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.

What are you most thankful for?

 I believe people want the best for their children from the time they say “I just want them to be healthy” and count their fingers and toes immediately after they were born.  It takes time to move on to more important matters and the thousands and thousands of decisions, big and small, that are made as the most precious part of your life grows up.  I believe most parents knock themselves, too harshly at times, for making wrong decisions, missing some event, not saving enough, etc., believing if they were perfect that their children would be too.  I’m not perfect, my parents weren’t, you’re not and my children won’t be either. That’s the reality of life.  Stop worrying about just the here and now and make the best decisions you can to help guide your children to adulthood.  Parenting is a long-term effort and worth everything you put into it.

My children took very different paths as they entered adulthood.  My son entered the work world, has started a few businesses, worked two jobs at times, and busted his butt every day.  My daughter went to college, figured out how to afford her own apartment during school, and went on to the corporate world.  She’s worked every bit as hard.  She married in her twenties and my son, in his forties, appears to finally be ready to take the plunge.  He likes big and fast cars.  She drives a hybrid.  He eats meat,  She’s a vegetarian.  He lifts weights.  She runs marathons.  As different as they are, they share a father that’s very proud of them.  They were both up to all the challenges that life threw at them and they are good, responsible, happy, and successful people.

That’s what I’m most thankful for.  More than anyone can know.

What's a gift you always wished someone would give you?

Anything that they think I’ll like.

Ever since I was a kid I loved buying gifts that I thought a sibling, parent, child, or relative would really like.  I shied away from asking for a list of things they wanted, preferring to think about the person, what they like to do and what type of gift might be something that they would appreciate and perhaps never think of themselves.  My sister said when we were younger that I always bought the most thoughtful gifts.  That’s exactly what I was going for.  I love to see the surprise in their eyes.

To this day I collect ideas all year long for the next birthday or Christmas.  It might be an off-hand comment about something someone had seen or something I notice while browsing in a store.  I try to take notice of the activities they do and look for potential ideas.  I keep a list and add to it as soon as things pop up.  Waiting for last-minute inspiration is not my thing.  Too stressful.

I have a little list of ideas in case people ask.  But at this point in my life if I really want something I buy it for myself.  Getting old has that privilege.  

So surprise me!  That’s what I’m wishing for.

What were your friends like in college?

To say I was a serious student might be a bit of an understatement.  From 1974 to 1977, my days were filled with school, a part-time job (and once two jobs), and a girlfriend, leaving no time to hang out and sometimes nowhere near enough time for a good sleep.  When my girlfriend and I broke up around the same time I started working full-time at Wright State, during what would become a 3-year-long final year, my social group expanded a little bit. 

I moved into a two-bedroom townhouse apartment in Kettering with John Sloan, finally leaving the only home I knew on Ashwood Avenue in Dayton.  John and I met at Wright State in his office after my assembler program crashed the university’s mainframe computer.  My previous assembler programs used an interpreter called ASSIST (Assembler System for Student Instruction and Systems Teaching) which shielded the system from a variety of errors like mine, but for this project, I was using the real IBM assembler and had failed to save and restore the return memory addresses properly.  John showed me how to fix that, but not after I told him it was the IBM operating system’s fault that it crashed, not mine.  Really, how could it not protect itself from a student’s silly mistake?  IBM would later fix their bug.

I started working part-time at the university as a student maintenance programmer, having built enough of a reputation in COBOL to get me noticed.  That skill began as a between-semester challenge when my CS300 program would not work properly and I convinced the professor it was an error in WATBOL, the COBOL interpreter from the University of Waterloo in Canada.  I proposed to convert my program from WATBOL to full COBOL, and had to figure out how to compile, link, and execute it, and convert all the required WATBOL input and output files to standard COBOL.  This was not at all a trivial exercise and it took a wild week of learning and trial-and-error before I could turn in a successful execution of my program.  

Working for the university had perks, a desk in an office inside the I.T. department, and the use of an IBM 3270 terminal, replacing the use of punch cards.  I had a place to drop off books, study in peace, and learn from the professionals.  But it did keep me away from other students most of the time, limiting the number of friends I would make.  But it did lead to meeting and becoming lifelong friends with Jim Nicholas, who was their systems programmer and would hire me in 1977 as his sidekick.  Jim left for the Mead Corporation a couple of years later, where I would reconnect with him in 1981 to continue our journey together.

The only real group of people I hung out with was a subset of my peer computer science students that were into dancing.  The group took advantage of Wright State’s liberal arts college to take two classes of ballroom dance, one class of disco dancing, and hit the occasional dance club on a weekend.  I like to refer to ballroom dance as the most fun you can have with your clothes on.  Why this bunch of computer science students, usually referred to as introverts with no social skills, gravitated to dancing is still a mystery, but I cherish those times and their memories.

How is life different today compared to when you were a child?

It might take a book to describe all the things that are different now than fifty or more years ago.  The ones listed here are just those that jumped from my head first.  Almost everything today is better now, but I’ll start with the one that I am grateful to call my childhood.

My world was one of the stay-at-home moms, Dad home from work promptly at 5:30 pm, a small house for seven people, and what seemed to be a large backyard, at least big enough to play whiffle ball and climb its two trees.  Although not ours, most streets in the neighborhood had alleys to access garages, mount basketball hoops, and throw footballs and baseballs without the dangers of the open street.  That was particularly true on Ashwood Avenue in North Dayton, as our street was one of the few nearby that provided a cut-through alternative to the heavily traveled Siebenthaler Avenue from both Main Street and Riverside Drive.  It was not unusual to wander the neighborhood on bikes looking for adventure or make the two-mile trek to play three hours of Putt-Putt golf for sixty cents on an early Saturday morning, starting before my parents woke up.  I would ride three miles on my bike to and from baseball practice.  My parents would attend one game per year and I was grateful.  I played because I liked the games, not for attention.  None of the above is the norm these days. 

Cars were very different in the 1960s.  Seat belts were just starting to be mandatory equipment.  Not the lap-and-chest variety used today, just a skinny lap belt.  Most people hated them and refused to wear them.  Car batteries were a common maintenance item and you had to make sure they were filled to the proper level with distilled water.  Sealed batteries would come later.  Car tires went flat quite a bit, either from just losing air to nail punctures and frayed sidewalls.  Everyone knew to watch them closely and everyone knew how to fill them with air and how to mount a spare.  Travel was viewed as a bit of a gamble.  We hardly give it a second thought today.

I grew up with one small, black-and-white television in a corner of the living room.  As the number of younger siblings grew, the TV was moved into the fireplace, replacing the hearth and providing a better viewing angle to everyone.  My Dad was a master at replacing its tubes, taking them up to Victor's drug store, testing them out, buying the right replacement, and getting them plugged back in and the set running again.  I eventually bought myself a very small television for my bedroom with money I saved from my Dayton Daily News paper route.  Still black-and-white, but all to myself.  My parents didn’t have a color TV until the five of us kids pitched in and bought one for them.  I was probably about twenty-two years old when that happened.  That’s was about the same time I came to understand the Wizard of Oz reference to the “horse of a different color.”  That horse actually changed colors as it moved through the Emerald City.  We also only had three VHF channels, ABC, CBS, and NBC, we could tune into.  It would be a few years later before I was able to watch Star Trek.  Nowadays we stream HD content from hundreds of sources to screens as small as a few inches to massive 65” and larger flat screens.  

Smoking was a big thing back in my childhood and my parents lit up with the rest of them.  Most Sundays we would drive over to my grandfather Otto’s house in Beavercreek and the adults would be inside puffing away while my siblings and cousins played outside, even in the dead of winter.  As much as we tried to convince them how badly they smelled, they continued until my mother had to give it up for health reasons.  Then she understood what we knew for years, but even she couldn’t convince my Dad to stop.  A year or two after Mom passed he met Alice and after she said the cigarette smell was disgusting, he stopped cold turkey.  Smoking isn’t allowed almost anywhere inside today and not having people smoke on airplanes is particularly great.  Cigarettes are a habit I’m glad I never started.

Finally, needles are so much better today.  Going to the doctor’s office, for whether a childhood vaccine or a shot of penicillin when I was sick, the jab of yesteryear was pure pain.  So was getting novocaine at the dentist before getting a cavity filled.  The gripping fear of the coming pain was almost as bad as the shot itself.  But over the years the needles got smaller and the stab hurt less and less.  Now it’s almost not noticeable and the dread is gone.  I might be more grateful for this progress than any of the others.