Wednesday, March 4, 2009

What is work? Is work something you have to do to make a living? Then, what is play? Play is those things that you enjoy doing. So, what do you call it when your work is play? I have no idea what you call it, but then, what difference does it make if you enjoy what you are doing?

I just celebrated my sixtyseventh birthday a couple weeks ago (along with my sixth wedding anniversary) and I've been trying to figure out what it is that I want to do when I grow up. So far in my life I've just kind of bumbled along enjoying what I was doing. My growing up years were within the confines of glass, working (yes there's that word) with my mom and dad in their greenhouses. At the age of 17 they put me on the delivery truck and I drove all over Puget Sound country delivering house plants to grocery stores. Actually that's not quite accurate, because the summer that I was twelve, 1954, I sold magnetic hot pan holders door to door to earn money for a new bicycle, a three speed Schwinn Corvette (black with chrome fenders). That was a lot of knocking on doors to sell those little cloth hot pan holders with a maginet inside. I think I knocked on every door in Orting, Puyallup, Sumner, Buckley, and Enumclaw, but that summer I earned enough money to pay for my new bike and have spending money besides. Yes, the greenhouses were still there and if I couldn't find something else to do, Mom or Dad could always find something to fill my time.

But getting back to employment, or play, or work, or whatever. Over the years I've never worked for anyone for very long, just long enough to learn what it was that they did, and how to do it. My brother-in-law, Ralph Hubbard taught me how to hang Sheetrock. A few years later an old grade school buddy, Robert W. Norman (Bob) taught me how to tape and texture. I was in business for myself. But those electricians had the gravy jobs, so when offered the chance to learn the electricians trade, I jumped at it. But electricians have to work. Up and down ladders all day, crawling around in the mud under houses, and sweating up a storm in hot attics in the summer. So I went back to drywall where it was nice and dry and almost always warm and comfortable. But as I neared the age of forty, I got to thinking that I didn't want to still be hoisting 135 pound sheets of wallboard when I was sixty five, so I started looking for something else. It wound up to be printing.

I didn't know a thing about printing, but I bought an A.B. Dick 360 offset press and started learning how to run it. My little brother, Leland Meitzler, was going to school at Green River College and had discovered the field of genealogy. We pooled our resources, bought a computer, and started publishing. We called it, "Washington State Genealogical and Historical Review." WOW, what a long title. We discovered that if you can't say it in one breath, it's too long. So after a couple years we shortened it to Washington Heritage. It was a lot of fun, but it didn't have the potential for paying the bills that we were looking for, so in 1985 we set out to leave our mark on the geanological field by starting a publication called "Heritage Quest."

So here we are, nearly 25 years later, things have changed and have gone directions that I never could have dreamed about 25 years ago and books and historic prints seem to dominate my life. Am I having fun? Haven't had so much fun since I was a kid in the swimmin' hole on South Prairie Creek. Retire? That's what people who have jobs and work do. When You're having fun why quit?