about missed opportunities.
With the concept covered above, that I am mystified about missing a possible career as a firefighter, this could have been still decided after having these fine young boys in my world. However, I then fall upon the other current happinesses I would not want to consider giving up. The love of my life who is with me today (that grown-up little girl who dazzled me in childhood) would not likely have come back to me if any of the earlier events covering three decades had not prepared my life for her to join me a few years ago. The imagined retirement “with great benefits” would almost surely be without her. Not acceptable! And certainly, any alteration in the way my life developed, even from age thirty-one onward, would have created different channels of life’s flow for my sons also, almost surely leaving me today without the incredible grandson who delights me immeasurably.
The problem stated here is what science fiction writers take on every time they venture into stories of time travel. They know absolutely that any slight change affected in the time-line of history disrupts the flow from there forward. Loving where I am, who I am and who shares my today with me, I can have no regrets about my yesterday.
So I set out to write this manuscript simply to state the facts of my zany work life as it unfolded. The emphasis I give to having no regrets does not mean I could not have done things better. For me, what’s done is done, and I am a happy person with my life being just as it is. For you, especially if you are on the verge of becoming an adult who is as clueless as I was when I finished high school, I don’t recommend starting out on a fifty-year journey that involves a constant search for employment. With a little effort, some help from a sounding board or two and perhaps some luck, you can find a passion and combine it with a career. You need not become what I am today – a sixty-five year old who is still curious about what he will be when he grows up.
If this book has given you nothing but a few laughs, I hope the levity was good for you.
Appendix
Simple Listing of Jobs
[In basically chronological order]
1 Newspaper carrier
2 Lawn keeper
3 Snow remover
4 Pin-setter
5 Dishwasher – restaurant
6 Truck farm worker
7 Resort catch-all and beach jockey
8 Truck stop gas jockey/tire repairman
9 RV lot man/repair apprentice
10 Auto buyer/seller
11 Book packer – distribution center
12 Textile warehouse clerk
13 Construction laborer (union)
14 Carpenter’s helper/apprentice
15 RV assembly worker (piece work)
16 Heavy equipment operator
17 Truck driver
18 Electrical contractor warehouse clerk
19 Janitorial serviceman
20 Minister’s helper/driver - PT
21 Administrative office worker
22 Ministerial assistant – Full time
23 Ordained minister/co-pastor
24 Pastor
25 Emcee/Speaker – National church conventions
26 Sales rep – Real estate – Indiana
27 Sales recruiter – national rep
28 Advertising designer – print
29 Actor (stage – Midwest region, road shows)
30 Pinkerton – night watchman
31 Taxi driver – Indianapolis Yellow
32 Advertising sales – traveling regional rep
33 Sales/Creative rep – Advertising Agency
34 Radio commercial writer
35 Radio commercial on-air spokesman
36 Actor – dinner theater company, Indianapolis
37 Television commercial actor
38 Video spokesman – industrial
39 Model – print and runway
40 Sales rep – accounting systems
41 Sales rep retail – diamonds and custom jewelry
42 Social Director – apartment community
43 Television comedic actor – pilot
44 Sales rep – typewriters and contract services
45 Singer – weddings
46 Spokesman – tradeshows (live marketing)
47 Promotions coordinator for Clinical Psychologist
48 Sales rep – Multi-image productions (nationally)
49 TV spokesman – contract
50 Actor – professional theater, Phoenix , AZ
51 Host – Television game show pilots
52 Convention Emcee
53 Character actor – national sales meetings
54 Host – Beauty Pageants
55 Host – Awards shows
56 Witness Locator/Screener for Law Firm
57 Film actor – motion pictures
58 Television actor – soaps/late night
59 Apartment maintenance manager
60 Handyman – restaurants
61 Sales rep – new autos
62 Wedding officiator
63 Crowd control director – rock concerts
64 Mobile home repairman
65 Film Extra actor– movies
66 Sales rep – Classic autos
67 Construction contractor – decking
68 Sales rep – RV
69 Driver for non-emergency medical transport
70 Sales rep – Golf clubs, as a custom fitter
71 Sales rep/Asst. Mgr – Travel
72 Sales & Marketing rep – Reclaimed barn lumber
73 Writer/producer/spokesman – P.O.P videos
74 Sales rep – Debt collection system
75 Contract administrator – engineering firm
76 Office manager
77 Marketing manager & tech producer, underground industry
78 Robotics – camera operator/underground
79 R & D manager – created new robotics process
80 Sales rep – security systems
81 Storage manager – self storage properties
82 Sales rep – Mattresses/furniture (retail)
83 Sales rep – Real estate – California
84 Home remodeler, including plumbing and bath design
85 Leasing Agent
86 Sales rep – Equity-release products/ finance
[If this book sells – #87 - - Author]
Fields of work
[ Not a technical listing as in Federal tax categories ]
Manual Labor Sales
Industrial Motor-related
Construction Administrative
Clergy Clerical
Performance Maintenance
Advertising/Marketing Finance
Management Engineering
Technology Research
All listed above are PAYING jobs only. I have weeded out several endeavors that paid me only nominally, and I totally avoided listing the seven or eight Multi-level Marketing jobs (beginning with Amway in 1978) in which I spent time but was never able to profit a dime.
Jobs I Didn’t Pursue
(But probably would have enjoyed)
Peace Corp worker, Fire Fighter, Letter Carrier, Long-haul Trucker, Golf Pro, Pilot, *Flight Attendant, Bartender, Cruise Director, Travel Writer, Tour Guide, Ranch hand, Meteorologist, Teacher, Forest Ranger, Parcel Delivery Driver, Machinist, **Fork-lift Operator
* A very late pursuit was actually made but was abandoned for the chase of a television dream, described in Chapter 12
** This item first appeared when I worked in the book publisher warehouse at age eighteen and I marveled at the skill those operators exhibited. At age sixty, I handled a fork-lift on occasion as part of my job at a storage property. It was, as I suspected so many years before, fun.
