This week, we continue my reminiscences of my college days at IUPUI, where I studied computer science and worked as a programmer at the IU Department of Medical Genetics.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 73 of Contemplating Life.

This week, we continue my reminiscences of my college days at IUPUI, where I studied computer science and worked as a programmer at the IU Department of Medical Genetics.

I started work at the genetics department in April 1977 during my eighth semester. We already covered the classes I took that semester. I would go to work early in the morning and ride with my dad. He worked at a sheet metal shop at 10th and West Street, just a couple of blocks from the genetics lab at Riley Hospital. I would work most of the day, and then the wheelchair van would transfer me to the 38th St. campus of IUPUI, where I would take evening classes. I don’t remember how many hours I worked for those first few weeks while I was still in school. It was only a month before finals when I started. After finals, I began working full-time at the genetics lab. Dad would take me to work each morning and pick me up again at the end of the day throughout the summer.

Over the summer, they hired three other student programmers. I don’t remember the names of the two guys, but there was a girl named Chrisel. We all got along very well. We had good times but managed to get a lot of good work done as well.

We had a timesheet that we were supposed to fill out each day and turn in at the end of the week. One of the guys came up with the idea of writing a computer program that would fill it out for us. We would crank the timesheet into a teletype machine and run the program, and it would fill out our hours. We were supposed to work an eight-hour shift with a lunch break in the middle. We didn’t actually clock in and out on the computer, although we told everyone we did. The program would start at 9 AM and randomly pick a time plus or minus 2 or 3 minutes. In the middle of the day, it would randomly pick a time for a ranch break. At the end of the day, it would pick a time that exactly matched eight hours. So it looked like we were arriving at random times plus or minus a couple of minutes and leaving exactly 8 hours later, but it was all bullshit. Don’t get me wrong… We really did work approximately eight hours. But the timesheets were a complete fabrication.

I don’t recall what we were paid hourly. One day, on payday, I noticed that the other students were being paid more than I was. Upon closer inspection, the hourly rate was the same, but the other student programmers did not have Social Security withdrawn from their checks. Apparently, at the time, there was a provision that if you were a student employee, you did not have to pay Social Security. But I was having it withdrawn.

The other programmers said, “Go talk to Randy. He will fix it for you.”

Randy was the department’s business manager. He was in his mid-30s and in a wheelchair from a spinal cord injury. He could move his arms a bit but had difficulty gripping things with his hands. He had some sort of mechanical device strapped to his wrist. He could flex his wrist, and it would open and close the grip of his fingers, allowing him to hold a pen or pencil. I thought it was a very clever device.

I never did go to see Randy about getting exempt from Social Security. I thought to myself, “Who knows, maybe someday I will need that extra time of eligibility.” It was one of the smartest decisions I ever made. Two years later, when I had to quit work because of my worsening disability, I needed to have paid a minimum of 8 quarters of Social Security payments in order to be eligible for Social Security disability. I had accumulated exactly 8 quarters. Had I taken the exemption for student employees and not paid into Social Security, I would’ve never been able to draw disability payments. I often wondered if Randy anticipated that possibility and did not automatically give me the exemption.

The girl, Chrisel, was an interesting character. She had an air of sophistication and haughtiness that bordered upon arrogance. It seemed that she was raised in a family of wealth and privilege and exuded that attitude. She seemed offended by Dr. Gersting’s gruff personality. She said, “I told my mother that Dr. Gersting’s language was crude and colorful. It’s populated with such words as ‘sucker.’ My mother replied, ‘I presume you are not referring to a piece of hard candy on a stick.’ I replied, ‘No, Mother. He says sentences like, ‘If this sucker doesn’t run by Friday, we are going to be screwed.’” That was an accurate description of Gersting. I loved him for it. She was disgusted by it.

One day, I got to meet her mother, a child psychologist who worked at Riley Hospital. One day, during our lunch break, she took me upstairs to meet Mom. It turns out that I was likely a former client of her mother. While sitting in the small waiting room outside her mom’s office, I had a flashback to a distant childhood memory of being in that very waiting room. There were pictures of clowns hanging on the wood-paneled walls. When I looked into the office, I also noticed the space.

I’m guessing I was about 4 or 5 years old, and my parents took me to be evaluated by a psychologist. They wanted to know if my disability was only physical or if there was something mentally wrong with me. In those days, I had an imaginary friend that concerned them. They took me to a woman for evaluation. She interviewed me and gave me puzzles to work. She had little triangular and square wooden tiles of various colors. She would show me a drawing, and I had to re-create the pattern using the colored tiles. I had no difficulty completing the task quickly. She reported to my parents that I was highly intelligent and that imaginary friends were completely normal… especially for smart kids like me with an overactive imagination and no other siblings to play with. Unless there was another female child psychologist occupying that same office 18 years ago, I’m certain it was Chrisel’s mother. Unfortunately, I didn’t put all this together until after I left her office, but I later told Chrisel that I might have been one of her mother’s clients when I was a child.

Chrisel and I went on a sort of a date one afternoon. We took a break and walked all the way over to University Hospital, about two blocks away. She said that the cafeteria there made great milkshakes. She invited me to come with her to get one. We had a nice time. I’m never one to turn down an opportunity to spend time with an attractive, smart woman, but overall, I don’t think she was quite my type. She was just a little bit too in love with her own sophistication.

She later went on a date with one of the other guys who was working with us. I think it was just dinner and a movie. I don’t think anything ever came of it.

Dr. Gersting taught a summer school class in the genetics department that summer. It was called “Discrete Computer Simulations CS 543.” He held it at 8:30 a.m., just as I was arriving. There were about five students. Besides me, all the rest were genetics grad students. We sat around a conference table. I was at the end of the table. Gersting was to my left. So I could look straight ahead and not make eye contact with him. That was a good thing because I often dozed off during the class–it was so early. One of the things that would occasionally keep me awake, if not exactly focused on the work, was a girl sitting on my right. She often wore loose-fitting flannel shirts with several unbuttoned buttons on the top. She never wore a bra. When she would turn a certain way, I could see down the front of her shirt and get a good look at her bare breast all the way to the nipple. I’m pretty sure she was lesbian, but that didn’t matter. Boobs are boobs. I was 20 years old. Given such an opportunity, I couldn’t keep from looking. Besides, it kept me awake.

Our final project was to write a computer simulation using a FORTRAN package of programs. I forget the name of the package. We had the option of doing a simulation that Gersting assigned or coming up with one of our own. The project was some sort of boring simulation of a widget factory. You had to run different scenarios to see if you could improve efficiency by expanding a production line with an extra workstation. I wanted to come up with a more interesting scenario. As a joke, I asked if I could simulate customers arriving at a brothel. Was it worth it for the Madam to hire an extra girl, given the average wait time of her customers? Gersting said that unless I could come up with real-world data to base it upon, just do the standard assignment. Not having access to the raw data, I did the assignment as assigned. I earned a B for the course.

When the summer ended, the other three student programmers left, and I never saw or heard from any of them again. I went back to part-time employment, working during the day and taking classes at night for my ninth and final semester.

When I was preparing my schedule for that final semester, my guidance counselor uttered the most dreaded words a college senior could hear: “You weren’t planning on graduating this semester, were you?”

Yes, I was planning on graduating.

You may remember many episodes ago when describing my first semester at IUPUI. I took a college algebra course that earned me 5 credit hours, and I was awarded an A. I felt that I needed the class to prepare for calculus, which I had never taken in high school. I was warned at the time that the School of Science would not count that course towards my mathematics requirements. They considered it a remedial class. I didn’t realize they were not going to count them as credit hours at all. No one had told me I would get no credit whatsoever. I just thought it would not count toward my math requirements, which I fulfilled. By the end of my ninth semester, I would have fulfilled all of the requirements for my degree except for the total number of credit hours. I was going to be five hours short.

I asked the counselor, “What am I to do? Go take some elective courses like art appreciation or basket weaving just to get five more hours. That’s ridiculous. I’m an undergrad getting As and Bs in graduate-level courses in computer science. Why do I have to take some crap course just to graduate?”

He suggested I write a letter to the Dean of the School of Science to see if I could get an exemption and get that 5-credit-hour remedial math class to count as an elective. So, I wrote to the dean and told him about the misunderstanding regarding the math class. I explained that I was warned that it would not count toward my math total, but I had already fulfilled my math requirements. I pointed out that I was making good grades in graduate-level courses in computer science. I explained that the Indiana Department of Vocational Rehabilitation normally only pays for 4 years of college, but I had cajoled them into paying for my ninth semester. I didn’t think I could get them to extend that another semester.

A few weeks later, I got a reply from the Dean. They would count that math class as an elective, and I could graduate in December 77 as planned.

Now for a brief epilogue: I need to start doing my research for these episodes before the editing phase. I tend to write the episode and then rush to get it recorded. Then, during editing, I decide to look up things so I can add links in the description and photos for the YouTube version. I need to do my research first.

Christine Ann Roeske was the woman who worked with me that summer in the genetics department. She went by the name Chrisel. I think she spelled it C.H.R.I.S.E.L. It must’ve been a childhood nickname. I always thought it was a shortened version of Crystal, but apparently, her real name was Christine. Her mother was Dr. Nancy Arnold Roeske. I didn’t remember her mother’s name, but I remembered their last name. I just chose not to mention it in the podcast because, let’s face it, I wasn’t very flattering to Chrisel.

That last name is spelled R.O.E.S.K.E. but is pronounced, “ress-key”– not “row-ski.”. I remember discussing with her that my uncle’s name was Roell, which is spelled R.O.E.L.L. The R.O.E. in both names is pronounced the same, with the “O” essentially silent. It’s ress-key and rell, not row-ski or row-ell.

I wanted to look up Dr. Roeske to see if she was working at Riley when I was a child. According to a blog post I found memorializing her, I don’t think she held that position. It says she completed her residency in 1964 and then took the position at Riley. I would have been nine years old in 1964. I’m pretty sure the thing I remembered was prior to that. Dr. Roeske was quite a woman and I encourage you to read the linked article about her. She died of cancer in 1986, a few days after her 58th birthday. I did not find an online version of her official obituary.

The article mentioned she had 2 children but didn’t give their names. It mentioned her husband, Dr. Roger William Roeski, so I went looking for his obituary in hopes of finding Chrisel’s actual name. I found a partial obituary that stated, “His first wife Nancy Arnold Roeske, daughter Christine Roeske, and sister Romelle Roeske preceded him in death.” He died in 2009 at age 82 from complications of Parkinson’s. It described Dr. Nancy as his first wife, so apparently, he remarried.

At first, I just saw the name Christine, and it didn’t sink in that she had preceded him. I googled her and found a record for her on a genealogy website that said, “She died on 11 October 1991, in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia, at the age of 34, and was buried in Minneapolis.” The article about her mother said that Dr. Roeske was born in Minneapolis. It didn’t list a cause of death for Christine, and I have no idea how she ended up in Australia. I would like to learn more about her life.

So, that’s the rest of the story. I need to start doing this research before I write.

In our next episode, I will talk about my final semester at IUPUI, my continuing work at the genetics lab, and my graduation with a BS degree in computer science.

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