One of the men that I had met at the Training Center was a CPA named Norm Green and we had become good friends

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We did one small job together. That is we used his CPA status to get us in the bidding and I did the work to complete the job. The company was called Senior Citizens Action network and at that time it provided rides for senior citizens to the doctor, the store, or where ever the person wanted to go.

They had hired a CPA who specialized in non-profit companies to do their bookkeeping. SCAN had federal, state, county and city founding. Each entity had a contract that specified what expenses it would pay for and what percent of each item they would pay.

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In its normal practice the federal government did an audit of the books and found them to be far out of line. So far that they immediately halted founding. The state and county did the same. This left SCAN with just city founding and the city said they would give the organization a month to straighten things out. It put out bids to do the fix and I went to SCAN and looked over the problem and calculated a bid that Norm won.

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It seemed that the CPA had turned over the daily transaction processing to two high school girls who had no accounting experience. I don’t know what instructions these young women were given as to how. But they had not followed any rules in allocating expenses to particular agencies that I could find. It was a mess!

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What I had to do was go back two years and look at each transaction and determine how the debits should be charged. It took me three weeks of eighteen hour days but I got it done and the feds came back and did another audit and okayed the accounting and reinstated its founding. And so did the state and county. If you have SCAN as your Medicare Section B and D provider, and you like them, you can thank me. It is the company I saved thirty-two years ago.

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                                         Pertec Business Systems

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It was July of 1979 and I had a friend who knew the manager of technical publications at Pertec Business Systems and he knew that the manager needed technical writers. The manager, Mike Penarro, had not put out ads yet but he needed to fill three positions very quickly or he would lose the headcount. The problem was he didn't have the work for them at the present time but in a couple of months he was going to be overloaded with work.

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I had been working as a consultant so long that I did not have a proper resume to present. I also didn't have a word processor to write one. So, I wrote a very simple, BASIC language word processor that allowed me to enter text, add test and delete text. Very simple but it was all I needed. I wrote the system using one of Tom's systems and Rexon's programming language. The funny thing was that in those days the only printers we had on the Rexon computers were the ones that used the eighteen inch wide light green and white striped paper. If you aren't old enough to remember this just think of paper that has one inch stripes across it alternating between white and a very light green. This paper was the standard for the computer industry at the time. But it wasn't the standard for printed resumes. But it was the only thing I had so I printed it out and brought it to my interview.

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I went in with my unique resume and talked with Mike and we hit it off. He asked about the resume and I told him the story. He must have been impressed because he hired me.

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He told me about his problem of no work and we agreed that I could and would make myself look busy until the work came in. I had the perfect project to make myself look very busy. Writing My Ph.D. dissertation.

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In those days the tech writers literally hand wrote the material and turned it over to a person who had a word processor and that person typed the material into the machine and create the finished product. I spent the first three months writing my dissertation and I made a deal with the word processor that she would type it into her machine and I would pay her a dollar a finished page. This worked out great for her and for me. I finished my dissertation in October and turned it in and it was approved in December and I had my Ph.D.

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                                                                                           Bassett Way

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During the Jimmy Carter presidency inflation took off like a rocket and carried over into the first years of the Reagan administration. At one point in 1981 our house was appreciating $1000 a week. That was big bucks at that time.

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Our kids were gong into junior high and the high school that they would go to was not a good one. Ruth and I decided that we would sell our house and move to a better school district in east Anaheim. When we went to buy another house we found that mortgage interest rates were 18% and this made the payments too high. So we rented a house near the school. The house was located on a street called Bassett Way.

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Now I mention this because it was an interesting time and our neighborhood was greatly affected by it. What was happening was that the "Boat People" from Vietnam were being trained to live in the U.S. and then they bought homes in the area. A number of these people bought homes on our block and we all wondered what was going to happen to the neighborhood.

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What happened was marvelous. The Vietnamese started upgrading their houses immediately. They painted, upgrade the landscape and did all sorts of things to make their new homes nicer than when the bought them. They upgraded the entire neighborhood. One man tore out his cement drive way and hand laid a beautiful brick driveway. It was gorgeous. I would walk down and watch him as he was building the new driveway wondering what he was doing. When he got done we had become friendly and his finished product was a work of art. All of our new neighbors were very nice people and I enjoyed living in that neighborhood. It was quite an experience.

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                                                       The Bancroft Group, Ltd

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While I was working at Pertec I had met an Australian named Russell Gardener. Russell said he had a computer system that he wanted to import into the U.S.. The kind that was to be named Personal Computer, or PC by IBM. He wanted me to help him do this. He paid me well for the work I did for him so although I had never seen the computer system I continued to perform tasks for him.

It got to a point that he wanted me to work for him full time and was willing to pay me very well to do it. So I quit my job at Pertec and I went to work for him as a consultant.

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To this day I do not know what his reasons were for paying me to represent him in the US, but I think that he had a con going. I don't have the slightest Idea what it was but I believe it existed. I think that he was using my reputation either here or in Australia to pull off some type of con.

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Things started to not add up after six months and finally when he called me from Australia at 3:00 AM and started reading me the riot act for not doing my job I quit on the spot. To this day I do not know who Russell Gardener was or what his real reason for paying me good money to "rep" him here were. But I don't think it had anything to do with computers. Another con man. Side note: Six months after I quit working with Russell I heard from a very reputable source that he had died of a heart attack in the Melbourne airport.

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                                                                                       The CPA System

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A while after we had straightened out the SCAN mess Norm Green mentioned that he would like to become a computer dealer and sell computers to CPAs.

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I called Jim Getzinger at Rexon and told him about Norm's wish to become a computer dealer. He asked me if I was in the deal. I asked if it mattered. He said if I was part of the package we could become dealers.

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I told Norm what Jim had said and he said, "Let's form a corporation – and we did – and we became a dealer for Rexon Computers. He was president and I was general manager. The interesting thing is that our first customer wasn't a CPA. It was an elevator manufacturer that I found. We successfully installed his system with software written by a programmer we hired and things went on from there.

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Norm decided he would have a program written especially for CPAs who could put their client's data our it own disk. Each client would have a disk for its data and there was no way it could get mixed up with other clients. It worked out just fine and we proceeded to sell computers until Norm felt that he knew more about the computer industry than I did.

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He was the president which made him the "CEO" and I was the general manager which made me the guy who ran things and things were going just fine. But Norm thought that he could run the business better that I could so he took over. And that was the end of our relationship. The company lasted less than six months under his leadership.

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                                                                                                  The Jeweler

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A friend I knew through Norm Green told me he had a client who was a jewelry manufacturer, wholesaler and retailer and needed a computer system (program) created that would track the sale of his products. To look at the store you would think that it was a retail jewelry store. It was far from that. In the back of the store was a high quality jewelry manufacturing facility. His craftsmen created high-end jewelry for many of the other retailers in the area. The store was in North Hollywood and about a half mile from Bob Hope’s home.

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The owner wanted a system that would track all of his sales, both retail and wholesale.  He also wanted to be able to track the progress of the products he made. From the start of the process through each step and for him to have the ability to enter a product number and have the system show what part of the manufacturing process the product was in at that time. My friend said that he was backed up with work at the time and couldn't do the job and asked if I could do it. I said yes I could.

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For the first week I drove from Anaheim to North Hollywood every day and he first told me about his company and then showed me through the manufacturing process. As I came to know him I liked him very much. He was a very understated man who I assumed and later found out was quite wealthy. He was in the jewelry business because he liked it.

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As we got to know each other we would have personal chats about our life and he mentioned to me that he was a certified jeweler. I had never heard that jewelers were certified but he told me about his apprentice program and the final project that he had to do to become certified. He had to create a major piece of fine art jewelry. He chose to create an altar cross for the Catholic church across the street from his store. He asked me if I would like to see it and I said most certainly.

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We went across the street to the church and he introduced me to one of the priests and we went into a room that had a safe on one wall. The priest opened the safe and took out an elegant box about eighteen inches long and fourteen or fifteen inches wide and six inches high. It open from a hinged lid on the top and I saw pieces of gold and silver fitted into a foam base.

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The jeweler started to put the pieces together, each one fitting precisely into another. When he was finished I was looking at the most beautiful cross I have ever seen. It had gemstones placed at just the appropriate spots on the cross. It was truly a work of art. Later he told me that the cross was worth $50,000. It was then that I knew I was right about him being wealthy.

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Since he wanted to track all of the sales I needed to build a database of his wholesale and retail customers. I was amazed as I entered the names of very famous people who were his regular customers. He was indeed the jeweler to the stars.

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One of the interesting things was that while he was computerizing his accounting system, he was doing it from a handwritten accounting system. He did all of his own accounting and he did it in a handwritten ledger. He would turn over this ledger with his sales and expenses to his CPA to do his taxes. But no one touched the transactions but him and his CPA.

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That was about to change. He knew he needed to upgrade his system and hire a bookkeeper to enter the transactions into the computer and print out his monthly reports. And that is what I did for him. I created the system that allowed him to move into the twentieth century.

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                                                                                       BASIC to C Conversions

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Jim Getzinger left Rexon and started his own company. It was at the time just before Unix System 5 was to be announced and it was known that there were very few application programs that would run on Unix. AT&T's Bell Labs had created Unix as a development system for developers at Bell Labs. It was never meant to be a product that they would sell.

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Because of a 1958 antitrust suit, AT&T was forbidden from entering the computer business. The company did license the system to many university computer departments and the young computer students took to this new operating system. Those students graduated and worked their way up to management positions in computer departments. They then contacted AT&T to find out how they could get Unix for their business computers.

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It was at Unix 5 that I entered this picture. Jim's company had built seven translators that translated a particular BASIC application into C and the program was worked on by an engineer until it functioned under Unix as it had functioned as a BASIC program. I was hired to manage the group of programmers who did the translations.

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The reason programs needed to be translated was that there were no programs available in C for the new version of Unix. We worked very closely with a group from Bell Labs to create as many applications as possible that would run on Unix 5. The program was a success and when Unix 5 was announced there were many application programs that were available for end users.

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                                                                                                               Underhill

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The house that we rented on Bassett Way was sold and so we needed to find a place in the general neighborhood so the kids didn't have to change schools. We found a nice house with a pool on Underhill Avenue just couple of blocks from the school.

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The house had three bedrooms and the garage had been walled off, side to side to create a fourth bedroom, so everyone had their own room. The house was in a nice neighborhood and it didn't look that bad from the outside but it was not it very good shape.

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The roof was missing some shingles and there was an open spot eighteen inches long on the peak. I went up and looked at it and went to the hardware store and was able to semi-fix it. I fixed it well enough that it didn't leak but it needed a whole new roof.

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The back yard was the swimming pool. I had an above the ground pool on Sherrill but this was the first time for me to maintain a full-sized regular pool. It was fun learning : - ).

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