Recording More than Just Cats

It started with a Fisher-Price tape recorder in the 1980's, continued with a GE cassette recorder in the 1990's, and has culminated (at this point in the 21^st Century) with a Sony IC digital recorder.

I've been recording stuff for most of my life.

When it was a Fisher-Price tape recorder, I recorded random things. I mean, really random. I recorded bad attempts at playing the piano. I recorded the theme during the end credits to the TV show “The A-Team.” I once accidentally recorded someone’s flatulence. (That never stopped being funny.) I even “interviewed” our pets—our bobbed-tail cat, Bobbie, and our Springer Spaniel-Australian Shepherd mix dog, Bernie. I acted like they were answering coherently.

Parenthetically, I have to mention that I lived a mile outside of a town of 1,200 people. This was before we got a Nintendo Entertainment System. We didn't have a VCR yet. There was no such thing as the Internet or smartphones. We actually used our imaginations back in the 1980's. Dang kids today.

Many years after I forgot about the Fisher-Price tape recorder, my parents gave me a gray GE tape recorder for Christmas. After once again using it to record random things—like my friends and I being stupid teenagers—I found a practical use for it while serving an honorable, full-time mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1997–1999. While I wrote home to my parents nearly every week, three different times I recorded and sent a cassette letter home. That way my parents could hear my voice more often than just twice a year (Mother’s Day and Christmas).

In August of 1998, I found an even more valuable use for it. I had been keeping a written journal since December 1987. When I was nearly 10 years old, I had plenty of time but very little desire to write in it regularly; over 10 years later, it was the opposite—I had plenty of desire to write but very little time. I was serving as the “zone leader B” in the Walnut Zone of the California Arcadia Mission. That meant I was not only supposed to help the “zone leader A” with missionary work in the Orangewood Ward and Samoan wards in the Walnut California Stake, but I was also a “district leader” over two other missionary companionships and was in charge of the zone paperwork that had to be faxed weekly to the mission office in Arcadia.

My schedule reached a point where I hardly had time to write in my journal anymore. I barely had time to study the scriptures! I needed a new method of recording the day’s events and feelings, and so on Aug. 20 I resorted to using a tape recorder in lieu of a longhand journal.

For exactly 10 months to the day, I would record the day’s events—sometimes in the mornings, sometimes at night—nearly every day. I called it my “captain’s logs.” (I was and still am a Star Trek fan.) Every so often I’d miss a day or two, and so I’d have to play catch-up the next time. But I kept it up and kept purchasing blank cassette tapes—sometimes 60-minute tapes, sometimes 90-minute tapes—until my last cassette tape ran out two days before I was scheduled to return home.

While recording my captain's logs, I never concerned myself with what I was going to do with all them when I returned home. I just kept at it. When I left southern California on June 22, 1999, I had a total of 27 cassettes that were completely full—nine 60-minute tapes and eighteen 90-minute tapes, making a total of about 36 hours of recordings. At home, the longhand journals resumed.

In 2003, I finally figured out what I was going to do with all these recordings. While taking Oral History at BYU, I found a man on campus selling used transcribing machines he had fixed. I bought an old Sony industrial model—probably older than me—with a foot pedal, for $250. It’s been worth every penny.

In the 11 years since then, working on my “missionary book” has been a luxury. With most of my focus on jobs, church callings and family, there have been periods of a year or two when I wouldn't touch it. Other times, I worked on it almost daily. Over the years, I've transcribed all 27 cassettes, and edited, proofed, added end notes and proofed my missionary book again. After a long hiatus, the right time and opportunity came along in 2011 to purchase a relatively cheap but licensed copy of Adobe’s InDesign CS4. I've formatted it piecemeal, using my limited understanding of InDesign and even more limited graphic design talent. (Refer to my last blog entry. I'm the guy who only got one talent.)

As of yesterday, I’m so close to publishing it and yet so far. Yesterday, I started rearranging the end notes from where I had placed them at the end of each chapter to the back of the book (per the fourteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style). To those of you who know InDesign, that means I have a lot of residual problems that now need to be fixed. I also have to finish the front matter and add back matter, such as an index. At this point, this monstrosity is already approaching 500 pages. 

It’s not the kind of book you publish to sell; I’m publishing it so I can have that 10 months of my life on paper and so I can finally understand the entire publishing process—from raw manuscript to polished book. When it’s finally published, I’m only going to print about 10 copies or so. If I interacted with you as a missionary in the California Arcadia Mission, you may want to order an advanced copy from me. Because I probably talked about you.

But I promise I never recorded anyone’s flatulence.

Where Did I Put My Talent?

Go Ye Therefore and Teach All Nations, LDS.org.

In the New Testament, the Savior Jesus Christ taught his disciples a parable about “talents,” which in this case meant a unit of weight as well as a large sum of money. The Savior had spent the bulk of the previous chapter (Matt. 24) explaining some of the alarming signs and calamities preceding his Second Coming—alarming for us living in the 21^st Century because of how relevant to our society the warnings are.

After spelling out what must have sounded more like the emphasis was on the “dreadful” than “great” in the “coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (as described by Malachi), the Savior then gave his disciples some hope. He taught them parables about the weeding-out process—the five wise virgins from the five foolish, the sheep from the goats, and the wise servants and their talents from the foolish servant.

In the parable, a man about to travel abroad hands out talents to three of his servants—five to one servant (let’s name him Joseph), two to another (let’s name him Nathanael) and one to another (let’s name him Judas). While the master is gone, Joseph and Nathanael take those talents and, by trading with others, double them. Judas, meanwhile, buries his one talent. Literally.

“After a long time” the master returns and “reckoneth” with the servants. After all, the money didn't belong to the servants; the talents belonged to him. Since he was out of the country on business and couldn't increase his earnings, he gave his servants stewardship over some of his talents—trusting them with a lot of money—to do something with on his behalf.

Photo from PersonalFinanceJourney.com.

No surprise, Joseph is rewarded for doubling five talents into ten—after all, he earned as much money as Nathanael and Judas had on them combined! The master then piles on the praise by saying, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord” (Matt. 25:21).

Then it’s Nathanael’s turn. He received two—only one more than Judas—but he also chose to double what he had received. While Nathanael’s final sum is only 40 percent of Joseph’s, he receives the same reward—the master says the same thing to him verbatim (except for one word) as he had to Joseph.

Finally it’s Judas’ turn, his talent still buried. No doubt the reason he hadn't retrieved it once he heard his master had returned—since this is a parable about being prepared for the Second Coming—was because he was caught completely off guard and didn't have time. Instead, he was left to do the only thing many procrastinators choose to do when time is officially up—make excuses. Judas even goes so far as to blame his master as being the reason it was buried—no introspection, no humility, no “Lord, is it I?” attitude. As a result, what he had been given was taken away from him, leaving Judas with the inevitable “weeping and gnashing of teeth” of regret at having squandered an opportunity.

Was it fair that Judas only received one talent? According to Matt. 25, the master didn't distribute the talents randomly. In verse 15, it states the master handed them out “to every man according to his several ability.” In other words, he gave five talents to Joseph knowing he’d double them. It’s possible that Nathanael wasn't as “talented” as Joseph, but the master knew the potential was there. So he tested him with an extra talent—and Nathanael came through. Judas’s bar was apparently set pretty low. Much like with Cain in Gen. 4:7, all the Lord required was, “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?” That was it—just do something with it. And yet that was apparently asking too much.

I work from home, and so I take the occasional break from my basement office by going upstairs and letting the rays of the sun re-energize me Superman-style. This morning, while at the kitchen table, I glanced out our sliding back door and saw the sixth-graders at Ucon Elementary running the mile around the track. It was apparent they had just started since all of them were close together in single file. It didn't take long for everyone to start spreading out—each kid “according to his [or her] several ability.”

While I admired the kids in front for their speed, I noticed the kids straggling behind. One boy appeared to have a limp, but he was still jogging. The boy in the back was walking, albeit you could tell he was putting forth some effort to be quicker. Ignoring the kids in front—because I knew the teachers would shower plenty of praise on them—all I could think of watching some of the straggling boys was, “Don’t give up, kid.”

Photo from MapMyRun.com.

From personal experience—as the kid who always finished third-from-the-last in running the mile in school—I wanted to run out to the fence next to the track and shout encouragement to the stragglers. I wanted to tell them not to compare themselves to the kids in the front (and I wanted to tell the kids in the front to do the same thing to the kids behind them). I hated running while growing up, but it’s now growing on me as a thirty-six-year-old. This last year, I reached a milestone of running six miles without stopping, and I participated in two 5K's—making it into the top ten both times. I don't care that that may sound slow to many people. It's something to me.

We live in a world where others are quick to judge and compare and condemn. It’s frustratingly easy to get caught up in comparing ourselves to others, when what you need to do is compare Present Self with Past Self. Regularly. If you find yourself lacking, you step up your game. You push a little harder today and focus on keeping up that level until you find you have strength to push yourself a little harder. Then the next time you compare Present Self to Past Self, you’ll find your talents have increased.

You may even find they've doubled.

"I'm Going to Get It"

“April 4, Academy Awards. I made it. Looking across the orchestra, just before Susan [Hayward] read it off, something popped in my head. 'I’m going to get it.' And I did. I kissed Lydia and walked to the stage dripping wet, except for a pepper-dry mouth: classic stage fright. I’ll never forget the moment, or the night, for that matter. Backstage, posing beside Willy with his third Oscar, I said, 'I guess this is old hat for you.' 'Chuck,' he said, 'it never gets old hat!'"

-Charlton Heston, April 4, 1960 (Charlton Heston: The Actor's Life, Journals 1956–1976)

Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur. Photo from Photofest.

In the late 1970's, Charlton Heston was convinced by a friend to publish the work journal he had been keeping for the past two decades. It's called Charlton Heston: The Actor's Life, and is essentially a two-decade compilation of his equivalent to Facebook status updates—daily tidbits of "a hundred words or so" written at the bottom of an appointment book given to him by his wife as a Christmas gift. Unfortunately for us, he started the journal while wrapping up The Ten Commandments. Fortunately for us, there were many other movies he worked on during the next two decades—including Ben-Hur, which earned eleven Academy Awards out of twelve nominations (a feat that wasn't duplicated until 1997 and 2003, with Titanic and the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, respectively).

Reading through his published journal, I’m finding it’s hard to find an entry to spotlight in a blog because there are so many little snippets in his life that would make great blog posts. So I’m going to shoehorn some of these snippets from a one-month period—with both ups and downs.

On March 30, 1960, Heston and his wife, Lydia, attended the premiere of Ben-Hur at Tokyo Theater. MGM had been begging Heston to attend, even though the film was doing fine. As a matter of fact, they were only days away from the 32^nd Academy Awards. However, the emperor of Japan himself—as well as the empress and the crown prince—were planning on attending. The emperor had never so much as set foot on the Ginza, Tokyo’s version of Broadway. According to Heston in his autobiography, In the Arena, he was compelled to attend “for the protocol of the thing.” But he adds, “We were happy to go along with that.”

The trip to Japan, with stops in Seattle and Alaska, brought back memories of serving in the army in World War II, according to Actor’s Life. He says, “To be in Alaska again still shrouded me in the melancholy of a twenty-year-old at war and far from home.” While the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended planned invasions of Japan that Heston could possibly have taken part, 1960 was Heston’s invasion.

And the Japanese more than welcomed him. He says that the restaurants were “fabulous” and the people were “wonderfully friendly.” The theater had been redecorated—inside and out—and new projectors had been installed, which, of course, gave Murphy’s Law an invitation to crash the party. He recalls in Arena that the film broke “three times in the first ten minutes.” He had to stop Jim Castle, head of MGM distribution for the Far East, from rushing up to the projection booth, “clearly bent on murder.” However, once Castle saw the “corpse-pale” projectionist’s face, he observed there was nothing he could do to make the man feel worse than he already did.

Chuck and Lydia Heston with Jimmy and Gloria Stewart at the 32nd Academy Awards. Photo from Charltonhestonworld.homestead.com.

In spite of the hiccups, the premiere itself went well, but things weren't going so well at home in America. Heston states in his journal that the trip was interrupted the first day by a call no one wants to get—Lydia’s mother had had a heart attack. He says his wife took it well, and the day, for the most part, progressed as planned until she boarded a plane at midnight to fly home. When he arrived in Los Angeles on April 2, he says his mother-in-law seemed “past her crisis.”

Two days later, Charlton Heston would be on top of the world at the 32^nd Academy Awards. According to Heston in Arena, the long night began while he strolled into the lobby. It just happened to be at the same time as Jimmy Stewart, the Best Actor nominee for Anatomy of a Murder. After the media went crazy taking photos of the two nominees together, Jimmy took Heston’s arm and said, “I hope you win, Chuck. I really mean that.” Heston states, “He did, too. I don’t know another actor alive who would've said such a thing. He’s an extraordinary man.”

Photo from Charltonhestonworld.homestead.com.

Several hours later, while Susan Hayward reached for the envelope for Best Actor, Heston says he had “an odd experience.” He says he felt, while glancing to his left at a chandelier at the other side of the hall, an “almost audible click” that he had won. He says he sat with perfect equanimity until Susan read his name. During the course of his acceptance speech, he thanked an uncredited contributor, writer Christopher Fry—which annoyed the Writers Guild. (They had refused MGM give credit to Fry on the movie.) While taking pictures afterward with Ben-Hur director William Wyler—“Willy” in the journal entry—he realized receiving an Academy Award never gets “old hat.”

After the show, he and his wife first stopped at the hospital to show Lydia’s mother the Oscar, and then they moved from party to party “all night long.” He says, “Though I drank, I’m afraid, more or less steadily until we got home at dawn and sat on the front steps to savor the L.A. Times’ front page, I was stone cold sober.”

The rest of the month was certainly incidental, but there isn't the room for it in this blog. I will mention, however, that he subsequently received a rebuking letter from the Writers Guild for mentioning Fry in his acceptance speech (an “entertaining controversy,” he adds in his journal). He also participated with the negotiating committee in the Screen Actors Guild strikes, led by none-other-than our future fortieth president, Ronald Reagan. The month of April did not end on a happy note, unfortunately. On April 30, while rehearsing for The Ed Sullivan Show in New York City, he received a call from Lydia that her mother had passed away.

Heston mentions in the introduction to Actor’s Life that because of his journals, "I still don't have many answers, but I've got better questions. The journals have taught me a lot... But the main thing I've learned is this: It's not always the way you remember it was."