For this reason Biographies are high on my list of preferred reading. A good biographer has to understand a complex personality, a technology or art of some kind, the time in which the individual lived and worked and the social economic consequences of whatever they did. A good biography has the accuracy of a history book, reads like a novel, delineates like a technical manual and puts it all in psychological and philosophical context. Not an easy assignment.

Documenting one’s own life is even more demanding.

As I have stated elsewhere, one of the principal purposes of this web site is to document my life and times and see what value can be drawn from this one experience. To facilitate this, there are several layers of material each providing a different perspective and cut of the information. Each one, generally, provides a different voice and assessment. These distinctions are not rigid, however. The web site evolves organically. There is feedback between what is going on in my life, information I wish to publish for some specific reason, real-time thinking I am engaged in, and the purpose of my own learning/understanding.

The next layer of this dig is a Chronology of stories, some serious, some humorous - all relevant. These snapshots provide a sense of time and place and the mind space that I occupied at the time. Listed, with each year, are my projects. These are also detailed separately. This History will be linked to the Chronology - year by year - and to an essay about each year. The information, in the Chronology, for each year is contextual. Comments about what was going on at the time. The essays dig deeper into major lessons learned. Some of these get intense and very personal. I want, here, to get to raw experience and conclusions drawn - 1947 is an example. There is also a section that focusses on those who taught me. From time to time there are essays that take on a specific story like the 25 year history of work environments that I presented at SFIA in April, 2000.

All this is tied together with numerous links. In all, it is possible to get many views of one version how circumstance, events, ideas, goals, hopes, successes, failures and many people composed this emergent verb called a life.

This is a work in progress. It will take well into 2002 before it approaches any level of completeness. [Note: in 2007, I leave this optimistic statement as written eight years ago].

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The big news here was the slow ending of a depression and a world gearing up for a global war. I was not aware of these thing in these terms but I grew up in it. This is important - when I entered school, my entire living experience had been in the context of a military family fighting a war. In many ways, for those of us who lived it, WWII was the big event of the 20th Century. It shaped nearly everything including the Cold War which followed. And, for good and bad, it is still the precursor of the world we live in today. At the beginning of WWII, the United States was still, statically, an agrarian society. At the end of it, it was a global industrial power. Within 10 years of the end of it, it had become a consumer society. The “touch and feel” of our culture went through a great transformation in the period of 20 years. I lived to see it. This change surprised me. What surprised me more was that no one else I knew seemed to notice it. People older than me could not get out of the Depression. People younger did not see the change. I grew up believing that social transformations are possible - a belief based on experience, not theory.

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It was not a slam dunk that the US entered the war on the side of England and the other allies - this is forgotten today. There were many supporters of the Axis Nations. In fact, our trade with them remained high during the entire war a fact that was to shock my naive mind [link: 1947] a few years later when I learned of it. A FACT not recognized in our society to this day even though the book Trading With the Enemy was published in the late 1980s.