Follow That Passion (Part 1 of 7)
This is the first of seven retrospective blogs exploring how recognizing and honoring one’s passion often creates a rich, satisfying life. Several questions posed to me over the decades will be addressed, with the first being…
How did you get into the entertainment design business?
I grew up in a non-entertainment family, without any show business connections whatsoever. My dad was a self-employed probate attorney and mom, an elementary school teacher. My younger sister was often my audience in the early days.
Our family lived in a Southern California suburb of San Diego, CA, 120 miles south of the center of American entertainment design and production - Los Angeles. My childhood years were far away from major television and movie studios, and equally distant from fledgling theme parks such as Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland® - the first Disney theme park in the world, designed by Walt Disney and his hand-selected group of Imagineers.
In San Diego, ours was a subset of smaller live stage plays, local television and radio stations, and big screen movie theaters - both indoors and out in the open as drive-ins. The standout was the San Diego Zoo, later to be world renowned for compassionate, natural and realistic animal habitats compared to the caged boxes typical of other zoos. Perhaps our zoo was being influenced by the magical walk-through environments of theme parks developing in Los Angeles?
As a young boy, I became fascinated with the subterranean mystery deep inside manholes - the round, metal-covered portals in the middle of streets and scattered across vacant land tracts. My dad had once introduced me to a gentleman who eventually led the regional utility company, so one day I decided to write a letter to him at the San Diego Gas & Electric Company, whose truck and crew I had seen servicing the manhole in front of our home. I really wanted to climb down and experience what the crewmen were encountering, and at the age of eight, it was passion urging me to write the letter.
What I’ve come to realize across prior decades is how my career evolved across a lifetime, a direct result of curiosity in getting to know people, writing letters and emails, together with making phone calls. The career didn’t happen in one day, or week, or even across several years since it never was static in either form or function. It certainly didn’t occur overnight from some lucky break. My career journey began in a place of passion, with a focused fascination to learn about how things operated in my single digit years.
Going back even further, I believe passion first commenced as an exploring vine - with green buds of curiosity growing into joyous sprouts as I pretended and aimed interest toward the dimensional world. I can say with sincerity I imagined being a designer and maker from very early on, then came to understand: When one imagines, interesting situations materialize (though not always as anticipated).
My best guess of when a career path vision germinated was several years before the manhole attraction - around three years old - as one of my dad’s new fence panels in our yard was sawn upon by yours truly. No big deal, right? Well, based on what I learned from my mom decades later, it was a big deal from my dad’s perspective.
My father was a lifelong perfectionist, and after hearing some of his unrepeatable language upon seeing what I had just cut into, I vaguely recall wondering how he learned to build a fence without first experimenting with different ideas and approaches. This early event in my life made a permanent impression, since I had been simultaneously encouraged by my mom to experiment toward making things. However, at this moment, I was confused after being scolded for trying something new.
From 1960s wooden Lincoln Logs to 1970s plastic Lego® bricks. This Boeing 707 airplane, built completely from scratch and a few magazine photographs, actually won a prize — of more Lego bricks!
We all learn by doing, so from that failed dad-mimicking moment I regrouped to continue making things in my bedroom, then branching out to the garage after school when dad was at the office, then at the kitchen counter on summer afternoons, and later - strewn across the covered back porch of our house into the back yard combining found objects, cardboard, tape, bailing wire, paint, adhesives, kit parts and motorized components to make an array of creations. Included was a miniature model roller coaster from repurposed electric train cars and track, a passenger jetliner from Lego® bricks, and a miniature, ridable ‘Super Slide’ patterned after early fiberglass hump slides. Concerned for my and neighbor kid’s safety, my pragmatic father hoped all this would be a phase I would soon grow out of, but there was much more to come.
Grab a blanket or burlap gunny sack! Giant fiberglass Super Slides emerged in the early 1970s. Some travelled with carnivals, while others were permanently constructed alongside a miniature golf course or go-kart track.
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