Observations-Engagements

A Virtual Celebration!

I’m 50 today, October 25, 2009. To celebrate and review my life to date, I’ve put up a series of posts, mostly on my work to date, including articles, photographs, videos, and audio recordings. Part of turning 50 is looking back to see what you have been but also looking forward to see what you want to become. I’d love your thoughts and comments.

I was surprised to spend too much time in my college years. I haven’t gotten to my recent (as in past 15 years) work, my personal and leadership transformations, the pilgrimages I’ve done, and my future plans.

So you’ll just have to come back! You can check the Updates page (when it’s ready) to see what’s new. Or connect with me on Facebook or Twitter. Or sign up for this blog’s RSS feed.

This is my life in pictures. . . so far, the slide show from my birthday celebration. It ran to The Beatles song “Birthday,” about the best choice there is, followed by a song “Too Young” by the French pop group Phoenix.

Thanks to my wife Christina, Dan Lewis, and my mom and dad for pictures. Hope you enjoy My Life In Pictures, So Far (PDF).

Note, however, that it’s a large PDF, about 10mb. It opens full screen and runs automatically. Hit the ESC key to stop. I’ll post a smaller version in the next couple days.

I am very grateful for my friends, family, coworkers, clients, and communities. My wish is that we all develop to our fullest and know fully who we are and who we can become–and do what it takes to serve to our fullest.

I would love to read your wishes, which you can post as comments.

As a newspaper writer, I excelled at features. I did news OK and loved covering town meetings, like my dad. I generally, however, disdained news reporters as shallow and superficial writers. As a feature writer, you could really write, and you could write long.

I started out studying photojournalism. For The Chesterton Tribune, my family’s newspaper, I shot and wrote a feature on the survival of he nation’s last interurban railroad, the Chicago South Shore and South Bend Railroad, which I loved to ride into the city of Chicago.

Later on, I styled my writing after Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.

HST Autograph

In that vein, I wrote as Gonzo, stream of consciousness, and observational as I could in “Late Night Life,” a feature my daughter Lilli suggested I include. I find it interesting now that my interests in human potential focus on choice and consciousness.

I did not completely disdain news. I covered a fire and tried to capture how it was fought as an intern at The Times of Hammond, Indiana. I was also the only Chicago-area reporter to interview an alleged shyster preacher in “Issue Splits Church.”

I wrote short introductions as well. My favorite is “Thinking Eyes Feeling Moments,” an introduction for the Missourian Sunday magazine’s story on the Picture of the Year competition. This was the first issue designed by my fellow student Chris Paule. I had a crush on her, but she didn’t know it. I think it was reading this piece where she decided I probably wasn’t just a heartless snobby critic after all.

“Luminous Faces of Pilgrims” is in a similar vein and introduced an article written on pilgrimages by Dr. Judith Wright. The title says it all.

My favorite feature is “Runaway,” written for the Missourian. I met this runaway kid, and this story recounts my meeting with him as a narrative for a story on runaway kids in Columbia, MO. It was the last student feature I wrote and is, in retrospect, a disciplined version of the criticism and feature writing I did at Indiana combined with the political and economic reporting I learned in class.

My features editor loved it and got it published, even though her boss, who headed the features section of the paper, didn’t like long stories at all. (The Columbia Missourian is a professional paper run by professional reporters and editors as a lab for students at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, generally regarded at the nation’s best.)

Tags: Chesterton Tribune, Columbia MO, Hunter S. Thompson, South Shore Railroad, Tom Wolfe

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) became the focus of my writing and career beginning in 1986, when Vince DiPaolo hired me as an assistant copy editor at CASHFLOW magazine. I loved technology and was one of the first people I knew to have a PC, a real IBM PC at home. EDI and electronic funds transfer, the two technical topics I covered at CASHFLOW fit my interests.

When CASHFLOW magazine moved to Atlanta, I used my knowledge of EDI to start my career as a freelancer. Initially I wrote for a newsletter called EDI EXECUTIVE, started by Vince and a Jack Shaw, an industry consultant. Later on I worked as an editor for Daniel Ferguson, another industry leader, on his journal EDI Forum, which we later rebranded The Journal of Electronic Commerce.

My first freelance article, sold on a query letter, covered EDI for Business Marketing magazine. One of my books is on EDI and the healthcare industry. I did a report on EDI and healthcare for the U.S. Congress, which was incorporated into a story on healthcare networks.

One of my favorite articles on the subject is a history piece that I wrote for Dan’s journal on contract from Vince. It’s a ghostwritten piece called “EDI at Sears: Past, Present, and Future.” I spent a bit of time in the Tower interviewing technology and business managers and learning how what was at that time the world’s largest retailer used technology to enhance business operations.

Tags: EDI, Sears

I grew up near the Indiana Dunes. As a child, we’d go out to the Indiana Sate Park to the beach. Battles between industry on the Southern shore of Lake Michigan and the preservation of the natural beauty of the Dunes were sources of conversation and concern throughout the time I lived in Chesterton. I hiked in the Dunes with my family, friends, and alone for many years. I rode my bike out there.

Most of all, I loved the sense of nature and tried to capture their beauty, desolation, and the juxtaposition of nature and industry it in photography.

As I’ve sorted through pictures and writing for this retrospective, the most of the photos themselves and the stories of how I came to take many of them will come later, as I continue. In the meantime, I have attached an incomplete article I wrote on the Dunes and the people I met while photographing them in the summer of 1983. The photo below and the photoset are from November 2004.

View more of Collin’s photos of the Indiana Dunes.

Read Dune Days in Indiana.

I’m a closet foodie, and in college I was a closet cook. As a student in feature writing at the University of Missouri, I spent one semester writing for the food section. The news people may have looked down on it as recipe writing, but I loved it.

I found a British woman who told me all about the marvels of British cookery, which is much more pure than French cooking, with all its heavy sauces covering the food. I cooked a meat and kidney pie for the story and picture in “Blackbird to Beef.”

I also took the picture in “Confessions of a Closet Cook.” One of my instructors in the photojournalism department was absolutely appalled that a real editor would publish such an ugly picture. But then that was the point.

I hung around artists and musicians in school. I listened to concerts and records, and Indiana University is was wonderful place to listen to concerts because there’s generally several excellent recitals a night. Here are profiles I wrote of some of the artists I was privileged to have as friends and neighbors.

Jane Fox. Jane was the old lady who lived in the apartment on the second floor of our building when I moved off campus as a sophomore. I got to talking to her and found that she had been a modern dance instructor at the university for more than 50 years. It was also my first page-one feature.

Philip French. Mr. French was a classmate of my dad’s when he was at Indiana University in the 1950s. I met him several times when he came to the States from London. I remember his visit when I was a sophomore, and I asked him about the British view of the American Revolution. In his refined London accent he said, “Well, you know the British Army never lost a war. The Revolution was just one we happened not to win.” I reviewed his book of on three critics, and wrote a profile for the paper.

Paul Sturm. When I first saw him, Paul was the crazy looking guy turning the electronic dials and playing with tapes. I reviewed a “happening” he and some of his artist friends put on, and then interviewed him. He was engineer for a late night radio station, and I’d visit and talk about music and help with tape experiments. We had broad tastes, not like the narrowly focused, in his words, “jazz Nazi’s and classical fascists.”

David Baker. Professor Baker is a pioneering jazz educator and composer. He was flamboyant and mischievous, especially in a music school of symphony musicians. He was my next door neighbor and would invite me to his student parties. He called me one of the best music writers he had seen at the school.

I took his jazz history class as a junior, and during our exam on avant garde jazz, I kept turning my head and looking at him as he laughed in the back of the class. I was baffled. He’d play a piece, and we had to identify it by style. Nothing he played that day was jazz. He was joking with the symphony students, playing Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Conlon Nancarrow. I kept looking back confused because I wondered why he was playing composed music and not improvised jazz. I wanted to point that out. “You should have,” he told me later. “You were the only one in the room who knew what I was playing. I would have loved it, you dig?”

I last saw David for the first time in more than 25 years in September 2006, at the premier in Chicago of his Concertino for Cell Phones and Orchestra.

I was an art critic in college, writing for the Indiana Daily Student 1979-82. I loved music when I went to college and had dreamed of going to music school. As a freshman at Indiana University, I took about half of the freshman music program and studied trumpet privately with William Adam, one of the best trumpet teachers in the world at the time.

IU is a world-class music school, and I got to see first-hand the talent of future symphony and jazz musicians and top music educators. That was not who I was.

I realized how much I liked to research, read, and write. I combined my knowledge of and interest in music by writing for the school paper, the best student-run paper in the country at the time. I wrote for the arts section, where the real writers worked, not the news section. I was a snob, and at times I wrote like one.

I remember reading Ralph J. Gleason, a legendary journalist and Rolling Stone co-founder, on criticism. Here are some of the pieces I wrote.

Review of records by DNA and XTC.

Modern dance review by the Dancing Cigarettes.

Concert review and interview with the Ramones!

Concert review of fusion jazz band MX80.

Concert review of Toots and the Maytals written in stream of consciousness style and as much like Tom Wolfe as I could manage. More on that in the Features post.

Book review of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Curse of Lono. I wanted to write like Thompson, too. Again, more in Features.

I’m still upset that Chicago lost the 2016 Olympics to Rio. My wife Christina and I spent that dreary, rainy Friday three weeks ago in a hotel ballroom full of building subcontractors, preparing to celebrate winning the bid. We had it in the bag.

That arrogance no doubt had something to do with Chicago losing in the first round to a city known for its crime (Rio) and a city known for its congestion (Tokyo); nothing negative immediately comes to mind for Madrid. I knew when I saw the pictures of the public support from the beach-goers in Rio that we had nothing like that kind of public support.

Business leaders supported the bid, as did the building subcontractors we were with. But not an overwhelming majority of Chicagoans I talk to. Too much congestion. Too much corruption. Too much of a hassle. Shortsighted, I’d think, or say depending on how well I knew the person.

I felt somewhat comforted that the Washington Post said “Chicago Gets Gold Medal for Design.” It also helped a lot to hear former U.S. Olympic Committee chair and general sports marketing legend Peter Uberroth commented, in effect, that Chicago didn’t lose the bid as much as Rio won it. He also disabused some notions that provided a little more comfort, namely that the U.S. Olympic Committee is in disarray and didn’t do its job with the International Olympic Committee, with which it feuds.

Yet arrogance, lack of support, and political disfavor do not get to the heart of the matter. I don’t exactly buy the corruption argument many local opponents put forth. I like Mayor Daley and what he’s done for the city, and, a few mistakes aside, how he ran the bid. I have voted for him every time he’s run, and if he runs again he’ll likely get my vote again.

Even so, it occurred to me that I live in a city still known worldwide for the gangsters of the 20s and machine government, and I live in a state in which an inordinate number of former governors are indicted or end up in the federal pen. (Really, isn’t just one too many?)

What would take to transform government in the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago? What would it take to transform so that we live as the progressive place with the green reputation befitting the City in a Garden, with an efficient and effective transportation system, a government that supports citizens to learn and use their talents to their fullest, with the stellar reputation we are on the brink of gaining, as when Fast Company magazine named Chicago U.S. City of the Year in 2008, home to one of the most go-for-it and exciting U.S. presidents in a long time.

It would take a concerted, intentional effort to change the fabric of state and, by extension, city government. Corruption is rooted in the reputation of our state, and whatever realities lie behind the reputation are systematized, standard operation procedure, and status quo–in a word, invisible. I voted for Rod Blagojevich and George Ryan, too, and I’m sure I had good reasons at the time. I’ll bet there’s more to those stories of individual corruption than you read in the papers and see on TV.

New thinking is needed. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m on the steering committee of the event I’m about to suggest as a start, the Transformational Leadership Symposium–Staying Ahead of the Curve in Transformational Times, where we’ll consider new thinking on leadership and new ways to instill change, especially in an economy that’s forcing growth through innovation. New thinking on leadership is why I’ll attend, why I’m a doctoral student at the Wright Graduate Institute for Human Potential, and why I’ll do as much as I can to transform my own thinking about leadership and understanding of how to change systems of thought and, by extension, institutions of action.

Tags: Chicago, Leadership, Transformation