What I am about to write can only be written today, because it is time sensitive. Tomorrow, I start a new chapter in my story with a job change. It has been percolating for a number of months, affording me the opportunity to mull it over in terms of sharing it with you. After sifting through a bunch of muddy thoughts, it is the nugget of change that remains and my professional history is a testament to it.
I started working when I was twelve years old and I’ve been at it ever since. My waiter’s salary at the neighborhood deli was fifty cents a day. After elementary school, I worked at a local men’s clothing store, followed by a series of high school summer jobs, flipping franks at a Long island beach club to being a waiter in an extremely depressing, old folks home on the beach at Rockaway, Queens.
My best job, while at Queens College, had to be working for Greyhound at the ’64 Worlds Fair, driving rich people around in an oversized golf cart. In my junior year, I inadvertently made a career decision that would eventually catch up with me. I got a job as a page for NBC and actually worked at the real 30 Rock. I worked the Tonight Show when Johnny Carson was in NYC. Pretty much every famous person around during the mid-Sixties came on that show and it was a fabulous experience, believe me!
After graduation, I managed to get a full time job at NBC, making sure that all their stations carried as much network programming as possible. When I was a page, the real attraction for me was the entertainment side of the medium, but I got sucked into the advertising business. I left the network and proceeded to work at four different agencies, with names like Young and Rubicam, and Doyle, Dane, Bernbach. I spent millions of dollars of client’s money on network television programming. I closed out my twenty years in that world by working in sales at three cable networks, like USA Cable, when the industry was just beginning, the birth of today’s media explosion. I closed out my career as a sales executive for a company that distributed programs to television stations, something called syndication. During my advertising days, I also got to experience what its like to live through the ice cold, bloodbath of a personnel purge. I was out of work for around six months and managed to get involved with the Mafia, briefly trafficking in records and eight tracks that “fell off the truck”.
I left the city in 1987 for Santa Fe, NM, committed to never having a conventional job again, which I nearly got away with. The moment I arrived, I began doing marketing for a John Huston film festival and proceeded to wrack up a ridiculous number of jobs, a listing of which would surely put you to sleep.
During my fifteen years in the Southwest, I undertook at least a dozen bona fide ventures, which I know because I just shoveled out my cob-webbed resume and counted. After the film festival, I got into the book and audio book publishing business. In the Summer of 1989, I promoted a big concert series, called Music in the Pines. Staying in the music business, I spent a few years working with a small English record label, securing US distribution. My only straight job was a three year stint, helping to launch a radio station, KBAC, that became a mainstay for the community. I was introduced to Belize and ended up as a nature tourism consultant all over Centra America for several years, absolutely one of the more interesting gigs. Alright, that’s enough, because you get the idea. I have to leave things out like handling distribution and marketing for the Breast Bottle nurser, a silicon replication of the breast feeding experience.
I was able to fly to Kauai on the wings of the Gospel music business. Before leaving the Land of Enchantment, i began selling long form, Gospel music videos on BET, Black Entertainment Television. I met some wonderful people in that industry, artists and executives. Based on a terribly obvious pattern, it won’t shock you to know that it lasted just long enough for me to slowly acclimate to this island and it stopped. My partner in the nature tourism business ended up buying a Costa Rican airline. I started their conservation blog, successfully championing a worthwhile cause or two, all they way from here. I am not sure how agriculture and sustainability got into my head, but I proceeded to work with that community, helping to establish some farmer’s markets, even spending a year overseeing the County’s Sunshine Markets. I spent a number of years working on a project to establish a major alternative energy source and attempting to create a cattle feed that would keep them from being shipped off island, only to return as an overpriced hamburger.
The past few years, I have been in the micro-brewery/restaurant business. I am not sure there is a tougher business. Oh yeah, I owned a bar in Easton, PA in the early 80’s called Flickers. It was painted purple and closed in three months. It will take whatever you want to give and you won’t get it back. The best part here was helping to create an important institution in the community, a source of quiet pride for me.
It has been around sixty years since I served hot dogs and french fries to my classmates at PS 173. I know I began this with the idea of change and while the above recounting is abbreviated to avoid serious boredom, even a complete listing couldn’t touch upon the accumulated experience I hold close to my heart.
Tomorrow morning, I wake up, privileged to keep learning and experiencing life. My close personal friend, the Buddha, understood that life and the constancy of change are one.
Here’s to change. If you have gotten this far, where I am going is not the story, it is where I have been. However, the clothes above were purchased in a burst of energy, taking me from Ross to Walmart to K-Mart and back to you and to work tomorrow.