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.