<Begin Segment 19>
SY: So once you came back, or once you decided not to become a chick sexor anymore, what did you do?
AM: I saw an ad in the L.A. Times that said technical illustrator, upside down. What is it? So I went to check it out, and I liked it. But I didn't know what, if I could do it or not. Then I remembered that I had some samples from Lincoln Junior High School from my drafting class, and I managed to find it and I looked at it, I said I could do it. I could do this. And so I went to school for one semester, went back to sexing chickens, came back and there was a neighborhood Catalog and Advertising that did aerospace work that was hiring. So I wanted to know how much more schooling I needed before I could get a job, and they asked me to come back, come to work on Monday.
SY: That's, so you had how much training in this?
AM: Hardly... [laughs] But they liked my portfolio.
SY: And your portfolio was from junior high school, plus you took a course.
AM: No. No, I didn't have any technical illustration from junior high school. That was just a drafting. But you could tell by the neatness of the work I have kept for drafting, technical illustration in the field I went to is a scale drawing, disassembly sequence, and... well, let me put it this way. When a real commercial artist does the work, it's real nice. Me, not being a real commercial artist but a very beginning illustrator, my work is more kind of flat. But it had to be in proper disassembly sequence so that when the people out in the field have to take an equipment apart, it has to be accurate or it won't work. And that's where I came in. I could read the blueprint properly and if somebody drew it with an improper sequence I could spot it. And so I started going like this. I started checking the art of the people who were in the field way ahead of me.
SY: So it's a sort of a visual, it's an ability that's kind of an innate ability to --
AM: I guess.
SY: -- see things in their proper perspective?
AM: And proper sequence.
SY: Sequence. So did you actually have to draw, I mean, take something and then draw it out? Is that the...
AM: Well we, you start, well, there's two ways. If you're out in the field, like I went to Mobile, Alabama, to take a motor apart, we had to draw our own blueprint so that we could come back and draw it in disassembly sequence. So you have to be able to spot it. That's where a checker came in, comes in. And before that drawing reaches a certain point I have to show them that these things are not in the proper sequence, so that's where I lucked out and had the ability to do that. It just, I guess there's some things, some jobs that I happened to fit it. Not to say, not to brag or anything, but that's, that's where I found out I fit.
SY: Amazing.
<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.