Cars, Autos and More Pieces of Junk...

The All VW garage (what car of mine has EVER lived in a garage?!) ended abruptly in the spring of 1972. The thoroughly worn out three year old 69 VW Bug with 110K miles on it (yes!) blew a cylinder and found itself in the VW shop in Mill Valley. The shop was adjacent to the Ford dealer.



A bright red brand new Ford Courier talked to me, saying, "just think of the junk you could haul in me and with a cover over the bed I could double as a camper on weekend fishing trips". Yes! So a deal was struck, I paid cash for the truck (flush then, not now) and drove the lil' charmer home to a surprised wife. Weeks followed with my adding a cassette player so I could listen to The Stones and The Beatles on the way to work each morning. I added some truck style mirrors so I could see better when hauling all that junk down the road too. It good decent mileage for then to, 20 -25 mpg and for a truck was reasonably comfortable. Sometime in 1974 we moved to Petaluma and the truck certainly performed yeoman-like duty during the transition; furniture, a pottery wheel, a 1/2 ton of clay and a small sailboat I built came along for the ride. She lived for another three years running me helter skelter around the Bay Area fixing customer's room-filling computers day in and day out. In the summer of 1977 she stayed home while I attended a golf tournament, my dear wife, having a morning appointment of her own, stayed back til later in the day and then she drove the truck to the golf club (tried too) and blew the engine when a water hose broke along the way in the 108 degree California heat! So long to the lil' red truck, cost more to fix than she was worth (even then). I sold her for scrap with 165,000 miles on her 5 1/2 years after I bought her. Verdict: A Car - Good, honest transportation.

Computer Chatter

I dunno if anyone cares but my whole working life was a curious mix of the computer industry, IBM (yes), a small company in Long Island, NY called Potter Instrument Company and my last one Control Data Corporation. I worked in an IBM plant in San Jose, CA right out of the USAF and during this time wound up getting trained as a field engineer working in San Francisco and environs. Not just a job believe me, thoroughly entertaining and at times impossible. The City (As SF is known locally and elsewhere) was a bustling place full of people, cars, buses, noise, dirt and panhandlers. I was a young man with a starter family who lived in Stinson Beach about 25 miles away along the northern coast. I loved it there. We moved there shortly after my son Michael was born, from Campbell near San Jose in the fall of 1968. It was a small (660 sq. ft!) ex-tent house from early in the 20th century. Built on a platform flat on the sand. It became a house at some time in the past with 4 tiny rooms and thin walls coverred with lath and plaster. The outside was lap siding which we painted grey with white trim, our elephant look. It remained cool and wet most every day and suited both my mood and need for refuge from the chaos of the Streets of San Francisco sans Karl Malden from the TV show of the same name.
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The computers that challenged my patience and intellect at that time were room-fillers to be sure, huge 7 foot tall black boxes that roared with the sound of fans and gears. Complex beyond belief and prone to both errors and outright failure at any time. One spent a goodly portion of each working day in study of the modes of failure and in acts called Preventative Maintenance aka PM designed to stem the flow of Incident Reports aka IRs to the main office. My friend SC worked at the same location that I did in downtown SF, Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company aka PT&T and we grew to be best friends and co-workers. Days were spent cleaning filters, vacuuming the frames and checking voltages of the 360/50 and 360/65 processors and thier related periferals. Huge racks of reference books in dark blue matching covers lined the edges of the equally huge main room. It was always cold therein, these things needed airconditioning just to stay powered up as they had extensive heat sensors to detect overtemperature conditions in each section of the machine.
Humans came in second in this multi-million dollar computer facility thus we froze except when we roasted.
More to come...