If you were naturally sort of artistic or technically savvy, they just would let you run with it. We were very service-oriented; it was all about serving the science community.
There were about half a dozen of us on drawing boards in Graphics, doing pen and ink drawing. I remember we would have to hold our light over the drawing to get the ink to dry. And if you had the windows open, the soot or exhaust residue from the Steamship Authority ferry would come in the window, and just settle, all these little black little flecks all over your drawing. That was maddening.
Bob Ballard worked down the hall from us, and he was quite a presence. You could hear him walking down the hall, and it would be like, “Uh oh, who does he want today?” Haha, he was driven, so he just had that industrious energy. I hired on the spring before his Titanic survey cruise in ‘86.
Now that I’ve been licensing that video material to media outlets, I know how big a deal it was. But at the time, we were doing so many other things that it was just one part of what was happening at WHOI. Even today, there's just so much science going on any given day, all around the world.
We washed ashore when I was 14, when my parents bought a guest house with my aunt and uncle in Falmouth Heights. So I grew up in the Heights and went through Falmouth High School, then started working. I went to Bridgewater State College for a little while, but academia wasn’t a good fit for me. I was a doer. I’m a tradesperson, like my dad, who was a designer draftsman. He went around to different shipyards and he designed systems for Navy ships. So I kind of followed in his footsteps. I started drawing for Benthos, a small ocean instruments firm in North Falmouth. I learned an awful lot from those folks. And they sent me to school for drafting. So that was my official education.
A few years later, I followed my dad down to Mississippi to a US Navy shipyard. And I was there for three years, working in a huge room full of drawing boards. Contract workers like me would come in from other states just to work for two years on a project. But living around the Gulf of Mexico, it was just different from growing up here and I missed home. So I moved back to Falmouth, and within two weeks I got a job at WHOI as a Graphic Services technician.
I've always been so impressed with the amount of knowledge that’s here at WHOI. But also just the camaraderie, the attitude of, “Yeah, we can do that.” People just make things work. And that's really important at a place like this. The can-do attitude really is contagious.
It took longer to do stuff back then, because it was all done by hand. I think it was in 1988, my boss, Fritz, brought in the first Mac computers, and he was really gung-ho about getting on board with that technology. We had to ramp up our skills, but it really did cut our work time way down. And then digital photography took off. So I just started taking pictures, since I had taken photography in high school. We all kind of crossed skillsets back then. I started framing photos after I got trained by a coworker. So put that in my skill set bag. You could learn new skills and if you were naturally sort of artistic or technically savvy, they just would let you run with it. We were very service-oriented; it was all about serving the science community.
