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.

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.

 

Would you prefer to have an adventure, or read about one?

While there are a few adventures I would prefer to read about, for example, anything that triggers my selective fear of heights, having an adventure is far better.  How to get those adventures takes some thought, which I’ll demonstrate with a couple of examples.

My first trip to Europe is one type of adventure, one where you’re so completely thrown into a new environment that it’s overwhelming.  When Jeff and I landed in Paris we picked up our rental car, destined for our hotel.  We did a half-circle around the périphérique, exiting at the proper spot, landing on the streets of Paris without a clue where the street signs were located.  Using our map and counting intersections and roundabouts, we miraculously found the hotel.  After checking in we decided to walk to the Eiffel Tower, again figuring to use our obviously excellent map skills to locate.  After a few blocks, we noticed that the street signs are located on the sides of the buildings, about ten feet or so off the ground.  That discovered, we continued our journey to the tower and decided to buy a couple of bottles of water.  We ordered “deux eau”, or “two water”.  In rapid-fire French, the lady behind the counter replied with something like “gasse, non-gasse?”  At first I had no clue, but it only took a few seconds to deduce within the context of the situation that she was asking if we wanted sparkling or still water.  I replied “non-gasse”, Jeff held out some money so she could pick out what she needed, and we were on our way.  After a couple of days, I wanted nothing more than to fly back to my familiar, comfortable home.  On the third day, we were driven to Châteauroux, a city in south-central France, for a business meeting and towards the end, we were asked to help solve a computer problem involving a modem.  With the help of a translator, and probably a ton of good fortune, we were able to resolve the issue.  On the way back to Paris, my apprehension subsided and I was looking forward to the rest of the trip.  That’s good because the next day involved a meeting in Bristol, England and ended at a hotel bar in Vienna, Austria.  A longer story for another time.  Getting thrown into a totally unfamiliar environment and fighting your way through it will inevitably end in memorable adventures.

I learned a lesson about over-planning trips through what I first thought was an unfortunate event.  I was by myself in Napa Valley on a Friday day off and I had a list of wineries I wanted to visit.  But a network problem at work kept me on the phone all morning and by the time I was able to break free, more than half the day was shot.  Looking at my list, I decided I would first go to the ZD winery and taste their excellent chardonnays.  Having little time left, I needed to eliminate as much travel time as possible, so I asked the lady that poured the samples for a nearby recommendation.  I went to that unfamiliar winery, did a tasting, and asked for more recommendations.  This server pulled out a Napa map and began circling her choices.  She even called one of the wineries to see when they were going to close.  I followed one recommendation after another until the day was done then drove back to the hotel, reflecting on just how wonderful my day had unexpectedly become.  From that moment on, I don’t plan a trip, wine country or not, with a schedule that leaves no room for adventure.  Now a wine trip starts with what type of wine (e.g. merlot, champagne) we’re going to focus on, and each day starts with a scheduled, private tasting around 10:00 am in the direction we want to travel.  From there the rest just happens from tastings to lunch to dinner.  Leaving time for adventures was a lesson well-learned.

What are some of your favorite smells?

I like many aromas but some of the best are the ones that can only be truly appreciated when they are totally immersive, when every breath brings another wave and you’re compelled to breathe through your nose.  I played golf years ago in Florida on a course that doubled as an orange grove.  The sweet smell of fresh-squeezed oranges was everywhere.  Then on my first visit to the Hawaiian island of Maui, I walked out of the hotel room to be greeted with the smell of bananas and noticed the banana trees were planted all over.  Finally, we took the lavender tour at Matanzas Creek Winery in the Bennett Valley region of Sonoma.  The stroll through lavender fields was awesome and when we ended the tour at the drying barn’s open barrels of lavender seeds, the aroma was overpoweringly delightful.

Other smells are not in-and-of-themselves pleasing, however, they invoke a happy memory or perhaps just a feeling of a happy memory.  The smell of certain burning plastics brings back one of those happy feelings.  I seem to faintly recall a toy, sort of a boy’s version of an Easy-bake oven, that molded plastic into various shapes.  I have no memory of what I made or what I used it for, it’s just a feeling, but obviously a very good one.  Others I recall quite vividly.  I used to love to assemble model airplanes, meticulously gluing together dozens of parts.  The smell of that type of glue takes me back and makes me smile.

Perhaps an odd observation, but I find myself sniffing first when meeting people or turning the corner into a new room.  Scents travel and often are the first sense we can employ to gain a little recognizance ahead of an unfamiliar situation.  This might be a primal reflex, but I’m not an expert.  I’ve just caught myself over and over sniffing first and seeing, touching, or hearing later.  Maybe it’s just me, but it’s what I do.

Walking in the front door of the house and being greeted by waves of baking bread or a Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing dinner are awesome aromas.  Waking up to the fragrance of hot cinnamon rolls fresh from the oven. The first inhalations from a morning’s freshly brewed coffee.  

During COVID I lost my sense of smell for a few days.  Only when you’re missing something can you really appreciate how much you treasure it.  Coffee was just warm brown water, losing all of its appeals without its scent.  I hope that never happens again.

 

If you could thank anyone, who would you thank and why?

That would be a very long list of family, founding fathers, entrepreneurs, and managers that led me to where I am today.  From my German immigrant ancestors, the writers of the Constitution, computer hardware and software pioneers to those people that gave me a chance and trusted I would deliver.  But I give the nod to the question posed to Joseph Gayetty of New York and his 1857 introduction of a product I’m so thankful I don’t live without.

The 2020 pandemic caused panic buying of everything from cans of Spam to packets of yeast to lots of paper products.  It made everyone step back for a minute and decide what they could not live without.  While Spam is not considered by many, except myself and the entire state of Hawai’i, a delicacy, it’s shelf-stable for 3-5 years.  I wonder who has hundreds of cans they now regret buying.  Why yeast was gone is a mystery; it’s not like most people bake bread all that often.  Maybe the thought was you could make your own pizza dough and avoid contact with an infected delivery driver.   Paper products make sense, particularly toilet paper, for obvious reasons, and maybe tissues for blowing all the feared COVID snot from your nose.  Stocking up on paper towels, while I use them quite a bit, should have been a lower priority, but those were scarce also.  Maybe a poorer substitute for TP?  Trying to figure out how people think (or don’t) is not terribly useful in the grand scheme of life.

Back to Mr. Gayetty.  He is credited with introducing the aforementioned toilet paper to America.  You can read up on all the ways we cleansed ourselves before then, but none of them are in any way appealing.  Perhaps the best and most common dual-purpose idea was the Farmers’ Almanac, which for over one hundred years, was used for both reading and wiping.  Readers would punch holes in the corner of the publication so it could be hung next to the “throne”.  In 1919, the publishers began punching a hole in the upper-left-hand corner to help out.

Like many of the world’s greatest inventions, it took time to get it right.  Gayetty’s sheets would take thirty-three more years to become the now-familiar perforated rolls and another forty years after that before they were manufactured without any splinters.  Yikes!  

Thank you, Joseph Garrity, for the most indispensable product in my life. 

What have you changed your mind about over the years?

Swiss cheese.  That’s the first thing that came to mind.  When I was a kid, Swiss cheese smelled so bad I wouldn’t get close to it much less add it to my sandwich.  I avoided Swiss cheese until my thirties and only then due to an experience in Paris, France.  My co-worker Jeff and I were sitting out at a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées and he ordered us a plate of cheeses to go with our glasses of wine.  The cheese was fabulous and far “stinkier” than the Swiss of my youth.  I realized that my taste buds had changed, or perhaps weakened, over time, along with the rest of me, and I needed to revisit tastes, smells, sounds, etc. to see what else my older self now appreciated.  Getting older is the first key component of mind changing.

People.  Like most people I grew up in a sheltered environment, meaning people that were raised in similar economic, religious, and moral backgrounds.  Not having a greater perspective, I naturally thought most people were more or less like me.  While I think I had a great childhood, it didn’t prepare me for the greater world.  I have since learned, generally the hard way, that this absolutely not true.  There are some really bad and stupid people in this world.  There are reckless drivers weaving their way at one hundred miles per hour through four lanes of traffic.  There are people that seemingly have no control of their emotions or their actions.  At a recent petit jury selection, where about forty people were present, randomly selected from throughout our county, maybe one or two others dressed in anything that I thought was appropriate.   Most looked like they were pulled for a lineup.  I no longer just think someone will be anything like me.  I make no assumptions.  Getting experiences outside your little world changes your mind about things.  Lots of things.

Left-handed.  I grew up right-handed where the logical, left side of your brain is dominant.  But along the course of life, I began to perform some tasks left-handed.  It started quite logically.  If I could eat with a fork in my left hand, I could simultaneously use a knife with my right hand and avoid all that wasted switching time.  This reduced the time it took to eat and get excused from the table to resume playing or watching a TV show.  It takes a bit of practice to get that other hand to cooperate, but it’s really not that bad.  I became a switch-hitter in baseball and could shoot baskets with either hand.  I would throw a baseball to my daughter right-handed, but left-handed to my son. Sometime in mid-life, I decided to use my computer mouse with my left hand, really improving its fine motor skills.  For the most part, I tend to use whichever hand is closest or has a better angle.  I believe this constant drive to be ambidextrous fundamentally changed my mind, bringing out the right brain’s more creative side and achieving a better balance.  Perhaps this, more than the others, has literally “changed my mind”.

What is your definition of love?

Like many other powerful words in the English language, love has been used to describe those strong feelings you have about your football team, pair of jeans, or flavor of ice cream.  That description of “love” is better described as “I really like this one the most”.  But my definition treats it as a noun, not a verb, and is a real thing that lives deep inside you.

I believe love is formed when a person opens their heart to another and lets that person become a part of them.  Open long enough and carefully nurtured, that person becomes an internal part of you, as important, if not more, than yourself.  You want for them everything you want for yourself, safety, happiness, security, and more.  You will put yourself in danger so they’re not.  You’ll put their feelings ahead of yours.  They become a part of you.  When you lose them, it’s unbearable, at least for a while, because you’ve lost a part of yourself, not just them, and you miss that dearly.  

Are you more like your father or your mother? In what ways?

This is a really tough question.  I clearly look like an Otto, my mother’s side of the family, as does my sister and youngest brother.  I got my hairline from my grandfather Maurice Otto.  My Dad was six foot tall, had dark hair, and weighed a constant 150 pounds, none of which describes me at all.  My mother was about 5’2”, had blond/brunette hair, liked Manhattans, and was a frequent visitor to her chiropractor.  So while I’m 5’9”, the rest is a perfect fit.

My Dad was a pretty smart man, being an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Dayton.  I think I have similar smarts, at least those kinds of smarts.  My SAT scores for math and science were right at the top, calculus was my favorite college course, I dropped philosophy and couldn’t manage better than a “B” in English.  Computers and programming came easily, all that logical stuff fit neatly inside my brain.  

As I was raising kids I came to the realization that Dad primarily taught me to be responsible and my Mom taught me to be happy.  To me, being responsible is how you treat other people, and being happy is how you treat yourself.  They are not opposites but work together.  I don’t see how you can truly be happy if you treat others badly, but living your life solely for others without ever considering yourself is foolish.  That balance is who I think I’ve become.

By the slimmest of margins, I think I’m a bit more like my mother.  That probably wasn’t true in my 20s and 30s, but as I grew older, Mom’s wisdom was the guiding light I used to navigate all sorts of personal and professional challenges.  

Best of all, I had both of them.  And I miss them dearly, even after all these years.

 

What was your best boss like?

I’ve had the fortune of working for not only some very excellent bosses throughout my career but also the companies themselves.  The relatively few moments I spent in malfunctioning companies made me appreciate how building an organization that is morally rich is really hard but the benefits to its employees and customers are enormous.  You’re engaged, excited to start another day at work, and know you make a real difference.  These companies listen more than they talk, push decision-making down to the people that know best, and never push their responsibilities or blame on others.  My best bosses exemplified these attributes.  

Most of the CIOs I reported to did not have technical backgrounds but understood it well enough to make good decisions.  The CIOs that did understand Information Technology knew they weren’t the experts but recognized when the experts did not appreciate the bigger picture.  Their biggest value was knowing the right people throughout senior leadership, what was important to them, cultivating relationships, and understanding the politics.  This was critical as the 1980s and 1990s were filled with centralizing data centers, consolidating software, and combining staff to reduce costs.   Standardizing the technology enabled the organization to work together instead of being siloed.  Imagine a corporation with a dozen email systems, multiple domain names, and then trying to sync it all together.  Companies with good CIOs brought email and many other disparate technologies stacks together more quickly and they benefitted sooner.

The best bosses are easy to recognize.  They are the ones that you remain in contact with and look forward to the next time together.  Friends for life.

What is the longest project you have ever worked on?

Mead Corporation’s implementation of the SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system began in the year 2000 with a four-year timeline and a $125 million budget.  Mead had looked at ERP systems a couple of times earlier in the 1990s and decided then that the company wasn’t culturally ready for a single, process-oriented system like SAP.  But late in the 1990s, multiple divisions began requesting funds to implement their own ERPs, different ones, of course, and corporate had already purchased an ERP called PeopleSoft, so another look was taken and SAP was the ultimate decision.

The key focus of the project was change management, from executive management to division leadership to the employees that would transact in SAP every day.  Four years is not a long time to implement a $4 billion company and executives tend to lose their enthusiasm towards the end.  To jumpstart the project, a preconfigured SAP system was purchased from Monsanto, the chemical company, which was also in a continuous process manufacturing business.  Eighty percent of what Monsanto configured for “Source and Support” processes, for example, accounting, finance, and purchasing was adopted by Mead and led to the first implementation only nine months after the project launched.  That implementation was at the Coated Board division, selected because it produced paper, a critical proving ground to show that SAP would work in our core paper businesses, but also less risky than the larger and more complex white paper business.  After implementing Source & Support, the project would follow up a few months later with the “Order Management” processes, for example, accepting orders, manufacturing and shipping the products, and collecting money.  All this was supported by process training, local expert (“Super Users”) training, and finally just-in-time end-user training.  We were within a year of finishing the project when the MeadWestvaco merger occurred, extending the timeline a couple of years, but at that time I took on the newly-created Chief Technology Officer role, and while still involved, I was no longer officially on the project.

My role during the project was the SAP Technology Director, having the BASIS, ABAP, and Data teams reporting to me, and I reported to the Vice-President in charge of the SAP project with a dotted-line reporting relationship to the CIO, my previous manager.  The BASIS team was responsible for the installation and support of the core SAP software, the ABAP team wrote programs, interfaces, and reports for the team, and the Data team extracted, cleansed, and loaded data from legacy applications into SAP.  I worked a lot with the I.T. organization and to meet the project’s aggressive timeline we had to use what we knew best, IBM mainframes, the DB2 database management system (DBMS), and Windows servers.  The “usual” technology stack back then was an Oracle DBMS on large UNIX servers, but we had almost nobody on staff familiar with those, much less an expert.  To support the large DB2 virtual memory requirement for SAP, Mead bought three of the first 64-bit mainframes that IBM rolled off their production line, and while that was a somewhat risky move, we encountered only a few manageable issues.  We had to figure out how to manage an application with over 100,000 tables and indexes.  We had to move to an integrated, once-a-month, four-hour data center outage, perhaps the most difficult change management effort.  We had to create real-time, queued, and batch integration architectures and address locking and performance issues.  

It was a very energy-filled, fast-paced, and continually challenging project which resulted in lots of great memories and lasting relationships.  

 

What do you consider one of your greatest achievements in life?

Completing the 1985 Nationwide/Bank One Marathon in Columbus, Ohio stands above the rest.  While my time of three hours, fifty minutes, and 22 seconds is nowhere close to being great, it put me at 177th place in the group of 509 men in the 30-34 age group, almost to the top third in the field.  

The marathon is the only running event where I would stand at the starting line and wonder if I would complete the race today.  The question at the beginning of half-marathons or shorter races was how long would it take me to finish.  I attempted three marathons in my early thirties and only completed the 1985 start.  The other two I stopped around seventeen miles due to physical problems.  The first “failure” was due to improper running shorts causing a chafing issue.  The other one was knee pain that was bad enough to make me worry if continuing to run would cause permanent damage.  But in all three races, I was in great physical condition and had the super-low body-mass index of a marathoner.  But a marathon, as I learned the tough way, is just as much a test of mental toughness as it is being in shape.

The 1985 race was ideal for me.  The temperature began in the upper 60s and rose steadily to the upper 70s.  While most people would like it at least ten degrees cooler, I’ve always liked the warmer weather.  I think my muscles like being warm and staying loose.  The race started out in the usual fashion, the singing of the national anthem, the single gunshot, and waiting until the pack in front started to move.  First a walk, then a slow jog, and as the pack spread apart, into race pace.  Like me, the other middle-of-the-pack runners knew we needed to “take it easy” for the first half of the race, and on this day, that was a pace of around 7:15 per mile, which at the halfway mark I knew was a mistake and that’s when the mental toughness had to take over.  For the next seven miles, I had to run at a much-reduced pace, walk and drink a full cup of water at every opportunity.  When I hit the 17-mile mark and the course turned east away from downtown Columbus, I had to push through the desire to call it quits.  But at the 20-mile sign, when I realized that I had “only” 6.2 miles to go, the length of a 10K race, I knew I could make it and the doubts were lifted.  While I continued to run cautiously, noting multiple runners pulling up with leg cramps from dehydration, I didn’t walk the rest of the way.  Each mile crept by as I tried to run as smoothly as possible.  Finally, the finish line was in sight.  Unlike the shorter races, I had no final kick at the end.  More than just wanting not to cramp up, I was out of gas.  But as I crossed the finish line, and out of nowhere, I jumped as high as I could and pumped my fist in victory.  As I was suspended in the air, I realized that this was probably the dumbest thing I could have done and prayed that my legs wouldn’t buckle or a hamstring pop on landing.  As my feet made contact with the ground I felt muscles on the edge of failure, but they held.  I felt like I had run my entire life and this was the first time I ever stopped.  I also realized that “I did it” and that could never be taken away from me.  

This achievement took it all.  Many months of training, usually alone, with many runs of sixteen or more miles, in the cold of winter and the heat of summer.  Overcoming the doubts, pushing through the countless exhausting training runs, and getting back out there the next day to do it again.  That just gets you to the starting line.  The battle has just begun.  You have to give it everything, head to toe, to claim victory.  I did that once.  Can’t take it from me.