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| Casey and I strolling on a San Francisco beach, March, 2003 |
Life as a Normal Kid
There was nothing extraordinary about my life as a kid. Our family had two parents, two kids, and the occasional pet. For the first eleven years of my life, I grew up across the street from a cemetery and a fire engine house, one block away from our grade school. I was bright, shy, and "tall for my age." For the first three or four years of school, I was the tallest kid in the class. Being overly shy, possibly from a speech impediment (I couldn't pronounce a "thr" sound), I was really withdrawn and would never dream of being loud or disrespectful of my teachers. Before I realized that I was one of the smarter kids, I realized that I paid attention more than other kids did. The teachers always wrote on my report card, "He pays attention and is polite." I didn't start to be bored until sixth grade.
I didn't know how fortunate I was at the time to be attending Walker Elementary School. After fifth grade, my family moved "across the river," from the west side of Rockford to the east side (across the Rock River), where I completed sixth grade at Jackson Elementary School before attending Lincoln Junior High for my seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. I discovered that Jackson School was at least a year behind Walker School, so I pretty much slept through sixth grade.
At Walker School the emphasis was always on reading and math. We had speed reading tests in second grade, with all our scores posted for other students to see. We'd be tested at least once a month. I was a slow reader, only able to accomplish 250 words per minute (wpm). A buddy, Paul Longton, was reading at 450 wpm in second grade! We also had arithmetic contests with flash cards. The teachers were always supportive and encouraging as they pushed us, because our learning was very competitive.
In fifth grade, Miss Middlestadt began giving us ten trivia questions a week that we could do for "extra credit," and I just loved that. Only some of the kids had encyclopedias, so we'd have to research the answers at a library or in the newspaper or from talking with adults. Trivia questions appealed to my love of puzzles and games, so I led the class in correct answers. The questions were like "What are the names of all the cabinet secretaries for President Eisenhower?" or "What Chicago White Sox player was known for playing without shoes?" (answer: Shoeless Joe Jackson).
My wonderful elementary school was
demolished in 2018, and the land was turned into a city park. The
photo, below, was taken in 2017, a year after the school closed. You
can see the name "P. R. Walker" just to the left of the four doric
columns and under the "J". The school was built in 1911.
Although
I was a shy kid, I always had at least the average number of friends. I
was kidded to no end in second grade because I had a girlfriend,
Barbara Gross, but I think the boys all envied me. My friends and I
loved sports, so we would play baseball throughout the non-snow months,
and football in the snow. None of the families were wealthy, but we
always found fun things to do--collect baseball cards, ride our bikes,
play board games, have snowball fights, invent our own pastimes. More
than anything, we were ordered to play outside, no matter what the
weather. That type of upbringing had so many advantages over video
games that kids play today.
I was not an especially healthy boy either. I had the Asian Flu in 1958 and missed several weeks of school, and I had pneumonia at least twice during winters. Except for two broken bones playing basketball, I escaped all the broken bones other kids suffered. I had my share of hobbies--baseball cards, stamp collecting, model railroading, listening to rock-and-roll records, chasing butterflies--but mostly I was a very happy kid, as was my sister, Sue, with whom I spent most of my time.
In fact, just about all the kids I knew were happy. Everyone I knew had two parents, at least one sibling (and often, four or five), and enough food, clothes, and adequate shelter to survive and flourish. I only remember two kids who were an "only child" in their families; everyone had brothers and sisters to play with. We had our share of scrapes and bruises, but the neighborhoods were extremely safe, friendly, and Midwestern in values. And, they were almost entirely white. I didn't meet (or even see) a kid who was Asian, Black, Latino, or who spoke a foreign language until sixth grade.
I barely remember junior high school, maybe because it was so common, so normal. I was in junior high band during seventh and eighth grades, where I played the bass clarinet. I remember my ninth grade Spanish class, when they announced that President Kennedy had died. I remember the solemnity of basketball team practice that day and the very quiet ride home with my dad, who picked me up at school.
Mostly in junior high I was lonely. In seventh grade my dad had his first bout with cancer, and my dog died, and in the next year we had to cancel our vacation to New York City because my favorite uncle died. That year was culminated by Kennedy's death. I had a few friends but rarely brought one of them home to visit. We amused ourselves with golf, bowling, and reading, and I would hibernate in my room and listen to rock-and-roll on my transistor radio or big band music from Henry Mancini's early albums, which comprised my entire record collection.
My best
friends in junior high were Howard Fry, with whom I spent hundreds of
hours playing sports, and Jill Meyer, a close friend of my sister's.
Jill, Sue, and I spent one summer creating Jeopardy! boards that we would play together, and that was the source of most of my enjoyment that summer.
When I started tenth grade at Rockford East High School, life changed for me. I had enrolled in ROTC, at the urging of my father, and in doing so I immediately acquired several other friends, because we were all ridiculed by other kids in our school for being "military" geeks. I knew nothing about the military, but I had shied away from phys-ed because it involved swimming. I loved sports but was dreadfully afraid of the water--a fear that had been ingrained in me by my mother--and I'd hated having to swim naked in junior high swim classes. (Yes, boys were made to swim without clothes, which seems so abusive by today's standards.) Not only did I quickly adapt to the military training classes, but I fell in love with rifle shooting. (See my essay on Collaborations, where I talk extensively about our rifle team.)
Life
changed in another way for me in tenth grade: I fell in with a group of
five guys my age and began spending most of my social time with them. I had
known Howard since sixth grade, but I met all the other boys in
ROTC. The six of us became fast friends, and we were called "The Group" by
everyone who knew us. (Find out more about The Group in my Best Friends
essay.) Most of the time I spent with Cec, Jon, Joe, Dave, and Howard
fell into either of two categories: conversations about life or running a
coffeehouse. We spent hundreds of hours driving around together in our
parents' cars, talking deeply about whatever was on our minds. And
then for two years, starting in 1965, Cec, Jon, Dave, and I spent our
Saturday nights volunteering at a local church's coffeehouse, called
Heather On The Moor. None of us belonged to the church, but we were
welcome to do most of the work in keeping it running. I heard my first
live folk music at that coffeehouse. It was "good, clean fun," as our
parents would say, and we absolutely loved it.
In eleventh
grade, I decided to take a course in Newswriting rather than the
standard English course, and that was one of the best choices I ever
made in school. We were taught journalism--writing newspaper
stories--and had only a small amount of literature to satisfy the
English requirement. Although this perhaps set me back a couple years
in my studies of literature, I easily caught up in that discipline at
college. I loved to write stories for our school newspaper, which was
an award-winning, 8-page, weekly paper. In my junior year, I was one of only nine kids (including my Jeopardy!
friend, Jill Meyer) to win a Quill and Scroll award for having written
over 300 column-inches for our paper during the year. I was then
appointed the News Editor for my senior year, during which we produced
28 editions of the paper.
The person who really made my days in high school journalism enjoyable was our supervisor and teacher, Joan Schmelzle. She is my favorite teacher from all my school years. She not only supervised 50 kids in producing great newspapers and yearbooks, year after year, but she was my first real writing teacher. She wouldn't let you pad a 250-word newspaper story with fluff; she was tough, exacting, and our fearless leader. We'd work on three newspapers at a time, and she kept us focused and busy for a minimum of two hours every day in my senior year. My favorite days were Wednesdays, when we'd spend evenings at the local printer, pasting up the pages for Fridays' papers--re-writing headlines, aligning columns, and screaming at each other.
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| Joan Schmelzle and I during a visit to Rockford, 2017. |
Senior year of high school was certainly the culmination of my public schooling, and it couldn't have turned out any better. I had been Battalion Commander of our ROTC unit, News Editor of our school newspaper, part of a competitive rifle team that finished fifth in the country, and had placed second academically in a class of 689 kids. Still, I was stunned at the all-school assembly when I was given the citizenship award as the Outstanding Senior Boy. The biggest honor, however, came as I headed back to the publications room after the ceremony, when Joan Schmelzle walked next to me and said, "Congratulations, Steve; you deserved that."
I worked at my dad's company during the "long, hot summer" of 1967, while over 150 race riots raged across the country. My dad took me to Detroit to see some of the aftermath of those riots. In early September, I said goodbye to my high school friends and began my freshman year at the University of Illinois. It was the first time I'd ever been away from home, save for one religious retreat weekend in 1965, and I was not yet 18 years old when I arrived in Urbana. Thus began four incredible years.
The College Years
It was not always certain in my mind that I would go to college, maybe not until I was a junior in high school. My dad had built a successful kitchen wholesale supply company, and I think he had the dream of me joining him full-time after I finished high school. Once or twice he let drop the infamous line, "I'm building this for you," so how could I disappoint him? No one in his family had ever been to college, and certainly no one had had an established company waiting for them. On top of that, he had taught me how to keep the company's books, design kitchens, make sales calls, deal with vendors, and manage employees, so what else could I want?
Working in an opposing direction were the efforts of my high school teachers and mother. In our sophomore year students at my school were told what our class ranks were, and a weekly counseling class stressed that we should begin looking at college catalogues! The classroom had shelves of catalogues available for us to explore, more than two years before we were to graduate! When I found out I had a class rank of 4th, my mother insisted that college was a given for me, because I probably could get into any school. When I took the SAT's in my junior year, I scored an 800 in math, so the question was settled; I was going to college.
But where would I go? My dad came into my bedroom one night as I was studying, and he said how proud he was of me and that I "could go to any college or university I wanted." Then he quickly added, "as long as you pay for it." He did offer to introduce me to his banker, Mr. Zegunis, to apply for an Illinois State Guaranteed Loan, if I chose to go to a public university in Illinois. It was probably about then I visited the U of I campus for the first time, at the invitation of my friend, Art Ogren, who was a freshman there. I spent two days exploring the campus with him, and I totally fell in love with it. Why? In order of importance, it was a top-notch school, it was huge, everything about it was exciting, and it was 200 miles away from home. Although I did apply to two other universities, the day I was accepted at U of I was one of the best days of my life.
As with most college students, so much happened in my four years of college. At the University of Illinois, I found myself to be an average student among a lot of really bright kids. My dorm floor at Townsend Hall had 65 men, about 50 of whom became my friends. For the first week I was terribly lonely, so my parents came to visit the second weekend and brought my small TV with them. From that day, my new-found friends on the dorm floor were always dropping by for short visits to watch TV.
My first roommate was a fifth-year senior who was majoring in architecture and was always in the lab working on a project, so for most of the first semester, I had the dorm room to myself. In that semester I met Marty Olson, a sophomore, and he and I became roommates (and pinochle partners) when the second semester began. (I profile Marty in my Best Friends essay.) Marty and I did a lot of things together for the next couple of years and became great friends. He led the way in my decision to begin taking computer courses. We lived together for two years in the dorm and then shared an apartment with two other guys for a semester, after which he graduated.
I loved living in the dorm. U of I had over 100 individual dorm "floors" for men, and Townsend 4-South (the "Townsend Tankers") always ranked in the top ten academically and athletically across the campus. We had several guys on the floor who were "five-point" students (the university was on a five-point scale, not the four-point scale used at most universities). In my four years at U of I, my grades slipped a little, mostly brought down by three C's in French, but I still finished with a good GPA.
The men on the floor were really a tight-knit group. We had pinochle tournaments, went to university sports games together, and had some very good intramural teams. I played on the golf and volleyball teams, and our volleyball team won the university intramural championship one year. Marty played on several of the teams, being an all-around athlete. On a Friday night, someone would come up with an idea to see a particular movie and yell down the hall, "Anyone want to go see 'The Graduate'?" Half a dozen guys would yell back, "Yeah!" Eight of us would pull on our jackets and head out to the movie theater. It didn't matter who was going; it was a very open, welcoming social club.
I also really enjoyed my classes, although they were much harder than high school, as you'd expect. When I arrived at college, I was told to expect 2-3 hours of homework for every hour spent in class. I really loaded up with classes the first year. I had "proficiencied" 8 hours of credit on pre-college exams, and then I took 19 hours of classes the first semester, 20 hours the second. So, after my first full year, I'd accumulated 47 hours of credit, instead of the required 30 hours. For the remaining three years, I coasted. During my last two years of school, I had no Tuesday or Thursday classes!
My favorite classes were computer courses, all my nine literature courses, botany, and philosophy. Even though I was a math major, my math classes never really interested me. They were tough and boring at the same time. I eked my way through French, zoology, and phys ed classes.
For the first three years I was mostly an average college student--attending classes, going to games, playing my intramural sports, going to campus and dorm parties. I never considered joining a fraternity or independent house, and I didn't drink except on rare occasions. I also met almost no women, since my math and computer classes had few women in them, and I was quite shy and unsure of myself in dating anyway.
But changes did come, because of four different "themes" that emerged over the course of the last three years of college. These themes involved different people, events, and effects on me, and all of them were life-changing and long-lasting. It's a wonder that I got any schoolwork done. Truth be told, schoolwork probably occupied about a third of my life during those years.
The first theme was death. In February, 1968, during the only school-year weekend I spent at home with my parents that year, one of my good friends committed suicide in the dorm. Al Gronek had been the first person I'd met as a freshman, for he was my Illini Guide. He lived one door down from me and was always available to answer questions from a naive freshman. Often he'd appear at my door, walk in, and imitate Walter Cronkite, "And that's the way it is." I deeply regretted that I had not been there that weekend, for maybe he would have called on me after he'd lost a lead theater part, broken up with his girlfriend, and had a fight with his parents--all in one day. He took strychnine on that Saturday morning and died on the way to the hospital. When I returned to campus that Sunday night, I asked a floor buddy at the front door if anything exciting had happened while I was away, and he said (exact words), "Yeah, what's-his-name's roommate killed himself." I rushed to my room, and Marty told me that Al had died. That was the first shock of the year.
A few months later I learned, on the day I returned home from my freshman year, that my dad was terminally ill and needed a ride to the hospital. (I talk about that summer in the next chapter.) He died later that year, on December 4, and three weeks later my best friend's father died suddenly. I thought a lot about death and dying that year, for it was also the year that Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Maybe the most formative event concerning the process of dying was when I approached my English professor, Paul Friedman (who I profile in Meetings With Remarkable People), and told him my dad was terminally ill. I started crying and immediately changed the subject of our conversation to how I was floundering in my reading assignments. I asked for help, and in the next couple of months, he really taught me how to read. So often I think of our conversations and my lasting love of reading that came from them.
The second theme was love and the process of falling into it. 1969 had been a long, depressing year, because I missed my dad very much. My sister was preparing to move to New York City, and my mom had moved to a small house one block from where my family had lived. The "family" was dissolving. In Urbana, I began spending a lot of time at the Red Herring Coffeehouse, where poets, singers, and sages perfected the artistic expressions of unrequited love. By the time I went home to Rockford for winter semester break in late January, 1970, blizzards had buried the town deep in snow, and I was thoroughly depressed.
I was atop a tall ladder one day that week, tacking black-light posters to the ceiling of Paul Anderson's used bookstore, called "The A", when the front door opened and a beautiful woman walked in. She happened to ask Paul for an item that was at his other store, two blocks away, and he slowly looked up to the top of the ladder and asked me if I'd like to escort the young lady to purchase the item. I almost fell trying to get down the ladder quickly enough.
After the sale was made, Debby
Reese and I went for coffee in a nearby cafe and talked for two hours.
She was a sophomore at Northern Illinois University, majoring in English
and minoring in Art. (See more about Debby in my Best Friends
essay.) Soon we were writing long letters to each other, going to
concerts, and making occasional visits to our respective campuses.
Falling for her was easy, but maintaining a long-distance relationship
was not. An extended romantic relationship wasn't in the cards, but a
life-long friendship was. She was the first woman I fell in love with,
and the theme of love became pervasive in those young, college years.
It was the year in which I began to write songs, but there was a
competing theme.
The third theme was war.
The Vietnam war was raging, Nixon was president, and anti-war protests
were occurring on many college campuses. When the Kent State massacre
happened on May 4, 1970, I and many of my friends realized that it could
have been us who were killed by the National Guard. The University of
Illinois in Champaign-Urbana was one of the most active, turbulent
campuses in the country, and I had attended some of our anti-war
demonstrations. After Kent State, the last month of classes and finals
was canceled on our campus for the rest of the school year.
By the time I returned to campus in September, I had a new Martin 12-string guitar and began playing in front of people for the first time. Everybody was writing songs, and many of them were pro-love and anti-war. 1970 had been the year I finally faced the eventuality of being drafted, and I realized I was not only against the war, but against being associated with the Armed Forces. Many, many private talks with counselors and friends ensued, and I began my campaign to become a conscientious objector and do alternate service. It was fortunate I had front-loaded my college years with lots of required classes, because my studies took a back seat when I began writing songs and exploring my conscience.
The fourth theme was music. Throughout my college life I'd always had a record player and listened to lots of music--from Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell to Led Zeppelin, Buffalo Springfield, and The Beatles. It was the Age of Woodstock, which brought us Crosby, Stills and Nash, and it was the Age of Unreason, which brought the drug deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. It was a time of chaos, angst, and rebellion for young people.
In November, 1970, I performed in the wildly successful Red Herring Fall Folk Festival with Nancy and Judy Spratlin--all our own songs. Dan Fogelberg sat in to accompany us! A couple of my English professors came to the shows and knew then what I was doing in my extracurricular time. A week after the five shows were finished, Albert Melshenker, who I'd also performed with in the concerts, asked me if I'd like to co-write a folk opera, called "The Ship." There was not a moment's hesitation on my part.
We began writing "The Ship" together in mid-December and didn't finish the eleven songs until the following April. The full story of that journey is told in the Life In The Middle Lane essay. Most of my spring 1971 semester was spent writing the folk opera, working at (and living in) Channing-Murray Foundation, where the Red Herring was located, and organizing my application to become a full-fledged conscientious objector. Going to classes was a distant fourth priority.
Because of the timing of my application, I decided to delay my last two college courses to the summer of 1971. I definitely wanted to graduate, but not before my case was heard by the Rockford draft board. As it turned out, my application was approved in May, 1971, without appearing before the draft board. My two summer classes were a music appreciation course and a physical education course. I chose an air-conditioned sport--bowling, in which I became quite good!
I'll never forget
the last scheduled class session of all my school years. Finals had
already taken place, and I'd missed the notice that the concluding music
appreciation class had been canceled. When I walked into the bare,
dark classroom, I just stood there and laughed. I'd aced the course,
partly by submitting for extra credit the lyrics to the folk opera I'd
just written, and there was nothing else to say. It was the ultimate
anticlimax to seventeen years of school. I walked out of that empty
classroom into life.
Everything changed for me and the country in 1968. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, and Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June. The Tet Offensive had altered the Vietnam War in North Vietnam's favor in January. Anti-war and Black Power protests racked the country, punctuated by a famous protest at the Olympics in Mexico City. Richard Nixon was elected President in November. It was an altogether bad year from the country's perspective, while from my point of view it was the worst of years. In February, my friend in college, Al Gronek, committed suicide. He had been the first U of I student to welcome me when I arrived on campus in September, 1967. And then on June 4, one day before Kennedy's death, I reached home after finals to find out that my dad was terminally ill with colon cancer. He was given six months to live, and he died exactly six months later, on December 4.
The
hardest part of that year for me was not in accepting the imminence and
occurrence of my father's death, but having to work the whole summer as
his surrogate in running our wholesale kitchen supply business. In
previous summers I had worked in the warehouse, helped deliver kitchens
(appliances and cabinets), worked on the company's accounting books, and
done cold calling to people building homes. In the summer of 1968, I
had to do all customer interactions, pay all the bills, design and draw
kitchen plans, place orders with the manufacturers, manage our truck
driver, and visit my dad in the hospital twice a day for instructions
and guidance with jobs. At any one time we had 8-12 kitchen jobs in the
pipeline, so I had to hone my skills in each phase of projects, where
it was usual for each project to take about two months.
Our truck driver understood what was happening, and he was loyal and determined to see the whole year through. I don't know what we would have done had he left the company as dad was dying. His name was Merle Saunders, and he was almost as young as I was--a really good guy. He'd spent a few years as a long-haul truck driver, so he kept me smiling by telling stories about the road.
My dad chose not to tell any of his steady customers (construction company owners) that he was very seriously ill. In fact, he probably fooled himself by thinking that he'd defy the doctors and get better. My dad's silence was one of the reasons that I saw my friends very little that summer. I respected his privacy and kept the secret from getting out, although people probably guessed. The hard part was that dad wouldn't talk about his condition with any of us in the family either.
I did take off Sundays from work, but otherwise I worked at least 60-70 hours each week. I was always very tired and numb from what was happening--seeing my dad deteriorate by the week and having to put on a happy face with the customers and vendors. I did find one fun distraction, however. I would play horseshoes at a neighbor's yard about once a week, and it was as refreshing as a cold glass of lemonade on a hot summer night. Those were the only times I didn't feel pressure and depression that summer.
My friends gradually understood what was happening in my life. My college roommate, Marty Olson, visited from his home in Elmhurst and got to meet my dad, and I saw the guys from my high school group a couple times. An older friend, Paul Anderson, would often drop by to see if my mother and I were okay, and he did a lot of things for my mom. Most of my friends didn't want to disturb my dad, who was home in bed part of the summer, but they also didn't know what to say to me. I don't think I knew anyone whose father had already died. I was alone from the uniqueness of my situation.
My dad was insistent that I return to school in September for my sophomore year, so we advertised for the position and hired a woman who had kitchen sales experience. She was told the situation and knew it would be a short-term job for her. I would go home often that fall to see dad, and by October, I was able to tell him that I was loving my first computer language course and had chosen to stay with computers. I told him that I'd probably do that for the rest of my life, and he was pleased. He would have loved computers as much as I do.
My final visit to see dad was the weekend before he died. By then he was in a nursing home requiring constant, palliative care. He was mostly unconscious from the drugs, but on the last evening I saw him, he woke, looked at me, and said, "I love you, Steve." He had not said anything coherent for a couple weeks before then, but I'm sure the connection between us was genuine. I smiled and told him, "I love you, too, dad." And then he slipped back into unconsciousness. He died three days later.
It was a relief to me and my family, although his two sisters, my aunts, created a scene in disagreeing where he would be buried. I was pleased when they went home to New York City, after dad's funeral two days later. In the following weeks, all the customers were notified, the few assets of the business were sold, and the company was liquidated. By the next spring, my mom had packed up everything and moved to a smaller house two blocks away from where she had lived with dad.
The whole experience of 1968 was one of constant sadness, but it was also one of constant challenge and constant maturing. There was no choice; I had to run the family business and set aside emotions that would come out in the following years. I got the opportunity to support my whole family, which is relatively uncommon for an 18-year-old in middle-class America. Where most kids get the chance to mature slowly, living the summer of 1968 was like flicking a light switch from being a carefree kid to being an adult.
I returned to campus on Sunday evening,
December 8, and discovered that all the guys on the dorm floor had
joined in contributing to the American Cancer Society in my father's
name. Although no one really knew what to say to me, at a time when
words don't fix things, I was overwhelmed by that kindness. My mom
wrote a thank-you letter which was posted on the floor's bulletin board
for all to read, and, one-by-one, each person told me how sorry they
were to hear about my dad. The surprising thing was that almost every
guy wanted to know how I felt and how I was handling it, and many
private conversations took place in the following weeks. Although some
doors had closed, others were just beginning to open.
The Meaning of Life - Part I
If I think about my life as a series of decades, it was not my teens which were the hardest, but my twenties. Not only did a number of love relationships not work out, but I was continually immersed in my personal search for "the meaning of life." Maybe those things were related.
The roots of my "search" were undoubtedly in the hundreds
of deep conversations I had with friends and acquaintances in my late
teens, really intensifying after the summer of 1968. The friends
probably numbered ten or fifteen and were mostly my own age, but some were
older. I didn't have an agenda so much as a wide, insatiable curiosity
about love, friendship, religious beliefs, art, war, music, career,
metaphysics, and the challenges of growing up. A "deep conversation"
with a person was usually face-to-face and could be half an hour or
several hours. It usually began with "how are you feeling?" and led to
"what do you think?" Those conversations were exploratory, and nothing
was off-limits. I had a lot of friends and a lot of time to talk.
By the time I reached 20, I knew what my deepest interests were--music, computer programming, literature, Impressionist art--but I had no idea where I was going. I could let life happen to me in order to find out, or I could start searching for my right path. Simply letting life happen to me--letting people and institutions tell me what to think and what to believe--was no longer my nature after my dad got sick. I chose to search.
I took my first literature course in the spring of 1968, when I was a freshman, and I loved it so much that I took two more courses in the fall of 1968. One was a theater literature class, given by James Hurt, who was an Ibsen authority, and the other was a short story class given by writer Paul Friedman. (I wrote an essay about Paul in my Meetings With Remarkable People series.) Those two men really were the ones who taught me how to read and do critical thinking about what I was reading.
During
that semester I also took my one and only philosophy course from a
wonderful professor named Chandler. Evidently, he was the only
philosophy prof at the university who did not assign books to read but
simply conducted philosophical discussions. That was a perfect setting
for me. I sat near the front of the room and greatly anticipated each
class. He'd pose questions that provoked serious thought, analysis, and
exposition, and the discussions were amazing.
Those three courses, along with my first computer language course (Fortran), saved my life during that semester, as my dad was living his last three months. My mind was always engaged in those classes by things I really loved. I did have two other classes--zoology and differential equations--but they did not interest me nearly as much. In zoology, I was one of about 200 students in a lecture hall at 8:00 o'clock in the morning, and with "Diff-EQ" I was simply bored and uninterested.
If there's a single word that described me between the ages of 19 and 24, it was "intense." I saw deep meaning in everything. Of course, many of my friends were the same way, especially those people I met at the Red Herring Coffeehouse in Urbana. Buffalo Springfield's song, "For What It's Worth," came out when I was 17, and it was the anthem for my age group and interests. If I had five "deep" conversations in a week, it was a light week. What made everyone so intense?
Well, it was a "coming of age" time for most young people. The Vietnam War was raging, and most males were afraid of being drafted. The country was embroiled in race riots, anti-war demonstrations, Watergate, Charles Manson, Idi Amin, the end of the Beatles, the first moon landing, and ratification of the 26th amendment to the U. S. Constitution, giving 18-year-olds the right to vote. Young people suddenly had the voice and power they had requested, but never experienced.
Music had also entered a new era by 1970. Although rock groups were still dominant, equally popular between 1970 and 1972 were Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, The Carpenters, Carole King, Cat Stevens, Carly Simon, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and a new group emerging as the leaders of country- and folk-rock, The Eagles.
It was a period of immense change in the world, and I was riding on top of that wave, at the same time trying to confront life and death experiences that came my way. When I was 20, I began writing songs in earnest, always carrying a personal notebook wherever I went. If I was suddenly inspired by a line or turn of phrase during a zoology lecture, I'd set my science notes aside and open my lyrics notebook to write it down. When I wasn't studying, reading, or going to classes, I was either listening to music or writing songs on my guitars.
In the fall of 1970, two very important things happened in my life, both of which were formative and even necessary in my search for meaning. The first was meeting Albert Melshenker as I took part in the Red Herring Fall Folk Festival and, only a couple weeks later, being asked to join him in writing a folk opera, called The Ship. We worked closely on our "Contemporary Folk Music Journey" for almost five months, meeting nearly every day. It was like creating our own self-help seminar. We looked at what it was to be human and go through all the emotions of a life-changing event. (The full story of my experiences with The Ship is in my essay, Life In The Middle Lane.)
The second process I began only a week after work on The Ship commenced. I started the process of determining whether I was a conscientious objector. I knew I objected greatly to the Vietnam War and serving in the Armed Forces, but what was at the core of that objection? I began a series of discussions with two religious counselors, Rabbi Lester Frazin (my rabbi from Rockford) and Reverend W. Edward Harris (minister of the Green Street Unitarian-Universalist Church in Urbana), about what it means and what it would take to be a conscientious objector. (I have profiled Rev. Harris in my Meetings With Remarkable People essays.)
Becoming a full conscientious objector is (or, at least, was) a very difficult process. Two Selective Service draft statuses exist for conscientious objectors. I-A-O is for C.O.'s who will serve in non-combat rolls, such as medics, while I-O is for C.O.'s who agree to serve in a civilian work "contributing to the national health, safety or interest," but not in the Armed Forces. I wanted to apply for full I-O status. During the next several months, which was my senior year of college, I attended many counseling sessions, wrote the necessary essays to answer the Draft Board's four questions on my C.O. application, and asked seven people to write letters to the Draft Board in support of my sincerity. Very importantly, four of those people had received honorable discharges from the Armed Forces and held different views on military service than I did.
Not only were my beliefs about military service sincere, but I also believed that civilian service was a noble and worthy cause, so while I was filling out Draft Board forms, writing essays, and asking people to write supporting letters, I also began working and living at Channing-Murray Foundation, which is where I wanted to do my alternate service. In May, 1971, I received notice from the Draft Board that I had been approved as a conscientious objector. To my knowledge, I was the first person to receive full I-O status without appearing in person in front of the Draft Board of my Rockford district. My position at the Foundation was also approved by the Draft Board.
As I finished college, continued full-time work at Channing-Murray Foundation, and enjoyed part-time participation in my band, The Ship, the first phase of my "search for meaning in life" was drawing to a close. I was well-read, had taken part in literally hundreds of "life and its meaning" conversations, and was writing lots of songs, but one event quite unexpectedly kicked me into the next part of my search.
As I describe in my Meetings With Remarkable People article about Gary Usher, the episode occurred in the spring of 1972. Usher was a very famous music producer and was to produce our album on Elektra Records, so our group met him when he visited the studio where we rehearsed. I said very little during our hour talk with him, and then all of us (about a dozen people) agreed to go out to dinner. He lagged behind the group and walked up to me to say, "When you regain your self-confidence, you're going to be really something." That really stopped me in my tracks.
I didn't speak
with Usher again until we arrived in Los Angeles at the end of May. On
the second night there, Melshenker and I joined Usher and his wife,
Bonnie, for dinner at their home. After dinner he stunned us by
presenting a parable (for my benefit) and inviting us to listen to the
metaphysical concept album he'd composed and recorded, called Beyond a Shadow of Doubt.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, which is described in full in
my essay about Usher. When we began recording our album two days later,
his final "push" was to tell me about The Morning of the Magicians,
which became my first foray into really difficult reading in my search
for "the meaning of life." Thus began a journey that lasted almost
nine years.
The Meaning of Life - Part II
After my brief time with Gary Usher, it's fair to say that I dove into the pursuit of finding meaning in my life. Looking back on that effort, I think it took nine more years to reach the summit of my search. For a few years I thought the ultimate goal was to be married, have kids, and work at a successful career. After all, that had long been the most natural path to take--a path that was more important than anything to our parents. Despite my efforts--and probably excessive efforts--to follow that path, it hadn't happened by 1976, when I decided it was time to move away from Illinois.
My years between 1972 and 1976 were filled and fruitful, but with more endings than beginnings, it seemed. I'd played in two bands, worked at a wonderful computer job for three years, and found many deep friendships and love, but I chose to give up (or accept the loss of) most of that and move away from Illinois to California. It wasn't that I was idle during those years in my "meaning of life" search; if anything, I was overly active.
After
I graduated from college in 1971, I never stopped reading, but rather
than follow a professor's syllabus, I devised my own. Most of what I
read was either in the areas of psychology/philosophy or was fiction of great writers. Hemingway seemed to describe the "human condition"
better than anyone for me, but I also branched out to writers I hadn't
read. I read a lot of D. H. Lawrence, Harold Pinter, G. I. Gurdjieff, and Rollo May.
During that time I realized I hadn't really gotten through grieving about my dad's death in 1968, and so, for some reason, I read Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward in late 1973--a thoroughly depressing book. I didn't shy away from depression. If it took getting depressed to find the meaning of life, it was a necessary and worthwhile sacrifice.
Meeting
John and Margaret Cardwell in the summer of 1973 had a tremendous
impact on my life. Margaret was my first ceramics teacher, and her
husband, John, was an English professor at a community college in
Champaign. (I profile Margaret in my Meetings With Remarkable People series of essays.)
 |
| Margaret and John Cardwell at the Indiana Covered Bridge Festival, October, 1980. |
John
and Margaret soon represented the ideal couple to me. They treated
each other with great respect and support. They laughed all the time.
They enjoyed good food and conversation at dinner parties they'd host.
And they each had their own space to do creative things in their large
home--Margaret in her painting and sculpture studio and John in his
library. I spent many, many evenings with them, often exploring aspects
of the "meaning of life" question as they saw it. They were infinitely
patient with me and my floundering.
After
I grew to know them well, I asked them once if they'd ever had a
serious argument. That stumped them. After a few seconds, Margaret
said, "Yes! I remember once I baked two dozen chocolate chip cookies
and left them to cool while I went to teach a pottery class. When I got
home, I discovered John had eaten all of them!! I was really mad at
him." I started laughing and said, "That's it?" They both agreed that
it was the most serious tiff they'd ever had, and John said, in his
defense, "Well, they were really good cookies!" That planted one seed
in my search, although it would be another fifteen years before I came
to value it fully and use it.
The things I learned from them were much more by demonstration than by verbal instruction. They showed me examples of shared, hard work rather than tell me about them. There was the time John took out the back seat in their VW bus and asked if I'd help him fetch some manure for their garden. I thought we were going to drive to a garden store to pick up sacks of the stuff, but John drove us to a farm, handed me a shovel, and told me to start loading from the manure pile. We drove back to the house with the car windows open, and the three of us spent the afternoon spreading the manure over their immense garden tract. That year I enjoyed the largest, most delicious vegetables I'd ever had.
During
the same time, I grew close to Steve and Sue Porges, with whom I played
a lot of volleyball on a recreational team. They were professors at
the University of Illinois, and, as with the Cardwells, I was often at
their home. Both had appointments in the Department of Psychology, so
deep talks about relationships and personalities and mental health were
commonplace with us. As I discuss in my Meetings With Remarkable People
essay about Steve, I learned much from them about the importance of
having a "well-rounded" life. Steve often urged me to read books from
different and varied disciplines, and he was the first to say to me,
"Know thyself." I think he was the first to recommend Rollo May's book,
Love and Will.
I moved to California in 1976 and spent much of the next four years without a network of friends. Oh, certainly I made very good friends, like Chet Amborn, Chet Ratliff, Steve Rebello, and Joe and Gail Miluso--all close friends to this day--but I was also quite occupied in solo activities. I read more than ever, and I compiled journals of writings, songs, poems. Leaving everything behind in Illinois was a soul-cleanser, because it provided a lot of isolated, thoughtful time, with new adventures and good challenges. I especially had the opportunity to focus on "meaning of life" issues.
But what does that really mean? I struggled with that concept by asking myself several inevitable questions--why do I feel unfulfilled? Shouldn't life have more in it? What is the point of living? A deep loneliness gave me the opportunity to ask those questions, even though my life was filled with good fortune--an interesting job, lots of new friends, and activities I loved. Though I may be armed in life with all that I needed, what was the ultimate target?
By the spring of 1980, it had become clear to me that the purpose of my life was not
to see how much I could love others. For over a decade I had placed
love as the central focus and goal in life. After all, I was from the
"peace and love generation." Love was certainly part of the key, as I
explored one path after another, but it wasn't the destination for me.
I'd read books like Zen in the Art of Archery, Love and Will, The Game of Life, The Psychic is You, Meetings With Remarkable Men, and Seeker of the Truth. All of them added to the meaning of life but didn't quite capture it for me. There was something still missing.
It was during the spring of 1981, when Steve and Sue Porges were on their sabbaticals at Stanford University , that "the search" came to a conclusion with one sweeping realization, while Steve and I were eating dinner at a deli in San Francisco one night. I tell this anecdote in my article about Steve in Meetings With Remarkable People, but I'll repeat it here. As close as I can remember, here are our words:
I said, "Somehow life has always been a conflict for me between pursuing what I wanted to do and helping others. Now I see that they work together and are equally important. The secret of life is to be the best you can be and to do good for others. Isn't that right!?" Steve looked up and replied, "Yes, that's right. Would you pass the mustard?"
And
that was it. Although I've refined that principle in the last forty
years, the basic premise hasn't changed. I've developed my own "4-H
Club" of guidelines since then, but there was never a search for
further meaning. I was content that the search was over and I had found
my life's meaning. In trying to be the best I could be, while at the
same time doing good for others, I continually focused on four things: Hard work, Helping others, Health, and Harmony in life. Finding love was a result of those four things, not a cause of or preface to them. In 1980's jargon, I was finally "centered" when I kept those four goals in mind.
Hard work
was always part of my make-up, whether I was working with my dad, doing
my homework for school, doing alternate service as a conscientious
objector, or designing computer software systems at different
companies. This was the most natural of the four H's for me. In my
20's I adopted the philosophy that was later Facebook's Sheryl
Sandberg's trademark phrase, "Done is better than perfect." In effect,
define the goal, work hard to reach it, and then fix things. It's the
same process whether I was writing a song or a computer program or an
essay. Focus and get it done, then fix what needs fixing.
Helping others was not quite as natural or well-defined for me. You have to get out of your own way to meaningfully help others. I most admire teachers in our society, because, to be a good teacher, you have to want to "go the distance" in helping others. I'm not an accomplished teacher, but I'm a willing and eager one. I've taught students in ceramics, ballroom dancing, songwriting, golf, and many computer applications. I've also discovered that mentoring young people is a perfect fit for me.
But "helping others" goes beyond teaching them. It's doing good things for them as a way of leading my life. Helping other people is based first on being cognizant of them--observing how they live, appreciating their struggles, and often putting yourself in their place. Everyday life presents so many ways you can help others, and, consistent with my subtle religious upbringing, it's best when you help without them knowing it.
Health comes in all forms--physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. My mental health changed much for the better in knowing the Cardwells and the Porgeses, but it probably wasn't until meeting Gail Montgomery in 1988 (see my Meetings With Remarkable People essay about Gail) that the greatest changes occurred. I'm a hearty advocate of counseling based on all I've gained from it. During my three years of work with Gail, including finishing with the grief I still felt over my dad's death, I changed from being a fundamentally unhappy person who had happy moments to being a fundamentally happy man who sometimes had sad moments. Gail was most eloquent in answering my question a couple years after we began, when I asked, "Why am I doing all of this?" Gail smiled and said, "To be happy."
Harmony was the most elusive to acquire and practice of the four H's. I conceptualized it long before I had a word for what I was seeking, but I found that word in the late 1980's, reading Tony Hillerman's The Ghostway. The word is hozro, a Navajo word which means "a sort of blend of being in harmony with one’s environment, at peace with one’s circumstances, content with the day, devoid of anger, and free from anxieties." When I am bothered by something, I work on it--in one or many ways--until I'm no longer bothered as much. Harmony takes more than wishing; it takes hard work.
Over the years I have given up "seeking the truth" and replaced it with "seeking harmony." Seeking harmony seems much more inclusive to me--seeking the light and living within it, rather than expecting the light to shine on me.
So the search was over, for the most part.
I worked in computer software development for forty-two years, from July 1, 1973, to July 1, 2015. In those forty-two years I had seven distinct periods of employment. I was as interested and fascinated by computers and programming on my last day of work as I was on my first day. It not only provided a rich, challenging environment for my puzzle-solving, number-crunching mind, but it provided so many other benefits in my life that I can't imagine a better career for me.
Prior to my full-time employment in computers, I spent two summers (1969 and 1970) getting my feet wet in the industry, so my summer experience with Woodward Governor in Rockford, Illinois, is listed first, followed by profiles of my seven full-time jobs.
Woodward Governor Company For two summers I worked in translating ECAP, a well-known Electronic Circuit Analysis Program, from Fortran to FAST, which was a proprietary language written by my department boss, Bill Barrett. My friend, Joe Ahlgren, had arranged an interview for me with the company in the spring of 1969, a few months after my dad had died and just after I had taken my first computer language course. I was thrilled to have a summer job, but I was in way over my head working on such a complex project.
Working at Woodward Governor, a major manufacturer of airplane engine governors, was my first exposure to the real business world. I worked in a group of about eight computer scientists for a company of several hundred employees. Perks included free lunches and haircuts, and I liked all the really bright people around me. Still, it was the only time I ever worked in a company having more than 30 employees. Although I learned a lot from a technical aspect, I also learned that I preferred to work in small companies and be my own boss.
Illinois Natural History Survey When I left my first musical group, The Ship, I knew it was time to get serious about finding my life's work. I found a bulletin board on the University of Illinois campus where job opportunities were advertised, and I noticed one job description that looked promising. It was with the Economic Entomology Department at the Illinois Natural History Survey, and they were looking for a recently-graduated Fortran programmer. Fortran had been my favorite course in my computer curriculum.
After one interview with Dr. Bill Ruesink, a top entomologist ("bug man") at the Survey, I got the job! We connected immediately, which was good, because most of my initial work would be for him. He was beginning to work on a scientific model that would simulate the life cycle of the alfalfa plant--including weather factors, insect predators, mowing practices, and the use of pesticides. The goal of the project was to minimize the use of pesticides in the environment while maximizing plant growth.
My work with Dr. Ruesink on the alfalfa project lasted for almost three years. It took us to Cornell University at one point, for they were participating in the joint project. I also joined Andy Hildebrand, another Survey scientist, in a parallel project that used a scientific modeling language to attack the pesticide problem. The model used partial differential equations and "continuous programming" structures. Andy and I worked together so well that he asked me to edit his PhD thesis on the subject, since I had been a math major and understood differential equations. (The one and only time I've been on a motorcycle in my life was with Andy, as he ferried me to my car once from the Survey building!)
The really fun part about working at the Illinois Natural History Survey was in designing databases for their scientific collections. Only one of those projects was finished while I was there, but two others were begun and continued after I left the Survey. With scientist Dr. Larry Page, we built the very first Ichthyological (fish) database in the country; the 32,000 preserved specimens on-site were collected from Illinois waterways. Its reporting capabilities were hence used by the EPA in approving building plans for factories on those waterways. I worked a lot with Larry's staff in the fish lab, and so I'll never forget the smell of formaldehyde.
I
also worked extensively in the Survey's herbarium with Dr. Robert
Evers, a true naturalist. From the 135,000 mounted specimens of
Illinois plants in the herbarium, he had personally collected over
114,000 of them, from every one of Illinois' 102 counties! Dr. Evers
taught me the ins and outs of systematics--how plants and animals are
classified in collections--so I could design the database and start his
staff on entering the classification data for all the samples. I
absolutely loved listening to Dr. Evers' stories about botany and
collecting samples, including the two times he'd been bitten by
rattlesnakes during his collecting days.
The third scientific collection I worked with was in the Survey's insect room. In 1975, the collection comprised over 5 million
insects; the INHS collection today is over 7 million specimens. When I
first saw the insect drawers in endless cabinets, I couldn't believe my
eyes. Unlike the fish and herbarium collections, the insect collection
was from all over North and Central America. The pinned butterfly
collection had all sorts of exotic specimens, some as large as eight
inches wide. The photo below is of the current collection manager in
one of the many aisles.
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| Tommy McElrath, insect collection manager, Illinois Natural History Survey |
I shared a basement office at the Survey with Barb Peterson, who was also doing Fortran programming for INHS scientists. We'd walk down a long hallway to the Geological Survey half of the building and use a Remote Job Entry (RJE) card reader that linked to the university's IBM 360/75 computer. That's right! I started my career using punched cards and lengthy printed listings of programs--one step more recent that punched paper tapes. My alfalfa modeling program took up an entire box of punched cards.
Working at the Natural History Survey was a real joy. In my three years there, we accomplished a lot, and I got my first taste in training users, writing documentation, and finishing projects. I even got to teach my first little seminar on "The Power Of Computers." When I explained to the scientists who attended the seminar that the university's computer could do "one hundred MILLION arithmetic operations per second," many of them began to consider using computers for the first time.
International Data Applications (part 1) In 1976, I decided that it was time to move out of the Midwest, and my choices were to move to New York City, my birth place, to be near my sister or to move to the Bay Area in California to live near my brother. When I wrote to Mike, he immediately wrote back and offered to pay for my plane ticket to come to San Jose and "interview" at his new software start-up company. From my week-long stay, I fell in love with California! Not only did I love the prospect of working with Mike in an international banking and foreign exchange project, which was to be in Fortran(!), but I found a great apartment in Los Gatos that accepted large dogs. My Irish Setter/Golden Retriever mix, Brandy, was five years old. So, I packed up and moved to California in August of that year.
From August, 1976, through April, 1978, I worked with Mike, his wife, Sumaye, and two other Fortran programmers, Reid Larson and Gerry Perko. Reid was an old friend of mine from the Geological Survey in Illinois, and Gerry was a very experienced electrical engineer/programmer who happened to answer a newspaper ad to join Mike's company, International Data Applications. With modems we would dial into a Univac 1108 timesharing computer to do our work. The three of us programmers had some great times. We were all fast coders who "spoke the language" in our technical discussions. When we got stuck on a problem, we'd walk two blocks to a neighborhood grocery store to purchase It's-It Ice Cream bars to help us think. That usually worked. There was also the time when Gerry accidentally deleted a 600-line program he'd been working on, and I told him I could retype it in one hour. I finished the task in 58 minutes, and Gerry bought me a case of Dr. Brown's Cream Soda.
Interactive Applications, Inc. IDA temporarily closed in the spring of 1978, due to a contract dispute with our main funding source, Bank of Montreal. Mike immediately helped us find new jobs, and so he contacted Barry and Virginia Weinman in Palo Alto, where they ran Interactive Applications, Inc. IAI specialized in manufacturing and order entry software, using the Basic programming language. Even though I didn't know Basic, I was immediately hired, and I learned the entire language in about a week. I worked at the company for the next fifteen months, and, along the way, met Chet Leighton and Chet Ratliff. Both became very close friends, and, in general, I really enjoyed my time at IAI. Still, we always intended to re-open IDA at some future date, and that time came in the summer of 1979.
Chet Leighton and I shared the same office at IAI and had grown increasingly frustrated by the lack of coding standards (rules) at the company. Coding standards are important so you can easily read and debug another person's program, but that was the opposite of how most programmers worked at IAI. They didn't want other people to be able to read their programs, in the interest of job security. (It should be noted that Chet Ratliff was new to IAI and caught in the middle of the coding standards debate; he was a very good coder.) Chet Leighton and I co-wrote a standard of rules and presented it to the company, and it was rejected. A month later, my brother, Mike, approached us and asked if we'd like to join IDA again, and we jumped at the opportunity. So, we left IAI for IDA in 1979. (The irony was that the company actually adopted our coding standard a month after we left!)
International Data Applications (part 2) By 1979, Mike had changed the focus of IDA to doing mid-sized, accounting-based projects on Prime minicomputers. Some of the applications were for banks, but other applications were for insurance and property management companies. Once again, most of my programming was in Fortran, with some in COBOL. For part of the next four years, I traveled with Mike to visit banks all across the country--Portland, San Diego, Denver, Dallas, Philadelphia. I'd always wanted to travel a little for work, and this was my only experience doing that. It was fun to travel with Mike, especially when he'd fly his own 6-seater airplane.
During
those four years, I also met four people at IDA who were to become very
important in my life with Quartet Systems. In 1979 I met DiAnn Coburn
at a Prime Computer office. She was an executive assistant who was
studying computer programming, and I urged Mike to take a chance on
DiAnn when we needed to hire a new staff member. She was very bright,
understood the concepts of programming, and eager to learn more. DiAnn
also met her future husband, Gerry Perko, at IDA. When the company
re-opened, Gerry came back to work with us.
Mike also hired a young fellow, Bruce Homer-Smith, to take on the tech-writing duties for IDA. Bruce had never written a single line in a computer manual, but he had taught English in Oakland and written his own how-to book on needlepoint! To Mike, talent was more important than experience. In the remainder of my time at IDA, DiAnn and Bruce became very good friends of mine. Years later that was to prove crucial in my professional life.
In addition to DiAnn and Bruce, two other young guys were hired. Skip Morehead was hired to work in Operations under Gerry's direction, and David Wilson was hired as a programmer. At its biggest during these years, IDA had about 12 people working together. Skip and David later worked for me in my third tenure at IDA and then joined Quartet Systems many years later.
Goldcoast Software Chet had left IDA in 1982 to start up his own little consulting firm, and by the middle of 1983, he and I were seriously discussing starting our own company together. He'd linked up with a consultant from Coopers & Lybrand, Judy Ano, and the three of us seemed like a good match. Judy would do all the sales and marketing, while Chet and I would do all the software development. I was generally tired of working with banking software at IDA by that point, so, much to Mike's chagrin, I joined Chet and Judy in midsummer, 1983, to form Goldcoast Software Systems.
Initially we used dBase II, which was both a database management system (DBMS) and programming language for microcomputers, but we soon began using DataFlex, which was the first, true "multi-user" DBMS, developed by Data Access Corporation in Florida. We would package our software on CP/M and MP/M microcomputers and sell them to clients, while also doing the documentation, training, and support. Over the next few years, I worked on some very challenging applications--limited-partnership investments, credit reporting, education foundation management, and others. I really enjoyed all of the projects we developed; they all required that I learn an industry about which I knew nothing to start.
However, we were always scrapping to make ends meet. Half way into my four years at Goldcoast, Chet's and my goals for the company began to diverge. He wanted to build a small company order entry and accounting package for reselling as a product, while I wanted to focus on individual projects across many disciplines. Judy was torn between marketing for the packaged software and finding consulting projects to keep us afloat. I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the long hours, constant debt, and lack of a single focus, but my problems were suddenly solved in the spring of 1987.
International Data Applications (part 3)
While visiting my brother one evening, he asked if we could take a walk
and have a chat. During our walk, he asked if I would come back to IDA as the
VP of Software Development. IDA was working on a Trust Accounting
package for large banks, and he wanted me to lead the effort in
finishing the product. I would have a staff of five or six programmers,
do all of the design work, and have a big jump in salary. On the spot,
I agreed. It was perhaps the most lucrative walk I ever took with
someone. Mike asked if I would sign an employment contract, and we
agreed on three years. I gave my partners at Goldcoast a two-month
notice and then headed out.
On July 1, 1987, I returned to IDA, which then had beautiful new offices in San Jose and about 20 employees. I was well acquainted with two of the programmers on my staff--Skip Morehead and David Wilson. Both were top-notch coders and problem-solvers. My management style was fairly low-key; I could ask Skip or David to fix a problem or help another programmer, and they'd quickly do it. We were a tight-knit, friendly group. Even though we had schedules to meet, they were reasonable and accurate schedules, so there was little need to exert pressure. The work was all in Fortran again, but this time I didn't do any of the programming (even though the banking system contained some of my old programs). I really enjoyed the shift to designing most of the user interface and managing a staff of good people.
The company entered into contracts with Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Northern Trust, which decided to purchase the product, called Real\Trust, in 1989. By the time the end of my employment contract rolled around in 1990, Northern Trust wanted the maintenance and any future development to be done to Chicago, and so International Data Applications was closed for the last time. Mike had successfully run a product company for more than ten years, which was quite a feat. Once again, he helped all of the employees find future work, except for me. By the spring of 1990, I already knew what I wanted to do next.
Quartet Systems, Inc. Bruce Homer-Smith and I had always stayed in touch after he left IDA in 1983 to start his own small consulting company. Every year we went to several symphony concerts together, and we dreamed of the time we'd collaborate on software systems. Diann Perko joined Bruce in 1985, and Quartet Systems was incorporated. Bruce's brother, Chip, joined the company a couple years later, and they built a custom software consulting firm that was exactly what I wanted to be part of. The company was not at all concerned with growing bigger; they simply wanted to do software projects and maintain client relationships that would ensure future projects.
So, when I left IDA at the end of June, 1990, I started the next day at Quartet Systems! I brought a couple of my Dataflex clients with me from Goldcoast, at our mutual agreement. Quartet was just beginning to use the Informix database and language, switching over from DOS to the UNIX operating system, so I immediately began learning those disciplines. Soon we were getting software referrals from Informix, and we found ourselves busy and fully billable.
I worked at Quartet Systems for the last twenty-five years of my career. Each of us always worked from home, although we often visited client sites. We only did custom software; we weren't involved with software products or hardware. I really loved working with the people at Quartet. The philosophy that we should help people, have fun, and make money was always our three-pronged approach to finding projects.
For
the first eighteen years, the four of us worked as the original quartet
of Quartet Systems, but for each of four consecutive years starting in
2008, we added one more person--Gabriel Beccar-Varela, Noelle Pilat,
Skip Morehead, and David Wilson. We had lots of work and wanted to
ensure that our company would continue for a few years after Bruce,
DiAnn, and I retired in the mid-2010's.
While I was at Quartet, I added four major languages to my computer repertoire--Informix, Visual Basic, Powerbuilder, and C#. Computers got smaller and a lot faster, and databases got bigger and a lot more complex. We all became experts in OOPS--Objected-oriented Programming Systems--and SQL Server database structures and maintenance. We were a company of inter-changeable parts, so it was easy to shift projects from one person(s) to others, and it was so natural to collaborate on projects. We did software systems the way they should be done, and we became good friends with our many clients.
What I really loved at Quartet and had found nowhere else were our monthly meetings. Everyone was so good at what they did and such a nice person that we had a blast together. Problems were discussed and solved quickly, projects were planned, and finances were settled easily. We'd rotate where we met each month (mostly between Bruce's, DiAnn's, Gabriel's, Skip's and my houses), and we all knew where the nearest Mexican restaurant was for each house!
I've never heard of a small company that grew to be as successful and well-liked as Quartet Systems. I was so fortunate to work there a quarter of a century! You can find the full story about Quartet in my Collaborations essay.
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| Quartet Systems at DiAnn's retirement party. Back row: Steve, Noelle, DiAnn, Bruce; Front row: Gabriel, David, Skip, and Chip. This was our last group photo! |
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