Middle Man - 32 Key influences

32.1 My church and religion were the core of my social life

I attended church at least three times a week, usually more, throughout my entire childhood. Church was the center of everything we did, including my social life which was not possible without the friends whose families also attended church as regularly as we did.

But church-going was far more than a simple act of ritualistic observance. The religious instruction I underwent became central to how I think about myself and others, how I evaluate decisions about the present and the future, and although my beliefs have broadened over time, there is no doubt that religion continues to play an essential role in everything I do.

32.2 The approachability of everything and everyone in a small town

I was born at the Neillsville Memorial Hospital, and I graduated from the Neillsville High School. Not many people in America can say they were born and raised in the same location. My family moved a few times before I entered kindergarten. We lived briefly in Eau Claire, about fifty miles to the northwest, and then Granton, a small town a few miles away, but after I turned five and continuing till the year I left for college, my world was a radius of a few miles. Nearly all the children in my kindergarten class turned into teenagers and graduated with me twelve years later – in the same building. Now almost fifty years later many of them are still in Neillsville.

The stable land of my childhood must seem like a foreign country to most Americans today, who routinely find themselves in different schools, often in different states several times before adulthood. My own children have been through a total of five or six schools by now and will probably see a few more before they leave home. In the urban community where we live now, most of the kids have a sense of stability, having grown up in the area, but even then the multiple elementary schools and the size of the population make it impossible to know more than a fraction of the other kids. My entire school class was about one hundred, so we knew everyone exceptionally well, and altogether – counting teachers and faculty – the entire school may have been around one thousand, in a city of under three thousand, so although we may not have known everyone by name, it was certainly possible to know everyone indirectly. It was a microcosm of the whole world, and I learned lessons that were good training for later.

32.3 The shock of multiple childhood hospitalizations gave me an early sense of responsibility

Adults treat sick children with so much special care and affection that, today, my memories of hospitalization are more full of happy feelings of being the center of attention rather than any pain or suffering from long episodes in the hospital. But along with the various procedures I endured, I developed a sense that I was unique and that my life’s purpose was different than others. When my later years’ failures threw reality at me, I developed an appreciation for health and life that I think was harder for others to understand.

32.4 The luck of the emerging computer industry

The invention of the microprocessor and the untold numbers of blessings that it brought gave me something that would have been much more difficult in another society or in an economy without the vibrant growth made possible by a new industry. I was able to develop a proficiency, largely self-taught in an era when it was still possible to learn useful, employable skills in an industry that made me valuable and employable beyond the dreams of others like me who hadn’t been fortunate enough to be born in the excitement of the early computer revolution. Without computers, it’s hard to imagine how I could have enjoyed the wealth of amazing experiences I’ve had.