October 18, 2005 – A Life in Words

October 18, 2005 – A Life in Words

When I was 17 years old and just about to graduate from high school—I was attending Clover Park High School just south of Tacoma, Washington-my dad invited one of his army buddies to the house for dinner. The friend—I can’t remember his name but I'll call him William—and I were introduced and my dad said, “William is a counselor in the base personnel office. My dad was in the Army and we were stationed at Ft Lewis Army Base where we lived at 5638 Davis Lane: a four bedroom ranch style house in a military suburban housing development that would not look out of place if located outside the military base. It was a nice “Leave-it-to-Beaver” house built on a tree-lined curving street atop a bluff overlooking Interstate 5. The neighborhood was full of families with teenage kids, a few like me finishing school in the spring of 1963 and looking forward to the next passage in their lives. A handful had applied to universities and many of these had been accepted and were on their way in the fall. As for me, I wasn’t ready for college. I needed to see the world; to see and experience some of what I had read about and watched in movies and on television.

William had come over at my father’s invitation, unknown to me, to discuss my career. I had taken a class in journalism at high school and gotten it into my head that I wanted to be a writer. If I was going to see the world I should write about what I saw. William had come with the intention of talking me out of this crazy notion. My father was only trying to steer me in the right direction. He reasoned that the wrong life choice made at such an early age would lead me down a road of regret later in life. Before dinner, William began explaining to me the difficulties facing someone who wanted to be a writer. The number of jobs available in journalism was small while the multitude seeking to fill those positions was great. William cited the example of the number of positions in the Army given over to soldiers writing for the newspaper “Army Times” as compared to the number of soldiers in electronics, for example: a handful for the former and currently an unlimited number for the latter. Electronics was the field to get into in the Navy. I had chosen not to follow my father into the Army but rather enlisted in the Navy to serve out my tour of active duty required of every male born in the U.S. Those who did not enlist would be drafted and I decided it was better to choose my service rather than default of the Army.

William’s advice did not fall on deaf ears. It made a great deal of sense and I was nothing if not practical. When I got into the Navy, I was lucky enough to score well on the entrance examination all new recruits received shortly after arriving in boot camp at San Diego. My test scores made me eligible to be an electronics technician, which is what the Navy ordered me to become by sending me to three separate schools. After two years of learning basic electronic and computer theory in the Navy you would think that I would have enrolled in an engineering program in college when I was discharged. No. Instead, I chose a degree in economics. The truth be told, I lacked the skills to be a good engineer, the Navy testing notwithstanding. A good engineer is a creature of detail and I have to force myself to concentrate on the minutiae. I chose to study the production and distribution and consumption of goods and services and their management—another career William would have warned me against, had he had another shot at counseling my education choice.

The reality, however, was that I wanted four more years of school and I wanted to study whatever I found interesting rather than subjects that would position me for a specific career in life. Just as the Navy had provided me with a skill that made me valuable in the civilian work force—I had a relatively easy time finding work at electronics companies with military contracts—they were now paying me to attend college in the form of the GI Bill. Now, this is critical. As the head of our household and only bread winner for my wife IM and infant daughters ME and RD, my salary working at Collins Radio Company was barely sufficient to cover our monthly living expenses in a two-bedroom apartment in Plano, Texas, right off Highway 75. The GI bill provided a second income that not only covered tuition cost but provided a second income that afforded us a comfortable living, even allowing us to purchase a home two years before I graduated. Tuition costs at the University of Texas at Arlington where I spent the last two years of college and at El Centro Junior College, where I spent the first two, took no more than a fourth of the amount I received from the GI Bill.

As I went through my first two years at El Centro, I loved the liberal arts courses all the freshmen and sophomores were required to take, particularly the English, political science, and introductory economics classes. I was fascinated by the economists who created the discipline: Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Robert Malthus, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen, and the giant of my time John Maynard Keynes. In the last two years at the University of Texas, I used all my electives on courses that intrigued me as well, from Victorian English Literature to Western Political Theory to a great course on international economics. I was acquiring a liberal education. All of the managers I had while I worked at Collins were staunched supporters of my going back to school to get my degree. Most of them were retired Army, Navy and Air Force who were old enough to be my father. They must have seen something of their own son in me because they each found work for me even when the company was going through three rounds of layoffs. For a good six months near the end of my time at Collins I was filling orders for manuals from customers the company had sold equipment to.

I had been hired at Collins back in 1968 to be a technical writer documenting new equipment the company was building for military contracts. Collins radios were highly prized by NASA as well as the Air Force. Right after Richard Nixon the 37th President of the United States took office in 1969, the military contracts abruptly dried up. The wellspring that had supported a whole generation of engineers suddenly evaporated leaving flailing fish gasping for air on a rapidly drying riverbed. The resultant draconian change in the military-aerospace community hit Collins Radio very hard. I was luckily assigned to document computer and communications equipment Collins was manufacturing for commercial markets, the company’s last ditch effort to wean itself from government money and make its way in the civilian world. The charismatic founder of the company that bore his name was a self taught engineer and he had gotten it into his head to build a mainframe computer to compete against IBM. To his credit Collins built an innovative computer that formed the message switching front ends to IBM mainframes in American Airlines Sabre Reservation System back then. The company also pioneered one the earliest digital PBX—analog voice signals coming into the PBX were converted into digital packets for routing to and from individual subscribers. Western Electric (WECO) the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1995 was a large Collins Radio customer. All of this effort, however, was too little, too late and Collins was absorbed into military aerospace giant Rockwell Corp.

How I came to be a technical writer was a bit of serendipity, which has left me wondering whether you choose your fate or does your fate choose you. My previous employer, Bendix Field Engineering Corp. in Greenbelt, Maryland had the contract to maintain the electronic equipment at all NASA’s sites around the world tracking the Gemini and Apollo space craft orbiting the earth and eventually going to the moon. I had been hired to maintain the Univac computers found at the site in Greenbelt, the facility where personnel bound for sites around the world were trained. Without much to do—the Univac were pretty reliable systems and there were several technicians at the site—I was given the assignment to prepare training materials in support of the site’s instructors. This year of experience was all that was needed for me to land the tech writing job opening at Collins in Richardson, Texas just north of Dallas.

When I graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington, my resume opened doors that had heretofore been closed or at least less welcoming. It was the spring of 1974, Richard Nixon’s last year in office before having to resign. I had found a job at another military aerospace contractor, E-Systems, in Garland, east and west of Richardson off of Interstate 605, still within the Dallas metropolitan area. The job had nothing to do with my degree and everything to do with my past experience at Collins. This was an intermediate stop on our way west. By September, having been with E-Systems just over half a year, I accepted a job with Diablo Systems in Sunnyvale, California as a technical writer. Just under four years later, after writing technical manuals and marketing literature for Diablo, I would accept my first job as a journalist, the west coast editor for “Computer Design” magazine. Somehow I had taken William’s advice about electronics and just over 15 years later, I would fall into the job he had said were few and far between. Curiously, the reason I got the job was not my journalism ability, nor my degree in economics but rather my acquired knowledge of computers and electronics.