My father wrote:
My youngest brother, David, is going through some tough times right now.
He looks at my life now, and thinks I have it pretty easy, and in many respects, he's right. It hasn't always been that way though. I promised him that I would write and tell him how I got to where I am today. I hope that will give him a little perspective, and hopefully he will understand that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Having said that, however, that light is something that has to be worked for. It doesn't come easy. It's something that takes dedication and hard work. At least that's how it's been for me. It seems that very few things have come easy for me. I've always worked very hard to make things happen. Fortunately, after the hard work, the breaks have come.
I just wrote a letter to my mother and father for their 50th Wedding Anniversary. In that letter I thanked them for teaching me to work. I told them that I didn't appreciate it much when I was learning, but I've certainly come to appreciate it since then.
I work in a highly technical field and until recently worked for the world leader in the graphics simulation industry. That means that I've worked with some very smart people. At Evans and Sutherland, there is a wall in the main building devoted to the patents developed by the engineers that work there. I was never smart enough to get my name on that wall. Somehow though, I was able to last until this last round of layoffs, either the 12th or 13th in a row. E&S has gone from 1350 people when I started to 270 when I was layed off. Somehow, I was able to last as long as I did. It was not being the brightest bulb, because I wasn't. There were a lot of people that were layed off that I consider much smarter than I. I believe the difference was work. Pure and simple. It was work.
My first job came when I was 8 years old. I had just barely turned 8, and my \family didn't have much money. My mom and dad found a partial solution. My older brother and I got paper routes. For the next 10 years, I got up early nearly every morning and folded and delivered papers. I grew to absolutely hate paper routes. I'm sure my parents did too. Unfortunately, I didn't get to keep the money I was earning. My parents kept the money to help with the family. That's why I hated the paper routes so much. I did the work but didn't see the benefits. At least I didn't think I did. In reality, that is what helped our family survive. I think my parents could have handled the situation differently, like making me responsible for my own clothes, and letting me keep the money, but they didn't.
Even the paper routes weren't enough to support 8 growing kids. When I was 12, my dad had an opportunity to work with a general contractor for some extra money installing patio awnings. He worked for a while with the contractor and then struck out on his own installing window and patio awnings, as well as siding and aluminum sheds. My older brother Doug and I were his helpers. This is also something that I learned to hate. Almost every night during the Spring, Summer and Fall and sometimes during the Winter, either Doug or I, or sometimes both, would go with dad after school to install awnings. The same for Saturdays.
While other boys were playing and doing whatever, we were working. You know, in all that, it never occurred to me that my dad was also working, tons more than I was. After putting in a full day at Tooele Army Depot, he came home and had to go to work again. Looking back on it now, I don't know how he did it. There were many nights that we were out working past midnight. Then up again at 4 or 5 to do paper routes. At least with my older brother going half the time, I got a break every other time. My dad didn't get any breaks. He had to be there all the time. I thought I was working my butt off, but he's the one that was really working. He's who taught me how to work I wish I could say I always worked well and did what I was supposed to. The truth is, I got fired from my first real job (after the paper routes).
My older brother Doug had quit his paper route (handed it down to my brother Barry, really). Doug went to work for Allen's Foodtown in Tooele. I think he started as a stocker and quickly worked his way into produce. He helped get me a job there when I was a senior in high school. I was hired as a bagger. That didn't register with me though. What I saw was that all the young kids like me were stocking shelves. I was never really trained, and nobody really explained to me that I was supposed to be bagging all the time, so when times were slow, I would help the stockers.
I was working really hard and thought I was doing really well. After about a month, the manager called me into his office and fired me. He said I wasn't working out. It turns out I wasn't doing so well. When I was supposed to be bagging groceries, I was off stocking shelves. I was working hard, but not at what I was supposed to be working hard at. I was fired for not doing my job because I was doing somebody else's job. That was a learning experience for me. I learned that you can work very hard at something, but still fail. Just hard work is not enough. You have to work hard, but be smart about what you work hard at. More than anything, you have to learn how to play the game and find out what is expected. Then do that better than anyone else. That's where the hard work comes in.
My next real job was after I graduated from High School. I worked for a summer at Tooele Army Depot, as the Assistant Housing Manager. At the time, that sounded like a neat title. What it meant in reality was that I had to sit in the headquarters building with very little to do and try to look busy. I hated that job because it was so boring. I discovered that just putting in my time somewhere was also nothing I wanted to do. I had to be busy or I would go crazy. I worked there until just before going on my mission. My older brother was already on his mission, so I was giving most
of my paycheck to support him. I did that for the 9 months before going on my mission myself.
After my mission, I went to work for the Spanish Fork Foundry, making cast iron pipes and fittings. This was an extremely dirty job. I mean a filthy job. I was reminded of just how dirty it was with a picture that I put in the video for my folks wedding anniversary. Every day I would come home caked with dirt and grime that was unbelievable. This was when I decided that I was absolutely going to get my education. I worked for a little over $4 an hour, with people who had been doing the same for years. If ever there was a dead end job, that was it. It was going nowhere, and the people
working there had done the same. They had gone nowhere.
While working for the foundry, I was dating Ann. At least I was kinda dating Ann. I didn't have any money to date her. When I returned from my mission, my father was out of work. The money I earned working at the foundry was turned over to my parents to support the family. Any money I used to date Ann meant money that wasn't supporting them, so Ann and I didn't do much that cost any money. I simply didn't have it. I don't know why Ann married me. It certainly wasn't for the money. We got a bill from the doctor just after we were married and between us, we didn't have the money to pay the bill. It was only $12. We started out with nothing (and as I like to say, we still have most of it left).
Getting my education meant a lot to me. Fortunately, it meant a lot to Ann too. We both sacrificed a lot to make that happen. I started college in September 1980, just after we were married. For the next 9 years I was in school. I didn't have the luxury that some of the others had that I was going to school with. I had a wife and a family to support. This meant that I couldn't go full-time, so most of the time I was only part-time. I also chose a difficult course of study, Electrical Engineering. That means lots of math, lots of physics and computer science. I started with Math 101 at the University of Utah. That's the most basic credit class they have in math. I subsequently took 11 quarters of math, through trig, calculus, advanced engineering mathematics and statistics. It was very hard.
It was especially hard for me, because I could never participate in the study groups that were formed. I attended class and immediately had to leave to go to work. While others were able to work together to figure out problems, I had to do that on my own. I could never afford the time for study groups.
I had found a job at UPS, loading their trailers at night. That was also a very hard job. It wasn't dirty like the foundry, but it was a very hard job physically. Emotionally too. They were always timing us at UPS, driving us to work harder. They were also always yelling at us. After I left UPS, and started working in a professional environment, it was years before I learned not to tense whenever management came around. I was so used to being yelled at at UPS that I just tensed, from a conditioned response to managers. It took me years to unlearn that.
Working nights at UPS wasn't enough. I couldn't support my family on that. I had already begun taking student loans to help with the schooling. I had also flunked some classes. In the engineering classes, there are classes that are taught in groups of three. If you miss the first class, you have to wait until the next year to begin the sequence, as each class in the sequence builds on the previous class. My schedule didn't allow me to take the first class in the series, so I tried to skip the first class. I discovered that didn't work very well. I flunked those classes.
I also tried my hand at managing apartments. Basically, anything honest to make money I was willing to do. I took a job working part time moving furniture for Pioneer Moving and Storage. Picture 3 people moving a grand piano down a narrow stair case and you might begin to appreciate that job. It had to be done without getting any scratches on the piano.
Fortunately, while working there, UPS started their Next Day Air service. There were packages that didnt make the regular flights, and UPS wanted to earn and maintain a reputation for dependability with their air freight. They needed drivers that would be on-call to drive to the airport, pick up the packages that had been flown in on commercial carriers, and deliver them wherever they needed to go.
For the next 5 years, this was my part time job. Depending on the time of year, I would work from 10 to 11 at night until about 3 in the morning. I would come home for a couple of hours of sleep and get up around 7 or 8 and either go driving or go to class. I would come home, take a short nap and then get up and study. I would take another short nap before going to work again. I was always exhausted. I never got enough sleep. I would work so hard during the week that when the weekend came I would just collapse.
During all that time, I couldn't take time off, even when I was sick. If I didn't go to work, my family didn't have money for food. It was that simple. I have a plaque hanging on my wall for perfect attendance for 5 years. I didn't miss a day in all that time. It was actually over 6 years that I didn't miss a day. That was simply because we were always desperate for money. I couldn't take time off. There was no safety net to bail me out when things got tight. I remember being at work and having to run to the bathroom every few minutes. I'm not sure which end stuff was coming out of quicker.
Fortunately, my wife believed in food storage. We lived off of our food storage many times in those days. We didn't always eat well, and we didn't have the most fashionable furniture (our coffee tables were boards with food storage underneath them), but we didn't starve either, and somehow we made it through. I was suspended at UPS (that's another story) and we used our food storage heavily during that time. My wife made a real believer out of me. That's why we're so frugal (cheap and tight is a better description, but it seems to work for us. Our church leaders told us for years to do food storage and put money in the bank, so we did and it was there when we needed it).
During all this time, we decided that we would try and save a little. We had them subtract $5 from each paycheck at UPS and invest it in the company for us. Believe me, we missed that $5, but it's amazing how that grew over time. By the time we were ready to buy a home (which didn't happen until we had been married for 12 years), we had over $5000 for a down payment. That came from just saving $5 per week. That made me a believer in saving money, and not paying interest. It's a lot easier for me to pay cash and not have to pay for something many times over, which is what you do if you pay interest. That too takes hard work and discipline.
I wish I could say that my schooling went without a hitch, but that's not the case. I already told you that I flunked some classes. At the University of Utah, if you flunked the same class twice, you could never get credit for that class. This happened to me. The result of that meant that I could complete all the course work, but I could never graduate from the University of Utah with a technical degree of any kind. This was a major setback to me. I had worked for six years toward a degree, and suddenly found myself unable to ever graduate from the University of Utah.
This was a very hard time for me. I almost made the decision to become a full time driver for UPS. I would have been very high on the seniority list, so that was a very enticing option for me. Drivers were making about $30000 a year, and I was killing myself off to make half that loading docks, and driving the air packages. Fortunately, my wife was smarter than I was and she insisted that I look for another college. We settled for Weber State. I graduated from Weber State in March, 1989 with a degree in Electrical Engineering Technology, with minors in Math, Computer Science and Physics.
A year and 3 months after graduating (it took that long for me to find a job), I started working for Evans & Sutherland. I was there for 15 years. It was during the last half of those years that things really started turning around for us. It's only been since 1998, the past 7 years that money hasn't been tight for us. In other words, I was almost 40 before we started seeing that light at the end of the tunnel. That too came because of hard work.
At E&S, I worked extremely hard. I wasn't the smartest engineer by far. I have worked with some extremely brilliant people. They form the Who's Who in the simulation industry. You won't find my name there, I was never smart enough, but I made up for that with hard work, and it eventually paid off.
When I started at E&S, I started for a lower salary than I should have. I won't go into the reasons why, but I started there in a position unrelated to my schooling. However, through hard work and some breaks that came my way because of it, I was able to transfer over into a software engineering position after a year with E&S. I continued working hard. My family will remember that they didn't see much of me in those days. Just like before, when I was in school and driving, I was always busy. I wrote utilities on my own and began to establish a reputation. I was always rated in the top 20% at E&S. That came simply because I out-worked the other guys. I remember Tyson telling me I shouldn't work so much, especially since I was salaried and they weren't paying me for my overtime.
It's true, I was not being paid for my overtime, but I was compensated. Every time I asked for a raise, I got a raise. My manager recommended me for a Senior Engineering position after 6 years. The company said no. Nobody had ever made Senior Engineer in less than 7, which was their policy. At 7 years, I was promoted to Senior Engineer with no problems. I was loaned to a division to help a struggling program. I worked so hard and made myself so valuable to that project that when I suggested going back to my own group or leaving the company, that group gave me a 25% increase and thousands of stock options to stay with them.
Unfortunately, that all came to an end this past March when I was layed off after 15 years with E&S. Fortunately, they had a good severance package, and with my experience, I was able to find another job. It's not as interesting as my job at E&S, but it is still a good job, and I feel fortunate to have it. In many ways though, I feel like I'm starting over again. I have to prove myself once again and am starting at the bottom. I'm sure that in time I will be able to do so, as long as I'm willing to do the same things that have always worked for me, which is just plain hard work.
There's something else that I'm always dealing with, that most people aren't even aware of. In 1995, over 10 years ago, I was in a serious car accident. A lady slammed into my car that was stopped for a red light. She was going about 40 mph in an old tank of a car. My car was totaled, and I have had a permanent back injury ever since. I constantly live with pain in my lower back. I can only work on physical things for about an hour before the pain in my back is too severe to allow me to continue. This is just something that I have to deal with. It will never get better, if anything, it will continue to deteriorate. It means that exercise is hard to do, which is why I weigh so much. It's a lot easier and less painful to not exercise and keep the weight off. In spite of this long speech on hard work, I haven't been able to force myself to work hard on that.
Well, this has gone on too long, I know, but I wanted you to understand that life hasn't always been easy for me. I think I've had a rather hard life. It's been a good life though, and in most ways I'm happy or at least comfortable with where I'm at now. I've tried to follow the advice of the prophets, at least in money matters, and it has worked for me. I think it will work for everybody.
Basically though, I think the basis of the message is that I am where I am because of hard work. I've worked longer and harder than most of the people I've worked with, and even though I wasn't as smart as many of them, it has made up for the difference and I have succeeded where others didn't.
I'll never be rich. I'm afraid that I give too much of my money away for that ever to happen, but I am happy because money allows me to support my family and help others, and that is what makes me happy. This is what works for me. I don't know about others. This is the course I have followed and it's worked for me. Maybe I could have done things better some other way. I don't know. This is the only way I knew, so this is what I did.
I hope this brings you a little understanding about me and my life and can give you some perspective on your life too. At your age, I had basically nothing. I was almost 33 before I got a job that I really enjoyed. My education took me 9 years to earn and another 9 years to pay off my student loans. In other words, my education cost me 18 years, and so much time away from my family that I barely knew my older kids. I missed out on so many of the things they were doing when they were younger, but that is the price I paid to get my education. It's paying off now in so many way.
In a few years, if my health is good and they will allow me, I would like to continue working, as a missionary for the church. I hope to be able to continue working till the day I die (which may be sooner than later if I keep smarting off to Ann).
Now, I have a few assets, and pray that the Lord will bless me to continue working, for without that, I know I would lose everything very quickly. The other thing I'm convinced of is that He will open up opportunities when you are ready for them, as you prepare yourself for them. Basically, you make your own breaks. So many opportunities can pass us by if we haven't prepared for them. I really believe that.
There are lots more things I could have said, and probably some I should not have said. Just know that life is never easy, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. You just have to keep moving toward that light, and someday, you'll realize you're in it, and everything will be lighter and brighter,and hopefully, happier.
Love,
Robert
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