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Now if I were doing one of those high-tech presentation, the slide gets FUZZY and I’d say that it ALL STARTED a long time ago. I was home for a quick visit from grad school in the late 80’s and found this plumbing manual in the cellar of the three-family house my parents and relatives all live in.

I was attending Cranbrook Academy of Art, it was the late deconstructionist ’80s, and I felt like had landed on a PERSONAL GOLD MINE. These are details of some of the pages I found inside like these fittings that could also be seen as some plumbers special font? A CONCRETE CESSPOOL BLOCK looked more to me like a book—no offense to books of course. And vernacular shapes of flow diagrams looked more to me like dingbats. The main point was that I had found a tool box of imagery to tap, AND a way to get in touch with my VERY OWN personal history.

MY FAMILY’S TRADE IS PLUMBING. Cousins, uncles, and father in the town of Waterbury, Connecticut, the now defunct Brass Capital of the world. LOTS OF BRASS PIPE came out of Waterbury...And a lot of clock mechanisms too. Waterbury is roughly 100 miles Northeast of New York City.

Finding that plumbing manual inspired me to dig around the old cellar further and I found things like my FIRST TOOTH pulled. This would be really important if I’d gone into DENTISTRY. I found what I think were called wacky packs. There were also lots of old MAD Magazines. I loved these things as a kid BECAUSE they PARODIED something adult. Advertising and pop culture fair game...I think of it as a PRE-PUBESCENT form of critical discourse. I also found a note pad from a plumbing supply shop my father used, and written inside of it was a journal I had kept as a nine-year-old. I was a member of the Cub Scouts, or CUBE Scouts as written in the pad, and on this one particular day I had sold LOTS of TICKETS for something. I also found an acceptance letter from the technical high school I applied to with a SPECIFIC in plumbing.

This is my father organizing HIS tools. I thought I might become a plumber, and would in fact be soldering pipes together today IF COLLEGE didn’t work out. I have a funny story to tell about my father’s priorities...my parents were down for the weekend visiting and I wanted to show them the internet and our web site. As a present, my father brought with him a new toilet seat for our office bathroom, and as I clicked around showing him the web, with him standing behind me, the last thing I heard him say before disappearing was, Scott, I’m just going to go ahead and install this, and disappeared into the bathroom leaving me there moving my mouse around.