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.
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"
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 isone 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.
*******
Westayed in the Holiday Inn not far from the QuadCitiesAirport. 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 “FoggyMountain 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 Michiganwas the color of suet and filled with rolling chunks of ice that ate the shore. Lake Michiganwas 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.
Thereare 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.
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".)
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 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' 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 material (circa 1970 - 1980) from the collections of Bill Moore, Tom Weathers, and others. We decided to create this joint blog so our families won't have to sort through this stuff when we move on to that great office in the sky. Initially we will not attempt to impose any order or structure to the posts. That will emerge (or not) from the twisted nature of the material itself.
(Click on any drawing to enlarge.)
About Cardinal Associates
Cardinal Associates was founded in the early 1970's by Carrol McGaughey in a studio in the low-rent Plaza section of Charlotte, NC. It existed in one form or another until the early 1980s, then disappeared in Steve K's attic.The company produced "programmed" audio visual training material on various subjects (how to make a tie, operate a lathe, repair a car, play a guitar, use a slide rule, set up v-belts and toward the end, pour steel). McGaughey defined the business side of the company. Professor Jones, the man who lived for a time in our basement,(his photograph appears above) defined the underside of the company and perhaps the souls of some of our more impressionable members.
I can't say for sure what prompted Jones to draw these.
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).
