June 1, 2005 – Life as a Random Walk

June 1, 2005 – Life as a Random Walk

There comes a time in your life when you look back and wonder why things didn’t work out the way you wanted. The reality is that we are born into the world with a set of predispositions that are constantly being reinforced by circumstance. My predispositions I inherited from my mother, who is a very pragmatic woman. I left home right out of Clover Park High School in Tacoma, Washington, where I had completed by senior year’s work. I had spent the first three years of high school attending Austin High School in El Paso, Texas. In Clover Park, I was among a busload of students from Ft. Lewis, Washington Army Base where there was no high school. Clover Park is in a very well to do neighborhood of Tacoma. The gossip on the bus was that President Eisenhower’s brother lived there. Quarter acre or larger lots of custom-built homes set back from the two-lane blacktop that meandered through the subdivision. This was definitely not a Levittown.

Clover Park was and probably still is a great high school with lots of advanced placement classes, to which I aspired but lacked the prerequisites to attend, especially English AP, where my friends from Ft Lewis who did get in talked about the Greek philosophers and playwrights they were reading, I felt left out and left behind. The year zoomed by and faced with the prospect of finding a job and staying at home paying rent, I opted for an enlistment in the Navy. I entered the service with expectations of finding a position as a journalist, which the Navy had little use for and for the GI Bill that would finance a college education once I was discharged. The handful of journalism openings had a large number of applicants and the application process was daunting. Furthermore, if you didn’t get a spot you were likely doomed to scrubbing decks. In the parlance of starving artists, you would be “gaining life experiences.”

While the Navy had more journalists than they could use, what they needed and couldn’t get enough of were electronics technicians. When I was tested in boot camp, I did well enough on their battery of tests to qualify to become one. To this day, I wonder if the bar had been set low enough to get the required number of technicians or I had the skills to reach the bar the Navy had set. I did not have a great passion for electronics, but given the prospects of four years scrubbing decks—the plight of those who did not score well on the battery of tests, I reconciled myself to being an electronics technician.

Once boot camp was over, I spent forty eight weeks on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, learning all about both vacuum tubes and transistors as well as the radios and radar systems they went into. It was like being in school again, pop quizzes, tests on a regular basis, and lots of lab work experimenting with the new electronic gadgets. I threw myself into learning all I could about electron and hole flow in semiconductors—the hot topic of the time as the Navy’s equipment was ridding itself of vacuum tubes and adopting the smaller, less power consuming transistor. I learned about vacuum tubes as well because there were millions of vacuum tubes still installed in countless pieces of electronics gear throughout the Navy.

There are folks who create a life plan: college; advanced degree; job at Fortune 500 Company; vice president by the age of 35; President and CEO by the age of 40; vacation home in Florida, Arizona, or even California; two precocious children—ideally a girl and a boy; each with ambitions to be like their parents; country club membership… burial in a prestigious cemetery in the family crypt. For me, life is a maze. The first path I took was military service and in that one choice, the group heading off to college left me behind or I them, whichever your point of view. The result is I never caught up to the ones who successfully avoided being drafted into the military for duty in Viet Nam. Those who were not successful never caught up to me. I was leaving as they were coming in.

In the Navy, I not only became informed about the latest in electronics that made radar and radio communications possible, I also learned the workings of digital computers. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was already behind in the world of computers. When I was discharged from the service and entered college, I was married with a young baby on the way. College began in El Paso in 1966, at the University of Texas a year before the campus of Texas Western College at 500 W University Avenue. College. College was interrupted for a year to pay for baby, and resumed in Dallas first at El Centro Junior College and then at the University of Texas at Arlington. The interruption had taken us from El Paso to the suburbs of Washington DC and back to Dallas.

Once I received my Bachelor of Science in Economics, my wife IM, our two daughters, and I packed our bags and moved to California. The compelling reason for the move was that both IM and I were in love with the idea of living in California. IM had visited the state once in 1967 when she disembarked the ship bringing her from Australia—where she had spent a little over a year on an adventure—back to the states to be reunited with me. I had driven through the state as a teenager in 1963 and had fallen in love with the place. We settled down and became Californians, thanks to a little start-up company called Diablo Systems, which had just been acquired by Xerox Corp. and was on an expansion binge. I was hired to do technical documentation, what I had been doing in Texas at Collins Radio Company all the while I was going to college.

These choices were independent events not part of a grand life plan; likewise, the decision to leave the corporate world and join a small technical magazine based in Littleton, Massachusetts. I had been doing some freelance writing for a small advertising and public relations company off the 280 Freeway in San Jose near Winchester Boulevard. The owner, GL, knew the magazine editor and when a position for west coast editor opened up, GL recommended me for the position. I was hired after an interview with the magazine's west coast sales rep at the West Coast Computer Faire outside Brooks Hall in April 1977.

That propelled me into the world of publishing, which would consume the better part of my adult life. I have to add that my first foray into publishing was interrupted by a year in public relations. I had been drawn there by the money—more than I could imagine as a lowly editor, certainly more than I could command at the company I had left before joining the magazine. But in the end, the money wasn’t enough to keep me in PR. I needed the stimulation of the attention-deficit-disordered world of publishing, where each day, there was someone new to interview and write about. All that time in publishing, I was not part of the mainstream of any of the companies I worked for. I worked alone or in a small Northern California editorial office. I knew all my coworkers based in the east coast headquarters but I was the outsider dropping in for a week or two once or twice a year. Twenty years in publishing all culminated just after the new Millennium, when another fateful choice took me back into the corporate world, where I remain to this day.