Tom Myatt:  

My life has just been one big fluke. I never made any plans. It was all just dumb luck. It was my destiny to work at the Ford Motor Company Sterling Axle plant for the rest of my life. I hired on at Fords at the very young age of eighteen. My father who worked in management at Ford Motor Company pulled some strings and got me that job. You see, I never even planned to work at Ford Motor Company, which was a very good paying and highly sought after job. I had worked at Ford Motor Company for four years. Then in 1981 the labor market turned sour as the economy entered its eight postwar recession. This seemed like a tragedy at the time. I was making very high wages for an unskilled worker along with excellent medical benefits. Losing my job did not cause a whole lot of anxiety because Jimmy Carter had just signed into law a huge bail out program that was called the Trade Readjustment Act. This program paid laid off Auto workers their full salary for the period of one year. I was 22 years old, with all the time in the world on my hands. I had always taken at least one college class each semester while working full time at Fords. Characteristically, with no ideas or plans at all of what I wanted to do with an education, I decided to start a full time college schedule. I sighed up for a couple of semesters of general education, an electronics class, plus an applied math class for electronics. As usual, I had no plans, nor did I have any ideas of what kinds of jobs where available for anyone who had training in that field. I was just interested in electronics. I always had an interest in science and electronics. I had taken electronics classes in high school as well. After those two semesters of college, I decided to take a vacation and go to Southern California to fly my hang glider. I have been a hang glider pilot since the age of seventeen. I was subscribing to Hang Gliding magazine, which is published in Southern California. This magazine has many articles about flying out west. So naturally, this was an influence in my hang gliding vacation destination. It was 20 degrees below zero when I left Michigan. Within about 48 hours, me and a friend of mine drove in shifts straight out to San Diego. We were frozen for most of the drive until we hit the Mojave Desert. It was early morning and 75 degrees when we reached the desert. We pulled into a gas station and pulled off all our winter clothes, then jumped into our cut off Levi shorts (nothing says ...Expand for more