This week I discuss how I honed my craft as a writer by writing in online discussion forums on the CompuServe Information Service in the early 1980s long before the Internet was popular. This led me to write an award-winning article for a local magazine.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 21 of Contemplating Life.

Although it’s embarrassing to admit it, my storytelling techniques were influenced by Bill Cosby. I don’t want to be associated with him because I now know what a horrible human being he is. I no longer brag that we share the same birthday July 12. Still, I admire his ability as a storyteller. When he tells the famous story of his friend Fat Albert, he tells a lengthy tale simply to illustrate how fat Fat Albert was. Then he lets out a sigh and says, “Okay, I told you that story so I can tell you this one.” And then he tells the Fat Albert story that he wanted to tell to begin with.

I find myself using that technique a lot. I can’t tell you one story until I tell you the one before that. And I can’t tell that one until the one before that. So, there is a lot of “I told you that story so I can tell you this one” in this episode. And you’ve already seen that in previous episodes and will continue to see it in future ones. It’s how I remember things. It’s the way I think. And therefore it’s the way I write.

In 1986, I wrote an autobiographical magazine feature about my experiences in that school. The article titled “The Reunion” was a reflection prompted by an all-school reunion of Indianapolis Public Schools #97 James E. Roberts School for the Handicapped. The reunion, the event not the story, was to commemorate the closing of that school.

The article was published in the September 1987 issue of Indianapolis Monthly Magazine. It was awarded “Best Magazine Feature” by the Indiana Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists – Sigma Delta Chi.

My plan for next week is to read the article for you.

That’s the story I want to tell. But before I do so, I have to tell the story behind the story. And the story behind that one. And the story behind that one. And before I could tell you any of those stories I had to tell you about how I tell stories like Bill Cosby did. It’s all connected.

Okay… Where do I begin to tell the story? “The whole universe was in a hot, dense state then 14 billion years ago expansion started… Wait…”

No, no, no, no… Okay, maybe that is too far back.

Let’s try to get a little bit closer to the story we want to tell.

Set your way back machine to Thursday, May 26, 1983 – three years and eight days before the reunion. It was the final day of practice for the Indianapolis 500. Although there haven’t been carburetors in IndyCars for many years, that day still is referred to as “Carburetion Day” or “Carb Day” for short.

I’ve been a lifelong fan of the Indy 500. I almost started telling you a long story about how I’m a race fan but let’s cut that one out and save it for a future episode. Let’s just say it all started on Carb Day 1983. The practice session only lasts about two hours in the late morning rather than all day for most practice days. Mom attended with me and on our way home I asked her if we could stop by the RadioShack Computer Store on Crawfordsville Road. I wanted to see if they had the new RadioShack Model 100 Computer.

This revolutionary device was arguably the first true laptop computer. It measured 300x 215x50mm or about 11.75×8.5x2in and weighed just over 3 pounds. The gray monochrome LCD screen could display only 8 lines of 40 characters each. That seems ridiculously small by today’s standards and was also small compared to the 64×16 characters of the Model I. However the only “portable” computers in those days were the size of a suitcase and weighed nearly 30 pounds.

I fell in love with the machine the minute I saw it and we ended up taking one home that day. Normally I don’t remember the exact day that I purchased a computer. The sales receipt is long gone. But I remembered I bought it on the way home from Carb Day. A Google search told me the Model 100 was introduced in April 1983. Wikipedia told me the date of Carb Day for the 1983 race. I could’ve just said, “I bought it in the spring of 83” but where is the fun in that?

My dad had to disassemble my expensive new toy to wire in some extra buttons to operate the control and shift keys. In those days, I would type by poking at the keys with a stick in my right hand. I would hold pushbuttons in my left hand to operate the modifier keys. We managed to successfully wire in the micro switches on a cable about 18 inches long.

The Model 100 also had a built-in 300-baud modem. Note: “baud” is the number of bits per second. The fastest that dial-up Internet used was 56,000 baud. Today’s Internet speed is measured in gigabits or billions of bits per second.

When I built my first personal computer in 1978, I had a modem that I used for connecting to the IUPUI mainframe DEC-System 10 but by 1983 I have left my job working for the Indiana University Department of Medical Genetics and I didn’t have much use for a modem.

The Model 100 became an instant hit with journalists. The following year while I was at the Speedway, I was hanging out with reporters in the press room. Many of them were writing their stories using the device and then uploading them directly to their newspaper or wire service.

The Model 100 included a famous CompuServe “Snap-Pack”. It was a sign-up kit for the CompuServe Information Service. It consisted of a small envelope that you could rip off the perforated end and snap it open. Inside you would find an account number and a password to sign up for the online service.

CompuServe was hosted on a network of DEC-System 10 mainframes like the one we had at IUPUI. Your account number was called a PPN which stood for “Project – Programmer Number”. It was two numbers separated by a comma. I still remember mine. It was 70136,62. It was not only your account number but it was your email address as well.

Although technically the Internet was “born” in January 1983, very few people used it. Commercial Internet providers didn’t appear until around 1989. CompuServe was the first consumer online information service. There were also private computer bulletin board systems known as BBS. CompuServe was followed by services such as Prodigy and AOL but all of this predated the public use of the Internet.

I don’t know for certain when I finally opened up that snap-pack and signed into CompuServe for the first time but I’m guessing it was in the fall of 1983.

CompuServe was completely text-based. It offered email and real-time chat rooms known as CB rooms named after citizen’s band radio. You could use a nickname that was referred to as a “handle” also patterned after CB radio lingo. CompuServe also offered discussion forums called “SIGs” or “special interest groups”. You could read news articles, get weather reports, get sports scores, get stock quotes, and book airline tickets. It featured many of the things that we do with the Internet today as long as it didn’t involve images, video, or audio. By the way, in 1987 CompuServe invented the “Graphics Interchange Format” or GIF files that we use today. They updated the specification in 1989 to allow for animation. But this was still 1983. No online graphics.

There were local telephone numbers in major cities that you could use to connect to the service. However, the service was quite expensive. You were billed about $6 per hour or rather 10 cents per minute. Running at 300 baud that could add up very quickly.

I gravitated towards a SIG known as NIP-SIG which stood for National Information Providers Special Interest Group. It was the gathering place for newspaper people who kept the news pages updated. However, over time they evolved into a place where people discussed a variety of issues of the day. It eventually was renamed the “Issues Forum”. I ended up there because they had a section called “Handicapped Issues”. Not only did I participate in that subsection on a variety of disability-related issues, but I also discussed politics, religion, and other topics in the other subsections.

Each SIG was managed by a System Operator or sysop for short. The sysop of the Issues Forum was an amazing woman named Georgia Griffith. She was blind I believe for most of her life if not from birth. She accessed CompuServe using a braille terminal that would display one line of text as a series of raised bumps in braille format. She had been a music teacher for much of her adult life but had retired from that and now worked for the Library of Congress transcribing music into braille. She had a special device that she would drag across a musical score and it would create a raised shape of the music staff and notes that she could feel with her finger. I was amazed by the technology.

It was only after I knew her for several months that I learned she was also deaf. She lost her hearing late in life. I took the news pretty hard. I think it was probably the only time in my life that I felt sorry for someone regarding their disability. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like to be blind, build your life around music, and then later lose your hearing. I took it as a tragic loss for a dear friend. I had to remind myself that she had gone deaf long before I first met her. She was the same person I always knew yet I had no idea who she really was. Her second disability was completely hidden from me and of course, I wouldn’t have known she was blind either had she not told me.

I had already learned that communicating with people online was a great equalizer. It may sound trite or cliché but it allows you to connect mind to mind without any physical characteristics coming into play. My first realization of this phenomenon was when I was talking one-on-one with a woman whose online name was Daria Danai. At one point she simply asked, “Looks?” wondering what I looked like. I kind of freaked out because it was the first time in my life in a social situation when someone didn’t know I had a disability. I don’t recall what happened but I think I just disconnected. I wrote about it later in the Handicapped Issues forum.

In some ways, it was liberating to be completely free of my disability. On the other hand, I discovered that hiding my disability was hiding my true self. I’ve had plenty of opportunities in the decades since then either on CompuServe or on the Internet where I had the opportunity to keep my disability a secret and it just didn’t feel right.

Somewhere along the way, I drew the attention of Pamela Bowen. She was the city editor of the Huntington, WV Harold-Dispatch newspaper. Her husband Charlie also worked for the newspaper and they both worked as information providers for CompuServe. Charlie wrote a book called “How to Get the Most Out of CompuServe.”

She told me both publicly and privately that she thought I was a talented writer. We began exchanging lengthy emails with each other over the next several years in which we told each other our life stories. My emails to her became a kind of personal journal in which I shared my innermost thoughts.

We became extremely close friends. It was amazing the bond that developed between us. Unfortunately for me, yet fortunately for her, she is very happy in her marriage. If not for the strength of her relationship with her husband, I’m confident that we would have been even closer.

My letters to Pamela provided me with the kind of therapeutic value of a personal journal with the added bonus that I knew someone out there was reading what I was writing and appreciating it. At the time, the word blog had not yet been invented. Yet essentially that’s what I was writing. It was a personal blog about my life with an audience of one.

On several occasions, my mother said that she was going to collect all of the emails that I had written to Pamela and publish them as my biography. My response was, “Over my dead body.”

Her reply was, “Matter of fact… Yes exactly. When you die that’s what I’m going to do.” In those days we had no idea I could possibly outlive her.

Because CompuServe became prohibitively expensive for me, I had to find a workaround. A sysop had the authority to grant a “free flag” to members who contributed to the discussion groups. Eventually, I became the discussion leader of the “Handicapped Issues” section. That would give me free access as long as I was logged into the Issues Forum. If I logged in and quickly moved to that group, I would only be charged a few cents each time I entered and exited. However, writing emails was costly. Even if I found a way to compose them offline and upload them, at extremely low baud rates that was still costly.

Pamela was so committed to our continuing correspondence that she shared with me an account number and password to a somewhat secret file transfer area that was used by the content providers. I would log into her account, and upload a file with the name such as “pb071285” which meant it was a letter to PB on July 12, 1985. When she had read the message, she would delete it from the directory and leave me a reply with a “cy071385” the following day.

I eventually migrated from the Issues Forum to another popular feature on CompuServe – Human Sexuality Support Groups which held the online address HSX-100. It was operated by noted authors and sex educators Howard and Martha Lewis. I believe they had written a sex education book for high school use. On CompuServe, they had a series of pages of information about human sexuality as well as a lively discussion forum. Eventually, I was recruited by them to start a Handicapped Sexuality section on their forum.

My group wasn’t much of a success. I believe we attracted less than 10 participants and once we had each shared as much about our romantic successes and failures as we cared to share, it kind of went quiet and we eventually dissolved the group.

Howard appreciated my skill as a writer and suggested I start a section of personal reflections about my life with a disability. He came up with the name “CY’s Eye on Life”. If you listened to the first episode of this podcast I explained that I nearly called this podcast by that name but it’s a very confusing phrase to listen to. In case you don’t understand what I’m saying it is my initials CY an apostrophe S, eye (as in eyeball) on life. CY’s Eye on Life.

So, I told you those stories so I could tell you this one.

In early 1986, I received a small hand-addressed envelope containing an invitation that read, “You are invited to an Open House at James E. Roberts Public School #97 from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on May 18, 1986, commemorating 50 years of educating handicapped students in Indianapolis. And on the occasion of the closing of James E. Roberts School.”

I attended that open house and it brought back many emotional memories of my 13 years attending that school. After the event, I began writing a series of messages in the HSX Forum in my “CY’s Eye on Life” subsection. This series got rave reviews not only from professional writers like my friend Pamela but from many other people. I printed out copies of the messages and shared them with friends and family who did not have access to CompuServe. It also brought rave reviews.

Many, many people strongly encouraged me to submit it somewhere for publication but I had no interest in doing so. Writing those stories was a catharsis for me. I wanted to get those feelings out of my system and put them behind me. I didn’t want to have anything more to do with it once it was written.

One day, I was watching the noon news and there was an interview with a woman named Deborah Paul. She was the editor of Indianapolis Monthly Magazine. She said something I will never forget. She said, “I never feel like an experience is complete until I’ve written about it.” That precisely described my feeling about my writing. I need to write about things to put my experiences in perspective. I concluded that if this was the way she felt about writing, perhaps she would be open to publishing my work. If they liked it, great. If they didn’t, it would get all of my friends and family off my back because I could say I tried.

I took the series of messages that I had written and compiled them together into a single narrative. I submitted it to the magazine. In the topping letter, I mentioned what I had heard Ms. Paul say in that interview about why she wrote and how I felt the same way.

I don’t know if I told her that it was based on something I had written on CompuServe. These days, that would’ve been a dealbreaker. If you put something on the Internet, especially for free to the public, no one will buy publishing rights. If it was behind a paywall such as for Patreon subscribers, you might get away with it or they might consider it a reprint. But in those days, nobody cared about online publishing.

A few weeks later I received a handwritten note from Ms. Paul.

She said that she was going to write me a quick thank you/rejection letter when she started reading what I had written and couldn’t put it down. She wasn’t sure what to do with it because it was not the kind of thing they usually publish. She said she showed it to some of her associate editors and they didn’t know what to do with it either. She asked that I give them a couple of weeks and they would get back to me.

I did hear back in about two weeks in the form of a phone call. She said that they wanted to publish my story but there were three problems.

1. They never publish anything written in first person.

2. It doesn’t fit the format of the magazine.

3. It is too long.

She then said, “I got to thinking wait a minute… Just because we’ve never published a first-person feature before doesn’t mean we can’t start now. And I’m the editor of this magazine and I decide what is or is not our format. That leaves number three… It’s still too long.”

She gave me the option of giving me the story back again and allowing me to try to sell it somewhere else intact or to have them publish a shorter version. She said, “Chris, you’ve put your soul on paper. But we only want half of your soul”. We both laughed. When I told a friend about it, they said it reminded them of the line from the movie Amadeus when they told Mozart his music had too many notes.

She said, “I respect the fact that this is a very personal story to you so I want to give you the opportunity to submit a shorter version yourself. Or if you prefer I can just edit it. After all, that’s my job as editor. I edit.” I was happy to resubmit a shorter version.

As you might imagine, cutting your soul in two is no easy task. Writers never want their work cut but I was so happy that they would publish it I didn’t care. I resubmitted a shorter version of the story. The final version that appeared in the magazine had about five or six paragraphs cut from my resubmission and a couple of paragraphs that I had cut were put back in. I was very happy with the end result.

I don’t recall when I submitted the article or when it was accepted. It must’ve been late 1985 or early 1986 because she warned me they would be holding it until their September issue since it was school related. It would be a kind of back-to-school feature. Somewhere along the way, we made arrangements to go back to Roberts School to take some photos to accompany the piece. We also shot a photo in my home office and I supplied her with an eighth-grade class photo.

As the author, I received a couple of complimentary copies of the magazine. I wasn’t a subscriber. We also found out who was the distributor and my mom went directly t app 5o them and purchased about 10 copies so that we wouldn’t deplete the newsstand copies. I still have a couple of copies but I gave most of them away.

The response was phenomenal. I will talk more about what happened after the article appeared but I think it’s time to wrap things up for today. I haven’t decided yet if it will be read in 1 or 2 installments. In the episode following that, I will talk about what happened afterward.

I already mentioned that it received a top award in its category. More on that later.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. It’s not that I’m desperate for money, but a little extra income sure could help.

Many thanks to my Patreon supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.