A Writer’s Life

What would you like to talk about today?

Well, talking about photography sort of leads into the subject of writing, which has been my real passion.

When did that start?

Not sure.  Let’s see.  Remember when I told you about drawing a comic strip in elementary school?

cartooning

Yes, I do.

And I said I drew it as panels in a notebook?

panels

Right.

Well, I didn’t think of it until just now.  I drew the pictures, but I also had to write what the characters said.  The words I’d put in the little balloons over their heads.

balloons

So I guess my writing, as such, began then.

Guess so.

But it was interrupted in high school.  Remember how my English teacher was the faculty adviser for the school newspaper and yearbook?   Although I got good grades on my essays, he asked me to draw cartoons.  I suppose he had enough writers but needed a cartoonist.  So that’s what I did both junior and senior years.

Okay.

Who knows what might have happened if I had discovered then what I learned later in life.  I might have taken journalism in college.

journalism

Would have changed my life quite a bit..

Could be.

And when I did go to college, taking engineering, I was so focused on succeeding that I didn’t want to take on too many extracurricular activities.  Like the college newspaper..

Don’t blame you.

And when I worked for Westinghouse-Newark I didn’t have a need to write much.  I was just troubleshooting problems on the manufacturing and test lines.  Just fix a problem and move on to the next one.

But when I went into the Army, working for the Quartermaster Corps, I got my first taste of technical writing.  I wrote this 79-page report documenting the equipment I had assembled and used to test the cushioning materials.

report

Hey.  I just noticed:  I didn’t get a byline for that effort.  Oh, well.

Later, when I came out of the Army and went with Westinghouse-Baltimore, I started out developing test equipment.  But slowly I started taking on writing assignments such as editing the weekly progress reports of all the engineers in my section.

editing

That expanded into editing and writing parts of reports and proposals that went through our section.

And, now that I think of it, there were several other instances where I did some technical writing while I was still in my engineering section.

Go ahead.

First, I co-authored with Dave M. a patent disclosure on how to deploy a certain radar system.  That was the time I got the cash award and I was able to buy the Polaroid camera.

I remember.

Second, I co-authored with George H. a paper on radar echoes that we presented at a radar conference at a hotel in D.C.  No payment for that, but we did get to watch Jane Morgan rehearsing for a show that night.

jane morgan

She had a big hit with the song “Fascination.”

I’ve heard that.

It was a good one.

Third, I wrote an article that came out of my test-equipment development experience.

What was that?

I had to design and put together a delay line for the target simulator, so I devised a graphical way to design one.  Then, I thought, maybe a certain trade journal might want to publish it.  So I wrote the article, submitted it, and they published it.  I had a tear-sheet of that one, but I don’t know where it is.  However, mine looked something like this example.

nomogram

I got a small payment for that.

Good.

Finally, I wrote an article for the same magazine that came out of my editing work.  It was a way to numerically identify Greek letters to distinguish them from English letters.  So that a typist would know, for instance, that a handwritten letter was a Greek omega and not an English double-you.  Here’s a Greek omega.

omega

And that’s not a double-you.

Right.  There’s a difference.  Got a check for that article too.

Well, that’s about it for engineering.

And then you went into writing and editing full-time?

Yep.  Then I moved over to Technical Publications.  And I eventually retired from there as a technical writer.

I’ve got a lot more to say about writing.  Okay if we take a break here?

Okay.  See you next time.