Subject: RE: What Do Mudcatters Do For A Living?
From:
Don Firth
Date: 21 Aug 03 - 03:54 PM
I started out in college with very fuzzy ideas of becoming a writer, and if that didn't work out, I didn't have a fallback plan. I guess I just assumed I could muddle through somehow. Fell in with small group of folk music enthusiasts (Claire Hess, Walt Robertson, Sandy Paton, and three or four others). This was in the early Fifties. There were rumblings, such as a couple of songs recorded by the Weavers making the Hit Parade and the fact that when Burl Ives did a concert at the UW's Meany Hall it sold-out, but no one had any idea that folk would suddenly become a big pop-music fad. We figured it would stay in its own little ghetto, sort of like jazz. I started getting a few gigs (singing at a meeting of librarians, a reunion of retired airline stewardesses, a museum fund-raiser, that sort of thing), then I was asked to do a series of TV shows sponsored by the Seattle Public Library on what is now this area's PBS affiliate. About that same time coffeehouses were opening up around here and probably as a result of the TV series, I was suddenly in demand. I made a marginal but thoroughly enjoyable living until the mid to late Sixties by doing more television, singing regularly in coffeehouses and clubs, doing a bunch of concerts, and teaching guitar, both private and class lessons.
In the mid-Sixties, the character of the whole thing changed. Folk was out, the Beatles were in, the whole scene became inundated with drugs, and the coffeehouses started folding. Also, I was tired of having such a sporadic and unpredictable income that I couldn't plan ahead very easily. Boeing was hiring, so having a few drawing skills, I went to work for them as a production illustrator (sort of like drafting, but a bit looser). Got laid off with the rest of the world in the early Seventies when Boeing cut it's work force from 102,000 to 35,000 (famous sign on the outskirts of Seattle: "Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?").
While working at Boeing, I knew I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life, so I took some broadcast training in the evenings. Fresh out of Boeing, I got a job as a radio announcer. Straight DJ at first, then as a rush hour traffic reporter ("Disabled vehicle in the northbound lanes of I-5 on the ship canal bridge. Traffic backed up as far as the Mercer on-ramp. Avoid the area if possible. . . ."). Over the next eight years I worked for five different radio stations as an announcer, newscaster, news director, copy writer, and producer. Stations kept changing formats and announcing staff (any time the ratings came out and they didn't come in as high as they thought they should) and I decided that although it was a lot of fun, it was a very unreliable way to try to make a living.
So I went to work for the phone company (Ma Bell) as an operator (from broadcasting to narrowcasting). Bad move. I hated that job with a purple passion. The surroundings were pleasant, the pay was reasonable, and the bennies were pretty good, but you were little more than a galley slave chained to an oar. You got politely shat upon no matter what you did. Keep the customer contact as brief as possible ("You're spending too much time with some of the customers."), but always be polite, helpful, and amiable ("You're being too abrupt. Try to be more friendly."). A labor report I once read said that because of the contradictory demands of supervisors, the most stressful job was telephone operator, followed by flight traffic controller. After the divestiture (deregulation of telephone companies in the mid Eighties) Ma Bell went on a name-changing binge and laid off a bunch of people, including, fortunately, me. Never so glad to be unemployed in my life!
I got a job with an accounting firm that was under contract to do residential weatherization inspections for the Bonneville Power Administration. They wanted someone who knew word processing. This was mid-Eighties and not all that many people were familiar with computers, but I'd been dinking with one for a couple of years, and was attempting to write a science fiction novel with WordStar on my KayPro II. The BPA wanted big stacks of residential inspection reports from twenty-two different Public Utility Districts in the state boiled down to one cohesive six-page report per district. Most of it was boilerplate. All I had to do was fill in the figures, write a few comments, most of which were supplied by the inspectors themselves, and print it out. I "polished up the handle so carefully that they made me the ruler of" public information for the Washington State Oil Help weatherization program (which is to say, I answered customer questions on the 800 number information line while word-processing reports for BPA). Both programs fizzled when the contracts were not renewed, and the job came to an end.
During the time I was looking for another job, I managed to do a little fandango and broke a leg. Since I was already walking on crutches (polio at age two), this put me in a wheelchair. This was around 1990, and despite the ADA and Equal Opportunity Employment acts and all that, a 59 year-old-guy in a wheelchair ain't gonna get hired real quick. A counselor at the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation said, "You're not getting Social Security Disability Income? You could have been getting all this time!" She didn't add "you dummy!" but I'm sure she was thinking it. "It isn't all that much, but you could just retire, you know."
So I did ("They gave me a pension of ten pence a day, and contented with shellucks, I live on half-pay."). Now I'm learning a whole lot of songs I never got around to, practicing fairly regularly on the guitar (trying to regain some of what I lost while working "day jobs" for a couple decades or so), and even though I have to get around on wheels, I'm actually getting a few gigs. One coming up about mid-September, providing some of the background music for a poetry reading—very "Ken Burns" type of presentation. I'm also writing a book of reminiscences, "memoir" or whatever, of the folk scene as I muddled though it, and I've had a few magazine articles published here and there. Some of these long things I post on Mudcat serve as drafts for other stuff I'm working on. These days I'm writing a lot! You may have noticed.
I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.
Much more than you ever wanted to know about anyone. Thanks for putting up with me.
Don Firth
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