Phoenix End Times (from Steve, aka "K")

After Wimpy flew the Phoenix coop, I was left alone with Big Daddy. We worked together for a few more years before Phoenix gradually sank back into the sodden ashes of Cardinal Associates. Here’s a bit of what I remember.

Armed Robbery on Little Rock Road

I’m not a criminal but I played one in a DART program.

Big Daddy had squeezed yet another contract out of Exxon. Our mission was to train gas station attendants in safety practices and, more importantly, how to sell tires and oil to unsuspecting customers.

We couldn’t find a station that would allow us on site during business hours so we rigged up some empty Exxon pumps on wheeled platforms and rolled them onto empty parking lots. There was a lot of sky in those shots.

For one special sequence, The Hold-up, we needed a real station. Big Daddy landed the perfect location, a seedy Gulf station on Little Rock Road. The gun-wielding, drug-addled thief would be played by me. To be on the safe side, we hired a security guard to be present on the night of the shoot. His job would be to warn approaching customers that the “robber” was only an actor and we were shooing a “movie.” Big Daddy would be on hand to make sure everything went as planned.

On the night in question, as I stood at the cash register brandishing my revolver, a woman walked in and screamed. I turned around and saw another customer ducking behind the Coke machine. I looked around for my people and realized I was on my own. I feared that the real cops would show up any second and take me down. A few minutes later, the rental cop emerged from the bathroom, zipping up his pants. Big Daddy had also stepped away--into the 7/11 next door for a six pack of beer.

Men of Steel, Revisited

Continuing our exploits in the steel industry, well-documented elsewhere by Wimpy, Big Daddy and I traveled to Georgetown, South Carolina to scope out the local steel mill. We took Big Daddy’s Winnebago and camped in Myrtle Beach State Park. After visiting the mill, about which I remember little, we returned to our campsite where Big Daddy prepared egg foo yung in the Winnebago’s tiny kitchen. After dinner, we went swimming in the ocean. Big Daddy floated out beyond the breakers, with just his head visible above the water, like Mao in the Yangtze.

Fear and Loathing at Redstone Arsenal

With his usual brio, Big Daddy snagged a Federal contract to develop a series of video training films at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. It was subcontracted to us by a minority contractor, a bit of a scam. Big Daddy had worked with video back in his Huntley-Brinkley days but was a bit rusty to say the least. I had zero experience with video.

We fired up the Big Daddy’s Winnebago, our latter-day mode of travel, and headed south, Schlitz cans jingling along the way. We found a suitably cheesy motel, where Big Daddy bribed the desk manager and his girl friend to serve as his personal attendants during our two-week stay.

Our subject matter experts, three retired Army Corps of Engineers, met us at the motel to brief us on the project. The videos we were to produce would demonstrate how to prepare the foundation for and then rapidly assemble large prefab metal buildings, for the purpose of housing military personnel or displaced citizens in the event of a nuclear attack. Big Daddy called the front desk for another bottle of Old Crow.

Each morning, as we passed through the front gate of the military reservation, Big Daddy would give the soldiers a lazy salute. In the lavishly equipped video studio, we pretended to know what we were doing but accomplished little. During breaks, we would retire to the RV for a drink.

Before long, the project got hung up on some distant bureaucratic reef. Big Daddy was getting pissed. In the end, we dumped the contract and drove home. It turned out to be Big Daddy’s last hurrah.

Coda

After Big Daddy's death, I ran Phoenix out of my home for several years. Mostly, I wrote scripts for a textbook publishing company in Ohio. But computers were making slide training technology obsolete, and I lacked Big Daddy’s ability to land new business. By 1986, the strange dream was over.

Background note:

Cardinal was my first white-collar job after college. I started in the Validation Department, where my role was to round up groups of volunteers and subject them to hands-on, audio-visual, vocational training and then to administer a post test, thereby “validating” the effectiveness of the programs. To that end, I worked with drug addicts in rehab, high school dropouts, boy scouts, and other hard-up or marginal members of the community willing to donate their time. Among other activities, I had them tuning up cars, laying courses of brick, making cuff links on a miniature metal lathe, and building foot stools with power saws. By some miracle, no one was ever injured during these adventures. Later on, I graduated to “writer/producer” and continued in the capacity through the Cardinal and Phoenix years.

DART vs. COMPAQ and Beyond

The COMPAQ portable PC from the early 1980s physically resembled Cardinal's DART programmed instruction machine from the early 1970s.

It had a small rectangular screen and came in a hardshell. Its dimensions and 'look' were similar.

The COMPAQ keyboard locked shut at the base, making it an awkward and ugly suitcase. This "portable" item weighed close to 30 pounds.

It was like lugging around a sewing machine.

DART also had a case, but the machine wasn't meant to be mobile. Its case was for extended travel only.

The COMPAQ ran on DOS, and had huge floppy drives. Even with input capability, the machine didn't really do much, in practical terms.

You could sit around and type in DOS commands all night long, boring yourself to tears, by asking the machine what time it was, or day, or what was in the directory.

Or you could simply curse at it:

C: \> dir:
C: \> date
C: \> F U !!

For a while, COMPAQ sold their machine with a gimmicky DOS program that enabled "conversation" between its user and the system. I can't recall the name of it (it was a "she" name, like some friendly chick shrink or something). COMPAQ promoted it as artificial intelligence. Actually it was little more than BASIC code used to generate random responses to a preset table of queries, trusting the law of averages to make it seem like the system's brain was providing a cogent response to a comment or question.

The DOS program was little better than the fortune-telling 8-Ball we used to play with as kids. You asked a question and it provided a random answer when you looked at its bottom and read the plastic indicator floating in a small sea of glycerin.

All in all, even with the addition of a text processor - primitive WordStar - the COMPAQ was junk. It didn't respond very well to users' needs, it wasn't interactive, and it didn't teach anyone much of anything. It didn't do much, period.

Except maybe instruct us to hold our cash for the next new and improved generation of PCs.

Cardinal's DART machine hardware had no operating system, of course. It was basically a filmstrip projector and audio tape player with capabilities to advance, stop, and replay on command.

With Cardinal's piggy-back cartridge "instructional unit" inserted (the 'software' or teaching program itself), the 1973 DART system was actually smarter, more versatile, and way more useful than a 1983 COMPAQ could ever hope to be.


Cardinal's system surpassed the other teaching machine klunkers (on left) of its era.

(None of our equipment or people looked as goofy, either.)

What we were doing was something very much like early CBT. Same methodology, different platform.

We were trail-blazing and largely unaware.

In its core concept, Cardinal espoused B.F. Skinner's (picture below) behavior modification theories. Skinner's book was required reading for new hires. It was kind of scary almost fascist-sounding stuff, and some of us thought it best not to over think it.

As it turned out -- putting aside Skinner and all attendant ISD methodology -- it was Cardinal's DART machine itself that was the real genius of Big Daddy's vision.

But the timing wasn't there, nor the buying customers, nor the economy and so forth. Maybe we could have done some things better, but mostly it was misfortune in the market place that did Cardinal in.

It's too bad. There was enough talent in our building to have made a real go at it. Maybe we could've even made all those millions of dollars that Big Daddy and the execs promised.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

I don't know what Jones thought about Thomas Wolfe - probably not much.

This is where Conder's used to be - or close by. A yup place, as Bill says.

Beer Joints & Haunts #4

Conder's Sundries was like Cardinal's annex building, a sort of liquid cafeteria. If Big Daddy couldn't be located in the office, chances are he was there (and Jones too) having a cool one.

Boarders at the YMCA down the street also used it as a convenience store.

You could take a brief walk over the South Blvd. overpass and get a cold beer or a can of soup or chili patiently served up by Jim, the proprietor.

After I left Cardinal, Jones made a point of telling me that gentleman Jim sometimes "asked about me." He knew such a remark would always embarrass me.

Several times I met Jones there again, and on one occasion we ran into several members of the Cardinal annex crowd.

This is Jones' depiction of that day (click to expand picture).

Wm P's words are cut off, but it basically said "I didn't wanna see these f--kers." Not sure what Jones' "decision" refers to. It could be his periodic internal debate about wanting to stay employed with Cardinal.


Some other details:

• Tom W has his empty "spoit" pipe and a "Stewart Granger" beer
• Big Daddy is wearing his 1970s plaid pants and has an "Effete" beer
• Morey Amsterdam (Head of Sales) is doing his cello act, and has a "Rickles" beer
• Jones has a "Bayreuth" beer, a tribute to his Wagner opera obsession

Conder's has long since been closed and its space converted into some sort of sprawling tavern for Charlotte's Yup crowd.

Wm P's Supplement Video: Fear & Loathing in New York

(this is a companion piece to "Tom's "Fear & Loathing in NYC " video and cartoons)

This narrated video features Wm P's gnarly Tidewater accent.

Excerpt: "Tom's studies of the Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda had apparently saved his life.. "

Jones at Work

Here is Jones operating the machine that transferred slides to film strips.

He is being watched by the accusing image of O Donald. As Wm P noted in a previous post, the depiction of O Donald as stern authority figure might be a sort of shorthand for Jones' father.

I am the Tomas of various stobs.

Spectres

Jones spells it "specters" which must mean something.

Something haunted the old man.

I think that's Wm P in the upper right but maybe not because the character seems a little too cheerful (even though wan).

Treplow (Manny) is there - gleefully sardonic.

O Donald is present - stern and shadowy.

I think that's K and me down at the bottom. We both seem angry - at Jones or just in general - it isn't clear. One of us says, "Nyahhhh".

Beer Joints & Haunts #3

The Boulevard Sundries on East Blvd. showed up in my old box of Cardinal pictures. I must have taken the shot when me and Jones were on a gump, driving through Dilworth.

It seemed Jones had a beer hangout in every sector of town. Barkeeps knew him and would automatically bring out a can of Schlitz.

As I recall, Boulevard Sundries was sparse and empty and beat to hell inside. There was a big counter that looked more like a food counter than a tavern bar. The heat worked pretty good though, and on a rainy winter day the place was cozy enough. Jones was hungry and scarfed down some sort of impossibly lame looking sandwich.

I went back to the location several years later, and it had been gentrified into a fine little cafe with fine old grinders and fine little micro-brews served by with-it people. Or maybe I dreamed that. Whenever I went beer-drinking in Dilworth, it was usually at the White Horse, a nice but slightly snobby white collar place with even more expensive grinders, conveniently close to Wm Wilkerson's fine old house of restoration and unabashed trendiness.

Beer Joints and Haunts #2

In the days of yore, there were two beer haunts in a two story building (since torn down) at this location on E. Morehead in Charlotte. Cardinal was located maybe a half mile to the right, toward town.

The haunt on the first floor (I don't remember the name) was the more acceptable place. We usually went there straight after work. Sometimes McGaughey and other management people joined us (or, more correctly, we joined them). There was something tartan or plaid about the place. But maybe I'm just dreaming that.

After an hour or so downstairs, we climbed the foul smelling stairs to the Upstairs Lounge. It was a topless joint and pool hall. You entered the place into the pool hall. Sometimes we played pool with the girls. A few, despite their attire (or lack thereof) were gimlet eyed pool sharks, not to be fooled with.

To the right was the place where the girls danced. For a time Jones announced the performances for free beer. Slick Eddie knew all girls. Maybe he had a professional relationship with some of them. Two were memorable, Little Miss Concord and a mountain girl whose name I don't remember. Little Miss Concord was small and exquisite. She could dance well. The mountain girl had a pretty face and large silicon breasts. She wore soiled lime green underwear. Generally the whole thing was dispiriting and sad.

Beer Joints & Haunts #1

In the heart of Central Avenue High Society, The Penguin offered cold beer, greasy burgers, and no pressure. You could hang around in there all afternoon, and some of us did just that, back in the 70s. It was a bland little place, reminding me of a sad and ancient snack shop at some ne'er-do-well golf course.

Jones always stopped at the Penguin en route to my old rental house several blocks away on Kensington. Sometimes I went back with him to the Penguin, or to the Happy Days (or was it Happy Times?) farther east. The head shop was not too far away either, where Jones and I bought underground comics. There was another tavern up the road where a lot of us hung out too. I think it may have been called the Swayback Mare. Slick Eddie hung out there sometimes. Big Daddy CEO had lunch with us one day at the Swayback and raved about their fries. Jones didn't care for the Swayback because they played loud rock and roll, and there were no topless dancers to make the music tolerable.

I think the last time I was in the Penguin, it was with K. We pounded Budweisers and muttered about life at Phoenix, Inc. We came to no conclusions. Everything in those days was about loose ends. Nothing seemed to get resolved.

Jones' Beer & Hemingway Comics

I can't say for sure what prompted Jones to draw these.

He used to talk the "Are you for the Bridge?" talk on many occasions. He would often come into Cardinal's slide-sorting room and go into the act.

The work may be inspired by a drawing Tom W did, showing a bent figure saying "My name is Anselmo and I come from Barco de Avila- Let me help you with that pack."

Jones always portrayed Tom W in some sort of paramilitary or safari-stye shirts with epaulets. I don't know why he chose me to be Roberto in these drawings.

The guns are labeled in detail as to manufacturer and origin.

Jones borrowed my copy of "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Usually he returned books. Like my copy of Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" (which he greatly enjoyed and went on a baseball kick for a while, going around saying "Hey Babe" to everybody).

I looked for my copy of FWTBT the night I helped him transport his few earthly possessions from Cardinal's basement to a rented room at the Normandy downtown. I never found it.

Jones' Beer & Vonnegut Comics

1 -Jones' Beer & Vonnegut Cure for the Gleet


















A very basic glossary of Vonnegut's terms:

• karass - a group of people linked in a cosmically significant way, even when superficial linkages are not evident. (cross reference with Bill & Tom's use of term "intertwingle")
  
• granfalloon - a proud yet cosmically meaningless association of human beings, or false karass (e.g. Indiana "Hoosiers," AT&T Employees).
• wampeter - an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve
• foma - harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls.

2 - Jones' Portrayal of Cardinal's "Chromium Family"

Trip Across the Heartland of America (from Weathers)

This is a story I wrote in 1974 about the return trip from a visit to some large equipment manufacturer or another (Caterpillar?) in Moline, Illinois. Moline is one of the Quad Cities. The others are Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa which is just across the Mississippi river from Illinois. There is a fourth city but I have forgotten it, which is an easy thing to do.


We rented a 1974 Pontiac Grand Prix because it was the only car available. However, it cost only a little more to drive across Illinois than it does for two people to fly.

*******

We stayed in the Holiday Inn not far from the Quad Cities Airport. At night we went to the Holiday Inn bar and watched a group of country performers. There were two sisters and a man whom I assumed was their father.

The girls wore long skirts and one played guitar while hopping up and down to “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”.

A. became fascinated by the girls who danced. Even now, he speaks wistfully about our time in the darkened bar where the girls wore long skirts and clogged and, the men wore suits and white socks, unaware of the dangerous Southern boys in their midst, full of bile and irony.

*******

We talked of this and that and watched the countryside go by. The farms were identical. Each had a white, two-story frame house, a barn, and three other outbuildings. Each house was surrounded equally on all sides by 192.3 acres of land. The land was wrinkled where there were no farms. Glaciers had pushed the ground into neat, parallel folds. I think the trees growing leafless from the folds were elms. I imagined that Indians were buried underneath.

A. cannot go far without beer. So we made flying stop at some unknown tavern off the interstate in the middle of an unknown field. While A. searched for beer through the maze of dark, nearly deserted hallways I found a bathroom. I had to pee all the way across the Great Heartland of America. For once, A. did not make fun of me and stopped whenever I asked. However, I did not bother him often and suffered a great deal in silence. Once, while passing a snowy pasture I dreamed of peeing in his beer.

*******

A girl with large Midwestern breasts, at a motel where we stopped to ask directions, led us astray and we ended up at Lake Michigan instead of the O’Hare Airport.

Lake Michigan was the color of suet and filled with rolling chunks of ice that ate the shore. Lake Michigan was filled with frozen vomit from the poorer sections of the city.

*******

We missed our flight and had to wait six hours. First we visited several bars then we went to the international terminal and watched people come through customs. Noses pressed against the glass like children we laughed as clean-cut young agents searched for dope and contraband.

A. got involved in a complicated discussion with a waitress about how to pay a bar bill. He wanted to use his American Express card but she wasn’t sure. Finally, it was resolved his way and that led to a discussion about how to steal credit cards and travel around the world.

There are 1,336 bars in the O’Hare Airport, one for every holiday, religion, and race. We spent most of our time in the Interdenominational Caucasian Christmas bar.

There is a giant room beneath the O’Hare Airport. It extends all the way under the city to Lake Michigan. They bring airplanes here to be painted with muddy water. It is also used to wind up stewardesses and businessmen.

The fog over O’Hare airport eats airplanes. They trundle down the runway beside the Christmas bar and are never seen again.

A. and I ran out of conversation and six p.m. The plane left at eight.

Jones Tortured by K Troll

Although it's maybe way too clever, I sometimes wonder if Jones didn't project aspects of himself into his depictions of us. K, for instance, is always pictured as a fierce, threatening character, when he was not that way at all. Here K is shown as a troll perhaps badgering Jones for some scrap of work.

(K appears as the left-most character in the title frame of this blog. WmP is on the far right. In his words, he is always shown as "the angst ridden drifter". I am the would-be thinker just beside him who is forever gnawing on the pipe stem that says, "spoit".)

Corporal Jones' Self Portrait

Jones used to tell us he served in Army Intelligence and that our English teachers were right: 'Army Intelligence' is an oxymoron.

I wonder what the old German script from the pipe is saying. "Spoit"?

The rest of the comic is too graphic to show here. It depicts Corporal Jones' switch from respectable, middle class, educated military man to a most foul and lecherous persona he calls "Mr. Unnatural."

YouTube, Environmental Context, and Blue Paper

YouTube has many how-to lessons out there on subjects that Cardinal used to do. Things like using power tools, tuning up cars, using office equipment, even how to make a tie. I recently looked at a few, thinking about how they compared with our old stuff. It’s apples and oranges, 1970s vs. 2009, but still they stirred up some rambling thoughts.

What if Cardinal had changed its instructional unit “How to Make a Tie” to “How to Make a Tie Knot”? Would students have learned something more practical for every day life than how to sew together a half-assed tie? I wish I had suggested this thirty years ago. Maybe Sales could have unloaded more units.



There is something else the tie video makes me think of. What if we had photographed more of our instructional stuff in some sort of environmental context? The tie guy’s teaching us from a dressing room. We shot “How to Make a Tie” on the floor on blue background paper. Which invites better attention?

We did lessons on things like how to turn brake drums, run circular saws, and build brick walls, all within the confines of our studio. Almost invariably, we shot against the blue paper background.

While the blue background certainly did present objects (and trolls) clearly, it was somehow detached and cold. Instructional things happened within a type of reference-less void. Even with Howard the Hand Model’s hands in the frame, something human was lacking.

What if we had shot the Carburetor Overhaul series, for example, in a real world scene? Looking at today’s how-to’s, I see that our old stuff (its quality and effectiveness in training aside) was presented in kind of a rigid format. I don’t think this is entirely due to the restrictions of 35mm still photography and a budget. A lot of times we simply had to do what was expedient and within the company standards.

This YouTube is at the other end of the spectrum. The video sort of lets it all hang out, maybe too much so, but it’s fun to look at. Can a student really learn from it? I don’t know, but it gets a high 'place in reality' score. Look closely...is that a Chock Full o’Nuts coffee can filled with nails just out of frame on the right?



We tried some test shots at Cardinal with the carburetors on a plain pine-like workbench surface (without real-life clutter) and the contrast was lousy. I wanted something more ‘mechanics friendly’ but we ended up using a yellow background paper. It worked, but to me it still had the same old empty void look.

Here are two shots with environmental context. The first shot is from “How to Properly Wash your Hands.” Warntz and I shot it on location in Cardinal's ladies room.

The second is from the “How to Make Appointments” lesson. I can’t recall who the model wearing the nurse's hat was. She may have been our receptionist.


(Even Cardinal's decor at the front desk area had that same neutralizing color, but in this case it was IBM blue, because they used to own the building.)

These Medical Assistant programs were shot when we converted a mixed bag series of 'career programs' done in rough fashion by some educational group in the Midwest. A lot of the lessons were cretin level, like “How to Fry an Egg.” I don’t think we ever got around to converting that one and measuring its objectives. Too bad. We could have put it in the real world and shot it at one of Jones’ favorite breakfast & beer joints downtown.

There was one other lesson in the Medical Assistant series that we struggled to produce with any style or appropriate environmental context: “How to Take Oral and Rectal Temperatures.” We used a live model for the first part, and tried using a toy doll for part 2. Eventually we sent the storyboards to the Art Dept. and said, “here, please make sketches.”

Jones' People Speaking in Stock Quotations

(Click picture to enlarge.)

Jones' stuff almost always had depth and meaning, although it wasn't always accessible to his audience.

Here, his people speak in stock quotations that have some significance to the characters. I (the "spoit" character on the left) have some question about Dayco - a Cardinal client I worked with. Manny (upper right) happily curses Duke. Wm P seems worried about PCA - where he ended up for a while. I don't who the guy in the middle is, why he is the playing bass, and what the significance of Scovill is.

(See Writers Who Couldn't Write... for more on "stobbing".

Jones' Vision of His Father the Lawyer

This is cropped from Rosebud Comix. The expurgated section is best left to the imagination.

It is interesting that Jones' lawyer dad is portrayed with a scrutinizing eyebrow similar to the one Jones used when drawing O. Donald. Jones' depictions of O. Donald, however, have no body and are limited to just an eyebrow and eye, a sort of cartoon synecdoche.

Jones Visits His Previous Place of Employment

As Tom alluded to earlier, Jones once took the bar exam and also worked at a downtown camera shop before coming to Cardinal.

If I recall, he told me that he worked briefly in municipal law and detested it. He said he "had no desire to argue about where to put water towers and other such meaningless shit."

This a rare instance of unlabeled beer cans. Instead he added some magazine details.

Hard Times Ghosts

Shot 1: Jones appears to have his comics-rendering Husky pencil in his shirt pocket.






Shot 2: Jones & Walt, occasion unknown

Fear and Loathing with Bill and Tom in NYC - Part 1

(Video narrated by Professor Ennui Pidawee.)

In the winter of 1974 (or 1975) Bill and I took a train trip to New York. My purpose was to look for ways to parlay my Cardinal experience into consulting opportunities. I set up meetings with Xerox Learning Systems and the media division of Random House. Bill's purpose, I suppose, was whatever adventure might transpire - that and keeping me company.

On the surface the trip didn't go too badly. Although no work resulted, I was well received in both places. However, beneath the surface, the trip was a freak show. Influenced by the writings of Hunter Thompson and Carlos Castenada, and my own fear and loathing, I suffered ongoing out-of-body experiences and recurrent paranoia.

Many of us from Cardinal, even though we occasionally pursued grandeur, were never (in the words of the Immortal Bard) shaped for sportive tricks.

This video, featuring sketches created by Bill and me, recounts the Trip and Impressions of New York. Part 2 will deal with Business and Coming Back.

(This piece first appeared on possumgolightly.com.)

Cardinal's Big Hard Times Meeting

This picture dates from sometime after the 1973 baseball season, in which the miracle Mets came from behind to win the NL pennant, prompting pitcher Tug McGraw's slogan.

Despite their shopworn mantra, the Mets went on to lose the World Series that year.

One morning, in late '73 or early '74, Big Daddy called an "all hands" meeting that took place upstairs in a large empty area between the plywood cubicles and the break room (Jones' secret kitchen).

As our fearless leader presented the bleak news of the company's fortunes and alluded to layoffs, many of us squirmed and held tight in those black canvas director chairs.

He urged everyone to hang in there, and to "believe" that Cardinal would get past the hard times. It's hard to recall the sequence of events. I think a lot of us left in '74. And then, several of us came back over the next few years and tried again.

Not sure, but I think the object to McG's right might be a mock-up of the exhibition booths for one of the trade conventions.

The full version of this photo is shown below. Whoever took the shot (probably E.H.) framed it artfully over Slick Eddie Mauney's right shoulder.

Hard Times (from Weathers)

(Click picture to enlarge.)

Here, Jones relates the current state of affairs at Cardinal. Although he seems to address the missive to me ("Cap'n Tom") I expect it was a newsletter sent to several expatriates. (In my case, although I had quit full-time employment at Cardinal, I still came in when there was money for the occasional free-lance gig.)

Like several of us, Jones had an unhealthy attachment to the place. And some of us, perhaps influenced by the company's misfortunes, or Jones' virtual homelessness, or maybe the financial malaise of the country at large, became obsessed with the notion of "hard times". It showed up in the group writing efforts posted to the walls of an abandoned upstairs office. Wm P penned one installment in which he (or somebody) tries to get warm by wrapping up in tar paper. And he has somebody (maybe Jay C, JC?) saying, "I'm cold buddy".

In a hard times experiment, I once drank beer with Jones in a public park, being covertly gawked at by upstanding citizens. Jones seemed pleased and proud.

(Note the official, legal sounding language that Jones uses. He was actually a law school graduate and might have even passed his bar exam before becoming a salesman in a camera store.)

List of Cardinal Titles

Production Artifacts #5 (from Moore)

Professor Jones, whose collection of foul and sick yet somehow madly brilliant drawings is featured on this website, really did have a job at Cardinal.

Jones saw to it that the multiple trays of 35mm slides assembled by the writers during their studio shoots were transferred in their correct instructional sequence, and processed as film strips.

He sat behind some sort of massive photographic machine (I can't recall its name) in the company dark room, inserting slide after slide into the device.

This shot was taken on one of his many runs to the MPL Lab. I suspect that since a camera was along for the ride, this may have turned out to be another one of those infamous gump trips, involving truancy, beer, and more beer.

Production Artifacts #4 (from Weathers)

I think Bill is right - that we took the work seriously and did not allow much off-the-wall stuff into our Cardinal Productions. But some humor did seep through. Bank checks (like this one) by "B. Moore Successful" are an example, although I doubt that this particular check showed up in one of our units ($3.06 for a massage - times really have changed).

Most of the whimsy was so subtle or specialized (maybe like this blog itself) that you had to be there to get it.

There were Eddie H.'s trademark mirror shots. Whenever possible, his photographs included a reflecting surface (like a car's outside mirror) in which something interesting might appear. There were also various "gump" shots (see Pig Genitalia for definition of gump) . Steve K appears as a fierce looking robber in some units. I managed to slip in pictures of a motorcycle and a Jaguar in the "Disassembly and Assembly of A Wankel Rotary Engine". And although not intended to be funny, my homemade animation of an ignition firing trace is humorous in a cringe inducing way.

Aside 1 - Actually, as I think back, I expect that were was quite a bit of inadvertent cringe inducing humor in the earnest, sincere way that we approached some of our writing. Bill alludes to this when he notes in Production Artifacts #2 how wordy the writing seems. We believed (or I believed) that anything could be explained to anyone if you broke up the operation into small enough steps. Also, the notion of explanatory overkill was not acknowledged. Explain what you are going to teach, teach it, then review what you have taught. Keep the "learner" on a very short leash. That was our motto.

Aside 2 - It has only been in recent years, in the twilight of my career, that I have learned to trust readers. K taught me that when he said, maybe quoting somebody, to get rid of what you love most. Which is what Bill was getting at.

Production Artifacts #3 (from Moore)

Making up a Shot Sheet helped a writer get through the photography session faster, which alleviated heckling from Eddie H.

This sheet was for a lesson on the Rochester carburetor, a pretty routine "over the shoulder" shoot based on the Claud Hunter CPCC programs.

Claud had a line in his original script about the small metal fasteners found on carburetors called "grasshopper clips." In his narration he said they were called this because they had a tendency to "hop off into oblivion." I kept this line in the Cardinal version.

It was rare to have anything off the wall in our scripts. One other example I can think of is when Tom Weathers snuck in some humor in his Slide Rule program. He used a scenario of the student "taking a slide rule into a grocery store to buy green beans," and then added something like "and you are hiding the slide rule under your coat so no one will think you are strange."

Production Artifacts #2 (from Moore)

One of Cardinal's secretaries would type up the storyboard card stack into a script, using the faithful ORATOR font ball on their salmon-colored IBM Selectric.

The script would then be recorded by the Voice of Cardinal, Jerry A, usually at Munwoe's House of Tapes.

In looking at this, I notice how wordy it seems (I was the writer). I guess this sort of introductory hand-holding talk was normal back in the 70s, but it's overkill in these days of the self-reliant internet generation. Today's web-based training editor would slice it out.

Production Artifacts #1 (from Moore)

Digging in the mound, I found a blank Storyboard Card, the basic Lego part of a programmed instruction lesson.

Usually the writer would end up with a fat stack of cards wrapped with a rubber band. In the case of the Automotive Series, the stack was always fouled with dirt and grease from its journey through the pre-production phase called "student testing."

Which reminds me of the perils of testing the car programs. I was doing the Fuel Systems series and had a lesson in which the student disconnects the fuel line going into the carburetor. At the end of the review, the student (and supervising writer - me) failed to make sure the nut was securely tightened at the inlet port. If this had happened on the "studio car" (Cardinal's much-abused 1974 Malibu), someone would have caught the problem. But we were testing the lesson on our boss's (Don A's) sporty red Mercury Cougar. Don luckily discovered the problem on the way home. We could've created an engine fire engulfing the prized Cougar, and possibly lit up our VP of Production too. It was a major blunder.

Cardinal Car Series (from Weathers)

(The picture - elaborating some obvious point or another - is from one of my car books. All those books started with the Cardinal Car Series.)

Wm P's recent post resulted in a star burst of neural activity. In no particular order, and with no particular attempt at artistry...

• When we started the car series I didn't know shit about how cars worked. I mean I really didn't know shit. I had to learn about coils while we did the the electrical testing programs.
  
• Because none of us knew shit, we did some stupid things. We were going to do one unit that required the student to remove the distributor from the test car (and remember this was all hands on training with a student doing the work live). Something happened and a screwdriver got dropped down the distributor shaft. I recall that it hit the oil pan with a wet thunk.
• A photographer named Massey shot some of the first units. He showed up with a cardboard box full of Nikons and Hasselbads (or at least one Hasselblad).
• I procured cars from local car dealers for some of the units. They never asked questions, just gave me new cars for God knows what.
• My best procurement was the 400cc Yamaha trail bike that I got from the local Yamaha dealer to illustrate something in the Wankel series. Slick Eddie and I kept the bike for a weekend, riding it across vacant lots and back alleys all over Charlotte.
• One picture in the Wankel unit showed a hand holding a can of oil near the gas filler cap of the test car (was it Wm P's Wankel powered Mazda?). I don't remember the point I was trying to make, but McGaughey got really mad because the picture implied that you were supposed to mix oil with the gas - which would have ruined the engine.
• Claud H and I traveled to New Jersey to investigate using model airplane Wankel engines in the automotive series. It was in the middle 1970's. Claud wore a pastel leisure suit and I wore my father's hand-me-down polyester suit (maybe plaid). The waiter in the airport restaurant corrected my pronunciation of the "filet mignon".
• On another trip to New Jersey I met one of the Cardinal sales guys in Newark and we drove over to the North American headquarters of Mercedes Benz. They wanted Cardinal to develop a library of training units for repairing old, classic MBs. It looked very good but when I got back to Charlotte McGaughey killed the deal because the work violated Cardinal/DART principles. This still makes me cringe.
• Although nothing ever came of the idea to use model airplane Wankels I jealously guarded the little jewel-like engine that the guy gave us and when I left Cardinal the engine left with me.
• I also made it home with a variety of Sun Electric test equipment (timing light and volt tester) but gave it all back when the Sun deal fell through.
  
• Shuman the Human and I went to Roseville Mn to investigate doing work with Marquette Test equipment. At night we went to a cavernous bar where a lovely Norwegian chanteuse entranced us with her rendition of "Jerimah is a Bullfrog."
  
• I don't remember exactly how it happened but one day Claud, our technical advisor, said he had been approached by Little Brown to do some text books but that he didn't want the bother. I said, then or not long after, well I'll do the writing. Over the next 15 years or so, he and I did those five books. Weird.
  

Tune-Up Relic #1 (from Moore)

Who's under the hood? I would think it must be Tom W.

I think the testing machine might be Sun Electric's stuff.

Many of us, if not all, got our hands dirty with the car programs. That's a saga unto itself.

For the Marquette Emissions Tester lessons, I recall going on location at a test shop with another Cardinal writer, Harriet R (aka "Squeaky"). We made jokes about sticking the probe into the exhaust pipe. Midway into shooting the storyboard, the fumes got pretty bad, and both of us felt dizzy. So we went outside and smoked a few cigarettes to make us feel better.

McGaughey's Obituary (from Weathers)

This is from the files of Don A. who, as McGaughey's Lieutenant, ran the place in the early 1970's.

I heard the Tokyo story when McGaughey and I were flying to Chicago to visit Sun Electric - I think it was my first week at Cardinal. That trip is described in a post in the Writers' Stories blog.

Notice that only one paragraph is devoted to Cardinal/Phoenix.

(Click picture to enlarge.)

Lloyd Rose and Tax Sale News Clips (from Weathers)

Jones sometimes sent news clips.

The one at the top refers to Lloyd Rose. A talented and handsome woman, she was a minor recurring character in our mythology. I knew her at UNC-Charlotte. I think Wm P knew her (or knew of her anyway) through W, one of his mythical friends. The last I heard, she was doing movie reviews for some big newspaper on the East Coast. And I think that she wrote an episode of "Homicide Life on the Streets".

The other clip says that Cardinal stuff is being sold by the IRS to pay off 25,000 in back taxes. Apparently 40,000 was owed to other creditors. Jones, like many of us, had a morbid fascination in the decline of the company. I don't know who the fish-like character at the bottom is. Might have been M, one of the principals. I heard that he ended up working nights on a loading dock trying to pay off debts, while still trying to find customers during the day. I remember him wandering through the Moorehead Street building one day asking , "Does anyone know McGeorge Bundy?" M thought that Bundy could somehow advance our cause.

(Click picture to enlarge.)

Seth Ellis Allusion (from Weathers)

Noticed a feral odor coming from the desk drawer where I've stuck this stuff, and a little scurrying mouse noise. Maybe Jones has become one of those meme things, using Wm P and me for his own dead ends.

I'm the guy with the empty pipe that makes the spitting, "spoit" noise. I'm reading one of the books that Jones recommended (which I never did real in real life).

Spiral-eyed Slick Eddie is being hen-pecked by his oddly elegant and large girl friend.

Wm P wonders.

I think the guy at the bottom is Seth Ellis ("Theth"). He was an English Prof from UNC-Charlotte who Jones used to drink with somewhere along the Plaza. Both my sister ("thither") and I had classes from him.

Jones Opera Afternoon: The Final Cut

Jones' Typical Day at Sanford's Tavern (from Moore)

Wanda the barmaid used to work at the Why Not downtown, where a lot of us hung out. Eventually she moved to Sanford's on the north end. I went to Sanford's only once with Jones. The scene was almost exactly as pictured. Earl the shit-kicking talker dominated the bar (driving us to a table). The jukebox was blaring something by Jim Reeves or Hank Williams, and Wanda took maternal care of the ol' Perfesser.

Red Haired Woman (from Weathers)

Mythical earth-mother lust figure who apparently reminded Mark The Beast of a real person (famous then in local circles) - whose name I have blanked out of the picture.

Jones & Mark at Home (from Moore)

Mark the Beast was a patient guy to put up with Jone's opera binges. Meanwhile, he was always on the prowl. Or at least thinking about it.

- drawing from Salamander Comix

(click on picture to expand)

Jones & Mark: Gerontophilia & Cuckoldry

Cast (L to R): The guy with the horns (unidentified, maybe named Lannis); Slick Eddie; Bucky from Duke Power; Mark the Beast (The Perpetrator); Jones; and Wanda the Angela Lansbury of Barmaids.

Location: Sanfords Tavern, Hwy 49 N. Charlotte

Beer Brands: Treehouse, Nouvelle Orleans, Nuclear Power, Merry Wives of Windsor, Masters & Johnson, and Peterbilt.

Jones Depicting ?? as Tristan (from Moore)

The mortally wounded Tristan... whoizzit?

I've a person in mind, but only Jones the artist knew for sure.



(click on drawing to expand)