Topical Guide 242
Mark Dorset
Life Imitates Art?
For nearly three decades following World War II, Chacallit slept. It was awakened at last by a local boy, Deke Schumacher, who, riding the crest of a wave of success as Vice President for Computer Furniture at IBM, walked away from it all in a huff one day and returned home, to the steep hills of Chacallit, beside the rushing waters of the Whatsit, to start his own computer furniture company. Sales of the ChacalliTech Computer Scooter, a platform — actually a whole line of platforms of various sizes — that can be installed under computer components, allowing one to move them around at will, exceeded even the sunniest predictions of Deke himself. What the ChacalliTech ads say about the Scooter (borrowing, probably unconsciously, from a nineteenth-century advertisement for Studebaker wagons) is true: “The Brightest Star in the Computer Furniture Firmament Is the ChacalliTech Computer Scooter™.”
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 1
Chacallit, New York
Chacallit today is, in outward appearance, remarkably like the town in which Lorna grew up, and that similarity is the result of a pattern of economic decline and renewal that first isolated Chacallit from architectural modernization and then rescued it from physical decay. Had the town prospered throughout this century, modernization and overdevelopment would certainly have obliterated its past. Instead, Chacallit dozed until the ChacalliTech prosperity brought new hope for the future and an urge to restore and preserve the past, with the result that, when I visited, I found that I could easily imagine life in Chacallit as it must have been in the early part of this century, when Lorna was a girl.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 1
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