The back room of the library was populated by what could only be called geeks. Little did I know that, by joining them, I would become one of them.² It was there that I met Bob C, who, like Lester R, would become a lifelong friend, colleague, and mentor. Bob was into electronics, as were a number of the other decidedly unpopular kids who hung out in the library. One of our first jobs was to create an alarm system that would let the librarian known whenever people came and went through the back door of the library, to prevent someone from letting in miscreants who wanted to steal the knowledge set aside for the good students. Bob used a magnetic switch coupled to an illuminated lamp; close the door and the lamp would go off; open it, and the lamp would go on. Pretty trivial, but I thought it was very cool.

1975, my freshman year in high school, as a time of enormous change in the world, though few people realized it at the time. In January of that year (when I was still in eighth grade), Popular Electronics ran an article on the Altair 8800, the first true microcomputer. When I was a freshman, I joined the school’s competitive slide rule team; by the time I graduated, the slide rule competition had been eliminated in favor of another mathematics competition that permitted the use of a pocket calculator. During that time, a number of my library friends and myself started a computer club; we called it The Beaumont Computer Group.

We didn’t have access to a “real” computer, though one or two of the guys had been learning BASIC programming on a regional mainframe. We were all fascinated by the technology, and tried to learn all we could. We bought used computers: one of them, a monstrous ancient beast, had been used in the accounting department of a hospital in Beaumont that had closed down. It had thousands of vacuum tubes and used patch cords to perform a rudimentary sort of programming. We were essentially given it for free, as long as we’d haul it off. Parts of it sat on my back patio for months. We acquired an IBM magnetic ledger card reader from an east Texas electrical utility coop that was upgrading. And, finally, towards my senior year, a friend of mine managed to get his hands on the COSMAC ELF.

The ELF was an extremely rudimentary microcomputer consisting of an 1802 8-bit microprocessor, 256 bytes³ of RAM, a hexadecimal keypad, and a two-digit hex display. It was on this computer that I wrote my first computer program: I believe that it added together two numbers. Pretty amazing, in its way.⁴

This is what a gateway drug looks like.

Even though I attended college on a music scholarship, and even though I graduated as an English major, I have been programming computers⁵ ever since. It’s now my career and has served me well.

At some point in the early 1970′s I started listening to tons of classical music. I would spend hours in the Beaumont Public Library (both the original one in the converted church as well as the new one that was constructed about the same time), digging through the stacks as well as checking out music to listen to at home. At some point around the beginning of high school, I received a very nice cassette tape recorder for Christmas. Once I had a tape recorder, I would check out albums from the library and record them onto cassette to listen to later.² I worked my way through Bach (which is where I started), Beethoven, and Mozart (who, frankly, I found fairly frivolous and uninteresting). I climbed the heights of Mahler and soared into the wondrous clouds of Stravinsky. And, ultimately, I found the esoteric avante garde in the works of Pierre Boulez, especially his 12-tone Pli Sélon Pli, which was (and still is) one of the more fascinating musical works I’ve ever heard.³

Once I started junior high school and began playing in the band, I learned to read music. Not well, of course, since I was a percussionist, and our bands did not really teach melodic percussion (xylophone, marimba, etc.) to students, leaving them to be played by those percussionists who had happened to have piano lessons. I was not satisfied with this, so I, in essence, taught myself how to read and play music on the piano that was in our house.

Eventually, when I was a sophomore in high school, I started taking piano lessons. Like any other piano student, I practiced my scales and arpeggios and played music more suitable for a child than a teenager, but my piano teacher⁴ seemed to understand what I was looking for (not so much to become a performer as to be a creator) and he pushed me down that path. I learned how to read and play chord symbols so that I could improvise piano parts for pop and jazz songs. And, ultimately, I started writing my own music.

Part of the thrill of composing was actually seeing notes on paper; they were (and are) magical to me. Those little black dots could cause sounds to leap forth from a voice, an instrument, an ensemble, and it was amazing to me that my notes could get performed by others.

My orchestra conductor (Mr. F) also encouraged me; during my senior year, the orchestra actually included two of my arrangements in one of our concerts. He also introduced me to Dr. Richard Willis⁵, the Composer-in-residence at Baylor University, who conducted our all-Area orchestra that year. Mr. F told me to bring some music to show to Dr. Willis; he, too, was encouraging, and he took some of my works away with him to study further. I enjoyed meeting a “real, live composer,” and, frankly, didn’t think much about it until a few months later when, totally out of the blue, I received a letter announcing that I had been awarded the Baylor Composition Scholarship.

I had never really considered Baylor for college. In fact, I honestly wasn’t really aware of it much until the Area Orchestra concert. I didn’t know, for example, that it was a Baptist university. I just knew that they played in the now-defunct Southwest Conference. Until that moment, I had fully intended to go to North Texas State University, very well-known for its music (and, in particular, it’s jazz) program.⁶ Once I received notice of the scholarship, I visited Baylor’s campus, applied, was accepted, and made plans to attend as a music major.

I still write music; you can hear one of my compositions, “Channeling Philip Glass,” by clicking on the player below:

I can say that with all honesty because, even though I cannot remember the specifics from the summer I started attending Forest Park High School, it is always hot in Southeast Texas in August. Moreover, it is usually humid, and sometimes raining. I know it rained on the first day of school, at least, because I know that I was 12-for-12 in having it rain¹ on the first day of school. Marching band practice started in early August, and consisted of 2- to 3-hour sessions on the practice field out in front of the school.

As the biggest freshman boy in the percussion section, I was awarded the bass drum. The other bass drummer was a sophomore named Lester who had actually volunteered for the role.²  Lester showed me the ropes, and I learned to march in a reasonably straight line, and I learned how to play the bass drum part to “The Young Lions” (the school’s fight song derived from the title song of the 1958 movie).³ We marched “8 to 5″; that is, we took eight steps for every five yards, which means that each step is precisely 22-1/2″ long. This has stuck with me; ask me to walk somewhere, and I will lead with my left foot, and my stride length is still precisely 22-1/2″ long.

Somewhat to my surprise (at least when I look back in hindsight), the heat didn’t bother us much. Granted, it was hot, but it wasn’t like there was anything we could do about it. Heat, and it’s close friend Humidity, was something you had to accept in southeast Texas, or you wouldn’t last very long.

Modern, all-season fabrics had not yet been invented in 1975.⁴ Our marching band uniforms were 100% navy blue wool, and they weighed about 14 pounds (even more when they had absorbed all your sweat). There was always a point in the middle of the football season where the first cold front of the year came through. The temperature dropped to about 50°F, and the uniforms became bearable.

Home games were pretty simple; we’d go home after school on Friday and return an hour or so before game time. We’d meet in the (air-conditioned) music hall for a quick rehearsal, then march across the parking lot to the football stadium. Road trips, however, were much more fun. We would load up the busses (since our band had about 250 members, we usually required five or six busses for the band members and another bus for the larger instruments, which included the percussion). Bus trips could be as brief as a 10-minute drive across town, but they sometimes involved lengthy drives. I recall playing El Campo HS one year; that trip was about six hours each way, and we stopped in a local dance hall before the game for supper.

My first game was memorable. At half time, we left the stands and lined up along the field for the show. The drum major whistled for us to start, the band started to play, and a new row stepped off the sidelines every fourth beat. Since I played bass drum, I was standing next to Lester in the very last row. As you might expect, I was a bit nervous, having never done this before. Our turn came; we lined up; we stepped forward; and I immediately swallowed a bug.

The insect, attracted by the stadium lights, had flown in my mouth at the exact moment I stepped off the line. Suddenly, all nervousness disappeared, totally forgotten. In fact, pretty much everything was forgotten except for the feeling of a bug crawling around in my mouth. Somehow, I managed to maintain my composure, and worked on getting the damn bug out of my mouth while still playing the bass drum and marching through the routine. Eventually, I managed to mangle him (the bug) up enough so that he stopped crawling, and I spit his lifeless corpse out onto the football field. I went through the rest of the halftime show in a bit of a daze.

The moral of the story is: no matter how nervous you are, it can always get worse.⁵

Our band director, Mr. J, was a wizard at arranging pop tunes for marching band; he also had an evil sense of humor. One year, he arranged “You Picked A Fine Time To Leave Me, Lucille” (Kenny Rogers) for our band. We always thought it was hilarious to respond to the other team’s fight song with a country & western waltz.

Towards the end of the season, the UIL⁶ marching band competition took place. In my freshman year, it was held at Little Cypress-Mauriceville High School. For three days before the competition (which was held on a Saturday), it rained. Not just any rain: a deep, persistent, tropical east Texas rain storm. The day of the competition was clear and cold, but the football field was utterly saturated. After the first band competed, it was 90% mud. After the second band, it was 99% mud. By the time we performed that afternoon, the field consisted of solid, sticky, gooey mud about 18 inches deep. We knew this, of course, and we told each other to make sure that our shoes were laced tightly.

That didn’t help.

We stepped off the sideline into the muck. Marching, for the first few yards, wasn’t actually that bad. At some point, however, our routine called for us to stop and “march in place” for a while. When we stopped and lifted our left feet for the first “in place” march, our left shoes came off. On the next step, the right shoes came off. The following step, and the left sock came off. On the fourth step, the right sock came off, and we stood there for the next few dozen beats slowly stomping our footwear into the cold, wet ground.

I’m told that, years later, when they would turn over the football field each spring, they were still discovering lost shoes, socks, mouthpieces, drumsticks, and trombone slides(!) embedded in the field. I can only imagine a team of archaeologists a few thousand years from now trying to determine what weird religious rite took place on that site.

We have a picture of him, taken sometime during the end of WWII, his shirt off, drying rolls of some film on the deck of his Navy ship.¹ The film is unusual; certainly much bigger then 35mm, it also appears to be much longer than the average roll of 6.5cm film (which is usually only a dozen or so shots). This looks like there could easily be fifty images in the 6.5 or 4.5cm  format.

We were the first family in the neighborhood to get “Pong,” and we were the first people we knew² to get a VHS video camera. He encouraged my interest in electronics and that interest is almost certainly the reason that I have the career that I do.

For me, however, it all started at the Christmas of my 7th grade year when I received a very early Texas Instruments calculator.³ With astoundingly expensive gift (the retail price was $149.99 at the time), I was the envy of all of my school friends. With this magical⁴ device, I could take the square root of a number without tedious calculations.

Sadly, I no longer have the SR-10, but I now own a collection of high-end calculators that I’ve acquired through the years. I wrote some of my first computer programs not on a “computer” per se, but on a programmable calculator.⁵ I may be one of the few people who moved from calculators to the slide rule, and not vice versa; in high school, as a freshman, I joined the University Interscholastic League⁶ slide rule team. By the time I was a senior, however, the slide rule competition had been dropped in favor of a mathematics competition that permitted the use of a calculator.

I was one of the first people to acquire the original Palm Pilot, and I’ve certainly kept up with the gadgets through the years. To me, it is fascinating to see how much power can be held in the palm of your hand. While most of us take such things for granted, it’s worthwhile to pause occasionally and reflect that our smartphone has more raw computing power than existed on the entire earth in about 1970. Imagine if people of that era could see the astounding things we do with so much power at our fingertips: Angry Birds! Facebook! Twitter! With all seriousness, however, we have so much power available to us at so little a price that we can afford to spend much of it on games and amusements.

Robert said, “Susie eats too much candy and if she doesn’t watch out it’ll Rotterdam teeth out.”

You have to understand that snow in Beaumont is not entirely unknown. Even though Beaumont is near the Gulf Coast, it does freeze, sometimes for days at a time. When we were still living on 3185 Gilbert, we had snow one winter, but it did not “stick” because the ground was so warm.

This snowfall, however, was in an entirely different category. It snowed for an entire day and night, with temperatures well below freezing, leaving at least a foot of the white stuff covering every surface. Every surface, including roads, trees, and vehicles, since Beaumont was far enough south that it did not own a snowplow or sanding/salting equipment. Nothing was moving on the streets, and there were sporadic power outages (though, thankfully, none in our area).

My brother Mark and I hiked (in the snow) down to the local convenience store to purchase milk, bread, and whatever other necessary items we needed. It was really impossible for a car to go out on those roads. We, of course, made snow angels and threw snowballs and all those other snow-related things that kids do, but with a sense of urgency that’s probably not nearly as common in, say, Boston or Chicago. We knew that this was a rare event, and we were determined to make the most of it.

For once in my life, I knew what a “snow day” was; the next day, it warmed up, the snow melted, and things were back to normal, but not without leaving a blessed chill in our hearts.

However, Ted had a rather devious plan to avoid taking a fully-decorated car on his honeymoon. He parked his car in front of the church on the day of the wedding, but he had arranged with my parents to borrow their car for the honeymoon, and he had left the car in the driveway of an elderly gentleman (a good friend) who lived a few blocks away from the church. He would leave the church with all the traditional good wishes and rice-throwing, drive his car to the friend’s house, change to Mom & Dad’s car, and then leave on his honeymoon unscathed.

However, the elderly gentleman¹ approached me and my brother Mark at the wedding and said, “I really hate to see Ted leave town in an undecorated vehicle,” and handed us the keys to the car. We drove over to his house, decorated that car fully, then came back to the church for some light shaving cream and shoe polish action on Ted’s car.

Ted & Dale were a bit surprised when they got out of Ted’s car at the friend’s house, expecting a clean getaway.

You really can’t trust anyone.

So, I won’t do that to you.

Instead, I’ll try to group things into smaller subjects while keeping the overall flow roughly chronological. For example, instead of having a single post about my high-school years, I can break it into several smaller chunks, each of which are easier to digest.¹

You can thank me later, if you happen to make it that far.

All of my brothers had been band members. Warren (the oldest) played flute and then tuba (an odd combination, yes?). Ted was a percussionist, and Mark played trombone. Before we had moved from our house at 3185 Gilbert, my mother had gotten her teaching credentials and, as a graduation gift, my dad had gotten her an electric organ. Ted went on to play guitar in a rock’n'roll band, and both he and Mark continued as avid amateur musicians. With this heritage, it was inconceivable that I should do something other than join the band and, quite honestly, I never considered any other option. I chose the drums; my parents acquired a new Ludwig snare drum, and I started tapping on things.¹ My band director, however, was a remarkable man named Don Knapp. He taught me the rudiments of drumming, some of which I remember to this day.² If you’re not careful, you might learn about the diddle, the flam, the paradiddle, and the roll, not to mention the drag.³ There will be more about “Mr. Knapp,” as we called him, in a future chapter but, for now, let me just say that his introducing me to music is one of the greatest joys my life has known.

In 6th grade we “dressed out” for gym class, for the first time in my life. The school provided jock straps, shorts, and t-shirts (most of a uniform gray color) of the “one size fits none” variety. On my first day in gym class, one of the other kids pointed at my paunchy belly and laughed. For the remainder of my life, I was fat. The reality of my actual weight had nothing to do with it. At that point, I was perhaps 250 lbs lighter than I am today, and yet I was fat. I was always a “big kid,” even to the event of playing a defensive lineman on the 4th-grade football team when I was in the 3rd grade, but it my body image had never been a source of humiliation before. I regret the incident, of course, but I’m not looking to blame someone else. My interests have always leaned towards the introspective (music, poetry) and I’ve always felt blessed that I grew up in an era where I could pursue those interests and not have to work hard for a living. My parents, of course, grew up in the midst of the Great Depression as well as World War II, and tried to instill in my a respect for the value of hard work. I even spent a few summers doing hard work myself—working in a chemical plant, roofing houses—and that was enough to reinforce my desire to have a career that was both cerebral as well as air-conditioned.

In reality, that incident was a minor episode compared to some of the other events of my middle-school years. A very important event was, I think, being selected for the school districts Honors program. Basically, those of us who were selected completed two years’ worth of English, Science, and Math during our seventh-grade year, and started taking courses at least a year ahead of our classmates. In addition to the advanced coursework, it had the side effect of grouping me together with approximately 20 other people in the same situation, and that particular group shared a large number of course in the following years. It led us to having a very close-knit relationship that lasted all the way through high school.⁴

My memories of this two-year period⁵ are disconnected and scattered. I’ll relate some anecdotes, in no particular order.

Pissing contests

The boys’ bathrooms at Joseph J. Vincent Middle School had urinals that consisted of a long, tin trough attached to the wall. The trough had water that was continuously running down its sides and out the drain. The idea, of course, was that the boys would like up along the trough, facing the wall, and relieve themselves. The troughs could probably accommodate a dozen or more boys each, and the bathrooms had at least two of them. I’m sure the architects of this system felt that it would be much more efficient and cost-effective; whereas the troughs could hold a dozen boys each, there was probably only room for individual urinals to accommodate half that number. Of course, boys will be boys, and there were numerous episodes where two boys would stand at the end of the trough to see who could pee the farthest. I don’t recall ever being one of the participants, but even the spectators found it amusing. There were variations on the game, of course. For example, the boys could stand at opposite ends of the trough and see if they could pee on each other.

Corruption

My math teacher much preferred bass fishing to teaching. He was actually quite a good teacher, but we knew that every Monday would be spent reliving his fishing trip from the weekend before.⁶ During the finals that year, he announced that, if we happened to have a borderline grade (for example, an 88.5% average), he would give an additional point for each bag of rubber worms we brought in for him, up to a maximum of 10 points. Thus, for the cost of about $20.00, a student with a low B grade could ensure an A on his or her report card. I’m sure that such behavior would be reported on the nightly news today, but no one at that time seemed to think much of it, and the teacher had at least three dozen bags of worms on his desk by the last day of class.

The problem of evil

After playing Little League for a few years, I finally saved up enough money to purchase a top-of-the line baseball glove (specifically, a first baseman’s mitt). Very excited about my purchase, I took it to school to show my friends, and it was stolen from my locker even before lunch. My youthful optimism died that day, and I was never quite the same again.

The best science lesson ever

The year was spent on learning the scientific method, on understanding observation, comparison, and documentation. At the end of one semester, my science teacher announced that we would have a very simple oral exam as our final. No need to study, because we had been seeing the material ever since the first day of school. On the day of the exam, she had us stand outside the room and called us in one at a time. Then she asked us each three questions:

1. What was the title of our textbook?
2. What was on the brass plaque outside the main entrance to the school? and
3. What was written in 2-foot-tall letters on the wall outside the cafeteria?

As an exam, it was one of the worst grades I ever received. As a lesson on the importance of observation and analysis, it stuck with me the rest of my life.

Trust

At some point in the autumn of my 7th grade year, a group of us were playing kickball on the baseball diamond near the school. For the uninitiated, “kickball” is essentially baseball, except that it is played with no bats, no gloves, and a large red, rubber ball instead of a baseball. The pitcher rolls the ball towards the plate, and the “batter” tries to kick it to the field, and play continues just like baseball.⁷ There was a close play at third base and I had to slide to avoid the tag. I crashed into the other player and ended up limping off the field. I kept limping, too, through the winter break, and into the spring. My mom got very tired of me “pretending I was hurt” for so long so, to put me in my place, she took me to an orthopedic doctor. The doctor took some X-rays and found that I had a hairline fracture of my lower left leg.⁸ He said, “If you had come in four weeks ago, I probably would have put it in a cast, but it’s almost healed now.” My mom was properly horrified and never questioned my medical self-diagnoses again.

Mathematics

Being in the Honors program give us opportunities not afforded to other students. During my 8th grade year, we were invited to send a team to participate in the local Kelly (Catholic) High School’s math competition. Our math teacher selected four students  to represent our school, and I was named one of two alternates. On the day of the competition (a Saturday), one of the team members fell ill, and I was called at 7AM to take her place.

The competition was basically a 2-hour-long test. I showed up and finished the test in about an hour, so I spent the rest of the time writing down my answers on the question sheet. After they collected our answer sheets, the test moderator reviewed the answers with us so that we could see how we did. When our team got together afterwards, we all shared our (estimated) scores, and they belittled me because mine was at least 20 points higher than any of theirs. After all, I couldn’t have scored very high, since I was only an alternate, right?

At the awards ceremony, I finished in third place, ahead of any of my teammates, and was at least treated with a bit more respect for the next few weeks.

What the hell was I thinking?

All kids do stupid things, right?

The rumor was, if you exhaled deeply while someone from behind pulled in on your stomach (sort of like the Heimlich Maneuver), you would feel dizzy and giddy.

I volunteered to be the test subject. I took a deep breath, blew out, and my friend squeezed me from behind.

When I came to, I was on the floor looking up at the very concerned faces of my friends.

Apparently, I was only unconscious for about 10 seconds, but it was enough to scare the bajeezus out of me.

The road goes ever on

Sometime during Middle School, my brother Ted gave me a copy of The Hobbit. If you’ve been keeping up⁹, you’ll recall that I first encountered Bilbo Baggins as a play in elementary school. Ted had read The Hobbit in high school, and he passed his copy on to me. I read it voraciously, and then followed up with The Lord of the Rings. This started a cycle that lasted for at least the next four years: I would read The Lord of the Rings, set it aside for a month or two, and then read it again.

After the first six or eight repetitions, I slowed down a bit, only reading it during the Christmas and summer vacations. Tolkien’s magnum opus opened my eyes to things I’d not encountered: poetry, myth, history, and this set the direction of my life for the next decade or more.

I can’t emphasize enough how important LOTR was to me. I kept a journal in which I copied all of the poetry from the book. I learned about Old English alliterative verse and tried to duplicate it. I found some of Tolkien’s more academic books and encountered Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for the first time—along with that, The Pearl and other medieval poetry. This led inevitably to Chaucer, to learning about medieval music, and to studying the medicine and history of the Middle Ages, as well as the British legends of the Fisher King. Expanding outwards from Tolkien, I found C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and  Dorothy Sayers.

This was almost entirely a secret passion. For some reason, I intimately understood that this was a subject that would not be treated with appropriate seriousness by my hormone-inflamed, football-loving classmates. I did not even speak of it much to members of my immediate family. Yet a passion it was, and a passion it remains to this day.

I no longer re-read LOTR every year,¹⁰ but I have estimated that I’ve probably read it at least thirty times in all.

* * *

By the summer of 1975, Nixon was out of office and I was on my way to high school.

With the forced integration brought about by the Civil Rights Act and the subsequent “white flight” from the urban areas to the suburbs, Troop 7 disbanded and my father and brothers no longer participated in scouting. I remained enthusiastic, however, so when I finally turned 11 (the minimum age at that time for becoming a Scout), I talked my folks into letting me join the local Scout troop associated with a nearby church. One evening, I attended my first Scout meeting as a “Tenderfoot.” I was assigned to a Patrol, and given the office of Scribe (I was supposed to write stuff down).

After some activities, the troop gathered as a whole unit (instead of in separate Patrols) and held a ceremony to honor the Scribes. The scoutmaster asked the scribes to come forward, so I stood up and moved to the front of the room. Everyone started laughing, and the scoutmaster explained that he was looking for the troop Scribes, a pair of high-school seniors who had won those jobs the year before. He sent me back to my seat, my face burning with the utter humiliation and shame of my mistake.

I never attended another Scout meeting, ever.