The NEB&W Club Coordinator

Well, John, you work full-time for the club. How did that happen? In 1989, I was hired by the Student Union to work here, because at that point we opened the layout to the public on a weekly basis. And we a year earlier had gone out to San Diego to see how they had managed to do a museum-type open house and at the same time a volunteer club. So we based it on that model. So, well, what are your jobs? Are you kind of a coordinator, the director, or what do you... Yeah, I mean, my job is to work on the model and teach new members how to model, to have the materials available and the research. So someone says, "How do I do something?" I can have some idea, you know, what projects need to be done, how to do it if I know, or who to go talk to if I don't know, and kind of oversee that. And of course the administration of the financial aspect of it and the publicity and... Everything. So you work for the university. I work technically for the Student Union, which is under the university, but the Student Union in turn is run by the students, independent. They direct that, it's like a $9 million operation. The Student Union? Student Union, yeah. Wow. So all students here are my boss. Oh, don't you want to say anything to 'em? You're gonna get fired today, or... I'll take a raise. John, you were doing essentially the same thing before. Now you're getting paid for it. That probably is a dream job for you because you've devoted so much of your life to this club. Yeah, I mean, in the past it was a full-time volunteer job, and at the same time I was trying to have an income, and so I needed another job for that. So it was very hectic, and this is a little bit less hectic. Well, the club has a hobby shop, and are you still operating that, and how does that work? We started off with essentially a gift shop, and we found that the volume of visitors wasn't enough to sustain that, but we started moving into serious hobby items, and we tried a mail operation, and then now we're kind of, since it hasn't worked too well, we're working into trying to sell information via the books that we've done. I think that we're doing something significant. We're doing something that's enjoyable, which is the main driving force, but at the same time, I think we're doing something very significant. And as I've thought about it, this is probably the most significant thing I can do with my life. I'm here, there's space. I seem to have some skills in doing some of the things that need to be done. An understatement. And so I think that this is what I've decided that I want to do. This is your life's calling, in other words, your vocation. Yeah, and this is a long answer, but so Arthur Sullivan on his deathbed said, "A cobbler should stick to his own," which meant that he should have been doing what he wanted to. In all his life, he wanted to compose serious music, but he wound up doing stuff with Gilbert, writing operettas, and then the stuff that survived is the operettas, and no one pays attention to his serious music. And so a model railroad is kind of a trivial thing to some people, but I don't want to, you know, look back and say, "Gee, I should have been doing this all along."