This book is the story of Mike, a person born into a time of unquestioned white privilege in south, in Western North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, and yet a time of innocence, hope and optimism for the future... a time of transition from the practices of centuries past, with chamber pots, outhouses, and bartering through telephone party lines, televisions with rabbit ears, and on into the realm of the cell phone and internet. It tells the story of the Whitt, Burnette, and Lowe families as they struggled to make a living, at times some of them subsisting on biscuits and molasses three meals a day. It follows Mike as he struggled through an admittedly underwhelming scholastic career marked by a period of experimentation and confusion. To break the deadlock, Mike joined the Cold War Navy in a hitch that spanned Jimmie Carter's Iran Hostage Crisis and Ronald Reagan's Beirut Peacekeeping Operation, a hitch that also exposed him to the technologies around which his professional career would later revolve, morphing into an improbable engineering career in which he became a Program and Profit Center Manager for the fifth largest electrical engineering firm in the U.S., an author of a best-selling engineering book and a multitude of technical manuals, engineering standards, and magazine articles. In short, this is the story of a life that spanned a remarkable time in human history, a time in which change became the new normal, in which the improbable (or impossible) became reality. In the end, Mike provides an inspiring perspective into how important it is to be optimistic, to never quit, and to take nothing for granted.
This book is the story of Mike, a person born into a time of unquestioned white privilege in south, in Western North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, and yet a time of innocence, hope and optimism for the future... a time of transition from the practices of centuries past, with chamber pots, outhouses, and bartering through telephone party lines, televisions with rabbit ears, and on into the realm of the cell phone and internet. It tells the story of the Whitt, Burnette, and Lowe families as they struggled to make a living, at times some of them subsisting on biscuits and molasses three meals a day. It follows Mike as he struggled through an admittedly underwhelming scholastic career marked by a period of experimentation and confusion. To break the deadlock, Mike joined the Cold War Navy in a hitch that spanned Jimmie Carter's Iran Hostage Crisis and Ronald Reagan's Beirut Peacekeeping Operation, a hitch that also exposed him to the technologies around which his professional career would later revolve, morphing into an improbable engineering career in which he became a Program and Profit Center Manager for the fifth largest electrical engineering firm in the U.S., an author of a best-selling engineering book and a multitude of technical manuals, engineering standards, and magazine articles. In short, this is the story of a life that spanned a remarkable time in human history, a time in which change became the new normal, in which the improbable (or impossible) became reality. In the end, Mike provides an inspiring perspective into how important it is to be optimistic, to never quit, and to take nothing for granted.