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  GBS 3 – Letting It All Hang Out Mona and Me - GBS Camping Trip G eneral Business Systems (GBS) didn't pay well but it was a fun place to work. The company was just a little over 2 years old and still on the small side, under 100 employees. Consequently there were lots of opportunities to do many things, you could take on as much work as you could handle. It was a fast paced and loose environment. GBS had 3 or 4 branch offices. I worked at the Burlingame branch which was also the company headquarters. I knew everyone in the Burlingame office which was maybe 40 people. I also knew some of those working in the other branches as they would need to come to HQ every now and then either for training or to meet with upper management. I t was a fun work environment because pretty much everyone got along and was supportive of each other. It had a real family feel. There seemed to be little if any undercutting. We worked together and helped each other. It was not the cutthroa...

Roxie and The I-Beam S hortly after I move to San Francisco some friends from Eugene came down for a visit. Along with a couple of other friends of mine, we all decided to go out dancing. I was still living at my friend Larry's place in the Haight-Ashbury district of the city. Right around the corner was a dance club called the I-Beam. The club's clientele was largely gay and it had a cover charge but it was the logical choice as we were a mixed group (straight and gay) and it was convenient. When we got in we were pleased to find a quite large dance floor affording us lots of room to dance. The music was good to dance to, after all, this was the disco era. We had fun dancing the evening away with each other and as a group. At one point I went over to the bar to get a drink. When the bartender brought me my drink he handed me two free passes for another night. S hortly after this my friend Roxie moved down to San Francisco from Oregon. I knew Roxie from Eugen...

  GBS 2 – I Ain't Good at Faking I was a computer programmer in Silicon Valley. Computers were still a new industry. Many things were being done for the first time, guidelines and standards lagged behind and were sometimes developed on the spot. Everyone was sort of inventing the wheel but not all those wheels were round. C ompared to my friends I was making good money but my job at General business Systems (GBS) did not pay well (starting salary was $800 a month) by computer programmer standards. Surprisingly the company had a lot of great people in it. There was a real family atmosphere. Due to the type of programming (no structure, no standards or guidelines) people's programming styles and skills were all over the map. Many of the programs were a mess. It was interesting and sometimes maddening trying to figure out other people's logic/thinking . Not everyone is good at logic and being good at logic is essential to being a good programmer. Many people (those...

Joining the Fray My first programming job out of college was with General Business Systems (GBS) located in Burlingame. Burlingame is just south of San Francisco on the north side of Silicon Valley. It was the fall of 1978 and this was my first professional/career job. I had lots of jobs before this one of course. My first job was working on a farm stand. I'd worked retail, worked on the stock market, drove a delivery truck, worked in a bakery factory and in an electrical warehouse. I also worked at an elementary school and a bike shop while in college. And oh yeah, I also did a little over 3 years in the Air Force repairing navigation systems. But this was my first real career type job. I was always a hard worker, even in the Air Force, but this was the first time I was in what I considered a professional job. I was about to step into a place where I had never pictured myself. In the movies newly hired staff with little or, in my case, no real experience started out ...

Becoming Fudge Fudge helping me with my morning stretches Fudge was 10 months old and about 25 pounds when we got him. He was full grown but still in his puppy phase. He loved to play with other dogs and the bigger the better. But Fudge was shy around people. He was especially uncomfortable with people he didn't know and just plain didn't like men. He liked me from the start, but I was the rare exception. A former co-worker of mine, Joe, who had relocated to the Santa Rosa area, came to town for a convention just after we got Fudge. He came over to the house and was the first male to visit us after we got Fudge. It was a nice spring day and so we sat out on the back deck. Fudge came out with us and proceeded to bark at him for most of an hour before he calmed down. That was the last time Joe came to visit us. We had taken Fudge to our vet and while Fudge didn't bark at him he noted Fudge's shyness and expressed some concern. We knew we had work to do. F...

As I was looking through pictures of dogs on the Puppy Love Rescue site, I came across a picture of a dog that jumped out at me. He looked like he might have personality and his eyes drew me in. He was black with some brown and a light tan trim, mostly on his legs which looked to be on the short side. He was sitting sideways but looking back at the camera with his large tongue out licking the side of his nose. His back legs pointed to the right but his front legs were a little more toward the camera and his body was rotated clockwise enabling him to look directly at the camera. He was billed as a corgi mix, which was something that interested us. I showed the picture to Kris and we decided to look into adopting. We filled out the rather extensive application from. Turns out that rescue agencies are quite particular about who they will allow adopt one of their dogs. We had found a couple of other potential dogs on other rescue sites as well. The corgi mix was the first dog we applied ...

The 1973 film American Graffiti, with that great soundtrack (by George Lucas of Indiana Jones and Star Wars fame) takes place in the summer of 1962.  1962 is the year Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game.  It's the year Marilyn Monroe was found Dead.  It's the year Johnny Carson took over the Tonight Show from Jack Paar.  It's the year of the Cuban Missile crisis and the year James Meredith enrolled at University of Mississippi.  It was also the year I turned 13 becoming an official teenager. 1962 was a great year for movies headed by “Lawrence of Arabia”, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, and “The Miracle Worker”.  It also included a bunch of other good flicks such as the first James Bond movie, “Dr. No”, “Lolita”, “The Manchurian Candidate”, “That Touch of Mink”, “The Birdman of Alcatraz”, “Whatever  Happened to  Baby Jane”, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”, “Mutiny on the  Bounty”, “The Longest Day”, “Days of Wine and Roses”, “Requiem f...

Larry I met Larry in the Air Force. We both joined up about the same time in April of 1969. We both came in from the New York City (NYC) area but Larry came through the Whitehall Street induction center in Manhattan (the same induction center referred to in the Arlo Guthrie song “Alice's Restaurant”) while I came in through the Fort Hamilton induction center in Brooklyn. Larry was a city kid. He grew up in the Bronx, one of the boroughs of New York City, the only one of the five boroughs on the mainland. I grew up on Long Island which includes Brooklyn. It occupies the southwest corner of the island. Larry and I were inducted within a week or two of each other. We did basic training in barracks that were right across from each other but we never ran into each other as during basic training everyone is pretty much restricted to interacting with the guys in your barracks only. After basic we were both assigned to the same career field, Navigation and Radar Repair and con...

California Here I Come Again 20 Belvedere I n September of 1978 I arrived at 20 Belvedere Street in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco. I was in my little Toyota pickup truck packed full with all my belongings. 20 Belvedere was where my good friend Larry lived and I was set to stay with him and his roommates Robert and Debbie until I got on my feet and found a place to live. 20 Belvedere was a three story Victorian type building, the kind you commonly see in San Francisco and Larry and his roommates were renting the 2 nd floor. It was just a couple of houses off Haight Street and 3 blocks from Golden Gate Park. W hen I first arrived in SF the city seemed so busy and fast paced compared to what I had become used to in Oregon plus I was a little depressed about having to leave Eugene. However, it didn't take me long to adjust, after all, I had spent my first 18+ years in an even faster paced setting, New York and I am not really one to dwell in depr...

Remembering Valerie Valerie dancing at my wedding W hile looking through a box of old photographs I came across a couple of postcards that were sent to me in December of 1979. I had recently been transferred to Sacramento. One postcard was from Louanne and the other from Valerie, two members of the Barrington Gang that had moved from Eugene to San Francisco around the same time I did. Louanne's post card had a picture of a reenactment of the assassination of President Kennedy. Now a postcard of the assassination would be weird enough but a postcard of a reenactment of it? Who thinks something like that is post card worthy? That is just too funny. I've always appreciated Louanne's sense of humor. The picture on the card from Valerie was of a vintage Christmas card which in it's own way was very Valerie. The cards asked about how I was finding Sacramento, informed me they'd be in San Francisco for Christmas, and asked if I might be there as well. ...