Richard Bolles, Who Wrote ‘What Color Is Your Parachute?,’ Dies at 90
This content was originally published by PAUL VITELLO on 2 April 2017 | 1:30 am.
Source link
It also found a fan base among job-seekers attracted to Mr. Bolles’s homespun style — a fusion of boot camp rigor (job-hunters should spend at least 40 hours a week hunting), practical advice (“If you’re being interviewed over lunch, never — never — order a drink ... Don’t ... do ... it! ... Even if they do it”) and muted spirituality.
Continue reading the main story
Job-hunting was an art form, more like dating than like selling a used car, he told readers. “You may never understand why things sometimes work, and sometimes don’t,” he wrote.
With that in mind, Mr. Bolles said, “What Color Is Your Parachute?,” subtitled “A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career Changers,” was framed less as a guide to the job market than as a guide to help readers understand themselves — to help them figure out what they really liked doing so that they could find the job that would let them do it.
“You need firm ground to stand on,” Mr. Bolles told an interviewer in 2000. “From there you can deal with the change.”
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Bolles, an ordained Episcopalian priest until 2004, when he left the ministry, said the title of his book came from an oft-repeated discussion he had in the 1960s with parishioners who were unhappy in their jobs. They would say they were thinking of bailing out. “And I always thought of an airplane when I heard that phrase,” he said. “So I would respond, ‘What color is your parachute?’”
“Parachute” climbed book-sales rankings slowly but steadily throughout the decade. In 1979, it reached the New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for more than a decade, returning intermittently for years afterward.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Bolles was well qualified to write a handbook on changing direction; he had changed his own several times, from planning a career in the chemical industry to becoming a minister and then experiencing being fired, at 41, and enduring the anxiety of unemployment at a time when he and his wife then, the former Janet Price, had four small children.
It had never entered his mind, though, that he would write a blockbuster. “I was just trying to help people be better prepared than I was when I was fired and started looking for a job,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2014.
Photo
Mr. Bolles said in 2014 that he hoped his franchise would continue after he was gone and that his son Gary had asked him about updating future editions of “What Color Is Your Parachute?”
Credit
Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
Continue reading the main story
Yet whether he knew it or not, Mr. Bolles had anticipated a sea change in the relationship between workers and employers in the United States, said Micki McGee, an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University and the author of “Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life,” a 2005 examination of self-help literature that includes a close analysis of Mr. Bolles’s book.
Continue reading the main story
She said “Parachute” had come along right at the beginning of a historic shift, when corporate strategies like outsourcing, subcontracting, downsizing and mergers were starting to erode traditional notions of job security. The idea that you could stay in one job for a lifetime began coming undone in the early 1970s, and “Parachute’s” perennial sales reflected, at least in part, this new reality.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Bolles said he had come to acknowledge that connection over time, but, he added wryly, the success of “Parachute” had also reflected the fact that it was a pretty good book.
Richard Nelson Bolles was born March 19, 1927, in Milwaukee, the first of three children of Donald Clinton Bolles, an editor for The Associated Press, and the former Frances Fifield, a homemaker.
His brother, Donald Jr., who followed his father into journalism, was killed in 1976 in Phoenix when a bomb detonated under his car. Donald Bolles Jr. was then working as an investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic, and the killing was widely believed to be linked to a series of exposés he had been writing about corporate and organized crime in the state. The assassination resulted in the prosecution of one person but remained largely unsolved.
Continue reading the main story
After serving in the Navy at the tail end of World War II, Richard Bolles studied chemical engineering for two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then transferred to Harvard, where he earned his bachelor’s degree cum laude with a major in physics. While still an undergraduate, he was moved by a sermon he heard one Sunday at church about a critical shortage of ministers. After graduation, instead of accepting a lucrative job offer in the chemical industry, he decided to become an Episcopal priest.
He attended General Theological Seminary in New York, where he received a master’s degree in New Testament studies and was ordained in 1953. He served as a rector at several churches in northern New Jersey, including St. John’s in Passaic, where he often counseled teenagers on sex and drug use. After participating in the 1963 March on Washington led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he reached out to an all-black church in Passaic and, with its pastor, the Rev. Avery Johnson, led the integration of their churches, despite the opposition of some parishioners.
Mr. Bolles had been a clergyman for 18 years when a combination of budget problems and philosophical differences with superiors led to the elimination of his job and his dismissal in 1968 as a pastor at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, the flagship church of the Episcopal Diocese of California.
After six months of anxious searching, he landed a job in 1969 with United Ministries in Higher Education, an interdenominational church organization that had long been involved in recruiting and supporting college chaplains across the country. But college chaplains were increasingly being laid off, leaving Mr. Bolles a new mission: to help chaplains at campuses in seven Western states find new careers.
Continue reading the main story
That effort led him into research that inspired him to write the how-to manual that evolved into “What Color Is Your Parachute?” Among his other books was “The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them,” on balancing work and personal life.
Continue reading the main story
Besides his son Gary, he is survived by his second wife of more than 12 years, Marci Mendoza Bolles; two other children from his first marriage, Stephen and Sharon Bolles; and 10 grandchildren. A third son, Mark, died in 2012.
In the 2014 interview, Mr. Bolles said he hoped his franchise would continue after he was gone. His son Gary, he said, had asked him about updating future editions of “Parachute” and finding other job-counseling experts who might provide new advice.
Continue reading the main story
“I told him to make sure to find people who were funny, have a lightheartedness about them,” Mr. Bolles said. “When you are out of work and on the ropes, that is so important.”
Continue reading the main story
The post Richard Bolles, Who Wrote ‘What Color Is Your Parachute?,’ Dies at 90 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
