Some Terminology Never Dies

I imagine that most occupations and pastimes of any age have not only unique descriptive terms, but terms that in fact misdescribe, because whatever they once described has evolved.

This is an IBM green card that I was using when I wrote programs for mainframes in the 1990's.

What?

Yes. Yes it is.

OK, then, here's what the original (1960's) green card looked like.

(If that link goes dead, someone please mention it in the comments and I'll replace it.)

The original was basically a two-sided piece of heavy stock with information useful to some programmers, particularly assembler programmers. It contained instruction names, the hexadecimal codes for the instructions, instruction mnemonics, that sort of thing. You carried it in your shirt pocket, you carried it in your back pocket, or you left it on your desk, in which case it went missing. Being carried around in pockets accounts for the disreputable appearance of the green card in the above picture.

Over the years the card was from time to time reprinted, having been expanded to provide more information and/or tailored to meet the requirements for use with more modern and different systems. The version shown above is also of heavy stock, but unfolds to eight pages with two sides.

These later versions made their appearance in different colors - blue, pink, yellow, whatever, but no veteran assembler programmer was going to ask to borrow someone's "pink card" or "blue card." Programmers who did so and were heard by veterans faced death by derision. Green card it was and green card it would remain.

When my programming career ended (2001) the green card was in fact neither green nor a card. It was a booklet of roughly (perhaps even exactly) the same width and height of the original green card, but containing dozens of pages of information.

For your amusement, I shall mention that I first got into electronic data processing a few years after its commercial inception, not at the very beginning. The mainframe was at a Boston newspaper and required its own room, climate control, raised flooring, etc.

It was an IBM 360-20, with 24K of memory. Of that 24K the first 1A40 (that's 6720 for fingers and toes people) bytes were reserved for the system. Thus, for application programmers the first byte available was 1A41 and the last byte available - "high core" - was 5FFF (24575).

That 24K is what my first home computer (as they were called at the time), an Apple II+, came with. You could buy an additional 24K, but that was it. That is laughable today, as your desktops and laptops have so much more.

Mainframe computers are known by old timers as "the big iron," and are in much wider use than many people imagine. Why? Power. If you need to process ten or fifteen thousand transactions per second, then you still need the big iron.

Keep on Keepin' on

I have mentioned Rob, mentor and close friend, in earlier posts. Rob was about ten years older than I, personable, funny, knowledgeable to some extent about nearly everything. I met Rob in 1971, I think, in Boston. When I worked at Blue Cross there he was my vice-president. He took a senior vice-pesidency at Blue Cross in Chicago in 1979 and surprised me by offering me a vice-presidency there, which I accepted.

We ran together off and on throughout the years in Boston, then non-stop from 1979 to 1983 in Chicago. At that point I left Blue Cross and we saw each other less frequently but kept in touch.

A year or two later he left Chicago, got divorced and married again, and ultimately settled in Georgia. It's the state he was from, but that was a coincidence.

By then, "keeping in touch" pretty much meant a phone call every three or four years, but the conversations were always long and full of laughs.

He fell prey to Alzheimer's Disease, and in the early stages his wife had to separate him from the internet, as he was sending emails containing some lurid stories which he presented as fact, which was highly unlikely.

About six months ago I asked a mutual friend (and former girlfriend of Rob), Maryellen, what she'd heard from or about Rob. She was horrified to learn that I didn't know that he had died "quite a while ago." I googled him and found his obit, and he had been gone for three years.

Although we hadn't seen each other for perhaps twenty-five years, for me the world is emptier now.

This has been a strange year in that regard. My best friend in Vietnam (1966) was Fred. It is quite normal, you might even say routine, for Army friends to lose track of each other, and when we left Vietnam for different assignments that was the last I saw of him.

I never forgot him, and when the internet came along I began searching for him. He had a slightly unusual name, and I found only one person with that name, a resident of McMinnville, Tennessee. I called and it was the wrong Fred.

Around 1997 or so I left a message on a site that was designed to help Vietnam veterans contact each other. I just said I wanted to know that he was out there somewhere and left my email address.

I kept looking and a few years ago found that he had been promoted and gone back to Vietnam around 1970, but that was all I ever found.

Several months ago I got an email from a woman who said "I think you are looking for my grandfather." This wasn't going to end well. If he was alive she'd have let *him* know, not me.

I sent her the details I had about knowing him in Corpus Christi, Texas and in Vietnam, and found the two pictures of him that I knew I had somewhere, scanned them, and sent them to her.

She is Fred's granddaughter, although they never met. Fred took his own life in 1972, shortly before she was born, leaving no information as to why.

It does seem strange that I was still looking for him thirty-nine years after he died, but many things that happened before the advent of the internet haven't made it there yet.

I guess I'm thinking of him today because of Veterans Day, and because a couple of days ago his granddaughter emailed me. She checks on me every three or four weeks.

I hope Rob and Fred are the only two I find out about this year.

Keep on keepin' on, y'hear?

Never Give Up

When I returned to Illinois from Virginia, I signed on with a consulting group. My first assignment was to be at Allstate, which required a ten person contingent: a project leader, a technical leader, and eight assembler programmers. I was to be the technical leader.

The project leader and I got there a couple of weeks ahead of the rest - in fact not all "the rest" had been found and hired. I wound up interviewing a couple of them myself. After a couple of weeks everyone was present and *that* is when I learned that Allstate didn't need ten techies. What they needed was a group of people to document some systems written in assembler, and they had decided that should be done by assembler programmers. Our group *might* write a dozen lines of code a week among us.

I called my employers and told them they had to get me out of there, and a week or two later they arranged an interview at IBM for a programming job working (as a contractor, not an employee) with an assembler programming department. I was interviewed by the manager and a couple of days later he introduced me to the others in the department, six in number, and informed me that I would be working with (read "for") Rick.

Rick was in some ways old school IBM: all business, not one whit more sociable than he had to be. I, on the other hand, tend to be somewhat gregarious around people with whom I work. Within a couple of weeks I had made several friends in the department, but no progress in that area with the Great Stone Face, Rick. Nearly every minute of the work day you could walk by his cubicle and see him either staring at programming code on his monitor or making modifications to it, oblivious to his surroundings. In fact, and I *swear* to you this is true, one day an employee in another department had a heart attack, paramedics raced by Rick's cubicle with a gurney and then returned, wheeling the patient past Rick, and when I mentioned it later he was completely unaware of the incident. He was a dedicated worker, no doubt about *that*.

He gave me assignments, pointed me to the programs and libraries I would need, and basically ignored me until I went to him and said I was done. I *tried* to break him down, but that was a very slow process. I would go into his cube, park my butt on his credenza, and wait until he was forced to look at me. He, on the other hand, would ignore me for a bit, then take a deep breath to let me know that this was an imposition, turn to me, and give me the phoniest smile in creation while saying "Yes?"

But *this* Yankee is made of stern stuff, and after a couple of months I could actually get a few minutes of non-work conversation out of him. At some point he began calling me "Fred," which was most assuredly not my name. However, I would have dipped my arm in boiling oil before asking him why, at least until I had *some* information about it.

That came one day when he decided he wanted to talk about a problem he was having with a program. He just *couldn't* find the problem and thought that perhaps talking it out with me would help. I looked over his shoulder as he discussed the program routines and found that he had inserted some testing code to provide him with interim information to help the debugging. Interestingly, he had named the testing routine "Fred." Aha!

I asked him "Why 'Fred?'" He said he had once had a boss that named such routines Fred and he had picked up the habit. Good enough for me, and soon we were *both* calling each other Fred, a practice which persists to this day. (My greatest triumph came one day when the two of us had lunch and I presented him with a bottle of wine from Lynfred Winery, the label of which proclaimed it to be "Fred's Red.")

The Great Stone Face cracked one day. The breakthrough came as the result of some work he had given me. When I said I was done he tested the program. Soon his voice wafted across the corridor: "Hey, Fred. It doesn't work." I, of course, denied that this could be true in a four dimensional universe, and learned something about how the department worked. When you made a modification to the program you owned the *entire* program, not just the code you wrote, not just the functions the code affected. He had found something in the program that didn't work. It wasn't related to my coding and in fact it was obvious that it had *never* worked properly. I pointed that out and he gave me an Ownership 101 lecture. Go back and fix this one, and in the future when I fixed something, test *every* function in the program. It didn't matter if it had never worked, if it didn't work *now* it was my responsibility.

The breakthrough? I said "You should be in Quality Control," and he replied "You should be pumping gas."

That's one of the funniest things anyone's ever said to me, and I have known a lot of people over the years who would have paid mucho dinero for front row seats to it. I once related the story during a telephone conversation with Debbie (you'll just have to read older posts if you want to know about her) and it was several minutes before she could breathe properly.

Rick and I slowly became good friends, and the final proof was that one hot summer afternoon I got him to steal out of the building with me and make a quick run to Dairy Queen.

I left IBM nearly ten years ago, but several of the department members, including Rick and me, still have lunch once a month, and every couple of months Rick and I get together for a movie and dinner.

Stuck in the Sixties, Musically

I imagine that the great majority of pop music fans favor inordinately the music of their youth, the major exception being (perhaps) those who were young musicians and were always impatiently finding fault with the music of the day.

My own experience was that with the arrival of heavy metal I "dropped out" when it came to keeping up with contemporary music. It's not as if I've *never* listened to or liked newer artists, only that at one time I was on top of things, so to speak, and since then my exposure to new artists and new music has been pretty much accidental.

Thus, this post, devoted to pop music related trivia, will focus pretty much on the fifties and sixties. Here are some tidbits for you:

• The Animals: The original members were a tax collector, a ship's instrument maker, a postman, an illustrator, and a salesman.
  
  
• Seven different artists reached the top forty with Mack the Knife, aka Theme from the Three Penny Opera.
  
  
• The Ronettes, The Crystals, and The Chiffons were all sixties girl groups. In the 1986 remake of Little Shop of Horrors, three black women are occasionally seen and heard in musical numbers and in the credits are identified as Ronette, Crystal, and Chiffon.
  
  
• The Bobbettes: If you're old enough, you may recall their only hit, Mr. Lee.
  
  One, two, three,
  Look at Mr. Lee.
  Three, four, five,
  Look at him jive.
  
  Well, the truth is that the Bobettes were aged 11 to 13, Mr. Lee was their fifth grade teacher, and they didn't like him at all. The above lyrics are the cleaned up version of their original recording, I Shot Mr. Lee, which began
  
  One, two, three,
  I shot Mr. Lee.
  Three, four, five,
  I got tired of his jive.
  
  
• Pat Boone and Roy Orbison were classmates at North Texas State University.
  
  
• Sky Pilot was slang for a military chaplain. When Eric Burdon & the Animals released their song of that name in 1968 it went to number one among the troops in Vietnam and stayed there for six months.
  
  
• Johnny Cash had a big hit with A Boy Named Sue, written by Shel Silverstein. You may recall the verse in which Sue finally finds his father and they get into a fight, Kickin' and a-gougin' in the mud and the blood and the beer.
  
  Silverstein later wrote and recorded Father of a Boy Named Sue. In this version, told by the Sue's father, Sue is gay and when they meet and fight, they do so Kickin' and a gougin' in the mud and the blood and the creme de menthe.
  
  And yes, that Shel Silverstein - A Light in the Attic and other children's books.
  
  
• With a Little Help From My Friends, it was reported, was Vice President Spiro Agnew's favorite pop song until someone told him that the friends were drugs.
  
  
• Fats Domino, with eighteen Billboard Top 20 hits, never made it to number one. The closest he came was with Blueberry Hill, which reached #2.
  
  
• Tommy Edwards reached #18 in 1951 and #1 in 1958 with It's All in the Game, written as Melody in A Major in 1911 by Charles Dawes, who was elected Vice President in 1912.

Doowop. Really.

But first an afterthought related to the previous post. (No, honest, we'll get to doowop.)

Georgia Gibbs, whom I called "The Queen of Cover Artists," covered so many LaVern Baker songs that it really angered Baker. Whether it's true or not, there was at the time a widely reported story that Baker took out a flight insurance policy naming Gibbs as the beneficiary, so that if anything happened to Baker then Gibbs wouldn't go broke.

OK, doowop. For some reason So Fine, a song by The Fiestas, popped into my mind the other day. Close behind it came the memory that the flip side was a doowop song, Last Night I Dreamed. Now this is one of those songs that people tend to love or hate. I recall a young woman telling me that in places it sounded like "a bunch of castrated pups."

Sooo . . . I went to YouTube to search for it and was *quite* surprised to find it. I haven't heard it for roughly fifty years. So Fine charted in 1959, while I was in Germany, and although I've heard that any number of times, I had never heard Last Night I Dreamed anywhere but on the jukeboxes in German bars.

I snagged it from YouTube and then, well you know how you watch a video on YouTube and then get presented with the option to watch any number of videos that YouTube thinks might be related to what you just watched. I don't really have a point to make in this post, and am just gonna ramble a little about where those choices took me and the memories they stirred, all fifty or more years old. If old folks bore you, go away.

One of the choices was Daddy's Home, which reached #2 in 1961, by Shep & the Limelites. The mildly interesting thing about this song is that it's a sequel (generally known as an "answer song") to You're a Thousand Miles Away (1956, didn't make the pop charts) by the Heartbeats. James Shepherd had been the lead singer of that group at the time, so he recorded the original song with one group and the sequel with another. He tried to milk it to death by releasing Three Steps to the Altar and Our Anniversary, but they tanked. Enough was enough.

YouTube then took me to one of the truly great doowop songs, In the Still of the Night, by The Five Satins. Recorded in a church basement, this was Voted 100th best song of the 20th century by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

From there I went to My Girl by the Temptations. Arguably the best song to come out of Motown, it was written by Smokey Robinson and was the RIA/NEA pick for the 20th century's 45th best song.

And then . . . and then . . . don't do this, I'm warning you. I clicked on something described as "Most Requested Oldies Medley." Have you ever been doing something and wished you were having a root canal instead?

OK, we'll wrap this up with two items: 1) Since you're dying to know what song the RIA/NEA chose for the 20th century's best: It was Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Judy Garland; and 2) a short list of doowop tecommendations (in addition to those mentioned above).

• I Only Have Eyes For You by The Flamingos
  
• Money Honey by Clyde McPhatter & the Drifters
  
• The Tracks of My Tears by The Miracles
  
• Stay by Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs
  
• At My Front Door by the El Dorados
  
• Over the Mountain by Johnnie & Joe
  
• Sixty Minute Man by The Dominoes
  

As with the numbers mentioned in the preceding post, these can all be found on YouTube.

Doo Wop. Umm, Maybe Next Time

I grew up in New England, which was largely what you might call a white bread area. In the sixth grade (Portsmouth, New Hampshire) I met a black person for the first time, a classmate named Harry. That's pretty much how life went for me until I joined the Army.

In my teens (Beverly, Massachusetts) my friends and I listened to rock and roll on the radio and began to be exposed to music by black artists. At first the Boston area stations played almost entirely songs by white artists. When blacks had hits on the R&B charts the songs were covered by white artists such as Pat Boone and Georgia Gibbs, whom I consider the King and Queen of Cover Artists, based entirely on the number of black artists' songs they jumped on.

In 1955 the flood gates opened when the Platters became the first black artists to reach number one on the pop charts, which they accomplished with The Great Pretender.

As a result, some popular R&B singers such as Big Joe Turner, Clyde McPhatter, and Ivory Joe Hunter began to be heard on stations that were previously devoted pretty much to whites, the exceptions being singers of ballads and blues, such as Nat King Cole, and suddenly the charts really showed a mixture of black and white. Fats Domino, Little Richard, The Coasters, The Platters, and others often reached the top of the pop charts, not only with rock and roll but with slower music as well, and we white teenagers not only liked it, we liked it a *lot* more than white cover versions.

Here it must be noted that things were very different on the music charts in those days. It was not unusual for there to be two or three versions of the same song in the top twenty. Occasionally this was simply due to several white artists or groups recording the same songs, but often it was a matter of white artists covering tunes by black artists.

I think the reason we preferred the the black artists is that the white artists didn't know what the Hell they were singing about. If you'd like to hear a classic example, listen to Long Tall Sally by Little Richard and then listen to it by Pat Boone. Another? Listen to Shake, Rattle and Roll by Big Joe Turner and then by Bill Haley & His Comets.

There's no getting around it: the white versions fail in two respects. First there's the style of the playing and singing, with black artists displaying emotion and excitement. Second there's the bowdlerization of the lyrics. Consider, for example, Little Richard's

Long tall Sally, she's built for speed.
She got everything that Uncle John needs.

And now Pat Boone's

Long tall Sally's got a lot on the ball
And nobody cares if she's long and tall.

Similarly, there is Big Joe Turner's

Way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shinin' through.
Way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shinin' through.
I can't believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you.

And Bill Haley's

Wearin' those dresses your hair done up so nice;
Wearin' those dresses your hair done up so nice;
You look so warm but your heart is cold as ice.

My absolute favorite comment on a "cover" situation involved the song Earth Angel, recorded by both The Penguins (black) and The Crew Cuts (white). I'd love to attribute the quote, but I don't remember who wrote it and I can't find it on google. It went something like this:

On the pop charts the Crew Cuts version reached number three and the Penguins version reached number eight. On the R&B charts the Penguins reached number one and the Crew Cuts were nowhere in sight.

I didn't want to clutter up this post with images of videos, or even with links, so I'll leave it to those of you who are interested to search YouTube for the songs and artists. You'll find everything mentioned here.

Well, I intended to write about doowop, but you can see what happened. Doowop will be next up.

Everything's Easy When You Know How

I take it as a given that the thing humans do least well is communicate. Nowhere is this more evident than when one person who knows how to do something but is not an expert wants to explain, without props, to someone who is a complete novice how to do it.

My first piece of advice to the novice is if the teacher says - nay, insists - "It's easy," then you must say immediately that your mother is dying, your manslaughter trial begins in twenty minutes, or that you have recently contracted a loathsome social disease. Say anything that will allow you to make your escape.

Throughout my adult life, the topic regarding which I have been most frequently - that is to say, always - victimized is cooking. Not one peson has ever tried to explain to me how to make a particular dish without saying "It's easy."

Unhappily, they clandestinely share a dictionary with uncommon definitions for common words, and once they begin their cooking explanations it becomes obvious that their version of "easy" means "So complex that several days into the preparation of this dish you will eat the raw ingredients with your bare hands in order to stave off starvation."

One evening each week, or as close to that schedule as we can manage, I visit my old junk mail friend, Bobby, previously mentioned in this blog. Our arrangement is that we alternate cooking responsibilities. Bobby can cook. I, on the other hand, . . . .

Given my limitations, the variety of meals that I cook for us is limited, and it recently occurred to me that it *is* the twenty-first century after all and perhaps Google really is my friend. I began a search for "easy meals."

This is the absolute truth: I clicked on the first results link and at that site I clicked on a "100 Easy Dinners" link. I then clicked on the link to the first dinner title that caught my interest: Chicken Marsala.

Keep in mind that to me, "easy" means "Start a stove burner and dump everything on top of it." I'd even include putting the food into a pot or a pan first. OK? Now, forget the process, just look at the list of ingredients:

1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon Essence, recipe follows
2 (6 to 8-ounce) boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut in halves and pounded thin
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 tablespoons butter
3 cups sliced mushrooms (cremini, oyster, shiitake)
3/4 cup Marsala
1 cup chicken stock
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Chopped chives, for garnish

Recipe for "Essence" (required above)

2 1/2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons garlic powder
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon dried leaf oregano
1 tablespoon dried thyme

Now here is a list of the above ingredients which I do *not* have on hand:

all-purpose flour
boneless, skinless chicken breasts
olive oil
sliced mushrooms
Marsala
chicken stock
freshly ground black pepper
chopped chives
paprika
garlic powder
onion powder
dried leaf oregano
dried thyme

And a list of the ingredients that I *do* have on hand is:

butter
salt
black pepper
cayenne pepper

Now one *expects* to have to buy the chicken, and perhaps one or two ingredients, but you see what I mean, right?

Perhaps I should mention that I *do* have a tablespoon too. No, don't be so cynical. I also have a measuring cup.

Which of you will volunteer to contact the usage panels of the various Webster's dictionaries, the American Heritage dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary, and numerous others, in order to inform them that they omitted a definition of the word "easy?"

I threw the word "bachelors" into my search and things look more promising. One conclusion reached in short order, however, is that if credit is given for a recipe and that credit goes to a woman, I'll just move along, thank you very much, 'preciate it, my mother is dying, I gotta go. When it comes to "easy" we don't speak the same language.

As an aside, the *best* single instruction regarding a recipe that I ever heard was at a back yard party in Maryland. The hostess and another woman, both thirtyish, were talking about the recipe for something the hostess had prepared. The latter was reciting ingredients and when she got to vanilla extract, the guest asked "How much?"

"Oh, 'bout a mouthful."