It’s a wonderful wife

My beautiful wife!

When I was a sophomore in college at East Texas State University in late 1969, the university changed the way the semesters were scheduled by moving fall semester finals to before Christmas rather than right after. That gave us nearly a month between the end of fall and the beginning of the spring semester. Not wanting to be idle for that time, I wanted to get a job to make a little money. My sister Sande, a sophomore at South Garland High School, and I headed out to Northpark Center which had opened just four years earlier. She immediately found a job as a waitress at Kip’s Big Boy Restaurant, but I did not want to work waiting tables so I applied at all every other non-food shop in the mall – over 150 at that time – and got nothing, even though it was just three weeks before Christmas. Not finding what I wanted, I went back to Kip’s where they hired me to buss tables.

On my first afternoon I managed to drop and shatter a full tray of dishes, relegating me to the kitchen where I spent the next month washing dishes. On the up side, I met one of the best-looking girls I had ever met – Jean Caskey. I asked her out to a concert by Dionne Warwick, but since that was not until February I also took her to see Midnight Cowboy, which had opened that past summer. After we saw the movie I asked if she was REALLY hungry, and when she said yes, I took her to Phil’s Delicatessen, where their burgers were huge.

Since I came home from Commerce every weekend to help my mother with her interior decorating business, I was able to take Jean out those weekends. We dated for two-and-a-half years, getting married August 4, 1972, less than three months after I graduated from ETSU. We moved to Carrollton where I had gotten my first job and eventually bought our first house there five years later. We also were able to do a good bit of travelling. When I worked at Lone Star Gas in downtown Dallas I was able to attend job-related events all over the United States, often taking her with me – Washington, DC; Boca Raton, FL; New Orleans; New York City; Anaheim, CA; Las Vegas; and Colorado Springs. We also made trips on our own to Corpus Christi and Rockport (on our honeymoon), to visit her sister Sue in Charleston, SC; skiing in Colorado; and many other places all over Texas, the US and even Guadalajara, St Thomas, the Bahamas, Canada and Britain.

We both loved to eat, so we have done that both at home and everywhere we traveled. We’ve had Chicago-style pizza in Chicago, muffulettas and beignets in New Orleans, Katz’s Delicatession and Carnegie Deli in New York City, and many great dining experiences everywhere we went.

Jean has been with me through thick and thin. About a year before we were married, I decided to buy a motorcycle and pick her up for lunch at Zuider Zee restaurant, where she worked. On the way there I wrecked the bike, breaking my jaw. Of course she wonedred why I never showed up for lunch – I was in the hospital! Then in Tulsa the summer of 2003 I spent a month in the hospital, along with nearly a year in rehab, from Guillain-Barre syndrome. And, of course, most recently on November 1, 2012, I ended up at Parkland Hospital after being hit by a car, suffering a traumatic brain injury.

Jean has been there to help and support me ;every step along the way. With the TBI keeping me from being able to take care of the bills, for the first time in her life Jean had to take over those chores. I hadn’t meant to keep her in the dark about our finances, she just did not have any interest. Two years ago she and Evan had to dig through my stuff – mostly online because I received and paid bills online whenever possible – to figure out who we owed and how to pay for everything. Jean worked miracles getting me organized and taking care, not only with the bills we already had, but also the new ones resulting from my injury, from medical bills to long term disability and Social Security Disability Income.

I always knew how wonderful she was, but after the past two years, I am truly amazed at what she is capable of doing, for me and with me.

Jeannie, I admire and love you, beyond belief!

Waiting to adopt

In my lifetime I have been fortunate enough to have visited 38 states in the US and have lived in seven. I have also been to Canada, Mexico (three times), the US Virgin Islands, The Bahamas and Great Britain – England, Wales and Scotland.

In 1983 Jean and I, having been married for eleven years, were ready to begin the process of adopting a child. Jean knew that the best place for us to do that was at Hope Cottage. Adoption was starting to be a more difficult process because the stigma of having a child out of wedlock was more acceptable in this country so more unwed girls were deciding to keep those children. The number of children available at Hope Cottage was shrinking so fast that, whenever they would announce when they were accepting applications on a first-come, first-served basis, people wanting to adopt would line up outside their door several days before hand, hoping to get a chance to adopt. By 1983 they ended that process and began just taking applications during certain times of the year and then do a random selection from those for the twenty or so couples they would select for the coming year.

We submitted our request and began waiting to see if we would, as I put it, “win the adoption lottery.” We learned that the selection would be made sometime in June of 1984, which was the same time that we had been planning our vacation to the British Isles. I had been planning that trip for over a year. Each payday I would walk over to the bank and purchase a hundred dollars or so of American Express travelers checks in British pounds in preparation for that trip. There was also a book store near my office where I would buy travel books that I used to plan where we would and what we wanted do see and do – my parents had been on guided tours all over the world, but I wanted to do it myself. That’s why we were going to the UK, where they spoke English!

So in late May we flew to JFK in New York City and on to Heathrow near London. From there we rented a car, loaded our luggage and set out to learn how to drive on the left side of the road. Our first stop was in Guildford at a small shopping area. The first thing I learned was that I should have brought some cash in pounds, because I had to pay to park the car. I left Jean in the car while I walked into a store to find where I could cash one of my travelers checks. I was not successful and finally went back to the car and we left. Our next stop was in Winchester to see the cathedral, where I did manage to get some pounds to pay for parking.

Over the next four weeks we saw Stonehenge, Dartmoor National Park, Tintagel Castle, Oxford, Blenheim and Kensington Palaces, Portmeirion village, Sherwood Forest, York, Fountains Abbey, Beatrix Potter’s home in Near Sawrey, Cumbria, Loch Ness (we saw no monsters), Inverness, the Isle of Skye and Edinburgh. After a week in Scotland we turned in our car and took a train back to London, where we spent our final week using the “Tube,” London’s underground transit system, to take in the whole of the city. All along the way we stayed at bed-and-breakfast lodging in private homes, guest houses, small hotels, farm houses and even a castle from the 15th century.

When we finally returned home, we found waiting for us the letter from Hope Cottage accepting us into their adoption program which resulted in us receiving Evan two and a half years later. He was thirteen days old when we went to Hope Cottage to get him. He is now 27 and will turn 28 in little over a month.

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.

Wait ’til next year!

My sister Sande was born on October 5, 1953, the same day the Dodgers lost game six of the 1953 World Series against the New York Yankees. I was not quite four years old, but I was already disappointed that I had to miss that game on TV, just because we had to go to the hospital.

The world series was first broadcast on television in 1947, but only in a very few areas of the country – New York City, Philadelphia, Schenectady and Washington, D.C.  1951 marked the first time that Major League Baseball’s World Series was televised coast to coast.  My father bought our first television in 1953 because he was a big fan of the New York Yankees. When we watched that first world series, it was only natural to me to root for the hated opponents, the Dodgers of Brooklyn.

I soon learned that just six years earlier, Branch Rickey and the Dodgers had broken major league baseball’s color barrier by hiring Jackie Robinson. By the time I was ten, my mother would leave me at places like Sanger Harris while she did her shopping for her job as a decorator. I would spend hours scouring the book shelves for information about the Dodgers. One day I found a book “Artful Dodgers,” about the team and many of the players like Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Carl Erskine, Carl Furillo, Roy Campanella, and all the others. I did not have any money but I really wanted that book. When I mentioned that to a store clerk, she asked whether my mother had a Sangers credit card. I knew she did and told them so. The clerk then informed me that she could look up that information and let me buy the book on my own.

In 1962 Major League Baseball added two new teams, the New York Metropolitans and the Houston Colt 45’s. As National League teams, that brought the chance I could see the Dodgers within about 250 miles away, rather than the previous distance of nearly a thousand miles in St Louis. That first year I talked my father into making that trip. We rode a Trailways bus into downtown Houston and took a taxi to Colt Stadium (the Astrodome would not open for another three years). Seeing the team I had followed for nearly ten years, I was ecstatic.  The Dodgers lost that game 1-13.

In the fall of 1983 Jean and I took a vacation to California where we were able to go to a Dodgers game at Dodger Stadium on September 20th. I was so thrilled to be in that place I only knew from TV and movies. The Dodgers lost that game 2-15.

At the end of 1996 I accepted a job with IBM in White Plains, New York. This gave me a chance to see the Dodgers again, this time at Shea Stadium. I went to a game on April 15, 1997, which was also the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s first game as a Dodger. At that game Major League Baseball retired Jackie Robinson’s number 42, and at the game were his widow Rachel, along with several Dodgers who had played on the team with him, including Sandy Koufax, Carl Erskine, Tommy Lasorda, Vin Scully, Don Newcombe and others. The Dodgers lost that game 0-5.

We lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from 1997 through 2007. On September 7 and 8, 2001 (the weekend before 9/11) I took Evan to St Louis to see the Dodgers play two games against the Cardinals. The Dodgers won the first game 7-1, but lost the second game 5-6. I had finally gotten to see the Dodgers win a game while I was there.

For 94 years teams in the two major league baseball had only played each other in Spring training and the World Series. That changed in 1997 with the inauguration of MLB Inter-league play. For some reason I don’t remember when we went to see the Dodgers play at the Ballpark in Arlington, but over the years of Inter-league play, the Dodgers have won 11 games and the Rangers have won 8 games.

The Dodgers have been in the World Series 18 times, winning six. The longest period without an appearance is now: it has been 26 years since the Dodgers appeared in the 1988 World Series. After losing the National League Division Series to the Cardinals this year, all I can say is, wait ’til next year.

Number games

Learning numbers

I learned yesterday that a new brain is in the process of development. This is special to me because it will be our first grandchild. Evan and Mirjam are expecting a child due in seven months, about Cinco de Mayo!

My own father Ted spent a great deal of his time helping to focus his son towards success in life. I learned to swim when I was two years old, I learned to read before I was five, and, like him, he wanted me to gain a mastery of numbers. Whenever we were together he would have me count, add, subtract, multiply and divide in my head. When I was ten the Federal Reserve Bank, where he worked, acquired its first IBM 1401 Data Processing System (computer), and he was sent to Endicott, NY, to learn how to program it. After he returned home, he started working with me to learn how to count in binary arithmetic: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc, and later to program in Autocoder. In high school my nickname was “IBM.”

So after suffering brain damage, not only could I not read or even remember the alphabet, I did not know numbers or how to count. When I first arrived at CNS, two months after the injury, whenever the therapists needed me to answer questions to determine the levels and types of memory losses I had suffered, they had to test me orally. So, like Julie Andrews sang in The Sound of Music, I had to “start at the very beginning. . .  with A, B, C.” And mathematically, with 1,2, 3.

A different area of the brain is used for math than for language, so those two kinds of trauma recover at different rates. While I was still having trouble remembering which letter of the alphabet was which (and still do to some extent), I was more quickly able to recognize and remember numbers. That was partly because there are only ten digits – versus 26 letters – but also because of the early training I had received from my father. Thus after only two or three months at CNS, one morning I awoke to discover that a large portion of my numeric skills had suddenly come back. I could do basic arithmetic like counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. What I could not do (and still can’t) was doing that in my head – mental arithmetic. But that wasn’t really much of problem. Even in class I could write the problem down, make notes, and still find the answers. Outside of class I use my phone or a computer to easily handle anything dealing with math.

I was so excited about recovering that part of my memory, and so determined to get my reading ability back, that I announced to Kimberly, my reading/math teacher, that I no longer needed help with the math and we could focus on my reading. Of course, she did not believe me and proceeded to give me a math test. She gave me a page of one hundred arithmetic problems that I had tried and failed just a couple of weeks earlier – I had completely given up after struggling trough just five or six problems – and I quickly finished it and answered all of the remaining ninety some-odd problems correctly!

The math was BACK!

9/11/2001

American Airlines home office

The September 11 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks launched by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda upon the United States at the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. The attacks killed almost 3,000 people. On that day I was working at the American Airlines center at 3800 N Mingo Rd Tulsa, OK 74116.

I had moved to Tulsa in 1997 to work for Commercial Financial Services, which went out of business a couple of years later because of fraud perpetrated by part of senior management. After that I worked for several companies as a contractor, including American Airlines (!), The Nordam Group, Oklahoma Central Credit Union, and eventually Sabre, which was a subsidiary of American Airlines. I was hired as an employee, not a contractor, in May of 2001, just before American Airlines outsourced their entire IT organization to Electronic Data Systems (EDS).

My responsibility at Sabre/EDS centered around maintaining the inventory of American Airlines’ aircraft engines, which FAA regulations required to be overhauled periodically. My function was to keep up with which engine was on which aircraft. Planes would be brought into our Tulsa center and engines would be removed for overhaul and replaced with other already overhauled engines, thereby keeping the planes flying as much as possible.

On the morning of September 11, because an American Airlines aircraft, Flight 11 from Boston’s Logan Airport heading for Los Angeles, was the first aircraft flown into the World Trade Center,  all of the employees at the Sabre offices became glued to the available televisions and online news programs to see what was happening. I saw our Flight 11 soon after it had hit the North Tower (1 WTC). That was quickly followed by United Airlines Flight 175 that, too, had left Logan Airport en route to LA, when the hijackers flew into the South Tower (2 WTC). Next, American Airlines Flight 77, which had left Dulles International Airport in Virginia, also en route to LA, was flown by hijackers into the Pentagon. Finally, United Airlines Flight 93, which had left Newark International Airport heading to San Francisco, as passengers attempted to subdue the hijackers, the aircraft crashed into the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The attacks resulted in the deaths of 2,996 people, including the 19 hijackers and 2,977 victims. The victims included 246 on the four planes (from which there were no survivors), 2,606 in New York City in the towers and on the ground, and 125 at the Pentagon. Nearly all of the victims were civilians; 55 military personnel were among those killed at the Pentagon.

I’ve had over 40 jobs

My first job was working for my mother. She had gone to college during World War II to receive an education in textiles. When I was in kindergarten she found a job at Sears as an interior decorator. She took what she’d learned there and started her own freelance decorating business which she called Vesta Spreng Interiors. She would design and make draperies for friends and neighbors, and found work for home builders at first to select exterior brick and paint colors along with interior carpet and kitchen cabinets. That work soon led to taking care of the designs for model homes. That would include designing and making draperies and sometimes adding furniture, art, towels and other items to make the homes look attractive and lived-in.

My mother would work with the builders and decide what needed to be done with the houses and she would make the draperies, purchase the furniture and equipment necessary for hanging the window treatments, and on Saturdays my father and I would load up our station wagon and we would take everything to the houses we were working at and handle the necessary installation. At first, I was only a “gopher” handing my parents the tools and materials they needed, but by the time I was 12 or so I could handle the same work they did, including hanging drapes, installing furniture and hanging pictures on the walls. We did this nearly every weekend until she retired when I was 35 years old! We used to tell people that I had 25 years of experience as a decorator!

Last week I mentioned my years as a musician with the Caballeros. During my four summers at college I worked for a motion picture shipping company in Dallas called Central Shipping and Inspection. We loaded film containers from our warehouse onto trucks for delivery to theaters across Texas. While I was in college at East Texas State University – now Texas A&M – Commerce – I was a teaching assistant. In 1969 ETSU changed their Christmas break schedule from a couple of weeks right before finals for the fall semester to four weeks after finals and before the start of the spring semester. That gave me the opportunity to work for a month and make some money. I went to work at NorthPark Mall at Kips, where I first met and began dating my wife Jean.

We got married  in 1972 after I’d graduated from ETSU, moved to Carrollton, TX, where I started my first “real” job at Rogersnap Business Forms. From there I went to TJM Corporation, another business forms company, where I worked as a forms salesman. After that I worked for Computer Language Research (aka “Fast-Tax”) where they trained me to program computer applications to process income tax returns for accounting forms. That gave me the skills to write software with PL/I, which would keep me working for the next 30 years. From there I went to work for a software consulting company, Cutler-Williams, Inc., who assigned me to work at Lone Star Gas, Dallas’s natural gas utility. Soon I was “hired away” from Cutler-Williams to work full-time at the utility, where I stayed for over 17 years, moving through two subsidiaries before returning to the “mother” company at the end.

Cutler-Williams was only the first of six or seven consulting/IT service companies that helped me find work using the computer skills I now had. These consulting firms helped me get jobs with IBM Credit Corporation in White Plains, NY, The Nordam Group in Tulsa, Nielson Media Research in Florida, State Farm Insurance in Bloomington, IL, and others.

After leaving Lone Star Gas, I moved us from Texas to Wichita, KS, to work for USF&G Insurance. After a couple of years they closed their Wichita office (on their way to eventually closing the entire company) and I moved to Baltimore, USF&G’s home office, to work for F&G Life, their life insurance office. Then I went to White Plains to contract at IBM; then Commercial Financial Services in Tulsa (to where we moved for ten years); American Airlines; The Nordam Group; Oklahoma Central Credit Union; Sabre, Inc./EDS Corporation; Decision One (Sprint); Domino’s Pizza; Tulsa County Jail (Corrections Corporation of America); Healthcare Administration Technologies; and Genesis10. During my time in Tulsa I also worked for Fellowship Bible Church Tulsa, Christ for Humanity, Carol Publishing (Everything Rosie), Whoopi Goldberg and writing for Network Magazine (CMP Media’s Data.com website).

In April of 2004 after nearly a year recovering from Guillain–Barré syndrome I moved to Tampa, Florida, to work for Nielson Media Research. This was another PL/I consulting position which ended in January 2006. I was able to quickly segue into working at State Farm in Bloonington, IL, but that only lasted about five months, after which I moved back to Tulsa. After a couple more failed attempts at consulting positions, I decided to move back “home” to Garland, Texas, and attend A+ Texas Teachers to obtain a Texas Teachers’ Alternative Certification Program classroom training which allowed me to take and pass the TExES Exam #131: English, Language Arts and Reading 8-12 and the TExES Exam #139  Technology Applications 8-12 teaching certifications. I am also “highly qualified” in Mathematics with 35 hours of college credits, 27 of which are upper level, which gives me the state’s teaching certification in Math. After teaching at DeSoto High School for a couple of weeks, I quickly learned that, as much as I wanted it, I was not cut out to be a teacher.

Looking for something else to do using that education, I got a job at the University of Texas at Dallas’s Callier Center for Communication Disorders. This is where I was working when I was hit by a car while walking across the street to work, November 1, 2012.

In all, I have had more than forty different jobs, in 13 cities over 55 years. Do they give out awards for that?