Nino Media

 BOOK FIRST PROOF

BOOK FIRST PROOF Aug. 15th

It is seven o'clock in the morning, just like every other day. I'm sitting in my home office in front of two Apple computers and three monitors. Off to one side are three OBSBOT live-streaming cameras connected to a third computer, a MacBook. Curled up on the floor beside me is my best friend, Toby, my five-year-old Aussiedoodle. He is almost always by my side

Although I retired four years ago after more than half a century as a freelance photographer, cinematographer, and videographer, I still remain active in the profession. Today, most of my work is as a volunteer, producing photo and video projects for nonprofit organizations.

Some things, however, have never changed. I still wake up every morning at 5:30, regardless of what time I went to bed. I make breakfast, exercise for an hour, and then quietly walk into my home office. Toby follows me, and together we try not to make a sound because my wife of fifty-six years, Antoinette, is still asleep.

I am eighty-one years old. Thankfully, I am still healthy and fit, but no one can fool Mother Nature forever. I know my time is becoming more precious, and I don't want to leave this world without preserving the memories of my very unconventional life—a journey that began in a world where technology was almost nonexistent and has carried me into today's age of artificial intelligence.

This room was once one of our children's bedrooms. Over the years, Antoinette transformed it into a living scrapbook of my career.

In one corner, hanging from a pair of hooks, are hundreds of media credentials collected over the past thirty years, or at least since we bought this house. Running just below the ceiling on all four walls are dozens of hats from assignments across the United States and around the world. The walls are also covered with photographs of my family and of me working alongside presidents, world leaders, celebrities, athletes, and other well-known personalities.

Yet the photographs I treasure most are not photographs at all.

They are simple sheets of white paper covered with colorful drawings made by my grandchildren. Every time they visit Grandma and Nonno, they proudly tape another masterpiece onto the wall. Some are now layered three or four deep because we've nearly run out of space. Those drawings mean more to me than any award or credential hanging in this room.

My granddaughters are four and six years old, and they amaze me every time they visit. At their age, they already understand technology in ways I could never have imagined as a child.

The other morning, my six-year-old granddaughter picked up two remote controls—one for the television and the other for the streaming device. Within seconds she had everything turned on, navigated through YouTube, and found exactly the children's program she and her little sister wanted to watch. She did it so naturally that she never stopped to think about it.

Watching her, I couldn't help comparing her childhood with my own.

That comparison happens often.

Whenever I look toward one small corner of my office, my eyes settle on a small flag from the city where I was born, surrounded by a handful of black-and-white photographs from my youth. They represent what may be the most important chapter of my life—the first twenty years, what I often call my "previous life."

I was born in Trieste, Italy, just nine months after the end of World War II.

For many people, childhood and the teenage years become their happiest memories. For me, they are memories I would rather not relive.

Growing up in the aftermath of one of history's most devastating wars, in a city scarred by conflict and uncertainty, was no place for a child. We were desperately poor. We were always hungry, always cold, and we owned almost nothing. Toys didn't exist in our world. Illness was everywhere, and it was not uncommon for children to simply disappear because they had died from diseases that today are easily treated.

But something valuable did come from those first twenty years.

They gave me a lifelong fear of ever returning to that life.

That fear became my greatest motivation. It pushed me to seize every opportunity, to appreciate everything life offered, and to embrace every new technology that came along. Time after time, technology became the bridge that carried me from poverty and hardship toward a life I could never have imagined as a child.

This book is the story of that journey.

CHAPTER 1

# Chapter 1 – The First Light

# Chapter 1 — Life After World War II

I was born in Trieste, in northern Italy, in 1945, just nine months after the end of World War II. I like to joke that I was the result of my parents' end-of-war celebration. After all those years of war, there probably wasn't much else to do.

Of course, as a baby, I had no idea what was happening around me. I know only the stories I was told later and the few memories that stayed with me as I grew older.

There were just three of us in the family: my mother, my older brother, and me. I vaguely remember my father, but he wasn't living with us. In those days, it wasn't unusual for men to leave home to find work somewhere else so they could support their families. Sometimes, however, they simply disappeared and started new families elsewhere.

My brother and I would eventually learn that our family situation was complicated. My grandfather on my mother's side had been killed during World War I, and my grandmother died shortly afterward. On my father's side, I remember seeing my grandparent only once. From what I was told, there was not a good relationship between my mother and my father's family. But these were complicated times, and many families had been torn apart by war.

We were desperately poor, but so was almost everyone we knew.

The war had ended, but for ordinary families, the struggle to survive was far from over. Food was scarce, work was difficult to find, and every day was about making it through to the next.

That was the world I was born into—a world with almost nothing, where technology was not even part of our vocabulary.

Looking back now, it is remarkable to think that a life beginning in those circumstances would eventually be shaped by some of the greatest technological revolutions in history.

But before any of that happened, there was simply the struggle to grow up.

My brother and I were eventually placed in an institution called the *Istituto dei Poveri*. It was a large complex where children from poor families lived and were cared for. In the difficult postwar years, many children were dying from malnutrition and disease. The institution had been created to help prevent that from happening. We received regular meals, medical attention, and what, for the circumstances, was a good educational start.

My brother was seven years older than me, and we were not together in the institution. It was almost like being in the Army, except we were little children. Discipline was very strict, which was understandable because there were hundreds of children living there. We all wore the same uniform, followed the same routines, and were expected to follow the rules.

Yet, in the middle of all that discipline, something happened that I still remember vividly.

Trieste was a contested territory after the war and was under Allied administration. For children like us, that probably turned out to be a very good thing.

Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Allied forces stationed in Trieste would send trucks with wooden benches in the back. We would climb into the trucks, and they would take us to a nearby military post.

For us, it was like entering another world.

We were given what was probably the best meal we had ever eaten. There were toys. And then, in a large room, we sat in rows of chairs and watched cartoons projected onto a large screen.

I had never been inside a movie theater. I had never seen television. I had never heard a radio or a record player.

And then, suddenly, there were moving pictures right in front of me.

But I wasn't really interested in the cartoon.

I wanted to know where the pictures were coming from.

I kept turning around in my chair, looking toward the small, bright light coming from the back of the room. I was fascinated by it. My teacher kept telling me to stop turning around and watch the cartoon.

I probably wasn't very good at following instructions.

I was more interested in the machine creating the pictures than in the pictures themselves.

I didn't know it at the time, but perhaps that was the beginning of something that would follow me for the rest of my life—a curiosity about technology and a desire to understand how things worked.

Decades later, that curiosity would lead me into photography, motion pictures, television, video production, editing, computers, digital technology, and eventually the technology that is changing the world again.

But at that moment, I was just a little boy sitting in a dark room in postwar Trieste, staring at a beam of light.

CHAPTER 2

My fascination with photography began during my early school years. I was seven years old in 1952 when something happened that would unknowingly shape the rest of my life.

One day a photographer came into our classroom. At the time, I had no idea he was a photographer because I had never seen a camera before. To me, everything he carried seemed mysterious.

He unfolded something with three legs and placed it on the floor. I would later learn it was called a tripod. Then he mounted a large camera on top of it and carefully arranged the class, moving us around until everyone was in position for the photograph.

What fascinated me most wasn't even the camera—it was what he held in his right hand. It looked like a small metal tube with a flat cup on top. From a small container he scooped a little pile of fine powder onto the cup. We had no idea what he was doing.

Then he looked at us and said, "Stand still and smile."

An instant later there was a brilliant flash—almost like a tiny explosion. The bright white light filled the room, followed by a puff of smoke and the unmistakable smell of burnt flash powder. The photograph had been taken.

That was my introduction to photography.

Looking back, I realize I had witnessed a piece of photographic history. Flash powder, once common, would soon disappear as safer flashbulbs and eventually electronic flash became the standard. Few photographers today have ever seen one used, and even fewer people can say their very first photograph was made that way.

The image of that photographer, his large camera, and the brilliant powder flash became permanently etched in my memory. I never forgot it.

Throughout my career, every time I photographed a group of people, that memory would quietly return. Even today, when I pick up one of my highly computerized digital photo and video cameras—machines that automatically perform many of the tasks I once had to do by hand—I still think about that photographer in my classroom in 1952, holding a scoop of flash powder before creating a single photograph.

Without either of us knowing it, that brief moment marked the beginning of the journey that would become my life's work.

CHAPTER 3

### The First Time I Saw Technology Bring the World to Me

At the age of eleven, after spending six years in the house for poor children, I finally went back home.

I was almost pleasantly surprised to discover that my father had returned. During those six years, I had known very little about him. I eventually learned that he was a machinist aboard a cargo liner and spent much of his time traveling around the world. In my mind, the idea of a father who traveled the world was almost unimaginable.

Not much else had changed during the six years I had been away. We were still poor, but at least there was electricity in the house and our meals were more regular. More importantly, I was old enough now to begin understanding what was happening around me.

I was attending middle school, and for the first time I was making friends outside the house for poor children. My older brother, who was eighteen, had enrolled in the Guglielmo Marconi Radio Communications School.

One day he brought home something I had never seen before: a **radio galena**, a simple crystal radio.

That was one of the first things they learned about in radio school—the most fundamental principles of radio reception. To me, it was fascinating.

The radio was incredibly simple. There was no battery and no electrical outlet. A small piece of crystal was enclosed in a little glass tube sealed at both ends with rubber plugs. A thin metal wire passed through one of the plugs and touched the crystal. The wire was connected to an earpiece.

You would move the tip of the wire slowly across the crystal until, almost magically, you heard a faint radio station in the earpiece. Move the wire a little farther and another station might appear.

No batteries. No power cord. No obvious source of energy.

And yet there was a human voice coming out of that little earpiece.

I didn't understand all the science behind it, but I knew one thing: **I wanted to understand how it worked.**

That little crystal radio was my first real introduction to the idea that technology could somehow capture something invisible in the air and turn it into sound.

My curiosity about technology was beginning.

After school, my new friends and I would meet in a square near our house. We played soccer, chased each other around, or simply did what eleven-year-old boys everywhere do when they have nothing better to do.

There was a trattoria on the square, with tables outside and a television mounted high on one of its walls.

One evening, I noticed that people were gathering around the television. They weren't talking. They were watching silently.

Something serious was happening.

On the screen was the sinking of the *Andrea Doria*, the beautiful Italian ocean liner that had collided with the Swedish liner *Stockholm* off the coast of Massachusetts. The disaster had occurred on July 25, 1956, and the ship would sink the following morning. Fifty-one people died, although the vast majority of those aboard were rescued.

I knew that Massachusetts was in America.

America, to me, was unimaginably far away.

And there it was, on a television screen in a little square in Trieste.

I remember wondering how that was possible.

I asked one of the adults watching the television if he knew how those pictures had traveled all the way from America to our television.

I don't remember exactly what he said. I mostly remember the strange look I received.

Apparently, I was asking a question nobody wanted to answer—or perhaps nobody knew how to answer.

But I was stubborn.

When we returned to school in September, I asked my teacher the same question.

He hesitated.

The next day, however, he came back with an explanation. Instead of giving me a private answer, he decided to explain it to the entire class.

For me, that was even better.

He explained that television news in those days was a very different world from the one we know today.

News photographers and film crews would travel by boat, airplane or other means to wherever an important event was taking place. They used motion-picture film cameras, often shooting on 16mm or 35mm film. The exposed film then had to be processed in a laboratory.

Once the film was developed, an editor physically cut the pieces that were wanted and joined them together. The finished film could then be narrated, combined with a soundtrack, duplicated and distributed to broadcasters.

Getting pictures from a distant part of the world to a television station could take considerable time. In some circumstances, the film might have to be transported by aircraft before it could reach a broadcaster.

That meant something that seemed immediate to me on television could actually have happened hours or even days earlier.

The idea amazed me.

I was looking at moving pictures of something that had happened thousands of miles away, yet there was no satellite television, no internet, no smartphones and no digital video.

There was film.

There were airplanes.

There were laboratories, editors and television stations.

And somehow, all those pieces came together to bring a piece of the world into a little square in Trieste.

### Seeing the World Instantly

Looking back now, that experience seems almost more important than I realized at the time.

I was only eleven years old, but I had just discovered something that would become a recurring theme throughout my life:

**technology was constantly shrinking the distance between people and events.**

I saw it again and again as the years passed.

The radio brought voices from somewhere else into our home.

Television brought moving pictures from distant places into the neighborhood square.

Years later, I would work with film cameras, television cameras, videotape, editing systems, digital cameras, computers and eventually the internet.

Each new technology made the previous one seem impossibly slow.

And if that same disaster happened today, the difference would be almost impossible for that eleven-year-old boy in Trieste to imagine.

Today, passengers and witnesses would immediately begin recording with smartphones. Within seconds, photographs and videos could appear on social media, messaging services and livestreaming platforms.

Before the ship had even disappeared beneath the water, millions of people around the world could already be watching the disaster unfold.

Within minutes, television news organizations could have helicopters, drones where permitted, high-definition cameras and satellite communications at the scene.

Rescue operations could be broadcast live around the world.

Within hours, television networks would have live interviews with survivors, interactive maps, computer-generated animations showing the collision and experts explaining what had happened. Thousands of professional photographs could be uploaded directly from the scene.

The biggest difference would not simply be the quality of the pictures.

It would be **time**.

In 1956, the world had to wait for the pictures.

Today, the pictures would arrive almost as the event was happening.

That eleven-year-old boy standing in a square in Trieste could hardly have imagined such a world.

But something had already changed inside me.

I had become fascinated by the question of **how technology could make the impossible seem ordinary**.

I didn't know it yet, but much of my life would be spent discovering the answer.

CHAPTER 4

## Chapter 4 – Started Earning a Living

### Learning a Trade

I turned 14 and finished school. *Scuole Medie*, or middle school, was at that time, on average, the highest level of education most people could achieve. For families like ours, higher education was simply not an option. Most young people needed to start earning a living and learn a trade. Higher education was largely reserved for families with money, and we certainly were not one of them.

The system was also very strict. If you wanted to learn a skilled trade, you normally had to complete a four-year apprenticeship. During those four years, you were paid very little. It was much easier to find a job in a restaurant kitchen or behind the counter of a bar, where you could earn a little more right away. But if you were willing to accept the low pay and learn a trade, the future was much better.

There were more changes at home, too. My father went back to traveling, and this time we never heard from him again. My brother enrolled in the Italian Air Force and was gone as well.

Once again, it was just my mother and me.

And once again, life became difficult.

I had to start working. I needed to earn some money to help support my mother and myself. Opportunities were limited, and wages were very low. Fortunately, I was hired as an apprentice in an automobile mechanic shop that specialized in tuning and repairing cars, including some very expensive automobiles such as Ferrari and Maserati.

That was the first time in my life that I actually sat inside a car.

We didn't own a car, of course. We didn't own any transportation at all. Our two legs were our transportation. Even taking a bus or a tram was a luxury for us.

As I began learning the skills of an automobile mechanic, something unexpected happened. My dream of becoming a photographer slowly began to fade. I really enjoyed working on automobiles. There was something fascinating about taking a machine that wasn't working and figuring out what was wrong with it, then bringing it back to life.

The irony was that I was learning how to repair automobiles that I would probably never be able to afford in my lifetime.

By the time I turned 18 in 1963, life in Trieste had improved considerably compared with those difficult years immediately after World War II. Television was becoming more popular, although it was still out of reach for many working-class families. Radio remained the main way people received their news and listened to music.

One afternoon in the fall of 1963, I was walking home from work. Along the way, I started noticing groups of people gathered around parked cars, all listening to the radios. Then I saw another group, and another. Something unusual was obviously happening.

I stopped and asked someone what was going on.

The news had come from the United States: President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.

The news hit people in Trieste especially hard. Kennedy was not a stranger to the city. He had visited Trieste on December 11, 1952, years before he became president. At the time, he was a young U.S. senator from Massachusetts, and Trieste was one of the most sensitive political flashpoints of the Cold War.

The following morning, the main newspaper in Trieste, *Il Piccolo*, carried the assassination story on its front page. The newspaper also published photographs of Kennedy's visit to Trieste eleven years earlier.

Those photographs had an unexpected effect on me.

Seeing them reawakened something I had almost forgotten: my desire to become a photographer.

For the moment, however, becoming a really good automobile mechanic was still my main objective.

I was becoming quite good at troubleshooting. Our shop was frequently called when a car broke down somewhere in the city. Sometimes there wasn't time to bring the car back to the shop, so someone had to go to the location and figure out what was wrong.

One particular call is something I will never forget.

One morning, we received a call about an Aston Martin that had broken down in the middle of the city's largest square. We didn't have a car available, so I loaded some tools onto a bicycle and rode to the square.

I wasn't sure what was so special about this particular Aston Martin, other than the fact that it was sitting in the middle of the city's main square, an area normally accessible only to pedestrians.

When I arrived, I took a look at the car and started troubleshooting.

Five minutes later, I had found the problem.

The Aston Martin was ready to go.

The driver paid for the service call, and I remember that he gave me a very generous tip. Before leaving, he told me something about the car that I found fascinating.

It was one of the Aston Martins that had been specially modified for the upcoming James Bond movie, *Goldfinger*. Several cars had been prepared for the film and promotional appearances, and they were being taken around Europe to promote the movie.

I couldn't believe it.

I naturally went to see *Goldfinger* when it came out, and it became one of my favorite movies. Every time I watched that Aston Martin DB5, I remembered the morning when I had ridden my bicycle into the middle of the city to repair one.

Meanwhile, my older brother was doing very well in the Italian Air Force. He had always been the successful one in the family. He received several promotions and was eventually trained on a very specialized missile-guidance system.

His career took him all the way to America.

He was sent to Florida for training at the Cape Canaveral area, and when he came home on leave, he brought photographs with him.

Those photographs introduced me to something I had never seen before.

Color photography.

Every photograph I had ever seen in my life had been black and white. Suddenly, here were these vivid color photographs from America. I remember being amazed by them.

One of the places my brother visited was Cypress Gardens in Florida. To me, the photographs looked almost unreal. The gardens were magnificent, and the pictures showed a world that seemed impossibly beautiful compared with the life I knew in Trieste.

I remember looking at those photographs and making myself a promise:

One day, I would go there myself, with my own cameras.

I had no idea then that it would take almost half a century for that dream to come true.

## Chapter 5 – A New Beginning

The year 1965 became the turning point of my life.

### 1965 — The Year Everything Changed

1965 was the most important year of my life.

My brother was discharged from the Italian Air Force and moved to America. He found a girl from Trieste, became engaged, and got married. Somehow, he also managed to get in touch with our father. That was when I finally learned the truth.

My parents had divorced when I was a child. My father had moved to America and remarried.

It was shocking news, but in the aftermath of World War II, it was not as unusual as it might seem today. In fact, it seemed almost normal. None of my friends or cousins had a father at home either. Many families had been broken apart by the war, by poverty, or by people leaving in search of a better life.

My father offered me the opportunity to come to America. Because I was still under 21, I could join him without having to go through the lengthy immigration process that most emigrants had to endure.

Suddenly, the possibility of America became real.

In March 1966, a new beginning was about to start.

I remember it was very early in the morning when I left our apartment with my mother and one of my childhood friends. We walked to the central bus station, and I remember carrying a small suitcase with everything I owned inside.

That suitcase represented my entire life.

I boarded the bus to the airport, and I was on my way to America.

A few hours later, for the first time in my life, I was sitting inside an airplane. And I had to take three of them to get to New York.

The closest I had ever been to an airplane was seeing one flying across the sky. I had always wondered, *How can those things possibly stay up there?*

Now I was inside one.

Saying that I was nervous would have been an understatement. But at the same time, I was excited and curious.

I buckled my seat belt. The plane slowly moved around the airport and then stopped. The two propeller engines began accelerating. The plane started moving, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Before I knew it, the ground below me was getting smaller and smaller.

That was the moment I realized I was truly starting a new chapter in my life.

The entire trip took about fourteen hours. I didn't close my eyes for a second. I kept looking out the window, fascinated by the clouds below us and the ocean appearing between them.

Then reality really began to set in.

Over the speaker, the captain announced that we were approaching Kennedy Airport and asked everyone to fasten their seat belts.

I looked outside.

In the distance, I could see New York City.

I had seen New York countless times in photographs, but this was different.

This was real.

I was only minutes away from setting foot in America—and from meeting my father, whom I had not seen in more than fourteen years.

After the plane landed, I simply followed the crowd. At a booth, an immigration agent checked my passport and paperwork, stamped my documents, and then said the words that would stay with me forever:

“Welcome to America.”

I replied, “Thank you.”

Those were the only two words I knew in English.

That was also when I realized that learning English was going to be one of my first priorities.

After collecting my suitcase and going through customs, my next challenge was finding my father.

He was supposed to be waiting for me at the airport.

Would I recognize him?

What would I say to him?

Would he recognize me?

And what about all the feelings I had about the fact that he had left us when I was still a child?

All those thoughts were going through my mind.

But I was about to start a new life, and I decided to let bygones be bygones.

I walked out of customs and saw dozens of people waiting for arriving passengers. I looked around quickly and then saw my brother and my sister-in-law.

Then I saw my father.

I recognized him mostly because he was standing next to my brother. Most likely, he recognized me because my brother pointed me out.

And just like that, after more than fourteen years, I was standing in front of my father.

There was not much discussion about the past that evening. From the airport, we went to an Italian restaurant in the Bronx for a nice dinner. I had too many questions about my new life to spend much time thinking about the old one.

My brother had found me a small, furnished apartment in Queens. He had paid the first month's rent, and from then on, I was on my own.

After dinner, he drove me to the apartment, gave me the key, and told me to get some rest. He would pick me up in the morning and give me a tour of New York.

I walked up to the second floor and, for the very first time in my life, opened the door to my own apartment.

It was small and modest, but to me it looked luxurious.

For the first time in my life, I had absolute privacy.

The apartment had one bedroom, a living room, a nice kitchen, and something that seemed almost unbelievable to me: a full bathroom.

No more bucket of warm water and a sponge.

But then I saw something in the living room that completely captured my attention.

It was a piece of furniture with a built-in television, an AM/FM radio, and a record player.

I stood there looking at it.

Television. Radio. Record player.

All in one piece of furniture.

I had come from a childhood where basic necessities had often been a luxury. Now I was standing alone in my own apartment in Queens, surrounded by things I had only dreamed about.

As I stood there looking at that television, radio, and record player, I realized that the first twenty years of my life had finally slipped away.

My new life had truly begun.

# Chapter 6 – Learning to Live in America

# My First Days in America

My first night in America should have been easy. I should have been exhausted. I hadn't slept in two days. But instead of falling asleep immediately, I just lay in my new bed, staring at the ceiling.

Is this real, or am I dreaming?

Eventually, I fell asleep.

I woke up early in the morning, and for a few seconds I was still unsure whether all of this was real. Then I looked around the room. It was real. I was in America.

The first thing I did, of course, was turn on the television.

In Italy, we had only two television channels. Here, I started turning the dial and kept finding another channel, and another, and another. I didn't even try to count them. There were so many.

I finally stopped when I saw a musical group with two women and two men. I later learned they were The Mamas & the Papas, and the song was "California Dreamin'." That song has remained one of my favorites ever since.

Then I went into the kitchen.

For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by technology in a kitchen.

A refrigerator?

In Trieste, only people with money had refrigerators. My brother had stocked his refrigerator well, and I had never seen that much food in an apartment at the same time.

Then there was a little gadget on the counter that I had never seen before. It took me a while to figure out what it was.

A toaster.

I had never seen one before.

And then there was a coffee percolator, another completely new piece of technology.

I suddenly had a new mission: I had to learn how to use all this technology.

That also meant learning how to cook.

My mother was no longer there to take care of those things for me.

But my next introduction to the modern world was something even more basic, and yet, to me, almost miraculous.

A shower.

In my own bathroom.

No more carrying buckets of hot water. No more sponge baths.

The first time I stood under that shower and felt hot water falling directly on my head, I realized something.

I had started a new life.

Early that morning, I was already ready to see New York.

At exactly 10 a.m., my brother and sister-in-law picked me up. I sat in the back seat of their car, my eyes wide open, ready to absorb everything that appeared in front of me.

To say that the ride from Queens to Manhattan was exciting would be an understatement.

For my brother and sister-in-law, it was just a normal drive. For me, it was like being transported to another planet.

Huge bridges.

Driving underneath elevated subway tracks.

Big cars everywhere.

Buildings that seemed impossibly tall.

Stores everywhere.

Traffic everywhere.

Everything was bigger, faster, and more crowded than anything I had ever experienced.

Finally, we arrived in Times Square.

My brother parked the car in a parking garage, another thing I had never seen before, and we walked into Times Square.

The place was alive.

Thousands of people everywhere. Hundreds of cars, trucks, and buses moving through the streets. It was organized chaos, but somehow it worked.

There were stores everywhere, with windows filled with things I had never seen before and didn't even know what they were.

And there was music.

Music everywhere.

Two songs that stayed with me were "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" by Nancy Sinatra and "The Ballad of the Green Berets" by Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.

And then there were the pizza restaurants.

I had never seen so many pizza places in one place in my life.

It was lunchtime.

And guess what?

I had pizza for lunch.

I was born in Italy, and my very first pizza was eaten in Times Square, New York City.

To this day, I still tell everybody that story.

Getting adapted to New York took a while.

Everything I needed was there, including things I didn't even know existed.

I went to work in an auto repair shop in Lower Manhattan. Getting to work and back was an adventure in itself. It took me almost an hour each way and involved four different subway trains.

My new job was going well. I worked with a lot of nice people, and the skills I had learned back in Trieste impressed both my boss and my coworkers.

I also started taking English classes at night, and I was making good progress.

Fortunately, New York was an international city. Wherever I went, I could usually find somebody who spoke Italian.

But Little Italy became my favorite place.

Those few blocks in Lower Manhattan represented regions of Italy and cultures that I didn't even know existed when I was living in Italy.

For the first time in my life, I was also buying records.

Actually, I bought several.

Now I had a record player in my apartment, and I was discovering music in a completely different way.

Fifty-eight years later, I still have that collection of albums I bought in a small record store in Little Italy.

For the first time in my life, I was also making good money as a mechanic.

I could pay all my living expenses, including my rent, and even put some money into savings.

Savings.

That was another new concept for me.

But most important of all, I could send money to my mother every month.

My brother was starting a new family, and I had to participate financially in helping support our mother.

That wasn't only a personal responsibility. At the time, it was also part of Italian law. If an elderly person needed public assistance or welfare, but had adult children who were able to help, those children could be required to contribute to the support of their parents.

But we never did it because it was the law.

We did it because she was our mother.

Things were going really well.

For the first time in my life, I was independent, earning enough money to support myself, learning English, discovering America, and at the same time being able to help the person who had spent her life taking care of me.

I had arrived in America with almost nothing.

Now, for the first time, I could begin to build something of my own.

Chapter 6A The Army days

## The Army Wasn't What I Expected

### The Draft

As part of my immigration requirements, I had to register with the Selective Service within six months of arriving in the United States.

I did.

This was during the Vietnam War.

When I registered with the Selective Service, I explained my situation. I was supporting my mother in Italy, and the small monthly pay of a private in the Army would leave her without the money she needed to survive.

I also explained something much more personal.

I had been born immediately after the end of World War II. I had grown up surrounded by the destruction and hardship left behind by that war. I had seen poverty and experienced it myself. People around me, including children, were dying because there were few, if any, health services available to them.

I had no desire to go into another war.

I didn't want to go somewhere halfway around the world and kill people who had done absolutely nothing to me. And, even worse, I didn't want to be killed myself.

Those were very personal reasons, but they weren't enough to keep me out of the Army. My only other solution was to go back where I came from—to Trieste.

My dilemma was simple: Was life in America worth risking my life for?

The Army, however, offered some options.

The first concerned the money my mother needed to survive. The Army had something called a Class Q Allotment. It was intended for people with dependents who would be negatively affected financially by their being drafted. The Army would take part of my pay, add a matching amount, and send the money to my dependent.

Although my monthly pay would be cut in half, my mother would receive about $70 each month. That was big money in Italy in 1966. It could make a real difference in her life.

But was all that worth my life?

The Army had another option. Since I was an experienced mechanic, they could train me to work on Army vehicles, which would give me a non-combat assignment. The catch was that I had to serve a full two years after completing the training. That meant I had to sign up for a three-year tour of duty instead of the regular two-year draft.

I had nothing better planned for the next three years, and that sounded like a good deal.

So I signed up for three years.

It had been exactly eight months since I had stepped off the airplane at Kennedy Airport, and I was already wearing an Army uniform. I hadn't even had the chance to file my very first income tax return with the IRS.

As ordered, I reported to Fort Hamilton in New York along with many other new recruits. I immediately discovered that things were not going to be quite as great as the recruiter who convinced me to sign up for the extra year had made them sound.

Although my English had improved greatly since arriving in America eight months earlier, it was nowhere near perfect. For the first time, I was also hearing accents of the English language very different from what I had become accustomed to hearing in New York.

At the same time, unlike New Yorkers, many of these people had difficulty understanding my accent.

That caused some frustration.

I also found myself at the receiving end of ridicule and insults. Certain soldiers used words to describe Italians that I had never heard before and had no idea what they meant. Slowly, I learned.

I learned what those words meant when the sergeant added one of them to my name and everyone laughed.

It was embarrassing.

With all the new recruits, we were bused to Kennedy Airport. From there, we boarded an old Boeing DC-3 and flew to Fort Gordon, Georgia, to begin basic training.

Among the new draftees I met several other Italians who had also been drafted. We became friends. They had been in America for many years and spoke English much better than I did. They became a great help to me.

They also knew about another option available to them.

If they received orders to go to Vietnam, they could refuse to serve and return to civilian life. The drawback was that they could never become American citizens. They could, however, remain in the country legally as green-card holders for the rest of their lives.

Not a bad deal.

But it wasn't for me.

I had never been told about that option. The moment I signed up for the extra year, my status apparently changed from that of a draftee to a volunteer. I was no longer eligible simply to leave the Army without facing serious legal consequences, potentially including a court-martial.

After two months of basic training, we were sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for two months of advanced individual training.

By then, I had already been in the Army for four months, and my mother had still not received a single check from the Army.

I inquired through the lengthy Army channels, trying to find out what was happening. It took a while, but eventually I received an answer: It often took several months to implement a Class Q allotment, especially when the recipient lived outside the country.

Regardless, I was receiving only half the money that everyone else was receiving, and my mother wasn't receiving anything.

The only very good news I received while at Fort Jackson came in the from of a telegram from my brother.

For the first time in my life, I was an uncle.

My sister-in-law had given birth to their first son.

My family was officially expanding in the United States, and I was looking forward to going home and meeting my first nephew.

After completing advanced training, I received orders to go to Fort Hood, Texas, where I would begin my duty as a mechanic.

Apparently, there was no formal training waiting for me. Instead, I would learn the job by actually doing it.

That wasn't what I had been promised, but I enjoyed the challenge of working on these incredible machines.

There was something else I noticed at Fort Hood that I had never experienced before.

Black and white soldiers kept mostly to their own groups. They rarely spent time together.

That was very strange to me. As a mechanic, I worked with and became friends with everybody, regardless of the color of their skin.

Slowly, however, I was waking up to something I had thought had ended with the American Civil War.

Racism was still alive, especially in the Southern states.

One weekend, a few of us decided to go to Waco, about an hour away by bus. There were plenty of bars and nightclubs, and many of them had good bands playing.

There were four of us. One was a Black soldier from Jamaica.

We arrived at a nightclub and started paying the cover charge. The man at the door suddenly asked where we thought we were going.

The three of us who were white were allowed inside.

The Black soldier was not.

To say that I was shocked would be an understatement.

Here was an honest young man who had been asked to give his life for his country, and because of the color of his skin, he wasn't allowed to go inside a nightclub in Texas to listen to a band.

Of course, none of us went inside.

We simply went back to the bus station and returned to the base.

That experience would remain with me for the rest of my life.

By then, sixteen months had passed since my draft. I was doing well as a mechanic and had received several promotions. I was now a Specialist Fourth Class and was making a little more money than when I had first entered the Army.

But the Army was still taking half of my salary to send to my mother, and my mother had still received nothing.

I tried every possible channel to find out what had happened to the money. Every person I was told to contact said that an investigation had been started.

Sixteen months had passed, and still no answer.

My last attempt was to talk to a priest.

I did, and surprisingly, he finally managed to get an answer. But the answer made no sense.

The Army financial center in Indiana had no provision to send Class Q payments outside the country.

My money was apparently sitting somewhere, doing absolutely nothing.

I asked if they could simply give me the money so I could send it to Italy myself.

That wasn't possible.

I then asked for a hardship discharge because I believed I qualified for one.

It was rejected.

The reason?

I was already receiving the Class Q allotment.

I tried to make some sense out of all of this, but I couldn't.

Finally, I came to a decision.

I would make it official. They would either correct the problem, or I would return to civilian life, get a job, and send the money to my mother myself.

When I told Army officers what I intended to do, they laughed at me.

Actually laughed.

I was warned that if I left the Army, I would be charged with desertion and could spend many years in prison.

I took the chance.

One evening, I packed my personal belongings and left.

Before leaving, I taped a note inside my locker explaining why I had gone. I wrote that my mother was more important to me than the United States Army.

From that moment on, I was a fugitive—AWOL from the U.S. Army.

I knew very well what the consequences could be, but I felt I was doing the right thing.

I got on a bus in Houston headed for New Jersey, where my brother had moved.

When I arrived, I explained to him what I had done. Although he wasn't very happy about it, he understood my reasons and partially agreed with what I had done.

The bus ride to New Jersey took a couple of days, with several changes along the way.

For the first time, I traveled through Mississippi and Alabama.

That was an entirely new experience.

At every stop, I saw signs saying "For White Only" outside bathrooms, bars, and restaurants.

I couldn't believe my eyes.

I was in what I had always considered one of the most advanced countries in the world, and I found myself looking at something that seemed more than a century behind the times.

When I finally arrived at my brother's house in New Jersey, I got to see my first nephew for the first time.

It wasn't exactly a pleasant reunion.

My brother was concerned that one day someone might show up at his door looking for me. In a few words, I had to find somewhere else to live until my situation was settled.

That first night, I decided to take the bus into Times Square.

I needed a break.

I was by myself, walking among thousands of people and trying to figure out what I was going to do next.

The first thing I needed was a job.

I also needed somewhere to live where I couldn't easily be found.

As I walked through the enormous Saturday-night crowd, I literally bumped into someone who looked familiar.

We were both stunned.

It was one of the Italian friends I had met at Fort Jackson the year before.

The last time we had seen each other, we were both wearing Army uniforms.

Now, with thousands of people surrounding us, we had somehow walked directly into each other.

There was something almost like fate about that encounter.

He was with his new girlfriend, who would soon become his wife.

We went into a bar for a drink and started sharing memories of our adventure in the Army.

I explained my situation.

He invited me to move to Connecticut, where he lived. There was a large Italian immigrant community there, he told me, and I wouldn't have any trouble finding work as a mechanic.

It was the first good news I had received in a long time.

The following day, I got on a bus to Connecticut.

A new phase of my life was about to begin.

Chapter 6B, life as a AWOL

## Back to the Army

## Back to Connecticut—and Back to the Army

I decided to give Connecticut a try.

It was hard to digest that, in reality, I had become a fugitive from the Army. How much was I really worth to the Army? Would they actually dedicate any time or resources to finding me? I couldn't believe how my dream of being in America had turned into a nightmare.

This was also the time when the anti-draft and anti-Vietnam War movements were becoming the focus of demonstrations all over the country. I felt that the Army had much bigger problems to worry about than looking for me. As far as the Army was concerned, I was insignificant.

I found a job almost immediately, working at a foreign-car dealership. I rented a furnished room from an Italian family, and slowly, things began getting back to some sort of normal. For all practical purposes, I almost felt like I was back in Italy without ever leaving America.

I made many friends and gradually became part of the Italian community. Most of the young men I knew had girlfriends, and many were already planning weddings. That was something I couldn't imagine myself doing.

After everything I had gone through with my own family, I was afraid to even think about marriage.

But that only lasted until I met the woman who would become the love of my life. We have now been married for more than 55 years.

We got engaged and started planning our wedding. But then I came to my senses. There was no way I could start a family with the Army hanging over my head.

I finally told my fiancée the truth. I explained my situation and decided that I had to return to the Army and find out what would happen.

By then, I no longer needed to send money to my mother in Italy. The social assistance laws in Italy had changed, and my mother was finally receiving enough assistance to live safely. For the first time, I knew that she would be okay without my monthly support.

One early morning, I took a bus to New York and turned myself in at the same place where I had originally been drafted.

I was handcuffed and taken to the Army stockade at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

After sixteen months on the road, I was back in uniform, sleeping in an Army barracks with other soldiers who had done essentially what I had done. Around us were tall fences topped with wire, with armed guards patrolling outside.

Now I had to wait and find out what would happen to me.

It was the summer of 1969, and under normal circumstances I was only about three months away from my scheduled discharge. Now, who knew?

After a few weeks in the stockade, I was told to meet with an Army attorney. He was a young guy, probably fresh out of college, and prepared to deal with someone who simply didn't want to stay in the Army.

But his attitude changed as I began explaining what had happened.

I told him about the money that had been taken from my Class Q allotment. The money was supposed to be sent to my mother in Italy, but instead, it had been withheld. I explained that I had no choice but to leave the Army and find a job so I could send my mother money to buy food and keep a roof over her head.

His attitude changed immediately.

This wasn't a standard AWOL case.

About a week later, I found myself sitting in front of a higher-ranking officer. It was almost like a trial. I told my story again.

When he heard the circumstances, he shook his head in disbelief. It seemed as though he had heard of similar cases before.

Without asking many questions, he filled out some paperwork.

The next morning, I was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas, to an Army rehabilitation center. I was never told exactly why I had been transferred there.

I was assigned to a platoon that was basically going through Army training again. For some reason, however, I was given various duties but never actually participated in the regular training.

Then, one day, I was taken to the office of a captain who was also a social worker.

After hearing my story, he couldn't believe what had happened to me.

He told me that I would be discharged on the exact date I had originally been scheduled to leave the Army. There would be absolutely no punishment for my AWOL time on my record.

It looked almost as if the Army was trying to bury the whole case.

Then he asked me some very unusual questions.

Had I ever contacted the Italian Embassy while I was away from the Army?

Had I ever told my story to any newspaper, television station, or other media?

Of course I hadn't.

It was becoming obvious to me that the Army was concerned about negative publicity if the story of what had happened to me became public.

I assured them that I had kept everything to myself. I didn't want publicity. I didn't want revenge. All I wanted was to go back to living a normal life and put the whole experience behind me.

In November 1969, I received a General Discharge under Honorable Conditions.

The reason given—and one I accepted, although I could have challenged it—was my inability, due to language and communication difficulties, to adapt to military discipline.

I signed what seemed like a mountain of documents. Among the copies of everything I had signed, the captain handed me an envelope.

Inside was an Army check for $1,400.

It was money that had been held from my pay, including the money from the Class Q allotment that was supposed to have gone to my mother.

In a strange way, it felt like my compensation for three not-so-good years.

At that moment, I was officially a civilian again.

I still had to wear my Army uniform for the flight home because the military had issued my return ticket. The captain from Public Relations even drove me to the airport himself.

Finally, I was going home.

Three long, turbulent years were behind me.

It was time to start my life over—again.

On the flight back to Kennedy Airport, my mind wouldn't stop thinking about what a waste those three years had been, both for me and, in many ways, for the Army.

But even under the darkest clouds, there is usually a silver lining.

Looking back, I realized that I had learned things about America and about technology that I probably would never have experienced as a civilian.

I learned how to maintain and repair an Army personnel carrier. I drove everything from small Jeeps to huge five-ton trucks. I used two-way radios for the first time in my life.

I learned a lot about physical fitness. I slept in tents for the first time during outdoor combat training.

And then there was one particular piece of training that has stayed with me all these years.

We were actually formally trained in what to do when nature called while we were out in the field.

If you had to do number two, you were instructed to dig a hole exactly one foot by one foot by one foot.

When you were finished, you covered it back up.

I'm sure that knowledge will come in handy someday.

But there was also something much more serious that I learned during those three years.

I learned that racism was still very much alive in America, especially in some of the Southern states.

Back in Italy, what we had learned in school was that the American Civil War had ended slavery and, in our simplified understanding, had ended the problem of racism.

I discovered that history was much more complicated than what we had been taught.

The Civil War had ended decades before I arrived in America, but racism had certainly not ended with it.

That was another lesson America taught me—one I never expected to learn when I first arrived with nothing more than a dream of starting a new life.

– Photography by Anthony

## Chapter 7 — From Mechanic to Photographer

After the unexpected three-year delay, I was finally ready to start over again.

I went back to my mechanic job, and everything seemed to return to normal, almost as if nothing had ever happened. But for me, finally ending those three years in the Army, with all the ups and downs—mostly downs—was a tremendous weight off my shoulders. I was 24 years old and ready to move forward.

I was still undecided about whether being a mechanic would be my forever job or whether I would ever fulfill my dream of becoming a photographer.

Two months after my discharge, in January 1970, I was finally able to marry my fiancée, who had patiently waited for my Army experience to be over. She had planned our wedding down to the smallest detail. There was something almost crazy about the fact that in my entire life I had never attended a wedding, and the very first one I attended was my own.

Ironically, my decision to become a photographer came from my own wedding. And the very first business lesson I received in my future profession came directly from the photographer my fiancée, now my wife, had hired to photograph our wedding.

He had no idea, but he was directly responsible for my decision to change careers.

During the wedding, I watched him constantly. I studied every move he made and every word that came out of his mouth. I watched his techniques, everything he did with his cameras and lights, and even how he moved his equipment from one location to another.

And then there was something else that made my decision even more significant: how much he charged us for the wedding album.

It suddenly became very clear to me. Being a photographer, especially a wedding photographer, seemed infinitely easier than rebuilding an automatic transmission. It was much cleaner, and judging by what he had charged us, it appeared to be much more profitable.

Wedding photography was not really part of my dream for the future. I wanted to get into commercial and advertising photography and, eventually, photojournalism. But at that point, I was willing to do almost anything that would get me into photography.

The city in Connecticut that was going to become our new home had a large Italian community, and speaking Italian would be a definite advantage for a future wedding photography business. And Italians, I had learned, liked to buy lots of pictures.

So, right there at my own wedding, I made the decision: I was going to become a photographer.

In the following weeks, my wife and I used all the money we had, and borrowed whatever more we needed, to buy equipment and open our first photography studio.

My first camera was a Hasselblad 500C with an 80mm standard lens, a 50mm wide-angle lens, and a 150mm telephoto lens. I bought some studio lights and put together a basic darkroom.

By the end of the spring of 1970, **Photography by Anthony** was born.

The place was small, but it was more than adequate for a startup business. It had a little reception area, a larger studio, a dressing room, a small darkroom, and a bathroom. It was a great place to start.

There was only one problem: I still had a lot to learn.

Back then, learning photography was not easy. There was no internet, no YouTube, no online courses, and no way to instantly find the answer to a technical question. I read every book I could find and joined every professional photographers' association I could find throughout the Northeast, from New York City to Boston.

Once a month, I traveled to their meetings and educational sessions, as well as their annual conventions. Looking back, those experiences were among the best learning opportunities of my entire career. I was learning directly from photographers who were already doing what I wanted to do.

This was also my very first adventure as a business owner.

Like most inexperienced new business owners, we were convinced that once we opened the doors, the money would start pouring in.

Reality had other plans.

When I started, I had very little of my own work to show potential clients compared with established photographers who had years of work in their portfolios. That was probably my biggest disadvantage.

So I started doing work for free just to build some kind of portfolio. I photographed mostly portraits and did some weddings without charging. Eventually, as I had hoped, wedding bookings started coming in.

But there was a problem.

Wedding bookings were good for the future, but not necessarily for the present. Most weddings were scheduled months in advance. I might get a booking, but all I was receiving immediately was a deposit to hold the date.

Money was tight, and meeting our monthly expenses became a real challenge.

The commercial and advertising assignments I had been hoping for simply weren't materializing.

I started wondering if perhaps my destiny in life really was to remain a mechanic.

I have to admit, those were depressing times.

Then one day, I received a phone call that would finally take me in the direction I had been hoping to go.

The call came from the Eastern Seal Rehabilitation Center, a nonprofit organization. They asked if I would be willing to do some volunteer photography work for them.

Of course, the last thing I needed was to work for nothing. But one thing I had plenty of was free time.

So I accepted.

For several months, I did promotional photography for their newsletters and other materials. Then one day, I was told they were going to have their annual board of directors meeting. They asked if I could set up an area where I could make formal portraits of the board members.

No problem.

I brought all the lights from my studio and converted one of their meeting rooms into a portrait studio. I also photographed many of their activities and meetings that afternoon.

I met a lot of people and received many compliments and thanks for the volunteer work I was doing.

But something else happened that stayed with me to this day.

Someone asked me where I was from. I knew immediately that he was asking because of my accent. I told him I was born in Northern Italy.

His response surprised me.

"True artist."

I had never thought of myself that way. But I thought, maybe being an artist could be good for business.

Eventually, it was.

I guess I just had to start behaving like one.

A few days later, I received a call from someone in the public relations department of Xerox, whose headquarters were nearby.

She thanked me for the excellent portrait I had taken of the president of Xerox, who was one of the Eastern Seal board members.

My heart was pounding.

Then she asked if I would be interested in doing photography for Xerox's monthly newsletter and other corporate needs.

Of course I said yes.

I was suddenly booked for several assignments.

For the first time in months, I had a huge smile on my face.

The following day, I received another call.

This one was from Conoco, also headquartered nearby.

It was almost the same story. They thanked me for the portrait I had taken of the president of Conoco, who was also an Eastern Seal board member. They asked if I would be interested in doing corporate photography for them.

Of course I said yes.

I was booked for several projects.

The decision to volunteer for a worthwhile organization was probably one of the best business decisions I ever made. I had gone there looking for nothing more than an opportunity to practice my photography, and instead I walked away with two major corporate clients.

The business was finally getting off the ground.

The wedding business was doing very well too. Although I knew it wasn't where I ultimately wanted my business to go, weddings were bringing in good money. They were helping us survive while I built the commercial side of the business.

After about two years, I had built a good reputation as a wedding photographer and was booked solid. Some brides even changed their wedding dates so I could accommodate them in my schedule.

There was one big advantage to weddings: they took place mostly on weekends.

That left the rest of the week open for me to serve my corporate clients and expand into the commercial and photojournalistic photography that I had originally dreamed about.

Exactly three years after opening our first studio, in 1973, my wife and I bought our very first house.

But we didn't just buy a house.

We added a two-story addition.

On the upper floor, we built a 24-by-30-foot studio. On the lower level, we created a reception room, an office, and space for future color and black-and-white darkrooms that were already part of my plans.

The business was gradually shifting away from weddings and toward commercial and advertising photography.

We expanded our equipment considerably. We added Sinar 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras, ELM and Superwide Hasselblads, Nikon F2 cameras and additional lenses. We built a special adjustable light table for product photography and added much more equipment as the business grew.

Business was good.

Xerox remained one of my main clients. I photographed assignments at their headquarters in Stamford, and I also traveled around the country photographing Xerox installations.

But one assignment in particular has stayed with me all these years.

One morning in 1975, I received a call from the Xerox public relations department.

They needed me that afternoon at the residence of the Xerox president in Westport.

It was very important. They couldn't tell me exactly what the assignment was, but they needed my Social Security number—not for Xerox, but because the Secret Service had requested it.

I immediately realized that this was more than an ordinary corporate assignment.

She also instructed me to use my Hasselblad, work handheld without a tripod, and bring plenty of black-and-white film.

For a few seconds, I wondered if my Army background could somehow cause a problem.

It didn't.

That afternoon, I drove to the Xerox president's residence.

Waiting for me at the gate was a very cordial Secret Service agent. He got into my car with me, and we drove to the main house, which was incredibly magnificent.

Near the large garage, I discovered something I had never seen before.

Inside the garage was a complete communications center, with several Secret Service agents working around a collection of communications equipment.

I asked what was going on.

I was told that Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was going to arrive in about an hour for a private gathering with local corporate executives.

I would have a Secret Service agent with me throughout the afternoon. He would help me with my equipment, but more importantly, he would tell me what I could and could not photograph.

At the end of the event, when the vice president left, I would have to turn over all of my exposed film to the agent.

The reason I was there instead of the media photographers was simple.

They didn't want the media there.

Instead, they asked Xerox to have their own photographer—me—do the photography.

About an hour later, two helicopters landed on the lawn behind the house.

Vice President Rockefeller stepped out and was greeted by the executives.

I took pictures whenever I was told I could.

At the end of the gathering and meetings, the vice president went around shaking everyone's hands.

He shook mine too.

Then he returned to the helicopter and flew away.

I handed all the exposed film to the Secret Service agent, went back to my car, and returned to my studio.

It was an unforgettable experience.

But there was another lesson I was learning about business.

The connection with two major corporate clients was bringing me business from many smaller companies.

Back then, there was no Amazon, no Facebook, and no social media where companies could instantly market their products.

If you wanted to buy something, you went to a store or looked through one of the many catalogs that arrived in the mail.

And somebody had to take all those photographs appearing in those catalogs.

Those photographs had to be good.

We had several companies coming to us because they needed professional photographs for their catalogs.

Inside our studio, we had four stations dedicated to product photography. Product photography eventually became one of our main sources of business.

But there was a problem.

We were shooting color transparency film, and there was no way for us to process it in-house.

We had to take the film to a laboratory about an hour away and then return the following day to pick up the processed film.

Even worse, we couldn't always break down a set after photographing a product. We had to wait for the customer to see the transparencies and approve the photographs.

The entire process wasted an enormous amount of time, and our customers weren't happy about the delays.

I decided there was only one solution.

We needed our own color laboratory.

So I decided to build the darkrooms on the lower level of our addition.

We installed a large Colenta E-6 film processor, a Colenta color paper processor, an Omega 4x5 color enlarger, and, of course, a complete black-and-white darkroom.

We also hired two full-time technicians to operate the darkrooms.

The new system changed everything.

Business became more efficient, and our clients were much happier.

But there was something we hadn't anticipated.

News that we had a complete color laboratory spread quickly through the local photography community.

Other photographers started asking us if we could process their E-6 film.

Suddenly, something that had originally been built to solve a problem inside our own photography business became a new source of revenue.

And just like that, another chapter in our profession was about to begin.

Chapter 8

Seven years had passed since we started the business, and we arrived at an unexpected crossroads. We had reached the maximum volume of work our operation could comfortably handle. We could have simply rushed each assignment to squeeze in more business, but that would have risked lowering the quality of our work and, eventually, losing the clients who trusted us.

The logical choice was to expand, and that's exactly what we did.

We arranged financing through our bank, leased a much larger industrial building, purchased additional equipment, and hired more employees. It took nearly two months to move everything and renovate the new facility to meet our needs. Once completed, we installed more film processing equipment and expanded our technical staff. We had grown to fifteen employees, and my primary responsibility shifted from being a photographer to managing people, equipment, production schedules, and the day-to-day operation of the business.

Business continued to grow steadily, and before long our staff had increased to twenty-five employees.

Throughout those years, Kodak became much more than our primary supplier. We developed an excellent working relationship with both their technical and marketing teams. Their support went far beyond selling us photographic materials. They provided valuable technical assistance, marketing guidance, and promotional programs that helped us expand into the higher-end amateur and consumer photography markets.

With Kodak's assistance, we also entered the rapidly growing consumer film processing business by offering "in by 10, out by 5" C-41 color film processing. We created a separate section of the laboratory dedicated exclusively to walk-in consumers, opening an entirely new market for our company.

Was I happy about all this growth?

I wasn't sure.

On one hand, it was an incredible accomplishment. This poor kid from Trieste, whose formal education had ended with middle school, was now running a successful and rapidly expanding company with dozens of employees. On the other hand, I deeply missed being behind the camera. Photography had always been an artistic challenge, a way to express creativity and capture emotion. As the business grew, my days became filled with management meetings, employee issues, equipment purchases, and financial decisions. I had become more of a businessman than a photographer, and that created an internal conflict that stayed with me for years.

As my business responsibilities increased, so did my involvement within the photographic industry. Besides remaining active in several Professional Photographers Associations, I also became an active member of the Photo Marketing Association (PMA), the organization that brought together manufacturers, suppliers, laboratories, and photographic professionals from around the world. Attending PMA conventions allowed me to stay ahead of industry trends while building relationships with many of the companies shaping photography's future.

Around 1980, another technological revolution was beginning. Video production was becoming increasingly popular, and many of our commercial clients started asking whether we also produced videos.

At the time, we didn't.

But I saw it as the perfect opportunity to create what I called a "lateral business"—serving the same clients while offering a complementary service.

We invested heavily in professional video production equipment. The industry standard at the time was Sony's Betacam SP system. It was expensive, but it offered unmatched reliability and image quality, making it the obvious choice for a company that wanted to produce first-class work.

We built a state-of-the-art editing suite, purchased several professional cameras for both studio and location productions, and assembled a talented video production team.

Another service quickly became one of our most popular offerings. Families brought us their treasured home movies on 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm film, and we transferred them onto VHS videotapes, preserving memories that otherwise might have been lost as projectors disappeared from American homes.

Once again, the number of employees continued to grow.

At that point, I believed we had probably reached the final stage of our company's growth. I couldn't imagine where we could possibly expand next.

I was wrong.

During the annual Photo Marketing Association convention in Las Vegas, I was approached by representatives from Noritsu, the Japanese manufacturer whose revolutionary One Hour Photo processing systems were beginning to transform the photographic industry.

They were already familiar with our laboratory and believed we were an ideal candidate to add one-hour processing to our operation. Their sales presentation was convincing. They predicted that the traditional overnight laboratories—the very type of business that had made us successful—would eventually be replaced by one-hour processing labs located inside retail stores.

They had a legitimate argument.

Progress has always been the toughest competitor.

That conversation marked the beginning of the next chapter in our company's evolution.

We were about to enter the exciting—and highly competitive—world of One Hour Photo.

## Chapter 9 – The One Hour Revolution

Once again, another chapter in my journey as a business entrepreneur was about to begin.

This time I was expanding into the new world of one-hour photo processing laboratories. In a way, I was creating my own competition, knowing full well that if I didn't, someone else certainly would.

Until then, customers had to bring their film to my laboratory, leave it with us, and return later in the day to pick up their prints. The new concept turned that model upside down. Instead of customers coming to my lab, I was bringing the lab to them.

Our first one-hour photo lab was on its way.

We found a freestanding building in a convenient location with easy access for customers. Noritsu delivered and installed the equipment, then trained several members of my staff to operate the new laboratory.

The response was immediate. The new store was a tremendous success.

At the same time, our traditional processing business—film dropped off by 10:00 a.m. and ready by 5:00 p.m.—was dying quickly. Rather than wait until it became worthless, I made the difficult decision to shut it down and sell the equipment while it still had value. Had I waited only a few more months, as one-hour processing became the industry standard, that equipment would have been worth little more than scrap metal.

Noritsu made expansion remarkably easy. Besides supplying the equipment, they also provided financing. Before long I had opened three additional one-hour labs.

Life had changed in ways I could never have imagined.

The poor kid from postwar Trieste was now an executive businessman driving a Porsche 911 Turbo. The last time I had sat in a Porsche, it wasn't mine—I had been an auto mechanic working on someone else's car. We also bought a much larger home in a beautiful country setting, surrounded by two acres of property. By every measure, we were doing extremely well.

It also seemed that my life behind the camera was becoming a distant memory.

Around that same time another revolution quietly entered our lives—computers.

Our first system was a Xerox graphics workstation that allowed us to create presentation slides for our commercial clients. We designed the graphics on our computer, transmitted the files electronically to a Xerox production facility, and the finished slides were delivered to us the following day. At the time, it seemed like an incredible innovation.

Looking back, I now realize that it was also the beginning of the end for the traditional photo processing industry.

Soon computers were appearing everywhere. Cash registers, payroll, inventory control, accounting, and virtually every aspect of running the business became computerized. I found myself spending countless hours learning this new technology. I never believed I could simply let employees operate systems that I didn't understand myself. If computers were going to become the backbone of my company, I needed to know how they worked and what was happening inside them.

With every passing year, my dream of simply being a photographer drifted farther into the background.

Then one day I received an invitation from Kodak to attend a special meeting at their headquarters in New York City.

The event was reserved for what Kodak informally called its "Million Dollar Club." The name didn't mean we were spending a million dollars each year with Kodak, but we were close enough to be considered one of their major customers.

When I arrived, I was greeted by Bill Cosby, who at the time was Kodak's celebrity spokesman, years before his spectacular public downfall and eventual imprisonment. Every guest shook his hand and posed for a photograph with him.

That evening Kodak hosted an elegant dinner. As impressive as everything was, everyone in the room was asking the same question:

"What are they trying to sell us now?"

After dinner the presentation began.

Kodak announced that it was entering the one-hour processing business with a new retail concept called the Kodak Center. They had developed their own processing equipment, each store would follow a standardized Kodak design, and the company planned to support the entire operation with a national advertising campaign.

It was an ambitious program, and Kodak made us feel privileged to have been selected as participants.

I didn't hesitate.

Within three months I had opened three additional one-hour labs—this time as Kodak Centers.

On many evenings I would sit alone in my office in front of two computer monitors, surrounded by financial reports, expansion plans, and business forecasts. My thoughts would often drift back thousands of miles to my childhood in postwar Trieste.

Was all of this really happening?

How could a boy who grew up in poverty, with little formal education, who had once worked as an auto mechanic, now own a multimillion-dollar company in an industry he hadn't even known existed during the first twenty years of his life?

Sometimes even I found it hard to believe.

10

Well, here I was, sitting in my office, surrounded by the technology that represented the success of the company I had built. Computers sat on my desk. Monitors from the closed-circuit cameras around the laboratory and studios allowed me to keep an eye on every operation. It was my 20th year since arriving in the United States, and what a journey it had been.

Twenty years in Trieste, twenty years in America.

That little starving kid from Trieste, who once had dreams that seemed impossible, was now a business executive running his own multimillion-dollar company. I was married for 20 years to an incredible woman, we had two beautiful children, a beautiful home, and I was driving the kind of car I only dreamed about as a child.

Back then, dreams were all I had. But when dreams become reality, something else happens: you realize that reality can be fragile. Maybe that was the greatest gift those difficult years had given me—the ability to always look ahead and ask one question:

"What could possibly go wrong?"

One day, one of our best clients invited me to his studio to show me a new camera he had purchased from Kodak. At first glance, it didn't even look like a conventional camera.

It was still a regular professional camera that exposed traditional photographic film, but it had something else—a secondary digital imaging system. Inside was a new device I had never seen before: an electronic image sensor. The camera could capture the image digitally and display it immediately on a small television monitor so the client could see the photograph right away instead of waiting days for the film to be processed and the prints returned from the laboratory.

It was an incredible invention.

But there was one obvious problem: the digital image quality was nowhere close to what traditional film could produce. Film was still far superior. The colors, the resolution, the detail—nothing compared to what we were producing every day in our laboratories.

A lot of people would have looked at that camera and dismissed it.

I couldn't.

On my drive back to my office, my mind was racing. I kept thinking:

"Did I just witness the birth of a new technology, and at the same time, the beginning of the end of an entire industry?"

The thought was frightening.

At that moment, I was planning to open two additional Kodak Center one-hour laboratories. The business was profitable, but expansion also meant taking on a significant amount of additional debt, much of it through equipment financing directly from manufacturers.

What would happen if this new technology improved faster than anyone expected? What if customers stopped using conventional photography systems? What if the very equipment I was financing became obsolete before it was paid off?

My instincts told me I needed answers.

The first thing I did when I arrived back at my office was call my Kodak representative and request an emergency meeting. He arrived the following morning. I was a major customer, and my call had obviously gotten his attention.

I explained exactly what I had seen and why I was concerned.

His reaction surprised me.

He laughed.

Not a reassuring laugh—a dismissive one. Almost as if my concerns were unrealistic. He told me I had nothing to worry about. According to him, this was only experimental technology and it would take at least another 20 years before anything like this could reach the mass consumer market.

His answer sounded rehearsed, almost like he was repeating a company statement that had been prepared in advance.

But something about it bothered me.

If I looked back throughout history, major technological changes rarely followed a comfortable timetable. New inventions often started as experiments, then suddenly improved, became affordable, and changed entire industries much faster than established companies expected.

My feeling was that Kodak was not only trying to reassure me—they were trying to reassure themselves.

I told him to put my order for the two additional one-hour labs on hold until I understood more about this new technology.

He was not happy.

But I was not about to take on millions of dollars in additional debt while ignoring what my instincts were telling me.

I asked him a simple question:

"If this new technology begins affecting my business, will Kodak take back the equipment and forgive the remaining balance?"

I already knew the answer.

Of course not.

No manufacturer would do that.

The risk was mine.

The investment was mine.

The future of my company was mine.

And for the first time in 20 years of building my business, I began to wonder if the greatest challenge ahead would not come from competition, the economy, or management.

It might come from a technology that, at that moment, was still sitting quietly inside a camera—waiting for its time to arrive.

Chapter 11

My optimism about the future came to a sudden halt. Was I overreacting? My worries were not just about myself. I had more than fifty employees—highly trained technical people, many of whom had learned their trade after joining my company. I felt that we were more than coworkers; we were a large family. What would happen to them? How would they earn a living if the skills they had spent years mastering were suddenly no longer in demand?

Over the following months, I spoke with many people in the photo-processing business. Surprisingly, I seemed to be the only one who was seriously concerned about the impact that digital imaging technology would have on our future. Perhaps I was wrong, I told myself. But despite trying to reassure myself, all the growth plans I had made for the company came to a halt.

For the next few years, we heard very little about digital technology. There were occasional news stories, but nothing that seemed immediately threatening. Every year I attended the NAB convention in Las Vegas, and I gradually began seeing digital cameras on display. At first, there was nothing to worry about. Most were low-end consumer models with limited capabilities. For a short while, I allowed myself to believe the transition would take much longer than I had feared.

That feeling didn't last.

Little by little, sales began to decline. The volume of film arriving at our laboratories grew smaller each month. My suspicions had been correct. The photo-processing industry was beginning its final chapter. Digital technology was taking over the imaging business. This was only the early 1990s, and the changes were arriving far sooner than the twenty years Kodak had predicted.

It was time to take action before it was too late.

Unfortunately, it already was.

The pace of technological change was astonishing. I tried to sell my individual one-hour photo labs, but there were no serious buyers. The smart investors had already seen the future and knew exactly where the industry was headed.

Eventually, the volume of incoming business no longer covered our operating expenses. In simple terms, we were operating in the red.

Then came the most painful part of all.

I began laying off employees.

Every conversation was heartbreaking. I apologized to each one, but apologies could not stop reality. Many of my competitors had already closed their doors, and I knew my turn was coming.

The only part of my business that had not yet been affected by the digital revolution was my video production department. Video editing and production remained steady. Fortunately, that division had always operated as a separate business under a different name, so I decided to relocate the editing suites and production studio to a new location.

Then, with a broken heart, I shut down the photo-processing operation.

It was the first time in my life that I had failed at something.

For a long time, I blamed myself. I kept asking what I could have done differently, even though deep inside I knew the truth. Kodak, the very company that had built the film industry, had also accelerated its collapse. By embracing digital technology much sooner than many of us expected, it unintentionally destroyed not only its own business but also the livelihoods of thousands of independent laboratories, retailers, and entrepreneurs who had built their companies around Kodak's products.

The next step was even more painful.

The laboratory still owed money on much of its equipment, most of it manufactured by Kodak. Machines that had once cost hundreds of thousands of dollars were now worth little more than scrap metal. I was certain that sooner or later I would hear from Kodak's attorneys regarding the outstanding debt.

I decided I had better hire an attorney of my own and prepare for what I believed was inevitable.

Chapter 11

I began to realize that my life seemed to move in twenty-year chapters.

The first twenty years were spent in Italy. I was born into poverty, had very little, and struggled just to find my place in life.

The second twenty years were completely different. I came to America, served in the military, married, started a business, and built it into a successful company. I had achieved what many people only dream about. Then, almost overnight, technology changed everything. Through no fault of my own, the business I had spent two decades building began to disappear.

Now I found myself wondering what the next twenty years would bring.

I was devastated. Watching twenty years of hard work collapse because of technological change was almost impossible to accept. But feeling sorry for myself wasn't going to pay the bills or support my family.

The truth was that I still owned a video production business. For years it had been more of an added service for my photo-processing clients than a business in its own right. It generated some income, but nowhere near enough to replace what I had lost. Still, it was all I had.

It was time to start over.

In many ways, I felt as if I were back at the beginning of my photography career, except this time I also had video production. I certainly wasn't an expert producer. I understood the technical side of cameras, lighting, editing, and equipment, but I had never devoted myself to the creative side of storytelling. Then again, I kept asking myself, "How different can it be?" To me, video was simply photography that moved.

Fortunately, I wasn't starting with empty hands.

I already owned more than half a million dollars' worth of professional photo and video equipment. I had a fully equipped studio, cameras, lighting, editing systems, and everything else needed to produce professional work. The only thing missing was the determination to get back out there and rebuild.

So I picked up the phone and began contacting many of my former photo-processing clients. This time I wasn't offering film processing. I was offering video production, along with photography whenever it was needed.

Once again, I was a one-man operation.

But there was one thought I couldn't get out of my mind.

What would technology do next?

After what had happened to my photo-processing business, I was determined never to be caught by surprise again. I began researching every new technological development I could find. Back then, research wasn't nearly as easy as it is today. There was no internet filled with search engines, no social media, no YouTube videos, and no AI assistants to answer questions in seconds. Finding information meant attending trade shows, reading industry publications, talking to manufacturers, and spending countless hours doing homework.

In the spring of 1995, I attended the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Convention in Las Vegas. I wasn't there simply to buy new equipment. My mission was to see what technologies might threaten my future.

It didn't take long to find the answer.

Computers.

More specifically, computer-based Non-Linear Editing, better known as NLE.

The picture quality wasn't yet equal to conventional tape-to-tape editing, but I had heard that argument before. Years earlier, digital camera sensors also couldn't match the quality of film. Yet they eventually destroyed the photo-processing business that had supported my company.

I wasn't going to ignore the warning signs a second time.

Standing on the convention floor, I realized that the editing side of my new business could eventually suffer the same fate as my photo laboratories. That changed my entire business strategy. Instead of building a company that depended equally on production and post-production, I decided to focus primarily on creating content. Editing would remain an important service, but I would never again build my future around a technology that could quickly become obsolete.

Once again, I was back at the drawing board.

I also studied how much the video industry had changed during the previous decade. Predicting the future was impossible, but the direction was becoming obvious. Video technology was advancing at an astonishing pace. Cameras costing more than $50,000 could become obsolete in just a few years. Clients always wanted the highest image quality available, and if you couldn't provide it, one of your competitors would.

Technology wasn't simply making equipment less expensive or more convenient.

It was redefining the entire profession.

Chapter 12

So it was time to start over once again.

I began contacting many of my former photo-processing customers, along with clients from my earlier photography business. To my pleasant surprise, the assignments started coming in almost immediately.

My first major client was a large travel agency that specialized in promoting hospitality resorts throughout the United States and the Caribbean. They needed both promotional videos and still photography—exactly the kind of work I enjoyed most. On average, I completed two assignments each month, with each trip lasting five to seven days on location.

The destinations included resorts throughout the United States as well as Barbados, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and many other Caribbean locations I had never visited before. What had started as a difficult setback was unexpectedly becoming an exciting new adventure.

My life had definitely changed. Perhaps the biggest symbol of that change came when I sold my Porsche and replaced it with a minivan. Prestige no longer mattered; I needed room to carry cameras, lighting, tripods, and video equipment. Many of the luxuries I had once considered essential quietly disappeared.

I had gone from being a company executive to being the worker once again.

Part of me felt like I had failed. After all, I had built a multimillion-dollar company with more than fifty employees, only to watch technology make much of it obsolete. But another part of me felt something I hadn't experienced in years—excitement. I was back behind the camera where I truly belonged. Whether shooting still photographs or producing video, I was once again creating instead of managing. I had rediscovered the passion that had started my career.

The biggest adjustment was financial. When I owned my company, more than fifty employees generated revenue every day, even when I was on vacation. Now there was only one person producing income—me. If I wasn't working, no money came in. That required a completely different way of thinking.

Fortunately, my client base continued to grow.

Before long I began receiving assignments from television broadcasters. First came work from the Golf Network, followed by the Wrestling Network. Although the volume of work increased, I had no desire to build another company or hire employees. My previous experience had taught me that lesson well.

I was no longer a business owner.

I had officially become a freelance videographer.

Another surprise awaited me. The expensive editing suites and studio equipment that had once been the heart of my business were no longer necessary. At the end of each assignment, I simply handed the videotapes to the client. Large broadcast production facilities handled all of the editing and post-production. My job was to capture the images; theirs was to assemble the final program.

That realization led to my next major decision.

Just as I had done twenty years earlier, it was time to move back home.

I sold my editing equipment, closed the studio, and established my office in my home. I no longer operated under a company name. I simply worked under my own name—a one-man operation doing what I loved.

Surprisingly, working from home and waiting for the phone to ring didn't bother me at all. I had adjusted well to this new phase of my life.

By then our family had also grown with the arrival of our third child. Although I was often away for a week at a time on assignments, having my home as my base allowed me to spend far more time with my family than I ever could while managing fifty employees. Watching my children grow became far more rewarding than running a large business.

Then another unexpected opportunity appeared.

One of my broadcast clients had frequent assignments in Florida, and I soon found myself spending one or two weeks each month in the Sunshine State. I had become a commuter.

One day that client suggested something I hadn't seriously considered before.

"Why don't you move to Florida? If you lived here, we could give you a lot more work."

It was an intriguing idea.

Convincing my wife took a little longer.

With each trip south, I stayed an extra day or two to explore different communities and search for the ideal place to raise our family. The more time we spent there, the more convinced we became that it was the right decision.

In August 1997, we officially became Florida residents.

Another twenty-year chapter of my life had closed, and a new one was just beginning.

Chapter 13

The move to Florida was flawless. We bought a beautiful home in a great neighborhood, and another one of my childhood dreams finally came true—we had a swimming pool in our own backyard. That alone made the move worthwhile.

Our children quickly settled into their new schools and began making new friends. I continued servicing my existing clients, but now, instead of boarding airplanes for every assignment, I could simply drive there. The third cycle of my life had started on a very positive note, and it was about to get even better.

A large portion of my work involved producing video interviews for television broadcasters, both national and international. Most assignments included a producer sent by the network, myself as the videographer, and a sound technician. My responsibility was to transform whatever location we were given—usually a hotel meeting room—into a professional television studio.

Using my own creativity, I designed the lighting, camera angles, and background while working closely with the producer, whose recommendations depended on the topic of the story. Clients were consistently pleased with the final product, and before long I was receiving more and more calls to set up interviews.

Then one day I received the phone call that truly changed my videography career.

It was from ESPN.

ESPN had recently launched a new channel, ESPN Classic, dedicated to documentaries and feature stories about some of the greatest athletes in history. They told me they had seen my interview work and that the visual style was exactly what they were looking for. More specifically, they wanted my "Renaissance style" of lighting, posing, and overall presentation. They immediately booked me for several assignments, with many more to follow.

That description intrigued me.

My Renaissance style?

It took me a while to understand what they meant, but eventually my thoughts traveled back over forty years to my elementary and middle school days in Trieste.

Art was one of the major subjects taught in Italian schools. In Italy, art was considered a national treasure, and the Renaissance, beginning in the fourteenth century, represented one of the greatest periods in human artistic achievement. Without realizing it, those lessons had become part of me. The concepts of light, composition, balance, and classical beauty had quietly stayed in my subconscious throughout my life.

Who would have imagined that the poor little boy growing up in post-war Trieste would one day be hired by one of the world's largest television networks because of artistic principles he had learned in elementary school—lessons that, at the time, I often found boring?

Life has a strange way of preparing us for opportunities we cannot possibly imagine.

By the summer of 1999 another technological revolution arrived. Unlike the digital camera revolution that had destroyed my photo-processing business only a few years earlier, this one would become both a tremendous opportunity and a warning.

Apple introduced Final Cut Pro.

For the positive side of the industry, it completely changed professional video editing. For the negative side, it would do to the traditional editing business almost exactly what digital photography had done to commercial photo processing.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of highly skilled editors would soon find themselves without work.

Final Cut Pro was an affordable, computer-based editing system that cost only a fraction of traditional editing equipment or even earlier non-linear editing systems. Fortunately, my painful experience in the photo-processing industry had taught me an important lesson. I immediately recognized what was about to happen and decided to sell my expensive editing equipment while it still had value.

Unfortunately, my prediction proved correct.

Within only a few years, the traditional video editing industry had almost disappeared.

There was, however, one major difference from what had happened in photography. When digital photography arrived, billions of dollars worth of photo-processing equipment instantly became scrap metal. In video production, the transition happened more gradually because cameras were still recording on analog videotape.

Although editing was now performed on a computer, the original tapes still had to be played back in real time using professional videotape decks. Those analog signals then had to pass through a capture device that converted them into digital files before they could be edited inside the computer.

It would take several more years before professional cameras caught up with the computers and began recording directly in digital formats.

As far as we knew in 1999, however, we were entering a completely new era.

I purchased a new Apple computer and installed Final Cut Pro.

What I remember most wasn't just the software—it was the manuals.

Final Cut Pro came with two enormous instruction books, each containing well over a thousand pages. The software itself cost $999, a considerable investment in 1999, and Apple recommended purchasing one of their Power Mac computers, which cost approximately another $3,000.

Apple also encouraged users to subscribe to its technical support program, staffed by Apple engineers who would assist with installation and operation of the software. I eagerly signed up, expecting expert guidance whenever I encountered problems.

My first support call quickly brought me back to reality.

Whenever I asked a question whose answer happened to be buried somewhere in those thousands of pages, the polite response was usually, "You'll find the answer in the manual."

So it was back to reading the manuals.

Even though Final Cut Pro represented a major technological leap, the editing process still required a great deal of equipment and labor compared to today's standards.

Professional cameras, although extremely expensive, were not designed to provide high-quality playback of their own recordings. We therefore needed professional videotape players, usually Betacam SP decks, connected to an analog-to-digital converter, which transferred the video into the computer's hard drive in real time.

Only then could the actual editing begin.

When editing was completed, the finished program had to be converted back into analog form and recorded once again onto a Betacam SP master tape for permanent storage. If the client needed multiple copies, that master tape was shipped to a duplication facility where it was copied onto VHS tapes or other requested formats for distribution.

Social media did not exist yet.

There was no YouTube, no online streaming, and no cloud delivery.

Physical tapes were still the only practical method of distributing video programs.

This revolutionary computer editing system also transformed the economics of video production. Before Final Cut Pro, professional editing houses routinely charged around $250 per hour for basic editing, and considerably more if clients wanted sophisticated effects.

Now independent videographers like me could purchase the software, edit projects ourselves, charge clients far less, and still make a healthy profit.

Ironically, we often hired freelance editors—the same professionals who had lost their full-time jobs when traditional editing facilities closed—to come to our homes and edit projects on our own computers while we were away on assignments.

It was the first major democratization of professional video editing.

Nearly thirty years later, I am still editing with Final Cut Pro on an Apple computer, although today's version bears little resemblance to the one I purchased in 1999.

The technological progress has been extraordinary.

Instead of two massive printed manuals occupying half a bookshelf, the documentation is now online, constantly updated, searchable within seconds, and supplemented by thousands of instructional videos. Whenever I need to learn a new feature, I simply search the internet or watch a YouTube demonstration where someone walks me through the process step by step.

As someone who also appreciates nature, I can't help but smile every time I think about those enormous printed manuals. Just imagine how many trees have been saved by replacing thousands of printed pages with digital documentation.

Technology never stops moving forward.

Sometimes it destroys an industry. Sometimes it creates entirely new opportunities. More often than not, it does both at the same time.

My life had already taught me that lesson once.

It was about to teach it to me again.