During one or two summers, as well as part-time during the school year, I worked for a small Canadian company which developed electrical instruments for military planes.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I had been building electronic musical instruments since I was a kid.
Fortunately, I've also been an electrician, and that's a happy memory for me.
In the early 1980s, I got into a war with my management - they just kept on suing me and I lost everything. So I had to go out on tour to make sure the electricity stayed on.
I wanted to further my education, so I went on to get a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and came back and served about ten years in the Canadian Navy as what we call a combat systems engineer.
I left school when I was 16; then I worked for my father, who was a welder. And I was a welder for three years, you know, welder of fabrication, metal 'cause it was a big industrial town, Sheffield. It was much steel and coal and stuff like that.
When I was young I had an apprenticeship as an engineer.
And during my college, at the end of the junior year I worked in a mine.
The day after my high school graduation in 1952, I headed to Alaska. I was 17. I started out greasing equipment, then became a heavy-crane operator. I made and saved good money there for two years.
My dad was a telegraph operator for the Cotton Belt Railroad. He worked seven nights a week from 4 until midnight, no vacation.
As soon as I left school at 16, I worked in a factory making aircraft components.