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| Williamsport, Pennsylvania |
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| This is the view of Williamsport, Pennsylvania,
in the distance, from the overlook South of the city. In the foreground are
my daughters Gale and Judy. That's the West Branch of the Susquehanna River
flowing through the center of the picture. |
| I left my job in White Plains, NY at the Nationwide
Insurance Company for a job at Weldon Pajamas. The home office for Weldon
Pajamas was in Manhattan in the Empire State Building. Their manufacturing
and most office functions were in Williamsport, PA. I took the train into
Manhattan each day for a month in order to get acquainted with the firm and
then moved to Williamsport where I was to set up and manage their EAM processing
functions there. Initial efforts were to focus on accounting and Order processing. Jean, I and the girls settled into a home on Mulberry Street in Willimsport, within sight of the Curtin Junior High School and a half block from Brandon Park. We were happy to be back in Pennsylvania just an hour or so from where our parents lived. Lycoming College was just on the other side of Brandon Park and I began to entertain thoughts of resuming my formal education. Weldon was a large family owned and operated business. Family members permeated most levels of upper management. I soon learned that their business interactions were often emotionally charged and tempers sometimes flared. One evening, at an after hours meeting in their conference room with many attendees, the exchanges became rather heated. My role, at the meeting, was not so much to contribute but to observe and learn. It didn't take much time for me to observe the discussions turning into a shouting match. The intensity grew and culminated with several soda bottles being thrown across the room. It was at that moment I decided I would not work there any longer. I found my next job at the Williamsport Area School District. My immediate boss was the Business Manager who reported directly to the school board. This was somewhat unusual because that position, in other public school systems, reported to the Superintendent of Schools. The Williamsport arrangement may have satisfied the boards needs but it was the source of ongoing snooty friction within the administration. We bought our first house on Cherry Street in Williamsport. It was an older home that needed sprucing up badly. The back yard was badly overgrown with shrubs. The interior needed to be completely repainted. The upstairs was previously an apartment and had to be converted back to single home status. The accumulated junk in the attic and basement took 9 pickup truck trips to the landfill to dispose of. The bathroom downstairs need a major overhaul. Outside, the shingle siding needed to be repainted. There was a upstairs back porch that I decided would make a great office if it were enclosed. Jean, I and the kids took on these challenges ourselves with high spirits. After an extended period we had transformed the home into a comfortably attractive place to live. The school district's administrative offices were on the top floor of an old grade school which also had children enrolled in grades one to four on the first floor. They put me and the equipment in the basement. Having those kids around was a constant reminder of what our efforts were all about. It was great seeing the kid's enthusiasm as the school year cycled through each season and holiday. Christmas was especially touching as all the classes were assembled in the school's main hall to sing Christmas carols. The entrance to my quarters were through a room that the principal like to call his gymnasium. Dodge ball was a daily occurrence in that room for those kids. When I think about those days it deepens my regret over the current abandonment of dodge ball as a playground activity. My initial charge at the school system was to automate their accounting and payroll functions. This was accomplished in relatively short order but with minimal cooperation from those individuals who were previously associated with these processes, including the Business Manager. It seemed they as though they expected that my efforts would not result in a meaningful system and that they were expecting or hoping for failure. I always wondered if the decision to bring automation to the school system and to hire me was forced upon my boss. After the accounting system was up and running I made several overtures to automate other business functions but, to no avail. During this lull I was approached by the Assistant Superintendent to automate the student report card system. The Assistant Superintendent was from the other side of the districts administrative divide and the request should have been run through my boss, the Business Manager, for approval. But I didn't care if approval was obtained or not, I was delighted with the challenge and dove into the project with gusto. My boss and I were not previously on the best of terms and the report card effort, as well as other subsequent instructional systems, may have further harmed the relationship more than I realized. Working with the Assistant Superintendent was a delight. The report card system was installed in the three Williamsport junior high schools as well as the high school. I gained my first exposure with computers during this period. We, the district administration, did not have a computer. But, a computer was installed in the Williamsport Technical Institute, (later to become the Williamsport Area Community College) a two year post high school institution controlled by the district's school board. The Technical Institute used the computer for instructional purposes so I only had access to it at night. Programming computers in those day was extremely tedious since there were no programming languages. Programs consisted of all numbers, representing memory locations, operations and registers. I loved it. My work required me to interact with school principals. It was fascinating to observe the influence the principal's personality and policies had within a school. The differences in students' deportment were immediately discernible upon entering a school. While working for the district the level of my regard for faculty members gradually diminished while my regard for principals grew immensely. Faculty would incessantly whine about every infringement of their supposed right to do nothing. Their continuous complaints about being underpaid reached cacophonous levels. They, the faculty, took to heart the self promoted notion that theirs is the most noble of professions and is worthy of all kinds of special considerations. The concept of teachers possessing qualities that transcend all others in the national labor force has taken on mythological proportions. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear the myth will be shattered any time soon. Working with computers made me recognize the limitations of my education. So, I began taking courses at the Technical Institute, all were in the areas of math, electronics and statistics. It was also during this period that I got my first taste of teaching. The head of the computer department at the Institute asked me to teach an introductory computer course. Mostly, in my first teaching attempts, I learned how painfully annoying student talking during a lecture can be. I remember well tossing a student out of the classroom because of his incessant chatter. I learned later, when I was teaching full time in west Virginia, that I could mostly control student behavior by throwing a dark look at the offender and with some discrete gestures. Up to this point in my marriage I was mostly an absentee father. My first priority was to be a good provider, a parental principle common within my generation. I carried it to extremes. If I wasn't working at a part time job I would spend enormous amounts of time at work to make an impression or to learn as much as I could. Raising our kids became Jean's responsibility almost exclusively. She was an excellent mother. She did not work outside the home until our youngest daughter, Nancy, entered grade school. Jean then worked in a school cafeteria to ensure that she would always be home when the kids were home. Child rearing was her domain. But then, as our three oldest daughters entered their teens, my fatherly concerns about girls exposure to the predatory sexual proclivities of teen age boys caused my to intrude into the existing mother/daughter relationships. After all, I was once a teenage boy and knew all about the power of testosterone. I should have known better and kept my distance from what was already proceeding very well. I worked hard a trying to impose my goofy notions of rules and disiplineary actions. Thank God that Jean was able to soften the impact of my inane ideas. Child rearing differences between Jean and I, however, continually eroded the compatibility fortress that previously served us so well. The marital road we were traveling became considerably bumpier. It was tough having access to a computer only at night and having to physically transport data back and forth across town. It took some strenuous persuasion to convince my boss that the district's administration should have their own computer. Our arguments were often nose-to-nose confrontations which further deteriorated our relationship. Ultimately he would send his assistant to communicate with me rather than deal with me directly. But, the administration did eventually acquire a computer, an IBM 1401. The 1401 took up as much space as 2 refrigerators but had just 8K of magnetic core memory. It sure improved productivity and made life much easier. Several years later, when I obtained approval to bump up main memory to the maximum of 16K, I thought I'd gone to heaven. In those days computers did not have operating systems and database management systems were not available. It was necessary to control program space and data space in main memory. Disk file space had to be managed with record placement on the disk drive's cylinder/track/sector determined by formulas used to hash record keys. Main memory was conserved by carefully planning program development to take advantage of overlaying strategies. Those were exciting days when almost all technical projects had an element of innovation associated with it. There was a sense of exhilaration among most computer practitioners. It may seem incredible now but back then all computer programs were freely exchanged, at no charge, between institutions and businesses. we also implemented, at the school district, school census, student attendance and test scoring. After implementing test scoring and then pondering its possible ramifications I proposed a system to alter student evaluation reporting. It consisted of:
I foolishly thought that everyone would be as excited about this system as I was. I took my ideas to the district's subject area supervisors, individually, to get some feedback. In each case I received polite acknowledgments but no indication that it was something they would like to see implemented. I assumed the rejection I received on my student evaluation ideas was due to my lack of a college education, That I wasn't viewed as a peer amongst educators who were armed with doctorate degrees. So, although I had continuously been taking college courses to expand my knowledge base, I now formally enrolled in Lycoming College as a Psychology major. I also approached the district's coordinator of federal grant programs to determine if the concept was worthy of a grant. The coordinator took the idea to the state department of education, where purse strings were controlled and whose approval was needed, to determine feasibility. He returned indicating that state officials felt that the concept was fundable and to submit a formal proposal for a grant. I spent about a month, including nights and weekends, coming up with a grant proposal approached 50 pages in length. Days after giving my proposal to the grant coordinator, whatever momentum it had began to sag. The coordinator did not submit the proposal to the state and my frequent prodding could not get him to do so. Then, one day when reading a newspaper account of school board proceedings, the article indicated that the school system had eliminated student testing altogether and replaced it with a system that entailed having each student assigned a project that would be subjectively evaluated by the teacher. I was devastated. My opinion of educators, collectively, took a nosedive. I could not find out then, nor do I still know to this day, how the elimination of testing originated or how the school board was convinced of its efficacy. The focus of our efforts shifted away from instructional systems to business office applications. We next tackled automating the income tax system. This was very dull stuff and the guy in charge of the area was super cautious and strung out the implementation tediously. During this developmental stage one could not help but notice that the size of the income tax payer files was much bigger than those of other taxes. It took only a cursory examination of records to determine that there were many people who should have been paying taxes but were not represented in our files. I made a pitch to the Business Manager to develop a computer system that would cross reference all tax files and the school district's census files to identify those individuals who were not paying taxes to the same extent as their neighbors. Astonishingly, this proposal was rejected. I can't fully remember, but I think I was told that introducing that system might compromise school board members' electability. I think my experiences with human foibles are not unique and I suppose many, in all walks of life, are often disheartened by their encounters with self-serving superiors. My pursuit of a degree at Lycoming College was proceeding well during this period. My chief interests were in the area of learning. I, personally always hated attending school and wanted to discover what it was about any given teaching strategy that made some students respond positively and others to have difficulty with it. I took one or two courses each semester. I studied and worked on projects during the evening and on weekends. All-nighters were too common for my well being. Thankfully, the school district allowed me to attend classes during the day. Attending classes, was mostly a mind numbing experience. However, I immensely enjoyed art projects and the lab assignments that entailed training rats. After leaving Fordham University I received a grade of "A" for every college course I ever took, except one. An Anthropology course at Lycoming left me bewildered about what course material was relevant. I got a score of less than 50% on my first exam and all my efforts afterwards could not raise my final grade above a "C". Regrettably, I remain to this day, anthropologically crippled. All this was during the late 60's to early 70's at the peak of this country's social upheavals. At that time, with four high school aged daughters I worried about how they were being influenced. I was constantly stunned by the disintegration of moral standards among the college students and staff as well as the support of national policies that culminated in unbelievable human suffering throughout the world. Harmful behavior was not only accepted, it was encouraged. Almost all the social ills we experience today are directly traceable to those times and the people by whom they were perpetuated. And, alarmingly, the residue of the harm created by those incredibly self absorbed individuals, is still today, celebrated by them. They will go to their graves believing in the righteousness of their self indulgences. Instead they deserve an immeasurable upbraiding to instill in them the shame they are thus far incapable of assimilating. Retrospectively, I can recognize the emotional damage that I was experiencing because of the strain I was experiencing. My overall disposition had imperceptibly been altered and my tolerance level had deteriorated considerably. Consequently, this was the most tumultuous period of my marriage. At work my relationships with almost everyone suffered as I became both paranoid and ever more quarrelsome. I looked to Jean to give me some guidance regarding my work related problems. I would angrily reject her ideas so she stopped offering them. It was inevitable that the day came when my boss informed me that my contract would not be renewed. I was fired. I requested that I be retained, in a lesser capacity and salary, until I completed work on my Psychology degree. A sympathetic boss and school board agreed. I was allowed to work only at night. This worked out well because it allowed me to increase the number of courses I was taking. Jean took a job at a garment factory to shore up our reduced income but the work was nerve wracking for her and her normally up-beat disposition suffered. Within a year I graduated from Lycoming College. I had the second highest average in my graduating class. I was the salutatorian. I was offered a Psychology fellowship at Bucknell University but I turned it down because I was not interested in clinical psychology. It was somewhat difficult but I was successful at getting accepted to Penn State's graduate school of Educational Psychology. Jean, I and our daughter Nancy packed up and moved to State College. Our three oldest daughters, who were all out of high school by this time, chose to get an apartment and remain in Williamsport. |
