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Erik: How did your father’s work ethic influence your creative career development?
Doug: Oh, that’s cool. My father was a very cool guy, and uh, he, he actually was a very
hard worker. And he dropped out of high school. He got into a lot of trouble with gangs and
things, actually lived in Brooklyn, probably about twenty blocks from here. And he saw
his friend’s family succeed, and uh, so he asked them why? And he was like “oh,
because you went to college.” So my dad did not have a high school degree, so therefore
he couldn’t even get to college, and he had this second kind of thing he saw, which
was he was working as a telephone man at the time. It was before modulate jacks where you
could just plug phones into your house, if you wanted a phone in your room it had to
be wired from the basement and someone had to come do it – it was just like cable today.
And he saw these two guys that were 20 years his senior drunk and asleep in a closet, in
one of the major high rises in midtown. And he said, “I don’t want to be that. I’m
gonna put myself through college.” And so my father got a GED and he put himself through
college at night for marketing management, and he became a regional sales manager and
then a became a national sales manager for 3M, selling fiber optic technology. And so
that was his experience, and he translated that to me in trying to make me part of any
technology investment in anything that I was to do. So he was a photographer in college
and he saw that I was getting into creative stuff, and so he encouraged me to take pictures
with his camera. He really didn’t like the idea of me using his camera because he was
afraid I might break it, and so I was always encouraged to work as a child, and I started
working, I think at like 14, I had a paper route, and I was collecting money and building
up a lot of reserves. And so for every birthday I would never just get a gift, I would get
half the gift, but I would get a bigger gift. My freshman year in high school – I wanted
this camera, and it was twice as much as the budget my parents had for my birthday. And
so they said, “hey if you can come up with this much money, you can have this, you know
crazy” – actually at the time it was a Minolta camera, and it had a wireless flash
unit – at the time which was really great – and proprietary so you could take the
flash off and put it anywhere in the room and take a picture. And so I paid for half,
they paid for half, and it encouraged me to really work for the things I wanted. And so
it - this quality of nothing is given, everything requires work. And I think that’s what he
gave me, as a person, was this idea that nothing comes easy. And I think that’s why I work
so hard.