How I Ran Over Myself with a Farm Tractor
My father was a career Navy officer, and I grew up a nomad, in a life very different from the stable, settled existence that I imagined all "civilians" lived. So when the opportunity came to taste life on the farm, well, I took it.

We lived on a Navy base in Rhode Island; I was thirteen. To turn a plot of lawn near the base swimming pool into a community garden, a tractor was employed to strip sod from the area. It was then customary to leave military vehicles unlocked with the keys in the ignition, in case of emergency. So there's this tractor, with keys, and nobody is watching...

I had seen kids drive tractors in the movies; how difficult could it be? Eventually, I got up a good speed going downhill, then hit a bump that pitched me forward in front of the drive wheel. I averted my head as the wheel ran up my back and over my shoulder, and looked up just in time to see the runaway tractor disappear into the swimming pool. I was basically OK, with nothing broken, but shivering with a justified fear of military justice. The tractor in the pool was the big news item of the day, but my role, and brush with eternity, was never discovered. Because I survived that day, I can tell this story:

How I Became a Scholar in a Magic Land
Two years later, my Dad was posted overseas, and I spent the last years of high school in Morocco. It was the perfect time to experience the exotic...and Morocco is a truly magical place. I traveled the country far as I could on my motorcycle, and I'll leave it to you to imagine what a grand time this young, fearless explorer had.

I'm not now, and was not then, a mental giant, but this was a really small school. Intellectually and experientially stimulated, I read voraciously, got a job at the base library, scored a blue ribbon at the science fair, etc. I was even tapped to edit the yearbook (is this where my eventual career in graphics began?). A classmate started calling me "Professor." And the name stuck. I was saved from embarrassment and ignobility by a single empowering attribute: I had a steady girlfriend.

In college I discovered a passion for the performing arts, and resolved to be a major American actor. At my Alma Mommy, at that time, the object was to learn the broad and general aspects of a profession; specialization was strictly for the post-graduate. So my theatrical education included the backstage arts (design, production, lighting, sound, etc.) in even proportion with the performing arts. Well, I did pretty well at that, too.

One day, I was part of a crew rigging scenery from the grid—the open metal platform above the stage floor from which lights and scenery are hung. At this theatre, it was accessed by climbing a metal ladder, then stepping across some two feet of open air onto a catwalk. (It is done more safely these days.) Laden with rope and lighting cable, I arrived at the top of the ladder and stepped across to the catwalk. In my haste, I banged my head against a steel beam, and lost all stability. A fellow student was watching; in the nick of time he reached out and pulled me across. Had he not, I would have fallen and become impaled on the light stands stored below. And I would not be able to tell this story:

How I Gave a Hollywood Leading Man His Start in Show Biz
Ten years later I was working backstage for a minor Pittsburgh university's semi-pro theatre. I was also moonlighting as the Artistic Director of an avant-garde theatre company with an improving reputation. We chose to do a show needing an all-American, sulky, teenage heartthrob-type guy. At auditions, the right-looking kid showed up, one Michael Douglas, a grunt at the local educational television station who held cue cards and pulled cables off-camera for Fred Rogers. He had no acting experience whatever, but he did all right at audition, and I gave him the role, which he performed admirably.

And that hooked him. He moved to New York, took acting lessons, did standup in clubs, and got a minor movie role with dialogue. In film, having a dialogue role means joining the Screen Actors' Guild. But there was already a SAG member named Michael Douglas, and another named Mike Douglas. So our Michael had to take a screen name; he did so by paying tribute to a Hollywood pioneer, and changed his last name to Keaton.

Eventually, I had my best success not as a director, but as the local expert in specialty furniture for the stage (such as period reproductions and really sturdy actor-proof pieces). But one can ride that donkey only so far. I figured if I could build it for the stage, I could build it for the real world. So I took a leap and started my own custom furniture and fine woodworking business, sharing studio space with a local sculptor in an ancient warehouse with a decrepit freight elevator in the back. The thing clanked like a trolley and squealed like bad brakes, but it was reliable. One day, returning from a delivery, I reached through the aperture in the safely gate and yanked on the rope that summoned the elevator. Nothing happened. After a few moments, I leaned into the shaft to yank the rope again. From the corner of my eye I saw a bright silver chain drifting into view. No human has ever moved faster than I did in that moment, escaping the descending elevator. I didn't know that the device had been inspected earlier that day; they greased the ways and adjusted the cables to ensure silent operation—and installed three-foot long safety chains to the bottom of the carriage. Were it not for those chains, I would have been crushed or sliced in two by that elevator. But that did not happen, so I can tell this story:

How I Came To Live In a Clock
My business grew; I had to find my own working space. The former Duquesne Brewery, a landmark building across the Monongahela River from downtown Pittsburgh, was renting to small manufacturers and artists. The "Penthouse" was available—this was the top three floors, forty foot on a side, which originally contained the elevator mechanisms (still in operation), the dust collection systems (dismantled long ago), and the famous Clock. To announce its restart at the close of Prohibition in 1933, the brewery installed what was then the largest single-faced clock in the world atop their new brewhouse. It measured 60 feet in diameter, with the painted slogan "Have a Duke" visible from half the city. I was the prototypical starving artist; to economize, I built a small apartment in the new studio. It was crude and starkly industrial (and really cold in the winter!), but from there I could see the whole city.

In time, I sold that business, and returned to my backstage career. I saw my first Macintosh in the light booth at the University of Pittsburgh theatre in 1987. It was used to program and control stage lighting. To me, the technology was extraordinarily advanced and esoteric, and I could not imagine ever comprehending such complexity.

In time, physical limitations put an end to my theatre career. Lacking the credentials for academic pursuits, I returned to school to learn this new thing called desktop publishing—on the Mac, of course. It took a while, but I finally caught on. After a few years of apprenticeship, I got myself hired to a real job—for the first time in my life—with The Vanguard Group. Things have settled down a bit in the ten years since. No grand adventures in exotic lands, no show biz glitz, no brushes with death. But tomorrow isn't here yet.

— John Donnelly