In 1970, The Beatles sang, “Long and Winding Road” which is a convenient description for my journey starting in that same era.to become a writer and publisher. As a cable repairman for the phone company, I was required to keep a daily journal of the time spent clearing circuit troubles. Later, my job on the Engineering Economics Staff was writing explanations to the Public Service Commission about the reasons the company needed to raise the rates. To escape from the complexities of that job, I would go out of the office for lunch and take notes of the sights on the bustling streets of downtown Baltimore. Over time, those notes became poems.
In
pursuit of a management degree in night school at Johns Hopkins I took an
elective course in creative writing. I could feel some deep energy growing
inside because for that course, I really enjoyed doing the homework. Both the
phone company and my college professors encouraged me to pursue leadership
roles in the community, both for my own experience and for the public interest
in my company and my school. Being a member of the Jaycees at the time, an
opportunity to write led me to becoming the editor of our chapter’s monthly
newsletter. In addition to reporting on the activity of the chapter, the
newsletter offered a platform for my lunch time ‘people watching’.
The
old “Birds of a feather….’Cliché proved true at Hopkins. A cadre of writers I
met in undergrad classes reunited in graduate classes in Advanced Creative
Writing. It didn’t take long before we started the first literary magazine in
the Hopkins evening college. Most of the founders were anxious to submit some
of their work for publishing. Since I was the only member of the group with a
BS in management, I was voted in as Managing Editor. Two of my bosses at the
phone company where also faculty members at Hopkins night school. Turns out
that the Dean of the Evening College was an occasional guest on my boss’s boat.
Wasn’t long before the “Nocturne” literary magazine had an office with a
typewriter at the Hopkins Homewood campus.
I was
well positioned and lucky, but also qualified to find some shortcuts on “The
Long and Winding Road” Also, as I moved up the career ladder with the phone
company, more writing opportunities came my way. Concurrent with receiving my
MS in Adult Education, the phone company was shifting to centralize their
training function. At last a door opened that led to my escape from Engineering
Economics and I moved into a position in the newly reorganized training
department as a course developer, and then a Management Trainer and
Organization Development internal consultant.
With
that on my resume, I retired from the phone company, started my own consulting
firm. That led to an opening at the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant doing
basically the same kind of work for the next ten years. With a lot of
instructional development experience, I was offered a position on the staff of
a consulting firm started by three retired AT&T executives, one of them was
a former boss when I worked in DC. He was also a neighbor in Southern Maryland.
Worked
mostly from home but traveled a lot. Their firm had no brick and mortar office,
so we had many virtual conferences before they became the vouge recently. It
was during that period, the 90’s and early 20’s that I was bitten by the
historical fiction bug, and wrapped a story involving two of my favorite
cultures; the Irish and the Native American indigenous tribes. Thus, was born
“The Saints Lost their Way”, published by Breffni Books through Create Space on
Amazon.
