Where did the “computer for the rest of us” go.
I have been programming and using computers since 1959, some self-taught, some with help of others.
I wrote my first small program for Ohio Oil on an IBM 650 (cards in, cards out). I started with Elliot Organik’s Programming the IBM 650 and the help of other programmers.
I next encountered the Burroughs 3500(?) as a graduate student at Case Institute of Technology.
Then I worked nearly 20 years at Univac working on the Univac 1107 and later models.
Then the personal computer became more interesting and I went out on my own. Then in 1984 Apple came out with the Macintosh. This was the “Computer for the Rest of Us”. It was simpler to use, almost intuitive. I was smitten and have moved up whenever I chose or could afford to.
But somewhere along the way Apple lost its way. Each new group of Apple programmers had to change the Mac OS to their way.
One of the most gratuitous changes was a couple of years ago when printer orientation went haywire.
For a long time I could put an envelope in the back tray of an Epson WF-3640. Push it in so far and tell my Mac to print the envelope. Whoosh! Done!
Then somebody in Epson or Apple decided to change the software. The orientation displayed on the Mac was different. I forgot all the little things I had to do differently. The envelope had to be put in the back tray opposite what was shown on the tray. I forget all the details but sometimes the envelope went through without even being printed.
I just looked up on the Epson website about printing envelopes from one of the front trays. I followed all the directions, but the printer insisted on an envelope being in the back tray!!!
Enough debugging for the day. I would rather read a history book.
Showing posts with label Case Institute of Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Case Institute of Technology. Show all posts
Saturday, January 26, 2019
Thursday, January 07, 2016
If...
Some have said that “if” is the biggest word in the English language. It certainly does have a lot of import on our thinking, be it blame, regret, or thankfulness. Our lives are certainly filled with choice points of our own doing or the actions of others. “If my teacher hadn’t suggested,,,, then I might not have…” “If I hadn’t asked for a raise, would I have ever gotten one.”, and on and on.
I have so many “if’s” in my life that got me to this moment of typing on a laptop that I could probably fill this issue of the Reader. And you would have fallen asleep by the fourth page.
One of my early if’s is if my parents hadn’t divorced, would my mother have moved us in with her aunt and uncle? That determined where I started school. If my great aunt and uncle hadn’t bought a house on the other side of the city, would I have have gone to a second elementary school. At that school I met many others who would become life-long friends.
I did lose those contacts when my mother decided to rent an apartment on the other side of town. By the time I started high school, she remarried and we moved back to the other side of town.
That house was in a school attendance area different than the area many of my old friends were in. I made the choice of asking for an exemption to go to that smaller school to be with my friends again.
One of the math teachers at the smaller school punctuated his remarks with “When you go to Case…” meaning Case Institute of Technology. Five of us started as freshmen there a year or two later.
But would I have been able to afford the $750/year tuition? The assistant principal suggested that I apply to the Huntington Fund for a scholarship. I did and was granted a full scholarship.
With my job at Kroger’s, suggested to me by one of the friends I met in the second elementary school and with whom I still correspond, I was able to afford books and bus fare across the city to Case.
Shortly after we moved back across the city, I attended a Methodist Church within a half-hour’s walk and was active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF). This continued into my Case years.
I don’t know the exact cause, but I started losing interest in my engineering studies. I ran for president of the area MYF council and won. Also on the council was the daughter of a doctor. After I flunked out of Case, I started dating her.
We both went to Ohio Wesleyan the following fall, she as a freshman and me as a junior. Despite my flunking out of Case, the Huntington Fund kept funding me. They had long dropped their maximum scholarship to $500, and I had to take out student loans to supplement it and my own part-time job earnings to make the $1,100 annual tuition.
I got good enough grades in mathematics that Case took me back in the graduate program with a full fellowship in the computer center which included a $75/week salary! I also married that sweetheart from two paragraphs back.
I don’t think you want to put up with two thousand words of all the twists and turns of the next fifty plus years, but I have many, many “If I hadn’t done this, would this interesting thing have happened.” I’ll try to collapse those into the few paragraphs remaining of my space.
We chose to move to Minnesota and my employment with Univac because we liked canoeing. After five years I became restless and managed a transfer to Europe. We started in Switzerland for a few weeks and then lived in Italy for the next two years.
I became unhappy with the management in Rome and transferred to Sweden. We liked Sweden so much that we stayed four years. But then my wife decided our kids should go to junior high in the United States. Another “if” I must stick in is that my wife met an American women on the subway who had a cabin in Brimson. She extended an open invitation to visit them.
I gave a wishy-washy description of my interests to my previous bosses at Univac in Roseville, and so we didn’t move back to Minnesota. Instead I wound up in “exile” in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. I was “rescued” when Univac needed people to work on a new computer in Roseville. That computer was cancelled and I was put on another project, on which I didn’t shine.
Meanwhile, the microcomputer revolution started and I jumped into it. I blew that too and wound up as a bus driver. But my wife was doing quite well in her work. What we didn’t do well on was co-ordinating when we would take our annual BWCA visit. With the background of a whole bunches of “if’s” we finally visited our friends in Brimson and did so annually.
Yikes, what if I could have 2,000 words!
Our son went to Japan and when we visited him we missed an annual visit to Brimson. We went in fall instead and found property for sale. We bought it, and a few years later had built our own cabin.
This time my wife engineered the transfer and we moved from the Twin Cities to Duluth to be nearer our cabin. But she found more and more things to do in Duluth and has less time to spend in Brimson. And we’re both getting older and mowing lots of paths and cutting firewood seems to take longer and longer.
We have lots of memories of all those if’s and we know lots more if’s are coming.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
- Robert Frost
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2016-01-07 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2016/01/06/6522_if.
I have so many “if’s” in my life that got me to this moment of typing on a laptop that I could probably fill this issue of the Reader. And you would have fallen asleep by the fourth page.
One of my early if’s is if my parents hadn’t divorced, would my mother have moved us in with her aunt and uncle? That determined where I started school. If my great aunt and uncle hadn’t bought a house on the other side of the city, would I have have gone to a second elementary school. At that school I met many others who would become life-long friends.
I did lose those contacts when my mother decided to rent an apartment on the other side of town. By the time I started high school, she remarried and we moved back to the other side of town.
That house was in a school attendance area different than the area many of my old friends were in. I made the choice of asking for an exemption to go to that smaller school to be with my friends again.
One of the math teachers at the smaller school punctuated his remarks with “When you go to Case…” meaning Case Institute of Technology. Five of us started as freshmen there a year or two later.
But would I have been able to afford the $750/year tuition? The assistant principal suggested that I apply to the Huntington Fund for a scholarship. I did and was granted a full scholarship.
With my job at Kroger’s, suggested to me by one of the friends I met in the second elementary school and with whom I still correspond, I was able to afford books and bus fare across the city to Case.
Shortly after we moved back across the city, I attended a Methodist Church within a half-hour’s walk and was active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF). This continued into my Case years.
I don’t know the exact cause, but I started losing interest in my engineering studies. I ran for president of the area MYF council and won. Also on the council was the daughter of a doctor. After I flunked out of Case, I started dating her.
We both went to Ohio Wesleyan the following fall, she as a freshman and me as a junior. Despite my flunking out of Case, the Huntington Fund kept funding me. They had long dropped their maximum scholarship to $500, and I had to take out student loans to supplement it and my own part-time job earnings to make the $1,100 annual tuition.
I got good enough grades in mathematics that Case took me back in the graduate program with a full fellowship in the computer center which included a $75/week salary! I also married that sweetheart from two paragraphs back.
I don’t think you want to put up with two thousand words of all the twists and turns of the next fifty plus years, but I have many, many “If I hadn’t done this, would this interesting thing have happened.” I’ll try to collapse those into the few paragraphs remaining of my space.
We chose to move to Minnesota and my employment with Univac because we liked canoeing. After five years I became restless and managed a transfer to Europe. We started in Switzerland for a few weeks and then lived in Italy for the next two years.
I became unhappy with the management in Rome and transferred to Sweden. We liked Sweden so much that we stayed four years. But then my wife decided our kids should go to junior high in the United States. Another “if” I must stick in is that my wife met an American women on the subway who had a cabin in Brimson. She extended an open invitation to visit them.
I gave a wishy-washy description of my interests to my previous bosses at Univac in Roseville, and so we didn’t move back to Minnesota. Instead I wound up in “exile” in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. I was “rescued” when Univac needed people to work on a new computer in Roseville. That computer was cancelled and I was put on another project, on which I didn’t shine.
Meanwhile, the microcomputer revolution started and I jumped into it. I blew that too and wound up as a bus driver. But my wife was doing quite well in her work. What we didn’t do well on was co-ordinating when we would take our annual BWCA visit. With the background of a whole bunches of “if’s” we finally visited our friends in Brimson and did so annually.
Yikes, what if I could have 2,000 words!
Our son went to Japan and when we visited him we missed an annual visit to Brimson. We went in fall instead and found property for sale. We bought it, and a few years later had built our own cabin.
This time my wife engineered the transfer and we moved from the Twin Cities to Duluth to be nearer our cabin. But she found more and more things to do in Duluth and has less time to spend in Brimson. And we’re both getting older and mowing lots of paths and cutting firewood seems to take longer and longer.
We have lots of memories of all those if’s and we know lots more if’s are coming.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
- Robert Frost
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2016-01-07 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2016/01/06/6522_if.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Don’t listen to your parents
This is probably not the best advice at this time of year, but I assume most of my readers are not expecting fantabulous gifts under the tree from Santa or their parents.
I’ve had lots of fun with the mantra:
I think the best advice was just plain encouragement: get good grades. Sometimes that encouragement also took the form of a dime or a quarter for each A on my report card. A dime? That’s not much! Ah, but I grew up at a time when a movie ticket was ten cents, and candy bars and ice cream cones were a nickel.
My encouragement was also by example. We had lots of magazines and newspapers in the house, and my brother and I were given books from time-to-time.
My parents were divorced before I started school, and my father “bribed” us with neat Christmas gifts that encouraged creative play. Among these were train sets and Erector sets. Our imaginations soared, even as we had difficulty getting every square nut to turn easily on the small screws.
Then there was the advice that was off-the mark or just plain wrong.
One year about St. Patrick’s day we were getting dressed to go somewhere and my brother and I wondered about wearing green. My mother replied, “We’re Orange Irish!” As far as we knew, Magree was an Irish name, but we had no knowledge of any ancestor coming from Ireland. Plus, because of the divorce, my mother had very little contact with her father-in-law and knew very little of our father’s family history. If she did, she never shared it with us. On her side, her grandparents were born in England or Germany.
Many decades later, I pieced together that my Magree line was resident in the United States since at least 1830. An irony was that my great-grandfather was born in England, though he sometimes claimed to be born in Brooklyn. His father was probably born in Baltimore, and the closest record I have of him having any Irish connection is being the master of a ship in 1851 bringing mostly Irish immigrants from Liverpool to New York.
So much for being Orange-Irish.
When I proposed to my wife-to-be (Jan), my mother didn’t think she was suitable for me and that the marriage would not last. Sorry, Mom, but it has lasted longer than your two marriages put together.
Before I met Jan, I had flunked out of Case Institute of Technology. I considered going to Ohio Wesleyan in the middle of Ohio, but my mother didn’t like that. I wouldn’t be in Cleveland where she could see me more often. Well, I did go to Ohio Wesleyan and got good enough grades to get into graduate school at Case.
Because of the divorce, I didn’t see my father much and so didn’t get much advice from him.
I did ask him for a loan of $107 to pay for my meals at Ohio Wesleyan for one semester. When I tried to pay him back, he refused to accept it.
None of his seven children followed his example on education. He dropped out after the eleventh grade. All finished high school, five received college degrees, and two of those did graduate work.
But the advice from my Dad that I chuckle about the most is that music must be foot-tapping. Probably ninety percent of the time that I turn on MPR the music has a strong beat. Today, it was L’Arlésienne by George Bizet (and I identified it within two minutes!) If you are not familiar with it, it is the piece that “The Prisoner” times over and over again, getting a different time for each record.
My mother remarried when I was fifteen. My stepfather insisted that we use Desenex (and only Desenex) on our feet every morning and that we polish our shoes every week. He did have a point because he had been hospitalized with athlete’s foot some years before. I haven’t checked with my brother, but I rarely powder my feet. If I do, it’s with Desenex only because I happen to have it on the shelf. Polish shoes? One does not polish today’s athletic shoes, and I can’t even get myself to oil work boots with any regularity.
My last piece of ignored advice is not from a parent, but a teacher. In my high school boys had to take a semester class called “Personal Regimen”. I won’t go into the details of the class, but we could get an F for wearing Levis. I had been wearing Levis since junior high school ($4.95 a pair) and my mother liked them because they were easier to wash than many other pants. Sixty years plus later, I wear jeans almost all the time: to church, concerts, theater, restaurants, and more.
Oh, one last word. The best thing I got out of Personal Regimen was learning to tie a tie. If I really need to, I can still tie a Windsor knot without looking in the mirror.
When people ask Mel’s age, he tells them to guess. The latest guesser took six tries to guess, all but the last under.
I’ve had lots of fun with the mantra:
Don’t listen to your parents!I’ve done my share of listening to my parents and other parental figures, and taking their advice to heart. I’ve also done my share of ignoring advice, either because of orneriness or because the advice was just plain wrong.
They tell you to act your age.
If you act your age, you’ll grow up.
If you grow up, you’ll get old.
If you get old, you’ll die.
So, why act your age?
I think the best advice was just plain encouragement: get good grades. Sometimes that encouragement also took the form of a dime or a quarter for each A on my report card. A dime? That’s not much! Ah, but I grew up at a time when a movie ticket was ten cents, and candy bars and ice cream cones were a nickel.
My encouragement was also by example. We had lots of magazines and newspapers in the house, and my brother and I were given books from time-to-time.
My parents were divorced before I started school, and my father “bribed” us with neat Christmas gifts that encouraged creative play. Among these were train sets and Erector sets. Our imaginations soared, even as we had difficulty getting every square nut to turn easily on the small screws.
Then there was the advice that was off-the mark or just plain wrong.
One year about St. Patrick’s day we were getting dressed to go somewhere and my brother and I wondered about wearing green. My mother replied, “We’re Orange Irish!” As far as we knew, Magree was an Irish name, but we had no knowledge of any ancestor coming from Ireland. Plus, because of the divorce, my mother had very little contact with her father-in-law and knew very little of our father’s family history. If she did, she never shared it with us. On her side, her grandparents were born in England or Germany.
Many decades later, I pieced together that my Magree line was resident in the United States since at least 1830. An irony was that my great-grandfather was born in England, though he sometimes claimed to be born in Brooklyn. His father was probably born in Baltimore, and the closest record I have of him having any Irish connection is being the master of a ship in 1851 bringing mostly Irish immigrants from Liverpool to New York.
So much for being Orange-Irish.
When I proposed to my wife-to-be (Jan), my mother didn’t think she was suitable for me and that the marriage would not last. Sorry, Mom, but it has lasted longer than your two marriages put together.
Before I met Jan, I had flunked out of Case Institute of Technology. I considered going to Ohio Wesleyan in the middle of Ohio, but my mother didn’t like that. I wouldn’t be in Cleveland where she could see me more often. Well, I did go to Ohio Wesleyan and got good enough grades to get into graduate school at Case.
Because of the divorce, I didn’t see my father much and so didn’t get much advice from him.
I did ask him for a loan of $107 to pay for my meals at Ohio Wesleyan for one semester. When I tried to pay him back, he refused to accept it.
None of his seven children followed his example on education. He dropped out after the eleventh grade. All finished high school, five received college degrees, and two of those did graduate work.
But the advice from my Dad that I chuckle about the most is that music must be foot-tapping. Probably ninety percent of the time that I turn on MPR the music has a strong beat. Today, it was L’Arlésienne by George Bizet (and I identified it within two minutes!) If you are not familiar with it, it is the piece that “The Prisoner” times over and over again, getting a different time for each record.
My mother remarried when I was fifteen. My stepfather insisted that we use Desenex (and only Desenex) on our feet every morning and that we polish our shoes every week. He did have a point because he had been hospitalized with athlete’s foot some years before. I haven’t checked with my brother, but I rarely powder my feet. If I do, it’s with Desenex only because I happen to have it on the shelf. Polish shoes? One does not polish today’s athletic shoes, and I can’t even get myself to oil work boots with any regularity.
My last piece of ignored advice is not from a parent, but a teacher. In my high school boys had to take a semester class called “Personal Regimen”. I won’t go into the details of the class, but we could get an F for wearing Levis. I had been wearing Levis since junior high school ($4.95 a pair) and my mother liked them because they were easier to wash than many other pants. Sixty years plus later, I wear jeans almost all the time: to church, concerts, theater, restaurants, and more.
Oh, one last word. The best thing I got out of Personal Regimen was learning to tie a tie. If I really need to, I can still tie a Windsor knot without looking in the mirror.
When people ask Mel’s age, he tells them to guess. The latest guesser took six tries to guess, all but the last under.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Walk on the random side
“Life is a journey, not a destination” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
This concept can be put into a single word: serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole in 1754. It means finding good things where you weren’t looking for them. It comes from “The Princes of Serendip”, an Arabian tale. Serendip was also featured in Prokofiev’s “Love of Three Oranges”.
Ah, this whole column is going to be very serendipitous. I thought of this column as about the twist and turns of my own life. But like my life, this column is going to turn up ideas I wasn’t looking for,
The March from the “Love of Three Oranges” by a Soviet composer was, irony of ironies, used as the theme song for the radio program “FBI: In Peace and War”. One of the FBI’s tasks at the time was finding Communists. On the other hand, many of Prokofiev’s works were anti-establishment. Think of “Lieutenant Kije”!
After my parents divorced when I was about five or so, my mother moved in with her aunt and uncle. Once I started school, I was often free to roam. I knew all the vacant lots and stores, where the library was, and where a super-duper playground was.
When I was nine, my aunt and uncle bought a house on the other side of town. I don’t know which came first, a new job or a new house. Whichever, my mother’s uncle still worked within walking distance.
Again I explored an ever wider area, learning where the movie theater was, a great sledding hill, and the community center and the Y. I had a take a streetcar to the downtown library. I made a new set of friends, and eventually joined some of them in a Boy Scout troop.
After my first year of junior high, my mother decided to get her own apartment back on the other side of town. Again, I had freedom to roam. No sledding hill, but a vacant lot for baseball and an actual ball diamond a bike ride away. I also frequented a drug store for malts, ice cream sodas, and sundaes. That lead me to drop my paper route and work 5-10 after school three times a week.
After I started high school my mother remarried and we moved back across town. I was supposed to go to a high school with about 3,000 students, but I got district permission to go to the high school where my Scout friends went. And this road made all the difference. Would I have gone to Case if I had a different math teacher who didn’t punctuate his remarks with “When you go to Case…”
When still in high school I also decided on my own to go to a Methodist Church within walking distance. I wound up being active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) even into my college years. This lead to some pressure to go into the ministry. This and the long daily commute to Case created several conflicts.
While in college I decided to run for the President of the MYF subdistrict. Also sitting on the subdistrict were a couple of attractive high school girls, both of whom I dated. But I preferred the second one. Fifty-six years later, neither of us regrets the choice. And my wife still doesn’t regret voting against me because she thought MYF was not for college students.
During my tenure on the council I didn’t do so well in my junior at Case. I was asked not to come back for the spring term.
I don’t remember what led to my choice of Ohio Wesleyan University other than it was Methodist. Possibly it was my new girlfriend was starting there in the fall.
When I visited OWU before applying, the registrar recommended that I major in mathematics, which I did. Surprisingly, after my dismal last two semesters at Case, I got all As in math except for a single B.
Prior to graduation I applied to Case for a graduate assistantship in the computer center. I also applied for an assistantship at the University of Michigan in communications, which included computer science. I heard from Case right away and was even offered a summer job in the computer center. I didn’t hear from U of Mich until late July or even early August
When I graduated from OWU we got married and rented the upstairs of a duplex in Cleveland. This also meant that my wife would have to go to college in the Cleveland area. She chose Baldwin-Wallace way the other side of the metro area.. Fortunately, she could commute with an instructor who was friend of her mother. By the way, this friend was also the one who recommended the duplex.
We both liked canoeing and made a few day trips to Portage Lakes. But our dream was to go to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. We did so in August 1961. The trip was a mix of adventure and misadventure. We didn’t know it at the time, but it changed our lives forever by offering a wide range of unexpected choices. Many of them were “the least traveled” and “made all the difference.”
That covered about 25 years of my life. I have notes for the next 50 but have run out of space and have other articles lined up for the next few weeks. If you really, really want more, tell me so when you see me.
Mel thinks he has each day well-planned but something else always arises.
This was also printed in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2014-09-25 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/09/25/4105_walk_on_the_random_side.
This concept can be put into a single word: serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole in 1754. It means finding good things where you weren’t looking for them. It comes from “The Princes of Serendip”, an Arabian tale. Serendip was also featured in Prokofiev’s “Love of Three Oranges”.
Ah, this whole column is going to be very serendipitous. I thought of this column as about the twist and turns of my own life. But like my life, this column is going to turn up ideas I wasn’t looking for,
The March from the “Love of Three Oranges” by a Soviet composer was, irony of ironies, used as the theme song for the radio program “FBI: In Peace and War”. One of the FBI’s tasks at the time was finding Communists. On the other hand, many of Prokofiev’s works were anti-establishment. Think of “Lieutenant Kije”!
After my parents divorced when I was about five or so, my mother moved in with her aunt and uncle. Once I started school, I was often free to roam. I knew all the vacant lots and stores, where the library was, and where a super-duper playground was.
When I was nine, my aunt and uncle bought a house on the other side of town. I don’t know which came first, a new job or a new house. Whichever, my mother’s uncle still worked within walking distance.
Again I explored an ever wider area, learning where the movie theater was, a great sledding hill, and the community center and the Y. I had a take a streetcar to the downtown library. I made a new set of friends, and eventually joined some of them in a Boy Scout troop.
After my first year of junior high, my mother decided to get her own apartment back on the other side of town. Again, I had freedom to roam. No sledding hill, but a vacant lot for baseball and an actual ball diamond a bike ride away. I also frequented a drug store for malts, ice cream sodas, and sundaes. That lead me to drop my paper route and work 5-10 after school three times a week.
After I started high school my mother remarried and we moved back across town. I was supposed to go to a high school with about 3,000 students, but I got district permission to go to the high school where my Scout friends went. And this road made all the difference. Would I have gone to Case if I had a different math teacher who didn’t punctuate his remarks with “When you go to Case…”
When still in high school I also decided on my own to go to a Methodist Church within walking distance. I wound up being active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) even into my college years. This lead to some pressure to go into the ministry. This and the long daily commute to Case created several conflicts.
While in college I decided to run for the President of the MYF subdistrict. Also sitting on the subdistrict were a couple of attractive high school girls, both of whom I dated. But I preferred the second one. Fifty-six years later, neither of us regrets the choice. And my wife still doesn’t regret voting against me because she thought MYF was not for college students.
During my tenure on the council I didn’t do so well in my junior at Case. I was asked not to come back for the spring term.
I don’t remember what led to my choice of Ohio Wesleyan University other than it was Methodist. Possibly it was my new girlfriend was starting there in the fall.
When I visited OWU before applying, the registrar recommended that I major in mathematics, which I did. Surprisingly, after my dismal last two semesters at Case, I got all As in math except for a single B.
Prior to graduation I applied to Case for a graduate assistantship in the computer center. I also applied for an assistantship at the University of Michigan in communications, which included computer science. I heard from Case right away and was even offered a summer job in the computer center. I didn’t hear from U of Mich until late July or even early August
When I graduated from OWU we got married and rented the upstairs of a duplex in Cleveland. This also meant that my wife would have to go to college in the Cleveland area. She chose Baldwin-Wallace way the other side of the metro area.. Fortunately, she could commute with an instructor who was friend of her mother. By the way, this friend was also the one who recommended the duplex.
We both liked canoeing and made a few day trips to Portage Lakes. But our dream was to go to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. We did so in August 1961. The trip was a mix of adventure and misadventure. We didn’t know it at the time, but it changed our lives forever by offering a wide range of unexpected choices. Many of them were “the least traveled” and “made all the difference.”
That covered about 25 years of my life. I have notes for the next 50 but have run out of space and have other articles lined up for the next few weeks. If you really, really want more, tell me so when you see me.
Mel thinks he has each day well-planned but something else always arises.
This was also printed in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2014-09-25 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/09/25/4105_walk_on_the_random_side.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
What did I learn outside school?
Last week I asked what did I learn in school, with an emphasis on how much I had forgotten of what I supposedly learned. What I really learned in school was to learn. I had teachers who excited me about a subject, and I had subjects that excited me even if the teacher didn’t.
I also had many other people outside school who enticed me to learn, something too many kids don’t have. The high point of this seems to me to have been when we lived with my mother’s aunt and uncle, especially between the ages of 9 and 14. My environment was rich with printed publications.
They subscribed to the morning Cleveland Plain Dealer and the afternoon Cleveland Press. They subscribed to Saturday Evening Post or one or two of its competitors. They may have even subscribed to National Geographic. I loved comic books and subscribed to Walt Disney Comics and bought Looney Tunes from time to time. But we also had books. I remember having a set of “East Wind Stories”, a set of stories about fictional animals. I borrowed books from the school library and the downtown public library.
We also listened to the radio. I remember that Aunt Gertrude had to have the station changed five minutes before Walter Winchell came on: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press.” We also had 78 rpm records and listened sometimes to the station that played some classical music. Was that WDOK? I remember preferring piano music to violin music because the pitch was often lower. And of course, lots of pop music.
We had no TV then. I remember a when TV cameraman came to the sledding hill I often went to. He filmed me going down the hill with hands and feet in the air. To see the newscast, we stood outside a TV store. We also went to the TV studio where they graciously showed it to us.
I had many more outside school learning experiences before I graduated from high school, but in interest of space, I’ll skip forward to the summer before my senior year of college. I wanted to learn about computers and found a summer job at Ohio Oil Company (Marathon). Because I was put in a clerical job rather than a computer job, I borrowed Elliott Organick’s “Programming the IBM 650” from the company library. With that knowledge, I wrote a program to calculate the square root of any number. I gave it to my supervisor who passed it on to others. Within days I was transferred to a group more closely involved in computers. Eventually I was given the task of writing a program to process quotas for gas stations and others. I had lots of help from others on details of how the IBM 650 worked. On my last day, I handed in the manual for how to use the program. I think it was used by Ohio Oil for a year or two.
When I graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, Case took me back for a masters program in mathematics. Not only that, but I was given a graduate assistantship in the Computer Center that covered tuition and paid $75 a week too!
One of the jobs of Computer Center assistants was to provide help to sophomores who were taking the mandatory numerical analysis course. We started in July, were given the ALGOL manual for Burroughs 220 and let loose. In the fall, we were answering all kinds of questions for the undergraduates.
We also learned the assembler called SAVE written by a PhD candidate. As a project for the only computer class I took, I wrote a simpler assembler called HELP, of which SAVE was the answer. Darned if there wasn’t somebody using HELP long after I left Case.
Case had ordered a Univac 1107 and I learned its assembler and instruction set from a manual. When I completed my master’s work I applied for work with Univac and was hired. I was first set to some mathematical project that I had no idea of how to proceed. Luckily for me that group was dissolved and I was moved into the FORTRAN compiler support group. My boss never learned to write FORTRAN but he was a crackerjack at solving problems with the compiler. I wound up solving problems with the FORTRAN library, pieces of code called on by users that did things not part of FORTRAN itself, like mathematical functions. I never took a class in the compiler or the assembler it was written in. We just jumped in and started solving problems.
Because I did have experience (or was it interest) in ALGOL, I was given the responsibility for fixing problems in the compiler, written by somebody else. A Norwegian customer wrote an extension for simulation, called, surprise, SIMULA. Without any training except the manual and trial and error, I fixed problems in SIMULA and its library.
I spent nearly twenty years at UNIVAC and kept learning things on the fly and even giving classes in what I learned! I’ve lost track of the software I learned.
Then I went off on my own and learned more and more computers and software. Even now with thirty years experience with the Macintosh, I learn something new with every release. I’ve lost track of the number of software programs I’ve learned.
With these I’ve learned three things: software can be easy, software can be obtuse, and we ain’t seen nothing yet!
Also published in the Reader Weekly, 2014-08-14 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/08/21/3928_what_did_i_learn_outside_school.
I also had many other people outside school who enticed me to learn, something too many kids don’t have. The high point of this seems to me to have been when we lived with my mother’s aunt and uncle, especially between the ages of 9 and 14. My environment was rich with printed publications.
They subscribed to the morning Cleveland Plain Dealer and the afternoon Cleveland Press. They subscribed to Saturday Evening Post or one or two of its competitors. They may have even subscribed to National Geographic. I loved comic books and subscribed to Walt Disney Comics and bought Looney Tunes from time to time. But we also had books. I remember having a set of “East Wind Stories”, a set of stories about fictional animals. I borrowed books from the school library and the downtown public library.
We also listened to the radio. I remember that Aunt Gertrude had to have the station changed five minutes before Walter Winchell came on: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press.” We also had 78 rpm records and listened sometimes to the station that played some classical music. Was that WDOK? I remember preferring piano music to violin music because the pitch was often lower. And of course, lots of pop music.
We had no TV then. I remember a when TV cameraman came to the sledding hill I often went to. He filmed me going down the hill with hands and feet in the air. To see the newscast, we stood outside a TV store. We also went to the TV studio where they graciously showed it to us.
I had many more outside school learning experiences before I graduated from high school, but in interest of space, I’ll skip forward to the summer before my senior year of college. I wanted to learn about computers and found a summer job at Ohio Oil Company (Marathon). Because I was put in a clerical job rather than a computer job, I borrowed Elliott Organick’s “Programming the IBM 650” from the company library. With that knowledge, I wrote a program to calculate the square root of any number. I gave it to my supervisor who passed it on to others. Within days I was transferred to a group more closely involved in computers. Eventually I was given the task of writing a program to process quotas for gas stations and others. I had lots of help from others on details of how the IBM 650 worked. On my last day, I handed in the manual for how to use the program. I think it was used by Ohio Oil for a year or two.
When I graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, Case took me back for a masters program in mathematics. Not only that, but I was given a graduate assistantship in the Computer Center that covered tuition and paid $75 a week too!
One of the jobs of Computer Center assistants was to provide help to sophomores who were taking the mandatory numerical analysis course. We started in July, were given the ALGOL manual for Burroughs 220 and let loose. In the fall, we were answering all kinds of questions for the undergraduates.
We also learned the assembler called SAVE written by a PhD candidate. As a project for the only computer class I took, I wrote a simpler assembler called HELP, of which SAVE was the answer. Darned if there wasn’t somebody using HELP long after I left Case.
Case had ordered a Univac 1107 and I learned its assembler and instruction set from a manual. When I completed my master’s work I applied for work with Univac and was hired. I was first set to some mathematical project that I had no idea of how to proceed. Luckily for me that group was dissolved and I was moved into the FORTRAN compiler support group. My boss never learned to write FORTRAN but he was a crackerjack at solving problems with the compiler. I wound up solving problems with the FORTRAN library, pieces of code called on by users that did things not part of FORTRAN itself, like mathematical functions. I never took a class in the compiler or the assembler it was written in. We just jumped in and started solving problems.
Because I did have experience (or was it interest) in ALGOL, I was given the responsibility for fixing problems in the compiler, written by somebody else. A Norwegian customer wrote an extension for simulation, called, surprise, SIMULA. Without any training except the manual and trial and error, I fixed problems in SIMULA and its library.
I spent nearly twenty years at UNIVAC and kept learning things on the fly and even giving classes in what I learned! I’ve lost track of the software I learned.
Then I went off on my own and learned more and more computers and software. Even now with thirty years experience with the Macintosh, I learn something new with every release. I’ve lost track of the number of software programs I’ve learned.
With these I’ve learned three things: software can be easy, software can be obtuse, and we ain’t seen nothing yet!
Also published in the Reader Weekly, 2014-08-14 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/08/21/3928_what_did_i_learn_outside_school.
Friday, August 15, 2014
What did I learn in school?
I learned a lot but I’ve forgotten most of it.
I find I remember the classroom setting more than I do what was actually taught. Maybe this is why so many of us think we were never taught about certain things. I can still picture my first elementary school, buying Victory stamps, and the VE banner that was displayed. I remember reading Dick and Jane and writing the numbers out to 200!
I remember many things about my second elementary school, but the classroom scenario that sticks out the most is the vote on the distance to the moon. What, a vote on a scientific fact? I remember a fourth-grade substitute science teacher doing this. For years, I thought she didn’t know and was asking the class. But she may have only been sampling the class. I remember that incident more than I do how far is it to the moon. Without looking it up, I’d say 250,000 miles. With all the moon shots in the news, you would think that number would stick better in my head. Is this one of those facts that get forgotten because we can always look it up if we really need to know?
I do remember learning typing and driving, probably the two most important life-long skills most of us need and use. I do remember taking French in 8th grade, but I didn’t continue because I would rather learn printing. How many people set type by hand now? I took Latin in high school because I was advised that it was the basis for many other languages. All I remember of that two and half-years was that I was elected president of the Latin club, and we read an abridged “Aeneid” and “Horatio at the Bridge”. I remember a music teacher telling us that anyone with intelligence can learn to sing. I didn’t get around to learning until I was in my 60s, and now I don’t practice enough to keep my voice in shape.
I don’t remember learning much about World War II in school. That may because we might have been using textbooks that hadn’t been updated. Also the teacher was not very inspiring. The only history I remember from that whole year is a picture of the Haymarket Square riot in a text book. The picture was on the right-hand page of the small but thick orange textbook. The picture was an engraving from some archive; I don’t remember if it was a photograph or a drawing. And I don’t remember much about the Haymarket Square riot other than there was lot of police violence. It was probably labor related and took place in Chicago.
Was I taught about Hiroshima and Nagasaki in my American History class? I don’t remember. I had that class in 1954. It could be that the textbook hadn’t been updated. These events have been reported over and over for almost 70 years, and so it is hard to remember where I learned what.
Another digression: “, and so…” Mr. Conrad, my 11th grade English teacher, frequently told us how to use "and so", but I don’t remember exactly what he prescribed. This particular piece of grammar was almost the only thing I remember from the class.
I had Mister Rush for trigonometry and another class. I don’t remember much of the material but I remember his punctuating his remarks with “When you go to Case…” meaning Case Institute of Technology, now part of Case Western Reserve University. Darned if five of us didn’t go to Case. Only two of us graduated, yours truly not being one. But I got to come back for graduate school.
Now, Miss Palmer, I remember her well. She was a fearsome taskmaster, but she taught Shakespeare well. I enjoyed reading an act each day for homework for both “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”, and then we would reread each act a few scenes at a time. She gave me a lifelong love of Shakespeare, but I have yet to read all of his plays.
Interestingly, I don’t remember taking much homework home. I had two study halls most days and got most of it done in one of them. The rest of my study hall time I read science fiction from the school library.
College and graduate school are also a blur. I remember translating “Clementine” into French, I remember reading Candide (English, condensed) and “Brothers Karamazov”. On the latter, what did I care what the meaning of the mortar and pestle was?
How much do you remember of school? For most of us, that is only what we use on a regular basis. I have a Master’s in mathematics and I don’t remember anything from “Functions of Complex Variables” in graduate school. I do remember the book was blue, I think the author was from India, and it is still on the right hand side of my book case, first shelf above the bottom shelf.
What we really learned in school was to learn.
Back to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I remember reading about the horrible deaths both immediate and years later. I remember that prisoners of war were killed in the blast. I remember the justification that lives were “saved”. I have long questioned how many kids’ lives is one soldier’s life worth.
Where I think I learned this is from reading newspapers regularly. If your only news source is radio or TV you’ll never have time for all there is to know. With newspapers, you have a larger selection of stories, you read them at your convenience, and with the Internet, you have a huge selection to choose from.
One of Mel's high school classmates said, "Learn something each day." Mel often wishes he wouldn't forget it the next day.
Also published in Reader Weekly, 2014-08-14 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/08/14/3890_what_did_i_learn_in_school
I find I remember the classroom setting more than I do what was actually taught. Maybe this is why so many of us think we were never taught about certain things. I can still picture my first elementary school, buying Victory stamps, and the VE banner that was displayed. I remember reading Dick and Jane and writing the numbers out to 200!
I remember many things about my second elementary school, but the classroom scenario that sticks out the most is the vote on the distance to the moon. What, a vote on a scientific fact? I remember a fourth-grade substitute science teacher doing this. For years, I thought she didn’t know and was asking the class. But she may have only been sampling the class. I remember that incident more than I do how far is it to the moon. Without looking it up, I’d say 250,000 miles. With all the moon shots in the news, you would think that number would stick better in my head. Is this one of those facts that get forgotten because we can always look it up if we really need to know?
I do remember learning typing and driving, probably the two most important life-long skills most of us need and use. I do remember taking French in 8th grade, but I didn’t continue because I would rather learn printing. How many people set type by hand now? I took Latin in high school because I was advised that it was the basis for many other languages. All I remember of that two and half-years was that I was elected president of the Latin club, and we read an abridged “Aeneid” and “Horatio at the Bridge”. I remember a music teacher telling us that anyone with intelligence can learn to sing. I didn’t get around to learning until I was in my 60s, and now I don’t practice enough to keep my voice in shape.
I don’t remember learning much about World War II in school. That may because we might have been using textbooks that hadn’t been updated. Also the teacher was not very inspiring. The only history I remember from that whole year is a picture of the Haymarket Square riot in a text book. The picture was on the right-hand page of the small but thick orange textbook. The picture was an engraving from some archive; I don’t remember if it was a photograph or a drawing. And I don’t remember much about the Haymarket Square riot other than there was lot of police violence. It was probably labor related and took place in Chicago.
Was I taught about Hiroshima and Nagasaki in my American History class? I don’t remember. I had that class in 1954. It could be that the textbook hadn’t been updated. These events have been reported over and over for almost 70 years, and so it is hard to remember where I learned what.
Another digression: “, and so…” Mr. Conrad, my 11th grade English teacher, frequently told us how to use "and so", but I don’t remember exactly what he prescribed. This particular piece of grammar was almost the only thing I remember from the class.
I had Mister Rush for trigonometry and another class. I don’t remember much of the material but I remember his punctuating his remarks with “When you go to Case…” meaning Case Institute of Technology, now part of Case Western Reserve University. Darned if five of us didn’t go to Case. Only two of us graduated, yours truly not being one. But I got to come back for graduate school.
Now, Miss Palmer, I remember her well. She was a fearsome taskmaster, but she taught Shakespeare well. I enjoyed reading an act each day for homework for both “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”, and then we would reread each act a few scenes at a time. She gave me a lifelong love of Shakespeare, but I have yet to read all of his plays.
Interestingly, I don’t remember taking much homework home. I had two study halls most days and got most of it done in one of them. The rest of my study hall time I read science fiction from the school library.
College and graduate school are also a blur. I remember translating “Clementine” into French, I remember reading Candide (English, condensed) and “Brothers Karamazov”. On the latter, what did I care what the meaning of the mortar and pestle was?
How much do you remember of school? For most of us, that is only what we use on a regular basis. I have a Master’s in mathematics and I don’t remember anything from “Functions of Complex Variables” in graduate school. I do remember the book was blue, I think the author was from India, and it is still on the right hand side of my book case, first shelf above the bottom shelf.
What we really learned in school was to learn.
Back to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I remember reading about the horrible deaths both immediate and years later. I remember that prisoners of war were killed in the blast. I remember the justification that lives were “saved”. I have long questioned how many kids’ lives is one soldier’s life worth.
Where I think I learned this is from reading newspapers regularly. If your only news source is radio or TV you’ll never have time for all there is to know. With newspapers, you have a larger selection of stories, you read them at your convenience, and with the Internet, you have a huge selection to choose from.
One of Mel's high school classmates said, "Learn something each day." Mel often wishes he wouldn't forget it the next day.
Also published in Reader Weekly, 2014-08-14 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/08/14/3890_what_did_i_learn_in_school
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Minimum wage, inflation, and personal experience
My first wage job that I remember was at Saywell Drug in Cleveland, Ohio. I probably started in the summer of 1951 after I quit my paper route. I started at fifty cents an hour. This was a low-skill entry job. I was a soda jerk, stocker, and small-item cashier.
Using the US Inflation Calculator, anything I bought for fifty cents would now cost $4.50.
Note: these figures were requested on March 16, 2014. A week later, many were a few cents higher.
I had a couple other jobs in that range. Then in late fall 1954 I started at Kroger’s as a stock clerk and bagger. My starting union-negotiated salary was $1.05. A dinner at a small diner then would cost $9.13 now.
When I flunked out of Case Institute of Technology in January 1958, I was earning $1.75 at the same Kroger’s store. Anything I bought with an hour’s wage then would cost $14.16 now. I was also a relief cashier on weekends.
No Kroger store had any full-time openings then. I eventually was hired as “third man” at a new Pic’n’Pay. Third man was sort of meaningless. I was after the assistant manager in groceries only. Produce and meat were separately run departments under the manager. I was only a glorified stocker and bagger. They wouldn’t let me be a cashier because I wasn’t bonded. They also did their best to make sure I never worked close to 40 hours per week. They would have to give me more benefits. My wage, in a union store? $1.54! I had to get the help of a union business agent I knew to get my $1.75. That $1.54 is now $12.46. Don’t you think a fast-food manager has a harder job with more responsibilities than a grocery clerk?
When I went to Ohio Wesleyan in the fall of 1958, I worked my first year at a local Kroger store. My wage was $1.54!!! I made the mistake of not putting that in writing to the union steward. He was sort of in the pocket of the manager and never really acted on my behalf. When I called the union office in Columbus they pointed out that I had waited too long without filing a written claim.
In June 1960 we were married and I started graduate school back at Case. I also had a graduate assistantship that paid $75 per week. Our upstairs apartment cost $65 per month and $75 when we moved downstairs. That $75 per week would be $592.69 in 2014 dollars. If I supposedly worked 20 hours per week, that would be almost $30/hour. I checked current graduate assistant salaries; the average is about $20,000/year or about $384/week. I was treated like a king! I was allowed nine credits per semester, I had use of the gym and library, and I had free parking in the lower lot.
I didn’t go on to a PhD program and opted for a full time job. My interviews were with Sikorsky in Framingham MA, GE in Syracuse NY, and Univac in St. Paul. I don’t remember the exact offers from each, but it was something like $8,400, $7,900, and $8,100. All things considered, I took the job nearest the Boundary Waters starting on Feb 3, 1963. The things I could buy then with that money would cost $61,918.94 today. Ah, a bright spot! A computer software engineer with a master’s degree can start around $85,500! But, the complexity of the work is far, far greater than when I started on mainframes that were giant toys compared to my iPhone. No wonder the computer industry wants to increase the number of H-1B visas for programmers.
When personal computers came along I saw no future in mainframes and started my own one-person company. I never implemented my grand visions and after over ten years tried getting a computer job. Ha! The checklist for “skills” was far longer than just a Masters in Mathematics. I eventually wound up driving a school bus in the Twin Cities and then moved up to transit buses, aka city bus. I started at $8.50/hour in 1995 and wound up with over $12/hour in 1999. These translate into 2014 dollars as $13.05 and $18.42 or $27,144 and $38,314 per year. According to salary.com, twenty-five percent of school bus drivers in Duluth earn over $35,623 per year. I assume that those have to get a lot of charter work.
My last job was as a ski instructor. I think my final pay in 2007 was around $8.00 per hour. That would be $9.03 in 2014 dollars. But the work was spotty depending on the weather and the people who show up. I don’t think I ever got more than 30 hours per week. I don’t know what the current pay is, but I did get nominally priced season passes for my wife and myself, a nifty jacket at a good price, and discounts at Ski Hut.
Other than the ski instructor, which often is a fun job, a computer programmer, which takes far more specialized learning than I had, and some school bus drivers, I think too many workers are worse off than I was way back then.
I think Adam Smith is being shown right again, it is lawful for the masters to organize to keep wages down, but it unlawful for the workers to organize to raise wages.
- Mel
You can find more of my thoughts at
http://magree.blogspot.com
Using the US Inflation Calculator, anything I bought for fifty cents would now cost $4.50.
Note: these figures were requested on March 16, 2014. A week later, many were a few cents higher.
I had a couple other jobs in that range. Then in late fall 1954 I started at Kroger’s as a stock clerk and bagger. My starting union-negotiated salary was $1.05. A dinner at a small diner then would cost $9.13 now.
When I flunked out of Case Institute of Technology in January 1958, I was earning $1.75 at the same Kroger’s store. Anything I bought with an hour’s wage then would cost $14.16 now. I was also a relief cashier on weekends.
No Kroger store had any full-time openings then. I eventually was hired as “third man” at a new Pic’n’Pay. Third man was sort of meaningless. I was after the assistant manager in groceries only. Produce and meat were separately run departments under the manager. I was only a glorified stocker and bagger. They wouldn’t let me be a cashier because I wasn’t bonded. They also did their best to make sure I never worked close to 40 hours per week. They would have to give me more benefits. My wage, in a union store? $1.54! I had to get the help of a union business agent I knew to get my $1.75. That $1.54 is now $12.46. Don’t you think a fast-food manager has a harder job with more responsibilities than a grocery clerk?
When I went to Ohio Wesleyan in the fall of 1958, I worked my first year at a local Kroger store. My wage was $1.54!!! I made the mistake of not putting that in writing to the union steward. He was sort of in the pocket of the manager and never really acted on my behalf. When I called the union office in Columbus they pointed out that I had waited too long without filing a written claim.
In June 1960 we were married and I started graduate school back at Case. I also had a graduate assistantship that paid $75 per week. Our upstairs apartment cost $65 per month and $75 when we moved downstairs. That $75 per week would be $592.69 in 2014 dollars. If I supposedly worked 20 hours per week, that would be almost $30/hour. I checked current graduate assistant salaries; the average is about $20,000/year or about $384/week. I was treated like a king! I was allowed nine credits per semester, I had use of the gym and library, and I had free parking in the lower lot.
I didn’t go on to a PhD program and opted for a full time job. My interviews were with Sikorsky in Framingham MA, GE in Syracuse NY, and Univac in St. Paul. I don’t remember the exact offers from each, but it was something like $8,400, $7,900, and $8,100. All things considered, I took the job nearest the Boundary Waters starting on Feb 3, 1963. The things I could buy then with that money would cost $61,918.94 today. Ah, a bright spot! A computer software engineer with a master’s degree can start around $85,500! But, the complexity of the work is far, far greater than when I started on mainframes that were giant toys compared to my iPhone. No wonder the computer industry wants to increase the number of H-1B visas for programmers.
When personal computers came along I saw no future in mainframes and started my own one-person company. I never implemented my grand visions and after over ten years tried getting a computer job. Ha! The checklist for “skills” was far longer than just a Masters in Mathematics. I eventually wound up driving a school bus in the Twin Cities and then moved up to transit buses, aka city bus. I started at $8.50/hour in 1995 and wound up with over $12/hour in 1999. These translate into 2014 dollars as $13.05 and $18.42 or $27,144 and $38,314 per year. According to salary.com, twenty-five percent of school bus drivers in Duluth earn over $35,623 per year. I assume that those have to get a lot of charter work.
My last job was as a ski instructor. I think my final pay in 2007 was around $8.00 per hour. That would be $9.03 in 2014 dollars. But the work was spotty depending on the weather and the people who show up. I don’t think I ever got more than 30 hours per week. I don’t know what the current pay is, but I did get nominally priced season passes for my wife and myself, a nifty jacket at a good price, and discounts at Ski Hut.
Other than the ski instructor, which often is a fun job, a computer programmer, which takes far more specialized learning than I had, and some school bus drivers, I think too many workers are worse off than I was way back then.
I think Adam Smith is being shown right again, it is lawful for the masters to organize to keep wages down, but it unlawful for the workers to organize to raise wages.
- Mel
You can find more of my thoughts at
http://magree.blogspot.com
Friday, January 31, 2014
My illustrious second-rate sports career
As long as I can remember, I’ve done quite a bit of physical activity – from riding on the back of somebody’s bicycle at 3 or 4 to lots of snow shoveling this winter. The first-named led to a bleeding ankle; the last-named led to a sore back. Not all my physical activity has led to injury, but there have been quite a few “incidents”.
In between I’ve climbed trees, sledded, rode bicycles, played pickup games of baseball, touch football, and basketball, canoed, hiked, and a few organized sports.
In the summer of 1952, nine or more of the boys I hung out with formed a Class F Baseball team. I sometimes pitched, sometimes played third-base, and maybe sat on the bench. The most memorable incident was that I pitched a 0-1 no-hitter. The other team got their run by a combination of walks and stealing. This “feat” made it to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but they misspelled my name as Melvyn MacGree.
Class F baseball still exists in Cleveland and is still sponsored by the Cleveland Baseball Federation.
In my first year of high school gym, I ran a “mile” in 5:12 and 5:19. The coach suggested I join cross-country team. I never made the cut for the seven that counted, just part of the crowd that might push some in the other sevens down in finish ranking. In one race I did slow down to help one of our seven who had been hit in some way by an opposing runner.
I also joined the cross-country team in my second year of college. But I didn’t do so well as I developed “shin splints”. I got some therapy for them, but they plagued me now and then.
I did take a fitness class at a Y in my forties. That included gradually increasing running distance. I was proud of myself when I ran a mile in about eight minutes.
Now it’s a big deal for me to walk from my house to UMD.
A high-school classmate recommended that I join the wrestling team. I did and managed to be the 133 lb. wrestler for a couple of years. There was no one else in that weight class. If there was, I generally won the wrestle-off for a meet. I had a miserable record. I was often taken down in less than a minute. The coach selected five or so wrestlers to go to state, none me, of course. Every year at least one of those guys won a state title. My last year I had a better record, I think 4-3. It should have been 5-2, but being a January starter, I graduated the night before my last allowed match. Guess what lots of high-school graduates do. At least, I lost on points rather than by a takedown.
I practiced with the Case Institute of Technology wrestling team. I wrestled in intramurals at 147 for a fraternity I didn’t join. The first guy was a well-muscled rock. That was how he behaved. When he had the down position, I could not budge him. I even sat back on my heels to give my opponent a chance to move. He didn’t. When I had the down position he gripped me tight but made no move to get better control. The score: 0-0! I won a referee’s decision for being more aggressive. My second was with another team freshman. This was a much more interesting match: 4-4. Again, I won on referee’s decision. The last match should have been the hardest. I won 7-2. However, I never made the cut to wrestle in a team match.
After I flunked out of Case, I went to Ohio Wesleyan University. I wrestled once in the intramurals at 154 as an independent. I really don’t remember any of the matches, but I won all of them. I had practiced with team, but I never made the cut for a match.
I took up skiing in the early sixties. I took a week off work to learn at Buck Hill. After the class I did snow-plows on my own. On one run I was heading straight for the lift. My best tactic was to fall. One ski came off, windmilled, and hit me below the knee. My four-dollar ski pants have a hole in them! There’s blood in there! I’ll spare you more details, but the doctor put extra-padding on the stitches. I did learn enough that week to move beyond the snow plow.
I do have many more ski stories, but I’m running out of space. In the spirit of my “second rate” career, let me tell a bit about my amateur racing. At Spirit Mountain, I qualified for going to the NASTAR nationals. Why? The top three in each gender-age-speed category qualify. Since there were never more than three male racers in my age and speed category, I qualified five times. I went to Park City in 2004 where I was 21 out of 23 and to Steamboat Springs in 2007 where I was 14 out of 15. My times were about twice those of the winners!
I still have a season pass at Spirit Mountain, but I’m getting wimpy about when I go. If the temperature is not above ten degrees Fahrenheit, I’m not too interested.
So, other than sporadic visits to the Essentia Fitness Center, my exercise is some woodcutting, some lawn-mowing, and some snow-shoveling. Now I have a sore back from all this season’s snow shoveling.
Hey, when my back doesn’t bother me, I can do over 30 pushups!
In between I’ve climbed trees, sledded, rode bicycles, played pickup games of baseball, touch football, and basketball, canoed, hiked, and a few organized sports.
In the summer of 1952, nine or more of the boys I hung out with formed a Class F Baseball team. I sometimes pitched, sometimes played third-base, and maybe sat on the bench. The most memorable incident was that I pitched a 0-1 no-hitter. The other team got their run by a combination of walks and stealing. This “feat” made it to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but they misspelled my name as Melvyn MacGree.
Class F baseball still exists in Cleveland and is still sponsored by the Cleveland Baseball Federation.
In my first year of high school gym, I ran a “mile” in 5:12 and 5:19. The coach suggested I join cross-country team. I never made the cut for the seven that counted, just part of the crowd that might push some in the other sevens down in finish ranking. In one race I did slow down to help one of our seven who had been hit in some way by an opposing runner.
I also joined the cross-country team in my second year of college. But I didn’t do so well as I developed “shin splints”. I got some therapy for them, but they plagued me now and then.
I did take a fitness class at a Y in my forties. That included gradually increasing running distance. I was proud of myself when I ran a mile in about eight minutes.
Now it’s a big deal for me to walk from my house to UMD.
A high-school classmate recommended that I join the wrestling team. I did and managed to be the 133 lb. wrestler for a couple of years. There was no one else in that weight class. If there was, I generally won the wrestle-off for a meet. I had a miserable record. I was often taken down in less than a minute. The coach selected five or so wrestlers to go to state, none me, of course. Every year at least one of those guys won a state title. My last year I had a better record, I think 4-3. It should have been 5-2, but being a January starter, I graduated the night before my last allowed match. Guess what lots of high-school graduates do. At least, I lost on points rather than by a takedown.
I practiced with the Case Institute of Technology wrestling team. I wrestled in intramurals at 147 for a fraternity I didn’t join. The first guy was a well-muscled rock. That was how he behaved. When he had the down position, I could not budge him. I even sat back on my heels to give my opponent a chance to move. He didn’t. When I had the down position he gripped me tight but made no move to get better control. The score: 0-0! I won a referee’s decision for being more aggressive. My second was with another team freshman. This was a much more interesting match: 4-4. Again, I won on referee’s decision. The last match should have been the hardest. I won 7-2. However, I never made the cut to wrestle in a team match.
After I flunked out of Case, I went to Ohio Wesleyan University. I wrestled once in the intramurals at 154 as an independent. I really don’t remember any of the matches, but I won all of them. I had practiced with team, but I never made the cut for a match.
I took up skiing in the early sixties. I took a week off work to learn at Buck Hill. After the class I did snow-plows on my own. On one run I was heading straight for the lift. My best tactic was to fall. One ski came off, windmilled, and hit me below the knee. My four-dollar ski pants have a hole in them! There’s blood in there! I’ll spare you more details, but the doctor put extra-padding on the stitches. I did learn enough that week to move beyond the snow plow.
I do have many more ski stories, but I’m running out of space. In the spirit of my “second rate” career, let me tell a bit about my amateur racing. At Spirit Mountain, I qualified for going to the NASTAR nationals. Why? The top three in each gender-age-speed category qualify. Since there were never more than three male racers in my age and speed category, I qualified five times. I went to Park City in 2004 where I was 21 out of 23 and to Steamboat Springs in 2007 where I was 14 out of 15. My times were about twice those of the winners!
I still have a season pass at Spirit Mountain, but I’m getting wimpy about when I go. If the temperature is not above ten degrees Fahrenheit, I’m not too interested.
So, other than sporadic visits to the Essentia Fitness Center, my exercise is some woodcutting, some lawn-mowing, and some snow-shoveling. Now I have a sore back from all this season’s snow shoveling.
Hey, when my back doesn’t bother me, I can do over 30 pushups!
Thursday, December 01, 2011
To my Ukrainian reader
If you know Yuri from Kiev who was a graduate student at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio in 1960-1962, please say hello. Probably you don't know him, but it is surprising how often there is a connection. Nothing ventured, nothing gained!
I still remember translating English to English between him and a graduate student from India.
I still remember translating English to English between him and a graduate student from India.
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