This week we continue reminiscing about my high school days traveling back and forth between a special education school and my regular neighborhood high school.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 26 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue reminiscing about my high school days traveling back and forth between a special education school and my regular neighborhood high school.

During my sophomore year which was the first year that I split between Roberts Handicapped School and Northwest High School, the schedule was easy to arrange because all of my classes at Roberts were already scheduled in the morning. All I had to do was skip the ones that I was taking at Northwest and take them in the afternoon there.

I was concerned that perhaps the teachers at Roberts would have a hard time accommodating my scheduling needs for my junior and senior years. It was probably a very difficult task to schedule 30 kids ranging from freshmen through seniors into 24 class periods between two teachers. Somehow they made it all work out.

I took math, history, and bookkeeping at Roberts in the morning. At Northwest, I would take science and English. The question was, which science? Normally a science major would take chemistry in their junior year. But the chemistry labs were all upstairs. The lab tables had a sink in them. There was specialized chemistry equipment in the room. It was the one upstairs class that actually was impossible to move downstairs. You can teach math and social studies anywhere and I was always disappointed they wouldn’t move those classes for me.

I wanted to take physics but it was strictly for seniors. I couldn’t convince them to let me take it in my junior year. The only two options were “Earth Science” and “Physical Science”. Although I had a mild interest in meteorology having always been fascinated by tornadoes, most of Earth Science was geology rather than climate. I didn’t care about that. Physical Science was a freshman physics class for non-science majors. You had to have at least one year of science even if you weren’t a science major and this was the course you took.

It was pretty much a junior high science class rather than at the high school level. The vast majority of the kids in the class were not exactly academically inclined. They were taking the class because they had to. For many of them, their academic skills were barely sufficient to get through it.

The grading scale was adapted to allow these non-gifted students to squeak through with a passing grade. It was based on a points system. Tests and quizzes were worth a certain number of points. Lab reports earned points as did homework assignments.

To get an “A” you only needed 80% of the available points. 70% would earn you a “B”, 60% a “C”, and 50% a “D”. On average, two or three kids each semester failed to get a passing grade at 50% of the required work. I discovered that I could get full points or nearly full points on tests, quizzes, and lab work and completely skip all the homework and still get 80% for an “A”. If for some reason I blew a quiz or got less than full marks on a test I could do homework and make up the points.

If there was ever a case of a class that failed to challenge an academically gifted student it was this one. I did not belong in that class.

The teacher was one of my favorites of all time – Mr. Stan Irwin. Having him as a teacher was the only thing that made the class tolerable. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant. I had a lab partner who was capable of getting As and Bs in the class so he was the closest thing I had to a peer in the room. When the teacher would ask a question and my hand would go up, I could see that he was ignoring me most of the time. He knew that I knew the answer. He wanted to see who else in the class knew the answer. When he would ask the question and get nothing but blank stares from the rest of the room then he would call on me.

I don’t know how much I really learned in the class but the lab experiments were definitely fun. I think my favorite was doing electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen and then lighting a flame and igniting the hydrogen. When we did it, it was from a small glass bottle it made a nice satisfying popping sound. Mr. Irwin also created hydrogen from some chemical reaction and filled up a balloon. When he set fire to that we had a really nice fireball.

He had me hang out after class one day for a heart-to-heart talk. Apparently, I was doing a really bad job of hiding my disdain for the lack of academic prowess of my classmates. He approached the topic very sensitively. He wasn’t chewing me out. He was being sympathetic and offering me advice as a mentor when he said, “You know and I know that you don’t belong in this class but those are the cards we’ve been dealt. Next year, when I have you in physics and you want to go toe-to-toe showing off your intellect with classmates who are the quality of your buddy Dennis Adams then go ahead. Bring it on. Show them what you’ve got all out. But when you’re in here, show some compassion. Let me put it to you this way… If some of the football players were always up in your face flaunting their physical abilities and mocking you, you wouldn’t like it very much.”

Wow, he had me on that one. I apologized and I thanked him. He had explained it in terms I could precisely understand. I had always liked the guy but now I felt a real bond. Fortunately, I never experienced any such harassment from the jocks but I knew I wouldn’t have liked it if I had. It wasn’t so much that I made fun of the other kids, but I did kinda look down on them.

While writing this, I was going to say that if Mr. Irwin had asked me to throw a chess match the way my junior high mentor Mr. Kohl had done, I would have done it. While writing that sentence, it occurred to me that’s exactly what Irwin was asking. He wanted me to dial back my intellectual ego for the sake of someone else’s feelings.

Irwin has suggested I could intellectually spar with people like my friend Dennis Adams. We mentioned Dennis briefly in the last episode. He was one of the students who hung out with me in the science department office before my first class. All these years later, I can confidently say that Dennis is the most academically gifted person I have ever known. He would have been valedictorian of his class but he got a “C” in gym class his freshmen year and it killed his GPA.

Dennis said his guidance counselor kept giving him different standardized achievement tests and IQ tests trying to find one that Dennis would score below the 99th percentile.

He would write love notes to his girlfriend describing their relationship like the plot of a sine wave that has its ups and downs. He declared he wanted “Pi over 2 for you forever.” If you aren’t nerdy enough to get that, a sine wave peaks at Pi divided by 2. He wanted their relationship to stay at that maximum level. It doesn’t get much nerdier them that. Apparently, he got his wish. Over 50 years later he’s been married to the same woman he fell in love with in high school.

You would think with his academic prowess he could’ve written his own ticket to any school in the country. In the end, however, he landed at IUPUI funded by the Indiana Department of Vocational Rehabilitation. That was the agency I planned to use for my college finances. What I’ve not told you yet is that Dennis also had a disability. He had a rather severe hearing impairment and wore hearing aids.

Dennis wasn’t just a good friend. He changed my life for the better by setting me on my career path as a computer programmer.

At an early age, I had no idea such a career awaited me. I wanted to be an astronomer. I mentioned in an earlier episode that my fascination with the night sky sparked my early interest in science. It was also the height of the space race and the eventual moon landing in 1969. That also led to my passion for science fiction. So astronomy was a natural choice. I presumed that you could sit in a wheelchair and look through a telescope just fine. I got my first telescope for my 13th birthday. I really enjoyed looking at the craters of the moon, the Galilean moons of Jupiter, and the March 1970 partial solar eclipse.

I developed concerns about my chosen career path when I saw a photo in a book that showed an astronomer who had climbed up into the structure of a giant telescope to change a photographic plate. I tried to dismiss it saying, “Oh well, I’ll just hire somebody to do that for me or maybe get a grad student to do it.” I didn’t think about what I would do when I was a grad student and it was my job to do that dirty work. Nor did I think too much about the fact that there are no significant astronomy programs here in Indianapolis. I think Butler University has one and they do have a small observatory. Butler is a private school and Voc Rehab will only pay state school tuition or up to the state school amount for a private university.

These days, technological advances would make it easier for someone like me to be an astronomer. Telescopes use digital cameras for imaging. Astronomers do a lot of computer programming to analyze their data. You don’t have to be physically present at the telescope to do your work – especially if your instrument is Hubble or the JWST.

The thing that finally made me give up on my dream of becoming an astronomer was an assignment I had in eighth grade. We were supposed to investigate what we wanted to be when we grew up and what it would take to do that. I learned that most astronomers have a Ph.D. That required four years of college and another three or four years to get your master’s and doctorate. While spending that much time in school wasn’t appealing, I figured I could put up with that. The thing that scared me away was writing a master’s thesis and a doctoral dissertation.

I hate research! I hate research with a passion. Book reports, term papers, index cards full of footnotes… all of that is kryptonite to me. I like learning for the sake of knowledge but regurgitating that knowledge in a nitpicky formal way rather than just showing off like a know-it-all… Not for me.

At one point, I figured I would end up in law school. There were no physical requirements except perhaps stamina which I had sufficiently at that young age. It would take lots of years of postgrad work but I thought I was up to the challenge. Even though you don’t do a dissertation there still is a lot of research and writing but it’s a different kind. I liked the idea of making logical arguments to prove my point. The pay would be good. And I have a passion for the law and politics. Years of watching my mom as a disability advocate and the work she had done as a lobbyist were very inspiring to me.

All plans for law school flew out the window once I discovered computers. I will be eternally grateful to Dennis for setting me on that path.

The Northwest High School math department taught a class in computer programming. They had a classic ASR-33 teletype machine complete with the paper tape punch and reader on the side. It was connected via a dedicated phone line to a timesharing Honeywell computer located in the Indianapolis Public Schools’ main offices downtown. I seem to recall it was a Honeywell 200 but I just researched that on Wikipedia and it didn’t mention timesharing capabilities so I might be wrong about that.

The class taught the BASIC programming language.BASIC n all caps. BASIC is an acronym for Beginners All-purpose Systematic Instruction Code. It was the primary language in those days for teaching computer programming.

My problem was, the teletype was located in the math department office which was upstairs. Dennis got me a book and I taught myself the basics of BASIC. He agreed that if I wanted to write a small program, he would go up there and type it in and run it for me. I created a program to track statistics for an intramural basketball team that my friends in the neighborhood were in. I think we only ended up putting in the stats for one or two games but at least it got me some experience in programming.

That wasn’t good enough for Dennis. He wanted me to have the opportunity to have hands-on experience with the machine. He thought about recruiting some help to carry me up the steps for a day so I could use the teletype. There was a better solution. If I couldn’t come to the teletype, the teletype had to come to me. The machine used a special, always-on, dedicated phone line. If it had been a dial-up or had an acoustic coupler, that would’ve been easy.

Dennis noted that the phoneline was very long. It was sitting coiled up on the floor in the back of the machine. He figured out that we could run the cable out the window of the math department office upstairs and back in the window of the home economics department which was right below it downstairs. He got permission from both department heads and one day with the help of a friend they carried the teletype machine downstairs and connected it in the home-ec department with the cords running out the windows..

For about an hour, I had my first experience actually operating a computer. We played a couple of classic computer games such as tic-tac-toe and submarine warfare. I don’t think I had yet gotten my basketball stats program ready yet. I tried some classic exercises in using an interpreted computer language such as typing PRINT “Hello world” at the READY prompt and having it print the words back to me.

I was late getting to my science class with Mr. Irwin. I asked Dennis, “Don’t we need a hall pass or a note from the math department explaining why I’m late?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll walk in with you. Irwin knows me and we will just say we got tied up doing something for the math department.”

Dennis accompanied me back to my class. He didn’t say anything when we walked in. He just walked through classroom, went to the storage closet and then out the other door of the adjoining classroom without any explanation. He left me hanging there! Feeling incredibly awkward, I had to tell Mr. Irwin that Dennis and I got tied up on a math project. Irwin accepted that and never asked for any further explanation so it turned out okay. I forgave Dennis for abandoning me. He’s too good a friend not to forgive but as you can tell, 50+ years later I still haven’t forgotten. Anyway…

I have a great fondness for that old ASR-33 teletype. We had about a dozen of them at IUPUI when I first started there two years later. History tells us that Bill Gates had one and used it to write a BASIC language interpreter for the Altair personal computer in 1975. Gates didn’t have an Altair computer to test the software. He had written an Intel 8008 emulator that ran on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 mainframe at Harvard. Until he and Paul Allen delivered the product to MITS headquarters, makers of the Altair computer, it had never actually run on that machine.

I’ve fantasized a lot about that situation. I was a computer science student at IUPUI in 1975 and I had access to a DEC PDP 10 and ASR-33 teletype machines. I’m confident that Dennis and I could have done the same thing as Gates and Allen if we had thought of it. Our lives would’ve been much different. I’ll discuss that fantasy and others in future episodes.

Dennis was a year ahead of me. After I graduated high school and became a computer science major at IUPUI we would continue our friendship there. I’ll have more stories to tell about our college days together and our continued friendship over the years.

I recall on the last day of school my junior year… Dennis’ senior year as he and I exited the building via the science wing door he shouted rather loudly a mathematical cheer he had taught me.

E to the X, dy/dx. E to the X/dx. Cosine, secant, tangent, sine… 3.14159. T-square, slip-stick, boogie factor 2… Northwest high farewell to you! Although we might have thrown in an expletive in there somewhere.

A brief PS to this episode…

After I initially recorded it, I dug out some old high school yearbooks so I could insert some photos YouTube version of this podcast. I found this picture in my 1972 yearbook. It shows Dennis appearing on TV in the “Exercise in Knowledge” quiz show for high school students. He signed my yearbook over that photo. It says, “Chris, What can I say? We have had many interesting talks. Many interesting programs! Hope your helper next year is more dependable. Dennis C. Adams”

That shows what kind of a guy he is. He knew I was counting on him to help me with various things and he was disappointed in his own performance. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend when we were in high school.

So, Dennis, you are a very good helper. There was no one more dependable. Even if you did abandon me as we came back to my grasp after the computer project 🙂

Many thanks to you for all these years of friendship and for setting me on my life’s career as a computer programmer.

Next week, I’ll have more stories to tell about my junior year at Northwest.

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