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| Drawing from http://www.vecteezy.com/free-vector/collaboration |
Recently I've thought a lot about how fortunate I've been to take part in many types of collaborations in my life, where each collaborative body has been a group of people with a single primary goal. Although I've derived a great deal of enjoyment from solo activities--ceramics, glasswork, tennis, golf, skiing, songwriting, computer programming--the most fulfilling activities have been those done with other people, where we all had a common goal in mind.
This article talks about my ten favorite (and probably most successful) collaborations with groups of people. It does not include collaborations I've had in personal relationships, such as my marriage with Suzanne or close friendships I've had. Certainly those relationships have all been collaborative, but they were not established with a single purpose in mind. The collaborative groups I'll talk about were all "teams" of people, where each person contributed to the overall success of the group.
The collaborations are presented in chronological order. The final sections talk a little bit about the collaborations that didn't make the list, including some real clunkers.
Waller Tailors Baseball Team. The first team I ever joined was a little league baseball team that was sponsored by a tailor shop in Rockford, Illinois. We were the Waller Tailors--a rather odd name to put on the front of a baseball jersey for kids to wear. It was the summer when I was nine years old, and I was already very much into baseball. I played the game every day in my neighborhood, knew every Major League baseball player from the cards I collected, and would listen to the Cubs each day on my transistor radio, if the reception was clear enough from Chicago, 70 miles away.
My best friend, Lenny Schmeltzer (see my Best Friends essay about Len), was already on Waller Tailors from the previous year, and he asked if I'd like to go with him to team tryouts for the 1959 summer season. I remember it was on a Sunday afternoon, and we rode our bikes to the tryouts. When we got to the field, there must have been 50 kids there to audition for the team. Every kid had his own glove and wore his favorite baseball cap.
I was a tall, shy boy who was there more to be with my friend than to make the team. Lenny knew lots of the kids, but I didn't know anyone else. The coach told several of us to go out near second base, and he began hitting ground balls to see if any of us could catch and throw. I distinctly remember taking a spot behind a few of the other kids, because I really wasn't serious about trying out, but immediately I was the one catching all the ground balls, as they'd get past the other boys.
During the afternoon, we all got the opportunity to run, throw, hit and catch, and it was great fun, but I was ready to go home. When the coach gathered all of us around him at the end of practice, I was stunned when he announced my name with others to join the team. It was like winning the lottery. My friend was as surprised as I was, I think, at the end result. He was a cinch to make the team, because he could field, hit, and throw with the best of kids, but I was anything but a cinch.
As it turned out, we had a very good team. I was definitely chosen because of my fielding and throwing, not for my hitting. The coach put me at third base because I was one of the best fielders-- and because I was one of the few kids who could throw the ball across the diamond to first base without having it bounce once or twice. That was a big deal in little league. The coach marveled at how I never made an error at third base, and for the first time in my life I gained the respect of other kids.
I still remember the first names of most of those boys--Lenny, Russ, Don, Bob, Danny, Corky. We had two good pitchers and three kids who could hit the ball a mile, including my friend, Lenny. One game had to be stopped early, because our team had hit all of the baseballs into the creek bordering the outfield. Russ was our red-headed catcher, and he'd throw bullets down to me at third base to catch guys trying to steal a base. Corky was Coach Hancock's son, so he got to play every game despite his lack of any discernible talent.
We won most of our games and were finally defeated about halfway through the playoffs, but it was a magical summer for me despite the loss. I remember hitting two line-drive doubles in my final game, after getting only singles throughout the season. The coach asked why I'd waited the whole summer to hit like that, but I know he was pleased for me.
Collaboration. Playing for Waller Tailors added the concept of basic teamwork to my life. You didn't have to be a great baseball player, or even very good. You had to be able to contribute to the team and support each other. I have no idea what my batting average was that summer, but I do remember that we won most of our games, because we played well together.
A Final Thought. I had hoped to play with the team the following summer of 1960, but my family moved from the west side of Rockford to the east side that year, and there was no way to get me to the games, since my family only had one car. As the years went by, I grew to appreciate that team more and more. I didn't see the other kids after that, but I sure remember them--how we cheered for each other and played the game of little boys.
Rockford East High School Rifle Team. My second collaborative success didn't come for another six years, when I joined the Rockford East High School rifle team. At my father's urging, I was a student in ROTC, which had been very popular in high schools in the early 1960's. If you took ROTC, you were eligible to try out for the rifle team, and I made the team in my junior year.
So what is a rifle team? In high school it usually consists of 10 shooters, each one assigned a heavy-barrel 22-caliber rifle owned by the military. You would maintain your own rifle for the whole school year; no one else could touch it. These were bolt-loaded, single-shot rifles that weighed about 19 pounds apiece, including the palm rest, aluminum "butt" hook (which fit underneath your armpit), and sling (which anchored your rifle to your firing jacket).
We fired at targets that were placed about 50 feet away from us. Each event (whether it be in practice or competition) would consist of 10 shots in each of three positions--prone, kneeling and standing-- for a total of 30 shots. Prone position was the easiest and standing position the most difficult, as you might imagine. Each bullet was fired at a separate bullseye on a heavy paper target--ten bullseyes (plus two practice bullseyes) per sheet. Each bullseye was a series of ten concentric circles; the closer you got to the center, the more points you scored. A "pinwheel" in the center of a bullseye was worth 10 points, and it was about the size of a pin head. If you want to know how difficult shooting a rifle is, try hitting a circle the size of a pin head from 50 feet away, without using a magnifying scope.
We were fortunate to have a great rifle team coach, Sergeant Willard McHughes. He knew how to shoot a rifle, because he had been an alternate on the U.S. Army biathlon team. He had an Arkansas drawl and a toughness we'd only seen on television or in movies, having earned two Purple Hearts in Vietnam. He still had pieces of shrapnel embedded in his skull from his wounds. We loved him like a second father, and he adored us.
Unlike all other high school sports teams, a rifle team competes for almost the entire school year. Practices were held after school on two or three days a week, and rifle competitions ("meets") were usually on Saturdays. We had our own firing range on-site, but we often traveled in Sgt. Mac's old van to other schools and military academies for meets. We were a rag-tag bunch of kids. When I was a junior, our team was only average, occasionally winning a match. Senior Scott Briggs was a very good shooter, but he was the only one of us who typically shot higher than 250 (out of 300). A score of 250 is considered "expert" by the military. Of the ten of us (see below), only two were seniors, and they were the best shooters on the team.
Going into my senior year, I was a mediocre marksman, with an average of about 210. Then in our first rifle meet of the year, I shot 238--a personal best. Sgt. McHughes took me aside and told me I could be a really good shooter if I focused on steady improvement. Three of my best friends (Dave Billingham, Cecil Germann and Joe Sharp) were also on the team, and we all started shooting personal bests and pushing each other.
For years our high school, Rockford East, had never beaten our main rival, Rockford West, in a rifle match. That changed in the late fall of 1966, when I was a senior. Shooting in a tri-school meet at our home range (Rockford Auburn was the third school), Dave, Cec and I were in the final group of marksmen to shoot that day for East. (The top five scores were added together for each school, with a maximum of ten shooters per team, so each school had three or four shooters per "round.") When Sgt. McHughes posted the final scores, each of us had personal bests! I shot a 253, Cec shot 257 and Dave set a school record with a 268. Dan Youngberg, a junior, shot another personal best of 246. Our top five shot a 25-year school record of 1261, quite an amazing score, since the old record had been 1222. Finally, we'd become an elite team.
For the rest of the year we hardly lost any matches. Dave, Cec, Dan and I always shot above 240, taking turns leading the team. It was quite astonishing for a team with a history of always finishing in the bottom half of every meet. In that year, there were 210 public high schools in the United States that had ROTC, and many of those schools had rifle teams. (Four of the schools were in Rockford.) When we fired "Nationals" at the end of the year, where the target sheets were certified and graded by the U. S. Army, our team came in 5th place in the country! I think it's fair to say we were darn good.
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| At left, I'm shooting with Scott Briggs during my junior year. At right, my only souvenir--a "Zero" practice target with a "pinwheel" bullseye made by three bullets! |
Collaboration. The East High rifle team was the first endeavor that taught me the importance of individual performance. I had to be focused only on how I fired my rifle; there was absolutely no focus on how others performed. This was a completely different type of "team" activity for me, unlike the baseball, football, and basketball teams with which I was familiar. It was a very interesting mix of physical and mental discipline. You had to control your muscles, your balance, your every breath, but the greatest demand was on how you focused on the process of firing each shot. Since you had ten minutes to fire ten shots, each shot took 50-60 seconds of concentration. It was a unique form of collaboration for me.
A Final Thought. As a footnote, I should mention that none of us wore protective headgear over our ears in those days. With ten rifles firing within a confined concrete basement, I'm sure it damaged my hearing, but I have no regrets. Shooting on that team was one of the most enjoyable things I've ever done.
Rockford East Newspaper Staff. My other main activity in high school was to work on the school newspaper, the East Highlights. East High was known for its student newspapers and yearbooks, and during the 1966-67 school year, we produced 28 issues of the 8-page newspaper. The journalism staff was supervised by Joan Schmelzle, who was my favorite teacher ever.
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| Highlights news staff (l to r): Jill Meyer, Steve Cowan, Vicki Caplan, Roger Lundin. |
I chose to enter the Newswriting class that Joan taught, rather than a traditional English class, for my junior year. Newswriting was a combination of English literature and journalism, and I thought that would be a refreshing change from reading Longfellow and Coleridge for months on end. From the very beginning I loved the Newswriting class. Juniors were assigned by seniors on the newspaper staff to write news, sports, feature, and even editorial articles each week, and so we were taught to do interviews, write concisely, and meet deadlines. If you were a good writer and got your stories in by the assigned time, without requiring an excessive amount of rewriting, you were assigned longer articles to write for subsequent weeks. I was one of nine juniors to write more than 300 column inches for the paper during the year, and so I earned a Quill and Scroll Honor Society award.
At the end of my junior year, positions were announced for the following school year, and I became the News Editor of the paper. That meant that I was in charge of designing and editing pages 1 and 3 in the Highlights. Three friends of mine--Jill Meyer, Vicki Caplan and Roger Lundin--also joined the news staff. The Publication class for seniors spanned the last two hours of school every day, which was an added benefit for working on the newspaper or yearbook. But it was a lot of work. I wouldn't have gotten through the year without the help of Jill Meyer, who easily could have been the News Editor instead of me.
(Jill Meyer went on to marry Dan Youngberg, who is mentioned earlier in the Rockford East High School Rifle Team segment. She uses her first name, Annette, now. I am still good friends with Annette and Dan, who live in Oregon.)
Each edition of our newspaper took three weeks to produce, which meant that we were always working on three editions at once. We had to come up with 10 ideas for news stories each week, assign them to the junior newswriters, edit and rewrite articles that came in, coordinate pictures with the photo department, write captions and headlines, and design page layouts. We also had to work with other page editors to make sure we weren't duplicating stories found elsewhere in the paper.
I remember one incident where it paid for me to look over the Feature pages in one edition, even though they weren't my responsibility. The paper had held a creative writing contest for the school--mostly poems and short essays--and I was reading through all the winning poems, just one day before publication. Suddenly, I recognized one of the poems and said to several people in the Pub room, "What's a song by the Smothers Brothers doing in the winning poetry selections?" Joan let out a shriek, and most of the people were stunned into silence. No one could believe that a plagiarized piece had almost won the top prize of the contest! The oversight was quickly corrected.
My favorite part of every week was late Wednesday afternoon, when Joan Schmelzle would drive all of us editors (five in all) to a local newspaper print shop, where we'd work for several hours on the physical layout of that week's paper. The articles (in single columns), headlines, photos and captions were already printed, but we had to paste them together onto large sheets, one for each page of the paper, and make them look as clean and organized as possible. If photos didn't fit, we had to crop them; if headlines or captions didn't work, we had to rewrite them. With Joan's constant supervision and advice, we pasted up an entire 8-page paper in about four hours. Those were stressful hours, but I loved them. We'd each go home feeling we'd created something special.
At the end of the school day on Thursday each week, the papers would be delivered to the Publications room from the printers, and it was always amazing to see the finished product. They would be dispersed to all the classrooms early the next morning, so over 2,000 students would have a Highlights to carry around with them on Fridays. It was quite a cool feeling to see our front page in the hands of so many people I didn't know.
I would be remiss in not mentioning the two students who did the most work on the Highlights, Editor Steve Ohlson and Assistant Editor Dale Larson. They worked to pull all the pages together, and they were really good. Dale was an especially good friend and an excellent newspaper guy. He was the only one of us to major in journalism in college and go on to have a career in journalism.
My career in journalism ended when I graduated from high school, and yet I took with me skills and memories that I value to this day.
Collaboration. Being on the newspaper staff taught me collaboration amidst chaos. You had to be productive while surrounded by conversations, yelling, gesturing, all sorts of distractions. For the first time I felt
pressure to meet multiple deadlines each week, and so it taught me to block out all those distractions. I had to actively work
with many other people who had one common goal--to put out a really good
newspaper. Thanks to many people, that's what we did.
A Final Thought. Joan and I have stayed in touch and remained good friends for almost 50 years. Sometimes I go back and reread what she wrote in my yearbook the week I graduated from high school. "Dear Cowan--Please not another 3-column 3077 below the flag! Seriously, Steve, thanks for a really good job on the news pages!" I realize now that my years with the East Highlights prepared me for all of the work-related collaborations I was to have the rest of my life.
The Ship. In late 1970, Albert Melshenker ("Mel") and I met at the Red Herring Fall Folk Festival and began playing our songs together. Within a month, he asked if I'd like to join him in writing a folk music opera, called "The Ship," of which he had written most of the first song. Even though it was during my senior year of college, I thought the lengthy project would be tremendous fun, and I readily accepted his offer. After writing together almost every day for five months, we finished the eleven-song "folk music journey," which took just under one hour to perform, in two halves.
Although writing songs with another person takes a great deal of collaboration, the real collaborative effort was in arranging and performing the piece. We invited three of our friends (Billy Panda, Mark Hamby, and Todd Bradshaw) to join us in forming a group, also called The Ship, to perform the piece. Little did we know that the group would last much longer than the folk opera did.
Billy, Mark, and Todd did most of the instrumental and vocal arrangements, although ideas flowed from all five of us. Except for Todd, we all sang lead and harmony parts, and many of the four-part harmonies were just stunning. The initial version of "The Ship" came together in less than a month, which, in retrospect, is unbelievable to me. We performed five shows in May, 1971, to sold-out audiences in Champaign-Urbana, so about 1,500 people had heard the songs less than two months after we had finished them.
During the summer of 1971, all of the songs were rearranged and parts distributed more evenly among the four singers. We also took that summer to memorize all the chords and lyrics, which was no easy feat. The songs had an average length of over five minutes apiece! In September of 1971, we performed seven more shows to sold-out local audiences, and we also began performing the piece at other college sites in Illinois. We acquired two managers, Roger Francisco and Peter Berkow, and by early 1972 we had signed a contract with Elektra Records to record "The Ship." We went into a Los Angeles studio in late May and all of June, 1972, to do the recording. Below is the back cover from that album. This photo was taken by the famous photographer, Frank Bez, on a ship sailing off the coast of Santa Barbara. We were told that the ship had once been owned by J. P. Morgan, which we thought suited our quick ascendancy to stardom.
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| Todd Bradshaw, Steve Cowan, Mark Hamby, Billy Panda, Albert Melshenker (l to r) |
Although our collaborative efforts extended to performing many other songs that individuals in the group wrote, since we were all songwriters and lead singers, I still think "The Ship" was our best collaboration while I was in the group. The four singers all got to sing lead, two-part, three-part, and four-part harmonies. We performed the piece fewer than thirty times, getting better and better as we went along. Besides the fact that "The Ship" songs had lots of lyrics and a ton of chord changes, it was so difficult to perform because we did not pause between songs, except for an intermission break after the sixth song. Those "continuous music" halves were both over twenty-five minutes long! I played my 12-string guitar for almost the whole time, and I was usually exhausted by the end.
Our best performance of "The Ship" also had the largest audience, over 2,000 people in the Great Hall at Krannert Center For The Performing Arts in Urbana, Illinois. Many of our relatives and friends were there, along with record company executives. It was a night I'll never forget. The tempos were great, the vocals were strong and locked in, and there were no mistakes or rough moments (except for one near-disaster). I think each of us that evening reached the magical place all musicians seek, where you just feel together and invincible. It was perhaps the best musical collaboration I've ever known.
The near-disaster moment came during one of the faster songs (probably "The Storm"), when Albert Melshenker accidentally hit the boom (weighted) end of my voice mic with the end of his guitar. My voice microphone swung toward me and hit me in the mouth (while I was singing), causing a sudden pop in the sound. I just leaned forward a few inches, pushed the mic back in place, and continued singing. Had I been looking off-mic, it easily could have been more awkward or even disastrous. I glanced over at Mel, and we both smiled. It was a very good night.
Collaboration. If you have sung and/or played an instrument in any type of musical group, you know how difficult it is to sound absolutely together as one. It is achieved in that moment when you do not try to stand out but only perfectly blend in, and so it defines for me the very essence of collaboration. It is when the "self" disappears and the "whole" emerges, and everyone feels it. At our best, The Ship was that collaboration.
A Final Thought. I
have written extensively about The Ship in a
blog called "Life In The Middle Lane." Cut and paste the following link in your
browser to read a much longer account of my days with the group:
http://someuncommonlifestories.blogspot.com/2016/06/life-in-middle-lane.html
Asleep At The Net Co-ed Volleyball Teams. Although I have probably been on at least ten co-ed volleyball teams, the first two teams were the most successful and the most fun, because the chemistry on the teams was exceptional. We were good friends off the volleyball court, and that contributed to how well we played together on the court. The second team (in California) was named Asleep At The Net (which I named after the music group, Asleep At The Wheel), and the first team (in Illinois) may have had the same name--I cannot recall. The two teams were amazingly similar, and so I consider the second team in many ways an extension of the first. That's why they appear together in this segment.
My four years with those teams began when I refereed an outdoor volleyball league in Urbana, Illinois, during the summer of 1974. Near the end of that league, I was asked by the players on one of the teams to join them for a fall volleyball league in Champaign. That league would be co-ed, indoors and much more competitive than the Urbana league. I jumped at the chance to play volleyball with them.
Three of the people on that first team (Steve Porges, Sue Carter Porges and Bill Greenough) were professors in the psychology department at the University of Illinois. One of the remaining players was the best woman player in the league, Patti Nolan. The team needed another tall man who could hit a volleyball and block at the net, so they asked me to play. Steve and I were the main hitters and blockers, while Sue and Patti were excellent setters and defensive players. It was a real treat to join an established group of people who already knew each other and played well as a team.
Over the course of the next two years, our team won five of the six league championships in which we played. We were in a league one night a week but often practiced together one or two other times each week, including Sunday mornings at the huge U of I Intramural Building, where they had six courts of indoor volleyball going at once. Somehow we fell in with a guy named Walt Tam, who was an assistant coach of the U of I women's volleyball team. The coach of that team was the famous Arie Selinger, who later coached the United States women's volleyball team from 1975 to 1984. I learned a lot from Walt Tam, as he put us through drills on how to hit, block, set, serve, pass, and even dive on the floor when there was a need to chase a volleyball. During those two years, our recreational volleyball became serious volleyball.
Co-ed volleyball at that time was always comprised of three men and three women on the court, without much strategy or offense. We were very good because of our speed, defense and passing. Also, Steve Porges was our "secret weapon." I think he was the only left-handed hitter in the league, and, thus, so difficult to defend, and he could take over a game with his intensity. When he raised his game, so did the rest of us. It was a sad day to say goodbye to all of the people on that team when I moved to California in August, 1976.
The first thing I did in the Bay Area was look for places to play volleyball and, hopefully, a co-ed team to join. It was one month later when I attended an "open" night of volleyball at a San Jose State University gymnasium. People were asked to form ad-hoc teams, so I approached two people I didn't know and asked if they'd like to team up. That was how I met Joe and Gail Miluso, who are dear friends of mine to this day. Joe Miluso was very much like Steve Porges--tall, left-handed, hard hitter, good blocker, and intense.
After that first evening, we decided to form a team and play in the Campbell city co-ed league. We found three or four other players, including Gail's sister, Marcia, and so we became the West Coast version of Asleep At The Net. Once again, Joe and I were the main hitters and blockers on the team, and we were good because of our speed and defense. We played about two years together, winning one or two of the championships along the way.
Collaboration. Unlike my previous experiences of little league baseball and rifle team competition, co-ed volleyball required a higher level of interactive, physical collaboration. Each time the ball came to our side of the net, our team of six people focused on passing, setting, and spiking the ball as best we could. As one person moved on the court, the other five would react and follow. The timing for a successful play had to be almost perfect. When it worked--and it very often did--it was a tremendous feeling of collaboration.
A Final Thought. Not only were my experiences with the two volleyball teams so similar, but I have stayed good friends with two of the people from each of those teams. Steve and Sue Porges are leaders in neuropsychological research, and they split their time between campuses in Indiana and North Carolina. Joe and Gail Miluso are retired now and live close to us in Sunnyvale, California. We see each other often and still talk about those old volleyball days.
Appaloosa. In April, 1975, two years after leaving The Ship, I joined the country-rock/bluegrass band, Appaloosa. They were a well-established group that played at clubs, auditoriums, dances, and parties. Unlike The Ship, they were an all-electric band, so I had to have pick-ups installed in all my instruments when I joined. I had literally never used a guitar amplifier before in my life, so Les Urban, a band mate and very good friend, had to show me how to plug my guitar in and adjust the amp.
I had known Les and lead singer, Glenn Levinson, for years and had occasionally caught Appaloosa's show at one of the clubs in Champaign. I always loved their high energy and variety. They could play straight country, Texas swing, bluegrass, or country/pop rock. While I was in the group, they did not do any originals, but covered songs from artists as diverse as Buffalo Springfield, Doc Watson, Merle Haggard, Commander Cody, Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks, The Eagles, and Buck Owens.
When I first (jokingly) suggested to the guys that they should add a high harmony and mandolin to the mix, it was a couple of hours later when they invited me to join the group. The next day I went out and bought a mandolin, having never touched one before. The music store guy had to teach me how to tune it, but then I discovered that playing rhythm mandolin was pretty easy, because the strings were tuned in the reverse order of a guitar's first four strings. If I could play a song on the guitar, I'd picture each chord from the guitar, reverse the fingering on the first four strings, and play that on the mandolin. Easy!
After a couple of weeks, I had learned parts to most of Appaloosa's songs. I was usually given the second harmony or high harmony part. They were standard vocals that could usually be learned from recordings that existed, so my contributions were easy to learn, compared with the parts I had to learn in The Ship. Since I was already familiar with performing in front of crowds, often in more difficult settings, joining this band was a joy from the first day. Les Urban put in a lot of hours with me during those early weeks, so I was familiar not only with my parts, but his vocal parts as well. He made my transition into the group as easy as possible.
I still worked as a full-time computer programmer in the months I played with Appaloosa, but I played with the group three or four nights a week. On the average we had two gigs per week, plus one or two practices when we would learn new material. All six of us really knew how to play music, so we didn't have to learn how to be in a rock band or how to divvy up parts. We had two featured "lead" players--Les (lead guitar and peddle-steel guitar) and Randy Sabien (lead guitar and fiddle)--and four rhythm players--Glenn (6-string guitar), Larry (drums), Ed (bass) and me (6-string guitar, 12-string guitar, mandolin, and tambourine). Glenn sang lead most of the time, while Les, Randy, and I added harmony vocals. Figuring out the instrumentation and vocal parts usually took less than half an hour for a new song.
We were fortunate to always have a very good lead singer in Appaloosa. When Glenn left the group in September, 1975, he was quickly replaced by singer David Wright, who had been in the group previously. Both of those guys could really sing the heart out of a song, so singing harmony vocal was like hopping a freight train and holding on. There was no temptation to be shy in my singing; they always sang on key and in tempo, so I just had to match them. Where I made the mistake of listening to myself in The Ship, trying to not make errors, I listened exclusively to the lead singer in Appaloosa.
And then there was that quality of high energy that's hard to describe. A large percentage of our songs required an energy that was constantly in overdrive. Maybe it was the fast tempos that Larry set on drums, or the insanely fast solos that Randy would play on fiddle or Les on peddle-steel, but no one ever had to urge us to go faster or harder in our songs. Because of the high energy, the crowds loved us, and we got better and better in our performances. I also steadily got better in all aspects of playing and performing. I was never so flattered in my music "career" as when David Wright told me one day that I was the best harmony singer he'd ever sung with, and he'd been with a lot of bands.
Below is a photo of the band from when Glenn Levinson was in the group. I can't remember where the photo was taken, but it was probably a frat or dorm party on campus. We had just set up our sound system for the night and were getting ready for the gig. It's one of the rare photos of me in one of my wild western shirts. I bought a bunch of those snap-button shirts when I joined the group. They were fun to wear and brought out the "country" side of me.
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| Randy Sabien, Glenn Levinson, Larry Jacobs, Ed Clem, Steve Cowan, Les Urban (l to r) |
During the eight months I was in Appaloosa, we played 67 gigs. They ranged from nights at our favorite campus bar, Ruby Gulch, to appearances at private parties, a dance marathon, U of I street dance, Labor Day music festival, and a joint concert with The Ship at the U of I Foellinger Auditorium. Our audience could be as few as 50 or as many as 10,000 people. It didn't matter to us; we'd play hard for anyone. We played one large party (a couple hundred people) on a farm and were paid with 100 Appaloosa tee shirts and all the beer and food we could consume. That worked for us.
I
have great memories from my days in Appaloosa. It was definitely the most
fun I ever had playing music. I'm still in touch with Randy, Ed, and Les.
Glenn, Larry, and David have passed away, and I only knew them while I was in
Appaloosa.
Collaboration. Very seldom do we have the opportunity in life to join in a high-energy collaboration, where the high energy is required to ensure the group's success. Appaloosa was like that for me. If my rhythm guitar playing or harmony vocal wasn't solid and spot on, the collaboration would not work. It was also a unique collaboration in that I could lean on all the other guys, just from eye contact, to be sure that my part was right--that we were together. When I consider it, eye contact played a bigger part in this collaboration than any other one in my life.
A Final Thought. As with The Ship, I
have written extensively about Appaloosa in a
blog called "Life In The Middle Lane." Cut and paste the following link in your
browser to read a much longer account of my days with the group:
http://someuncommonlifestories.blogspot.com/2016/06/life-in-middle-lane.html
International Data Applications. I moved from Illinois to California in 1976 to work with my brother, Mike, and his wife, Sumaye, at their new company, International Data Applications. Over the next fourteen years, I worked at IDA three separate times (1976-78, 1979-1982 and 1987-1990). Mike did more to influence my career and encourage my development as a systems analyst than any other person.
When I started with IDA in 1976, I was a good computer programmer. I was fast and efficient at what I did, and I could finish programs without supervision, but I had always worked alone. Those first two years at IDA allowed me to work with other programmers (Reid Larson and Gerry Perko, primarily) for the first time in my career, and so I became a much better programmer as part of a group. We mostly collaborated on an international banking software product, and we co-designed, reviewed, and tested each other's work. The company temporarily closed its doors in the spring of 1978, due to a contract dispute with Bank of Montreal.
In the summer of 1979, IDA opened its doors again, and I went back to work with Mike and Sumaye, along with my good friend, Chet Leighton. To ensure that we had adequate funding, we began working on independent projects, in addition to developing a property and financial management software product. This was a different type of collaborative effort--a small company with multiple revenue streams. It was also the first time I was placed in charge of a product and exposed a bit to the rigors of marketing. Mike and I traveled to lots of places around the country to pitch our product. He spoke the bankers' language, and I was the technical expertise for the software.
In 1982, I joined Chet Leighton and a marketing person, Judy Ano, to form our own little company, Goldcoast Software. We struggled with that for five years, and for several reasons it was not a successful collaboration (more on that later). In 1987, Mike asked me to return to IDA to be in charge of all software development, and I accepted. Returning as VP of Development was a whole new experience for me; for the first time in my computer career, I would be doing little or no programming or testing. I did most of the design work, supervised several analysts, spent a lot of time in meetings, and produced all of the technical documentation for a banking trust asset product, called Real Trust. Our clients were Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Northern Trust--really big banks.
It was a wonderful collaboration, made easier by my top two analysts--Skip Morehead and David Wilson, who I'd known for several years. The three of us solved all the problems that the technical staff ever encountered, and we were a great team within a team (the development staff) within a team (all of IDA). It was my first real taste of a high-pressure, schedule-driven software development project, and it gave me the experience and confidence that I needed to manage projects at Quartet Systems the last twenty-five years of my career (1990-2015).
That collaboration would never have happened had it not been
for my brother, Mike. As president of IDA, he could have micro-managed
the project, but he didn't. He would tell me what he needed, we'd
agree on a reasonable schedule, and I'd get it done with my
staff. The product was finished because he let us do it. The
development staff worked closely with the quality assurance (QA) staff,
headed by my sister-in-law, Sumaye, and all of us worked with the
documentation manager and sales staff. At its largest, IDA grew to
about twenty-five people, all of whom collaborated on a very good
banking product. The product was sold to Northern Trust in Chicago
early 1990, and IDA slowly dissolved over the next couple of years.
Collaboration. In the course of my eight years at IDA, I was challenged to be part of three different types of collaboration--a staff of programmers, head of a software product group and head of all development for a small software company. Each collaboration called on a different set of skills and had its own set of challenges. With IDA, I learned to program as part of a group, to design and schedule projects, to manage a staff of people (including HR issues), to do marketing, and to attend more than my share of meetings.
A Final Thought. The best fortune I had at IDA was to work with Mike. Several people have remarked to me over the years that he had the uncanny ability to choose good people. Rather than base his hiring decisions solely on a person's resume, he would go with people who had qualities that the job needed--intelligence, self-motivation, likeability. That's why he chose a kid named Bruce Homer-Smith in 1980 to write technical and user documentation, when Bruce had no experience doing that sort of work. As you'll see in my story about Quartet Systems, below, that worked out pretty well for me.
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| Steve Cowan, Sumaye Cowan, Mike Cowan, Bruce Homer-Smith |
This is a favorite picture of mine, because it shows Sumaye, Mike, and Bruce together. I can thank those three people for almost 80% of my 42 years in computer software. The photo was taken at the wedding reception for fellow-IDA employee, David Wilson, in 2014.
Afiomai Volleyball Team. I did not begin playing on men's volleyball teams until about 1980. Prior to that, I had only played on co-ed volleyball teams, which were not so much based on power but good defense. Co-ed teams joined city and industrial leagues which played during the week, but the USVBA men's volleyball teams I joined practiced during the week and played tournaments during weekends. To be USVBA-sanctioned, you had to have a team name, wear a team jersey, and pay to enter tournaments.
My first year of men's volleyball was nothing if not character-building, because we were terrible. We knew each other from playing on co-ed teams, and all the guys were generally inexperienced in men's team offenses. We
were also shorter than the men on most of the other teams, which made a big difference. That year we probably played in fifteen tournaments and won a total of four games all season, out of more than one hundred that we played.
In my second year of men's volleyball, we had a new coach who was from Samoa. Wes (and I regret that I can't recall his last name) took about five of us from the original team, added four or five other players he knew, and started drilling us in complex offenses. We didn't immediately realize we were good, but it felt different to me. The team was named "Afiomai" (pronounced uh-fee-oh-my), which is Samoan for "welcome" or "come on in." We stayed in the Northern California Class "C" division, where we had played and been badly defeated the year before.
Right away we began winning about half of our games, which was a huge improvement for some of us, but Wes wasn't satisfied. Instead of running a "6-2" offense, where there are six hitters, two doubling as setters, we switched to a "5-1" offense, where there are always five hitters and one setter. This is the offense that college and Olympic teams all use. Several things characterize a "5-1" offense, including constant position switching, "back row" hitting and fast-action "crossing" plays at the net. Before each play, all the hitters on our team would pass signals to the setter for the types of sets they preferred on that play. It got complicated for the setter, because a hitter could choose any of six different types of sets.
Wes also drilled us endlessly on defenses. We learned to dive on the floor, put up double and triple blocks and transition from offense to defense (and vice-versa) in a split second. Although there were only one or two players taller than I on the team, most of us could jump well. My 29-inch jump was only average on the team. And, we had four or five hitters who could absolutely kill the ball. I was the best middle blocker, because of my long arms, and I probably played the best defense. I got to be able to "read" hitters on the opposing team, and so, my court positioning was better than most.
Suddenly, as a result of all our practices, we began winning tournaments. In the last half of our season, it was rare for us to lose more than two games out of the twelve or fourteen we played in a day. Our division probably had forty or fifty teams, some of which we had not seen by the time the Northern California championships rolled around at the end of the season, but we won that exciting tournament and became Northern California Class "C" champions. What I remember from that day was the incredible elation, hard play, and exhaustion. I had played eight games in one day and went home with a trophy and a lot of soreness.
I do remember one sequence of plays in a late match that day. The other team had a tall, powerful hitter that I knew I could beat, because he tried to power the ball through me rather than around me. I blocked him three straight times, and he smashed the ball into the bleachers out of frustration, while the best hitter on our team came over and lifted me off the ground with a hug. It was one of the pinnacle moments in my volleyball life.
Collaboration. What I shared with my Afiomai teammates was the collaboration necessary to succeed in a hard, physical sport. Volleyball is a lot harder than it looks. The ball is traveling well over 100 miles per hour on a spike, and it wasn't uncommon to get hit in the face or to get a finger or ankle sprain. You are frequently diving or falling onto the floor. When you lose the fear of getting hurt, the chance to play on a team like that, where six people have to be absolutely in sync, is a wonderful experience.
I especially loved the speed of the game--the collaboration of fast play. It is probably most similar to football in that respect, where action immediately goes from an initial standstill to everybody moving at once. I loved the collaboration of timing and spacing, where during a single sequence of plays you might shift your court position ten times, all in sync with the others around you.
A Final Thought. The team played together the following year, but we were not as successful. Under the name Paradise, we won about half of our games in the Class "B" division. All the teams that year were taller than we were, and we realized it was the end of the line for us. I never played men's volleyball again, because I was only six-feet-one-inch tall and not a setter, but I'll always remember the year of Afiomai and winning a championship.
STAR Dance Formation Team. On April 1, 1989, after an all-day waltz and bolero dance workshop, I attended a meeting hosted by Steve Rebello and Tammy Amborn. All attendees (about 16 of us) were advanced intermediate dancers who enjoyed ballroom dancing two or three times a week. At the time, the Palo Alto area had a huge number of ballroom dance enthusiasts, and it was not uncommon to find 300-400 people at a dance place (a club, YMCA hall or school gymnasium) on any given night.
At the meeting, Steve and Tammy presented an idea that no one anticipated: they wanted to build a formation dance team, and they were inviting us to join the team. They would pick out the music and do all the choreography, and we'd practice once or twice a week. Each dance routine would probably take 8-10 weeks to learn, and we'd buy (or make) our own costumes. The goals for the team were to become polished enough to perform in front of large crowds, to learn lots of new dance steps, and to have fun doing something we loved. We would each pay a monthly dues of about $30 to cover expenses for the team, in addition to costume expenses. Thus, the STAR Dance Formation Team was created.
All of us on the team had taken dozens of dance workshops, taught by people like Ron Montez and Liz Curtis, who were seven-time undefeated Latin ballroom dance national champions. (Yes, I had danced with the great Liz Curtis!!) By then, I had taken more than fifty such dance workshops, in all types of ballroom, Latin and swing dances, so learning series of steps with a partner wasn't new to me. What was new to me--and everyone else--was doing those steps in a formation with several other couples, where your timing, posture, expression, and spacing had to be coordinated.
We began learning our first dance, a nightclub two-step, a week later with a team of six couples. Steve and Tammy did all of the choreography and would step in to dance if anyone was absent for a rehearsal or performance. The steps were beautiful and difficult, especially the frequent, mid-dance partner changes. The nightclub two-step (not to be confused with the Texas two-step) is a romantic smooth dance with lots of fast turns. Timing was crucial. As I'd lead my partner into an arcing double-turn toward another male dancer, I'd need to spin around 180 degrees to "catch" the female partner coming my way. When done properly, it's a gorgeous dance.
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| Dancing the nightclub two-step with my partner, Nettie, and the rest of the team. We're at the far left. |
The photo above shows us doing the two-step at one of our earliest performances--perhaps even our first! The men wore black trousers, suspenders and bow ties with white dress shirts, while the women wore purple blouses and black skirts that they actually made. To watch one couple doing the two-step is pretty cool; to watch six couples doing it in sync is very impressive.
Over the next couple of years, we expanded from six couples to eight couples, and Steve and Tammy came up with amazing routines in waltz, West Coast swing, East Coast swing, cha cha, foxtrot, and the L.A. hustle. I remember the East Coast swing was done to Elvis Presley's "Blue Suede Shoes", and the foxtrot routine, which we only performed twice at Christmas shows, was danced to Eartha Kitt's "Santa Baby".
The photo below shows us right after a performance of the L.A. hustle routine, which is a very fast "slot" dance popularized in southern California. Unlike dances such as the two-step and waltz, the L.A. hustle is usually not taught to beginning dancers, because it's so fast and involves constant turns by the woman. I loved the costumes we wore for that dance. By the way, the men did not dance with the dark glasses on; we donned those at the very end of the dance, in response to the cheering crowds.
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| Our team of eight couples after a performance of the L.A. hustle. Again, I'm at the far left. |
I was on the STAR Dance team for about 3-1/2 years, although the first two years were what I remember most about the team. The quality of the dancers during that time was at a consistently high level, although the women were always the better dancers--some of the best non-professional dancers in the Bay Area. The quality of dancer was not only important for learning complex dance steps quickly, but it was essential for all the partner changes we did. During any single piece, I might dance with five different women, so everyone had to be of relatively equal ability. All of us men on the team worked very hard at standardizing our leads, so the women didn't have to adjust much from one man's lead to the next.
We were also a very close-knit group socially during those first two years, although many of us had significant others outside the group. Our dance practices were great fun, and someone even came up with the idea of holding a non-dance social event once a month, with events as diverse as bowling, going to the circus, and picnicking at a winery (my choice).
We did many performances around the Bay Area, and we even took the entire team down to San Diego to perform two nights (four routines) at a popular dance club. I was probably the only person on the team who was familiar with performing in front of large crowds, having been in two popular bands, so I knew about the stage fright that people might be feeling. I made a point of talking with each person before every performance, in order to calm nerves, and we usually presented really good shows.
I also remember holding a very high standard for myself in all of the performances, so I can honestly say that I never once had a misstep during a dance. In fact, despite all the last-minute nerves, the team had very few missteps. It was a wonderful feeling to finish a dance and know we'd done a great performance. I do, however, remember two or three costume malfunctions. The funniest occurrence was when one of the women lost her belt during a series of turns, and she finished the dance holding up her skirt with one hand, the belt lying on the floor. That was some amazing dancing.
Collaboration. As anyone who has done ballroom dancing knows, leading and following takes a unique collaboration, and those tasks are much harder when multiple couples are involved and you get to dance with different partners. I was probably the most advanced male dancer on the team, but I still had to adapt to each woman's lead preferences. Two or three women requested a strong lead, while others required just the slightest of leads or would even anticipate my leads, in which case I had to slow them down.
Our hardest dance practices were when we were told to switch places--the women would lead and the men would follow. That was the most difficult collaboration I've ever experienced--to understand and be good at what the other person did. Steve Rebello and I would occasionally dance a step together--I leading and he following--to demonstrate an especially complex step sequence for the women. When we switched places, we all had a new appreciation for what it takes to collaborate on the dance floor.
A Final Thought. After the first two years, as one would expect, people began leaving the team for different reasons, and it got harder and harder to replace them with high-quality dancers. The men were especially difficult to replace, because most of the good male dancers in the area were either competing professionally or specializing in one type of dance, such as the West Coast swing. We needed good dancers who were not committed to competitions or one style of dancing. On top of that, each new member of the team had to learn several old routines, in addition to learning the new routines that Steve and Tammy were always choreographing, and that took a lot of extra time. I decided to leave the group in late 1992, after spending 3-1/2 years on the team, and they disbanded in early 1993. It was a really fun time while it lasted.
Quartet Systems. My greatest collaboration with a group of people, without a doubt, was the twenty-five years I spent working at Quartet Systems, Inc (QSI). We specialized in custom software projects for all sizes and types of organizations, and I think it's fair to say that we built a model company that was, by our standards, wildly and unexpectedly successful. Never have I heard of another company quite like it.
Quartet's roots really go back to my brother's company, International Data Applications (IDA). In the 1981-82 time frame, IDA employed five of us who would later go on to work with Quartet. Bruce Homer-Smith joined IDA in 1981 and went out on his own to form a software consulting company in May, 1983. The corporation was named Quartet Systems in 1985 when he hired DiAnn Perko from IDA to work with him. The two companies were quite different; IDA was a product company that worked mostly with large banks, while Quartet only did projects--mostly accounting-based--for smaller organizations.
In 1987, Quartet grew to three people when Bruce's brother, Chip, was hired. Where DiAnn was already an experienced analyst when she joined Quartet in 1985, Chip was a beginning analyst, but he also had accounting experience and could take over most of the company's human resource and accounting tasks. All through the 1980's, including my last three years at IDA between 1987 and 1990, Bruce and I had stayed in close touch and often discussed the inevitable time when I would join Quartet Systems, and we would work together again. That happened on July 1, 1990. Finally, Quartet had become a four-person company.
We had a lot of things going for us from the beginning of our collaboration. We all loved working from our homes; Quartet had no central office and thus had low expenses. Our biggest on-going expenses were phone lines, paper, and insurance for the corporation, while each of us would also get a new desktop computer, peripherals, and appropriate office software about every four or five years, just to keep up with technological advances.
None of us were entrepreneurs in the sense of wanting to grow the company; we were quite satisfied to remain a four-person company indefinitely. And, perhaps most importantly, we were not at all interested in developing software products. We all wanted to do projects where the client would own the finished software. That was different from most software companies, which usually want to retain the rights to software they write. We would, for the most part, bill for our time to the nearest quarter hour. It was very rare for us to do "fixed-price" projects, because we rightfully argued to each client that they would lose money by setting a fixed price. In other words, we almost always beat our project estimates.
The biggest things we had going for us, however, were our structure and flexibility. All four of us were good at software development. Bruce and Chip handled all of the accounting, insurance, and human resource work. Bruce, DiAnn, and I all had English literature backgrounds, so we could write proposals and documentation well, and the three of us, especially Bruce, took care of the marketing. DiAnn and I had the strongest technical backgrounds, although Bruce and Chip were very good for the few years they'd spent at it, so all of us could solve hard technical problems. Finally, Bruce, DiAnn, and I had a lot of experience managing projects by 1990, including managing teams of people. Client interface came naturally to us.
We also had a unique way of dividing the company profits among us. The company paid medical and dental benefits, and we split the remaining profits (after expenses) according to a pie chart that was based on two concepts. First, each of us had an intrinsic value to the company, with the sum of the values equaling 100%. Bruce and I were at 27%, DiAnn at 25% and Chip at 21%. So, if we all worked the same number of hours each year, I would take 27% of the profits, and so forth. Our pie chart values, however, were adjusted according to the number of hours we worked in the year. (These were hours worked, not billable hours.) If you chose to take a lot of vacations, your percent of the pie would go down. I usually worked more than the average number of hours, even though I would take eight weeks of vacation a year. Each person had the choice of working more hours and reaping higher bonuses. We also had SEP-IRA retirement account bonuses, which were also based on the adjusted pie chart percentages. This method of rewarding employees really works very well with a company of less than ten people, where there is no hierarchy in the corporate structure.
We really had all the bases covered, and we discovered over the years that our degree of flexibility was one of our strongest suits. I realized that a custom software company's "magic" number for becoming successful is to have a minimum of four experienced, flexible people. (An established company can manage with fewer than four people.) My previous company, Goldcoast Software, had made the mistake of starting up with three people, one of whom could only do marketing. That meant we were all working 60-80 hour weeks to get everything done, even though we were often not fully billable. At Quartet, I almost never worked more than 45 hours a week--mostly at home--and any task could be done by at least two people within our company! And, as it turned out, we were almost always fully billable.
When I first began at Quartet Systems, we adopted Bruce's idea of the "three-legged stool" for accepting projects. A project had to be fun, help people, and make money, in order for us to accept it. Those three criteria provided the basis for starting a project. We turned down more than one project because we didn't see how we could make money on it or because it wouldn't be at all fun. Typically our company would work on five or six large projects at a time, often with two, three or all four of us collaborating on any single project. It was not uncommon for me to work on five or six projects during a day, and we averaged billing 15-18 different clients a month.
I was usually the first to get nervous and raise a red flag, if we were running short of work. "Running short" meant that we had less than two months of work sitting on our desks, waiting to be done. Two or three of us would start calling existing clients (or their referrals) to ask about prospective new projects, and that succeeded 95% of the time. Within a week we'd have five or six months of work waiting to be done, which is exceptional for a four-person company.
Quartet did custom software for many different industries, the diversity of which is astounding. We did projects for organizations involved in intellectual property, asbestos litigation, limited partnership investments, stable value investments, credit reporting, homeowner mortgages, cemetery and mortuary management, television station programming, insurance, government low-rent housing, county government department management (budgets, road repairs, property taxes, etc.), city rent control, waste management and recycling, and county transit scheduling. Most, but not all, of the systems were accounting-based in some way. The only industry we were never tempted to work in was medical scheduling and billing.
What we really specialized in was creating software systems that helped people do their jobs easier. When we submitted proposals for projects, we were often in competition with much larger software companies, but we got those contracts because we worked fast, were good to our clients, and had a very solid reputation. We were also darn good at designing systems that worked.
In about 2005, the four of us started to discuss the prospect of adding people to Quartet Systems, in the interest of perpetuating QSI beyond when Bruce, DiAnn, and I would retire eight to ten years later. It was a slow, deliberate discussion that really paid off. In 2008, we hired Gabriel Beccar-Varela--one of the strongest technical minds I've ever known. Gabriel had actually worked for two of our clients, so we'd known him for years and knew he could step right in.
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| Back row: Chip Smith, Bruce Homer-Smith, Gabriel Beccar-Varela, Skip Morehead Front row: Noelle Pilat, DiAnn Perko, David Wilson, Steve Cowan |
In late 2009, we invited another ex-client of ours, Noelle Pilat, to join us in order to fill our largest client's need for more user training, documentation, and requirements definition. Noelle had a very strong accounting background, and I had worked with her for many years. She was that very rare client who could perfectly define her organization's business rules, and we knew she would be great at user training and requirements definition. That also describes another aspect of the collaboration we created at Quartet (and which was true at IDA): we filled positions at Quartet with the right people-- not from resumes, but from professional experience we were familiar with and from our instincts about the person.
In 2010 we invited Skip Morehead to join the mix, and then David Wilson joined us in 2011. I had also worked with Skip and David at IDA for many years and knew them to be top-rate analysts. They could manage large projects, do complex database designs and work with clients, and they were both about the same age as Chip, thus greatly increasing the chance that Quartet would continue beyond 2020.
The photo above is the last one of all eight of us together. It was at one of our monthly company meetings. At those meetings we'd send out client statements, discuss on-going projects, solve difficult technical issues, and then have lunch at some restaurant. (It is not true that I always chose to go to our local Mexican restaurant when I hosted the meeting; I chose a local Indian restaurant twice in twenty-five years.) Although we usually only saw each other once a month, we worked on projects together every day, but our Quartet meetings together were always special.
Collaboration. Being successful in a small software company is a real challenge. Everyone must contribute consistently and in an excellent fashion. Beyond the Quartet magic of fitting all the pieces together, the collaboration was comprised of especially good friends who had the same temperament and work philosophy. I do not recall a single argument between any two of us in the twenty-five years I worked at Quartet. The collaboration among us, and with our clients, was always based on respect and the ability to listen and produce solutions. Ultimately, that's what distinguished our collaboration.
A Final Thought. Quartet is still in business, and it could well go past its fortieth anniversary in 2025. Bruce, DiAnn, Gabriel, Noelle, and I have all retired, but Chip, Skip, and David continue in the Quartet Systems tradition of providing excellent custom software for its clients. Not once in its history was a person every laid off or fired from Quartet. When the company does close its doors someday, we will have a big party and invite all our old clients to celebrate with us.
A Few Honorable Mentions. In limiting this very long essay to ten collaborations in my life, I had to omit several good ones that I considered "successful." Here are a few of them:
- Heather on the Moor. For two years, my sister and I contributed to the running of a local coffeehouse in Rockford, Illinois. We converted a large meeting room in a church to Heather on the Moor each Saturday night. We set up tables and chairs, a refreshments table and the sound system, charged a small fee, and brought in local folksingers.
- The Red Herring Coffeehouse. I was co-manager of the Red Herring Coffeehouse in Urbana, Illinois, for two years between 1971 and 1973. In the basement of an old church, the Red Herring was open seven nights a week and would draw over 500 people from the University of Illinois campus on weekend nights. We had about 40 volunteers who kept the place running, and it was a center of great music in central Illinois.
- Urbana Park District Pottery Club. Between 1974 and 1976, I was part of a team of five people who ran a pottery club in an Urbana Park District building. The club had 40-50 members who attended classes and used the pottery studio. The five of us, led by instructor Margaret Cardwell, mixed the clay and glazes, stacked the kilns, and kept the studio in good shape.
- Pure And Simple Volleyball Team. In nineteen years, I played with about thirty volleyball teams. I've written about my Asleep At The Net and Afiomai teams already, but one other team I should mention was called Pure And Simple. I borrowed that name from a local fruit drink distributor, because they had cool tee shirts. It was a co-ed team that was noteworthy because the women were very good college volleyball players. We even entered some "reverse co-ed" tournaments, where the women would hit and block, and the men were not allowed to jump!
- Cuernavaca Homeowners Association Board. Twice I served on our homeowners' association Board for two-year periods. Our townhouse complex has 170 large townhomes, and, although the Board is very active and well-organized, we faced many contentious issues over the years. Luckily, I got to serve with many good people and learned how a homeowners' association works.
- Lincoln Junior High Basketball Team. I had played a lot of pick-up basketball as a kid, so I tried out for and made my ninth-grade basketball team. I was not very good, and I only got into one game. But I could sure shoot free-throws.
- East High Golf Team. I was a pretty good golfer in my teens, shooting 82-83 in a city-wide boys' tournament to finish in the top twenty when I was thirteen, but several kids were better than I was when I joined my high school golf team as a sophomore. By then I was interested in other activities, so I gradually became an infrequent golfer and didn't bother to try out as a junior. I can say, however, that on my first hole of competition, I got a birdie!
- Four Each Other. The first music group I ever joined was in college. The four of us (Guy, Nancy, Rod, and I) met in our college dorm, and we thought it would be cool to work up some songs together. We all loved Crosby, Stills and Nash, so we named our group after the phrase "for each other" in one of their songs. We played a total of one gig and then decided it was just too difficult to schedule practices, given our individual schedules.
- My First Men's Volleyball Team. As I described in my Afiomai segment, my first men's team was a real dud. We won four games during the entire season. We had no tall hitters and were soundly defeated in just about every aspect of the game. The highlight of the year was a tournament in Lake Tahoe, where we went skiing the second day of the weekend.
- Goldcoast Software. For five years I worked with Chet Leighton and Judy Ano in our little software company, trying to make a go of it, but we were not a success. We succumbed to the allure of trying to develop a product for small businesses, where we really should have been content with software projects. Judy was a marketing person, not a developer, so the mix of responsibilities was not good from the beginning. Chet had boundless energy and talent, but I didn't share his vision or goals, so I took a better paying and more rewarding job at my brother's company in 1987.
