I have had the opportunity to live many lives and vicissitudes of fortune, always in the right order somehow but far from the usual order. Particularly in my youth, I had many close calls with death, which is a clarifying experience. I have been a country boy living within a mile of millionaires and the near destitute of five different races and ethnicities, the home from which I viewed the moon landing and the live televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. I have been a prep school student in an all-boy world unified by the desire to get into the best possible college, a world suddenly up-ended by the drugs, politics, and music of Woodstock Nation. I have been a Harvard snob, youngest president ever of a snooty institution called a Final Club (where I began drinking in earnest) while the radical era of the Weathermen transformed leftist politics into bombs and Harvard into a sea of treasonous mimeographs blowing across the famous Square. summers and for a year after graduation, I was a paralegal for a Harvard lawyer, until I went to graduate Business School at Cornell, where I fell in love with probability theory, learned computer programming on IBM punch cards, and dropped out with a semester to go because I realized I was about to become a Certified Public Accountant. I was 22 years old.
It took me three more years to leave a hometown I hadn’t been more than a visitor in since the age of 13. During that time I wrote most of a first novel, served as editor and sole staff member of an historical magazine in support of the county’s Bicentennial celebration, and after chickening out on sending my novel manuscript to an agent my father had known in college, sat down at an old Underwood Standard typewriter in a plywood office next to the Today’s Sunbeam printing press, and learned how to write, frequently retyping whole pages to make two word changes in text.
I quit to take a job as a staff editor for a construction bid newsletter in Philadelphia, got fired for insubordination, took a position as proofreader for a nuclear engineering firm in the time immediately after Three Mile Island, quit under threat of being fired for editing instead of correcting typos in nuclear specifications, got a job as a technical editor with a McGraw-Hill subsidiary called Datapro Research Corporation, where I received a crash course in microprocessor and communications technology, and then thanks to a headhunter went to work as a competitive analyst in Dayton, Ohio, for one of the Big 8 computer companies experiencing rapid decline because of the meteoric rise of the Personal Computer as a game changing technology. I resigned after 18 months to go freelance as a business and technical writer. I was 32 years old.
Never again had a salary or a boss. Instead, one boss became many and my largest client, a General Motors division in Dayton, enabled me to move from video scripts and training manual copy about Just in Time Manufacturing into executive speechwriting and, eventually, major communication projects overseas. I had my own consulting firm with ten partners by this time, and acquired the UAW as a client along the way. I dissolved the firm when the partner who had initiated contact with the union decided to delegate vital early project tasks to a writer he’d signed as a partner against my wishes because he was careless and not a good writer or thinker. That’s when I resumed work full full time on the manuscript of The Boomer Bible, which I sold over the transom about halfway complete in early 1990. I was 36 years old.
Finishing the manuscript and a book tour took well over a year, and I was in no mood for business. But a friend called and wanted me to talk to a communication VP at Whirlpool Corp in Benton Harbor, Michigan. His company was going global, and he needed help with internal communication and training at headquarters and in Europe, where many of the facilities were newly acquired existing companies. I quoted him a ridiculous hourly rate and he accepted at a slightly reduced rate. That accounted for the next four years. After an interval in Hightstown NJ, I moved back to Salem, into my father’s house (and his father’s before him), resigned the Whirlpool account when the one man I trusted left to get his PhD in communications theories we had noodled out together, and then, oh, right, I got divorced, l went completely to pieces, and lost the family home to the bank. I was just past 40 years old.
The rest has been writing. And reacquaintance with a real life not spent on airliners or in conference rooms surrounded by drones in blue and gray suits. I was a clerk at a Borders bookstore, a business telemarketer, and a house-husband with a step-step-daughter during her teenage years. Subsequently, I renewed acquaintance with the woman who had been my boss at the nuclear engineering firm, and we got married shortly after I turned 50. Since then there has been another home in the country, plenty of dogs and cats, and a new set of relationships with her children and grandchildren, all of whom are fully grown with lives of their own. Along the way, there have also been multiple blogs and books and other media and genres of writing. At present my increasing lack of mobility has left me mostly housebound, a de facto recluse with only wife and pets as daily companions. I am 70 years old as I type this on my well worn couch.
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