Into It

These are transcripts of recorded interviews that took place in 1994. Deciding to do this was just one of those crazy things: you get an idea and for some reason, get excited about doing it. When I think about it, it's not really all that strange an idea, not for someone like me who is just curious about, well, many things. It was an excuse to meet some very interesting people and to poke into their lives. Just between you and me, doesn't that sound great? Only thing, it took a lot of work. Transcribing spoken words from recordings at that time was arduous - no speech recognition software - just a foot pedal on a tape playback machine. Tape? What's that? Spending two weeks of a summer vacation listening to recorded interviews - sloooowly. It was worth it: there's an interesting world out there if only you make the excuse to go find it. This book is a personal telling of life stories. Life stories are not a list of facts. They are experiences, told from a subjective viewpoint. They bring the human experience to where we can see it and they identify us as real, not just some numbers or generalizations. Each perspective is different, each story spoken in the language of the inventor.Obviously there are many routes to many different places in life, and we don't all want to arrive at the same place. As a society, we Americans represent many cultures, and each of us uses a personal language that communicates more than just the ordinary meaning of the words; work has as many meanings as there are people.