GUEST,Martin Gibson

Your crudeness deserves no response, but just to set the record straight:—

I have lived in the real world for seventy-two years. I have seen a fair amount of life and I have held a variety of jobs. I am also happily married to a wonderful woman and have been for several decades. I made my living from the mid-Fifties to the late Sixties by singing (television, concerts, and clubs and coffeehouses) and teaching guitar both privately (both classic and folk) and in classes (folk). I have worked doing production drawings for Boeing commercial aircraft (the production drawing for the 727-200 No. 2 engine firewall is my work, as is that for the 747 wing-to-body fairing, among many other others). I have also drawn cartoons and comic strips. I worked in radio as a general announcer and newscaster, a rock-jock, a classical music announcer, and for a year as a news director. I have also worked as a telephone operator, and as a technical writer for a company under contract to the Bonneville Power Administration (which means I've done work for the same company that Woody Guthrie did in the Thirties). I still sing, and my old friends tell me my voice is as good as it ever was, if not better. Note that maturity lends a certain acuteness of judgment, artistically as well as in life in general. I am and always have been a student of history and philosophy.

Regarding my last name. Those familiar with the geography of Scotland and with place-names in and around there will undoubtedly recognize it. My great-grandfather was born in Orkney, and like many Orkneymen in the nineteenth century, he hired on with the Hudson's Bay Company, and was promoted to Factor on San Juan Island in Puget Sound, where he settled and established the family from which I come. It is an ancient and honorable name, and at least three will-known British actors bear it: Colin Firth, Peter Firth, and Jonathan Firth. You will note that, rather than assuming an alias of some kind, and further, hiding behind the GUEST appellation, I use my own name—the same name I used when I made my living as a professional musician and the name I used on the radio.

By resorting to base insults as you do, you only dishonor yourself.

Don Firth