I started college in the fall of 1994 at the University of California Santa Cruz. My major would be the “3/2 Dual Degree Engineering Program.” That is, three years at Santa Cruz working towards a humanities degree, followed by two years at Berkeley working towards an engineering degree.
In high school chemistry class the spring before college, my friend Heather asked about my choice of college. She genuinely wondered if Santa Cruz would be a good fit for me. In describing UC Santa Cruz, she used the word “liberal” in a critical sense. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond because I didn’t know what that word meant, and didn’t have the humility to ask. I was 17. The web didn’t exist then—not in my hometown anyway—and no one in my circle talked about politics (that I can remember), except I suppose Heather in this one case. She was trying to tell me something…but as sometimes happens, I didn’t listen.
For the most part, I grew up in a small tourist town: people drank, skied, boarded, boated, and played sports. School was important, but recreation often took precedence.
My view of the outside world was primarily through cable TV—100 or so channels including my favorites: HBO, ESPN, MTV, and VH1. The idea of a politically-biased TV show didn’t exist—at least not in my 17-year old mind.
Prior to 1992, before she moved away for college, my sister would drive us home from high school. Upon arriving at home, one of us would call, “First TV!” This established the order of TV for the afternoon—taking 30 minute turns, with options to swap and trade for additional 30 minute extensions for favorite hour-long shows. She watched Oprah, Donahue, Jerry Springer and others. During her turn, I shot hoops in the driveway or did a loop around the meadow on my bike.
Other than nightly news and the local paper, my dad had no noticeable interest in politics. On TV, he usually watched baseball, football, or SportsCenter while eating popcorn and sipping beer or soda. He was a San Francisco 49ers and Giants fan. Dad was mostly focused on work, fun, and sports.
Of course, I had known about the protests and counterculture of the 1960s—my dad graduated from Cal in 1969, during the height of the protest and civil rights movements there. In learning of this, people would ask him, “What was it like?” I always listened intently, but knew he didn’t have much to say about it. He was too busy for protests—most likely on his way to class or work. Occasionally, the protesters would block his way. He would walk through or around them—sometimes unable to reach class.
(A few times during his life he said to me “I hate intellectuals.” I wasn’t certain what he meant by this, but it was clear that he had no interest in talking about intellectual stuff).
Throughout his high school years, he mowed lawns to save up for college. In college, he washed dishes at sorority houses to pay his way. He never had enough time to study, but he was driven. His goal was dental school, but with a C-grade point average in psychology, he had been waitlisted at the dental schools that he had applied to.
Prior to graduation—as an insurance policy to avoid the draft—he enlisted in the Air Force, but two days before his scheduled departure date for basic training, he received a call from UCLA dental school. Students were dropping out and joining “the movement.'‘ Instead of fighting in Vietnam, he attended dental school, followed by orthodontic school at UC San Francisco. Even more fortunate for me, he met my mom in LA.
Now it was my turn. During my last semester of high school, we toured UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz. Davis seemed hot and boring. Santa Cruz on the other hand had surf and mountain biking.
Like Oxford, UCSC is made up of multiple colleges which double as residence halls. UCSC had eight colleges in 1994. If I attended there, I would have to choose one.
On a rainy spring day, my dad and I toured the eight colleges of UC Santa Cruz. I was somewhat prepared for it to be different as I had been told by some family friends that UCSC was the “lesbian capital of America,” but I was struck by the language that welcomed us. Except for the name of the college, each tour opened with the same lines: “Welcome to Kresge College. We’re a lesbian-queer-bisexual-transgender-inclusive college.” My dad and I listened politely; we inquired about the curriculum and followed along with the tours.
I wasn’t excited. It was gray and raining. The dorms seemed dark and sullen—from the sixties, seventies and eighties. Of the eight colleges at UC Santa Cruz, the newest one seemed acceptable—College Eight. Months later I would learn its nickname—College Straight.
I pondered my options. The ag school—UC Davis. The commuter school—UC San Diego. Or this Dual Degree Program starting at UC Santa Cruz and finishing at Berkeley. I told my dad that it would be Davis, unless I was accepted at College Eight. A month later I was.
To make a very long story short, I attended Santa Cruz, then Berkeley and graduated. After a month long tour of Europe in the winter of 2000, I started work; living in an apartment in Richmond, 30 minutes from the Berkeley campus.
Within a year after graduation, it was clear that I was suffering from work-induced stress. I was not well-equipped for the intense corporate culture of “Silicon Valley.” Specifically, I had no exercise routine, nor much of a social life outside of work.
Five days a week, I woke up, drove to work, came home, plugged in my dial-up modem and ate dinner. On the weekends, I occasionally went mountain biking with co-workers or hiking with friends. The surf was now too far.
In the summer of 2000, for a period of months I worked 12-hour days and weekends; I was under pressure to manufacture a six-axis robotic welding machine that had only been built once before—the prototype build. There were no assembly instructions and the hundred or so engineering drawings given to me were in 2D-Autocad format. I barely knew what this thing looked like, let alone how to build it. I was the project manager of a 12-person, half-million dollar project only a few months into my engineering career. I had never run a meeting before this.
During my first few days on the project, before I understood the complexity of the task, I made a commitment to the customer—Duke Energy from South Carolina—to deliver on a specific day in four months time. A half dozen of their team would fly out for acceptance testing. Even their wives would accompany them as part of a work/pleasure trip to San Francisco. I felt obligated to deliver a fully operational system on-time. On top of this, I would later find out that the project had been given to me two months behind schedule. Long-lead parts were expedited. Some of the longest-lead items (16-weeks) were coming from NSK in Japan. Other long-lead items required careful “matched machining” (i.e. the tolerances of two mating parts being so tight they were aligned to each other within the CNC machine and then milled at the same time). Not a huge deal, but I didn’t know which parts required matched machining and couldn’t figure it out myself because my vacuous engineering drawing class at UCSC didn’t teach geometrical dimensioning and tolerancing, so I relied on an engineer named Mark to help me.1 This was embarrassing however, since Mark didn’t have a college degree, whereas I had graduated from the top public engineering university in America.
As an engineering student at Cal, I was used to seven-day work weeks, but this—a real engineering job—was completely different. Instead of a bike commute, I now had a short car commute. Instead of a house full of student roommates, I was living by myself. Instead of easy access to the Berkeley hills for hiking, I found myself limited to a short walking path near my apartment.
I was living next to a freeway again. On my side of the freeway, the road leading to my apartment was called Marina Bay Parkway; on the other side it was called South 23rd St. I was living a mile from the ghetto.
Shopping at the grocery stores in Richmond wasn’t anything like the Whole Foods in Berkeley. “Scoot forward playboy!” was the command another shopper issued to me one evening. Apparently I and another shopper were blocking the aisle. I held my ground, thinking over the meaning of “playboy.” Fortunately the other shopper, moved her cart to let the man pass.
The marina near my apartment was a superfund site—apparently contaminated with DDT. Walking a little farther down the marina path, I found an old, abandoned factory. This had been the site of American’s most productive World War II shipyards.23 I was living in the aftermath of the World War II boom and bust.
Similarly in Santa Cruz, I had been living in the aftermath of the Sixties.
And now the economy was booming again. Google was months old. Yahoo stock had doubled in the last month of 1999. Match.com opened up amazing opportunities for engineers like me to date women all over the Bay Area. The dot-com bubble was about to pop. 9/11 was lurking just around the corner.
I tried to focus on work, but I was losing my focus.
I worked in a group of twenty-somethings, at a startup that had been starting up 15 years. We were told; “IPO is just around the corner.” Fashionable were PDAs and various music sticks (the iPod hadn’t yet been released). 50% of our business was focused on one customer—Lucent Technologies fiber optic production based in Atlanta, Georgia
Most of Silicon Valley was pretty much unknown to me—just freeway exits between Santa Cruz and Berkeley. My co-workers brought back stories from Applied Materials, Novellus, KLA-Tencor, and SpeedFam. I was curious about these places and listened intently as they shared their stories.
Apple wasn’t highly thought of. Pixar had just moved from Richmond to Emeryville. SemiconWest was the big show of the year. The foundation of Silicon Valley, as we know it today, was still being poured.
The stress was incredible. Sometimes I wouldn’t sleep the entire night. Once I didn’t sleep for two nights in a row. Halfway through the third night I called my dad and told him I was worried I wasn’t going to sleep for a third night in a row. I also told him of these painful pin-like pricks that randomly stung all around my body about every 30 to 60 seconds. He recommended I drive to the emergency room and tell them what as happening. So I did. They gave me some sleeping pills and recommended I see a doctor the next day. The next day the doctor asked if I was stressed from work. I said, “Yes!” He gave me some simple advice: work less, exercise more.
One of my Match.com dates had given me an idea. She had joined a triathlon team in Atherton—Team Sheeper Multisport. Not wanting to be outdone, I started working out with the Cal Triathlon and Cal Cycling teams. Being a public college, Cal welcomed the public to join their club-sport teams. Leaving work around 4pm a few times a week, I would drive over to the Berkeley campus and enjoy these workouts: my favorites being the hill cycling workout with the Cal Cycling team and the open water swim at Lake Anza with the triathlon club. For months, I trained and raced in local triathlons almost every weekend. It helped.
A few months earlier I had stopped drinking, started attending Al-Anon meetings and spoke with a therapist weekly. All of this was life changing. Maybe even a lifeline.
A few months later I would find myself out of a job.
I had delivered the robotic welder on-time followed by much praise, but shortly thereafter, I communicated to my manager that I didn’t like the job. He offered me more money, but I turned it down. No amount of money would keep me. When the dot-com bubble burst in the summer of 2001, I was the first to be laid-off.
I spent the next month or two pondering my options and looking for a job.
Walking into the corporate world, I had been excited, but far from prepared. I lacked some fundamental living skills.
Certainly I can’t blame this lack of preparation on my college education, but looking back now, the incentives within higher education and the ideologies at my undergraduate institutions were lacking. Did they do a good job preparing me for corporate life? In some ways yes, in other ways probably not.
At UCSC I was indoctrinated in various alternative viewpoints. This was impossible to avoid even though I mostly associated with students from Orange County, Fresno, Sacramento, Ventura and San Diego. We were surfers. To be seen as captured by the “hippies” was an insult.
At Santa Cruz my Dual Degree Program advisor proudly stated that she viewed me, and all of us in the Program as “infiltrators.” We would “infiltrate” the corporate world with our newly acquired views. As usual I nodded politely and kept my mouth shut.
UC Santa Cruz was actually a much more stressful and challenging environment than UC Berkeley. The indoctrination—though barely perceivable in my economics, science, engineering and mathematics classes—was overwhelmingly in the general culture of the university.
I was fortunate though. My Dual Degree Program had almost no humanities requirements outside of my econ major. I took one philosophy class in which we studied Plato, Kant and other prominent philosophers. I took one writing class—Vietnam-War themed—taught by a chain-smoking vet named Dan who I really liked. He was even a real writer. For my final paper in that class I wrote about the War as portrayed in film. I interviewed vets at the VA, asking them questions about various Vietnam War films. “The war scenes in Forest Gump were the most realistic” they said.
The only “brainwashing course” I took was the College Eight Core Class, which, except for its environmentalist bent, seemed to have little effect on me. I wrote my final paper on the benefits of social Darwinism, contradicting the lessons taught in the class. I was 18. It was obvious based on her hand-written comments that she was unhappy with my viewpoint.
But even though I faced little direct indoctrination by professors, I indirectly absorbed this “alternative view” through my peers and from the community. The student body was a powerful force and actually caused me to change my beliefs, habits and identity. I even reasoned that studying electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley would be a poor choice because it lacked “balance and harmony with nature.” I reasoned that civil/environmental engineering would be a better fit, but finally, like many of my Dual Degree peers, I settled on mechanical engineering—partly to benefit from greater strength in numbers.
Of all the beliefs at Santa Cruz, the environmentalist concept of sustainability had the most impact on me. I even created my own class on this topic—Sustainable Agricultural Practices in South America. Much of my thinking was speculative—we were living beyond Earth’s carrying capacity and we were all going to die. “Look what happened to the Mayans,” I reasoned. Depressing.
There were other ideologies that worked heavily on me at Santa Cruz: vegetarianism/veganism, New Age spiritual and feminism. But almost none came directly to me through faculty and staff. Almost all of it was through my peers. The need to fit-in impacted me greatly.
After three years in Santa Cruz, I sort of gave up on social life; I buckled down at Berkeley and focused on graduating.
Berkeley engineering was a challenge; probably more challenging than it needed to be. But after graduation even bigger challenges would emerge.
This sketch was inspired by a simple thought: during my first year after college, while working for this company in Richmond, I had no fitness identity that was compatible with corporate-city life. I really didn’t understand the importance of exercise in helping me sleep and deal with stress. Even though I grew up doing all kinds of outdoor sports, I didn’t really know how to exercise during my work week, and I certainly didn’t choose a place of residence where I was inspired to run or ride my bike.
This breakdown that I had at age 24, in which I didn’t sleep for two and an half nights, inspired me find ways to adapt to city life. I made exercise a priority. I started to teach myself how to swim freestyle, breast, back, and butterfly in that condo complex swimming pool there in Richmond. I signed up for an embarrassing number of triathlons the following year and went overboard with my training for a while, but eventually settled in on a healthy routine.
I feel fortunate to have learned those lessons early in my career. I’m now 47 and exercise is a huge part of my life. In fact, more than anything, exercise is what inspired me to start this Substack. Before I came up with the name Trim to Truth I was planning on calling this Substack “Postive Trimming.”
Over the next few weeks I’ll share with you may favorite workouts, how I integrate exercise into my life, and how exercise keeps me feeling positive. Exercise creates positive emotions and those positive emotions inspire more exercise.
All Berkeley mechanical engineering students take a rigorous engineering drawing class, but not me. I took a poor substitute at UCSC which taught me almost nothing. Of all the classes I took in college, this was the one class I now needed most.
Richmond played a significant and nationally recognized part in the World War II home front. The four Richmond shipyards produced 747 ships, more than any other shipyard complex in the country. Richmond was also home to over 56 different war industries, more than any other city of its size in the United States. The city grew from less than 24,000 people in 1940 to nearly 100,000 people by 1943, overwhelming the available housing, roads, schools, businesses and community services. At the same time, Executive Order 9066 forcibly removed Japanese and Japanese-American residents from the area, disrupting Richmond’s thriving cut-flower industry. The war truly touched every aspect of civilian life on the home front. Through historic structures, museum collections, interpretive exhibits, and programs, the park tells the diverse and fascinating story of the WWII home front.
See here for a history of Richmond, CA. Excerpts below.
World War II and the Shipyards (1940-1945) - The next chapter was by far the most dramatic and earth-shaking in Richmond's history. World War II began, and the Kaiser Richmond Shipyards, one of the biggest wartime shipbuilding operations on the West Coast, sprang up on Richmond's South Shoreline in January 1941. The result was explosive growth, large scale in-migration of workers, a "boomtown" atmosphere, and profound long-term effects on the City. The shipyards covered much of the vacant industrial land in the South Shoreline harbor area, requiring extensive additional tideland filling. Richmond's population increased dramatically from 23,600 in 1940 to over 93,700 in 1943 as tens of thousands of new residents, White and Black, migrated from the economically depressed South and Southwest to work in the shipyards. Much of the new population was housed in temporary structures. Dormitories, demountable houses, and apartment buildings were built; more than 60,000 persons lived in public housing. Many "temporary" housing units remain today.
Postwar Adjustment (1945-1960) - At the end of the war, the shipyards closed in 1945 and a far-reaching readjustment began. Industrial production rapidly declined and the population decreased steadily from 101,500 persons in 1947 (a special census count) to 71,900 in 1960. A number of new industries moved in to occupy vacated shipyard structures. Among them were Kaiser Aircraft, Garwood, Butler, Southwest Welding, Pacific Vegetable Oil, United Heckathorn, and the first of the major warehousing operations, Ford Parts Depot and International Harvester. […]
Richmond - 1960 to 1995 - Four major developments since 1960 -- Marina Bay, Hilltop Shopping Center, the new Knox Freeway, and the Richmond Parkway -- have transformed Richmond's geography as well as its economy. Starting in the mid-1970s the Harbour Redevelopment Project on the city's South Shoreline led to the transformation of the old Inner Harbor Basin (the site of the wartime shipyards) into the Marina Bay development
Great story 👍