I'm Chris Born-Long. Welcome to my world.
You are looking at one of my primary interests—this website.
I love working on its design and layout, and making all the pieces fit and work together. With a painter for a father and a designer for a mother, I guess the genes
finally put in an appearance.
Born and reared in Chicago, I came to Austin at Christmas of 1978. My folks had moved here a few months earlier, and it seemed a good time to abandon those Yankee winters for warmer climes.
Most of my life I've done office work—accounting, word processing, administrative assistant (we were called "secretary" back then). I've worked for (among others) an ophthalmologist, an insurance company, a real estate appraisal company, photo giant Bell & Howell, and the best in frozen baked goods, Kitchens of Sara Lee.
Just before I moved south, I enjoyed a departure from my usual office work. In 1976, I was working at Sara Lee as public relations assistant, and completely involved in Sara Lee's bicentennial project—a 65-foot-high birthday cake for the nation. The cake components were created at Sara Lee's plants outside Chicago and in New Hampton, Iowa. Then, a week before the gigantic Independence Day celebration, a convoy of five trucks, each decorated with a special bicentennial birthday logo, carried the cake from Chicago to Philadelphia. I drove the lead car and hosted publicity stops in five cities along the route. Somehow, what stuck from that experience wasn't a new excitement for public relations. Instead, I fell in with the truckers, yearning for a life on the road, some time away from the world of business. So, in 1977, I took my show on the road, literally, and spent two years driving an eighteen-wheeler. It was great fun, but eventually the appeal waned and I felt the need to return to a quieter existence.
