I’ve had over 40 jobs

My first job was working for my mother. She had gone to college during World War II to receive an education in textiles. When I was in kindergarten she found a job at Sears as an interior decorator. She took what she’d learned there and started her own freelance decorating business which she called Vesta Spreng Interiors. She would design and make draperies for friends and neighbors, and found work for home builders at first to select exterior brick and paint colors along with interior carpet and kitchen cabinets. That work soon led to taking care of the designs for model homes. That would include designing and making draperies and sometimes adding furniture, art, towels and other items to make the homes look attractive and lived-in.

My mother would work with the builders and decide what needed to be done with the houses and she would make the draperies, purchase the furniture and equipment necessary for hanging the window treatments, and on Saturdays my father and I would load up our station wagon and we would take everything to the houses we were working at and handle the necessary installation. At first, I was only a “gopher” handing my parents the tools and materials they needed, but by the time I was 12 or so I could handle the same work they did, including hanging drapes, installing furniture and hanging pictures on the walls. We did this nearly every weekend until she retired when I was 35 years old! We used to tell people that I had 25 years of experience as a decorator!

Last week I mentioned my years as a musician with the Caballeros. During my four summers at college I worked for a motion picture shipping company in Dallas called Central Shipping and Inspection. We loaded film containers from our warehouse onto trucks for delivery to theaters across Texas. While I was in college at East Texas State University – now Texas A&M – Commerce – I was a teaching assistant. In 1969 ETSU changed their Christmas break schedule from a couple of weeks right before finals for the fall semester to four weeks after finals and before the start of the spring semester. That gave me the opportunity to work for a month and make some money. I went to work at NorthPark Mall at Kips, where I first met and began dating my wife Jean.

We got married  in 1972 after I’d graduated from ETSU, moved to Carrollton, TX, where I started my first “real” job at Rogersnap Business Forms. From there I went to TJM Corporation, another business forms company, where I worked as a forms salesman. After that I worked for Computer Language Research (aka “Fast-Tax”) where they trained me to program computer applications to process income tax returns for accounting forms. That gave me the skills to write software with PL/I, which would keep me working for the next 30 years. From there I went to work for a software consulting company, Cutler-Williams, Inc., who assigned me to work at Lone Star Gas, Dallas’s natural gas utility. Soon I was “hired away” from Cutler-Williams to work full-time at the utility, where I stayed for over 17 years, moving through two subsidiaries before returning to the “mother” company at the end.

Cutler-Williams was only the first of six or seven consulting/IT service companies that helped me find work using the computer skills I now had. These consulting firms helped me get jobs with IBM Credit Corporation in White Plains, NY, The Nordam Group in Tulsa, Nielson Media Research in Florida, State Farm Insurance in Bloomington, IL, and others.

After leaving Lone Star Gas, I moved us from Texas to Wichita, KS, to work for USF&G Insurance. After a couple of years they closed their Wichita office (on their way to eventually closing the entire company) and I moved to Baltimore, USF&G’s home office, to work for F&G Life, their life insurance office. Then I went to White Plains to contract at IBM; then Commercial Financial Services in Tulsa (to where we moved for ten years); American Airlines; The Nordam Group; Oklahoma Central Credit Union; Sabre, Inc./EDS Corporation; Decision One (Sprint); Domino’s Pizza; Tulsa County Jail (Corrections Corporation of America); Healthcare Administration Technologies; and Genesis10. During my time in Tulsa I also worked for Fellowship Bible Church Tulsa, Christ for Humanity, Carol Publishing (Everything Rosie), Whoopi Goldberg and writing for Network Magazine (CMP Media’s Data.com website).

In April of 2004 after nearly a year recovering from Guillain–Barré syndrome I moved to Tampa, Florida, to work for Nielson Media Research. This was another PL/I consulting position which ended in January 2006. I was able to quickly segue into working at State Farm in Bloonington, IL, but that only lasted about five months, after which I moved back to Tulsa. After a couple more failed attempts at consulting positions, I decided to move back “home” to Garland, Texas, and attend A+ Texas Teachers to obtain a Texas Teachers’ Alternative Certification Program classroom training which allowed me to take and pass the TExES Exam #131: English, Language Arts and Reading 8-12 and the TExES Exam #139  Technology Applications 8-12 teaching certifications. I am also “highly qualified” in Mathematics with 35 hours of college credits, 27 of which are upper level, which gives me the state’s teaching certification in Math. After teaching at DeSoto High School for a couple of weeks, I quickly learned that, as much as I wanted it, I was not cut out to be a teacher.

Looking for something else to do using that education, I got a job at the University of Texas at Dallas’s Callier Center for Communication Disorders. This is where I was working when I was hit by a car while walking across the street to work, November 1, 2012.

In all, I have had more than forty different jobs, in 13 cities over 55 years. Do they give out awards for that?

Publishing “Everything Rosie”

How do you get a book published? The usual way would be to start by writing a book, hopefully a book that people will want to read. Then you send it to publishers and everyone else you know hoping that someone will like it and find a way to publish it.

I did not do that.

In early June of 1996, I was fired from F&G Life Insurance in Baltimore, Maryland, where I’d ended up after USF&G had closed it’s offices in Wichita Kansas.

I happened to be watching TV on June 10, 1996, and saw the first episode of The Rosie O’Donnell Show. The sudden success of her show led several people to develop books about her and her TV show. In late 1996 James Robert Parish, an accomplished author of biographies about Hollywood celebrities, such as The Paramount Pretties and The RKO Gals, began work on just such a biography of Rosie, called Rosie: Rosie O’Donnell’s Biography. About the same time I had begun creating a web site about Rosie. During the middle of 1995 I had created my first website about my favorite actress, Karen Allen. In January 1996 I created the ACME Dodgers, in February 1997 I inherited a popular Animal House site from its original creator David Lundvall, who wanted a good home for it after he graduated college.

Then on April 27, 1997, I received an email from Steven Schragis, publisher of Carol Publishing Group in Secaucus, NJ, with the subject of “book”: “I am the Publisher of ROSIE O’DONNELL; Her True Story by George Mair. I’d like to send you a copy – can you provide an address?” This exchange began a series of events that resulted in my being asked to write a book about Rosie and her show. I was assigned to one of Carol Publishing’s editors to create a summary and outline of what I should write. I then went to the bookstore and looked at a lot of biographies to find ideas for what to write. I found one about X-Files star David Duchovny, The Duchovny Files: The Truth Is in Here, written by Paul Mitchell.

Not just a standard biography, that book was a compendium of both online and offline information about Duchovny and the information about him. So this is what I proposed to Carol Publishing: a little bit of bio, guest lists from each episode of her show, reprints of feature stories about Rosie and interviews she had given, some of her appearances in online chat rooms, clips from her stand-up act, and everything else I had created for my ACME Rosie web site. Carol Publishing liked the ideas of the book and offered me a $3,500 advance on royalties to write a 75,000-word book based on my proposal. I signed the papers and began the process of creating what I’d wrought.

I spent every day for five or six months writing and assembling this book while I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with my wife Jean and my 10-year-old son Evan. I would work all day at my day job and then spend all evening at my computer using Microsoft Word to write the book. Jean and Evan would find somewhere to go or something else to do so I could work alone without disruption. In January 1998 I printed and mailed a copy of my book totaling over 100,000 words to my editor at Carol. After a small number of editorial corrections – less than a dozen – they sent me a package with the proofs, to which I made only a couple of corrections, and the book was sent to the printers.

May 1, 1998 the book was released. I was scheduled to do a personal appearances at a few book stores in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Dallas, and also a TV morning news appearance in Tulsa and some phone interviews for radio and TV stations across the US. Of course the most rewarding part was being listed on Amazon.com for all to see! I did make a little money from sales of the book, but it took a couple of years for that to cover the money they had advanced me, and even then that was not a lot. I probably made a total of maybe $5,000 during the five or six years the book was in print. At the end of that time, Carol Publishing offered to sell me the remainder of about 300 printed copies at about $1 apiece, but as usual I did not have any money to do that, so I had to turn the offer down.

Anyone who is interested can purchase the book on Amazon or eBay for about a dollar, plus shipping. I will not receive any of that, but you are certainly welcome to check it out. Also, most of the information for the book is available online at my Everything Rosie web page.