Signs and Wonders

I have been asked by many of my readers, “When are you going to put all of your stories into a book? I’d buy one.”

I guess my answer is that I have gone that route before and found myself to be a failure. You see, in my experience there are creators, inventors, and idea people. They are on one side of the room. On the other side of the room are marketers, agents, entrepreneurs, and other trained individuals who know how to take a product and make it sell for big corporations. In the middle of the room are a very small group of individuals who can be creative, put out a product, and also market it. For the most part, one side of the room can do nothing without the other side.

Take the very successful music group, the Beatles. They were four musical lads from Liverpool who played cover songs in small clubs in England and Germany. They then signed on with EMI (Abbey Road Studios), were given George Martin as a music producer and Brian Epstein as a manager. Creators on one side and the Corporation and management on the other. The Beatles would have remained a club band on their own. They needed the Corporation, and the Corporation needed their talent.

The folly of youth is to not understand your skill set and how business really works.

In my 20s, I decided that my goal in life was to be an inventor and earn a living off my creations. My mind was ripe with ideas. There was no way that I would work for a large corporation.

I combined songwriting and patented inventions with the hope of striking gold. Songs, for which I painstakingly wrote out the music, fill my file cabinets. I would record the song and send it off to publishing companies, or hand deliver it to established professional performers. Always, it would return with the same rejection: “Sorry, but this doesn’t fit our needs.”

So, I scored my music with professional software and had 300 copies printed in octavo size.

“I will sell this music to schools across the US, and I will do it on my own. It can’t be that hard,” I thought.

200 copies sit in a box in my closet.

I then wrote a children’s book called The Man and the Maple and I was honored to have the world-famous artist, Jody Bergsma, illustrate the characters for me. The book was created to visually illustrate a song we sang of the same name on our concert tours. Though a few books sold at each concert and even fewer sold at bookstores and on eBay, I ended up with a crate of books with rusted staples sitting in my shed which smell of mouse urine.

Still not to be undone by failure, my mind busily created patent ideas: The Mitchell Methane Arrestor,  The Mole Moat, The Hardpack Gum Dispenser,  The Triangular Infant Carrier, and The Osprey Rescue Sling. Each time my patent attorney would eagerly take my money and launch into a patent search only to call me three months later to tell me that the ideas were too close to other patents.

I did have success patenting a portable tree stand. There were many interested sporting goods manufacturers who wanted to see the patent . . . to find out how they could work around it.

Later, as a bandsman playing outside concerts, I designed and patented a music stand protector to keep the wind and rain from destroying my sheet music. It was made from plexiglass and hot wire shaped to my standards. Because there were minimums made during production, I ended up with boxes of them in my shed. Another example of poor planning.

Then came the Hunter Safety Signs. Printed on yellow vinyl, they came in 10×10″ and 18×18″. The concept was simple I thought. I, as a hunter, share the same area of woods with hikers and mushroom pickers. If I was in the section of woods before anyone else, I would mount my sign by the road alerting anyone else who might want to enter the woods that there are people with guns in the same wooded area and they are listening for snapping twigs. At least the non-hunters would have a choice.

This obviously was misunderstood by the area hunters. Often, I would come back to my truck to find a nice 30-06 slug hole through the head of my silhouette on the sign. I tried taking them to local hunting stores to test-market the idea and though they reluctantly accepted a few to display, most were removed after a week because the customers got angry. They didn’t understand the sign’s purpose.

I also went to what I would call a Redneck gun and ammo store. The store was filled with testosterone charged gun customers who all carried guns protruding from holsters on their belts. Going to the counter to talk to the owner, I held up my sign.

Before I could get a word out of my mouth he yelled, “Get your trash out of my store you anti-gun nut!!”

Every customer looked at the counter, palms on their gun butts. There was no sense explaining, he wasn’t willing to listen.

Also in my shed are boxes of vinyl hunting signs.

The last thing I need in my shed are boxes of books which I have published and can’t sell.

I do hope that someday, someone who has a connection to the publishing industry will read the stories from Mitchell Way and think, “This guy’s collection would make a good book.”

Until then, I am happy posting a story each Saturday. Some are light satire, some not, but all have an element of truth which I may have embellished. I am extremely grateful to those of you who read each week as you sit down to your morning coffee. It is a joy to make you laugh.

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