Share some early memories of your son, Michael

Mike was raised by his grandparents in Pennsylvania until he was school age, so unfortunately I don’t have infant or toddler memories to share.  But from the time I first met him, and still true today, the thing that springs to mind is that he is a happy guy.  As he grew up he developed into a very extroverted, out-going child, loving to ride bikes around the neighborhood with a pack of friends, attend ice cream socials at school, and strapping on skates for organized events at Skateworld of Kettering.  We lived a quarter-mile from Indian Riffle Park and he loved the swings, monkey bars, teeter-totters, and merry-go-rounds.

Mike is a very determined person.  When he decided that he wanted to lose weight back in grade school, he controlled his diet, including eating cans and cans of tuna fish, to shed pounds until he was rail thin.  Then he decided to begin lifting weights and went after that with a passion, putting on solid muscle and eventually benching over three hundred pounds in high school.  He’s worked very hard to build up two successful businesses, working two jobs when necessary and teaching himself the business world.  When he puts his mind to something, it will get done.

Mike dreams big.  As he was planning our first trip to Disney World in Florida, I was told he wanted to get to the park when it opened and stay until it closed.  For the price of admission, I was willing to try although the prospect of that many hours walking around and standing in lines didn’t thrill me.  Fortunately, by mid-afternoon, he and his sister were exhausted and begged to go back to the hotel room and lay by the pool.  This was probably an even more appealing idea because I had purchased each of them unlimited fountain drinks for the week, for less than $10 each if memory serves me correctly, a serious bargain, particularly given the number of trips they made in that hot Orlando summer.

Mike loves cars.  I taught him to drive when he was sixteen.  We had two cars, both with manual transmissions, so he had no choice but to learn a stick.  There were a few hair-raising incidents as he tried to master driving with the extra pedal, shifter, and clutch added to normally overwhelming tasks facing a new driver.  But it would serve him well as he bought his first sports car, a Chevy Camaro.  Over the years he would buy and sell many other cars and I think he favors the Corvette above the others.  As they say, boys love their toys.

Share some early memories of your daughter, Laura

I was fortunate to be in the delivery room for Laura’s birth and as soon as they do whatever with umbilical cords and after stuff, they wrapped her up and laid her in my arms.  My heart melted as my baby girl turned from a pale blue to a warm pink right in front of my eyes. Her tiny hands with fingers unbelievably small gripped my pinky finger and that grip went right to my heart.  I feel sorry for any father that misses the opportunity to experience this once-in-a-lifetime bonding moment.  

Like most babies, getting them to go to sleep is a daily routine and sometimes a struggle.  Laura liked to be rocked slowly and I would sing countless verses of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm“, thinking up new animals and what sounds they might make.  Whether I reproduced a proper version of an elephant’s roar or a snake’s hiss didn’t really much matter and after a dozen, or two, or three, she would drift off to sleep.

Laura was excellent at reading, spelling, and English in general.  Phonetics came easy to her and I remember walking through the Dayton Mall pushing her stroller and she would read store names and properly pronounce them.  I think she was two, maybe three, years old when she did that and I recall what an amazing feat that was.  I think perhaps part of that was not talking to her in baby talk and part was my somewhat annoying, but I believe proper, habit of correcting her every time she pronounced something incorrectly.  It’s better to learn something correctly right away than have to re-learn it later.

When Laura started grade school most subjects came easy to her.  Except for math.  She came home one day and told me she was not doing very well in math and that it didn’t make any sense.  We talked about it and it occurred to me that her other classes allowed her the benefit of prior experiences.  She had read before, spelled before, etc., and she had a basic understanding to build upon.  But nothing prior could help her understand why this number added to this number equaled that number.  I explained to her that none of her prior experiences were going to help and that this was all new.  She went to school with a different mindset and math became as easy as her other subjects.  

Laura was not my first choice for her name.  I wanted to name her Lara after Superman’s mother.  That didn’t fly at all.  I had a favorite aunt, my mother’s sister Loretta, and searched for names similar and came up with Laura.  Her mother never knew about the connection to my aunt, but liked the name.  Her mother selected Christine as her middle name.  I have no clue the background or significance of that.  Laura decided when she was about five years old or so to change her name to Laurie.  I don’t know why she wanted that, but that was fine.  I remember she told my mother, repeatedly, that her name was now Laurie.  It took a while, but she was persistent and Mom finally made the change.

What was a book that really made a difference for you as an adult?

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand would be that book.  It taught me that critical thinking was the only way through life, that I would have to dig deep into issues, view them from different perspectives, and make informed, balanced decisions.  It taught me that others have their own agendas and they don’t make them public to you, but you can figure them out if you listen and watch closely.  Often their own selfish nature is disguised as helping others and too often that help is only short-term at best and never actually solves anything. 

That whole theme of short-term versus long-term explains a lot of the world’s issues.  Should we be focused exclusively on what’s needed today, this week, this month, etc., and not concern ourselves on what happens later on?  Conversely, is it wise to ignore all short-term concerns and look only at how it will play out later?  These are difficult questions and most often do not have assured positive outcomes in all cases.  But focusing on one to the exclusion of the other is a really bad idea.

The book taught me that the notion of greed is viewed backward.  The idea that an individual, making their own decisions on what they want to do with the money they’ve earned, is evil, but people that will take others’ money to give to the causes they want is the very definition of good.  That is so backward that it should be laughable, except a lot of people actually believe it.  

How a book written back in 1957 could ring truer today than it did back then is amazing, and perhaps a bit frightening.

Tell me your favorite story about Moses

Moses was the perfect cat.  He was loving, at least to humans, and everyone adored him.  I would take him to appointments at the vet and he would walk down the check-in desk where all the staff would pet him to his delight and there’s.  He never weighed more than eight pounds even though I kept his food dish full all the time.  He ate when he was hungry or when I opened his favorite treat, a can of tuna fish.  

Moses was also a fierce hunter.  When I moved into a new apartment, he spent the first couple of days getting rid of every ant and spider he could find.  He could easily jump six feet in the air and I once saw him clear a six-foot fence with graceful ease as some neighborhood dog gave a fruitless chase.  He only had claws on his rear feet, but that combined with his teeth were more than enough to take out his prey.  Combined with remarkable see-in-the-dark abilities, he would routinely disappear for hours and that leads to my favorite story.

I rented a house in Kettering for a short time and after ridding it of insects, Moses somehow found a way to get into the ductwork.  I could tell where he was as his feet moved on the thin aluminum and he would reappear, covered in dust, a few hours later, several times bringing a dead mouse with him to proudly lay at my feet.  How he could see from inside the ductwork is a mystery, but even crazier is that he would routinely jump down into sewer drains, spend hours doing who-knows-what, then come back inside and spend a few more hours licking himself clean.

Moses lived a long and happy life and now rests under a tree in my former house in Bellbrook, where I buried him amid a stream of tears.

I still miss my “little buddy in the purring business”.

What things are you proudest of in your life?

I’ve written about some of the things I’ve built during my career while answering some previous questions but after forty-four years of dabbling in Information Technology, I accumulated more than a few.   One of my favorite sayings is “I’m glad I never learned I couldn’t do something” and the stories below begin with a pair of projects I undertook at Wright State University that few others would have even contemplated trying, followed by two situations where technical ability had nothing to do with achieving significant changes and finishing up with how I helped resolve a dispute without knowing anything about the subject being discussed.

GOTHIC was a mainframe assembler program that read a single input card and printed out, sideways, each character using multiple lines of asterisks, creating large letters in a Gothic-looking font. Since the mainframe printers used continuous forms, GOTHIC was perfect for creating large fancy banners, many feet long, announcing birthdays or other special occasions. But GOTHIC was written for an IBM DOS (Disk Operating System) mainframe, not the IBM MVT (Multiprogramming with a Variable number of Tasks) version we used at Wright State, so it would need some amount of modification to work, which I decided I would try, even though I didn’t have a clue what assembler language was, that class still a couple of years away. Undeterred, I slowly came to understand that most of the assembler language was a one-to-one mapping to the actual instructions that mainframes execute, for example, that an AR (Add Register) adds the contents of one of sixteen registers, essentially a really, really fast place to store a number, to another register. That was good news, as all those instructions did not need to change. The other piece to GOTHIC was something I learned were called “macros”, and those were different between DOS and MVT. One by one I swapped one macro, for example, a DOS DTF (Define The File) to its MVT equivalent, a DCB (Data Control Block). The program changed, I received some help with the JCL (Job Control Language) needed to compile, link, and execute GOTHIC and submitted it to run. A bit later I was asked to come back to the office of John Sloan, ever since a great friend and one-time townhouse mate, where I was told my program crashed MVT because I had not “saved my return registers properly”, which at the time I had no clue what that meant, but it was the one last difference between DOS and MVT. However, I was pretty sure that a mainframe should not crash because of a simple student error. All ended well, GOTHIC was converted and was a big hit for years to come. And it got my name known within the administrative computer center, which opened more doors in the months and years to come.

The last quarter of my freshman year included learning the COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) programming language. To stretch the mainframe’s limited resources, the class used WATBOL (WATerloo coBOL), a teaching compiler developed by the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. All proceeded well until the last assignment of the quarter and I couldn’t get my program to run without it issuing an error and stopping. I checked the code over and over and tried a number of ways to figure out the source of the problem until I stumbled upon an unlikely “fix”. Adding a simple “PRINT” statement at a certain point in the program, for some unknown reason, bypassed the error. But this statement also meant my output didn’t look right. I was sure the problem was with WATBOL and not my program, and with my professor’s permission and support, I converted my program to COBOL, figured out how to create real MVT datasets, and copy WATBOL’s file data to the needed input files. I spent the first week of my summer break in a mad rush to complete this transition and was rewarded when my program, now running in a real COBOL environment, worked perfectly and I was able to turn in that final assignment and rest assured that my diagnosis of a WATBOL error was correct. It was a great lesson to learn early in my career that, even widely used programs like WATBOL can contain bugs and that nobody, and nothing, is perfect.

At The Mead Corporation, I managed the Network Services group which included all voice and data communications, and two stories on the voice side of things stand out as memorable.  I picked up responsibility for the shirt-pocket-sized company phone directory after its previous owner totally botched its production.  I told my group we were going to fix all the issues with the directory to the best of our ability and was greeted with a chorus of “why should we do that?”  Being the boss has the benefit of telling people they’re going to do it anyway and we proceeded to make a list of faults and ideas on how to fix them.  The biggest changes were moving from glossy to uncoated paper to make it easier to write on, going with a spiral binder instead of a glued spine so it could lay flat, and printing it landscape so each person’s information would fit on a single line.  The entire Network team did a QA check to look for errors and found hundreds of wrong names, numbers, and addresses, including one error for a member of our Board of Directors.  We received a lot of positive feedback and my favorite one was that it was obvious that people that travel put out the new directory.  The voice group was rightly very proud of what they had produced and I was proud to be the stubborn cuss that helped them get there.

The other voice story occurred when replacing the corporate phone system.  I had inherited a closet full of handsets that were collecting dust, mostly due to people upgrading to display phones.  I told my group that we were only going to have two handset choices, both beige and having displays, with the smaller one being for most people and the larger one available to call centers or administrative assistants that needed multiple incoming lines.  I was resoundingly told that this could never work as our executives wanted colors to match their office decor.  I persisted, knowing that our executives had more important things on their minds than their phone’s color, but also understood that if I was wrong I could change course and offer more selections, so the actual risk was minimal and the cost-savings of having standardized handsets was worth the try.  When people found they were all getting display phones they were thrilled and no executive ever asked about other colors.  My team members were shocked when nobody cared.  I’m really proud about being able to push changes in the face of the classic “we’ve always done it this way” mentality.  

The last story also occurred at Mead where I was invited to a meeting where I had no idea why I was included, as I didn’t know anything about the business topic being discussed.  After a few minutes it became clear that two people in the meeting had different views on something and instead of just sitting back and tuning out, I decided to challenge myself to see how both people could be right at the same time.  I figured that perhaps there was some assumption they were making differently and maybe I could find it.  So I sat and listened intently to their discussion, slowly figuring out what they were talking about and trying to spot that thing that would explain their differences.  After thirty minutes I thought I had it and it had to do with how the computer system worked and I was happy to be back in my comfort zone.  I listened for another ten minutes to validate that what I thought they didn’t know was the root cause of their disagreement and then asked the group for a few minutes at the whiteboard to present.  On the left side, I drew a diagram and asked the first person if that’s how they thought the system worked, and they said yes.  On the right side, I drew a slightly different diagram and asked the other person if it represented their view and they also said yes.  Then I pointed to the diagram that was correct.  Meeting over.  I was really proud of myself, not just because I successfully figured that out, but the fact that I didn’t waste an hour of my life just passively listening to people talk, but becoming actively engaged and making the assumption that both people were right, which was key to finding the resolution.  

What makes you happy?

A short-term view of happiness would lean towards accomplishing big goals like finishing a marathon, implementing a new computer system, or hosting the family for Christmas dinner.  The energy and focus needed to pull your mind and body together for a few hours, days, or sometimes weeks is a great adrenaline rush and the sense of accomplishment is a thrill.  But happiness shouldn’t be just about the short period of time when you feel you're on top of the world, but a lifestyle choice that is your normal.  Getting there takes getting to know yourself and laying out a course to get you happy most of the time because life’s twists and turns and ups and downs will guarantee that you’ll never be happy all the time.

For myself, I like a balance of social, physical, and intellectual activities.  That balance is achieved over weeks and months, not hours and days, so some days will be a lot more of one than the others, but over the course of a somewhat longer timeframe, things will even out.  

My Myers-Briggs personality profile is an ENTJ, the letters standing for Extrovert, seNsing, Thinking, and Judging, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.  While I’m an extrovert, I’m just barely an extrovert, 52% to 48%, meaning I prefer social activities in moderation.  If I spend a few hours presenting to a group of people, I like to take a few hours off in seclusion.  Conversely, if I spend a morning heads-down in my work, door closed and ignoring the phone, later in the day I’ll roam the halls looking for someone to have a conversation with.  In this dimension, my happiness is some of this and some of that, just in small doses.

The second leg of the happiness triangle is doing something physical.  Running has taken the majority of time in this dimension, but golfing and walking are common also.  In my youth basketball and baseball were prevalent, changing to tennis, racketball, and squash in college.  Running has been my favorite since my junior year in high school and being part of the track team my senior year.  I ran the two-mile race most often and consistently ran those races in just over eleven minutes.  I once ran the last leg of a two-mile relay, getting the baton in third place and managing to keep that position for the exhausting two minutes and seventeen seconds needed to complete my two laps.  I’ve finished one marathon and more half-marathons and 10K races than I can remember.  I ran some of the very first Turkey Trot races in Miamisburg, Ohio, back when just a few hundred die-hards would race, very different than the ten thousand plus that shows up in recent years.  Running easy gave me time to think, running fast or very long distances was a great stress relief and running races fueled the competitive juices.  

The final component is something intellectual and fortunately, my job always provided this in abundance.  As life went on some of that intellectual stimulation switched from writing programs to writing blogs.  I find writing a few pages for a blog or newsletter very much the same as writing a few pages of computer code.  I have to decide what to write, be clear on its purpose, break it down into sections, write down the words, either in English or some computer language, and finally review it a time or two.  Another recent intellectual exercise is doing genealogy research, spending hours combing through online records, visiting cemeteries, and going to libraries in search of clues.  I’ve made about 2,000 contributions to Family Search since I’ve retired and established that permanent record for others to discover is an extra benefit to loving to challenge my intellect.

The real key to all the above is keeping it in balance and perspective, and adapting to the realities of getting older.  The formula is still the same, just the activities are different.

What is one of your favorite holiday memories?

That would be opening Christmas presents when I was a child.  We grew up in a small house in the North Riverdale neighborhood in Dayton and the living room must have been all of maybe eight feet wide by twelve feet deep.  That tiny room was packed with couches, chairs, a TV, a stereo, a Christmas tree loaded with boxes, five kids, and two parents.  Somehow it worked.  

At first, we opened presents on Christmas morning, maybe got to play with them for what seemed all of ten or fifteen minutes, and then had to get dressed, go to Our Lady of Mercy for Christmas Mass, and then downtown for brunch.  We were going half crazy by the time we returned home and had time to play with our presents, but even that was short-lived as we packed back in the station wagon for our trip to Grandpa Otto’s house in Beavercreek for continued festivities.

It took a few years, but our parents finally realized they were packing too much into one day and decided to let us open our presents on Christmas Eve.  We were so excited!  A few hours to play before bedtime and our parents no longer had to fear us waking them up too early on Christmas morning, which, of course, we usually did.  That tradition, Christmas Eve for our family and Christmas Day for parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, etc., continued as I raised my family.  

So if The Ghost of Christmas Past would take me back to a childhood Christmas Eve, I would be reliving my favorite holiday memory.