Barbara Eberhard's Blog - Posts Tagged "biography"

In 2020, my parents both died. Separately, but within weeks of each other. As the writer in the family, I'm the one who put together their obituaries. Mom was first, and her obituary was mainly about what I knew of her and the family.
But Dad's was more complicated. Dad was a bit of big deal in his world of research architecture. And so I wanted his obituary to be filled with more about his work. He'd published a book called Extraordinary Events of My Life - mostly for the family - from which I borrowed liberally. I did some quick Googling of his name, and in the process, learned a lot. I knew Dad, as I said, was something of a big deal. But I had no idea, really, how much.
I began to understand how much when the obituary I wrote and published on Ever Loved, the same website we'd used for Mom, was picked up by numerous publications. It was used by the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) in their moving tribute to their founding president, John Eberhard. It was used by the State University of New York at Buffalo in a piece on the founding dean of their School of Architecture. It was used by the American Institute of Architects in their piece about Dad's passing as he had been both a Fellow of the AIA (FAIA) and the 2003 Latrobe Prize winner (to found ANFA). In short, it ended up in a bunch of places.
Realizing that Dad was something of a bigger deal than even I knew, I thought he belonged in Wikipedia. Thus began a 1-year process of actually getting Dad's bio in Wikipedia. My original obituary was "too flowery" for them, too many adjectives, too many accolades. Then, I was told Dad just wasn't notable. Which was patently absurd given how many institutions had published about his passing. I finally whittled the article done enough for one of the Wikipedia editors to note the awarding of the Latrobe Prize, and to give Dad a status as "notable" based on that.
By then, I'd done a lot more research, trying to find something that would make Dad notable enough for Wikipedia. And we'd gotten some amazing pieces published by ANFA and some of Dad's AIA colleagues about the great things that Dad had done.
And so, I decided to write a biography of my father. I've never written a biography. I write fiction, though I do call some of my novel fictional biographies. Still, writing non-fiction is a very different thing than writing fiction. For one thing, it requires actual facts. Which means research and footnotes and things like that. It's a daunting idea.
But I'm giving it my best. I have lots of papers from Dad's estate. I have the research I've already done. And I've now interviewed eight of his colleagues, with others to come, I'm sure.
So, for the short term, I'm switching from fiction to non-fiction. The tentative title is Maverick for the Built Environment: A Biography of John Paul Eberhard. We'll see how this goes.

I'm calling my father's biography (tentatively - don't hold me to it) A Maverick for the Built Environment. There are different aspects of being a maverick, though. And in many ways, they all apply.
Oxford defines maverick as "an unorthodox or independent-minded person". I've interviewed a bunch of his old colleagues from various jobs. I've got his papers - well, most of them. There's no question this definition fits. Although trained as an architect, and a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, Dad didn't design after 1958. Instead, he was interested in "systems thinking" and research. I have testimony he gave before Congress in 1972 about the need to understand how people use buildings, not just to design them.
Dictionary.com defines maverick: "a lone dissenter, as an intellectual, an artist, or a politician, who takes an independent stand apart from his or her associates." This definition also applies in that Dad challenged the AIA, including taking a small niche shell part of the AIA and turning it into a $60m organization he called the AIA Research Corporation.
Vocabulary.com has this definition: " A maverick is a rebel, someone who shows a lot of independence". In 1985, I went to work for a company - now defunct - called Codeworks Corporation. Our goal was to create a database of building codes across the country for architects to use if they were designing a building in a jurisdiction where they didn't usually. There I met an architect named Bill Brenner, who was my boss and is still my friend. He knew my father, though mostly by reputation. He was the first one who said to me, "Your father is someone that you either love or hate." What he meant was that Dad challenged the conventional thinking of architects and "rebelled" against those who were more interested in design than in the architecture my dad defined as the intersection of art, engineering, and science.
"If you describe someone as a maverick, you mean that they are unconventional and independent, and do not think or behave in the same way as other people." (Collins English Dictionary)
Yup, that's my dad.

I suppose every biographer has this challenge, or wants to have this challenge, but I feel like I have so much source material for Dad's biography, it's hard to keep track of it all.
Today, I spent part of the day working in the biography file and part of the day reading what I have of Dad's thesis from graduate school (I'm missing a lot of it - it may be in another file somewhere).
As I've mentioned before, I have some materials that Dad wrote himself about his various jobs. I also have his book, Extraordinary Events in My Life, which I've used extensively throughout the biography. I also have his professional files (or at least a lot of them) in a very large plastic bin. Dad had organized most of the files by his work life, but I found some "extras" in another box the other day, so I've added more to this box of professional papers. Officially, his professional papers have gone to an archive at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. So what I have are either duplicates or papers Dad found later and didn't send along. Along, with these professional papers, I have an entire file cabinet's worth of personal papers. I also have my parents' "loose" photographs and albums of photographs, including a couple of albums from before they met and their wedding photographs. Finally, I have an entire case of Dad's drawings - about 200 drawings and lots of other papers (like trip reports Mom put together to describe what they did, along with photos of places they went and Dad's drawings) and correspondence.
I have two files of tributes to Dad - one from ANFA and one from his colleagues at AIARC - in soft copy, making it easy to incorporate them into the biography. I've also searched on Google any references to Dad, including a bunch of obituaries that were written after Dad's death, most of which included some parts of the obituary I had written. And I have the obituary I wrote of Dad and the original Wikipedia article I tried to get published, which is based on the obituary.
Plus, other materials on some of the people mentioned in the biography, like Don Schon and others.
It's a lot of material.
What's in the biography as of right now are Dad's autobiographical notes from the many flash drives I inherited from him, as well as retyping of many of the sections of Extraordinary Events. Then I've folded in some of the pieces from the tributes and obituaries, particularly where they made sense with regard to certain jobs. For example, there is a wonderful obituary from SUNYAB that includes some of the history of how Dad got that job, which makes for very useful information for the biography. I've put in some of tributes in their own format, so it's obvious they are tributes.
I've been working my way through Dad's career, and thought I had done most of the work for his early work at Creative Buildings, Inc. and Sheraton Corporation. This would take me through 1963 (shortly after I was actually born). But I've only made it through about a half dozen of the files of professional papers - meaning there are probably two or three dozen more to look through. I haven't read all the papers I've downloaded that Dad managed the publishing of at both AIARC and BRB, which I'm sure will need to be folded into the biography. And I haven't even begun to look at the personal papers, which I'm sure will add some "color" to his working life, as well as adding in Mom and other important people in Dad's life. The artwork is starting to get into the biography in bits and pieces. I'm sure the photos are making the file substantial in size.
At this point, I only have about 120 pages of biography "written", most of which is notes and pieces of articles from 1963 onward. I keep trying to figure out how to "track" what I've used and what I haven't. And it's still mostly a jumbled mess at this point. Particularly challenging are the hard-copy files; I think I'm going to have to have some kind of divider in the bin for what I've looked at and what I haven't. And someday I have to start looking at the personal files.
And I still have a lot of reading to do!

I spent most of today on cover design for both my dad's biography and for my next fiction book. Needless to say, the cover designs are quite different.
The fiction book, tentatively titled "Rich People Problems: The Story of Raggedy Ann and Andy", was easier to create. Fortunately, Raggedy Ann is no longer copyrighted. So, I found an image of a "rag doll" on iStock for $12, and she serves as the primary image for the cover. I have made the titles for my non-fantasy books the same font: Eagle Lake. I did change the style of the cover overall from the design I had been using, getting away from having the non-fantasy and fantasy covers look the same. I also set up the paperback and hard cover covers to be the same, which is not the case for my previous non-fantasy books. The Kindle version is simpler, having no back cover. But similar enough that it's obvious they are the same book.
One of the challenges of using KDP to produce the covers, as opposed to some other software or hiring a graphic designer, is that there are only a limited number of designs. However, within each design, there are a number of layouts - including an author photo and biography, or not, and varying the placement of all the parts of the design - the title, the subtitle, the author's name, etc. I have rarely used the author photo - I'm not a fan of my picture in general. And I usually replace the author bio with reviews of my books, to hopefully convince readers that I write compelling books. There is also a selection of sets of colors to use, and then once you've set the colors, you can also vary them manually if you choose to. Same with the fonts. Each design comes with a default set of fonts. But you can manually change them if you choose to - like changing the font on the cover for my next non-fantasy book to match the styles of the others.
I found it much more challenging to make the cover for Dad's biography. For one thing, I wanted the look to be completely different than any of my other books. I wanted to incorporate a piece or two of Dad's artwork as well - though I only have high resolution images for some of them. The back cover description is not really a description of the book itself - as it has been for my fiction books - as much as an argument for the project and for Dad's being a maverick. Likewise, I've replaced the review section with some of the tributes that have been published about Dad, which again are part of the impetus for why I'm writing the biography in the first place.
Overall, though the two layouts ended up very different, I am happy with both. Subject to change as the books progress, of course.

Today I spent writing fiction again. I plan to write fiction again tomorrow.
It was an interesting change of pace after weeks of focusing on non-fiction.
I wrote the first chapter in what should be my next fiction book, a return to the fictional biography genre of my first book and all the non-fantasy books since then. As I've written before, I call this work fictional biography because the books are written in first-person narrative. And they tell the story - albeit not a full life - of a woman finding love.
I could call them romances, I suppose. Perhaps that would be more fruitful in terms of Amazon searches. In KDP, I chose the categories of fiction/contemporary women and romance/contemporary.
But I don't really think of these books as romances. There's almost no sex in them, for one thing. So, readers of romance novels, myself included, who enjoy the romping of the main characters would be woefully disappointed in my fictional biographies.
When I first started writing, before I wrote Life Reimagined, I tried writing a romance novel. I couldn't do it. I couldn't write a sex scene. I've read literally hundreds of them. But I couldn't write one. And in those days, when my parents were still alive, I was embarrassed to think my parents would be reading a sex scene, and think about me in that position. Beyond embarrassing!
Another thing I don't check on KDP is that there is something that people under 18 shouldn't read in my books. And a real sex scene would, probably, be something one should check the other box for - to presumably have some kind of warning on Amazon for younger readers.
Of course, I started reading romance novels - with very explicit sex scenes in them - long before I was 18. But that's neither here nor there, apparently.
At any rate, I don't want to have to check that box. I don't want to have to narrow my readership in any way. And the few scenes when my main characters may wander into a bedroom are usually mentioned but not described in detail. They may get to the point of kissing passionately and disrobing. But not beyond that. I leave that to the readers' imagination.
Anyway, picking from the fairly limited list of options in terms of genre on KDP, I pick fiction/contemporary women as the primary genre. And then, romance/contemporary as the secondary genre. Because my books are about love after all.

Today, I again found new things about my dad. Well, not new in his ideas, but new in his professional life, which I'm writing about in my biography of him.
In 1969, Dad testified to the following in front of a Senate subcommittee: "The final point I made in my testimony which I submitted for the record and which I would like to repeat because I think it was not stressed enough today, is that when we begin any of these processes of regulating the processes of building homes, we ought not to just measure whether or not materials are adequate and whether or not buildings are structurally sound but we ought to measure whether or not these buildings meet man's need, whether or not the people who are going to live in them have their physiological, psychological, and sociological needs being met. Mr. Chairman, we are abundantly ignorant about how to do that. We really don't know how to measure man's needs in that sense."
Dad, from the time he started at the National Bureau of Standards, and possibly before that, was a proponent of "performance-based building standards". I knew this about him, because it's one of the things that a lot of the people I've talked to about Dad talk about. Because it made Dad something of a pariah in the building industry.
You see, most building codes prescribe the size of things. They are engineering based. Dad advocated for performance-based standards; that is, not prescribing how things should be done with the size of things but rather with what we are trying to accomplish with the things. Moving toward these kinds of standards was a change in thinking. It's part of what made Dad a maverick.
But what I didn't realize until now is that Dad's push for performance-based standards was an early indication of his desire to measure how the built environment works for the people who use it. Not just to make buildings better by measuring the outcomes of their use, because that makes more sense than prescribing the walls have to be so thick, etc. But to produce better outcomes for the people using those buildings, whether they are homes (as in the case of his testimony here) or churches or schools or hospitals.
This passion, as science progressed, was what he was trying to accomplish with his last career move - the Academy for Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA). To use this new science, neuroscience, to measure human's interactions with architecture, to improve the built environment for human's use.
Maverick indeed.

My fictional biographies are usually populated with people that I can imagine. I mean, I was 20 or 30 once. I remember a lot of what happened in those times. And I know a fair amount about what it's like to be that age today, through colleagues and family.
But there are definitely some things I don't know about when I'm writing. For example, when I first started writing fantasy, I needed to know how far you could ride a horse in a day, as most fantasy involves riding horses, not cars or other modes of transportation. At least on the world I'd invented.
Some of the people in my fictional biographies have had jobs similar to jobs I've had. In my early career, I worked for a bunch of different kinds of companies. And some parts of businesses are fairly universal.
But this current novel is set on a cattle ranch. Do you know how many acres you need for a cattle ranch? Neither did I. Do you know where in the U.S. there are cattle ranches? Neither did I. Do you know how many cattle you can fit on a ranch of a certain size? Neither did I. Do you know how many people it takes to run a ranch of a certain size. Neither did I.
Fortunately, I have all the statistics in the world at my fingertips courtesy of Google. Now, you do have to be a little careful about what links you trust to have the correct information. And I usually try more than one to make sure the information is reasonably the same.
But it must have been challenging to write novels in the days before the Internet. You would have had to either write about things you'd experienced - or your friends or family had experienced. Or spend months or years researching. Or make it up, and hope you were close to the truth. Or not care if the reader called you out for the things you don't know.

As I've shared before, I'm working on a biography of my father.
In the wake of his death in 2020, I wrote an obituary using some materials he'd left behind, including his "autobiography", Extraordinary Events in My Life. That obituary became the first draft of a Wikipedia article I finally got through the Wiki-wickets in 2021.
But it also got "picked up" by others writing obituaries about Dad or articles about his passing.
As I'm writing his biography, I've copied or bookmarked all those articles, and I've found quiet a few errors in what they added to what I had written.
One says Dad helped create the National Conference of Building Codes and Standards (NCSBCS) in the 1980s. Dad had actually done it in the late 1960s, when he was at the National Bureau of Standards / Institute for Applied Technology. In the 1980s, Dad was back in DC (after a stint in Buffalo), but no longer at NBS. From other research I've done, NCSBCS came into being in 1967. It wasn't that hard to figure that out, and it's a little annoying to me that the reporter who wrote about Dad having been instrumental in bringing NCSBCS together didn't do at least a little background check to make sure the dates were correct.
Likewise, today I read another article about Dad that talked about the first faculty at the School of Architecture & Environmental Design at the State University of New York at Buffalo meeting at our house at 30 Voorhees Avenue in Buffalo. A quick Google search reveals that there is, in fact, no 30 Voorhees Avenue. And having searched my memory for the actual address (I was 6 when we moved there), I know it was 35 Voorhees Avenue, which I confirmed with a street view from Google Earth.
Now, I'm not perfect. And I'm sure I'm also making errors in my writing of Dad's biography. I only hope that the folks I send the draft to do a better job of fact-checking me than the fact checkers at either of the above publications.

As of today, I've written Dad's biography through 1972. He was born in 1927. Which means I've written about 45 of his 93 years. Almost halfway through his life.
Except that his working life was only part of those 93 years. Granted, Dad worked until he was well into his 80s; the last consulting he did was for the Brain Institute in 2010.
Still, I think it's a pretty significant accomplishment to have covered so much of Dad's life. The early chapters, about his childhood, are solely from Dad. He talks about growing up in Louisville and the time he spent on Long Island as a child. He mentions two significant women: his mother and his Aunt Minnie. These two strong women had a profound influence on Dad. His mother, who was a working nurse, nursed Dad through two bouts of rhematic fever as a child. After one of them, Dad had to learn to walk again, having been laid up in bed for months. Aunt Minnie was his refuge, I think, from the complexities of his family, with the seven children and his father, the pastor. Dad lived with Aunt Minnie and her husband, George, during his recovery and "loved her more than life itself".
After his childhood, the rest of the chapters are a combination of what Dad had written in his autobiographical notes and his book "Extraordinary Events in My Life". Interestingly, the stories in each are similar, but not quite the same. I've added my own research, as well, of course. And am including articles, obituaries, and interviews, as well.
So, as of today, the biography covers Dad's career through his tenure as the first-ever dean of architecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
But I have to use the term "sort of" because the years from 1972 through 2010 are many and include several more of Dad's "careers" - from the American Institute of Architects Research Corporation to the Brain Institute.
Importantly, I see the thread of Dad's career, not only in terms of being a research architect and pushing always for the science and art of architecture to get better. But also in terms of his desire for "evidence-based design" and ways to measure the built environment's impact on humankind, which culminated in his fascination with neuroscience as a possible avenue for doing just that.
For those who might be reading these blog entries, I will say that I still haven't read my way through all Dad's papers. I have started to archive the articles I've used, and as a result, can see some progress through the myriad of material in that way.
But I've got a long way to go. Even if I am halfway done - sort of.

When I first started writing about my father, John Paul Eberhard, it was to - unfortunately - put together his obituary.
I had actually written an obituary for our mother first, as she died first. She was in hospice for 10 days, which gave me a chance to think about what to write and to do a little research about her. That obituary was published on the Ever Loved website when she died on April 12, 2020. I knew when I wrote Mom's obituary that the only people who would really be interested were family and friends.
However, when I started writing Dad's obituary - shortly after Mom's - I had the idea that, because Dad was well known in his industry, the obituary might get shared more broadly. And therefore, it should probably be reasonably accurate. It also proved fortuitous as Dad ended up dying only two weeks after Mom. I think I've written about that before.
Dad's obituary then became the basis for an article to try to get him into Wikipedia. Now, like most of you, I've always thought Wikipedia was open to any editor, meaning anyone could update any entry. I guess I assumed there would be some kind of control over changes, but Wikipedia also seemed to be "open".
So imagine my surprise when my first draft of an article on Dad was summarily - and probably rightly - rejected. First, the Wikipedia editors - who are a real thing - didn't like that I was Dad's daughter. They prefer that entries come from folks interested in a topic, but not so close as a child. Second, they didn't like my "flowery" language. I talked about Dad being innovative; they didn't like that. I talked about Dad being a visionary; they didn't like that. Third, and most importantly, they didn't see anything about Dad's career that was "notable".
The question of notability is an interesting one, therefore. I did finally get Dad into Wikipedia on the strength of his having be awarded the LaTrobe Prize by the AIA, a biennial $100,000 prize, which was co-awarded to the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) to help fund/start the organization.
But the more I dig into Dad's history and career, the more I would argue makes him notable.
One thing he did early in his career was argue for and find funding for the creation of the National Conference of State Building Codes and Standards (NCSBCS).
Before that, he helped drive the development of the first computerized hotel reservation system, in a joint project between Sheraton Corporation and Hilton Hotels.
He testified before Congressional committees at least twice that I've found so far, once on the funding of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and once about plans to create the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS).
Dad was the first-ever dean of architecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNYAB), where he started a new concept in graduate school programs to give the students practicum experience as well as classroom instruction at the Buffalo Organization for Social and Technological Innovation (BOSTI), patterned after Organization for Social and Technological Innovation (OSTI) in Cambridge, MA.
He essentially created the American Institute of Architects Research Corporation (AIARC), which had been a sort of "holding company" within the AIA, but hadn't actually done any research. When he left, AIARC had grown to 60 people with a budget of $10 million.
And then there's ANFA and the LaTrobe prize, and a couple of books and, and, and...
But there are other instances of things that, I would argue, make Dad notable.
Perhaps the most interesting one is that there are 21 boxes of his papers, writing, correspondence, drawings, and everything else career-related at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. "Officially established in 1945, the Center now holds over 90,000 cubic feet of historic documents and artifacts in more than 3500 collections—placing the AHC among the largest non-governmental archives in the nation." AHC had contacted Dad in 1981 wanting to see if he would be willing to have them be the archive of his papers as part of their Contemporary History collection. Dad was both "flattered and dismayed" by the request, because he didn't think he was at the point of his career where archivists would be interested in him. However, he sent off papers in 1982 and then more and more throughout his career. The original inventory I have from 1984 said the archive contained 13 boxes. Now, in 2023, it's 21 boxes.
So, Wikipedia, I would think that Dad being one of only 3,500 collections at a place called the "American Heritage Center" would also qualify him as being notable. And, in fact, there's a hyperlink to his collection at AHC on the Wikipedia article for Dad.
So there.