ABSTRACT
I set out in life to be a playwright and backed into this field through the
research door, starting in the mid-1970s when I went down to New York to
see if I could get some of my plays put on. I knocked on the doors of a vari-
ety of organizations that I thought would be interesting to work for, doing
something more than waiting on tables, which is what everyone else was
doing. The first place that happened to have a job was the CEP [started by
Alice Tepper Marlin, discussed in Chapter 3]. The job was opening the mail
and filling orders. CEP just happened to be the only place probably in the
world at that time that was doing research and rating on environmental and
social issues. So I got into the research after about a year there and did the
research for about 12 years from 1975 to 1987. The last of my projects was Rat-
ing America’s Corporate Conscience, which was the first attempt then by
pretty much anybody to assemble social and environmental information
aimed at consumers for use in making purchasing decisions.
