10
Forks in the Road
“I HAVE AN ASSIGNMENT for you,” Dr. Joerger told me in my first week on the job at McDonnell. He wanted me to develop a computer program involving complex mathematical formulas. The palms of my hands were suddenly sweaty.
“Programming is not my forte,” I told him sheepishly. In fact, I’d flunked a brand-new elective course in introductory computer science at Washington University. I told him as much, and he shrugged and smiled, seemingly unconcerned.
“Don’t worry about that,” he told me. “Professors rarely knew how to teach computer programming, given that it’s such a new field. Here,” he said, handing me a stack of materials on FORTRAN that he’d lifted from the top of his filing cabinet.
I went back to my desk and started to study the scientific programming language right away, following the instructions in the tutorial materials, writing sample programs, and then testing the programs I’d developed. Within a few weeks, I was fluent.
Not only was I fluent, I was enjoying it. I loved programming so much that I taught other engineers how to write it, thinking they’d take to it as well as I had. Some liked it, but it turned out that most of the other engineers tended to shy away from it, preferring lab work in plasma physics.
Several weeks later, Dr. Joerger asked me if I thought about going to school for a graduate degree. No, I thought I was done with school forever. But he strongly encouraged me to continue with advanced studies, so I applied to Washington University. I wasn’t accepted, which didn’t surprise me, given the mediocre grades I’d earned patching together note-taking help and studying without the benefit of interpreting support.
In 1967, two years after I started at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, the company announced a merger with Douglas Aircraft Company into a conglomerate called McDonnell Douglas Corporation. With Douglas’s 60,000 employees and McDonnell’s 45,000 employees, the corporation was faced with a critical need to pare down the number of employees. Dr. Joerger called me into his office.
“Alan, you have three options,” he told me. “Move with the plasma physics department down to McDonnell’s division in Orlando and continue your work as an electronics engineer with skills in computer programming. Your second option is to move to the McDonnell Automation Company in the next building and assume a new role as a senior numerical control programmer responsible for developing numerical control programs to operate large tool and die machines for making airplanes, jets, and space capsules. Your third option,” he concluded, “is to leave the company.”
“This is a tough decision,” I said. “May I discuss this with Vicki and her family before giving you my answer?”
“OK, I’ll give you three days. I’m sorry this is so sudden, but such is the nature of big mergers like this. Big changes are happening fast!”
That night at dinner, we discussed the three options. Neither one of us was keen about moving to Florida. We had too many ties in St. Louis, and I was still working on my master’s degree, having started night school classes at St. Louis University two years earlier. We decided to go with the second option, staying in St. Louis. (Most of my colleagues moved to Florida, and I sometimes wonder where I would be today if I had gone with the team to Orlando, but I have no regrets.)
My new supervisor was Joe Sadonis, an older man and a true gentleman. My new job was to supervise and train two junior numerical control programmers as we wrote massive programs to automatically control large equipment that manufactured parts for airplanes and jets. Our programs incorporated all parameters, including tool selection, change of tools, feed rate, coolant, and cutting tasks. I wrote my FORTRAN instructions on programming sheets and submitted them to a team of keypunchers to punch the instructions onto IBM cards. Upon receiving the punched cards in long boxes, I’d review the printed copy for accuracy. Next, I’d make any needed corrections on them and return to the keypunchers for new punched cards. Each time I submitted jobs to keypunchers, the turnaround time was three days before I could take the next steps. In that case, I’d work on several projects simultaneously. Once the punched cards were fixed, I’d submit them to a team of computer operators for test runs on tape drives, which meant another day before I’d get the results and make additional corrections as needed. In those days, the mid-1960s, the computer room was made up of an IBM 360 mainframe with tape drives in an approximately 25-by-40-foot room. Today, our smartphones are far smaller yet more powerful than the old mainframe.
One day, as I carried a pile of three or four long rectangular boxes of punched cards for a single project, I stumbled, and they slipped out of my hands, the cards scattering everywhere on the floor. The programmers gave me “that’s too bad” looks. Luckily, each punched card was numbered. On my hands and knees, I gathered the cards, putting them back in order, one by one.
THE YEAR 1968 was tumultuous—riots, assassinations, a war raging in Vietnam, wounded soldiers and body bags pouring back into the country, campus sit-ins, and takeovers. It felt like everything was being reassessed and challenged, including deaf people’s education and career possibilities.
The biggest news in deaf education stemmed from a congressional act in 1965, signed by President Johnson, which provided for the creation of a national technical institute for deaf students, which would be hosted by an existing institution of higher learning. Many schools applied to be the host institution, but RIT in Rochester, New York, was selected as the winner. Not only was it a leading science and engineering school, but also it was coincidentally planning on relocating its campus from downtown Rochester to land on the city’s outskirts, where it planned to erect many new buildings. This timing made RIT perfectly suited to offer a deaf institute prime real estate designed explicitly for deaf college students, rather than retrofitted to the purpose.
In 1968, NTID welcomed its first class of seventy students. The students took some classes only for deaf and hard of hearing students, but they also enrolled in RIT classes and could pursue RIT majors.
When I read about NTID, I was intrigued and thought back to when I was a youngster and wanted to be a teacher of deaf students. Maybe I could combine my engineering skills with my dream of becoming a teacher in a college environment. I requested an application for a teaching position, but to my disappointment, the response I got in the mail was an admission application packet meant for a student. Rather than write to them again, I decided to let it go and continue with my graduate studies. Later, I would look back on that decision as fated.
Soon after sending away for information about NTID, Vicki was pregnant again, and we steeled ourselves for the journey, our past tragedy still fresh and painful. That fall, Vicki got very sick with H3N2, a flu virus that caused a pandemic between 1968 and 1969. H3N2 would go on to kill a million people worldwide, about 100,000 of them in the United States. Her new obstetrician, Dr. Ira Gall, was confident she would pull through, and the unborn baby would be just fine. When the five-and-a-half-month mark passed, and then the sixth and seventh and eighth months, we breathed easier and easier.
Bernard was born nine days past his due date, in late spring of 1969, big and healthy. The doctor had been right. Since we wanted to use Vicki’s father’s name, Bernard, our son was named Bernard Reuben after my Uncle Bill Mazie and my grandmother Rose Hurwitz. A few days after Vicki and Bernard arrived home, we had the bris ceremony at home, and the baby received his Hebrew name, Baruch Reuven.
New mom Vicki with our newly born son Bernard.
One day, while Vicki was changing Bernard’s diapers, he spoke his first word: “Block!” He was turning a blue wooden block over in his chubby baby hands as she pinned his diaper closed, and they were looking at each other when he said it.
“Yes!” Vicki signed and spoke back to him, delighted, “block!”
We didn’t know if our son was deaf or hard of hearing or not, but we knew that no matter what, early language development was important, and so we had exposed him from his earliest days to language all the time. We talked to him and read books to him. He enjoyed listening to us while we pointed at the words and pictures. Books were part of our daily lives.
When Bernard was six months old, we took him to CID for his first hearing test because of the genetic history in my family. Although we were told that Bernard had no detectable hearing loss, the audiologist, Dr. Irvin Shore, explained it was too early to be certain. He advised us to bring Bernard back in six months. But when Bernard was a year old, we didn’t take him back for his hearing test because he was talking and very responsive to everything around him.
One day around that time, Vicki said to her mother, “I was vacuuming under the crib yesterday, and Bernard didn’t wake up.” Her mother, who had never fully come to terms with Vicki being deaf, didn’t like this tidbit at all.