It was pointed out to me by several people who read the following biographical sketch in its pre-edited version that it was exceedingly long. In fact, I was told there was no way an eleven page "tome" could be considered a sketch. These people were correct. It is long, and if you don’t have the interest to forge ahead or just think an eleven page sketch is ridiculous, skip to the last three paragraphs (counting the poem) where I try to sum it all up.

Biographical Sketch of Jim Michie

There I was, dressed up in a cap and gown with no place to go, but my journey began despite my bewilderment. I had finished high school without more that ten hours of study or homework during its entire course. I had taken courses I was advised to take or chose because I thought they were easy. I was young, unambitious, naïve, and cocky. Through sloth and ignorance, I had endowed myself with, from my perspective, a terminal degree of little value in the world I faced.

So I went out into the world still working at the soda fountain job I had during high school, making enough money to get by while living at home. But my close high school friends all went on to higher education, and I began to feel the peer pressure of not coming up to standards. Of those friends, only one had taken a course that was open to me, since it required no money, which neither I nor my family had or were likely to come by. Jay Burke had chosen to go into the shipyard’s Apprentice School, where he was actually paid to go to school, and at a much higher rate than I was bringing in.

I looked to see if I qualified to get in and found that I didn’t. I needed to have taken more algebra, which I had avoided in high school because I hated what I did take, even though I loved plane geometry. It was here that I took my first conscious step on the education path; I decided to go to night school for the necessary algebra and make myself eligible for the Apprentice School.

The algebra was easy and the fall of 1956 found me working in the shipyard as an electrician’s helper on a bitterly cold ship-conversion job, doing real physical labor for the first time in my life. I didn’t like it at all, but I was waiting for my apprentice application to perk to the top, and I could get to one of those cushy jobs like Jay had in the shipyard’s machine shop, so I stuck it out. In January the Apprentice School called me in and told me there was an opening for an apprentice molder in the foundry, not any of the more glamorous trades that I had indicated being interested in on my application. The only thing I knew about foundry work was that it had to do with casting hot metal into shapes. It had to be warmer. I took it.

Boy, was it warmer, and exponentially more physical than what I had done as an electrician’s helper. It turned out that a molder was the guy that took wooden patterns (designed to come apart so they could be removed) and used them to make sand molds that the liquid metal was poured into to make castings. This was done by shoveling moist sand mixed with rosin into steel frames around the patterns and packing it in layer-by-layer with both hand tools and large pneumatic rams like jackhammers with a bulbous weight on the end instead of a chisel. You shoveled, packed, and rammed from seven in the morning to four in the afternoon with an exhausted hour’s break for lunch.

Such was my first month’s introduction to being a molder. Then the first classroom sessions started for me, and I had three mornings a week when I went to class rather than shoveling and ramming sand. By this time, my rabbit, Jay Burke, had finished his first year as a machinist apprentice and had been offered a chance to move to an apprenticeship as a Hull Designer—inside a heated and air-conditioned building—paradise! I decided I at least needed to do some studying and maintenance of my grades if I wanted to join Jay in Valhalla.

At the end of my first year as an apprentice, I was offered my choice of design disciplines should I want to change apprenticeships, and of course, I chose Hull Design. I was told by my instructor that this had never happened before to a molder apprentice, and I surmised that they only offered the apprenticeship to those they thought didn’t have the intellectual capacity for something like being a machinist, much less a designer. A little education didn’t seem like such a bad thing now.

While still floundering around in the summer after high school, I met my future wife, Trudy Johnson. She was a junior at Hampton High School, stunningly good looking, and a straight "A" student. She had come to visit one of our neighbors in the apartment building in which my family had lived all my life. I came in one evening to find her and the neighbor talking to my mother and saw her several times after that sitting outside with the neighbor when I was coming or going. I eventually asked her for a date, and I fell in love. By the time I had gotten into the Apprentice School, I had gotten serious enough to ask her to marry me, and we were engaged for almost a year, since the Apprentice School at that time did not permit its students to be married until they were twenty-one—a long way off for me, since I was the youngest person in my high school class (maybe with the exception of Jeanette Hornsby).

For some reason that neither of us now remember, probably that we were both too young and not quite sure about such a serious commitment, we broke our engagement a month or so before Trudy graduated from high school and a couple of months after I had switched to a design apprenticeship. She too came from a dirt-poor family, and although she had scholarship offers, elected to continue working as an operator at the telephone company where she had held down a night job while in high school.

I found myself unattached at this point, making good money, working in a reasonable environment doing intellectual work rather than laboring, and life was good, even though I had a long time adjusting to life without Trudy. I had received a strict Southern Baptist upbringing in my formative years, and I had prudishly avoided being lured by alcohol when all my friends were experimenting with it in high school. I found it during the year following graduation, and with the enthusiasm of youth, became a party animal. This really got serious when I was asked into the Pi Sigma Phi fraternity—the only one at the Apprentice School. Jay joined up right after me and we spent some of our not very hard-earned money on sports cars. I had a white 1954 corvette with a red and green plaid top, Jay had a white Triumph (a souped-up TR-2 he stumbled on—a consistent element of his life as you can read in his bio), and we were joined by another hull design apprentice, Joe Wise (NNHS ’54), who had a red Austin Healy. Needless to say, we cut fine figures in our own immaturely prioritized minds.

During my first year at the Apprentice School, I bulked-up from my 150 pound high school graduating weight to 210 pounds of very solid muscle—try shoveling sand and leaning on a pneumatic air-hammer all day—and was talked into entering my first team sport (I was always too small in high school) by my apprentice friends. For a couple of years on the track team, I threw the discus and the javelin and even tried my hand at the high hurdles, much to the chagrin of my abused knees and shins, but I wasn’t really that good at it.

I did find what turned out to be a life-long sporting interest during my time as an apprentice, canoeing and kayaking, which I successfully combined with fishing when not hell-bent on self destruction in some icy-cold (sometimes you had to break the ice to get downstream), swollen river—my most harrowing experiences being with Jay Burke, of course. Jay and I both picked up this avocation from our Hull Design Apprentice Instructor, O.K. Goodwin, who founded the largest canoe club in Virginia and has remained a life-long friend for us both. The canoe club’s newsletter (written by OK) and the Apprentice School newspaper (sponsored by OK) served as my first publisher, primarily poems on the themes of canoeing, conservation, and the environment.

About two years after our breakup, I was standing on the corner in front of Nachman’s department store with a can in my hands badgering passersby to contribute to the March of Dimes, when I encountered Trudy for the first time since we had split. Our subsequent conversation eventually led to a date, which led ultimately to the consummation of our originally intended marriage about a year later. I had passed the twenty-one year old requirement.

I got married and Jay got a scholarship to The University of Michigan, while Joe got a scholarship to VPI (now known as Virginia Tech). I, on the other hand, after achieving my goal of getting into a warm (or cool) environment, had gone back to underachieving with my never-learned study habits. This meant there was no chance of me getting a scholarship like Jay, so I decided I would follow along on my own, and Trudy and I started saving our money. I took the SATs and aced them, which was the only thing that got me into VPI. I certainly had no scholastic record to ride in on. Unfortunately, those same SAT scores got me placed immediately into the advanced math and English courses. The English was a breeze because I found myself overwhelmed and absorbed by the wonders of literature, but the math was hard even with the advanced courses I had gotten at the Apprentice School, and I still hadn’t come to see that math was the key to everything. I got through the first year as an engineering major with all the math required to graduate, but with the knowledge I didn’t want to become an engineer.

I returned to Newport News, and since I was an Apprentice School graduate, the shipyard immediately gave me a job as a designer. After years of scraping pennies, my first few weekly paychecks seemed like a fortune, even though we immediately started to pay off our government loans (if you remember hard, debt was anathema in those days). Life was good and Trudy and I agreed that she would forgo going back to work. Two young kids were more than enough for her to handle. I found time to sculpt, write, canoe, and fish as well as work and help Trudy (just a little) raise the family.

I was successful as a designer, putting my ability to visualize in three dimensions to work. I won a shipyard sponsored contest for innovative design and was awarded a thousand dollars (a lot of money in those days) for another design innovation. I was happy doing the creative design work I was assigned, primarily on aircraft carrier catapult systems,

Somehow (don’t forget I was still young and naïve), Trudy managed to get pregnant before it was time to go to college, but even so, we decided we would buy and live in a trailer in a convenient park just off campus. It was the cheapest mode we could find, and we had been preceded by Joe Wise, who had made the same choice. Believe me, a trailer with a colicy kid is no place for a guy struggling with advanced courses he had no business taking. It was a nightmare, but we made it through the first year, and I was able to go back to the shipyard for summer employment, since as an engineering student, I had been given a leave of absence to pursue college.

Not only did I find literature, but in my second year I found philosophy as well. I changed my major to English, which they offered a degree in, but also pursued the credits for doubling in Philosophy, which they didn’t offer at the time but had assured me would be available by the time I graduated. It was at this time that I found out what a psychological mess I was. To change majors required a visit to the school counselors and a review of the tests I had taken (particularly the Minnesota Multi-Phasic) during orientation week, before starting real academic work, to see if I was "suited" to another kind of career. I was informed that all my tests were "inconclusive," which on inquiry turned out to mean that my answers were so varied (read "unfocused") that the test could make no conclusions about my personality. Jay Burke later told me that this conclusion didn’t surprise him a bit.

We sold our trailer during my second year and moved into a new set of low-cost apartments on the next hill over, but not that low-cost. Things were tight, and the money we had saved was fast disappearing. Add to that the fact that I had no summer job with my switch to English as a major, and we started looking for money and a way to finish up as soon as possible. Our families couldn’t help us out and in those days there wasn’t much available from government loans. We got what we could and I continued to take 20 to 22 hours each quarter, which was all I could talk my counselor into allowing, and went to summer school as well.

During my first year I made friends with several of my young professors, many of whom were no older than I. One of these professors was also in charge of the school’s drama group, The Maroon Mask. I had small parts in several plays, but found the technical side more interesting and ended up doing sets, lighting, and technical direction. I also took a couple of sculpture courses and thus started my continuing efforts as a sculptor.

When I started my third year, I got the idea that an up and coming university like VPI needed to have a literary magazine. It would also help to get more of my poems published, so I went to the Dean of the English school and up a few more notches until I had the money needed to give it a try, which I did. It is still going today as Maelstrom, a name suggested by Trudy.

The exposure to these highly skilled and seemingly sophisticated consultants proved to be a revelation for an unsophisticated Newport News boy. When the project was over, after about a year and a half, I was lured by two of the consultants that had formed their own company to pursue a similar endeavor for General Dynamics in Quincy, Massachusetts, immediately south of Boston. I left my family for about five months in the winter of 1968 and put my recently gained experience as Chief Editor to work for this new company. When that job was over, I took another with a different consulting company on a similar project for Pratt & Whitney in West Palm Beach, Florida. This time I brought the family down with me where we stayed on Singer Island in a motel having single family apartments on the dune looking out over the ocean. We were there about two months in the late spring-early summer, and it seemed almost mystical to be in such close and regular rapport with the beauty and power of nature. After that, Singer Island was our vacation destination every summer while the kids were growing up.

After this less than one year stint as a "worldly" consultant, I returned to the shipyard to work for a fast-rising manager, Joe Deal, whom I had befriended on the LHA project where he was the Technical Director. He was in charge of a group of engineers and designers called Advanced Systems Design, where I worked on fascinating design projects I can’t talk about even today. He served as my mentor then and for many years following, teaching me what mentoring was all about (the commitment of friendship among other things), which I in turn tried to apply to others as my career moved into its later years. His recent death was the only real friendship I have lost to death. It was difficult.

Advanced Systems Design changed into yet another special project where the shipyard was again in a design competition, but for the Maritime Administration. On this effort I got my first taste of project management, and I didn’t particularly like it, so I was happy when the project was successfully completed and the cream of the project staff became the core of a new Market Development Division. Here I was able to spend a couple of years doing market analysis and advanced systems design that were much more to my taste than managing. I discovered the power of computers as an analytical tool during this period and had great fun with a world dynamics model and transportation systems analysis. The thirst for intellectual challenge that had consumed me in college was slaked every day by the creative challenge of the work. I ended up getting a couple of patents and a couple of copyrights during this period and couldn’t believe someone was paying me to do this.

During this period at the shipyard I continued to sculpt, canoe, and fish whenever possible. Somehow, I found time to design my own kayak from scratch, build the mold, and make my own fiber glass kayak. It worked! And when I wasn’t using it, Jay was.

When I had been in Massachusetts, I had bought a junker Volkswagen to get around. Back in Newport News, I was getting out of the car in a mall parking lot one day and the door wouldn’t close. I looked closely to determine the problem and found that the upper right corner of the driver-side door seemed to be misaligned with the doorframe by about an inch. I kept fiddling with it until looking at the underside of car revealed that the frame and pan were so rusty that the car had actually sagged when I opened the door. This was my "going to work" car and we had gotten used to having two cars, so I converted it to a bright orange beach buggy, which I drove for several years.

My last effort at Newport News was the coordination of the design for the new North Yard expansion, and to do this I got to pick four other people I wanted from the company to help me. I did so, and we guided both the design of the new Liquified Natural Gas and Ultra-Large Crude Carriers that were to be built by the yard and the layout and basic design of the shipyard itself. After about a year, when this project was coming to a close, we were all lamenting having to go back to our former jobs after such a stimulating period of being able to work closely with people whose capabilities you really respected when an article in a marine industry magazine came to our attention.

About the time it was becoming apparent we wouldn’t make a success out of our venture, I got a call from the other consultant I had gone to Massachusetts with (it’s a very small world). He was now Director of Marketing for Ingalls Shipbuilding (having taken over the job when Joe Wise left Ingalls—smaller and smaller) and wanted to hire me to manage their research and development, a group of about twenty-five designers and engineers that were developing new ship designs being peddled to the Navy. He knew first hand I had a ship design and engineering background and he knew I had spent a couple of years in the marketing group at NNS&DDCo. I needed a job, it was in Pascagoula, Mississippi, which both Trudy and I had liked, and it was working for someone I liked and respected. How bad could it be? I took the job and went to Mississippi by myself since it was in the fall and we didn’t want to interrupt the school semester for the kids. After I had been there only a couple of months, things started to unravel for my friend and he started making sounds that he might leave and go back to his boyhood home in the mountains of Colorado and contemplate his navel for a while.

There I was in a company where I had no real connections for survival other than my friend and a few new acquaintances I had made since being hired. If he left, my survival in the corporate jungle was by no means certain, and I hadn’t been there long enough to be considered to move up into his job. It was not a situation that I wanted to move my family into again. I knew that the company was just starting up a new shipbuilding project for the Navy’s Aegis Class cruisers, and I had heard they were going to put a small support group in the Washington area. While it would be hard to find a job in the Pascagoula, Mississippi area should I need one, it would be easy to find one in the Washington area if things turned sour. So I talked my way into being in charge of this future group of designers, engineers, and support staff and stayed in Mississippi, leaving the kids as they were for the whole school year. In the summer we all moved to Fairfax, Virginia.

It was a Director level job at a big company, so the compensation was pretty good, but after the novelty of the first year it began to get boring. Trudy on the other hand was fully engaged. She had started picking up college credits at Christopher Newport College during our Newport News periods when the kids got large enough for her to have the time. In Fairfax, she was close to George Mason University and she took advantage of it to finish her degree in Information Sciences. On the other hand, I was still two quarters short of a college degree.

Or finally, to put it most succinctly, as my father did whenever given half a chance, "the boy just can’t hold down a job."