Desparately Calm

Wow - this is my 300th post... Who'd have thought??? :-) ... And yet the story goes on:

I went through a "journey of introspection" in the winter of 1972... It's kind of strange to describe because I really enjoyed living in Eugene (Oregon) and wasn't the least bit unhappy. As a matter of fact, I recall feeling a deep sense of peace and well-being... But I knew things couldn't go on the way they had been going - having my life thrown into utter chaos every time my mother or sister decided to do something stupid on a whim...
Furthermore - I was sick of never having a penny to my name. Even when I was making good money as a delivery driver in Dallas all of it went to my mother and sister... It wasn't that I wanted money to spend on "things" (I'd been around my sister enough to know the folly of that)... I just wanted some control over whether there would be a roof over my head and food in the fridge at the end of the month... Somehow, that really didn't seem like a lot to ask :-)

So let me recap where I stood in the late fall of 1972:
I'd graduated from high school (at age 16) roughly 30 months earlier and hadn't done a darn thing for at least 21 months of that time. I had spent one semester in college but that got disrupted when my mother was hospitalized and almost died of cancer. (I really didn't see myself as the "college type" anyway)... And I had recently spent a few months driving a delivery truck and (in retrospect) I had been extremely good at it, but I certainly didn't feel that way at the time. (I've always been my toughest critic, and having my former boss constantly berate me didn't help matters either) ...

Aside: The sense of inadequacy probably goes back to the "Dunning-Kruger Effect". One of the findings is that people who are exceptionally good at things generally assume everyone one else is as well :-)

So the obvious conclusion was that I needed to find a job. For the first month or so I checked the classified pretty much every day but there really wasn't much available, and there were a couple of reasons for that: The first was that hundreds of thousands of people had been thrown out of work in the Seattle area during Boeing's 1971 downturn and a lot of them ended up in Eugene. And the second was that Eugene was a college town and there were thousands of students looking for part time jobs. (There was no need to hire full-time workers for unskilled positions.)

It seemed like my best long term prospect would be in a car-related field. And since sales was out of the question (wrong personality type), and becoming a mechanic required a huge investment (mechanics have to provide their own hand tools), I figured my best shot was as a car parts counterman.
So, sometime in November I decided to "pull out all the stops" and made a list of every car dealer and parts store in Eugene. Then I put on a suit and tie, and (over the period of a couple of days) I went to every one of them (about 25 total) .. It wasn't easy because I didn't have a car and it was cold out. I took the bus downtown one day, but most of the time I walked... Miles and miles...
I got the same answer almost every place I went... A lot of them seemed to feel bad for me (I must have looked pitiful) and told me that it wasn't my fault - they were having to turn away aerospace engineers with families as well. But that didn't really make me feel any better...

There was, however, one place that was looking for a parts trainee: Centennial Porsche/Audi on Centennial Loop. (I'm not sure when it closed but it's definitely not there anymore.) I got along really well with the parts manager, my fluency in German was a plus, and it was a good location - right off of Coburg Road. I could walk there in less than 1/2 hour if need be...The manager said he'd get back to me, but he never did... I knew I should call, but I was afraid to because that was my only remaining option and I really didn't want to hear that final "No"...

You know - although being a parts man at a Porsche dealership seemed like a "dream job" at the time I've often reflected on how incredibly fortunate I was that I didn't get it... Because when I finally gave up waiting for that call (after about a month) I set in motion a chain of events that changed my life forever...