Year 1969 –5425 Broadway
Mishawaka, Indiana
Year 1969 –I was always surprised at how reluctant Mishawaka was to be a suburb of South Bend. It thought of itself as an equal. A great number of people in this country have some concept of the location of South Bend, Indiana. Nobody has ever heard of Mishawaka. So when I heard people say they were from Mishawaka to strangers, I would add that Mishawaka is next to South Bend. This is somewhat more diplomatic than calling it a suburb. In any case, from here on, I shall call my life during this period as being in South Bend.
As you are aware, I am very sensitive to violence and even the perception of violence. This is one heck of a violent town. I lived in Detroit and other places. People shoot each other in Detroit. I have a different viewpoint on violence here, I think. You see, shooting people is not a violent act. It is almost passive: the gun and bullet do the work. In South Bend, people hit each other and stab with knives. This is violence: it is a feeling of anger and fear that pervades the air. We shall see this as we get on.
I was a professional hire in South Bend and not a college graduate hire so they could not automatically reject my position. I did inform them that I did not graduate.
I drove to South Bend after working all night to finish my job at UW Admin. I failed to finish the job. I had also promised myself to stop the speed/methedrine when I left the University. I did so but fell asleep and ran into a snow bank on the way to South Bend. No damage. Snow is soft. I made it to South Bend Bendix on time and took the company physical. I failed. They kept me anyway. I spent a week in a motel while looking for a new home.
That was an interesting week. I slept the entire week.
Almost. I mean I slept at my desk. I slept at the
motel. It was Thursday before I had a chance to
look for an apartment. I found a
room to rent in Mishawaka for $20 per week. I
did not make it back to the motel: I fell asleep on the new bed.
On Friday, I checked out of the motel,
spent the day at work, and drove back to Madison
that night. My new co-workers commented that I learned by
osmosis: my forehead was always touching the books.
One thing happened that week that I thought was indicative
of South Bend. I drove back to the McDonald’s for
lunch every day. I was staying at
the motel next door. One day early
in the week, some guy jumped out of his car and pounded on my
window. He was really angry. When the light changed I
proceeded to
the McDonalds. He followed me all
the way there and honked at every opportunity. He followed me
into the parking lot and
yelled at me in line. When we got
to the front of the line, I asked him what he wanted to eat so that I
could
order for him. I did not understand
the need for his actions but I was willing to listen – as I ate.
He left and I never did know what he
wanted from me. I was afraid if I angered him any more, he would
hurt me.
That weekend I pulled the remainder of my belongings out of the Randall street apartment and into the car. They had a new roommate: Phil the Hippy. I hope Allen liked him better than he did me. I am sure that he did.
I had my 1967 Dodge and drove to Bendix through town from Mishawaka every day. I went back there a couple of years ago. The cities are very different and there are expressways and all that. I could not retrace m old drive to work. Shoot, I could not find work.
But in those days, it was a fairly straight drive from Mishawaka on
main streets into South Bend on Jefferson to the Bendix plant -- at the
west end of the black neighborhood.
The first weeks at Bendix were interesting. Interesting to
the others. I slept. They gave me IBM Operating System
manuals but I learned through osmosis: I fell asleep reading them and
this meant my forehead touched them, I was a joke in the
office. I drove back to Madison on weekends to finish my student
job and to see Susan. The University sent me a degree as if I had
graduated. I first thought that maybe they had reconsidered my
appeal. The university has many rules. I know I had met the
degree requirements. I had been grandfathered into a degree
program they had abandoned in 1962 and it was now 1969. BUt we
had been through that and papers had been signed and in my
folder. I had met the Computer Science Department's rules and had
a signed copy from my original Comp Sci advisor. I had been
warned to do this because of the dynamic nature of the Comp SCI
requirements after it had split from the math department and was now
trying to figure out where the computer profession was going. I
hd gone over my credit points with the dean because my average was too
low to graduate. You must average 2.0 to graduate. The
means of figuring this average is complicated. You must have a
2.0 overall. A 2.0 for the first 60 and again for the last 60
credits. I was 2 grade points short for the last 60. I
appealed. They turned it down but they did make an exception to
their 30 credits rule. This rule states that the last 30 credits
must be taken in residence. This rule prevent students from
attending podunk university and transferring their last semester to the
Great University of Wisconsin for their degree. a good rule but I
could not make it. I was again 'failed out' for not making good
enough grades and appealing to return would take an act of God since
the dean of students and the president had acted on my behalf on
previous fail outs. So they permitted me to make up my 2 grade
points at another good university. We shall get to that.
But in the meantime, they sent me this degree and I thought maybe
they had reconsidered. You know how bureaucracies work. I
called the registrars office and a clerk assured me that the degree was
proper. I asked for a letter stating this since I am always
skeptical and did not want to deal with the issue 5 years down the
pike. I got a letter. It was a very nasty letter stating
that I had illegally obtained one of the degree certificates and they
would prosecute to get it back. This really pissed me off.
The degree was on the registrar's desk when he arrived on Monday
morning. I should have made a bigger deal of it. I
mean, by placing the degree on his desk, I proved that I had
access to it. Do you know how many students have access to the
registrar's office on weekends? Zero. Zilch.
Nada. Getting the degree on his desk for an exiled ex-student
should have been absolutely impossible. But then nobody thinks
about things like that. I mean I should have attached a note
stating that I had personally placed it there and if I had wanted to
could updated my student records file. But I did not want to
aggravate them and the fact that I could do it was enough satisfaction
for me.
Strange things had happened
when I left the university. I remained
friends with Susan for a while and stayed with her at her third floor
apartment
on
Then we
had the Mifflin Street Party.
This changed a large part of my world view and I now understood a lot
of
things I never understood before. My father had always taught: if
you were not there, it could not be your fault. And don't rock
the boat and other cop-outs from social and personal
responsibility. Mostly I followed what he said: stay out of
politics and controversy. I thought my sister in Biafra was
absolutely crazy. I thought about the same for my sister at
Berkeley. We ran up large large phone bills as I had tried to
understand why it was necessary to stand up to the police state.
Mifflin Street changed all of that. Now I understood. When
the police and their chief and their mayor decide to make war on a
segment of the population, we have lost the entire concept for which
our forefathers' fought. It is time to shed new blood or lose
your rights to be a person.
But Connie convinced me not to shed blood but to
take the story to the world outside of Madison. There were
fighter in Madison to cover the problem but the lies spread by the
mayor and the 'liberal press'. about the communist hippies trying to
take over the city spread across the entire country. I mean the
morning after the party, I walked into the office, tired and disheveled
having just arrived back from Madison. The Bendix Computer
Section coffee klatch was discussing how they would deal with these
hippy communists: the nicest thing they would do would be to shoot
them. I, somewhat timidly because I knew better than to start a
fight, suggested that the news was all lies and they needed to be there
to understand what was happening. They looked at me and told me
that I was right. They did not understand and that I was the
first hippy that they had ever met. This was so upsetting I just
left and went back to work. I mean, I drove a good looking, but
several year old car. I wore a suit everyday. Sorry to say,
the same suit. I kept my hair cut shorter than I liked it to
be. I never advocated political activity of any sort.
I just suggested the shooting people was not a good idea. You
have to understand the violence level of this city and the fact that
most thought that the Easy Rider motorcyclists got what they deserved.
A few weeks later I received from Kathie a full
page from the Berkeley newspaper showing a cop shooting student in the
back with the article stating the the policeman had no cause for
this. He had just run up the street and around the corner and
shot at the first person he saw also running with no attempt at verbal
or other physical action. I pasted this page on the side of my
desk. Discussions of shooting people were no longer held near
enough for me to hear.
I could write a book on just this part.
Maybe I should. I actually remember little of what I did there
and I know that they paid me more than I was worth. Part of this
is my requirement to be a perfectionist in my programming.
They had me apply for Department of Defense
Security Clearance -- Secret. This was appropriate because I
worked on a computer system that had some military applications and I
was a support person. We shall get to that.
I did occasionally work at the Mishawaka Missile
Plant. Since I did not have clearance, I had to be escorted
around the plant. This was great. A keypunch 'girl' was
assigned as my escort. Her name was Kelly. We wandered
around the plant so I could see what building a missile was all
bout. I als to the Bendix G20: the Bendix contribution to the
computer industry. Bendix had given up on this front but they
still had one and it was programmed for war games. The war game
room was interesting but even discussing this much is probably enough
for me to violate my clearence rules from 30 years ago.
One day I had to be back at the main plant for
lunch. I drove along US20 through town and found a car with a
flat tire tieing up traffic on the curb lane. The woman and her
children were distraught. I quickly changed the tire and
continued to the office. I apologized for being late and having
dirty hands. There were no little boxes of latex gloves in those
days. The people at the meeting told me that I should not do this
as she may have attacked me with a hat pin or something similar and
killed me. To this day I do not know if they were joking because
I feared the violence in their town or they were serious. I think
they were serious.
Oh. Kelly, the keypunch girl..For you people
who do not know what life was like before microwaves, digital watches,
and graphical computer screens, the amount of mechanical effort
in sustaining computers was very high. Just 5 years earlier
people wired boeards to get their work done. These were giant
pegboards with wire jumpers placed in a gridwork to produce printed or
punched output from cards punched by keypunch girsl. The main
advancement here was that instead of 407 machines using the pegboard as
a program, the cards were now read by an IBM 2540 card reader-punch and
a program executed toa ccomplish much the same things as the
pegboard. The programs were also punched on cards which produced
an object deck of cards which were binary data rather than
EBCDIC. EBCDIC was IBM's version of an 8-bit code because ASCII
had gone from 6-bit to 7-bit and IBM knew that sooner or later they
would need all 8. Besides no computer actually used 7-bit data
internally.
My main program, as we shall see, was composed of about 3000 cards. These I kept in two boxes and manully changed cards in the boxes to update the program. We did store the object decks on disk and linked them with library programs to produce executable programs also maintained on disk. We were progressive. To preserve the order of cards, we had two mechanisms. One was there were column reserved for sequence numbers in each language. On Aassembler, these were 73-90 with 72 reserved for contuation of text. COBOL used the first 7 columns for this same thing. But programmers did not amintain their sequence numbers well. SO we used the second technique. We took magic marker and drew lines across the program from one end of the box to the other. pilling a deck was a rare occurance but it was done and if you had done nothing to protect yourself, you could spend multiple days re-organizing your program. You also printed out on a regular basis, the entire program so that if you did dump your deck, you had something to help you put it back. Also the listing was used to debug the program.
Like many fields, the technology improvements have
been made primariuly to permit more time thinking and less time with
logistics.
I have never mentioned Susan's last name so I
think this is safe. It is a portion of my life that I rarely
mention. And maybe it should be left out altogether. I mean
Kathy and I had spent a lot of physical time together and we had
approached sex in a way that had avoided the full act although I think
it was her intent to get pregnant and with our time together, she might
have been able to do this. But with Susan, we just went at it on
the mattress on her floor in her apartment. The very first time
with Susan was the most enjoyable time having sex that I ever had in my
life. Maybe this is true for everyone but I do not think
so. Most memerable for most maybe, the best, I doubt it. In
any case we finished sweating, exhausted, and feeling so good that I
knew I had just entered a new world.
The problem now was that she was pregnant. I
mean I really liked Susan. But she was a manipulator. Most
of my girl friends were. Megan has commented on that. In
any case, I was the last to find out. When I went to Madison to
discuss it with her, she had already withdrawn from me. She now
had her own agenda. I asked. I begged. I wanted us to
get married. If she did nto want to stay married, I would take
the baby and she could go her own way. These were unacceptable to
her. She was going to have an abortion. This was a given
and nothing I would say would schange her mind. This was very
upsetting to me. The idea that sex could be so enjoyable and that
a baby could result from this joy was really overwhelming to me.
An abortion ruined it all. I could not dissuade her. She
wanted me to pay for it. I had no money. She had no money
and we decided to split the cost down the middle. She knew an
abortionist woman in town. The woman charged $300. But this
was a backrooom deal in a state where abortion was always absolutely
illegal and frowned upon. There were no local doctors and Susan
showed fear of this situation. We agreed that she would go to
Illinois where there were doctors in medical offices which performed
abortions. Just as illegal but not so strongly enforced as in WIsconsin.
I mean you have to understand that Wisconsin was
so radical that while I was there, they actually arested and
procesuted, in Madison, men who bought condoms at the local drugstroe
and it was proved they were not married. But the dovtor that
Susan found in Illinois wanted $600. I wanted the best for her so
I found $300 -- still arguing that I would rather find a way for her to
have the baby and I would make payments to her or take the baby or
whatever. No. She did not like me any more and she needed
the money but otherwise never wanted to see me again. I could not
even drive her to the abortion. She called me from Illinois
telling me that the doctor wanted another $100 or $200 dollars.
She wanted me to pay this. I offered half and did not know where
I would get the money but half was all I could afford. And
I would wire the money. She had the abortion. I wired the
money. I never heard from Susan again. I did the best I
could by Susan. I can understand that she might want to never see me
again. Every woman I have ever known -- including at least one of
my daughters -- has said the same thing to me. But the abortion
really hurt me. I mean here was my baby, my baby, and it was
murdered. And, Susan, I really would have sent all of the money
if I had known any way to get it. In those days, you could not
just take a cash advance on your VIsa card. There were no Visa
cards.
I have to lay out the emotions here because I
think that the Roe Versus Wade decision made many years later was the
absolutely correct decision. Women will have abortions, legal or
illegal. If we make them illegal, then only rich women will have
safe and legal abortions as they can travel to another country with
good medical practices. The poor women will have the abortions
under unsanity, unhealthy, and illegal back rooms by unqualified people
in it for the money. Reversing Roe V Wade is just another
Republican ploy to hurt the middle and lower classes. It will not
prevent abortions -- it will just make them illegal. When I
presented this argument to my church pastor some years ago and pointed
out that reversing this law would kill or maim women, his only reaction
was: "so what -- if they are going to violate God's law, they deserve
whatever happens to them".. I hate abortion more than almost
anyone I know. But I will not stand in the way of a woman who is
going to have one for fear that my interference will cuase either a bad
abortion or a woman dead or unabele to have a child at a later date
when she is ready to car and love it. Yes, murdering the baby is
on her conscience and is between her and God to resolve this but I
cannot have on my conscience the destruction or death of this
woman. If the CHristians really want to stop the murdering of
babies, then they have an easy solution. They can make the care
of pregnant women automatic as long as the woman needs the care,
medical and financial. They can find good homes for these babies
suchj thta the mother knows her child wil be well taken care of.
They can increase sex education in schools to cinclude birth prevention
and family responsibillity at ages before and after the girls can get
pregnant. Mostly I think the Republicans would prefer the entire
subject to be swept, like dirt, under the nearest carpet.
Years later, my second baby would die in a
miscarriage. I have two living, wonderful daughters. I
should have had four.
I look back now at the days when I thought everything was automatic and electronic and computerized, and wonder we ever did without pagers and cell phones and and microwaves.
Thursday, I went up to Detroit. I had several reasons for wanting to do this. The first was that David Borso was graduating high school and I wanted to attend his commencement. So after work on a Friday I drove like a madman from South Bend up to the farm and the Milan high school. I arrived just in time to see the proceedings start. I am sorry but I was so tired that I did not appreciate the ceremony.
I had a good night's sleep. Friday, I drove to Highland Park to Chrysler Corporation and visited my old friends. In those days I could've gone to the gate, asked for a visitor permit and done things officially. But you know me I never like officially. So I went in the corporate building, walked up the employee stairs past the guard, down the hall and out the back stairs into the corporate yard. I walked over to engineering, visited my friends for a while, and started to leave. While walking through the corporate yard back to the way I came in, I ran into or department manager. Now this guy really hated me but he was nice today. Instead of turning me in to corporate security, he walked me to the gate and told me to never return.
While visiting my friends, the programming manager from the engineering scientific side asked that I return to Chrysler and work for him. He informed me that he would pay any reasonable salary and get around the red tape put in place by my previous manager (the guy who walked the to the gate). Although this made me feel good, this was a job I would never go back to. It indeed, I never flew back to Highland Park ever again.
It was nice to visit my friends and I learned to appreciate the work I had done on my first ever computer job. I had friends who respect my talents. I discovered that the online warranty system that I helped install had been removed for lack of talent to support it. This was sad. I felt good that people in other departments still remembered me positively. Our little IBM 360 model 40 was busy supporting the corporate personnel database and the other commercial engineering applications. To me the most significant of these was the Project Management System for scheduling all blue automobile production. All of these programs and work had put us on the leading edge of commercial enterprise. If you want to have a concept of what we accomplished, compare the computer on which I am editing this file to our IBM 360 model 40. I am looking at a 19 inch full-color video screen sitting on top of my desktop computer with 512 MB of memory running at 2.5 GHz. I have attached to it for hard drives with a total of 500 GB of storage. I am in putting this text with a speech to text program while listening to television. Our IBM 360 model 40 and 256 MB of memory and eight removable Winchester hard drives. I remember that each track held 7294 bytes. I do not remember how many tracks and cylinders -- but there were not that many. I don't know how to convert the instruction speed to megahertz but the average computer instruction took 10 ms. Standard input was the 2540 card reader punch. Standard output was the 1403 printer. We had multiple tape drives and 1052 typewriter console. All these things are so old and so big that I doubt you'll find them even in a museum. My little computer sitting here will execute over 10,000 instructions in the 10 ms that our 360 executed one instruction.
Back to my story. I left Chrysler and drove back to Mishawaka. I got there about dinnertime, picked up Margie, and started for Rochester, Minnesota. Margie? I lived in a house that had been converted to three apartments: upstairs, downstairs back, and downstairs front. I lived in the downstairs back. Some other fellow lived in the upstairs. We do not see much of him -- I think he was a nice guy -- but I'd never knew. Margie lived in the downstairs front. She had a cute little red Mustang car. Margie was pretty and had a boufant hairstyle. Mostly she dated married men and we certainly weren't the same social class. Maybe I just wanted to improve her. Maybe I just wanted to have some arm candy. Margie was not a nice person. Margie had agreed to go with me to Steve Keidl's wedding in Rochester, Minnesota. So I picked her up and we headed off to Chicago. Margie hated hippies. Margie had no idea what hippie was. I do not think that anyone knew what hippie was. But when we stopped at the interstate rest area just south of Chicago we found a man hitchhiking to Madison, Wisconsin. This guy had a guitar, a big white beard, and was married to a nurse. I thought he made a good hippie. Margie did not: no nurse would very hippie. And this was a start of our weekend.
We let the man off in Madison. It was pretty late at night now and I guess the local Madison cops had no students to harass so they stopped us and held me gunpoint through the other policeman asked her questions in the car. After deciding they could not make points with Margie, they claimed that my car had been reported stolen and were just verifying that I was not a thief. Bullshit!
We drove north out of town on the interstate but I was really tired so he stopped at a park to get some sleep. I parked between two trees so that the doors could not open. Margie was afraid that we would be robbed. She is also afraid to mess up her hairdo. After getting very little sleep, I woke up with a flashlight shining in my face. The Highway Patrol informed me that this was a bad place to sleep because some convicts had escaped from the local penitentiary.
We drove on. I remembered that the highway into Rochester had been under construction for a long time. I was so tired I took the old detour. This was a serious mistake. It had been raining all the way from Madison. We ended up on a muddy dirt track from which I did not think I can turn around and return. I can see the main highway down across a car farmer's field from where we were stopped. I drove, slipped, and slid down the farmer's field in, through unknown quantities of mud and across a gradeschool playground. We got to the main road and drove to Gary Leive's apartment. It was really late and we would have slept in the car except Margie was worried what her hairdo. So we ran Gary's bell. Gary let us and set up the couch for us to sleep on. Margie would not sleep in the bed with me so I slept on the floor. Gary was in his bedroom sleeping with his girlfriend. I had told Margie that Gary's girlfriend was getting a divorce but she was still married. Margie refused to sleep with Gary in the next room with a married woman. So I had driven from Detroit to South Bend, 200 miles. From South Bend to Madison, 200 more miles. And then from Madison to Rochester, 250 more miles. All of this since noon on Friday. I was exhausted. More than exhausted. Absolutely wasted.
We got the Gary in the morning and had some breakfast. Everybody was introduced. Margie was haughty. I needed to go to the store for new tie or something I forget what. We made on time for Steve Keidl's wedding. Margie on a seat at the back of the church. As Steve and Gale walked up the aisle. Well maybe was just Gale. A little boy walked up the aisle behind her. She was somewhat distracted. The I had not been there for rehearsal but noticing hers and Steve's discomfort I figured the boy did not belong and escorted him out. This was sort of funny. The marriage was in a Catholic Church and Catholic churches will hold multiple weddings in one day. This little boy was a holdover from the morning wedding and he was as confused as anybody.
I apologize but that is all that I remember about the wedding. Gale was beautiful. Everyone then went to the reception. Margie was a very outspoken person. She had complained about hippies all the way to Rochester. Now she is making very unpopular statements about something I did not know what -- I got her out of there before she started a riot.
Bill Davis, Gary, and Steve had loaned me money for my previous school semester. I repaid Steve before we left. We drove in 250 miles to Madison and we stopped at Susan's old apartment. Susan hated me but she and her roommates and gone home for the summer. The apartment was empty but Margie was afraid that burglars would come and while we were there. She slept on the couch. I slept on the floor in front of the door. I did not notice at the time but Margie stole some trinkets from Susan's bedroom. Later I saw them on Margie's dresser in Mishawaka.
In the morning we went to a Connie's and Randy's apartment. I've mentioned Connie before and Randy was my roommate from the previous semester. I forget the name of the other roommate and there is another girl and we all had a sausage and eggs and toast breakfast on the floor. We ate our share. We discussed Margie's opinion of hippies and tried to find one. Phil the Hippie seemed like a good candidate -- but he was president of the State Street businessmen's Association and this disqualified him.
Margie and I took off for home. Margie stopped complaining about hippies and started complaining about blacks. This is more than even I could take. We got to Chicago and got off the expressway on the south side. We found a side street where some black kids were playing baseball. One of them yelled "I don't get out of the road for no honky". I let Margie out. That is, I made her get out. I drove around the block. I picked her back up and we drove in silence back to Mishawaka. That was the last time Margie I went anywhere together.
Later I heard from Gary about what she said that was making people
angry at Steve's reception. This made me very sad. I hate
bigots. I have always hated bigots. I had pretty bigots. I
wonder why I need girls to be pretty. I still do. But now
they are women and not girls. And I'm no longer young and
handsome. And so concludes my long weekend from South Bend to
Detroit to Rochester and back to South Bend. Mostly I was just
tired and disappointed whereas I should have been happy to have seen
David, my friends at Chrysler, and Kerry and Steve and Gale.
I thought about this tonight as I was driving across the Mexican
Sonoran Desert on a two-lane road. There is no drama in the above
story and there is no picture. So I need to add a little color to
it.
The drive to the graduation ceremony and such was exciting for the
Borsos and I was happy to be invited but high school commencement
happens to most of us somewhere along the line and we invite people to
see it.
Chrysler Corporation has significant security including gates,
checkpoints, alarms, and security personnel. It is a major
corporation having serious corporate secrets. I walked right past
this: they could have had me arrested. Today I would be treated
as a terrorist. Brave, stupid, callous, indifferent.
Whatever.
I walked into the Chrysler Corporate Enginering Data Center and
visited with my old friends. Right. When I left, the
director had put a letter in my corporate personnel file claiming I was
mentally unstable and dangerous to the corporation. If he caught
me on the premises, I would not see daylight for ten years.
What did we do while I was there and was still going on when I
left? In 1967 and
1968 we did things that nobody today could conceive of. I liken
it to imiagining what my father and his peers did 7 years earlier in
the space program. They put machines in space with elaborate
mechanical control systems. There were no microporcessors.
There were no DSL chips. DSL includes the word 'digital'.
They only did analog things before 1980. They put men in space in
oversized
beer cans with steering wheels. If you ever get to see an old
Gemini space capsule and are not impressed, I do not know what would
impress you. Today most telephones have more compute power than
the 1960 missile and capsule system. Want to see? Look at
an "I dream of Jeannie" black and white rerun showing the NASA capsule
monitoring room. Men put their lives on the line for miles
of wires, mechanical sensors, and God's good nature.
At Chrysler We did things in the same scope. We had a
computer with 90% less
total memory than you can even buy in one piece today. We ran an
operating system which simultaneously ran three different programs on
its best day on a computer that took 10 milliseconds to execute one
instruction. That is one hundred instructions in one
second. That is only 4 times faster than the frames in a movie --
to
move one character from one memory location to another.
WIth this system, we maintained the Chrysler Corporate personnel
files online. I even looked up the name, address, and personal
information on the then-famous Dodge girl. Married, two kids,
don't bother. In addition I, we, had implemented the predessor to
Gant charts, called Project Management System (PMS) which generated
PERT charts. These charts showed the entire production schedule
and resources for every car that were were going to produce for the
next 5 years. This included worker headcounts by skill and
education levels, machine requirements, outside vendors including
selection, retooling costs and equipment. This was the very foundation
of what our company
did for a business. Upon completed execution of one of these sets
of charts, the assembly line started and all of the cars of that model
were produced for the next 9 months. In addition we did
competetive cost analysis and dozens of other applications that I do
not remember. We did this. Two operators, a few
technicians, a dozen key-punch girls (women), a department secretary, 5
managers, and an IBM support person, 2 department support people (I was
one of them and Hank was the other) and about 16 programmers. 3
dozen people put us at the leading edge of the commercial production
world. And 2,000 other companies were doing similar,
ground-breaking things.
On this trip while visiting I was asked to return to work on the
scientific side
of the department. I almost failed my course at the university
the previous semester when I described what we had been doing at
Chrysler
Engineering Scientific. The professor told the class that some
day
we would be able to do static structural modeling analysis of such
things as suspension bridges. I raised my hand and pointed out
that we were doing dynamic car crash analysis today at Chrysler.
Static? Dynamic? Static means that you design something
that is standing still and you measure the stresses, strains, and
torques at each point of the object so that you can optimize the
materials used. On a suspension bridge, this is a serious task as
there are millions of points to measure and thousands of materials and
sizes of materials to choose from. And this does not even cover
what happens to the bridge when the wind blows or a car drives over
your cmputerized model bridge. Winds and traffic count as
'dynamic' events. We were doing
this. We were doing this in 1968 on a computer only 4 times
bigger and 4 times faster than our little 360 model 40. We were
examining the virtual deformation of automobiles as they collided with
other automobiles or solid walls. We did this. Those of us
that did this and remember it should pat ourselves on the backs.
We started an industry that is now composed of tens of thousands of
people using tools that we could not have imagined -- and we did it
using magnetic tapes, punch cards, and typewriters. There were no
CDs. There were no color monitors with 32 million colors.
There were no color monitors with 8 colors. There were no color
monitors. Period. We did this. And at Corporate, I
had run my car against the entire database of car repairs ever recorded
by the corporation. Nobody else had done this.
Just writing this, I am impresssed. And I walked back out and
walked away from it all knowing that I could do better. I did do
better. And the Universoty of Wisconsin Computer Science
Department: one 3-credit course in computing that was useful
. All of the other courses were programming languages (Algol was
the hot one) or mathematical analysis. and I almost failed the
one 3-credit course because of my dynamic crash analysis statement.
I drove back to South Bend and picked up Margie and drove her to
Rochester, Minnesota. Big deal. Yes, it was a big
deal. Margie was a small town girl on a faster social track than
I would see in my lifetime. She was very pretty and primarily
dated married
men. I remember chasing away a guy standing outside her
apartment. It had scared me as he held a shotgun and intended to
do her bodily harm. Margie and I came from and went to different
worlds. After driving 450 miles, I picked her up and we drove 400
miles more, In the one evening, she saw more than she probably
had seen in her lifetime. She would have never picked up a
hitchhiker. Let alone one that looked and acted like a
hippie. I am sure she never got stopped by Madison city cops and
watched
as her date was held at gunpoint while another cop checked out her
boobs.
Then again, what was Margie thinking as she sat bolt upright so as
to not mess her hair while I slept and a dozen state patrol officers
snuck up on the car and blasted us with their flashlights to see if we
were the escaped convicts from the local penitentiary. And
finding out that such people were in the area, then wat did she think
she had gotten herself into? She was a long way from home?
Her comfortable small town where she controlled the level of danger
that she could get herself into was not even close. There was no
escape.
I mentioned that we drove across a field back down to the
highway.
Gentle reader, what is the most adventerous drive you have taken?
I know there are professional race car drivers who will do things that
I would never do either on a track or a strip. I know there are
monster truck drivers out there who will drive these giant machines
over each other and through the worst possible bogs. I know there
are dirt bike riders out there who will tear up or down the side of a
mountain and break themselves and their bikes up in ways that make me
stop in awe of our medical skills. Then their are the military
situations, Iraq for example. But I expect most of you have
done little more than pull yourself out of a skid on a rainy
night. I am sure those advertisements for cars showing them
neatly maneuvering around a child or big rock in the street give you a
sigh of relief when nobody and nothing were even slightly damaged.
Tonight -- this night, not then -- I drove into a foreign country of
which I
have little knowledge of the language, through a fairly large city
composed mostly of dirt-track streets and only having a street address
of a house in an area where the streets are not labeled, got there
having to ask directions only once -- and I did not understand a word
the man said to me. I then drove 100 miles home to my RV -- on a
two-lane road with occassioanal center-line markings and no
shoulders. The dropoff on the road edges varied between none and
100 yards. I passed at least 15 little memorials to people who
had not been successful at navigating this road. The speed limit
averages about 40 mph. I drove at twice this speed passing by
other
cars that mostly had lights that would have been illegal in the
USA. I felt my rear wheels spin out on occassion and I felt my
front suspension and steering wobble as I went down and around a curve
that if my car had not held, I would be dead and memorialized, if I
were lucky, by one of those little roadside memorials.. And
tonight I was bored or I
would have driven slower. I saw policement chasing cars going the
other way -- chasing them because they had tried what I was doing and
had gotten caught. There. We have set the level of what I
consider fun and adventrous.
OK. Enough already. Yes, I am stupid or something.
But now look at Margie. We are riding in a 1967 Dodge Coronet 440
(middle model) 2-door hardtop. Tan with a black vinyl roof.
A poor excuse for a yuppie car. It is after midnight and we have
driven from Margie's little sanctum santorem across two states and it
is
raining cats and dogs. We have been held at gunpoint, chased off
by the highway patrol, and we are lost on a dirt-track road and almost
but not quite stuck in more mud than she has seen in her
lifetime. And her date suggests that we give up on the road
and take off cross country? Across a farmer's plowed field?
And
we do this and then drive across a grade school play ground? God
watches out for stupid people. I am still amazed at what we did
that night. And mostly because I was too tired and almost asleep
and had missed the detour signs and did not have the judgement to stop
when the asphalt ended. And as I just remembered -- cars in those
days did not have seat belts with shoulder harnesses.
Then the poor girl is put into a compromising situation: she is
supposed to sleep with her date, as close to a nerd as there was in the
1960's, with an unknown couple sleeping in the next room in a situation
that even the movie Peyton Place would have difficulty
duplicating. I was used to people sleeping with each other:
I had been to a university for 7 years where this was the norm. I
figure she dated those married men but never slept with them.
OK. So the remix has bottomed out. Would you have the nerve to
take Margie to the apartment of an old girlfriend who hated you so that
you could spend the night in relative safety? Would you have
stopped at dusk in the toughest part of Chicago? Would you have
kicked your date out of the car and then picked her up again?
Maybe not. When I got home, I slept so soundly that it took years
for me to remember enough of it to write it all down. I know I
saw little of Margie after that. She moved to another aprtment.
In June or July, Gary Leive
passed through town on his way to Miami. The Army had sent him to
Panama. I think he had a red Mustang but it could have been
anything. We looked at the moon that night: it was
the night of the famous astronaut moonwalk. He was leaving his
fiancé in
Rochester. I forget her name. She was a good woman.