Writings of a Mad Man
Some Quotable Quotes
"I Always knew that one day I
would take this road but
yesterday I did not know today
would be the day."
----------------Nagarjuna
----------------------------------------------------------------------
When one tugs at a single
thing in
nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
----------------------John Muir
--------------------------------------------------------------
Norbert Blum on politics:
"There are good kings and bad kings".
--------------------------------------------------------
"Excuse me, madam, I thought you were a trout Stream"
"I'm Not", she said.
- Richard
Brautigan
--------------------------------------------------
+ "If you are happy....It will pass" +
+ "If you are sad......It will pass" +
+ ...Nagasena +
----------------------------------------------------
It takes billions and billions of assholes to make up a single black
hole.
Astronomer Carl Fagan
---------------------------------------------------
History is an evil force, - me
--------------------------------------------------
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of
his enemies. -Gustave Flaubert
----------------------------------------------------
A bit of my philosophy: Some people believe that animals are
not conscious like us. What a ridiculous notion. They believe that animals have
no feelings and that everything they do is by instinct. Simple observation
tells me otherwise. They are made from the same fabric as we are. They evolved
from the same beginning. They are capable of enjoying life and fear death. The
survival of a species depends on a fear of death. It is a product of evolution.
The notion that evolution is only a theory is infantile. I’m sure that my dog
loves me. I once became friends with a raccoon.
Lastly, I am sure that the earth itself is alive and the universe is
God.
The Emerging Poet
After spending a night at Orleans, I was reminded of a poem that I
wrote at the Orleans School, preserved by Mrs. Estey, found in her
papers after her death and passed to me through her daughter, a friend
of my sister Peg. At that time I went under the name of Burr Arthur
<Buster> Cook which is signed on the original document along with
my age which was 7 years. Under the signature is the inscription:
"Beast powet in U.S.A.". This is the sum and substance of any evidence,
in existence, that I did anything in school. It disputes the claim of
the Board of Education, that I did nothing at all in school [photo].
The title of my poem is "My Itchen" and is included here in the
original spelling, a skill that did not improve until I started using a
computer and Word Processor with spelling checker.
My itchen
I whas itchen in the kitchen
while you was pitchen
the ball
in the hall
while you was pitchen
the ball
in the hall
it started to cry
cy yippiey
and that is the story
of my itch itch itchen
in the citch citch citchen
riten by Burr Arthur Cook
Beast powet in the U.S.A.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Here is the original manuscript :
SCHOOL
DAZE
Before
I was old enough to
go to school
I could not wait. I
envied the older children of the family who went off each day
to school. I remember thinking that school must be fun, only
the more mature get to go. I used to look at pictures in the
Book of Knowledge. We had a very old set of these books. I
was fascinated by the pictures and drawings of the solar
system in these books and looked forward to learning of these
things in school.
This was the way I approached my first day at school. I was
disappointed to find that the assignments had to do with
things that I had already learned from my older siblings,
such as, the alphabet, the colors and other pretty boring
stuff. I performed just enough of this work to ward off
punishments such as sitting in the coat closet for hours on
end with the boots and overcoats, or sitting in the corner of
the room where I first contemplated the properties of
triangular shapes.
I hated school. After my first year I knew that I had to
resist whatever it was they were trying to make of me. I
passed the first and second grades without incident, but
rarely had any papers or reports to bring home that would be
worthy of praise. Since my brothers and sisters got the
report cards on the same day as I, it would be difficult to
ignore them, which would have been my preference. My parents
were blessed with adequate IQ levels, and saw no reason why
their offspring wouldn't be the same. My reports were perused
and not much was said to me about it. However, conversations
took place between my parents and teachers, principal of the
parent school in Clifton Springs as well as the
Superintendent of Schools.
In the third grade I severed my relationship with schools and
withdrew. I refused to do anything at all. I remember
thinking, at that time, that I had it made. I was punished at
school by being made to stay after the rest went home. It
didn't matter, however, since I had found a way to direct my
thoughts and escape from their prison. I thought a lot of the
war, which was in full swing, and imagined myself finding
ways to assassinate Adolph Hitler or his Japanese equivalent.
I was well educated when it came to identifying all types of
aircraft, ours and theirs, as well as ships at sea and
artillery in the field. I knew the careers of Eisenhower,
Patton, McArthur, Rommel, Gene Autry and Charlie McCarthy. I
was able to think about these things rather than the long
division, which I detested. To my amazement, not much
punishment was dealt out at home on this matter. Instead, I
was taken to medicine men, mostly on pressure from the school
system. I remember one Doctor, a friend of my Grandfather, in
Utica, who remarked that I looked healthy and that he himself
had never been fond of school. In the public schools of today
I would have been treated as learning disabled and sent to
special classes. I don't know how I would have reacted to
that.
On days that I could not make it to school, because of one of
the numerous physical complaints I concocted, I was sometimes
given the choice of attending school or accompanying my
father and assisting him in his work as an independent
electrical contractor. These field trips were easier to
handle, than school. They usually took us to various cow
barns around the county and chicken coops and sometimes a
warm house. During these times I learned a lot about
electricity without which I never would have entered the
computer field and my life would have been much different.
Years later, my son Jim worked for my father for a period
long enough to learn several building trades which has kept
bread on the table for both of my sons and still does.
I don't have a lot of memories of school. I was pretty
successful at shutting it out. My younger brother, David
passed me by and wound up ahead of me and Jim was not far
behind. Somehow, I managed to be promoted from grade school
with the comment that I didn't earn it but, perhaps a
different teacher might help. It didn't. I became more
imaginative at finding ways to avoid going to school at all.
I recall that I found myself in an Algebra class taught by
Bob Kloepfel. Whenever I attended school, which I did
sometimes just to maintain relationships with friends that I
formed there, Bob Kloepfel would call on me to solve equations
on the black board. He seemed to enjoy watching me solve the
problem correctly, while others in the class could not, even
though I never did a single assignment for the class. Doc
Robbins, the agriculture teacher, liked to have discussions
with me, and I generally enjoyed his company. An English
teacher, Mrs. Spangle once praised my journalistic
capabilities when I decided one day to write an essay in
class. Mr. Foster, a shop teacher, enjoyed working with me
when I did a valve job on a Briggs and Stratton engine in his
class. It was too late for any of these people to reach me. I
was too far behind and involved myself in school only when
they discussed something that interested me. I recall, one
time, showing the science teacher the relationship between
the earth, moon, sun and planets and drawing diagrams on the
board in illustration. I know that he was impressed. His name
was Richard Kishler. He became furious with me when I called
him by his first name one time.
I was not good at sports and still do not know the rules of
the games of baseball, football and basketball. I was able to
run and jump and thus took part in track and field events
until someone decided that attending school was a requirement
for participation.
One day, in the early sixties, I dropped in at the BOCES
computer center, then on main street in Clifton Springs,
where Bob Kloepfel, my ex Math teacher, was in charge. He was
happy to see me but, informed me that he was having
difficulty getting the bugs out of a computer program he had
just written. I wound up spending the afternoon with him and
to his surprised, I fixed all his program problems for him
and showed him some useful tricks on the IBM 1401 computer.
Two
things in my life
caused a turning point. One was working
in
a very boring place,
sort of a continuation of my school
experience.
I was working,
in the 50s, for Chevron Oil
Company,
as a general
maintenance man, and getting by. The
job
was not difficult. It
required knowledge of general
construction
skills
including electrical and plumbing skills.
The
second thing,
precipitated by the first, was getting
involved
in amateur radio,
and taking a correspondence course
in
general electronics. An
FCC license opened doors for me
and
got me into companies
like Univac, IBM and Honeywell
Bull
where computers
became my area of expertise.
Prior
to my first day at
school my name was Buster. That is
the
only named I had. I
was very disappointed to find that
the
teacher would have no
part of calling me by my real name
and
insisted on calling me
Burr Arthur Cook. I had trouble
saying
this name and often
people thought that it was
Brarther
Cook.
One
of my earliest
memories is of an incident that took place
while
I was busy watching
a crew of men working on the road
that
passed our house. One
of the workman looked my way and
said
"hey Buster, how
about getting me a glass of water". It
was
a hot day and the
request seemed reasonable, so I went
into
the house to pump a
glass of water for him. While I
worked
the pump handle
filling the glass I casually asked my
mother
if she knew the man
in the road waiting for the water.
She
looked out and said
that she did not know him and asked
why
I thought that she
should know this man. I replied that
he,
somehow, had known my
name, Buster.
My
favorite books, at that
time, were "Buster Bear" and
"Bobby
Coon" both of which
my mother would read to me.
Sometimes
she would read
books to the entire family in the
evenings.
She would read a
chapter each night and then we
kids
would beg her to read
another before bedtime. The Uncle
Wriggly
books were
favorites at those times as well as Peter
Rabbit.
I
started going to movies
at an early age. My older brother
took
me a lot and we would
usually walk 3 or four miles to
see
Tarzan or Gene Autry
or Hop along Cassidy (not sure of
that
spelling). These were
my heroes. Later, the movies were
mostly
about the war which
provided adequate heroes.
There
were two stores in Orleans
at that
time. Both were
heated
by wood stoves in
winter. On winter days and summer
nights
Avery Hollenbeck's
store was a gathering place for
local
farmers and retired
men. They discussed crop prices,
politics
and local gossip.
I began stopping there, at first,
while
running errands for
my parents, but soon started
dropping
in there on my
own when I knew that the men were
gathered
there. I was well
accepted by this group and, in
fact,
they would dig into
their pockets and buy candy and
cakes
for me. I did not
fully understand at the time why
these
men enjoyed my
company so much. Whenever I arrived at
the
store they seemed to
be happy; laughing and grinning and
winking
as one after the
other would reach in their pockets
for
change and saying
"wouldn't you like one of these candy
bars
here?". I always said
yes and while I would be eating
that,
another would say
"how about one of these pies over
here?"
and I would shake
my head in a yes. They always bought
me
a Hires Root Beer to
wash it all down and the laughter
became
louder and louder
as I ate cookies, cake, pies,
bananas
and candy as long
as they wished to carry on. The
men
always gave up first,
thinking that I might explode.
They
were amazed at my
capacity and their eyes opened wider
with
each item that I ate,
but I was always willing to eat
one
more. When asked, I
would say yes I have had my supper
before
coming to the store. This worked so well in
Hollenbeck's
store
that I started dropping in at Fabrizi's
store and found the
same
kind of reception. I never got a stomach
ache although
some of the
men
seemed to become
concerned sometimes. One time I wanted
to
visit the store, but
the snow was very deep. I had no
boots
that were adequate
so I put on my older brothers boots
and
trucked on over there,
by way of the foot bridge. The
boots
were farmers type
knee boots, but on me they came all
the
way up to the groin,
which made it difficult to maneuver
through
the snow. When I
arrived at Hollenbeck's store all
the
men were there. John
Runyun, Halsey Smith, Avery
Hollenbeck
and several
others. They looked at my oversized
boots
and laughed even
more than usual. One asked if they
pinched
my feet. Avery
replied that I was pinching something
else,
and all laughed
loudly. It was a long time before I
realized
what they meant
and worse yet that they were right.
Anyway
I waddled home in
these boots with a full stomach.
One
time I was bringing a
loaf of bread home from the store
when
some of our chickens
jumped on me and started eating the
bread.
I made it home with
only half a loaf. I guess it was
only
fair since we later
ate the chickens. We had one large
rooster
in the flock that
always chased me after that
whenever
I got too close.
I would run to the footbridge as
the
rooster was too
chicken to enter the bridge which had
cracks
between the floor
boards. I have never been fond of
chickens
from then on. We
raised turkeys for several years,
but
I was never attacked
by a turkey.
-----------------------------------------------------
Work History
The following several pages describe my work
history in
the
Computer field. It will be meaningless to a
non computer
person. I just happened to be thinking of work
today.
My three page Resume has always contained some
of my most
creative writing.
RESUME
Burr Cook PHONE:(315)299-7706
44 Phelps Street
Lyons, New York 14489
BACKGROUND SUMMARY:
* Over 25 years experience in data processing
including
four
years of recent experience with ORACLE.
* Experience in multiple roles such as
programmer/analyst,
trainer, technical consultant, DBA, and
database
designer.
* Familiar with structured methodologies and
automated
tools
for modeling, normalizing and documenting
databases.
* Experienced with the following ORACLE tools:
SQL*PLUS
SQL*DBA
SQL*REPORT (RPT PROGRAMMING)
SQL*REPORTWRITER
SQL*FORMS 2.3 and 3.0
SQL*MENU
SQL*LOADER and ODL
IMPORT/EXPORT
PRO*COBOL
PL/SQL
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
o Independent Consultant - September 1987 to
Present
Developed and presented training seminars on
ORACLE
releases 4.1,
5.1A, 5.1B and 6.0. Presented courses on
ORACLE for Xerox
Corporation, Eastman Kodak Company,
Datamation, Buffalo
Board
of Education as well as for the Bull users
groups NAHU
and HLSUA.
This is a continuing part time project.
Developed and implemented an ORACLE
transportation
(busing)
application for the Buffalo Public School
System. Also
created ORACLE applications for the budget
office and
for the
Magnet School program using a Bull DPS-6 and
DPS-7000
system.
The bulk of the development was done on an IBM
AT and
ported
to the mainframe computers.
Acted as technical consultant and DBA for a
project to
convert
a large school district accounting system from
a
Honeywell
DPS-8 to a DPS-7000 environment. The system
uses an
IDS/II
database and TDS/COBOL TP routines. Also
developed on
line IQS
queries to integrate payroll with the above
system.
Developed and presented training courses on
IDS/II, TDS,
IQS,
DM6 TP and other topics for various Bull
computer users.
Installed PC XT and AT software for various
user groups.
Packages
included ORACLE, dBASE II/III, TURBO PASCAL,
LOTUS 123,
WORD
PERFECT, AUTOCAD, EASYLAN, FASTGRAPHS,
FORMTOOL,
MULTIMATE,
FRAMEWORK II, PROJECT WORKBENCH, RM COBOL,
SMARTCOM II,
SIDEKICK
and MicroSoft WORD. Created a medical office
automation
system
using dBASE III and a property management
system using
dBASE II.
Coded Accounts Payable programs using
Burroughs COBOL
and DMSII.
o Senior Education Specialist at Honeywell
Bull - 6/78
to 9/87
Developed and taught customer and internal
training
seminars.
Subjects included IDS/II (a CODASYL database),
TDS/TP,
IQS/AZ7
and ORACLE for DPS-6 and DPS-7 systems as well
as MS-DOS
and
micro Database seminars.
Consulted with customers in support of
Honeywell
software products
including on line TDS COBOL, IDS/II, IQS, AZ7
and
ORACLE. On one
occasion assisted the Indonesian Department of
Agriculture, in
Jakarta, with problems implementing
IDS/II-COBOL
programs under
MOD400.
o Programmer/Analyst at Ragu Foods - 6/77 to
6/78
Developed and implemented on line COBOL
programs for an
order
processing system running under CICS 1.3 and
using IDMS.
o Teacher at Monroe County BOCES - 6/76 to 6/77
Taught one school year of Computer science and
Electronics.
o Programmer/Analyst at Community Savings Bank
- 10/75
to 9/76
Developed and implemented a system for
administrating
IRA accounts
posting payments and producing various reports
including
monthly
statements. Developed reports from savings and
mortgage
databases,
by census tract, to comply with new state
redlining
laws. Both
systems made use of COBOL and CINCOM TOTAL
database
software. The
redlining system also made use of ADMATCH and
census
data.
o Consultant with Information Associates, inc.
- 9/72 to
10/75
Worked at customer sites developing programs
for
manufacturing
applications using IBM 370, UNIVAC 1100 and
SIGMA 9
hardware and
used COBOL, PL/I, BAL, RPG, DOS/OS/EDOS,
TOTAL, CICS and
PANVELET.
o Programmer at Fasco Industries - 10/66 to
9/72
Coded BOM explosion and sales analysis model
using
AUTOCODER on a
1440 system. Converted Systems from AUTOCODER
to PL/I
and BAL.
o Customer Engineer at IBM - 3/60 to 10/66
Service 1401, 1440, 360 and related hardware.
o Field Engineer at Remington UNIVAC - 5/59 to
3/60
Service NU90 NU80 hardware.
-------------------------------------------------------
California
Back
in the early part of
1988 I spent several months in
Riverside,
California,
about 60 miles east of Los Angeles.
Bob, who
was also an independant contractor, and had
a
business called B
Software, had asked me to run the
business
for a few months,
while he checked into an
Alcoholic
Rehabilitation
Center. He had an office on
Wilshire
Blvd. in L.A.
which housed several data entry
clerks
and he had a crew
of four programmers working on a
project
at A. L. Lewis
Corporation Offices in Riverside.
Lewis
was a parent company
to Lucky's Grocery Chain. The work
was
routine and not to
demanding. I would fly home every
other
weekend on a Pan Am
747 from LAX to JFK airport and fly
from
there to Rochester on
a small plane that seemed to take
longer
than the coast to
coast flights. On other weekends I
would
take a drive around
the area, where the scenery is
breath
taking. On weekends
that I did not fly home, I would
sometimes
send a ticket
(when BT Software could afford it) to
Vivian
and she would fly
out to spend a couple of days. When
Vivian
was there for a
weekend we always went for side trips
around
the west coast area
as she did not want to sleep in
the
apartment provided for
me in Riverside which was a fine
apartment
but it had no
furniture in it and I slept on the
floor
on a sleeping bag.
I
like to go to zoos, but
Vivian is not that interested.
Anyway,
we visited the San
Diego Zoo which is one of the best
along
with Lincoln Park in
Chicago, the Bronx zoo and the
Toronto
Zoo, which I
recently visited with my grandson Ben.
Vivian
likes the ocean
side and I prefer the desert. We often
drove
down the Santa
Monica Freeway to the end and up the
Ventura
coastal highway to
Santa Barbara. This is part of the
famous
route 1, all of
which I highly recommend for it's
unparalleled
beauty. All
the way from the Mexican border to
the
Redwoods in Northern
California. The Oregon coast is much
the
same all the way to
the mouth of the Columbia River where
you
meet the rain forest
of Western Washington. Big Sur is on
this
route as is Carmel
where Clint Eastwood was Mayor.
On
Occasions when I found
myself in Riverside on a weekend by
myself
I generally drove
about 75 miles east on Interstate 10
and
turn north to Joshua
Tree National Monument where the San
Bernadino
Mountains give
way to the southern boundary of the
Mohave
Desert. This is a
wild area about 50 miles North and
south
by 75 miles east and
west. In this area desert foliage
abounds.
I used this place
as my Sunday School and spent many
hours
meditating and
chanting out there. My chanting seemed
to
please some of the wild
life and one time I found myself
sitting
next to a Desert
Iguana which was about sixteen
inches
long. They sit very
still on a rock, in the sun,
lifting
one leg at a time.
They do it so slowly that you
don't
notice until you
realize that a different leg is now in
the
air. They do that to
cool there underside. Also, I have
seen
Big Horn Sheep,
Rattle Snakes, Mountain Lions, Gilla
Monsters,
along with many
critters I couldn't identify. The
most
impressive thing
about Joshua Tree, however, is the
plant
life. One time I
stopped there just in time to see the
Barrel
Cactus bloom. I ran
across a guy with a camera set up
to
film the opening of
this very impressive flower. The drive
through
the park is either
an uphill climb or going south it
is
downhill ride and you
could coast for the entire 50 miles.
As
you proceed through,
the type of foliage, always abundant,
changes
at various levels.
At the bottom Ocotillo is often in
blossom.
Further up you
are treated to Tree Cholla groves
with
various colored
desert wild flowers. At one time of year
it
looks like a sea of
yellow flowers. Near the northern edge
of
the park you suddenly
find yourself in a forest of Joshua
Trees
with branches that
reminded early settlers of Joshua's
arms
raised toward the
heavens. It is not possible to
describe
these amazing
freaks of nature. The rock band, U2,
wrote
a song about, and
named an album after, the Joshua
Tree.
To me Joshua Tree is
a sacred spot. I have shown it to
Vivian,
my wife, Butch, my
son, Chuck Lyons, a friend, and
Don
Love who lived nearby
and never took the time to look it
over..
Joshua
Trees are plentiful
to the north east from here all
the
way to Las Vegas and
to the north west to Edwards
Airforce
Base where the
Space Shuttle often lands. Vivian and
I
made the trip past
Edwards on one weekend that we went to
Sequoia
National Park. The
trip took us through Boron, made
famous
by Ronald Reagan
when he appeared in the Twenty Mule
Team
commercials.
I
didn't know it at the
time, but, I am descended from one
Joshua
Benson.
Another
favorite spot of
mine is at Big Bear, in the San
Bernadino
Mountains. This
is the closest ski area from L. A.
and
can get congested.
There are points up there where, on a
clear
day, you can look
out on the Mohave Desert towards
Needles,
the hottest place
in United States, while standing
knee
deep in snow.
I
still communicate with
some of the people I worked with in
Riverside,
especially Don
Love who is now in Chicago and Paul
Taylor
who lives in his
van in San Diego where his ex wife
lets
him park his van in
the driveway and lets him inside in
the
morning to use the
bathroom. I last saw Paul about two
years
ago when Butch and I
used the last of my frequent flyer
tickets
to fly to San
Diego. We rented a car and after
visiting
with Paul we
visited The Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree
and
Los Angeles. I
eventually had a falling out with BT over
our
different ideas about
business practices.
---------------------------------------------------------
Later
in life
I
met my wife at Roseland
Park. Vivian lived in Lyons and
since
I could not afford a
car I moved into the Iroquois
Hotel,
by the tracks, in
Lyons and obtained work in a
factory.
In April of 1953
Vivian and I were married and have
been
together since with
the exception of a couple of periods
of
separation. Before we
realized what was happening we had
four
children and not much
money.
In
1954 I decided to make
use of my electrical knowledge and
went
to Chicago to Coyne
Electrical School and took a course
in
Radio/Television repair
and tried to make a living at
that.
Having been a
general screw up all my life had not
prepared
me for running my
own business. The fact that I
drank
a little more than
socially at that time didn't help.
I
soon gave it up and
found a fairly well paying job at
Chevron
Oil Company.
The
oil business kept me
going for a few years but soon got
to
be boring and shift
work was not to my taste. My growing
hatred
for that job
prompted me to sign up for a
correspondence
course. I
completed the lessons rather rapidly
always
keeping ahead of
the mail man and waiting for another
good
grade to come
through, and they did. My choice of
schools
was The Cleveland
Institute of Electronics and the
purpose
was to prepare for
an FCC license. In 1959 I went to
Buffalo
to take a test for
a First Class FCC Radio Telephone
License
which I passed.
In
late 1959 or early 1960
I found an advertisement, in the
jobs
column, for Univac
Computer Repairmen, featuring on the
job
training. I sent a
Resume and was called to Buffalo for
an
interview. When I
arrived for the interview I found about
50
others had come at the
same time. We were all given
general
intelligence and
aptitude testing after which there
were
only three of us left
of the original 50. The interview
went
well and I was
offered a job. I was hired, along with
about
400 others from all
around the country, to fill a
government
contract. We
spent 20 weeks in a class room
learning
the inner
workings of the Univac Computer System. We
learned
about the computer
from the inside out. I had no idea
what
a computer was used
for when I started. Attending
classes,
eight hours a
day, and getting paid salary plus
expenses
at the same time
seemed like a good deal and it was.
I
received a diploma,
which certified me as a Field Engineer
on
the UNIVAC NU90
Computer System. Shortly there after, the
company
lost the
government contract and left the entire 400
of
us out of work. I was
called back to work there at a later
date,
but by that time I
had found a better deal. I am
grateful
to Univac
Corporation for launching my career in
Computers,
but, I made no
lasting friends there and I was
very
fortunate to have
found a job with IBM. Back to the
class
room. I worked for
IBM for several years, my resume
above
somewhere relates my
work history. I made some good
friends
at IBM, but, life
gets hectic sometimes and we have,
for
the most part, lost
touch. We lived in Webster during
that
period and my house
became a gathering place for IBM
"Customer
Engineers", as
we were called. We had many card
parties
at my house.
Vivian would usually leave town for the
night
while all the
rowdies from IBM came by to play Poker,
Euchre
and other such
games. These parties would last all
night
and I always had a
head ache the next day.
---------------------------------------------------------
When I was working at the
U of R,
around 1971, one of the key
punchers offered me a pet
raccoon.
She lived on a farm and
had shot a mother raccoon
for
stealing eggs from the chicken
house. They then realized
that the
mother had babies. Five of
them. I agreed to take a
male. I
thought it would make a
wonderful pet for
Stephanie. I kept
him in a box beside my
desk for a whole day and
took him
home after work.
The next day I found some
boards
and chicken wire and erected
a pen. It was about three
feet wide
and tall and about eight
feet long. On top of that
I
installed an old dog house, like
a cupola on top of the
pen. Rocky could hide in the
cupola as it
was entirely enclosed except for a hole in the
floor, also the
roof of the pen, to gain entry. I picked his
name, Rocky, after
the Beatles song, popular at the time.
On the front of the
pen I put a sliding door with a latch.
It took him five years to figure out how to open the latch
and at that time, during the early spring when a raccoons
thoughts turn to love, Rocky left and never returned.
Rocky turned out to be
more than
Stephanie could deal with
and the responsibility
fell on me.
At first we tried bottle
feeding, as he had
trouble drinking
from a dish, but as small
as he was he chewed the
nipple off
the bottle. His mother
must have been very
tough. We then
tried a dish of bread and
milk. This he did quite
well with
and soon grew big enough to
eat just about anything.
His favorite foods were
marshmallows and graham crackers. He
had a large bucket of
water and
dunked everything in it. I
tried giving him a
rawhide bone to
chew on thinking he would
sharpen his teeth. He
softened it
up in the water before he
ate it. His teeth got
very sharp
anyway and later I regretted
trying to help them along.
I lost several friends during that time because Rocky bit
them. I always warned
them, but
they had to find out for
themselves. They would
see me
walking around with Rocky on a
leash and him climbing up
on my
shoulder and sometimes on top
of my head. He seldom
attempted to
bite me, but I never
forgot that he was a wild
animal. I
could never feed him from
my hands as he was very
protective
of food and would bite any
one that went near it. I
usually
would put his food in the
cage while he was
sleeping. He
slept during the day and
wanted to play at night.
He would
allow me to snap a leash on
his collar as he knew
that meant I
would take him out to
play. He got along
famously with my
dog, Missy.
I took Rocky to the Vet
once a year
for shots. He needed both
cat and dog shots as
raccoons can
get both types of diseases.
The Vet was a little
afraid of him.
I don't blame him as
Rocky had powerful jaws
and his
bite could be severe. I was
never severely bitten by
him as I
learned what kind of
situations made him angry
enough to
bite and avoided them.
Rocky was a friend of
mine.
-------------------------------------------------
Honeywell
and Later
In the spring of 1978 I
was getting
tired of boring
programming jobs, and I
looked into
the help wanted section
of Computer world. I was
working
for Ragu Foods at the time
and was comfortable there
and
treated with respect. Sometime
during the winter of
1977/78, along
with Bob Christ, a fellow
programmer at the
spaghetti sauce
factory, I attended a
training class on CICS
programming.
The instructor for the
class seemed to live an
interesting
life, traveling from city
to city, teaching a five
day course
in each place. I found an
ad for just such a job
and set up
an interview in Wellesley
Hills, near Boston, with
Honeywell
Information Systems.
My first interview at HIS
(Honeywell Information Systems)
was fairly standard. I
talked to
several people and had to
demonstrate that I could
talk to a
group by giving a ten
minute lecture on a
subject of my
own choosing. I presented a
lecture entitled "Zen and
the art
of Writing Bubble up
Sorting Routines in
COBOL". This
presentation earned me the
alias "The Guru from
Ragu" which
stuck for quite a while.
Fortunately, I had some
experience,
teaching, with RBI, ECPI,
IBM, BOCES and at U of R
Computing
Center.
My second interview was
with Al
Manson who was to become my
boss for ten years and
also a life
long friend. I talked to
him on the phone just
before
Christmas, this past year, and
exchanged cards. For some
reason
this interview was to take
place at five in the
afternoon, I
suspect that it was because
of last minute flight
arrangements.
When I met Al, it was in
the parking lot, as he
was on his
was to a party, which is
not unusual for Al as he
was
invited to everybody's parties.
He asked my only one
question and
that had to do with the
accuracy of my resume. He
said that
if at least half of it
was true, he wanted to
hire me. I
assured him that it was. He
then handed me an expense
voucher
and told me to find a nice
hotel in Boston and have
lobster
for dinner. A flight home
was not available until
morning. I
did as he suggested and a
few days later I received
a very
nice offer including a very
adequate expanse account
and salary
about $5500.00 more than
what I was accustomed to.
My title at HIS was
"Education
Specialist" and a few years
into the job it was
"Senior
Education Specialist". My job was
to develop training
courses on HIS
software/database
technology/transaction
processing
technology and
manufacturing software.
It was also
my responsibility to
teach the course a few
times while
training an instructor to
use the material, usually
consisting of a student handbook,
an instructor guide, and
slides.
Most of the seminars were 3,
5, or 10 day
presentations.
Once I established myself
as a
productive member of the
Honeywell team, I was
allowed to do
my course development at
home and fly to Boston
when I
needed to use computers or
equipment that I did not
have at
home. The software that I
became involved with
became more
and more esoteric. At first
my territory included
Boston, New
York City, Toronto,
Baltimore, Washington D.
C.,
Buffalo, Pittsburg and
Philadelphia but soon I
started
stopping regularly at
Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas,
L. A.,
Phoenix, San Diego,
Sacramento, Minneapolis,
Detroit,
Seattle and Boise and most
other US cities, spending
more than
half of my time away from
home. I also made many
trips to
London, Paris, Frankfurt,
Dusseldorf and Helsinki,
traveling
well over a million miles.
Vivian accompanied me to
Paris one
spring and on another
occasion she joined me in
Angers,
France, near LaMans.
Recently, Vivian had
occasion to
visit London, Salisbury and
Stone Henge. I made the
same trip,
alone, several years
earlier.
After spending over
20,000 per year
on my American Express, I
was granted a platinum
card. One of
the best benefits were
the Frequent Flyer
Programs, where
by free tickets could be
obtained after flying a
certain
distance on a given airline,
usually 20,000 miles.
Getting these
free tickets allowed me
to take a traveling
companion along
now and then. I
especially enjoyed being
the tour
guide and showing someone
else some of the places
that I hold
sacred. I have made at
least 100 flights into
Sky Harbor
Airport in Phoenix and on
every visit I would make
it a point
to drive to the Grand
Canyon, each time being a
spiritual
experience. Vivian has
accompanied me, many
times, to
places like Atlanta, Phoenix,
Sacramento,
Seattle/Tacoma, San
Diego and many other
interesting places. My
expense
account allowed us to rent a
car, except in New York
City and
Chicago where Taxis were
used instead._
------------------------------------------------
Travel
I am in the mood for
reliving some
of my travels. In August
of, what I think was 1973 I took a 15 day trip to the west
coast. Prior to that time
I had
never been further west than
Chicago, where I attended
an
electronics trade school in
1954.
The trip was supposed to
be a
family vacation taking
advantage of some time
off between
jobs. I had been working
for the University of
Rochester in
a very interesting job,
helping Doctoral
Candidates and
those involved in Medical
research projects, to use
the
computer to analyze their data.
Anyway I was between that
job and
my new job as a consultant
with Information
Associates, Inc.
in Rochester and had some
time to kill. For some
reason that
I no longer remember,
Vivian had to back out
from the
trip at the last moment. That
left just Stephanie, then
barely 11
years old, and myself, so
I asked my good friend
Ike  to
travel with us
in my 1962 Plymouth with push button
shifting.
We started out on a
Saturday
morning, although I don't
remember the exact date,
but, Spiro
Agnew resigned as Vice
President while we were
on this
trip.
The first night of our
journey was
spent in Indiana, in a
campsite with two large
ponds with
swimming. We set up two
tents, the same way we
did more
than a dozen times on the
trip. Ike [photo]
had a one man pup tent and
Steph and I shared
a
roomy
umbrella tent which was easy to set up. After this
first night, Stephanie
could set up
the tent by herself,
which she did, and often
she would
help others set up their
tents as they arrived at
the
campsite. While Steph was
working on the tents, I
would start
a charcoal fire and cook
our evening meal.
Breakfast, being
the cheapest meal of the
day we ate in restaurants
and
diners, almost always having
pancakes, and for lunch
we snacked
either in the car or at a
roadside table. We took
no
interstate highways and stopped
frequently to take in the
sights. I
remember having a nice
campfire to space out on
before
going to bed. Stephanie was
very fond of toasted
marshmallows.
Stephanie has photos from
the trip and one of them
was taken
of this campfire.
We started out in the
morning of
the second day on US Highway
36 which took us through
two state
capitals, Indianapolis and
Springfield and spent the
second
night on the Mississippi
River 
at Hannabal Mo. The town is
full of Mark Twain
memorabilia including the picket fence and
the cave. We swam at the campsite but the water was muddy.
On the third day we
drove, on US
36, through St. Joe, Mo.
where Bonnie and Clyde
once robbed
the bank. We continued,
driving over half way
through
Kansas before stopping for the
night at Prairie Dog
State Park
where we were the only
campers to stay the
night. We swam
in a man made lake in the
park. We saw a jackrabbit
and I
convinced Stephanie that it
was a Jackalope, a
fictitious
animal of the area, a rabbit
with horns like an
antelope. I
later found a post card with a
picture of a lope, as we
called
them for short. I don't know
how long she was fooled,
but, now
she is middle aged and I'm
sure she no longer
believes in
lopes.
The next day, our fourth
of the
trip, was a very exciting
day. Like all the days
and nights
of the trip, the sky
remained clear. Just when
we
thought we couldn't take another
day of flat countryside,
their came
the mountains as if they
rose abruptly out of the
plains.
For some reason I wanted to
change my cloths before
getting
into Denver so I stopped and
went under the highway in
a dry
river bed where I saw a very
large king snake watching
me from a
nearby rock. I wasn't
sure just what kind it
was at first
and went hopping back to
the highway while putting
my
trousers on.
We encountered a severe
gas
shortage in the Denver area.
Fortunately we had enough
gas to
get well out of the area and
up in the mountains we
found a gas
station with no attendant,
you had to put one dollar
bills in
the pump like a vending
machine. We had a couple
of ones
and got enough to get us to
a town that had gas, I
believe it
was Durango Co. We came
upon a hail storm in the
mountains
and I thought it would
brake the windshield. We
found pock
marks on the roof of the
car. Before stopping for
the night,
near Durango, we went
through a long tunnel
under a
mountain, and also we found a
place where we could make
snowballs
in August, high up in the
Rockies. It got very cold
in our
tent that night, but, we
were prepared and slept
comfortably
in our sleeping bags
instead of on top of them
as we had
done previously. We took
a picture of the tunnel 
and some
high
country scenery. I
enjoyed experiencing the
freezing
temperature in the middle
of summer. It made me
realize once
again that the Tao is
all powerful and that I
am
influenced profoundly by the Tao,
while the Tao itself
remains
unshakable.
The fifth day of our
excursion took
us over some very
impressive mountains  but by
mid-day we
were
out of the mountains and into a semi-desert
area. Here we
found some dinosaur
tracks and stopped also, at the four corners
where Colorado,
New Mexico, Arizona and Utah meet. 
The only place
in the US where four
states come
together and a national
site. We continued
traveling
southwest through the Painted
Desert which seemed very
western
and very colorful. Like I
remembered from the
cowboy movies I
enjoyed as a youth. We
pitched our tents for the
night in
the middle of this desert
area and all night long I
had to be
careful not to move
around too much as cactus
spears
would poke through the
bottom of the tent,
sleeping bag
and blankets and everything
else I could find to
protect
myself. Still every now and then
during the night I got
the point,
when rolling over. This
campsite was on the Hopi
reservation.  Coal
had been
discovered on the
reservation and,
since the government
didn't know about the
coal when
they promised the land would
always belong to the
Hopis, they
were in the process of
slowly driving this very
colorful
people off the land. When
the miners came in, they
would show
no respect for the Hopi's
corn fields with their
bulldozers
etc. I had further contact
with Hopis later in life,
but that
is another story. Later.
Day number six of this
trek took us
to a town called North
Rim on the north rim of
the Grand
Canyon.
Most of the morning
took us along the Vermilion Cliffs and
the side trip to the
canyon rim took us through a beautiful
Pondarosa Pine forest.
We saw the canyon around
noon time
when it is free of shadows
and took many photos of
this
amazing place. This of the first
of many trips to the
canyon for me.
It is a sacred spot for
me just like Joshua Tree
and Organ
Pipe Cactus National
Monuments. This was,
however, the
only time I visited the
north rim and the only
time I drove
all the way. Phoenix
became a regular stop for
me in the
80s. I would fly into Sky
Harbor Airport and rent a
car and
stay in one of my favorite
hotels. When my work was
done and
the week end rolled around,
I would start out alone,
when I
couldn't interest anyone in
going along, and head for
the
canyon and sometimes to the
Hopi Reservation to visit
my
favorite people. OK back to the
north rim. After taking
several
pictures and having a near
nervous collapse when
both Ike and
Steph got too close to the
edge of the canyon for my
taste.
There were no railings or
safety features at that
time.
After we left the Grand
Canyon we
went north into Utah and
passed thru Zion National
Park. It
is a very special place.
One feature was a four
mile tunnel.
The mountains in Zion are
of yellow rock. No other
place is
anything like it. Each time
we entered a National
Park or
Monument there was normally a
substantial fee involved,
which we
never paid. We found out
right away that if the
car
contained someone over 65 years
old the admission was
free. I think
Ike was actually about 62
at the time, but easily
passed for
65. A couple of times the
toll booth attendant
asked for ID
and I would shout at Ike as
if he were deaf and he
would
pretend not to hear. I would
shout "he wants to see
your ID" and
Ike had a pocket full of
various ID cards, none of
which
indicated his date of birth
or age. They always gave
up and let
us in for free. Stephanie
found all this horse play
by grown
men to be hilarious.
That night we camped at
Cedar City
Utah. We got the last
available site as the
camp was
full. It was a possemans
convention and everyone
in camp was
some kind of deputy. We
behaved ourselves. Just
as I was
getting dinner ready to
serve Steph wanted to go
to the
camp headquarters where home
movies would be shown.
She insisted
so I gave in. Five
minutes later she was
back. When I
asked about the movies she
said they were all about
God and
stuff. It seems that the
place was run by Mormons.
For the
second night in a row there
was no place to swim.
On the seventh day we
drove across
the Mohave Desert in
southern Nevada. Here we
saw our
first Joshua Trees. We did
not know what they were.
The scene
was most unusual but got
boring after a while;
Just sand and
dry lakes. After a while
we saw the Sierra Nevada
Mountain
range rising out of the
desert. The road we took
over the
mountains was only open
from May through
September and it
took us up to the snow
line, about 12000 feet.
When we
finally descended we were in
the Yosemite Valley and
took a
little side trip to the falls 
which afforded a rest
while
Stephanie made a nervous wreck
out me by climbing around
on the
huge rocks at the foot of
the falls.
It got dark shortly after
we left
Yosemite. I called my
friend Bart in San
Francisco and
decided to drive on to the
city on the bay and sleep
in a bed
and shower. Around
midnight I woke Steph to
see the
Oakland San Francisco Bridge
Tunnel which was recently
damaged
by an earthquake during the
World Series Games.
We arrived at Bart's and
put Steph
to bed and partied into
the night with Bart and
Dave. In
the morning Rita took
Stephanie to the Zoo at
Golden Gate
Park and had a chance to
ride the cable cars and
see China
Town and take many photos.
On this, the eighth day
of the
adventure, we left San
Francisco heading north
across the
Golden Gate and followed
Highway 101 toward the
Redwoods. We
camped about two hours to
the north in a remote
campsite
occupied only by a family of
back packers from
Kingston, New
York. All of the redwood
trees in this area had
all been cut
down. You could walk into
the woods and find giant
stumps. We
climbed onto one of these
stumps and found it to be
about 15
feet across and flat as a
dance floor. We did an
imitation of
Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers which made us
hungry. After
dinner, sitting by the
fire, I was moved to
tears over the
demise of these giant
trees, older than
Christianity.
Early in the morning of
the ninth
day we stopped at a nice
municipal beach, on the
Pacific,  around
Eureka, California
and took some nice
photos. We
followed highway 101 north
through the Redwood
National Park.
Here, a very small
percentage of the
original redwoods
remains untouched, thanks
to Teddy Roosevelt. The
highway
winds through the woods like
a snake, as no trees
could be cut
down in it's path. Ike
reminded Stephanie that
the
squirrels must be as big as dogs
judging by the size of
the trees. I
think that of all the
places we saw on the
entire trip,
this was the most
impressive. It has never
been
convenient for me to return to
the Redwoods, but I
remember it as
a very sacred spot. Vivian
and I later visited the
Sequoia
National Park which is
similar. The sequoia
trees are high
up in the Sierras while
the Redwoods is a rain
forest. The
undergrowth is just as
spectacular as the trees.
It is
mostly covered with high
ferns 5 to 8 feet tall.
The
Redwoods took many centuries to
get that big and
foresters theorize
that conditions may no
longer exist for them to
grow that
big again. There are tests
under way to find out but
we won't
know during our life time.
After climbing around on
redwood
logs, with steps cut into
them so we could hike
into the
woods, we drove on into Oregon
and spent the night near
Grants
Pass. We made camp in a site
called Natural Bridge.
The
ponderosa pine woods was growing
out of old lava beds,
which is how
the natural bridge was
formed. The ground was
covered with
gray volcanic ash making
it difficult to keep
clean. In the
morning I washed in the
river even though it was
the
coldest water I ever felt; a
glacial stream. I washed
Stephanie's hair in the river and
she complained a little
about the
polar bear dunking I gave
her. I was ashamed of how
dirty we
had gotten, but we did a
fair job, even though the
ash
almost covered us again before
we broke camp and moved
on. That
morning of day 10 we found a
rustic log cabin type
restaurant
and had pancakes with real
maple syrup, making the
freezing
morning ablutions all worth
while.
After breakfast of day
10, we came
upon Crater Lake,
 Oregon,
a very calm lake
in an extinct volcano.
The banks of the lake
were too steep
and dangerous for us to
get down to
the lake,
so we followed
some of the hiking trails
along
the rim.
The water was the
bluest blue
I've ever seen.
The next stop was at a
laundry
where we washed and dried all
of our very dirty clothes
and
bedding. We continued northward
to Bend and then headed
due east
and stopped at a campsite on
the Boise River either in
Oregon or
Idaho near the border.
That night the campsite
had showers
which was nice. We saw
raccoons getting into the
garbage
cans.
On the morning of day 11,
before
stopping for breakfast, we
stopped at a scenic site,
on the
way up the side of a
mountain range. This was
a breath
taking scene, overlooking a
desert as colorful as any
we had
seen thus far. The area is
part of what is called
"The Great
Basin", a high desert area.
A lone man in a van
pulled into the
parking area while we
were there. We talked
with him
about the scenery and found
that he was a retired
widower
enjoying a vacation. He was
traveling in the opposite
direction
from us. We took some
back roads through Idaho,
taking us
to the Craters of the
Moon National Monument.
This spot
is used sometimes for
making movies about the
moon. The
landscape in similar.
Around noontime we
stopped at a
general store, to pick up
lunch, in a town called
Corral,
Idaho, 
with a population of
7 people. It was warm and
a dog was
sleeping outside and when
we went inside we found
the store
keeper sound asleep in a
chair. After we pick up
our
groceries the man was still
sleeping. We had put gas
in the car
and could not, in good
conscience, leave without
paying
for it. We tried several
different ways of making
noise with
no success. Finally the
dog woke up enough to
bark a couple
of times and the man woke
up and all was well.
That afternoon we
followed the
Snake River for a ways and by
evening we found
ourselves in
Jackson, Wyoming. We checked
out a campsite in Jackson
where the
owners made derogatory
remarks about the length
of our
hair, so Ike and I decided
not to spend the night.
Steph did
not understand, but we
explained that we could
camp in the
Grand Teton National Park
for free and all was
well. We found
a good spot and set up
camp in the middle of an
elk
reserve.
We awoke on the morning
of day
twelve to find our water had
frozen over night. We
were very
high in the mountains. We had
breakfast at Jackson Hole
in a
large teepee with a roaring
fire in the middle and
picnic
tables like spokes of a wheel
surrounding it. We had
all we could
eat of ham, eggs and
pancakes. They had
buffalo steaks
on the lunch menu, but we
were in Yelowstone by
lunch time.
Our favorite spot in the
Grand Tetons was at Jenny
Lake. The Tetons are some
of the
most Rugged in the US and they remind me of the Saw Tooth
Range in Idaho.
At Yellowstone Park we
visited Old
Faithful and rested for a
while waiting for the
geyser to do
what it does. We drove
northward from the Tetons
through
Yellowstone and drove
around the circle in  Yellowstone
and left the park
by the
eastern gate. We stopped at one point
to watch a moose grazing in a bog. That afternoon we drove
through Cody, and Greybull, Wyoming toward the Devil's
Tower  National
Monument.
I am not sure if we took
in the
Tower on this afternoon or
the next morning, but it
was a very
interesting place. On the
way into the Monument
Grounds you
go through a large colony
of prairie dogs. The park
ranger
told Stephanie that it was
useless to try to get
them to eat
out of your hand. "They are
just too timid" he said.
None the
less, we got a photo of a
prairie dog taking a
piece of bread
from Stephanie's hand.
On this, the 12th night,
we made
camp on the banks of a very
clear river in which we
could see
brook trout, doing what
trout do. During the
night we could
hear mules or donkeys
baying, they kept us
awake for a
while.
The 13th day was very
eventful as
we stopped at the Mount
Rushmore Monument. It is
interesting that, during the
depression, someone
convinced the
Congress to appropriate
money for this mammoth
carving. To
me, it seems like a
terrible thing to do to a
perfectly
attractive mountain in
the beautiful Black Hills
of South
Dakota.
We stopped again in Rapid
City, SD,
at a road side zoo which
featured a raccoon
playing
basketball, a skill that is
practically useless for
as raccoons
go. We spent a good
portion of the afternoon
on
Interstate 90 through The
Badlands and camped near
Mitchell,
SD.
On the morning of the
14th day we
drove south on I29 to
Council Bluffs, Iowa and
picked up
I80 east, driving into
Illinois by nightfall.
The next
day, number 15 of the trip,
we drove the rest of the
way home
by nightfall. We had the
pictures developed and
Stephanie
still has copies. Ike had
slides made from the
pictures that
he took. They were very
colorful.
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