Seeing Whoopi in New York

Whoopi with Jean and I

Over the years I worked at several jobs where I had to live somewhere far from home.

In 1994 after I left Lone Star Gas Company in Dallas, Jean and I moved to Wichita, KS, because I took a job there with USF&G Insurance, which was based in Baltimore, MD. After working there for sixteen months they closed that office and offered me a position with their life insurance division F&G Life in Baltimore. They moved me to Towson to live in a campus apartment at Towson University. After leaving F&G Life I took a job working for IBM in White Planes, New York. There I rented a small bedroom from a Jewish lady in Scarsdale.

In 2003 when I contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome and was in recovery for nine months. I then got a job in Tampa, FL, with Neilsen Media Research, the company that measures what people watch on television (ratings) so the networks can determine how much they can charge marketers for advertising. There I found an apartment where I could walk just 200 yards to the nearest bus that would take me to Neilsen.

Whoopi Goldberg grew up in the Chelsea area of Manhatten New York, but moved to California before she was twenty, where she worked at the San Diego Repertory Theater, and with various groups developing her skills as a stand-up performer. This was also when she adopted her name “Whoopi.” In 1984 under the direction of Mike Nichols they created Whoopi Goldberg, her one-woman show, which opened October 24, 1984 at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre.

For that highly successful show’s twentieth anniversary, she and Nichols decided to do it again with a brand new show based on the original creation – a one-woman show featuring several of her character creations: Live on Broadway: The 20th Anniversary Show. Because I had worked for her a few years earlier, she offered Jean and I free seats if and when we could get to New York. So we planned a trip to meet there – Jean from Tulsa and me from Tampa – the weekend of December 3 – 5, 2004 to see Whoopi at the Lyceum Theatre! You can see the photos I took here. Also check out my Whoopi web site.

Dedicated mass transit rider

Early DART suburban bus

I have used transit on a daily basis for over 37 years, in cities all over the world including Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Washington D.C., New York, Tulsa, Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland, Boston, Atlanta, Toronto, London (England) and other cities.

After spending two years in the mid 1970s at Fast-Tax learning to develop computer software using PL/I, I took a new position with the consulting firm Cutler Williams in order to work at Lone Star Gas Company, north Texas’ natural gas utility. Most companies at that time wrote their in-house applications in COBOL, which had been based on work by Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as “the mother of COBOL.” Very few companies used PL/I, a programming language developed by IBM in 1966. Since that was what Fast-Tax taught me to use, working somewhere else meant I was limited locally to only a few other companies, specifically American Airlines, Rockwell and Lone Star Gas. Working at LSG also meant I would be working in downtown Dallas, just a few blocks from the Federal Reserve Bank where my father worked for more than 30 years. One benefit of working downtown was being able to ride the bus to work. Mass transit in those days was operated by the city and was known as Dallas Transit System.

Back in 1977 DTS only served the city of Dallas, not any suburbs. That meant I needed to drive five miles from Carrollton into Dallas to the nearest bus stop. (Soon my riding the bus would allow us to not need two cars and so Jean often drove me to the bus stop; eventually DART would bring mass transit to the suburbs so I would be able to walk to and from a bus each day.) In the 70s the only way to ride the bus was to pay in cash each time I rode. Six months after I began working downtown DTS started offering a monthly pass which cost about 90% of what it cost on a daily basis, and Lone Star Gas, through a program offered by DTS, covered another 25% of that.

Then on August 13, 1983 voters in Dallas and several suburbs created Dallas Area Rapid Transit to build a regional transit system. Soon express bus service (see photo above) began running between downtown Dallas and the new member cities of Addison, Farmers Branch, Flower Mound, Glenn Heights, Irving, Richardson, Plano, Rowlett and Carrollton! Then I only had a 2-mile drive to the nicer, larger, much more comfortable express bus.

Jean had a cousin Beverly Davidson who also worked downtown. We often talked about her riding the busses that now came out to Carrollton, but like most people she could find many reasons not to use them. Then one day she had the battery stolen from her car while it was parked downtown. That night she called me and asked if I could teach her how to ride DART. The next morning we met at the bus stop in Carrollton and caught the bus for downtown. This happened to be a day in the 1980s when Dallas had a not-rare-enough winter ice storm and the bus was not able to use the I35E expressway, because so many cars had slid around to block the roads. Instead we came down Harry Hines Blvd. Even with that alternative route, it took us nearly two hours to reach downtown. Beverly and I were sitting near the back of the bus and after more than an hour in the bus, she – along with a lot of other riders – was at the point where she needed a bathroom break. Even though she was very shy about going up to ask the driver, her need was great enough to require the effort. Understanding the situation the driver pulled over at Walnut Hill Road to allow riders to get out to use the nearby 7-11 for relief.

Not confounded by the bizzare circumstances of that bus trip, Beverly continued riding transit to work for many years after this.