One of the first things I did on arriving in Atlanta was get in touch with the local branch of the SWP. They had an office in the city, not at all close to my parents’ new home in the suburbs, but to which I made the trek to buy books and meet with those who could teach me more about socialism. At that time, the party’s focus was infiltrating unions to radicalize workers and it was implied or suggested that I could best serve the cause by continuing my readings in socialism and getting a job in a unionized workplace. That sounded adventurous and meaningful to an enthusiastic nineteen year old, far more so than another year of university (and more debt). Shortly thereafter, I shelved my university plans and moved in with a girl I met through the SWP.
Once more I found myself in unusual circumstances. Miami is about as far south as you can get in the continental United States, but it was not and is not part of the Deep South, the cultural South (with a capital S), the stereotypical South of impenetrable accent and unreconstructed bigotry. It was something of a surprise on moving to Atlanta to meet real-life Bubbas and at least during the first few months to be unable to understand much of what many people said. To more than a few locals, even in 1980, I was considered a Yankee, and to many of them a potentially dangerous one. My new live-in girlfriend was a dark-skinned African-American.
I didn’t set out to find a partner. I don’t think she did, either. We were both youngsters motivated by the party and living with our families without many resources. Initially we were only housemates, two people sharing a flat because that’s how we could afford to live. But living together brought us closer together until we were in fact sleeping together and considering ourselves a couple. We lived in an apartment complex where other members of the party resided. As young people with no experience living on our own, we benefitted from the help and guidance of some of the more mature couples living nearby. We financed our lives through jobs at Lockheed Marietta, a massive factory on the north side of Atlanta for the manufacture of airplanes.
The work was well-paid for young people with little experience -- actually, zero experience relevant to airplane assembly. We managed to get these jobs through a bit of subterfuge that would lead also to our termination. One of the older party members was a legitimately trained machinist who had been employed at Lockheed a number of years and knew the job requirements for rookie assembly-line workers. The skills were quite basic – drill holes and shoot rivets – and we practiced these in advance with the help of our experienced party member. Hiring requirements stipulated a number of years’ experience and many young party members (me included) had none. The party therefore helped us concoct work backgrounds by manufacturing the identities of small factories on the west coast, far from Atlanta, with phone numbers of west coast party members willing to assume the identities of factory HR agents able to confirm our bogus employment histories. The most challenging part of the hiring process required passing an onsite skills test, assembling a set of metal sheets into a box with the use of rivets. Our training prepared us well and the scheme worked. Several of us landed jobs at Lockheed and joined the line assembling airplanes. That turned out to be the easy part.
Like many organizations committed to ideas, the SWP has a history marked by factionalism. It traces its roots to a splinter group formed in 1928 after its expulsion from the Communist Party for support of Leon Trotsky against Joseph Stalin. By the time I found them in 1979-80, the group had gone through a few more splits (and would splinter further in the years following) and was coming off of a peak period of growth and influence as a result of its participation in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. During my time with the group, I read and discussed books in study sessions, engaged in voter canvasing for candidates friendly to progressive causes (and occasionally for SWP candidates), participated in protest marches in Atlanta and beyond, and attended regional and national conferences to discuss policy and elect party leadership. I was never told what to believe, was never ordered about, and when the time came to leave, there was no coercion to stay.
Our tenure at Lockheed was brief. It seems our presence within the company became known to interested parties following a union meeting at which party members distributed political literature. I recall attending this meeting and may have been one of those handing out pamphlets. It is not unlikely union members reported us to the company – this was a rather conservative, even reactionary, part of the country – but it is also possible the company found out about us because of my car accident. I have no documents related to the accident so cannot verify dates and a possible sequence of events, but I do know the accident happened while on my way to work at the Lockheed factory (which places the accident during my time of employment). A car in the left lane moved into mine, touching the front of my car and pushing me onto the gravel shoulder. My rear tires lost traction and the car began to swerve back and forth before heading down an embankment and into two trees, first on driver’s side, then in front. As the door had been heavily impacted, I was unable to open it and had to lifted out after rescue workers peeled back the roof. In my car were a number of pamphlets, newspapers, and books that may have found their way to the company.
In the end, I lost my car (which had been a gift from my parents), had a fractured vertebra, and shortly thereafter my girlfriend and I were unemployed. The two of us and about a half dozen others were terminated for falsifying information on our applications. What followed was three years of short-lived jobs -- including factory metal pressing, custodial service, gas station attendant, grocery store clerk, restaurant work – and declining interest in political work. I didn’t have strong ideological or practical disagreements with the party. I gave my support when required, most particularly in pursuing unsuccessful legal remedy against Lockheed for unlawful information gathering and unjust termination. From time to time those of us involved were asked to sign off on our continued participation in legal action, though I was never called to testify or otherwise engage in legal proceedings. I lost interest because I couldn’t sustain the level of emotional energy required for political work. I couldn’t rise to the level of sustained righteousness necessary to persuade others of the value of our perspective. I began to want time to be me, who at that age I still hardly knew. My girlfriend felt much the same and eventually we went our separate ways. Apart from one last meeting before leaving the US, I never saw her again and I have had no contact with the party since the mid-80s.
What turned my life around next was working on a survey crew. I found the job as I found many in those days, though classified newspaper advertising, and knew nothing about the work except that I was qualified (meaning, no special skills required), and I wouldn’t have to work in a kitchen. I don’t recall the interview or if there was any special test. All that was required was to show up on time, be physically fit, and able to drive, read maps, and operate a telescope-like instrument known as a theodolite. Most days I and my colleagues arrived at the office, clocked-in, and met up with our teams before driving to the day’s work site, which was often an overgrown patch of land through which we had to clear a line of sight using our machetes. Sometimes we worked on new subdivisions, which required standing out in the sun (because all the trees had been cleared) and if it had rained, wading through muddy red Georgia clay.
The men I worked with were some of the most outrageous stereotypical rednecks I ever knew. Living in Georgia, you run into them regularly, but I had never had to spend hours with them. Five days a week. Week after week. As soon as we left the office, they were smoking weed when they weren’t smoking tobacco. They smoked on the job. After work, they smoked some more while drinking beer. Their lives were circumscribed, their outlooks narrow, their temperament not infrequently violent. Their interests were getting high, driving cars, shooting things, and fucking. I worked that job for several months, but less than a year, and it was the time in my life when I was perhaps most physically fit. Every day I was outdoors, walking up and down hills, through fields, and across construction sites. I regularly wielded a machete on overgrown thickets. By the end of summer my skin was uniformly brown, my hair bleached, my muscle toned. But I couldn’t abide my colleagues. After a string of low-paying, dead-end jobs culminating in working with these poor men, I was ready to go back to university and find a more meaningful and secure life.
Fortunately, while working all this and other awful jobs, I found something to sustain me intellectually. I had since my first year at university been reading politics and history but now something led me to the American Civil War. It wasn’t out of any direct personal interest as I didn’t know of any family involvement in the war. Perhaps it was living in Atlanta and encountering regular reminders in historical placards, streets and buildings named after people from the period, or even people (like my surveyor colleagues) talking about it as it happened only a few years ago. It wasn’t something that I ever noticed much while living in Miami or Wisconsin, both places far away from any major events in that war. I started reading and just couldn’t seem to stop. I had photo books, maps, subscribed to Civil War magazines, and visited battle sites around Atlanta. What I wanted to do most was go back to university and read history.
The thing about university, though, is that even a history major has to read quite a bit of history outside a narrow specialty. As a result, I ended up not reading the American Civil War, but modern Latin American history. Before doing any of that, though, I had to go hat in hand to my parents for financial support. Fortunately, though there was plenty of stupid stuff there worth holding over someone asking for money, my parents did not. They agreed to provide backing and in so doing turned my life around. I still had a few more years ahead of living with roommates and working low-paying jobs, but post-graduation I found a way to do something rewarding and be paid reasonably.
This time I took to university like a fish to water. I worked part-time, partied a little bit, but spent most of my hours reading, so much so that I did exceptionally well in my history courses and was awarded a prize for Best Freshman History Student. Apart from making Dean’s List a couple of times, it was the only award in my university career then or since. At the time, it was validation of my interest and ability and inspirational to continued effort. Unfortunately (or not), my interest in the Civil War was derailed by an introductory European history course and an encounter with the French revolution. What a gory, glorious decade that was, and my past in socialist politics provided a particular lens through which to view the events of 1789-1799. I was so enamored I chose French as my required foreign language and considered specializing in French revolutionary history until I read enough to realize it was one of the most well-documented revolutions in history. A career in the subject might require serious micro-specialization.
But in early 1980s, revolutions were not lacking, and my interest soon turned to Central America and the Caribbean, which were alight in the daily news with revolution and counter-revolution. A class in Latin American history led me to switch to Spanish and the pursuit of the history of the region. My previous political experience proved useful in forming a student group in support of Central American revolutionary movements and in participating in Atlanta community fundraising and public education programs for the same.
After leaving the surveying job and starting university, I went back to restaurant work: easy to find, conveniently located, flexible hours, and free food (and sometimes alcohol). I worked at a pizza and beer joint across the street from Georgia Tech and in search of new places to study found I could walk into the GT library without any ID apart from a backpack. They had a much bigger, much brighter library than Georgia State and I ended up spending many days there in the hours before I had to start making pizza. MJ Pippins was my last ever restaurant job, to be replaced by the low-wage job I most enjoyed and which at one point even held out the promise of some kind of career.
At the time, Kinko’s was quite singular, a business built on photocopying. At that time, almost no one had a personal computer (which in terms of productivity couldn’t do much apart from text) or a home printer. Cameras were still film-based. To disseminate information, paper and ink were required, and for small, local projects, Kinko’s offered a conveniently located, reasonably priced printing solution. Many of the stores were placed near universities because these institutions thrived on paper-based information exchange. One of the company’s more popular offerings was Professor Publishing. Instructors would drop off copies of journal articles and book chapters along with a class headcount, and Kinko’s would then sell students a bound, photocopied volume of readings. Professors loved it, students loved it, Kinko’s most especially loved it – but some publishers objected, took Kinko’s to court, and that was the end of Professor Publishing.
I participated in PP for two or three semesters at the downtown Kinko’s, just a block from the Georgia State campus. At least one semester we operated a store in the campus student center but I suppose with the end of PP, having a separate campus location wasn’t profitable and we all moved into a new downtown location literally across the street from the old. It was great to be able to leave work without smelling like a kitchen, to be able to interact with customers (instead of being stuck in a kitchen), and to not have to work nights (as the downtown area didn’t have enough evening traffic to support a night shift). It was also uplifting to work and interact with students, professors, and other professionals who made up much of our clientele, in stark contrast to my work on the survey crew.
I also had the opportunity to learn. I knew how to run large copiers and after repeated use knew the quirks of individual machines. I learned how to do minor service and knew when to call the guys from Xerox. I knew each machine’s potential output in numbers of impressions by minute and could calculate production times for large runs. I learned how to deal with a wide variety of people in a professional manner, both in person and on the phone. But perhaps most importantly, I learned how to use computers.
As a high school student, I took a typing class. I failed to master touch typing but developed my own system based on three to four fingers that I’ve been using ever since. Through high school and university, I relied on an electric typewriter to produce papers of increasing length and became familiar with liquid paper, white out, and counting characters and lines. It was a horrendously laborious way to produce written work, but at the time better than writing essays by hand. All that came to stop in 1984-85 when I was introduced to the Apple Macintosh.
That introduction came by way of a question from my store manager. Would I be interested in going to the midtown store to learn how to do desktop publishing? That store was one of the first in the city to purchase computers for that purpose, something until then I had never heard of. The concept from Kinko’s perspective was quite simple: have someone in-house produce customer documents (for a fee, of course) that would then be mass-produced on the company’s copy machines. My task was to learn how to use the computer, one of which would then be made available for our store. The training I received was quite idiosyncratic as it amounted to watching the guy in charge at the midtown store. He was about 10 years older with a background in graphic design and not especially interested in teaching me anything. But by hanging out with him I got an idea of what could be done with the computer. I just had to figure out how to use it and make those things happen.
Fortunately, my university had a computer lab with several Macs. I spent a good number of hours in the lab playing around and started to use these machines to produce my own essays and other documents, both work and study related. I became so dependent on the computer I knew I had to have one, but they were hugely expensive, especially for someone making just over minimum wage and working only part-time.
By the time I was ready to graduate at the end of 1986, I was fluent on the Mac and was given the opportunity to open a desktop publishing desk in one of the stores on the north side of town. Personal computers were still not widespread, and the average person didn’t know how to use them. I would be the computer specialist, have several computers plus a scanner and laser printer at my disposal, and would at least initially run a one-man operation. Professors in the history, political science, and philosophy departments encouraged me to attend grad school, but after three years intense study I was ready for something different. Kinko’s was offering a job where I could use computers all day long and be my own boss. The money wasn’t great but in the absence of other options it seemed worth doing.
The regional Kinko’s group was quite good about providing professional development opportunities and I was able to attend several training sessions organized by outside vendors in skills such as document design, photo-retouching, and typesetting. They even sent me to headquarters in Santa Monica, California for a bit of desktop publishing brainstorming. It felt like this might be a career in the making, though I frequently lacked confidence in my abilities, especially after attending training courses and seeing so many amazing talents. The desktop publishing desk grew quickly and I soon had a couple of part-timers working with me, which wasn’t especially pleasing as I now had to include management of others in my duties. After a little more than a year, though, the desktop publishing endeavor would end when I was offered a job in Japan.
Like many other things in my life, that change was not planned. I was driving to work one morning when I heard over the radio that the Japanese government was recruiting young university graduates to serve as assistant language teachers in the country’s public school system. This was known as the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) programme, which is still active today more than three decades later. No teaching experience was required, nor a teaching license, nor any specialized degree, just a willingness to work in Japan for at least one year. That set my mind on fire and that very morning I called the Atlanta embassy to request an application package, which I promptly completed and returned.
Among the required documents were personal references and for this I called on Doug Reynolds, one of my GSU history professors, a man with whom I had cordial relations as both a teacher and as the occasional Kinko’s customer. I had first met him in a world history survey course and later took his Asian history class when I needed more regional history credits to complete my degree. He was the one person from Georgia State that I stayed in touch with over the course of my life and the remaining entirety of his. He visited us in Fukuoka and we frequently visited with him on trips back to the US. Prof Reynolds died from cancer in Atlanta in 2020.
I passed the application screening and was called for an interview at the beginning of 1988. There were a great many people at the hotel near the embassy that day, about which I remember little apart from sitting in a long hallway waiting to be interviewed. The next I heard from the embassy was a letter informing me that I had been added to an alternates list and that I might be contacted shortly with an offer. I was hugely disappointed. Who knew how far down the list I might be. I would for the time being have to carry on with my desktop publishing work.
Several weeks later, perhaps April or May, a phone call came from the embassy. Was I still interested in the position with the JET Programme? A spot had become available, and my name was now at the top of the list. I accepted with alacrity and shortly thereafter began the process of resigning my job, shedding my possessions, and packing my bags for Japan. My life in the USA was almost finished.
But where would I be going?
In 1988 it wasn’t easy to find information about the town of Himeji, to which I had been assigned by the JET Programme. While the city is a regular stop in many tours of Japan, this is only because of Himeji-jo, the country’s oldest extant castle. Most of Japan’s castles were rebuilt following major damage or outright destruction during World War II. Osaka Castle, for example, is made of concrete and includes an elevator, where Himeji Castle is all wood, stone, and stairs. Himeji itself is completely unnoteworthy, even among the Japanese. The best I could manage to learn about Himeji in 1988 in Atlanta was demographic, economic, and geographic data in an almanac-like text at the university library. I found nothing, though, about what it might be like to live and work there.
I managed to contact a couple of the JET teachers then in Himeji, but as we had to rely on the post office with a minimum two-week turn-around between letters (one week going out, one week coming back), we managed to exchange letters only a couple of times before I had to depart. Unlike today, when you can walk around any city virtually via Google Maps, procure instant introductions to people living in faraway places through social media, and talk to anyone anywhere in the world in real time via video conferencing, there wasn’t much to learn at that time about a new international destination unless you were moving to a major tourist center, like Tokyo or Osaka. There was not much I could do but wait and try to study a bit of Japanese, which I did once a week with a private Japanese tutor. The results were fairly abysmal but helped ease the anxiety of not being able to do much of anything apart from selling my car, furniture, and other household goods.
In the meantime, orientation was organized in Washington, DC, where I spent a weekend living with a Japanese family and learning about many of the possible cultural pitfalls of living in Japan. And shortly before our scheduled departure, the embassy invited JET participants and their families to a departure gala at which we were regaled with speeches about the great adventure on which we were about to embark.
For reasons I no longer recall, I believed I would be required to dress formal in the Japanese classroom and so before leaving I laid out a good bit of money on a suit, as well as a couple of mix-and-match jackets and slacks and the accessories, such as ties, belts, suspenders, and shoes. Once I got there, I found slacks and a polo shirt were sufficient, but as I already had the clothes, well, why buy more? I was the best dressed JET teacher in Himeji.
Besides bags of clothes, I carried with me to Japan an Apple Macintosh. After working full-time for more than a year, I had managed to save enough to afford one (approximately 3000 USD in 1988), which was close to half the price of a cheap new car. And since this was the early days of Apple and proprietary operating systems, I also had to bring a printer, without which the computer would have been useful only for gaming (which in those days -- apart from Dark Castle, on which I spent many hours -- was arcade-level junk similar to Pac-Man or Galaxian).
I stayed with my parents for a few nights before departing for Japan. My mother thought, or at least expressed a wish, that I would be back the following year. I told her that might be a little soon, that it might take a year just to get adjusted and that I might need a couple of years. I really had no idea what to expect. I had moved across the country before, but never out of it. In fact, while I had traveled frequently as a youngster thanks to my father’s job (which included free stand-by passes for family members), I had -- apart from trips to Puerto Rico and the Bahamas -- never left the United States and didn’t until then have a passport. I spoke a smattering of broken Spanish, but except for when I first moved to Georgia and had had some initial difficulty deciphering the dialect, I had never been in a situation where I didn’t speak the language of the community into which I was moving. I had also never known any Japanese person (apart from my recent encounter with my tutor) and the only Asian I had ever befriended was a Chinese-American in the Socialist Worker’s Party, a guy who was culturally more American than Chinese. Almost all of the nonwhite people I had ever known were African-Americans and Latinos.
I didn’t know what was going to happen. I certainly didn’t expect that I would stay for five years and that by the time I left Japan I would be wearing glasses, have been married and divorced, and have become the owner of a freshly-minted Master’s in education. I maintained correspondence with Atlanta friends for a few years, but apart from my first Kinko’s manager and my Asian history professor, I would eventually lose contact with everyone I ever knew in Atlanta.
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