Conversion

Change happens.

My last entry on travel reminded me of a story. Back in the days of yore, when giants walked the earth (OK, thirty years ago), I had just begun work at Shared Medical Systems (SMS - later acquired by Siemens) and I worked in the group that did 'Conversions'. In those days, SMS was growing rapidly, getting tons of new hospital customers all the time. Converting from one electronic system to another is a hard time for a hospital, most run on very thin margins and any disruption to their cash flow is very painful. So we tried very hard to get their billings moving again as soon as we could. And we did that by 'converting' their old files from whatever system they used to run on into the SMS file structure so we could do billings right away, in many cases the very next day after the conversion.

I was very pleased to be in this group doing that work because it was SO challenging. In those days, there were many more manufacturers of computers and many more proprietary file structures, some specifically built for one hospital. So every conversion was different and each was a little like forensic archeology. We had to pick the files apart and tease the information out of them and specifications were always poor because the company or group losing the account was never tripping over themselves to supply proper information. They were probably hoping we would fail so they could get another shot at the hospital. So we wrote our conversions in a language called PL/I (Programming Language One), which allowed us to manipulate data down to the bit level so we could actually change characters around if we had to. And we often had to. This is what coding in PL/I looked like:
It was such a strong language, we could decode bizarre 7-bit junk or data with arcane random buffer lengths or files that had another file to tell where certain data was posted (which was never included in the batch they sent us). But this is where I learned my love of forcing the system to do what I wanted it to even if it had no intention of giving me what I wanted. It was a real rush to pull a jewel out of a steaming pile of crap. The executives knew we were doing magic and were grateful to us and sent us letters of appreciation. But no money.

So, what's this got to do with travel? Well, the most money came in when we acquired a group of hospitals and that was fairly regularly. The deal maker was a Vice President named Mike Mulhall who had such commanding presence that his statements were regarded as stone fact simply because he had uttered them. These were not negotiations, they were pronouncements. It was amazing to watch. So he and I would travel to these places and meet with a room full of people and 'negotiate' what was going to happen. They would bring in their technical experts and I would question them about their file structures, aging decisions, financial codes, etc. etc. right in front of everyone. Then I would give Mike my estimation of the difficulty factor for the conversion and he would apply it as one factor in the financial part of the deal. It was a little like the Pros from Dover had come to town and we were there to crack this kid's chest and get in a round of golf.

Only it wasn't golf, it was drinking. Mike drank more than any human I'd ever seen. On our fairly frequent trips, we would go the airport and into one of the many airline clubs he was a member of. I didn't sit in those cold plastic chairs at the gate for YEARS. When they called our flight, he called for another round. We only left when it was FINAL call. And then, when we boarded (always as the door was closing) he'd ask the stewardess for a drink so it would be ready as soon as we were in the air. At first, I tried to keep up with him, but that was just dumb. Mike was a studied, hardened professional drinker, but he never showed a sign of intoxication other than a reddening of the face as the evening (or day) progressed. There was more than one occasion when we would fly to our destination and go right into a meeting after drinking for hours! I have no idea how I pulled that off other than Mike expected me to, so that made me capable. It was a little worse when the meeting was first thing the next day because although he didn't feel it, I sure did.

Then my team and I actually had to DO the conversion and there was never enough time. But that's a story for another day. Imagine staying awake for three and half days straight and writing better code three-quarters of the way asleep than I did wide awake and rested. If I tried that now, I would be DEAD, DEAD, DEAD.

On the day of conversion, we didn't have any fancy file transfer, we had one of our guys hand-carry a set of tapes back from Michigan or Arizona or wherever. Timing was crucial as you can imagine. Between the day-end of the other system and the airline schedule, there was often a very tight timeframe. Our courier told the story once of his speeding across town in his rental car, squealing to a stop in front of the terminal door, jumping out with his case of tapes and as he ran through the door, he tossed his rental car keys to a cop standing there and said "Medical Emergency!" and just kept running. I can't remember if he said he made it through the airplane door as it was closing or it had already closed but either way there was no time for any rental car return.
We waited breathlessly for a ticket or bench warrant to arrive in the mail, but all we ever got was the rental car receipt. That means the officer may have personally driven the car to the rental car return himself and then had to arrange getting back to his post or made it happen some other way, but however he did it, we're grateful.

Can you IMAGINE trying a stunt like that now? We would be shot six times before we ever got through the first door. Traveling was different in those days.

Mike Mulhall died very young and it was a long time ago. He had a heart attack at the New York Athletic Club after a steam bath. I learned a lot from Mike, we traveled all over the country together, we were a good team. He is missed.
 

Travelin'

I'm traveling and the traveling is interfering with my blogging. What's up with THAT?

I recall the days of yore when traveling was exciting and interesting and I really looked forward to it. Now. . . not so much. Being in the destination place is still cool, it's the plane ride that's JUST NO FUN.

Right now, I'm sitting in a hotel room and out of one window is the Eiffel Tower and Caesar's Palace and out of the other window is the Arc de Triomphe and the Bellagio fountains. And if anybody tells you there's some sort of Recession going on, it sure isn't going on in Vegas. Just the money they make from cigarette taxes are going to keep this place afloat. I thought people were quitting smoking, but not in Las Vegas. I guess if you get cancer here, it stays here.

Being here is fine, but the frickin' terrorists have made travel annoying and unnecessarily long and . . . well, just not as much fun as it used to be.

When I worked at Eastern Airlines, they practically FORCED you to travel. A ticket anywhere on the system was $5. Yeah, five dollars! Unless you wanted to go first class, then it was SEVEN dollars. And if you wanted to travel to a city that Eastern didn't fly to, you could fly on another airline for TEN dollars. For our belated honeymoon, my wife and I flew from Miami to Hawaii round trip for $40. Plus there were outstanding discounts at the hotel chains where the pilots and stews stayed and cheap rental cars and discounted attractions. You could go broke saving money. There was a catch, of course, you had to dress nicely. OOOOhhh, bummer.

I know of managers at Eastern headquarters who flew to Dallas for steak dinners. We flew to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands just to buy a camera because it was so much cheaper there. I was sorry to see Eastern go under, I would have liked to stay with them, but it just goes to show: Just because you're some fancy astronaut doesn't make you a good CEO, does it, Frank Borman? Huh, does it?


It's probably just as well, I would probably have put us in the poorhouse (are there still poorhouses?) by doing too much traveling. Shoot, you could get to the airport a half hour before your flight, have your loved ones see you off at the gate and you were dressed nicely when you arrived. Now you have to strip down naked, show some 'security personnel' every fluid you own and every now and again have the privilege of having your belongings rifled through after you spent a lot of time arranging them.

Oh, well, it's still not as bad as Europe. I was flying out of Munich one time and I noticed a female security guard circling me and darting around and eyeing me. Now it could be because I'm extremely attractive, or it could be because I was wearing my hair cut very short and I was wearing a Deutschland Uber Alles t-shirt. Or both, I imagine. Just as I was at the head of the security line, she pounced! "Voud you kum wis me, pliss?"

She took me into a little room, just the two of us and she searched my luggage. No, not the way American 'security personnel' search stuff, no she SEARCHED my luggage. She felt around every article of my clothing, the waistbands, the seams, turned the pockets inside out, felt the weight of it, the whole bit. And since I was going home, these were my dirty clothes. Whoo Hoo!

Then the toiletries. She opened everything, smelled it, squeezed my toothpaste tube all the way up and down, took my electric razor apart. Just like the stuff you've seen in the movies. Meanwhile, I'm standing there with this stupid grin on my face and every now and again, she would look at me - but NO smile, there were heavily armed soldiers guarding the airport and they were very serious about their work.

In the end, Rosa Klebb let me go, a little disappointed, I think. "Sank you for your. . . <eyebrow raised> cooperation."

Travelin'.

A Little More Sixty Years

How's that for a title? I wrote earlier that English is such a rich, variable language that people can still write a sentence today that NO ONE may have every written before. Like this title for instance. What it means is that I'm going to show you some more photographs of matching locations separated by sixty years or so.

But first a bit of history. Back just after the Civil War, in the days of Fort Dallas (before there was a 'Miami', Florida) Dade County was pretty quiet except for the Indians. Along the stretch of Biscayne Bay coastline from NE 80th Street to 95th Street was a settlement named Biscayne and for quite a while it was the county seat for Dade County. The post office, court house, etc. were all there. Now it's all gone, any remnants are under the houses of Miami Shores. Military Highway ran right through town on what is now NE 10th Avenue. In later years, that would be East Dixie Highway. The only commemoration left is a small park (a park-let really) with a plaque and some benches. That's a little sad, but time passes, you know? Here's what the park looks like now. Here's my wife, Deb, sinking into the luxurious grass.

When we were there in 2002, I had no idea that I had been there before, but my Sherlock Holmes-like detective work has proven otherwise.

Here's a set of photographs taken by my mother of my father and brother in this park. Sure, there were changes, but once I figured out where to look, it all became very clear. I must say, it was very satisfying to figure out these locations.

Sherlock Holmes, my foot.

Sixty Years

In my last entry, I explained that I took a trip to Miami in an attempt to find the locations in some of the photographs in my Mother's photo albums. Nothing (hardly anything) was labeled (let that be a lesson to you) so I had to use all my detective tricks. Here are some examples of what I came up with.

Here's the house in Normandy Isle on Miami Beach where my mother used to work.

And here's the same shot sixty five years later.

Here's my father at the front door of the Normandy Isle house.

And here's a current view.

My father with his arm around the garden statue.

Here's the statue sixty five years later.

Here's my mother in the back yard before and after. Time passes, my friends. Take note.

Of Photographs and Fool's Errands

I inherited some photographs after my father died.

These were albums put together by my mother and judging from the albums themselves, she began this project during World War II and stopped making additions just a few years later. The pages were just cheap, blank black construction paper and any photographs were attached by the placement of large stickers glued to the corners of the photographs to hold them in place.

Consequently, one could place the photographs however one wished. And that's just how she placed them: however. She clearly had a methodology in the placement of the snapshots. Over the years I have come to refer to that methodology as the ninja spaghetti style of photo placement. My vision is that at some point, all of her photographs, all the way back to her childhood, were stuffed in a envelope or box. Then, when the time came to mount them, she reached into the box with her eyes closed and whatever came out was the next thing mounted. Years, locations and subjects were jumbled willy-nilly until you got a glimmer of what dying people must view as their whole life passes before them in a collage of random images. I know many of you are snickering to yourselves all comfortable in the comfort of your comfy chairs. "He exaggerates!", you say. Oh, no - no, I don't.

Well, they were no good to anyone in those albums, so I took it upon myself to scan them, identify the people and locations and date them to the extent possible. So, I removed the photographs from the albums, removed the glue and stickers and went about the process of sorting. I was as careful as I could be, after all, the stickers had been licked and put in place by my mother, even if a lot of them did intrude pretty dramatically into the photograph images themselves.

Although the photos only had some written identification in perhaps one out of a hundred instances, I was helped by circumstance. Since there was no standardization of photo prints early on, I could group the images by shape, size, edging, contrast, bordering and frequently a code that had been stamped on the back by the developer. Then, there are the usual photograph dating tools like clothing, age of children, etc. I also used the Kleylein Chronicle (see the previous blog entry) to confirm where someone might have been at the time in question. So, I got them scanned, cleaned them up, identified them to the best of my limited ability and then I entered the Fool's Errand part of the story. Some of these photographs were taken when my brother and I were babies. Actually, many more of them were of my older brother Dave, you know how that goes.

But I became very interested to FIND the locations where these photos were taken and see what was going on there now. When you're motivated, you find a way, here's an example. In this photograph, notice the sign to the right of my brother. Well, when you blow that up sufficiently and analyze the heck out of it, it says:

Boat for Hire
F. J. Reppenhagen
1030 NE 90th. St.
Phone 73088

This is just around the corner from a little man-made inlet called Lake Ward. Mr. Reppenhagen's (what a cool name) back yard was waterfront property on Lake Ward, right where his boat was parked. Now I knew exactly where these photographs were taken and as you can see on this map, it's only a block from NE 10th. Ave otherwise known as East Dixie Highway (see previous blogs). There's Lake Ward in the upper right. I have no idea why they called it 'Lake' Ward. It's clearly not a lake and Leave it to Beaver wouldn't be on TV for years.

This spot was a favorite with my parents for some reason. There were wide open grassy areas there in those days, it wasn't completely built up like it is now. We were living in a place only a couple minutes drive from there and I presume they took us kids so we could run around and look at the water. We didn't have television in those days. I took a trip down to Miami and drove to the locations I had determined in my research and took some photographs.
Here, for example, is the spot where I sat in the grass as a baby and where my brother and I ran around. I imagined that everyone was happy in those days. At least, that's what the photographs seem to imply, I'll take them at their face value. So, it all turned out to be not that much of a Fool's Errand after all.

What fun.

Keeping Track

I've built a lot of my 'reputation' on my memory.

Being in the computer/data processing business means thinking in different languages with specialized formats and syntax which are very unforgiving. It's either perfect or completely, unutterably wrong. There are also different symbols and methodologies of work flow that you don't bump into elsewhere and you have to know all the details and the smallest failing will mess. . . you. . . up.

Some people are good at this crap and others have different skills. I got into the business because I could process spacial relationships well and I had a good memory.

I was working at Genuine Parts in Miami driving a delivery truck and I saw an advertisement for aircraft cleaners for Eastern Airlines at the Miami airport, so I went down to apply. As I was leaving, I happened to overhear an employee say "OK, everyone here for the aptitude test, come on in." So I sauntered over and asked, "What kind of aptitude test." He squinted at me and said, "We're looking for people with data processing aptitude." "Oh, really", I said, having no idea what he was talking about. "Mind if I sit in?" No, there was plenty of room.

Well, I had never seen a test like this one. They gave us an image of a pile of boxes and asked what it would look like upside down and looking from the right. They gave us number sequences and asked what the next number would be. We're all familiar with these kinds of tests now, but this was all new to me. Fifty people took the test and they scored it while we waited. I was the only one that passed and they offered me a job on the spot. Talk about a life changing event.

So, don't tell me timing isn't important. It may not be everything, like some people say, but it sure is a lot. Where would I be right now if I had walked by that man one minute earlier or later? Would I still be in Miami? Would I have children? Would I still have hair? The mind reels.

My spacial relationship handling and memory actually improved as I exercised them in my career. People were fooled into thinking I was smart because I could remember stuff. Working in genealogy helps, too. You try keeping track of 10,000+ relatives!

But as the memory starts to 'slip' a little, you must learn to use tools to help out. And if there are no tools, you must build them. For example, the first time I went off on a genealogy trip and came home with copies of the same pages from the same book (at 10 cents a page no less!), then I built my Genealogy Bibliography in Excel. I'm sure I re-invented what many others have done, but I listed all the books, parts of books, family history sheets, etc. in my library and I carry it with me when I go on trips.

That's probably pretty common, but I don't know how common my other little trick is. When I set about the task of scanning my photographs, I wanted to keep them chronologically correct. So I named them all starting with the date in the format 'YYYYMMDD Names Places'. That was fine, but I still had to discover what the date was. So I put the scanning on hold until I built the Kleylein Chronicle. I gathered all the pertinent data I could from various sources like calendars, canceled checks, financial records, notebooks, school records, whatever and built an Excel spreadsheet listing events in my family's lives that might provide clues to identifying dates and people in photographs. Important dates might include:

• Purchase or sale of a house or car
• Vacations and who went on them
• Starting or stopping jobs
• Births, deaths, marriages, anniversaries, etc.
• Business trips or other work events
  
• Major weather events
• Illnesses or automobile accidents
• Work events like promotions or new assignments
• Education events like starting at a school or graduating
• Sprinkling of major world events like O.J. murdering his wife

It really helped when the people were standing in front of a car that we didn't own until 1985 to help narrow the window. I imagine that as time passes, it may provide a bonus by preventing a lot of arguments.

"Oh, yes, I remember we drove to New Orleans in 1992. . ."

"It was 1993."

"No, it wasn't!"

"Well, let's just look at the Chronicle, shall we?" Heh, heh, heh.

Decisions, Decisions

I was asked a provocative question last week.

"How do you find the time to do a blog?"

It was provocative because it had been a week since I made an entry. Sorry. I was actually feeling a little antsy because I hadn't written anything. Blogs are habitual. But put last week aside for a moment, I'll get around to how that fits in with this narrative. The answer to her question is that I don't 'find' the time. It's not laying around somewhere, I make the time because of Maslow. Maslow's Hierarchy of Need is a well known and well respected actualization model. It attempts to define why we do things, what our motivations are and how they rank. People gotta eat. Gene Kelly said, 'Gotta dance!' I gotta write this crap. And, yes, writing this blog is a little less critical than excretion, but barely.

When I tried to categorize this 'need', I found it spanned all the top four segments. I wrote a little while ago about details of some jobs I had when I was younger. This information may be critically important to someone. . . somewhere. . . sometime.

For example, my father worked for a company called the White Company in Baltimore when he was young. What did he do there? Was it his first job? How old was he? Was he a truck driver, or was this where he was introduced to auto and truck mechanics which he did all the rest of his life? I'm pretty certain the White Company wasn't some sort of front for a racist organization because apparently, they started out making sewing machines. That's pretty innocuous.

But I can't find out any of this information (yet) because my father didn't keep a blog. So, I won't make that same mistake. As a result, I take a couple of hours and write stuff and insert some spiffy images so people will have something interesting to look at when they get bored and that's practically a certainty.

But why is it so strangely important to me all of a sudden? Well, a symptom of the answer was what kept me from blogging last week.

I run a data center for a company that does data processing for hospitals. That's like the perfect storm of criticality. Computer work itself is important but when you're doing it for hospitals - Oh. . . My. . . GOD! - it doesn't really get much more critical. But it's actually OK, because we're the best in the business and have been doing it longer than everyone else put together. So we have processes and structure and documentation and we're well motivated. But we still have the occasional sixteen hour day like last week. And it's nothing like it was years ago when that was more normal for me than I like to remember. And I know there are doctors and nurses out there laughing, 'Only sixteen hours? Ha Ha Haaaa!' Hey, talk to me in thirty years. I also put in my three days straight without sleep more than once and have the burst blood vessels in my eyes to prove it.

But the event reminded me that I'd better be writing this stuff down if that's what I want to do. For a vast collection of things, my brother and I are the only ones who have any actual memory. That worries me a lot because my brother has lost almost all of his memory and most of his mind as well.

I mean, who's going to tell the hilarious story of when we were having a bonfire on 118th. Terrace and someone threw in a closed fingernail polish bottle. Of course it exploded and the shards of glass hit the person standing closest to the fire, that would be me, right in the face. Ha ha, good times. Three of the pieces hit within millimeters of my left eye (my left eye again!) at 2 o'clock, 6 o'clock and 10 o'clock. Three near misses, all around the eye! So I run into the house with my face covered in blood, screaming my head off. Boy, that must have been something for a parent to see, huh? It's a shame they didn't have video cameras in those days, that would be great stuff to show at parties and reunions.

The part I remember clearest is walking to North Miami a few times to see the doctor. Mom never learned to drive and there was only one car anyway. Plus, we were down at the end of a dead-end road and the idea of taking a taxi was in about the same league as taking a rocket ship. So, we walked. I remember it was fun taking the walks.

So, I have made a decision to write things down. My brother and I are the carriers of this baton and we're not carrying it alone. So, there.

That's me grabbing at my brother's trike. In the writing business, that's called foreshadowing.

What the Hell

Marilyn Monroe is famously quoted as saying, "Ever notice that 'what the hell' is always the right decision?"

I'd like to add that you often reach that decision state when you're tired. Frankly, a lot of the major directional decisions I've made in my life were made when I was tired. I'm tired right now, but I've got this thought in me and it has to come out.

When I interviewed with the company that I still work for, SMS, (now Siemens), I came right off an all-nighter at the computer lab and right into the interview. I knew instantly that this was the company I wanted to work for and canceled all my other interviews as I walked out. Now that I think of it, I guess it's a good thing they hired me. The interview was in January, they hired me and I didn't start until I graduated in August. It did take the pressure off the last couple of semesters. What's more, this is what I looked like when I interviewed and they hired me anyway!

I also made the decision to join the Navy when I was tired. I was going to school full time and working full time so when my friend Bob Deeter suddenly suggested we should just join the Navy, I followed Marilyn Monroe's sage advice (as I always try to do) and said, 'What the hell' and we joined up.

We took the summer off before heading off to camp, I wrote about that in a previous blog entry. I also had the opportunity to drive my mother up to Minnesota to see her family. We went in my mauve Rambler American, the first new car I ever owned. Hey, don't laugh, it was a good car, I gave it to my father when I went in the Navy and he drove it practically the rest of his life. One of the high points of that trip was loading Mom, Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Edwin in the car and having some clown run a stop sign and hit the car hard enough to spin it all around. Ha ha, what fun. No one was hurt and damage to the car was barely noticeable. Boy, they don't make cars like that anymore.

On the way back to Miami, we visited my cousin Audrey and her husband-to-be Andrew Houlihan. They were living in New Orleans and I distinctly remember deciding that as long as we were in the neighborhood, we would have to swing by and see them. Yeah, it's hard to reconcile how Minnesota and New Orleans were in the same 'neighborhood'. But I'm so glad we did because I got to meet Andrew and I thought immediately that he was so cool and had this dynamite southern accent. My instincts were right because even now, after all these years, he's still cool.

But the summer ended, I went to the beach a few last times to finish working on my tan preparing for the skin cancer that would come later. When we were visiting my Aunt Del and Uncle Mel (that's Uncle Mel to the right) up north with my mother, I happened to cross my legs and the skin on my leg showed. Well, Uncle Mel's eyes bugged out like you see sometimes in old cartoons. He asked, "Are you that dark all over??" He was stunned. This was a man born and raised in Minnesota in the heart of white-leg country. I think it had a profound impact on his whole belief system.

By now, my brother Dave had already moved to the Buffalo, New York area and was preparing for his marriage to the lovely Miss Donna Krueger. So as I prepared to leave to go off to boot camp, it never occurred to me that I was leaving my parents with an empty nest. And while it's true that they were never what you might call 'demonstrative' it may have at least been nice if I had awakened long enough to recognize what was going on around me and acknowledge it somehow. 'It never occurred to me' - a phrase I often use even to this day. But I was excited because I was taking my first jet aircraft trip. Bob and I were off to Chicago and on to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center where I would be introduced to 'culture shock' before they had even invented the word.

William Jennings Bryan

I was recently contacted by one of my friends from elementary school. For some of you, that may not seem like a big deal, but for me, that was a long time ago and far away. The Internet is such an amazing tool, just wait until we actually make real use of it. But this happening fits pretty well with the 'History of Northern Miami' thing I have going on.

Roads were few and far between in northern Miami, the real highway was the Florida East Coast Railroad. Flagler, the builder, was smart enough to build a lot of stations along the way at settlements which developed into towns. The most northern of these was Ojus at what is now Miami Gardens Drive and the West Dixie Highway. Below that was Fulford named for a weather station watchman who took care of stranded people and recorded the weather along the beach near Snake Creek. Fulford, which was roughly at 163rd Street and the West Dixie was renamed Miami Shores and when there was a conflict with the other Miami Shores farther to the south, renamed again to North Miami Beach.

The next town (OK, railroad station) to the south was Arch Creek. This place was very special because it had a natural limestone arch cut out by the northern branch of Arch Creek. This place had been inhabited by Indians for a long time and was one of the first places settled by non-Indians in the Miami area. There were farms and mills and storage warehouses and it grew a lot faster after the railroad arrived. The arch collapsed in 1973, but they've built a nice park there, maybe they'll rebuild the arch.

Incidently, I grew up along the southern branch of Arch Creek right alongside a canal that had been cut to help drain the swamp that fed the southern branch. It didn't quite work, because it was still a black muck swamp that would make sucking sounds when you stepped on it and your footprint would fill up with water. And, yeah, there were the requisite snakes and bugs and land crabs that contribute to the whole 'swamp' experience. My brother and I would tramp around in there in our bare feet. Geez.

Arch Creek developed into enough of a town that they needed a school, so one was built along what is now 125th Street about a block west of the railroad tracks in 1905. It was replaced by a two story, multi-room wooden building in 1914. Then in 1918, a much larger stucco building was constructed next door to the west on the site of the current William Jennings Bryan Elementary School. It was a smaller version of today's school and it burned to the ground just a few years later. The current school was built on that site in 1928 and named for a popular politician who had run for President three times and lived part-time in Miami.

That means when I started there in 1953, the building was only 25 years old. But based on the rest of what I knew of Miami, that was impossibly old. It was open air, with a court yard, no air conditioning and a wonderful library which was my first library exposure.

So thanks to Richard Scandore Weber contacting me, some other names have come to mind. I remembered Richard, he was my friend. And I remember Nancy Lee Sheridan and Tommy Septembre and Suzanne Slate and Russell Jacobs and Carol Craig. Where are these people now, what are they doing? Do any of them remember me? Why don't I remember more of them? Are they alive or dead? Do they have pleasant memories of the courtyard at Bryan? What do you want to bet the Internet is going to answer some of those questions?

Twenty-five Things

Here is a list of twenty-five things about me - in no particular order and of no particular value.

1. When I was younger, it used to bother me that I was so tall. Now, it is what it is.

2. I could watch the movie Airplane! over and over again, continuously.

3. When my right hand was crushed in the Navy and my index finger was nearly severed, my reaction was only mild annoyance.

4. I probably worked too much during the early part of my career. In one two year period, I worked three years. That's too much.

5. I am very happy with how my children turned out, I wish I'd had something to do with it.

6. I wish I had the opportunity to ask family history questions of my parents and grandparents. But that's not going to happen.

7. I find genealogical research to be like what Hal was referring to in 2001 A Space Odyssey when he said, "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all I think that any conscious entity can hope to do."

8. I hate it when I have no one to blame but myself.

9. Writing in this blog is surprisingly satisfying.

10. My cursive writing was so bad when I was young that I have been printing everything I've written my whole life.

11. I am not Mr. Spock.

12. My taste in music has been evolving. I seem to enjoy things of a more mellow nature now. For heaven's sake, what's up with that?

13. Alcohol is a gift that I find difficult to refuse.

14. I know enough about Microsoft Windows and the tools necessary to support it to be an effective systems administrator. What do normal people do when their home computer goes all 'Windows' on them?

15. I have had many, many different jobs in my life but I've been with my current company for 31 years.

16. I really like glazed doughnuts.

17. I have a vision for Maryland genealogy where everyone's family history connects to everyone elses in a single metadatabase. I have the same vision for all the Kleyleins in the world.

18. I have very vivid dreams and sometimes I can remember them in great detail.

19. My favorite color is blue.

20. I have been walking since I was eight months old.

21. I have been to almost every state in the United States.

22. Simon and Garfunkel were right when they said, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

23. If I had actually kept a 'Journal of Unexpected Results', I would be on volume three hundred by now.

24. I once won a Caribbean vacation just by dropping my name in one of those 'Win a Prize' boxes at an appliance store.

25. I have learned that you never know what will happen next.

Bonus: I have been sending out a 'QUOTE OF THE DAY' for twelve years. Today's quote was:

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

- Burke Breathed, Bloom County

Dixie Highway

In my last post I brought up my connection to the Dixie Highway, so you'll have to read it to know what I'm talking about here. Sorry. Sometimes complete thoughts don't fit into a neat little box, sometimes they're sloppy and flop all over the place, you know, like life.

So, the Dixie Highway was a route connecting south Florida and Illinois and Michigan. This was no interstate highway, it was mostly two-lane as many roads were in the early days of US Roads. This was 1915 or thereabouts when it was conceived. Many roads didn't even have a route number, so the Dixie Highway was marked with a DH sign like this. I guess if you didn't see one for a couple of days, you were off the route.

The real 'interstates' in those days were the railroads and that's really what opened up Miami. Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast (FEC) railroad brought people down to his hotel and towns were built around the stations he peppered along the way. The house I grew up in on 118th Terrace was very near the FEC track and I used to walk along it as kid. The big boom in Miami was a direct result of the railroad. But as cars proliferated, more and more people came down the Dixie Highway.

As I discovered recently, there was an East Dixie Highway and a West Dixie Highway. They called them that because one road was on the east side of the tracks and the other on the west. I knew all about West Dixie, because it went right through North Miami, right through the center of town, right by one of the Royal Castle restaurants (No. 24) I used to work at. The North Miami Theater was on West Dixie, the Carvel's, the People's Gas plant, the Ancient Spanish Monastery, all the big attractions.

And it was an odd road, because it was not north-south or east-west. It was on an ANGLE. I know now that it was designed that way to dump people onto NE 2nd Avenue and then south to downtown. Coincidentally, I also worked at a Royal Castle (No. 2 which was really the first one) in Little River right on the West Dixie Highway (see below).

But when I was growing up, much of the East Dixie had been overlaid by Biscayne Boulevard, but not all of it as I discovered. The East Dixie (just the Dixie Highway for a while, since it was the first) followed the path of the old Military Highway originally cut to allow troops to fight in the Seminole Wars. Well, this road was pretty joggy because it followed a limestone ridge along the coastline. One of the jogs took it down NE 16th Avenue right where I lived on 118th Terrace.

The main house of our neighbor there, Kobe's Trailer Park, turned out to be one of the first houses in northern Miami. It was built by the Burr family in 1907. Now it's part of a condo complex. Northern people sit on the grounds and drink gin and tonics and don't realize they're on the site of one of the first farms in northern Miami. They grew pineapples and fruit trees and tomatoes and shipped them on the nearby railroad. All without air conditioning.

Farther south on another still existing jog of the East Dixie, my parents used to take us to an undeveloped part of what is now Miami Shores so we could run around (nice socks, Dave). I was able to track locations by means of photographs and we were right on the East Dixie. How about that! Another of my Royal Castles (No. 112) was only a couple of blocks from there and I never knew it.

So, two places that I lived and many events in my life are tied to the Dixie Highway. But you know, information like this doesn't always jump out at you. Sometimes you have to go and dig it up.