MY  LIFE  AS  A  TRAFFIC  CONE

I’m sure that many of you consider traffic cones to be just pieces of some orange plastic material thrown up when and where someone thinks they are necessary. Well, the truth is, like any item approved for use on our public highways and streets, they must conform to strict Department of Transportation (DOT) specifications.

What few people are aware of is that in order to meet those requirements, new traffic cones are required to attend rigorous classes to learn exactly what’s expected of them and to properly prepare them for their important and dangerous profession.

Recently I was priviliged to be invited to sit in on a ceremony for graduating cones and here on my blog I’ve reprinted the commencement address from one of the oldest and most decorated cones to those young cones headed out on their road to service and safety

(It seemed to me that much of the advice he delivered might also apply to young humans too)

 

GEOSAFARI® CD-ROMS (1995)

GEOSAFARI® CD-ROM  (1995)

by EDUCATIONAL INSIGHTS

Original GeoSafari

The GeoSafari CD-ROM series was based on the original multiple award-winning 'plastic/electronic' GeoSafari introduced in 1987. It was an extraordinary educational experience and was hugely successful in the school and specialty educational store market. I believe it sold over a million copies. My group's challenge was to transform this experience into the new multi-media CD-ROM format, adding all the digital features it offered: voice, animations, video, record-keeping and much more: Simply put, we wanted to bring GeoSafari into the coming digital age.

We  created four GeoSafari CD-ROM titles. GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY, SCIENCE and ANIMALS. To give you an idea of the fun, learning and gameplay here is an ANIMALS game called 'Animal Sound-Off'. Now, GeoSafari was designed for ages 8 and up, as reading was required for almost every game, but as you'll see here Stephanie Ortiz, age 5, found a game where reading wasn't required and got pretty good at it. In this game she's playing against her older brother Jasson, age 22, who has never seen the game before and she's 'showing him the ropes'....

Another note: When Stephanie is trying to tell Jasson that the right answer is 'the Penguin...the Penguin' it's because she can't read yet and when she can, she'll not only see the written name but find that for every entry in every game there is a full glossary page with great information about that entry. Chances are she'll never forget the Kookaburra again. And probably neither will you.

Next I've picked out a couple of questions from three (of fifteen total) of the Animal games, NAME THAT BIRD CALL, SHARKS and SKULLS to give you an idea of the various formats, playpatterns and 'payoffs' we built into all our GeoSafari titles.

Ok.Hopefully that will give you some idea of the fun and learning in the GeoSafari CD-ROM series. I didn't even mention the educational 'GeoFacts' that popped up for every question or the medals you earned in your medal case if you answered all the questions in a game correctly on the first try or the digital trophy you earned if you completed all the games  perfectly. And most importantly, GeoSafari was designed to be played by families as well as individuals. The 'answer clock' could be set for shorter times to 'handicap' older players. Learning and fun (for everyone) was guaranteed with the GeoSafari CD-ROMs.

Next I've selected a couple of questions each from the SCIENCE, HISTORY and GEOGRAPHY titles to give you just a small taste of the content, gameplay and fun we've included.

GEOSAFARI CD-ROM SERIES: THE STORY

The Original GeoSafari

“It was the best of jobs, it was the worst of jobs”….that’s the way I felt trying to put together the product that was to become the award winning GeoSafari CD-ROM series. You see, this was the early days of the CD-ROM revolution and what I didn’t realize was that while the original plastic GeoSafari was a great, great product and a huge hit, Educational Insights’ markets were the schools and ‘specialty’ toy and education stores….not the mass market (Toys R US)… and not digital products at all. So while some schools had Apple computers at this time (1991), a pitiful few had CD-ROMS attached to them. The only way to make a product like this successful was to get it into the mass market which meant Apple and Microsoft Windows versions available at Best Buy, Comp USA and other mass market retailers… and this just wasn’t anywhere near Educational Insights’ 'comfort zone'.

So although I had a ‘go-ahead’ to develop the CD-ROM, it was with a certain shall I say, lack of support, or at least apprehension from the company. And rather than start directly on the project, I was directed to work on other, non-digital products while the CD-ROM project was ‘discussed’. A year was lost.

Now I had a vision of what the game would look and feel like and the technology was around so that we could have a human voice talking to to kids by their own name as they played. I also knew that in a ‘general education’ game like GeoSafari, we’d probably have to be telling kids that their answers were wrong more than once before they got it right. I needed a voice that could tell you that you were mistaken without turning you off, one that could actually encourage you to try again. So one day I’m driving on the 405 Freeway when a song comes on the radio by Richie Havens. Richie Havens! Yes! Now Richie and I go way back. We’re both Brooklyn boys and every so often our paths would cross on something amazing. The previous time was in 1981 when we helped our mutual friend Capt. Michael Sandlofer rescue Physty, a baby sperm whale that came ashore in New York. (You can read about this below in the blog entry PHYSTY and even see Jimmy Callanan’s great movie there). But I digress. 

I found Richie’s agent in NYC and flew in to see if he’d be willing to be the voice of GeoSafari. I honestly didn’t know if he’d even remember me but when he walked into the room he gave me the biggest bear hug and smile….”Stanley, Stanley, Stanley every ten years or so you come into my life with something wonderful….” I was so happy. Richie 

Richie Havens, R.I. P.

loved the GeoSafari idea even though his part was initially to be in the recording booth for hours on end recording thousands of kids names and other comments and questions for the game, while back in California we were assembling all the programming elements and photos, animations and videos that would make up the total experience. That was still more than a year away.

Lots of people know Richie from his legendary Woodstock performance and from his great music but he always was doing something positive for kids and even had started his own environmental group called the NATURAL GUARD in Connecticut. 

One anecdote: I had Richie’s office send me a cassette of some of Richie’s commercial ‘voice-overs’ to play for my boss and owner of the company (it was a family-owned company) Bert Cutler. I expected him to love my selection and see how great Richie’s voice could be for GeoSafari. His response? “It’s terrible! You can’t even understand what he says.” and he walked away. We were stunned. My team members asked me what we were gonna do now. “****-him” I said. He’s just wrong. We’re using Richie.” That’s all I knew. Fortunately Bert’s son, Jay, the VP, knew of Richie and maybe he convinced his dad of his greatness. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I would have quit if I couldn’t have used Richie. His voice was the glue that held GeoSafari together and also made it beautiful.

Look. I made many, many mistakes in putting together GeoSafari, It was a lot harder than I thought it would be and maybe I should have made the games simpler. I also initially put all the subjects on one CD-ROM (technically easy but a big marketing mistake) but maybe mistakes are the price you pay for trying to do something great. I certainly paid ‘em. My team Marcia Shank, Pat May, Denise Heyl, Erin Rosenthal, Krista Santacroce, David Liebowitz, Dennis Kerr and many  others were so committed to the product that they worked endless hours on it.

Finally we had working demos: GeoSafari Geography, History, Science and Animals. One thing I didn’t know but soon learned was that Educational Insights now wanted to become a public company and to do that successfully, you had to convince the Wall Street types that your company had a ‘future in the future’. So all of a sudden these well-dressed young business men were paraded into my little basement area to see our entry in the new digital world. One look at our rag-tag team and they were all skeptical. “Why do you think you can put out a product that can compete with Electronic Arts?” they all asked, in one way or another.

“Well, I don’t know if we can.” I answered, “let’s let you play GeoSafari and see what you think, OK?” “Oh and, by the way, we had Richie Havens record over 2000, names so GeoSafari will talk to the kids by their name. Lets try it, what’s your name?" The Wall Street guy answered “Ahmed”, as he turned around smirking to his cohorts, sure that that name wouldn’t be in our game. “Gee. I don’t know…..until I clicked on it and Richie’s beautiful voice rang out with “Ahmed, Is that you? Click on OK to use this name.” By this time his mouth was open and as we played the game and Richie would say things like “Ahmed, that’s three right in a row, keep it up” or “no, that’s not it but don’t worry, you still get two more tries.” We had ‘em. They all left impressed and the IPO was a success. And so was our project. We got great reviews and were even featured on ABC’s ‘Good Morning America”.

But things were changing. The 'world wide web' was just becoming popular and was replacing CD-ROM sales just by it’s scope and uniqueness. Also Educational Insights was sold to a bigger educational company, Learning Resources and that was pretty much the end of the line for me and for a digital version of GeoSafari.

One more thing I want to mention. GeoSafari CD-ROM was never only for kids. It’s most beautiful use was when families got together to play. It did more than teach you about Gila Monsters or who Emma Lazarus was. It brought families together.

And when I finally got to show Richie Havens the final product, after he played with it for awhile he said to me, and I quote, “I think this is the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

Well, It’s 25 years later and since our 1995 discs don’t play on current computers this was all ancient history and resumé material for me until just recently. I now have a 5 year-old running around my house and I realized I’d like to see if an obsolete computer could be ‘hacked’ so that she might try the GeoSafari CD-ROM experience. I was curious. My friend and engineer Pat May (who was part of the original design team) was able to find a vintage Mac and with some creative work-arounds install an obsolete operating system and boom! there was GeoSafari again. You’ll see Stephanie’s reaction in the blog. If nothing else comes of this I’ll have given her a valuable gift that has already made her (and her friends) smarter and will continue to do so in a most enjoyable way.

I’ve also drafted an e-mail to the heads of Educational Insights and Learning Resources to let them know about my blog and, while it’s only my opinion, I think a modern web version of their GeoSafari franchise would be both a wonderful educational experience and a profitable venture, far into our digital future. What do you think?

SLEETMUTE 

THE LEDGE

The Eskimos never hunted for sport. They hunted to eat; for subsistence. There were no 'trophys' in any eskimo cabin. Nonetheless they were subject to the State hunting laws. They said the Game Wardens occasionally fly over and if they’re caught hunting out-of-season they were in big trouble.

It was late March. Many families in the village had run out of meat. Some men had illegally killed a moose an hour or so away from the village and hid and camouflaged it because they didn’t want to transport it in daylight. This moose would be enough meat for the whole village until the salmon returned. 

After dark, two snowmobiles set out to retrieve the moose. Jack Egnaty, a cautious and competent Eskimo drove the first and for some reason I was selected to drive the second. We crossed the frozen river and went up a stream valley at speed. It was dark and only the snowmobile’s headlights lit our path. We were going faster than I felt comfortable going but I was determined not to fall behind or, God forbid, get lost again. I stayed close behind. The valley narrowed and the walls got steeper and soon we were zipping along a narrow ledge, not much wider than the snowmobile’s track and we’re 30 feet above the valley floor. The trail twisted and turned. Jack didn’t slow down and I stayed right on his ass. He was the Eskimo. He knew where we are going and why we’re on that ledge and why the hell we have to be going so fast.

Then, without warning, Jack peels off the ledge, racing furiously down the steep slope and into the valley. I’m right behind. Maybe the trail was out ahead. We zip along the frozen stream bed for a little while and then Jack guns his snowmobile up the slope, having enough momentum to JUST make it back to the ledge. My heart’s in my mouth as I climbed behind him, barely thinking of not making it up to the trail and falling backwards, snowmobile and all into the valley. I made it.

We sped along the ledge for another ten minutes or so and then Wham! Jack’s banking into the valley again and we repeat the whole harrowing sequence. Finally we’re back on the ledge. I’m covered with sweat. Jack stops his snowmobile. He gets off and walks back. He looks at me strangely and says, “When I fall off the trail you don’t have to follow me."

Reprinted from my book 'SLEETMUTE, A true story of Alaska' available on Amazon, Apple iBooks and other fine booksellers 

Today the school in Sleetmute is named after Jack Egnaty.

BATTERY MAKERS

What do Elon Musk and this fine young lad have in common? Right! They're both owners 

of a Battery Making Factory. Here's Elon's...

And here's the fine young lad's

   Ok, Ok, admittedly one is a giga-factory and the other is, well, I guess 'nano' in size, but still it's great to remember the good old days, before all those pesky safety and compliance 

regulations and words like 'hazmat' came into the vocabulary and kids could still 'roll their 

own' batteries.

 On the other hand maybe that fine young lad WAS Elon Musk.

   

APPLAUSE

1971

    After my year in Sleetmute, Alaska I was transferred to Hawaii where I worked as the designer of the Hawaii Curriculum Center. 

    The Center was a joint venture of the University of Hawaii’s School of Education and the State Department of Education. The mission: to develop creative educational materials specifically for the children of the State of Hawaii.

    This was actually my first design job, and while I had a degree in Industrial Design, I really had no experience in actually designing anything. But the Center was a wonderful place, full of very smart educators and psychologists totally dedicated to creating great new ideas for the classroom. I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time but  the products we were developing were based on 'peer-teaching' (kids learning from each other using our materials) were what we’d call ‘interactive’ today.

    One of my jobs was to take some rough prototype and make it so it looked and worked better. ‘Classroom management’ was also a big deal and if I could make it easier for the teacher to keep things together, I tried to incorporate that into the design. One of my most interesting experiences was with a product called PURPOSEFUL WRITING.

    PURPOSEFUL WRITING was a communication game where two kids would sit on either side of a divider on the table. There was a pocket on each side with cards that asked each kid to WRITE a message to the other kid and if that other kid could read, understand and do the requested task, the kid who wrote the message was therefore successful and would proceed to the next (more difficult) card.

    I made the divider into colored rainbows, blue on one side, red on the other and the cards had little colored stripes which 
corresponded to the side they were supposed to be on.

    The way things worked at the Center was that my design would be approved, made into a technical specification and bid package and  sent out to the local printers for competitive bids. Eventually a vendor would be selected and production began. We usually made a hundred or so 'prototypes' to test in our pilot schools all over the state. Usually the process took at least a couple of months and
I went on to my next project and pretty much forgot about it.

    Now The University of Hawaii had an Elementary School on its campus and one day, several months later, I happened to be walking by it and when I looked in, there on a table was ‘my’ PURPOSEFUL WRITING game being played by a group of tiny first graders. This was the very first time I saw a product that I had designed being actually used and without thinking I walked into the classroom and just stood there smiling, watching those kids writing, learning and enjoying themselves.

   The teacher, seeing this strange guy just standing there, was concerned and came over to me. “Can I help you?” she asked. Realizing that I had just intruded into her class I apologized and quickly introduced myself and explained that I worked at the Curriculum Center and that I had designed PURPOSEFUL WRITING and had never seen it in action before.

    The teacher smiled and nodded and, addressing the kids said, “Class, this is Stanley Resnicoff and he designed PURPOSEFUL WRITING.”

    These little kids all turned, looked up at me and then started to applaud with hands that were actually too small to make any sounds.

    I teared up. 

FRIENDSHIP

    In 1964 my brother got me a summer job driving a truck for Friendship Dairies. It was a big truck, air brakes and all that stuff and I had to get a special license to drive it. The job? Every night the truck would be loaded up with fifty thousand pounds of farmer cheese, pot cheese and other cheeses and at midnight I would set out from the markets in lower Manhattan and unload different orders at various locations throughout Brooklyn and Queens. I had keys, (many, many keys), to refrigerated lockers or warehouses at all of these locations as they were all closed and abandoned as I made my rounds.

    For the first week on the job I went out with Jimmy, the regular driver, to learn the route and the different things I had to know about each specific delivery. The driving was relatively easy at night, no traffic, but the physical unloading was pretty tough and all the while I kept realizing that I’d be doing this all alone next week.

    So finally it’s my first day, I mean night, on the job. In addition to my normal anxiety of driving and remembering the route and the various peculiarities of each delivery, I had one new big extra thing to worry about.

    It seems that a white cop had shot a black kid in Harlem that day and it had set off sporadic race riots in the city. The word around the market drivers was that there was trouble in Brooklyn and the cops were holding up trucks before they crossed the Williamsburg Bridge until they had five trucks and then they sent them across in a convoy for their safety.

    A CONVOY! Holy Shit! A convoy! My first night on the job and I’m gonna be in a fuckin' convoy. Besides, I’m thinking, what good is a convoy gonna be? All the drivers would be heading in different directions after we left the bridge. Well, I didn’t have much of a choice so I headed to the bridge.

    Midnight. The cops were there and I got on line behind several other trucks, waited and watched as the cops counted off five trucks and waved them across. Finally I was first on line and by chance there’s nobody behind me yet, so I hit the brakes to wait. But no. The cop is waving me across. “What about MY convoy?” I yelled at him. He spread his hands palms out, cocked his head to the side, smirked like only a New York cop can and said “Ya Got Cheese! YA GOT CHEESE! and forcefully waved me on.

    I guess he figured that no rioters would bother with cheese. I hoped he was right as I rumbled on into the dark Brooklyn night.

    He was.

SLEETMUTE

Sleetmute,Alaska 1969  

Page 96

“THE TIN MAN

It was probably January when I decided to move a short distance into an abandoned log cabin right on the riverbank. Now there were two things I didn’t know. First, it was abandoned because it’s too cold right on the river, and if that wasn’t enough, this cabin had been lifted up in a flood and rotated so now its front door faced north. Right into the wind. I didn’t know. I thought it looked good. It was impossible to heat.

That night, with no warning, I got sick. Really sick. I became very weak. I had a fever and I was burning up. I felt terrible and to top it off I had to take a wicked shit.

I can’t claim to have been thinking clearly but the only thing on my mind was to make it to the little outhouse near my previous cabin. It wasn’t far. Maybe 2 football fields away. I already had on two pairs of thermal woven cotton long-johns. I put on sweaters. I got on my parka. I opened the door.

It was brutal. Maybe 40 below. It was 4 am. The moon lit the snow. It was very quiet. I shuffled

ahead, the only thought on my mind was the relief that was waiting for me inside the outhouse. My steps got shorter. I was holding it in. Occasionally I had to stop. The outhouse was only fifty feet away. I thought I could make it. I was wrong.

I lost control. Diarrhea, hot diarrhea blasted from me completely soaking the fabric of my long-johns, enveloping me momentarily in comforting warmth – and then – one second later –everything froze solid.

So now I’m sick, it’s 40 below, I just shit in my pants and I’m immobilized with my legs encased in frozen excrement encrusted long-johns. I couldn’t move. I was the tin man. I quietly started to sob. And then I fell, face first, stiff as a board into the snow. I’m laughing as I write this. I wasn’t laughing then.

I crawled into the empty community center building. I remember it took me a long time to somehow open the door. I crawled behind a cold stove. I got into the fetal position. I fell asleep. I remember hearing kids find me in the morning. I remember them calling their moms.

The next thing I remember is being poked. I’m waking up. It’s dark. I’m in my bed. I’m naked. I’m clean. Something is hurting me. There’s laughing. I open my eyes to see three Eskimo women poking me with willow brush branches. They’re actually prodding me with branches and laughing at me. I was delirious. I remember trying to sweep them away with my arm. “Get the fuck away from me!” They kept laughing and poking. It was like a nightmare, laughing witch-like women torturing me all illuminated by the flickering fire. Mercifully everything finally went black.

The next day I was better. The fever had broken. I was very tired and weak. I remembered the outhouse, and the tin man and the women and the branches. They all seemed very far away. What seemed like one night to me then may have been more. I think those women saved my life.

We never talked about that night.

SLEETMUTE, A True Story of Alaska is available on Amazon, Apple iBooks and other fine booksellers.