A Sample from Changing Course
THE GREAT CAMPING TRIP SOUTHAn excerpt from Changing Course: From Cold War Childhood to Retirement AdventureIn 1970, when I was thirteen, our family set off on what became one of the most memorable trips of my childhood—a camping adventure down the East Coast and through Florida.Our transportation was a three-year-old 1966 Chrysler convertible towing a Ted Williams pop-up camper. With the top down, the Chrysler looked like a pretty glamorous way to see America. Towing a camper through the summer heat of the South turned out to be something else entirely.The Chrysler did not have factory air conditioning. Dad had installed an aftermarket unit right on top of the transmission tunnel between the front seats. It did a respectable job of keeping Mom and Dad comfortable up front.Scott and I were in the back.We roasted.As miles of hot highway rolled past, we did what kids did before smartphones, tablets, streaming movies, and video games. We entertained ourselves.My brother Scott, our friend Adrian, and I had previously formed what we called the Tape Recorded Fun Club. Armed with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, we created comedy routines, stories, and songs. One of our masterpieces was the "Tweet-Tweet Song," whose principal lyrical contribution to music history was exactly what the title suggests:"Tweet-Tweet!"The miserable heat in the back seat provided fresh inspiration.Soon we were composing songs about sweating, including the saga of a little red baby born in the "sweat barn" who eventually grew up to become the Sweat King.Hour after hour, we amused ourselves while Mom and Dad enjoyed their little oasis of refrigerated air a few feet ahead of us.We headed south through Myrtle Beach and then continued to Jekyll Island, Georgia. From there we traveled to St. Augustine, where we explored the old fort and visited the Fountain of Youth.Florida itself seemed exotic to me. This was long before inexpensive air travel made distant places feel commonplace. Palm trees, tropical plants, strange wildlife, and the heat made it feel as though we had entered another country.At Cape Canaveral we saw the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, the strange contraption NASA used to help astronauts learn how to land on the moon. Only a year had passed since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had actually walked there. The space program wasn't history yet. It was happening right in front of us.We continued south to Fort Lauderdale, where we attended a Polynesian dinner show filled with music, dancers, and an atmosphere unlike anything I had experienced back home in Virginia.Somewhere along the way I also encountered my first wild alligator.Naturally, we fed it.Hamburger buns at first.Then hard candy.This seemed perfectly reasonable to us at the time.The Chrysler, however, was becoming less enthusiastic about our adventure.Towing a camper through Florida in summer while running an aftermarket air conditioner was asking a lot from the big car. Eventually the temperature gauge began climbing.Then we stopped.A tow-truck driver arrived and delivered the reassuring news that we were about forty miles from anything.We were hauled to a repair shop, where a mechanic examined the Chrysler."This engine is seized."That sounded pretty final.Our family vacation appeared to have come to an abrupt and very expensive end.Except the Chrysler apparently hadn't gotten the message.After cooling down, the supposedly seized engine turned over again.Then it started.We continued our trip.Incredibly, that same engine would eventually accumulate roughly another hundred thousand miles.Our route took us through Orlando, but this was Orlando before Walt Disney World. The Magic Kingdom would not open until the following year. Instead of visiting Disney World, we saw a presentation and model showing what was being built.We were looking at the future.From Florida we turned north toward Atlanta and Six Flags Over Georgia before eventually camping beside Smith Mountain Lake on our way home.By today's standards, it wasn't an elaborate vacation. Five people, a Chrysler convertible, a pop-up camper, camping gear, improvised entertainment, questionable alligator-feeding decisions, and an engine that briefly decided it was dead.But more than half a century later, I can still see pieces of that trip with remarkable clarity.The places mattered, but what stayed with me most was the experience of discovering them together.We didn't know it then, but those long, hot miles in the back seat of that Chrysler were becoming the kind of memories that would last a lifetime.---Enjoyed the sample?Changing Course: From Cold War Childhood to Retirement AdventurePaperback and Kindle editions available on Amazon.
Faith, Doubt, and the Little Comic BooksReligion—and doubt about religion—ran through both sides of my family.On my mother’s side, my ancestor William Nash built a Universalist church in Addison, Maine, at his own expense in 1841. Universalists believed that a loving God would ultimately save everyone rather than condemn some people to eternal hell. They emphasized reason, conscience, and tolerance. The Universalists later merged with the Unitarians, who believed in one God rather than the Christian Trinity.My father came from a churchgoing family as well. His mother, Elise Schmidt, helped run the church in Gresham, Wisconsin. Yet Dad became an outspoken agnostic. His experiences during World War II had much to do with it. He had watched devout friends die while he survived, and that made it difficult for him to accept simple religious explanations about God’s will. His skepticism—and his willingness to say exactly what he thought—strongly influenced me.In the early 1970s, I frequently came across tiny religious comic books left in men’s rooms. I collected them, although it wasn’t until recently that I learned they were Jack Chick tracts. Their stories presented a stark choice: accept their particular version of Christianity or face eternal damnation.My friend John Webster and I delighted in picking apart their arguments. We ridiculed the stories and debated their claims with some of our more devout friends. One day, my mother overheard us and said that our intolerance made us sound like Nazis.The comparison startled me. Influenced by my father, I thought we were challenging intolerance and exposing irrational beliefs. But perhaps my mother’s Universalist heritage had taught her something we had overlooked: opposing intolerance does not give you permission to become intolerant yourself.
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Two Offers, One CompanyI was alone in a Kansas City hotel room, helping prepare a major proposal for Sprint, when the phone rang.A recruiter wanted to talk about a job selling enterprise solutions built around IBM technology. IBM itself wasn’t what caught my attention. After years of constant travel, the chance to work mostly from home in Northern Virginia sounded wonderful.I interviewed, flew to Rhode Island for the final round, and returned home expecting an offer.About a week later, another recruiter called. She described what sounded like the exact same job—but with a different company and a different territory.What was going on?The second opportunity came directly from IBM. Its territory covered the Chesapeake region, with an office in Bethesda, Maryland.Only then did I learn what had happened. During the week between my interviews and the expected offer, IBM had quietly acquired EarlyCloud. Without realizing it, I had found myself with two attractive opportunities from the same company.I accepted IBM’s offer and joined Business Consulting Services (BCS) as an Associate Principal. It began the longest and one of the most rewarding chapters of my professional career. My time with Telenet remained the most enjoyable.I joined a six-person consulting team serving the Chesapeake Bay region. We helped organizations tackle complex business and technology challenges. Unlike IBM’s traditional hardware and software sales organizations, BCS operated as an independent consulting practice. We recommended the solutions that best met each client’s needs, regardless of who made the technology.That approach suited me perfectly. IBM’s compensation system even reinforced it: if I designed a solution using another company’s products, I earned the consulting commission. If I recommended IBM products, the commission went to IBM’s product sales organization.Before long, I was promoted to Certified Principal. My work focused on the convergence of telecommunications, utilities, and media—industries undergoing dramatic technological change.One of my earliest successes involved the Public Broadcasting Service. The federal government had mandated a transition from analog to digital television transmission, and PBS needed a roadmap for making that enormous change. I won a $300,000 consulting engagement to develop the strategy, with a much larger implementation effort expected to follow.Then Washington changed the schedule. The government postponed the mandatory transition date, removing much of the urgency. We completed the planning project successfully, but the expected implementation never materialized.It was an early reminder that even a successful project doesn’t always lead where you expect.
---Enjoyed the sample?Changing Course: From Cold War Childhood to Retirement AdventurePaperback and Kindle editions available on Amazon.