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Jim Neatherlin's first STC meeting happened to be the first joint meeting of the Dallas and Fort Worth STC chapters in 1969. The all-male gathering consisted entirely of engineers, many who had taken their tech writing jobs to avoid layoffs. Others, simply tired of making "little black boxes," ventured into an area where they could write manuals, releases, and marketing collateral while still being involved in the engineering field.
The exception was Jim, who had trained as a technical writer at the State University of Iowa, now the University of Iowa (where he wrote the first thesis ever with a computer) and was teaching at East Texas State. People complained about having to drive to the "middle of nowhere," to the Holiday Inn on I-30, the former toll road. I-30 was the only road that linked Jim to Dallas, Grand Prairie, Arlington, and Fort Worth, each having a DoD subcontractor for whom he later ended up doing contract work.
