MY WRITINGS

Captain John Eisenhower took an interest in and helped me improve my grades in Plebe English at West Point. I almost failed the course, and had I done so, I would not have graduated from the Academy.

The part of English I did not get had to do with diagramming sentences; dangling participles, etc. It just did not make sense. The good Captain got me for English Composition and I started doing good and soon recovered from the grades I had received earlier. As had been my experience at the Navy Yard in Bremerton and later in my self-imposed Prep School in loading up with every math course in sight, I went to work to improve my writing ability. I not only succeeded, I actually got to enjoy doing it. Years later it would come in handy.

Let me flash forward to the latter part of my tour at Sandia Laboratories circa 1963. I was paired off with Candy Candelaria to design a computer based database of all AEC owned scientific equipment within the total AEC complex and military installations "including the ships at sea," as Walter Winchell would say. Our design not only generated a current location of the equipment but its capability, when it needed to be calibrated, where it could be calibrated, its current life expectancy and reported this kind of information on an exceptions basis. We were way ahead of the rest of the world. I wrote the system up in plain English and Candy provided the flow charts depicting the system.

Then Sarge Shriver interfered by offering me a position with the Peace Corps in Peru. I left the manuscript with our boss Max Allen and some months later I received a check from Purchasing Magazine for the write-up. They had published it and Candy had also gotten a check. This became my first published article. It was titled, Automated Bid Analysis Spins Off Savings, and came out in June 1965. When Corporate America read the article we, Candy and I, became very popular. We were invited to speak at Firestone Tire Company at Akron, Ohio and we had requests for information from many others. It also got me a promotion. I was appointed a project leader and assigned two programmers. I kind of liked the attention I got so soon after my return from Peru.

My second article was published in July 1968 by the Southwestern Cooperative Educational Laboratory (SWCEL) out of Austin, Texas and was entitled The Power Structure. It was in essence a speech I had made to an advocate civil rights group at a conference at the University of New Mexico. I reproduced the article as an essay in my Hispanic Notables in the United States of North America in 1978. This piece got me invitations to a number of meetings throughout the country and it fitted in quite well with my new position as Executive Director of the President's Committee on Mexican American Affairs. The essence of the article is to define what power for minorities is, how to gain it and how to use it. Read it some time. It is still relevant.

By now I begin to think of myself as somewhat of a writer and I undertook to write a newspaper column. The reason for it was an encounter I had with then, black civil rights advocate from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, now Congressman from Georgia, the Honorable John Lewis. My column was entitled The Minority No One Knows. It ran from 1970 to 1973 in the Houston Post, the San Antonio News Express and several other small newspapers in the southwestern United States. The subjects included in the series were Hispanics who had contributed to society in the United States of North America. They were, in effect, my response to John Lewis' charge that "the trouble with you `Mesicans or Chickanos' is that you haven't paid your dues". I packaged up the series in my book entitled HISPANIC NOTABLES IN THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA, and published by Saguaro Publications, 1978. Saguaro is a Mom and Pop shop I carry in my hip pocket. The 2nd edition is in progress and I hope to release it very soon as The Browning of America.

Three on Organizational Behavior by Prentice Hall, Two by Saguaro Publications, and the Pamphlet by SWCEL

But I have jumped ahead again. During the time I was at the White House under Nixon I also got selected for a Transportation Fellowship at George Washington University sponsored by the Brookings Institution. As a result I consorted with the famous Transportation scholar Thomas Owens of the Institution and they published my paper which was eventually my doctoral thesis, Consumer Conceived Attributes Of An Ideal Transportation System, in 1970.

Another term paper I had published in the October 1973 issue of Perspectives in Defense Management, National Defense University, was titled Computer Security. My treatment of the subject was in the vanguard of concerns on computer security and was issued as a guideline by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to its staff. Today it is archaic if I say so myself!

In 1990 I struck a deal with Prentice Hall and was contracted to author the Instructor's Manual With Lecture Outliner, to accompany the 5th edition of ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, by Stephen P. Robbins, Prentice Hall; in 1991. I wound up doing the same for the 6th and 7th editions in 1993 & 1996 respectfully. These three represent the most important writing works of my career.

Somewhere along the way I became a free lance writer for Hispanic Link News Service distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. Some of my more poignant work were the result of this effort. Such as the articles on Hate in America, on the Catholic priests crisis and on the Alamo which appear as stand alone chapters in my memoirs.

USMA Class of '51, YOUR LIFE - 1951 to 2001 (Published in time for 50th Reunion) For details click here.
 

MY NINE LIVES + (Memoirs - In Progress) For details click here.
 

Cuba Libre y Estado Unidence. (In Progress)

7COME11 (My Take on the reasons for the 9/11 disaster. - Manuscript completed)

La India Maria (My great-grandmother. - Script completed)

George M. Gividen, Ranger (In Progrress)

Selected for TumbleWords Writers Roster: 1997 New Mexico Edition.

Just Tearing Down Walls and Breaking Ceilings!

Read On! Enjoy!