Product Description
by Thomas B. Barker (Author)
Travel to the 1950's with Tom Barker as he takes you on his Rollfast Bicycle for a ride back in time when the minimum wage was $1 an hour, a stamp cost 3 cents and a newspaper was a nickel. Tom takes you on a visit to the lost world of the delivery of the mighty newspaper by an army of teens. Learn how hundreds of newspaper carriers got the latest news, fashion, sports, and advertising out to the masses. Understand the importance of the newspaper boy institution and the famous people it has influenced and were once among its ranks. Tom will tell you how he got his paper route, overcame obstacles, made new friends, and endeared himself to the customers on route S-2 in Irondequoit New York. Today newspapers are delivered by sometimes grumpy men in automobiles who deposit the thin wad of newsprint into a plastic tube at the side of the road. Back in the 1950's each customer had a special place reserved at their house for the gentle placement of the thick, rolled up, multipage conveyance of information. It was a different world back then and Tom will take you there.
Author Biography
Tom Barker graduated from McQuaid Jesuit High School in 1959, the same year that he "retired" from his "first job" as a newspaper boy. He went on to Fordham University, but two years later found his interest in science and love of photography were well blended in the Photographic Science program at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). It was there that he was introduced to statistical methods by Professor Al Rickmers. He landed a summer job at the fledgling Xerox Corporation at the end of his junior year at RIT. At the end of the summer job, he was offered the opportunity of a co-op in the Fall, Winter, and Spring. During this time he combined work at Xerox with his senior research project at RIT producing an analytical method for determining the "Degree of Permanence of the Xerographic Image." This work is recorded in both the Xerox Research Library and the RIT library. Based on his research on this aspect of xerography and other experiments conducted during the summer, he was offered an engineering position at Xerox. During his tenure at Xerox, he was responsible for six US Patents and numerous foreign patents. In 1985 Tom left Xerox for his "second career" as a professor at RIT where he taught applied statistics. Design of Experiments became his specialty and his book "Quality by Experimental Design" is in its third edition and is based on his extensive experience at Xerox where he conducted over 2,000 statistically designed experiments. Tom is now Professor Emeritus after retiring from RIT in 2005. He continues to make movies and to write books that range from a repair manual for Gilbert American Flyer trains to a 100 page travel-photography "Coffee Table" book. He has made over 100 movies and has earned awards for them on a national level. While at RIT in the early 1960's, he came in second to a budding filmmaker (Martin Scorsese) in the Brown Intercollegiate Film Festival. Tom and his wife, Anne, of 45 years travel extensively throughout the world and in the USA in their motorhome. He conducts a Movie Camp each summer for his two grandsons and their friends (12 in all) where the kids make movies. He lives in Webster, New York.
