| |
Who the hell is Tommy Touchdown? What is his significance?
Back around 1949, I was just becoming a teenager, and entering the
7th grade of the Carter School in Chelsea, Massachusetts. For some unexplained reason, I
joined the student staff of the school newspaper as a copywriter, i.e., I edited submitted
articles. But, somehow, the writing bug infected me. I wrote and submitted a whimsical article,
titled “Tommy Touchdown” in support of the school’s junior high football team. The article
won “great acclaim” and, although I didn’t know it at the time, started me on a lifelong
passion for writing. Today, some seventy years later, I am still writing.
After some five years attending M.I.T. and receiving my Bachelor’s
and Master’s degrees in Aeronautical Engineering, I spent the next forty-years working as an engineer,
while my wife and I raised two daughters. During my engineering career, I had more than fifty
papers published and, in addition, I wrote or contributed to uncounted proposals, reports, and
other documents. My reputation as a prolific writer resulted in one marketeer telling me that
I wrote so much because I had “diarrhea of the pen”! In 2005, some four years after retiring,
I decided to indulge my passion for writing by starting a blog – this one, “The Son of Eliyahu”.
For those of you who are curious, “Eliyahu” was my father’s Hebrew name – usually shortened to
Eli. His English name was Elias. Now, some fifteen years later, I have put out well over 400
blogs or articles on the Son of Eliyahu web site.
In addition to creating this web site, I set up and, for the past
15 years, have maintained my temple’s web site. I also generate most of my temple’s newspaper
articles and advertisements, all of the temple’s announcements on our community television
station, and nearly all of the temple’s posters and mailings.
Over these many years, I progressed from pencil and paper to a
manual typewriter and paper, and ultimately to a computer with its word processing software.
My editing career started with an eraser and a red pencil, evolved to a pen with red ink and
white-out, to today’s computer and its word processor editing power. I’ve seen printing go
from a Smith Corona manual typewriter to an IBM Selectric typewriter, to the early dot-matrix
computer-driven printers, to today’s powerful HP Printer-Copier-FAX machines. Along the way,
I’ve consumed untold reams of paper, ink cartridges, as well as a few computers and
printers.
When I first started generating documents, my research was done at
the local or school libraries, then at technical libraries where I worked, or through the use of
printed government and industry reports. Today, much of my research is conducted on the
internet with some coming from printed matter – newspapers, books, magazines,
etc.
My first home computer was a Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 desktop
microcomputer that I bought in the early 1980’s. The first computer-driven printer that
I used was a 7-pin dot matrix device that printed out on a very long roll of 8-1/2
inch wide paper – not on 8-1/2 x 11 inch individual sheets of paper. There was no
word-processing software available at the time - that came later.
My TRS-80 microcomputer had 64 kilobytes (kB) of memory -
of which only 48 kB was usable. Today, the memory of
home computers is measure in gigabytes or terabytes.
This TRS-80 had no removable memory like a CD or DVD drive or a USB flash drive.
Little did I suspect when I composed ”Tommy Touchdown” so long
ago what I had set in motion. So much has transpired over the intervening years, especially
the mechanical process of writing, editing and publishing that has been enabled by the
advent of the computer and all that is associated with it – printers, electronic storage
media, display devices, transmission technology, software, and more. While my education
and career were intimately tied to the engineering sciences, I always respected knowledge
of the proper use of the English language and have always tried to utilize correct English
in whatever I have written.
As I’ve written on my Home Page:
“I am David Burton {not my real name}, the son of Eliyahu and I
reside in the Greater Boston area of Massachusetts. I am using this web site to share my
thoughts with you, biased as they may be. Most of what you will find on this web site are
my ramblings, thoughts, prejudices, etc. on whatever topic that occurs to me at the time.
This is not a forum, so what appears here is what I want to say and will not reflect what
readers might want to have said. You are invited to e-mail your comments to me should you
be so inclined, but don't expect a timely response. In fact, I may not feel
like responding at all.
“If you want to use any of the material I have written, feel free
to do so, but please provide attribution if you do.
“You don't have to agree with what I have to say. But, I hope
that what I have to say will, at the very least, get you thinking.”
“Enjoy!!”
To those of you who may have enjoyed one or more of my perhaps
too-frequent rants, I hope to put out a few more that will capture your fancy. I write simply
because I enjoy writing. I hope you enjoy reading what I write as much as I enjoy the writing.
In my case, the writing process is as much enjoyment as the finished process itself – maybe
more.
|
|
