| General Fiction posted May 9, 2024 | Chapters: |
...44 45 -46- 
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The future looks bright
A chapter in the book What We See
What We See - Epilogue
by Jim Wile
| Background A high school teacher wrongly accused of sexual assault reinvents his life. |
Recap of Chapter 41: Alan leaves the Meyers brothers and heads back to his motel, where he calls Ginnie to tell her he’s fine and got the hard drive back. She has some doubts about the danger from the way he told her, and he promises to tell her the whole story when he returns.
He arrives home the next day in time for dinner, where he relates the entire story to Ginnie and Tommy. With great relief, she hugs him and begins crying when thinking about the danger he has been in. Tommy joins in a group hug. Alan cracks a joke, which eases the tension as they begin laughing uproariously. Alan then reflects on the good fortune he has ended up having in the last two years since he met Ginnie and Tommy and made them his family.
Epilogue
Late spring, 1987
The following week were the tryouts for the Junior League baseball teams, and Tommy did well enough to be accepted into the league. I filled out an application to become a manager then and submitted it. I was dismayed to find out a week later that they had turned me down. It was hard to imagine why with my credentials, having been the coach of the high school team, but I had a feeling what it might be, and I called the president of the league for an explanation.
Sure enough, someone on his staff had old information about the incident with Tina, so I set him straight about this and asked him to call Earl Pinkham for confirmation. To his credit, he did that, and he called me back and apologized for the misunderstanding. He gave me the manager position on the spot and assigned Tommy to my team. Artie had also made the league, and I asked if he could be on the team too.
The first practice was held a week later. This league was for boys aged 13 to 15, and, because it required tryouts to belong, the caliber of the play was quite good. The field size was now a regulation baseball size, as was the pitching distance.
I enjoyed teaching these young teens the finer points of the game and helping them hone their skills for high school ball and perhaps beyond. It felt good to coach again. I was often in contact with my friend Bobby Harken, who was doing well as the Grove Park High coach, and I told him I was grooming these youngsters to play on his team in a few years. He kept asking me when I was coming back to teaching, but I kept telling him it probably wasn’t going to happen, at least at the high school level.
Over the next few months, I had time to perfect my invention since my new assistant, Andrew Olafsen, was working out very well. He was even eager to do some overtime work and wanted to work Saturdays, which was fine with me. Tommy also continued to put in some hours at the shop, and, unlike Warren, Andrew really liked him and helped him learn a number of times.
I only needed to spend about two thirds of my workday doing repair work, which allowed me both to work on the invention and to begin holding more computer classes. They were the same two classes I had taught my middle schoolers, but I was now charging tuition for them, which brought in extra money. People from all walks of life took these classes, and I also developed a few others on specific topics like word processing and spreadsheet skills. The home computer was becoming very popular now, and much of our repair work became focused on this as well.
Six months after I had submitted my provisional patent application, it was accepted, and I now had a year to submit the full application, but during that time, my idea was safe, and others could not beat me to the punch.
I was able to integrate the “computer” with the glasses so that it is no longer a separate unit held in the pocket or on a desk with wires running to it. It's now a streamlined cylinder mounted on one of the temples (the parts of glasses that fold up), where the speakers are also mounted inside the enlarged temples. It isn’t wireless yet, because that technology still isn’t quite there, but I was able to run ultra-thin wires through the temples and encase them within the bridge to reach the other side. Thus, the camera, the speakers, and the “computer” are all connected now with out-of-sight wires.
Well within the one-year period, I applied for the full patent and received it within another six months. During this time, I continued tweaking the design and thinking about the best way to get this invention on the market.
I met with Harold Carmody, the patent lawyer, on a couple of occasions, and he explained to me that there are three different ways to proceed:
• I can manufacture the device myself.
• I can sell the patent rights to a medical manufacturing company for a
flat amount.
• I can license the usage rights.
• I can license the usage rights.
There are pros and cons to each. I am not really interested in manufacturing the device myself. I like inventing and the research it involves, but I also like teaching. Fabrication is a distant third.
My computer classes, as well as the coaching I'm doing, have reawakened my love for teaching, and I thought the best way to combine research and inventing with teaching would be to become a professor at the college level. But this is more of a long-term goal, since I would have to start by getting an advanced degree and perhaps becoming a teaching assistant at the same time. I would then apply for a faculty position somewhere. This would take money and time.
I would need a sizable amount of money to finance additional schooling and help Ginnie provide for our family while doing so, and I figure I would have to sell the business to avoid spreading myself too thin.
I could get an immediate chunk of cash by selling the patent rights, but I hesitated to do that because I would lose all future rights to the device. Plus, if it’s very successful, I could potentially make a lot more money by licensing the usage rights and earning royalties instead. If it’s as big a hit as I’m expecting it to be and I'm able to find a manufacturer with the same vision, perhaps I could get a fixed amount up front and negotiate a high royalty percent. That would be the challenge—to find just the right manufacturer.
Mr. Carmody thought my approach was a good one and suggested that I attend a few trade shows where I could meet representatives of companies interested in developing new products. That was an excellent idea, and I immediately began looking in trade journals for advertisements for trade shows.
I attended several of these with my invention and talked to a number of companies about it. I had interviews with several who expressed great interest, and I received some attractive offers. In the end, I decided to go with Fraleigh Medical. I had been very impressed with Wilson Fraleigh’s integrity in helping to set things right earlier by withdrawing his patent application on my invention. Since that time, he had fired his brother-in-law, and he no longer had that albatross around the neck of his company. He had made me the best offer I’d gotten for the usage rights, which allowed me to keep the patent. In addition to a 15% royalty rate, he had advanced me $100,000 free and clear without the necessity of taking it out of the royalties.
I now had enough money to finance my acceptance into the master’s program in electronics at Purdue University in nearby Lafayette, Indiana. I began attending at the beginning of 1988.
We continued to live in our house on Loser Street, next door to my store. I ended up selling the business to my assistant, Andrew Olafsen. I still own the house, and he pays me rent, but the tools and supplies and all aspects of the business itself are his now.
During these years, I earned my master’s degree and was a teaching assistant as I had envisioned. Once I got the degree, I applied for an assistant professorship right there at Purdue and was hired.
Also, during this time, my Text-to-Talk Readers became a big hit, and the royalties from them came pouring in. Fraleigh Medical did a phenomenal job of manufacturing and promoting them, and that went far in helping restore their damaged reputation from the years Fraleigh’s brother-in-law had had such a ruinous effect.
Tommy benefited greatly from the readers. For someone who is only moderately dyslexic, as he is, they did wonders to help him learn to properly identify words and to increase both his reading accuracy and speed when he wasn’t using them. He ended up graduating near the top of his high school class and is now enrolled in a fine arts program at Indiana University.
I had coached his baseball teams all the way until he entered high school, where he was on his high school team, and now he plays shortstop on his college baseball team. Although it’s a three-hour drive, Ginnie and I go to all of his home games.
Ginnie was eventually promoted to head nurse on the ICU and later became a hospital administrator at Sparrow Hospital for the remaining years that we lived on Loser Street. After Tommy graduated from high school in 1992, we moved to Lafayette, where we built a house. Ginnie joined the administrative staff of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital while I taught at Purdue.
I also enrolled in a PhD program because I eventually wanted to be a full professor. It was during this time that the effort I’d spent in getting the hard drive back from Warren was paying off because I began pursuing some of the ideas documented on it and was able to attain several other patents for devices based on them ahead of the competition.
I was beaten to the punch on one of the ideas, though: short distance wireless communications. That was first patented by Swedish inventors in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It later became known as Bluetooth, and a Bluetooth Special Interest Group was formed, of which I became a member.
Now, my major focus is the classroom. Teaching college students, especially in the engineering field, is a far cry from teaching high school students. My current students remind me of my dedicated group of middle school kids who attended my first programming classes. They are paying good money to be here and show a genuine interest in their studies—not all, mind you—but certainly most of them. It’s exciting teaching them, and a number of them work with me on my ideas in the engineering lab.
Over these years, dyslexia research has come a long way in combating the incurable malady that it is, and my invention of the glasses is an important tool in this effort. It is also in high demand by the blind as another tool besides braille to be able to read text.
The royalties from the usage rights for the invention as well as our professions provide Ginnie and me with a very comfortable life, and we are both doing what we love. Tommy too is very happy with his program at IU.
I never did hear what happened to the Meyers brothers, nor did I hear from them again, but one day, out of the blue, I got a phone call from Tina Cassidy. She is living in Ohio now and went to college, where she studied social work. She said she is working as a junior high school guidance counselor, advising kids with the kind of advice she wishes she had gotten during her wild years. She apologized again for the trouble she had caused me, but I told her I thought it was wonderful how she’d learned from the experience and had turned herself around into a responsible adult.
She had somehow heard of my success, both in the field of invention and now as a college teacher, and she just wanted to let me know that she is doing well and to express her sincere gratitude for my helping her to straighten out her life.
In a way, I’m grateful to her too for helping to bring me out of the timid shell I had once been locked in, largely due to my early experience with dyslexia. If not for Tina and the resultant resignation from teaching high school, I might never have found my new path or met the two most significant people in my life. It had been a painful experience and transition, but ultimately worth it in the end.
The biggest lesson from my life so far has been that we can’t always trust what we think we see, and we must find a way to the truth to overcome the false impressions that so often lead to misunderstanding and misery. This takes an open mind in the case of preconceived notions, false rumors, and outright lies. And it takes a creative mind to overcome the physical problems, like dyslexia, that may be obscuring the truth. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the effort to get to the truth is always worth it and is of utmost importance in leading a happy and fulfilling life.
The End
Book of the Month contest entry
 Recognized |
Many thanks to all who have been following this story. Your reviews and input have been invaluable in helping me improve it as each chapter was posted. I very much appreciate the time you took to read and review it. It was fun for me to see how you would anticipate some of the action to come, but I hope I was also able to surprise you a few times. In some cases, your ideas even sent me off in a new direction.
When I start a story, I only have a general idea of the theme and a vague idea of where the plot might go. I am more of a pantser (write by the seat of my pants), and the plot is largely determined by where the characters take me. At least until about halfway through, then I'm pretty sure where the story is going, and I will plot that out roughly.
An important aspect of writing a novel is pacing--something you don't have to worry about as much with shorter works. It's a challenge to make each chapter interesting but yet not pack a lot of irrelevant action into the story that doesn't either support the theme or help in character development.
When reading a chapter every few days, the way we do here at FanStory, you often find yourself wondering why a character acted a certain way, and you sometimes don't find out the answer until later. Often, in my responses to reviews, I would say, "Just wait; it will all become clear soon." In real life, hardly anyone reads a novel this way, so patience is a virtue. I've been posting this story for about four months, and it's not even a very long novel (69,000 words, or about 250 pages). But this makes me all the more appreciative of how you've hung in there, patiently awaited the next chapter, and been willing to accept the fact that the answers to your questions will likely be coming. I must continually remind myself to do the same when reading others' novels on FanStory.
Thank you, dear friends, for giving me a forum to present this story and for the interest you showed in it. It was a very gratifying experience for me.
Jim Wile
Pays
one point
and 2 member cents. When I start a story, I only have a general idea of the theme and a vague idea of where the plot might go. I am more of a pantser (write by the seat of my pants), and the plot is largely determined by where the characters take me. At least until about halfway through, then I'm pretty sure where the story is going, and I will plot that out roughly.
An important aspect of writing a novel is pacing--something you don't have to worry about as much with shorter works. It's a challenge to make each chapter interesting but yet not pack a lot of irrelevant action into the story that doesn't either support the theme or help in character development.
When reading a chapter every few days, the way we do here at FanStory, you often find yourself wondering why a character acted a certain way, and you sometimes don't find out the answer until later. Often, in my responses to reviews, I would say, "Just wait; it will all become clear soon." In real life, hardly anyone reads a novel this way, so patience is a virtue. I've been posting this story for about four months, and it's not even a very long novel (69,000 words, or about 250 pages). But this makes me all the more appreciative of how you've hung in there, patiently awaited the next chapter, and been willing to accept the fact that the answers to your questions will likely be coming. I must continually remind myself to do the same when reading others' novels on FanStory.
Thank you, dear friends, for giving me a forum to present this story and for the interest you showed in it. It was a very gratifying experience for me.
Jim Wile
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