OCR Text |
Show §15:5. It was not schizophrenia which launched me in Civil Service, as ,G, a cartographer, and secretary-draftsman in turn, but the shoe-horn of necessity. Once I quit all paying jobs, decided to make my financial way as a freelance writer and artist, but pay for those things is sporadic; we were not too far on the safe side of the depression and, like the haying on the farm, it took all hands to keep the crop coming in. After about a month of freelancing my realistic younger daughter, then about seven, finally summed it up. "We need a regular pay check. This isn't right." "You are the one who complained about your mother not being home when you come home from school. " "I know, " she said. "But it doesn't work out. " I had given up nursing, not because I didn't like it, but because it was still a twenty-hour job. One's family might as well be chucked out the window. War work opened the way for Civil Service, a five-day week with advancement, eight-hour shifts which coincided with school hours and very little left over of their being alone, and the Department of Agriculture, given the job of making mosaic maps for Link Trainers during the war had to develop a new technique. They thought those with art training might fit into working with photographs , which they did. Making an actual photograph of the earth's terrain two hundred miles by six hundred reduced and pieced together from hundreds of scaled down photographs to a map four feet by ten was creative work. I still remember with satisfaction the mosaic map of Bingham Canyon I did |