A Bi-Monthly Newsletter
Volume 6, Issue 2, March 2003
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Anecdotes From the 50th Anniversary Planning Committee

Greetings, members of the Willamette Valley Chapter, and my thanks to Rachel Houghton for offering me this opportunity to talk about the Society’s 50th anniversary!

For the past few years, I have been a member of the STC 50th Anniversary Planning Committee. The committee is managed by Georgina Cantoni of the Lone Star Chapter, who has the unenviable task of herding figurative cats, including four former STC presidents: Ken Cook, Bill Leavitt, Ernie Mazzatenta, and me. Our group also includes Executive Director Bill Stolgitis and Marguerite Krupp of the Boston Chapter, a new STC Fellow. Georgina has done a great job of focusing our thoughts and helping us define tasks that we could actually accomplish.

As our committee thought about how to celebrate STC’s milestone year, we realized that one of the best things we could do would be to capture memories from all over the Society, then make them available for everyone to share.

As a result, I submitted an article to Intercom asking members all over the world to send me their anecdotes about STC and the profession over the past 50 years. Bill Leavitt also sent out a letter to all chapter leaders, describing my efforts. (By the way, Bill has been corresponding regularly with chapter leaders ever since the committee began its work).

I then had the joy of receiving some wonderful, entertaining, inspirational messages in my in-box. In this message, I’ll have to content myself with a few samples, but I have some good news about the hundreds of anecdotes people have given me. Marguerite Krupp has been working closely with STC Webmaster Russ Bombardieri to create an information-rich area of the STC Web site. Not only will those STC @ 50 pages contain a great timeline, but they will also include some or all of the members’ anecdotes.

I hope you will check out that Web page when it goes online, which should be very soon. In the meantime, here are a few anecdotes to whet your appetites:

Sheila Jones, Associate Fellow, Canada West Coast Chapter, remembers how she took charge to help members reinvigorate the chapter.

“When I became chapter president in 1995, I held a strategic planning meeting to get the whole membership involved in setting goals and finding out what they wanted from us. This opened up the group to new ideas, and we now have one of the fastest growing chapters in the whole STC.”

Bill Collins, Philadelphia Metro Chapter, remembers a time when the chapter’s Publications Competition entries were truly trash.

“I served as co-chair of my chapter’s publications competition one year. All of the entrants’ documents — three copies of each — along with their supporting documentation and entry forms had been carefully boxed for shipment to the chapter that would judge our entries. I left the box on the floor of my office, intending to ship it the next day. During the night, my company's custodial staff put the box in the trash. By the time I discovered that the box was missing and realized where it had gone, it was beyond retrieval, despite my following its course to the site dumpster, discovering the number of the truck that had emptied it, determining the dumping location for that truck at the county landfill, and obtaining permission to enter the landfill. The end of the pilgrimage found me standing atop a literal mesa of garbage, dodging seagull guano and watching a steady stream of trash trucks dumping ton after ton of trash onto a pile in which one carton of technical documentation had as much chance of discovery as one particular grain of sand on the shore.

When I abjectly informed the entrants about the fate of their documents and the need to send me three new copies of their entries, their justified annoyance was — to my surprise — exceeded greatly by their kind commiseration and good humor.

The documents were graciously replaced, the publications competition was a success, and the subsequent awards banquet was a rollicking good time, complete with tiny trashcan centerpieces on all the tables.”

Ron Blicq, Fellow, Manitoba Chapter, became a technical editor by accident — and stayed to contribute half a century of talent.

“Exactly 50 years ago I got into TC. It was March 1953, and the Air Force sent me on an advanced avionics course, eight weeks too soon! When I arrived, the Commanding Officer said, ‘Would you mind looking after the section that writes and prints the instruction manuals on new electronic equipment? You won’t have much to do, so you can study for the course.’

Well, I never studied. There was too much to do! And five months later, when I completed the advanced navigation course, the C.O. said, ‘We liked what you did, so we’re going to keep you on as what we will call ‘technical editor.’”

I hope these anecdotes will motivate you to contribute some of your own stories to the STC At 50 Web page and help us further document our rich heritage.

Finally, I hope to see some of you at our committee’s session at STC’s 50th Annual Conference, May 18-21 in Dallas. We are scheduled for Tuesday morning, 8:30 to 10 am. We plan to discuss what we’ve been doing, and then we hope to learn about your 50th Anniversary ideas and accomplishments.

Elizabeth “Liz” Babcock can be reached at lizbab@owens.ridgecrest.ca.us.