Author Judith Kendall was our special guest on April 30th. Listen to the Podcast now: In 1965, three members of the Nielsen Electronics staff were paying little attention to the many social changes occurring in their era. For John Hampton, senior engineer, his invention of an airline cockpit recorder had his career spiraling forward and held the promise of a secure future.
General Manager, Loren Slaton, was close to achieving his goal of becoming the major stockholder in the corporation, and he was looking forward to running the company on his own terms. Robin Nichols had just about mastered the art of balancing a career with that of being a single parent and was finally settling into a comfortable routine with her two sons. Certainly these three were aware of the flower children promoting their free-love lifestyle…the underground use of illegal drugs seeping subtly into regular society…the mounting apprehension about the Vietnam struggle. These subjects had prompted many animated discussions around the water cooler, but they did not seem an apparent threat to their own existence. Or were they?
One rocky marriage would soon take a terrible turn, sending one of its participants scrambling to pick up the pieces. One formerly docile wife would not only surprise her husband by taking a bold stand, she would change the course of his life. One overconfident man would be blindsided by a puzzle that only the woman in his long-standing affair could solve. One woman’s principles would cast her into a struggle between right and wrong, complicating every aspect of her future. One tragic act would stun employees and have an unforeseen effect on management.
These incidents happened so rapidly that everyone was deep into the heady issues of the era before they even realized it, each of them struggling to survive the latest crisis, not one of them knowing how it would all end.
About Judith Kendall
Having lived and worked through the sixties, Judith Kendall was not only a witness to the significant changes occurring, she was part of them. Her own career launched during this period and over the next generations, she developed a seasoned perspective on the subtle and not-so-subtle distinctions between local neighborhood companies and large city organizations, knowledge that has lent itself well to her first novel, Overtime.
Put on the back burner for many years, her fascination for the sixties never dwindled, causing her to return again and again to finish the book. Each time, she was that much older, that much wiser, and had many more experiences to add. Her challenge was to keep the story in its time period and interweave the complexities of business relationships with the personal dynamics of the era, and that she has done.
