Some from the 1980s called it “networking,” others call it “word of mouth advertising,” marketing, etc. Some case(s) in point:

1. 1970, Sanitary Engineering Research Lab, Richmond Field Station, UC Berkeley. 4-5 other UC labs were at the Field Station also, so to safeguard for empty spaces in my timecard and workload, I “networked” my illustration services to the other labs: Forest Products, Earthquake Studies-Shaker Table, Transportation, etc. Before long I was working for most of them.

2. Occasionally this would also lead to work on the Berkeley campus, and so before long I was working for Professor Bill Oswald of the School of Public Health and those scientists just off campus where a “Motor-driven with Timer Pheramone Dispersal Device” was a Hoot to Illustrate and learn about insect pheramones. Likewise up in the Biology labs, along Ridge Road, “placebo” came into my vocabulary as many of their studies dealt with such. By this time I also knew most of the illustrators on campus including Gene Christman, then Sr. Scientific Illustrator for the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and later took his “Scientific Illustration Class” as a part of the Graphic Design Certificate Program through UC Extension.

3. Networking with friends is equally important, after our careers were over at Bechtel, San Francisco, an editor friend of mine connected me with a Temp Agency where I filled in as Contract Employee at Nellcor in Pleasanton, the manufacturer of the Pulse Oximeter that we all get to wear at Kaiser facilities clipped to our finger tips to non-invasively monitor our oxygen saturation. Clever Idea! There I was a Maternity Leave Replacement for 6 months for “Daria Colner’s office, Peter Bray speaking, how can I help you?”

Even to the present, the bottom of my every email has my signature signoff:

Peter Bray, Home Handyman
P.O. Box 234 Benicia, CA 94510
Cell: (707) 246-8082
Light home repair, Special Projects–
Please see our websites below:
www.handymanservicespeterbray.com
www.peterbray.org/pedro
Got your “Taproot & Aniseweed” for this month? Ask me!
New one-page, Taproot Blog every Friday

5. Join groups, not to excess, but effectively with like-minded spirits: First Tuesday Poets, Benicia Literary Arts, California Poets, Ina Coolbrith Circle, Academy of American Poets, Facebook, but that’s plenty! No, I don’t Twitter and I don’t tweet.

6. The Roman Poet Ovid was once heard to say and is often quoted: “Have your line forever cast; in the place where you least expect it, there will be fish.” (Or like minds, acquaintances, new friends, customers, accomplices!)

His Words (For Gene Christman)

I shall long remember
his words for he said:
“If you should learn
anything from this class,
learn how to see:
to observe, to find
symmetry in a leaf,
beauty in a stone,
architecture in a seed,
structure in a bone.”

And so I learned
how to see, to observe,
to find in my own way
things that had always been.
And though my pen
was often laid aside,
what I found were not only
the artifacts of yesterday,
and the technologies of today,
but the spirit, the emotions,
the intellect, the essence of life,
the sensations of being.
And with these observations,
I began to write.

Son Chris Bray and some 15 others were inducted into the Nevada Union Hall of Fame this past Saturday in Nevada City, California. He was an outstanding Cross-country athlete there and throughout his Cross-country career at Northern Arizona University. He is currently Cross-country Coach at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. Details posted at my Peter Bray Facebook page. (Courtesy photo)

Peter Bray lives, writes, and writes, and works in Benicia, California. He has written his column since 2008.

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