This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days. We talk about my third semester at the downtown campus where I met a woman who was the first able-bodied woman I ever dated.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 48 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days especially my third semester at IUPUI and the first woman I ever dated who wasn’t in a wheelchair.

We left last week’s episode on a bit of a cliffhanger telling you about meeting a woman who was the first able woman I ever dated, the first person in college I dated, and a relationship that lasted for decades. If you haven’t seen that episode I suggest you go back and see it first. There are some things that I set up there that pay off in this episode.

I mentioned that we met in the Hideaway Cafeteria in the basement of the Blake Street Library. I would journey there every day after sociology class. I had no trouble getting someone to open the front door to the library or pushing the button on the elevator to get to the basement. The Hideaway was a real cafeteria with cafeteria trays in a food service line offering a variety of choices at a decent price. This was unlike the 38th St. K-building lunchroom with nothing but vending machines. I didn’t seem to have any difficulty finding someone who would grab a tray for me and walk through the line with me.

I think it was about the second or third week of the semester when I was assisted by a rather short full-figured woman with long black hair. Most people just carried the tray to a table for me and then went on their way. She offered to sit down with me for lunch and explained that we were in sociology class together. There were over 30 people in the class and I hadn’t noticed her. Of course, I wore the same color wheelchair every day so I was quite familiar to her.

I learned that her name was Ella Vinci (as in Leonardo da) but she went by Ellie. She was a couple of years older than me. Reasonably attractive but not as hot as some women Himat the downtown campus. From that day forward we had lunch together almost every day.

She was very outgoing and quite kind to me. We would have long discussions about the topics in our Social Problems class. She was quite liberal politically and a crusader for social justice and women’s rights issues. Being of Sicilian descent she was also Roman Catholic. Although I was drifting away from the church at the time, I had not yet left the Catholic Church. So I considered her faith a plus.

As a psychology major, it was obvious she cared about people and was very sensitive towards their feelings. In her spare time, she volunteered to answer a suicide prevention hotline. By helping me with my lunch tray each day, she made sure I got fries with that. It took everything I had not to jump to the conclusion that she was “the one” I’d been waiting for.

I can’t say that I actually fell in love with her but I was quite attracted to her I certainly felt that the relationship was off to a great start and had lots of potential.

Soon after we started hanging out for lunch, we were joined by another of our sociology classmates – a guy named Bill. I don’t recall his last name. He was a tall lanky fellow who was extremely socially awkward. He revealed that he struggled with epilepsy which he kept mostly under control with medication. Because of his condition, he couldn’t get a driver’s license. He talked about how difficult that was during high school. Nobody wants to date a guy who can’t drive and who has the potential to fall down in fits of convulsions at any moment. Naturally, he was teased and bullied throughout his life for his condition. I could commiserate with him about the inability to drive and the adverse effect it had on my high school social life.

One day when Bill wasn’t around, Ellie sat down with me visibly troubled. “I’ve got to talk to you about Bill. I don’t know what to do. He wants me to meet his parents.”

“Do you mean like just introduce you as ‘my friend from school’ or ‘MEET the Parents?’”

“He means ‘meet the parents’ as in he wants to introduce them to his future wife.”

She went on to explain that the entire extent of their relationship outside our usual three-person lunch date was that one day when it was raining, she took him home to his apartment rather than having him wait on the bus in the rain. They ordered some pizza and either watched TV or put on some music I don’t recall. They sat next to each other on his sofa and at one point he put his arm around her and tried to grab her breast. She rejected the advance and he apologized. From that lone encounter and our shared lunches, he was already making wedding plans.

I listened attentively and tried not to show what I was feeling inside. A single sentence was screaming inside my head. That sentence was the proverbial, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

When she concluded her story and asked my advice I began explaining to her that Bill’s epilepsy was a disability. The social effects of it were not significantly different from what I had experienced. I explained to her that it takes willpower and ambition to believe that you are lovable. You operate under the assumption that if anyone was going to take you seriously as a boyfriend it would be a very rare thing. So there is pressure to make the absolute most out of even the smallest opportunity.

I don’t think I had yet thought of the joke about falling in love because the girl at McDonald’s asked if you wanted fries but I explained the dynamics behind such a situation. I told her that she was probably the first girl in his entire life who had ever shown him ANY kindness whatsoever. And so he had to jump at the situation full force and push it to extreme expectations.

The entire time I was “speculating” about what was going on inside his head, I was in fact talking about myself. I just kept thinking over and over again how terrifyingly close I had been to making a fool of myself the way he had.

Let me be clear. I hadn’t yet fallen in love with her. However, I was actively pursuing a course of action in which I sincerely hoped that someday she would meet my parents in that way. So although I had been keeping a level head and an appropriate perspective about my relationship with Ellie, the similarities to Bill terrified me.

She was amazed at the depth of insight that I had into his personality and she better understood what had happened. She had no idea that those insights were mostly based on my own feelings.

After our conversation, she spoke to Bill and made it clear to him she had zero interest. I don’t think the three of us were together again after that. I did see him once one-on-one and he explained he felt he had failed with Ellie because he had tried to put moves on her on his first date. I didn’t bother explaining to him that it wasn’t a date and furthermore, his issues went beyond that. If he wanted to believe that version of events, I wasn’t going to try to dissuade him from it.

Ellie later heard that Bill had a girlfriend. This one didn’t hesitate to take him to bed or so he claimed. The troubling thing was, that his new girlfriend was some sort of religious fanatic who didn’t believe in medicine and was persuading him to stop taking his anti-epilepsy drugs. That really concerned us both because, despite the issues, we liked the guy. We never learned what happened after that.

The consequence of this entire situation was it sealed my friendship with her. We grew much closer and eventually, I found the courage to ask her on a date. We went out at least three times and I think we got together at my house on at least one other occasion or I may just remember things we did after a date. We are talking about events 49 years ago.

Our first date was for dinner and we saw the movie “Jaws”. She had seen it before but wanted to see it again. The only time I was really scared during the movie was when Richard Dreyfus was inspecting the abandoned boat underwater and looked into the hole in the side of the boat. A dead guy’s head pops out of the hole with his eyeball hanging out. I flinched along with the entire audience but even more so because at that instant, she grabbed my arm. I said, “You did that just to scare me. You’ve seen the movie before. You knew what was going to happen.” She insisted that even though she knew what was coming, it made her jump, and grabbing me was a reflex. Yeah really.

We also went to dinner and then saw the movie version of the rock opera “Tommy” by the Who. Unfortunately, I had some bad chicken at dinner and was a bit nauseous by the end of the movie so we didn’t hang out long afterward.

We also went to see “The Godfather Part 2”. She said it was about her people because she was from a Sicilian background. Not that she had any mob connections. She was shocked at the scene when Kay told Michael that she didn’t have a miscarriage but it was an abortion. She said that was huge. Being Catholic myself and my mother being staunchly pro-life I knew actually what she meant but Ellie seemed to be especially affected by the scene.

I have distinct memories of sitting with her in my room listening to records. We speculated about the meaning of the lyrics to “Still… You Turn Me On” from the Emerson, Lake, and Palmer album “Brain Salad Surgery.” What did it mean when he said “Someone get me a ladder?” She thought perhaps, “so I can reach you.” I thought it was an interesting insight I never forgot.

Our most memorable date was when she invited me to my first hockey game. It was an Indianapolis Racers game at Market Square Arena. Now, I’ve already told you what a sweet and sensitive woman she was. But I have not said that she was soft-spoken as well. We had a very gentle personality. Except at a hockey game. At a hockey game, an entirely different personality emerged. It was quite common for a fistfight to break out at such a game. This was in the days before helmets were mandatory so the fights were particularly nasty. It was a minor league team though it seemed they allowed the fights to go on a little longer than perhaps the NHL would today. There’s an old joke, I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out. This was one of those games. She would scream and yell and cheer at the fights. She would also yell at the referees and didn’t hesitate to hurl expletives. I looked at her like, “Okay, who are you and what did you do with Ellie?”

I have often described her as the woman who taught me a deep appreciation of violence on ice.

She didn’t make it easy for me to keep my perspective on our relationship. At one point, she took a vacation to Puerto Rico with a girlfriend or a relative I don’t recall which. When she returned home she went on and on about how beautiful it was and speculated perhaps someday we would go there together. She seemed completely oblivious to the challenges that would involve. It’s one thing to accept me without regard to my disability but it was quite another thing to act as though there were no real obstacles between us. The statement was so unrealistic it was painful for me. I could have interpreted it to mean she would do absolutely anything necessary for us to be together. But fortunately, I recognized it for what it was. She really had no realistic concept of what day-to-day life would be with me under normal circumstances let alone taking an exotic vacation together.

I told my dad about the conversation and he was concerned I was developing unrealistic expectations. He said that I needed to keep my perspective. He said, “You can have a really nice time with her but you have to understand the challenges you face in a relationship.” I explained to him quite the contrary that I was not getting carried away because I was realizing how unrealistic she was about what life would be like with me. She was one who wasn’t keeping perspective. I went on to explain the struggle I faced because finding anyone who would take ANY interest in me would be extremely rare. I tried to explain to him the pressure I felt to make the very best of every opportunity because I didn’t think I would get a lot of chances. He then quoted the old adage, “Girls are like streetcars. If you miss one, another one comes along in a few minutes.”

“But dad… There are no more streetcars.”

“Okay, smart ass… Then buses. It’s just an old expression.”

“An expression I’ve heard before. But ask yourself, how many of those streetcars or buses are wheelchair accessible? That’s pretty rare. I feel like I have to catch every accessible bus I can. It’s just that this bus driver thinks she can take me to Puerto Rico and I know she can’t.”

When I said, “How many of the buses are wheelchair accessible?” Dad then understood what I was saying.

She brought me a souvenir from Puerto Rico – a small brown handmade bud vase. She had placed in the vase a small sprig of artificial Lily of the Valley flowers she had doused with her favorite perfume. I swear I could still smell that perfume on the plastic flowers years later. I don’t know what it was but it was distinctly her. I recall one day going into the library waiting on the elevator and I thought I smelled her perfume. I looked around the room and she was sitting at a table several feet away.

When I returned to the 38th St. campus for my fourth semester, we didn’t see much of each other anymore. I would occasionally see her downtown and I think she took one class at 38th St. We remained friends but didn’t go out anymore and didn’t see much of one another.

In 1976, Ellie took a bus trip to New Hampshire to campaign door-to-door for Indiana Senator Birch Bayh in his bid for the Democratic nomination for President. He was one of the most liberal politicians Indiana has ever seen. He was known for his work for equal rights, the ERA, the author of Title IX, and a whole host of other liberal causes. I encourage you to read the linked Wikipedia article about him. After finishing third in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts he dropped out of the race. Jimmy Carter became the Democrat nominee and the 39th president. Bayh continued to be an influential senator until he was defeated in 1980 by Dan Quayle who benefited from the Republican landslide that year.

On that trip to New Hampshire, Ellie met a guy, fell in love, and they were married. I was invited to the wedding and attended. At the reception afterward, she gave me a big hug and gave me a small sprig of the lily of the valley flowers from her wedding bouquet. I took it home and put it in the vase with the plastic flowers. It sat on a bookshelf in my bedroom for decades. I’m not sure what happened to it. It’s not there now.

She obtained a Master’s degree and went to work as a family counselor for an organization called Catholic Charities. She and her husband were extremely active in the church. I think perhaps they had become members of a secular Franciscan order. I think she had at least one perhaps two daughters.

I ran into her once or twice at archdiocesan events and we occasionally spoke by phone. Many years after we were in college together, I took the opportunity to tell her why I had so much insight into what Bill was feeling. I confessed it was because, to a much lesser degree, I was not different from him. I said I was grateful that I had not gotten out of control as had Bill. And I was grateful for the years of friendship that we had because I had been able to keep a proper perspective. I never did tell her how upset I had been when she suggested we could run off to Puerto Rico for a vacation together. It’s

One time I called her for advice when a friend of mine needed a family lawyer for a custody issue. I thought perhaps having worked in family counseling she could recommend someone. It was then that I learned she was divorced. That really surprised me considering how devoutly Catholic she was and how difficult it is to be a divorced Catholic.

Seven years ago just as I was recovering from getting my trach installed I discovered her on Facebook. She had just returned from a vacation in Rome with her daughters. We resumed our friendship online but she had radically changed since I had seen her last.

You won’t believe this but now she was a Trump supporter.

That’s why I want you to read the Wikipedia article about Senator Bayh. You could not find two people at farther opposite ends of the political spectrum than those two. I can only speculate that her staunch Catholicism led her to be radically antiabortion and thus Republican despite the conservative positions that were diametrically opposed to all of the social justice and feminist issues she supported in her college days.

I treated her kindly online and we reminisced about the good old days but I completely avoided any political discussions with her. I knew we could never be really close again. It’s not that I couldn’t love a conservative. But I can’t respect anyone who supports irrationality like a Trump supporter. I’m guessing it was about halfway through the Trump administration that she announced she was quitting Facebook. She couldn’t handle the toxicity. Perhaps she couldn’t deal with the reality that Trump was such an irrational, misguided, narcissistic, incompetent idiot. I don’t know.

She certainly wasn’t the woman I knew in college and I miss her, the original her, very much.

I had wasted my relationship with Rosie throughout high school because I constantly lamented that it wasn’t a romance and I never appreciated Rosie’s friendship the way I should have until it was too late. That lesson bore fruit in my relationship with Ellie in that I could enjoy our friendship even though it wasn’t a romance. And thanks to that sad guy Bill, I avoided making a fool of myself by pushing too hard to try to make something happen that wasn’t there. I learned not just to allow the friendship to happen but to be fulfilled completely by that friendship rather than seeing it solely as a stepping stone to something else. It was a lesson that served me well in every other relationship I’ve had with women for the rest of my life.

At age 68, with little or no social life beyond online friends, my chances of finding romance are smaller than ever. That doesn’t mean I’ve given up. I still see and enjoy friendships with women and cherish what I have while keeping my perspective on the difficulties that would be involved in a relationship.

As mentioned previously, I’m going to take a break for a few weeks to catch up on some other projects. In early January I will return with a political rant about Facebook and other social media. Then we will resume my look back at my college days. Look for Oscar movie reviews in February and March and then we will probably explore the first job I ever had.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my financial supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend and other things. But most of all it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days specifically my third semester at IUPUI in which most of my classes were at the downtown campus which had notably better wheelchair accessibility and girl-watching opportunities.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 47 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days especially my third semester at IUPUI spent primarily at the downtown campus.

Before we get into this week’s episode I need to do some housekeeping. I planned to do one or two more episodes and then take a few weeks off for the holidays. I also have some assistive technology projects I want to work on and I just need to put my head down and pour myself into those projects for several days at a time. That doesn’t leave me time to write, research, proofread, rewrite, polish, record, edit, rerecord, re-edit, and upload a new episode every week. So I really need to take a break to work on other things.

When I finished this episode, it was almost twice my normal length. I went back and forth several times trying to decide if I should do it all at once or split it. Ultimately, I decided to split it and I added an extra couple of anecdotes to the first half to flesh it out.

By having two episodes already written, that will give me a further break. This episode is a bit of back story for next week’s episode which is a really good one. But I think you will also find a laugh or two this week. After next week, I will be taking a break until the first of the year. I will also be doing my annual Oscar movie reviews sometime in February or early March.

So… Let’s move along with today’s episode

For my third semester, I was stuck yet again without a computer programming course I could take so I decided to primarily focus on the downtown campus where I could pick up several liberal arts requirements and get them out of the way. I still took a calculus class in the evening at the 38th St. campus but everything else was downtown during the day.

The girl-watching at the downtown campus was far superior to that at the 38th Street campus. There was a joke that IU students told about Purdue. I think it was equally applicable between the two campuses in which downtown was mostly IU and 38th St. was mostly Purdue.

Question: “What do you call a good-looking woman at Purdue?”

Answer: “A visitor.”

Sadly the stereotype was based on reality. Purdue is an engineering and science school and its 38th St. campus was occupied by few women and the majority more closely resembled Amy Farrah Fowler than they did Penny Hofstadter. And the opposite was true of the downtown campus. Trivia question… What was Penny’s maiden name in “The Big Bang Theory” TV show? Answer at the end of the episode.

There was one particularly strange and unattractive gal in my physics class named Kat with a “K”. She always dressed quite bizarrely in lots of scarves and ponchos with dangling fringe. One day she sashayed by me as she entered the class and the fringe on her poncho got tangled up in the joystick on my wheelchair. The chair took off across the room and I crashed into a table at the front of the classroom.

I’m quite embarrassed to admit we said some very nasty things about her looks. Someone suggested she was so ugly… How ugly was she… That she shouldn’t have been named Kat – she should have been named dog. From that day forward she was referred to as Kat the Dog.

Even in those days at the horny young age of 19, I wasn’t so shallow that I felt that looks were everything. There were simply more women downtown in the liberal arts programs and especially nursing programs than there were in computers, science, and engineering programs at 38th St.

That’s not to say that there were no attractive women at 38th St. I had a lab partner in physics who was pretty easy on the eyes even though she was a little bit of a nerd. There was a guy who was a teaching assistant who came up to her and asked her out for coffee right in the middle of physics lab. She politely turned him down. One of the other girls in the class witnessed it and asked us, “Who was that guy?” We explained he was a teaching assistant. The other girl asked, “What does he do?” My lab partner who was the target of his advances replied, “Apparently anyone he can get his hands on.”Him

As for me, after chasing my first true love Rosie through junior high and high school as well as taking a freshman girl named Cheryl to the senior prom, I had sworn off dating any more women in wheelchairs. I concluded that the combination of 2 disabilities would make a long-term, happily ever after, relationship prohibitively difficult.

There were several smart, attractive women in wheelchairs at IUPUI and although I was friendly with them I never pursued a relationship with any of them. My friend Mike whom I spoke of last week dated a gal for several months who was the most attractive disabled gal I ever met.

I held out hope that once someone got to know me, I might have a chance at romance with an able woman. I knew that such a person would be very rare so I wouldn’t have the opportunity to… I guess you would say… shop around. A nursing student theoretically might offer a better chance at success. I think I was buying into that cliché that one of my Northwest High School classmates had proposed about wounded veterans falling in love with their nurses.

I had the attitude that if anyone showed any interest in me at all, I had to try to make the very best of the friendship in hopes that it might grow into something more. I had learned from my experience with Rosie not to discount the value of being “just friends”. So in the worst-case scenario, I would have good friendships with women and under the best-case scenario, one of those friendships would grow into something more.

The combination of my inexperience with the fairer sex and my desire to find a significant relationship tended to make me sense clues or signals that were not particularly real. I had to fight the urge to fall in love way too easily. Looking back on the situation years later I joked, “If I went into McDonald’s and a good-looking girl behind the counter said, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ I had to resist the temptation not to fall in love saying, ‘She must love me. She’s worried I’m not getting enough fries in my diet.’” Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad… But it’s closer than I’d like to admit.

Let’s talk about the downtown campus facilities. I previously described how difficult it was to get around the 38th St. campus but it was much easier at the downtown campus. In those days it consisted of just three buildings all of which were completed in 1971 when I was in high school. I’ve included various photos of these buildings in the YouTube version of the podcast and there is a campus map linked in the description.

First, we have Cavanaugh Hall, located just south of W. Michigan St. on University Boulevard, a five-story building that is the heart of the campus. It was the first academic building on the official IUPUI campus. It is named for Robert E. Cavanaugh, the former dean of IUPUI’s Indianapolis predecessor, the IU Extension Campus. It housed classrooms, department offices, and the campus bookstore.

Although there were four steps at the main entrance, off to each side there were standard code-compliant wheelchair ramps. Two publicly available elevators connected the five floors and the basement so there was no problem with getting around the building in a wheelchair. You didn’t need keys to use the elevators and there were plenty of people who could push buttons for you.

A few hundred feet southeast of Cavanaugh across a courtyard was a building known as the Blake Street Library. In the basement of the building was a cafeteria known as “The Hideaway.” The building is now known as Taylor Hall named after Joseph T. Taylor first Dean of the School of Arts but I don’t know when the name was changed. Blake Street no longer runs south of Michigan Street since the construction of the Business/SPEA building in 1981.

In 1994, a new University Library building was constructed east of that location. The Hideaway Cafeteria was closed in 2008 when the Campus Center was opened just west of Cavanaugh. The campus center is connected to Cavanaugh by a second-story enclosed bridge over University Boulevard. It houses food service, a bookstore, recreational facilities, and other student services.

The third and final building available when I was there was the Lecture Hall located across a courtyard due south of Cavanaugh. It contains four or five amphitheater-style classrooms of varying sizes positioned together in the center of the building like wedges of a pie. An outer concourse surrounds the entire cluster. Several ground-level entrances are completely accessible. No need for a ramp.

I would sit at the top row of the seating area with the stadium seating extending below me. The swivel seats were fastened to the floor in front of a small rail table that extended the length of the row. On the aisle, I could get up close enough to set a notebook on the table. I rarely if ever took notes but I needed something to write on during written tests. Photos of the facility today I found online have more modern theater seating with an armrest table that folds up. So I don’t have anything to show you how it looked in the early 70s.

A fourth building was constructed downtown while I was there but I never had any classes in it. It was originally called the “Science, Engineering, and Technology Building“ with the idea that all of the 38th Street programs would move into that building. By the time it was completed in 1975, the name was shortened to “Engineering and Technology.” The final move from 38th St. to downtown wasn’t completed until the early 90s.

My transcript reveals I took “Integral Calculus & Analytical Geometry 2 MATH 164” which I’m certain was at the 38th St. campus in the evenings. Downtown, in the morning I had “Sociology S163 Social Problems” in the Lecture Hall. I then went to lunch every day in the Hideaway Cafeteria. We already discussed my third-semester French class a few episodes ago. I also had “Psychology as a Social Science PSY B104”.

There was a companion course I took in my fourth semester “Psychology as a Biological Science PSY B105.” I didn’t care for the biology class much. We had to memorize lots of brain anatomy and physiology and I’m just not big on memorization. The only interesting thing that happened in that psych biology class was the instructor discovered he could create his handout materials printed on computer paper cheaper than he could with a copy machine. He would go to a computer terminal, and type his handouts using a primitive text editor called TECO. That was an acronym for Text Editor and Corrector. It was designed more for computer programming than general word processing. Remember this is the early 70s and there are no desktop computers or word-processing software. Anyway, he could print out as many copies as he wanted and the University only charged his account one penny per page. In contrast, he could type on a typewriter, use whiteout to correct mistakes, and take it to the copy room where they would charge him 10 cents per page. The end result was, that all of our class notes were in all uppercase printed on green bar computer paper. I got a “B” in the course.

I enjoyed the psychology as a social science class more. On the first day, the teacher wanted us to get acquainted with one another and had everyone introduce themselves to the people next to them. She said, “Try to remember them and don’t go by what they’re wearing because tomorrow they will be wearing something different.” I chimed in, “Yeah I’m sure if I came in tomorrow in a blue wheelchair instead of a red one people wouldn’t recognize me.” They didn’t know whether to laugh or not so when I laughed then they did.

The teacher told one of my favorite stories I heard in college. When she was an undergrad studying psychology, there were various research programs you could sign up for extra credit or to earn a few dollars. Normally they were boring things like watching for the light to turn from red to blue and pushing the button as quickly as you can. Then she saw one posted on the bulletin board that said “Psychology Majors Only.” She thought that might be more interesting so she signed up.

In the experiment, they showed her a series of drawings and you are supposed to describe what was going on. For example, a young boy was sitting on a park bench with his head down feeling sad. A man sat next to him patting him on the back.

She knew if she said that none of the other boys would play with him and his dad was consoling him, it meant that she had trouble relating to others and feared rejection. If she said the boy struck out playing baseball it meant she had a fear of failure. Other possible descriptions would reveal something about her relationship with her father. No matter what description she came up with for the scene, she knew what the psychological conclusion was going to be and she didn’t want to reveal anything about her personality. She finally picked what she thought was the least troublesome description of each scene.

When the experiment was over, they revealed to her its true purpose. They didn’t care what she wrote. They were videotaping her to study facial expressions during stress. They knew that if they gave the test to a psychology major they would do just what she did which is to second-guess and psychoanalyze every possible answer. The test was merely an instrument to induce stress. They showed her the videotape of herself and she made her sorts of weird facial expressions. She chewed on the pencil. She tapped on the table. She flipped her hair back repeatedly. They got plenty of stress-induced reactions out of her.

As I said, I enjoyed the class and was awarded an “A”. I didn’t realize at the time that years later I would be studying personality and psychology through a series of self-help seminars on the Enneagram Personality Typology. I’ll probably do a whole series on that in future episodes.

It was during the third semester that I befriended a psychology major but I didn’t meet her in psychology class. We were both in the sociology class I had before lunch but I didn’t meet her there either. We met Perhaps one fateful day in the Hideaway Cafeteria.

She was the first woman I ever dated who was not disabled. It resulted in a friendship that lasted for decades. The details of that story will have to wait for next week.

Oh… What about the trivia question? No one knows Penny’s maiden name. In 279 episodes from 2007 through 2019 they never revealed her name. See the link in the description for more details.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my financial supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend and other things. But most of all it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days specifically my second semester at IUPUI and my first-ever programming class.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 46 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days specifically my second semester at IUPUI and my first-ever programming class. We’ll also recount the history of the first computers I ever used.

As reported in previous episodes, I can handle logic problems, story problems, geometry, trigonometry, and algebra with little difficulty. But if you give me a column of numbers, I can add it up three times and get three different answers. I attribute this problem to my beloved third-grade teacher Miss Holmes. She determined I was a gifted student and didn’t want to burden me with so-called “busywork” like mindless repetitive math and spelling drills. As a result, I’m terrible at basic arithmetic and I can’t spell the save my soul.

Given these academic shortcomings, getting into computers was natural for me because it required my logical thinking and I let the computer do the grunt work of arithmetic and years later things like spellchecking.

I thought I would trace my early history with computers from the beginning. Somewhere along the way I’m guessing about age 6 or 7, I was given a toy abacus. I believe it had about six or seven columns of beads. The lower portion had 5 beads in each column and above that were 2 beads. The lower beads were worth 1 each and the upper ones worth 5 each. When the lower section filled up to 5 then you would throw one of the upper beads. When both upper beads were thrown you would push them back and carry the one.

It didn’t take me very long to realize you really only needed 4 beads on the bottom and 1 bead at the top. Moving that fifth bead up and then only to immediately clearing it and pushing the 5-level bead was a wasted motion. Similarly having both 5 valued beads thrown only to reset them immediately and carry the one was a waste. I later learned that some abacuses are indeed built with only one upper bead and 4 lower beads.

I linked a couple of YouTube videos about abacus use. In one of them, a Chinese gentleman demonstrates a 2-5 Chinese abacus but you will notice he is only using four of the lower beads in one of the upper beads. I learned that the 1-4 style is Japanese and is called a soroban. I never knew what they were called I just played with it as a toy.

In high school, I took a bookkeeping class and we were allowed to use an adding machine but I didn’t have the physical strength to operate one. Of course, there were no pocket calculators in the early 1970s. I think the original pocket calculator the Bowmar Brain came out in my senior year of high school. It was a simple four-function calculator with a red LED display. It retailed for $240. One of my classmates in high school physics had one and we were all jealous.

In my high school senior physics class, I learned how to use a slide rule. That ability alone was enough to brand you as the ultimate nerd. All I would have needed was a pocket protector and a piece of tape holding together broken glasses to complete the picture. Fortunately, I didn’t have either of them.

My mom had a device that was a mechanical pocket-sized calculator called an Addiator. I have linked YouTube videos demonstrating one of these. The one I had was a little taller and narrower than the one in the video but it worked exactly the same. It was made out of metal perhaps aluminum or tin. It had several sliding pieces that you would slide up and down with a metal stylus. You would put the stylus in a notch corresponding to your number. If that notch was shiny silver you would drag it down. If it was tinted red, you would drag it up and over a hook to carry the one. There was a sliding lever at the top that you could pull out to reset all of the slides to zero. I barely had sufficient strength to operate it and if you didn’t get the stylus in the right hole and slide it as far as it was supposed to go, you wouldn’t get the right answer. If the stylus slipped out of the hole, you would get totally lost and have to start over. It didn’t help my bookkeeping grades very much because it was too hard to use.

The first digital computer I owned was a toy called DigiComp. It was mostly plastic with a few metal pieces. There were some springs that would wear out and I replaced them with rubber bands. I still have the device stashed away in a box in my room but I would have to do some restoration on it to get it working so I didn’t bother getting it out for this video. Fortunately, I found a YouTube video demonstrating it. As always, the link is in the description.

Essentially it was a programmable three-bit machine. It would teach you binary logic functions such as AND, OR, NOT, and XOR. You would program it by placing short half-inch or 1-inch lengths of plastic drinking straws onto little plastic pegs. There was a plastic tab hanging out the right side of the device and you would cycle it by pushing it in and out. It was labeled “the clock” and it stimulated one clock cycle of a CPU.

You could program it to do binary arithmetic but the most interesting thing it would do is it would count from zero through seven in binary and then recycle to zero. There were little 0/1 stickers placed on it that would appear in a little window as various pieces slid back and forth. The sliding pieces were appropriately called “flip-flops” because they flipped and flopped back and forth on each cycle of the clock. What I did not know until years later was that these were emulating an electronic circuit which is also called a flip-flop and is an essential component of computer electronics.

I already described my first encounter with a real computer when my friend Dennis carried the teletype machine downstairs at Northwest High School for me to log in to a Honeywell timesharing computer located in the Indianapolis Public Schools administration headquarters.

In recent episodes, we talked about tinkering around with the University’s DEC-System-10 computer via teletypes. However, my first programming class did not use that system. There were two other computers in the 38th St. computer center in the A-Building. The machine I used in my first programming class was an IBM System/360 Model 44. It was sold from 1965 through 1973. It was a specialized version of the IBM System/360 architecture especially designed for scientific computing, real-time computing, process control, and numerical control. I wasn’t aware it was such a strange variant. I just remember the model number and only learned of its specialized capabilities when researching this episode. I doubt that we ever used any of the advanced features.

We did not have direct access to the 360. You would type your programs on punch cards and put them in a deck. There were specialized cards already punched for you called JCL cards. That stood for “Job Control Language”. You would put a few JCL cards on the top of your deck, then the cards from your program that you had written, and then add a specialized card at the end to tell that you are done and what to do with it. You would wrap it in a rubber band and hand it to the computer operator through a window. I think you got some sort of a receipt with the job number on it so you could claim your output later. They would give you an estimate of how long you had to wait to get your output depending on how many jobs were in the queue ahead of you. You would come back in perhaps 30 minutes and they would hand you your output in the form of a double-wide green bar printout. They must’ve given you some sort of job number or something so you could claim your output but I don’t recall that exact mechanism.

You would unfold several pages of fan-folded computer printout only to find out that you made some small typographical error. You would have to re-punch that particular card and repeat the entire process.

Many of my listeners may have no idea what I mean by an IBM punch card. Let me tell you the history as I learned it with a little help from Wikipedia. It may not be 100% accurate.

1880 US Census took eight years to compile the data. Estimates were that would take as long as 12 years to compile the 1890 census at which point they would be two years behind at the time of the 1900 census. An inventor named Herman Hollerith who worked for the Census office came up with a system of recording data by punching holes in card stock. It was originally inspired by punchcards used in the Jacquard loom system for making fancy patterns in woven cloth.

Hollerith developed automatic machines that would count or sort cards depending on whether or not a whole was punched in a particular location. The census data was encoded in this manner. The original cards were the size of a dollar bill at the time because there was existing machinery available for handling paper that size. The 1890 census, although much larger than the previous, took only six years to tabulate using his machines.

He eventually formed a company called The Tabulating Machine Company. That company later merged with three other companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. In 1927 it was renamed International Business Machines or IBM.

The famous IBM cards used in early computers were first introduced in 1928 and quickly became the standard for all punchcard data processing. They used a smooth lightweight card stock 0.007 inches thick. They measured 7-3/8 inches by 3-1/4 inches. Vertically oriented rectangular holes could be punished in any of 12 rows by 80 columns. When we would type a computer program, each line of the program would be punished onto one card.

There were 2 types of keypunch machines the 026 and the newer 029 machines. I don’t recall the technical differences between the two. We had two or three of each of them and either one would serve our purposes. After looking at photos of the machines I found online, I remembered that I preferred 026 because its keyboard was on a short cable and you could move it around a bit. The 029 keyboard was not as flexible and harder for me to reach

The rows of holes were numbered with 12 at the top sometimes called the X row followed by 11 sometimes called the Y row followed by rows 0-9 with 9 at the bottom edge of the card. When you would load your deck of cards into a computer as we did with the IBM 1620, the rule was you put your deck face down, nine edge first. That phrase was drilled into our heads repeatedly.

I remember we had a humorous poem about a programmer who had to pull an all-night shift desperately trying to get the software to run before the deadline. All I remember of the poem was the final 2 lines…

He died of the console of hunger and thirst.

Was buried the next day, facedown, nine edge first.

I took three classes in my second semester. We already discussed my second-semester French class a couple of episodes ago. I also took ”Integral Calculus and Analytical Geometry MATH163”. It was my first calculus class I was awarded a “B”. I don’t remember much about it except that I never really understood calculus until I had to put it to use in physics class.

The programming class I took my second semester was called “Introduction to Algorithmic Proc” CSCI 220 and was taught by Dr. Larry Hunter. We learned fundamental programming techniques using the computer language FORTRAN IV which was very popular for science and engineering programming. We would write our programs in that language, punch them on cards, and run them on the 360.

I think Dr. Hunter had secret unfulfilled aspirations to be a standup comedian. He was a tall thin man whose mannerisms mirrored that of Johnny Carson during a Tonight Show monologue. He held his posture very straight with his shoulders back in one hand in his pocket. He would gesture with his right hand while lecturing. When he would turn to write on the blackboard it looked exactly like Carson turning to say something to Ed McMahon. There were plenty of jokes scattered throughout his lessons.

In addition to learning FORTRAN programming, part of the lesson was about how the hardware of a computer works. We studied the details of Boolean logic and how it was emulated using circuits in the computer. Complex layers of multiple Boolean operations are illustrated in something called a Karnaugh map. We learned how to create and read such maps.

He talked about how computer architecture was laid out. You can’t interconnect every piece of the computer to every other piece of the computer because it would be too complicated. Instead, computers used a system of parallel lines for transmitting data called a data bus. Each component would connect to the bus and communicate through it. He explained that the introduction of integrated circuits made this a necessity.

Knowing what a sense of humor he had, after class one day I told him I had come up with a pair of jokes based on his topics and told him he would be free to use them in future lectures.

I noted that some of having a data bus was necessary once computers were made out of integrated circuits instead of individual transistors. Could this be referred to as “busing to achieve integration?”

Okay for those of you too young to know, in the 1970s, district courts had ordered that children had to be bussed from predominantly white schools into predominantly black schools and vice versa to achieve racial diversity. That was busing to achieve integration

For my second joke, I wondered if Karnaugh maps would be on the final exam. If so, he was going to test our Karnaugh knowledge. If you don’t get that joke, I can’t help you.

He really liked both jokes. He said that we were getting away from using Karnaugh maps and he was considering dropping that section from the curriculum. But now that he had a good joke to go with it, he would have to keep it around a little longer.

He told both jokes in class a day or two later and gave me credit for writing them.

Can’t say that I learned a lot in that class that I couldn’t have taught myself from reading a book on FORTRAN. But that concept would be exploited in a later semester where the teacher would hand us the book and say, “Go teach yourself this course.” Much more on that situation in later episodes.

There was another computer in the A-Building that I did not use for press. It was an ancient IBM 1620. This machine was first introduced in 1959 and was popular throughout the early 60s. It was discontinued in 1970. You’ve probably seen one in old sci-fi movies. When they became obsolete, many were sold to Hollywood as props. They have a large array of blinking lights on the front console and lots of switches. It established in the 1960s media what a computer looked like to the common man. I’ve provided some photos in the YouTube version of this episode and articles linked in the description.

It was not a very powerful computer. The Fortran compiler on it was only for Fortran II and my class was using Fortran IV. We did spend some time learning the differences between the two versions of Fortran but we were never assigned any programs written in Fortran II.

The hardware used a strange format called Binary Coded Decimal. In computers today, a string of zeros and ones 32, 64, or more bits long using base two arithmetic. So for example a 32-bit memory location can store a number from 0-65535 or from -32757 to +32767. Floating-point numbers are stored in a binary format in scientific notation with the significant digits and the exponents stored separately.

The IBM 1620 used decimal arithmetic. It would use 4 bits of data to encode the numbers 0-9. Other combinations of bits were used as data separators or record separators. So in traditional computers, a 32-bit integer is limited to a maximum of 65535 but in BCD you can have a string of decimal digits as long as the entire computer memory. The length of a number was delimited by a data separator value. In theory, you could take two numbers each of which was a string of digits slightly less than half of the entire computer memory. Leave room for one instruction to add them together and it would do so.

Strangely, the computer could not do arithmetic. It would add digits by looking up the answer in a table. It also stored a multiplication table and would look up answers in that table rather than do the actual mathematics.

Because it was outdated and most people were using either the IBM 360 or the remotely located DEC-10. The machine didn’t get much use. Mostly we played around with it.

There was a program you could run on that machine that would put it into a tight loop of a particular duration. If you set an AM radio on the console and tuned it to a particular frequency, you would hear a buzzing noise. Someone had written a program to vary the frequency of that buzz and you could play music. They had several songs already programmed. There was no documentation available but I easily reverse-engineered the system they had for encoding the notes and I encoded a different song. I don’t recall what it was I think it might’ve been a Christmas Carol but I’m not sure.

Attached to the machine was a line printer that would print out your program for you or any other output. We had collections of decks that would print so-called ASCII art. That’s where you use different characters to vary the darkness of a particular square on the page. In some forms, you can overprint large characters to make them darker such as printing an “M” on top of an “X” or a “W” to make dark areas and use periods or commas to make light areas. We had all of the traditional computer images of the time including a Mona Lisa and a naked woman. See the links in the description for examples of ASCII art.

The only students who used this old 1620 for actual classwork were freshman engineering students taking “Engineering 109.” It was a course in FORTRAN II taught by an engineering professor who apparently didn’t know crap about how to teach programming. The computer science students like myself would get inundated with questions from the engineering students.

After living through this for several semesters, I developed a plan. At the start of a new semester, when one of these engineering students asked me a question, I told him, “Come back tomorrow at 2 PM and bring one or two of your classmates. I’m going to teach you computer programming. At the appointed time we found a corner of the computer center and in about 90 minutes I taught them the basics of FORTRAN programming. The universal reaction was, “Why the hell didn’t the professor just explain it that way?”

I told them they had to pay it forward. From now on they had to help other students in the class and leave the rest of us alone.

It worked beautifully. I did that for two or three of my last semesters.

Fast forward nearly 50 years later I met a young lady named Jenica who has the same disability as I have – Spinal Muscular Atrophy. I met her and her mother in a Facebook group on assistive technology. She taking electrical engineering classes at a Purdue extension campus in southern Indiana. They were teaching her C++ programming on Arduino microcontrollers the kind of which I use for developing assistive technology. She was struggling with the class. For me was déjà vu all over again. Here was an engineering student learning programming from an engineering professor who didn’t know how to teach the subject.

I spent perhaps three or four sessions with her via video chat on Facebook Messenger doing for her what I had done for those Engineering E109 students nearly 50 years ago. At one point, everything fell into place and she got it. Although I checked in with her several times, she insisted she now understood what she was doing and similarly, she was paying it forward by teaching the other students in the class.

Although it’s a bit off-topic, I have to tell you that Jenica is my hero because of a story she told me. In high school, she took an electronics course where she was the only girl among about 30 boys. When it came time to learn soldering, the teacher was concerned and asked her if she could handle a soldering iron. She said, “I got this” and had no difficulty. Meanwhile, there were boys in the class who were a bit squeamish about wielding a device that heats up to 400°. Her teacher pointed out that Jenica was having no difficulty with the device. They were embarrassed not only that they were being shown up by a girl but moreover a girl in a wheelchair. They had to grow a pair really quickly. I laughed so hard I cried and told her what is amazing person she is.

Back to my story… the next course in the curriculum was CSCI 300 Assembly Language Programming. The problem was, it is only offered in the spring semester I couldn’t take it in the fall during my third semester. That’s how they screwed me up by not allowing me to take CSCI 220 my first semester. It got me out of sync with the way the classes are offered.

I decided to primarily spend my time at the downtown campus picking up several liberal arts classes to fulfill those requirements. Next week we will talk about my third semester and the adventures I had at the downtown campus.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

In this episode, I continue reminiscing about my college days at IUPUI. We pay tribute to one of my dearest college friends, the late great Mike Gregory.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 45 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue my series of reminiscences of my college days. Today’s topic is my dear late friend Mike Gregory.

If you had asked me a few weeks ago where and when I met Mike, I would have said it was in my physics classes because my fondest memories with him are from that class. My transcript says I didn’t take physics until my fourth semester.

According to my transcript, the first-semester class I have not yet described was “Principles of Sociology SOC S161”. One of the main sections of the course was describing how cities evolved. I distinctly remember Mike and I having a conversation with the professor about the 1972 sci-fi novel “The World Inside” by Robert Silverberg. The story is set in the year 2381. People live in 1000-story tall buildings 3 km high. Buildings are divided into separate cities over groups of floors and there is a sort of caste system in which the rich and powerful live on the upper floors and the lower classes live further down.

Mike and I had both been fans of the book and thought it explored some interesting concepts. We discussed those with the professor. For our purposes today, I just tell it because it verifies that I met Mike in that first-semester sociology class.

Mike had a huge personality. He was very outgoing and the kind of person that could easily be described as the life of the party. He had a big hearty laugh that could fill the room. Mike was a few years older than me. Out of high school, he did a few years of duty in the Navy and traveled the world. He was an avid photographer. One time we got together and he showed me slideshows of all the places he had been.

Mike was a consummate BS artist at his core. He loved telling a story about how he got to be a communications operator in the Navy. Military messages were transmitted by teletype between bases and even ships at sea. In order to qualify for the position in communications he had to take a typing test.

A teletype machine is basically an electric typewriter connected over phone lines. It used an ordinary typewriter ribbon. Rather than having hammers like a typewriter, there was a cylinder that would move up and down and spin around similar to the ball on the old IBM Selectric typewriter. You didn’t put individual sheets of paper into the machine. There was a continuous roll of paper mounted on the back that would feed into the machine. Typically it was very cheap paper that was sort of a cream-colored newsprint.

In order to pass the typing test, he had to be able to type 30 words per minute for an entire page with no more than two mistakes. That’s a pretty liberal standard. They gave them the text that they were going to type in advance so they could practice typing the exact words that would be on the test. He went into the room the night before the test, rolled a bunch of paper through the machine, and then carefully typed the assignment on the roll. He then rolled the paper backward onto the roll where it was hidden.

When it came time for the test, he rigged the typewriter ribbon so that it didn’t print. The instructor started the test and he began randomly banging on the keyboard. The print head moved across the page making lots of teletype noise and he had to hit the return at the end of the line. He wasn’t really typing anything but the bell would ring so he knew when to hit return. But it wasn’t printing anything. It was just making noise. When the test was over, he cranked the page up revealing his pre-typed assignment. He had deliberately included one mistake so that it wouldn’t look obvious. He passed the test. Of course, eventually had to learn to type well enough to do the job but he got his foot in the door for a noncombat position during the Vietnam War.

I previously spoke about the lunchroom at the K-building at the 38th St. campus. Mike was one of a group of about a dozen people who hung out together anytime we were not in class. A euchre game would start up sometime in the morning and would often last well past dinner. When you had to go to class, there was always someone there who would take your seat and the game would continue.

After playing for hours, someone would say, “I guess I better go do some homework or go to class.” Then after about 10 minutes, they would say, “Am I at class yet?”

“No, you are still sitting here playing cards,” we would reply. Eventually, we had to go to class or study but the euchre game was a tough place to get away from.

At one point, Mike and I developed signals to let each other know what suit we wanted to be called. If you put your knuckle down on the table, it meant you wanted clubs. I would tap my ring on the table for diamonds. I don’t recall what the other signals were. We finally got caught and had to discontinue the practice.

My fondest memories with Mike were in physics class. We were in at least three perhaps four physics classes together. I spoke previously in Episode 15 about Mike in those classes when I talked about my kindergarten girlfriend who had no arms. She grew up to have a very well-endowed chest and I talked about the principles of physics where normally when one walks you swing your arms to counterbalance your rotational energy from the swinging hips. Mike and I figured out that because she had no arms to swing, the rotational inertia was absorbed by her bouncy boobs. Mike referred to them as coupled harmonic oscillators– a term we used in physics class to describe two objects connected by a spring. I linked that episode in the description in case you missed it.

In one of our physics classes, the professor would call the role and take attendance every day. You would answer by telling him how many of the homework problems you had been able to work on the night before. Typically we had three or four problems. One day just before class began, I turned to Mike and asked, “How many problems were we supposed to do last night?”

“You didn’t do the homework?” he asked. “We had three problems.”

I replied, “I guess I must have gotten two of them right.” In the same way that he had deliberately made a mistake on his typing test so as not to raise suspicion, I didn’t want to brag saying I could do all three problems so I dialed that back one and claimed I had done two.

The professor must have decided to call the roll in reverse alphabetical order that day because I was the first one he asked. I proudly answered, “I got two of them right.”

“Very good Mr. Young,” and he continued to call the roll. Much to my surprise and distress, it seemed like the average answer among my classmates was only one problem, and several of them admitted they were unable to work any of the problems even though they had tried. Apparently, the homework that day was especially difficult.

He then chose one of the problems for someone to work in front of the class. When he called on me, I said, “That was the one I missed.”

Someone else went to the blackboard and worked the problem. When they finished, the professor turned to me and asked, “Do you understand it now Mr. Young?”

“Yes sir.”

Mike could hardly keep from laughing. He leaned over and whispered to me, “You know Chris, a few years when they hand you that diploma with the letters BS on it, you are really going to have earned it.”

“Hey… I learned to BS from the master Mr. I Can Type 30 Words Per Minute.”

Mike and I enjoyed nerdy physics humor. In order to understand these jokes, I need to dig into some pretty obscure physics principles. So bear with me.

In electromagnetic waves such as radio waves or light waves, the frequency of the energy is denoted by the Greek letter nu. The formula for computing frequency is c divided by lambda or more commonly read as c over lambda. In this formula “c” is the speed of light and lambda is the wavelength.

Whenever I would greet Mike I would ask, “What’s new?”

To which he would reply, “c over lambda.”

The other physics joke question we enjoyed was, “What’s a Joule per second?”

The answer is, “True”. The joke is that it’s not “What” W.H.A.T. rather it’s the unit of energy a “Watt” W.A.T.T. You have probably seen your electric bill measured in kilowatts. A “Watt” can be defined as one joule of energy per second. Literally, a watt is a joule per second.

Watt’s a joule per second… True.

This next one is even more obscure… so bear with me again. In mathematics, you cannot take the square root of a negative number. That is because when you multiply 2 negative numbers you always get a positive number and if you multiply two positive numbers you get a positive number. But mathematicians and engineers have found the need to deal with square roots of negatives so they invented an entirely new system of numbers appropriately called “imaginary numbers”. While mathematicians generally refer to the square root of -1 with the letter “i”, engineers and sometimes physicists use the letter “j”. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea. If you take the square of that imaginary number whether you call it “i” or “j” the answer is -1. J squared is -1.

Mike seemed fascinated with the letter “j” in this context. Whenever someone was doing something the opposite of what would be expected, he referred to it as “j-squared” thinking or perhaps a “j-squared” way of doing things. The rest of us not so geeky inclined would just say something like he is doing it “bass akwards”. But for Mike, it was always “j squared” this or “j squared” that.

So… I told you that story so I can tell you this one.

One summer, Mike was visiting me and my family at our lakeside cabin in southern Indiana on Cordry Lake. We had a boat dock with an upper platform that was about 10 feet off the water. Those who dared enjoyed jumping off the upper level of the dock. That particular weekend, one of my sisters had a bunch of her friends visiting or it might have been friends from neighboring cabins, I don’t recall. They were all horsing around chasing each other around the upper dock platform and trying to push one another into the water. Occasionally, Mike would get into it, grab one of them, and toss them in the water.

I was sitting in the water in my floating lawn chair about 10 feet away from the dock enjoying the show. While Mike was sitting on the edge of the dock, one of the kids tried to sneak up behind him and dump him over the edge. Although the kid signaled me to keep quiet, I wasn’t going to cooperate. I said, “Oh Michael…” I never called him that. It was always Mike.

“Yes my good sir,” he replied mimicking my formality.

“J squared you,” I said.

Without turning around, he immediately reached behind him, grabbed the kid who was sneaking up on him, and tossed him in the water. The kid came out of the water looking at me wondering, “What the hell did you say that he knew to look behind him?”

Mike understood exactly what I was saying. In his own private parlance, j squared meant backward or behind. Saying, “J squared you” was code for “Look out behind you.” It’s not like we had this code prearranged. We would just talk to each other in geek speak and we knew what the other was saying.

Mike took a variety of jobs around campus to support himself. At one point, he was working in the basement with one of the physics professors as a lab assistant. They had built something I had never heard of. It was a gadget called Magnetic Resonance Imaging or an MRI machine. They were using it to scan lab animals. Mike told me that someday MRI machines would replace or at least supplement X-rays to help doctors look inside your body. I don’t know that the work they did produced any major breakthroughs but they were working on the technology way before it was the commonplace thing that it is today.

One day I was hanging out with him in the lab where he worked and he had just unpacked a bunch of supplies wrapped in bubble wrap. We all know how addictive it can be to pop bubble wrap. When you squeeze the bubbles in your hand they make a nice satisfying little popping sound. He had a strip of it about 8 inches wide and perhaps 6-8 feet long. I had him lay it out on the floor and aimed my wheelchair so that my left side wheels lined up perfectly with it. I took a running charge at it in my wheelchair. The heavy weight of my chair on the tile and concrete floor made a horrendous popping sound easily as loud as firecrackers. I got about 4 feet into the run and stopped quickly because it was making so much racket.

Then I had to figure out how to turn and get off of it sideways without making much more noise. We closed the door and I slowly maneuvered off of it trying to minimize the sound. We expected that people would come running any minute to see what the hell had happened. Or perhaps panic and call the police to report gunfire. Fortunately, in the early 70s, active shooters on college campuses were not a thing. Had we done it today, I’m sure it would’ve caused a panic. By the way, for four and a half years of attending IUPUI, I don’t think I ever saw any campus security. There might’ve been some at the downtown campus handing out parking tickets to people who didn’t have the proper stickers. I may have seen other officers but they were probably just Indianapolis police taking criminal justice classes and not actual school security.

Mike dropped out of IUPUI before completing his degree. I never knew if he ran out of money or if his grades weren’t good enough. He continued to work for a few months at some research institute that was housed in the A-Building on 38th St. It was mindless grunt work xeroxing the abstracts of scientific articles out of journals and then cutting them up and pasting them into notebooks. Of course, there were no searchable computer databases in those days for looking up articles.

Eventually, he found another job in Baltimore and moved there. His background in communication in the Navy landed him a job with NASA or one of its affiliate agencies. He would sit at a console and type commands to a satellite known as the High Energy Astronomy Observatory or HEAO. Scientists would bring him the coordinates of what they wanted to observe in the sky. He would prepare the commands to uplink to the satellite when it passed over a ground station approximately every 90 minutes. When the satellite would go over, he would initiate commands to download the previous data and then he would upload new commands.

That only took about 15 minutes coming and going. For the rest of the 90 minutes, he had nothing to do. He was able to make unlimited long-distance phone calls from the office so he would call me up and we would just talk for nearly an hour. Then he would say, “Well… I’ve got another satellite pass coming up. I’d better go.”

Eventually, we lost touch. Sometimes he would come back to Indy to visit family we would have a little reunion with him and a few other friends from IUPUI such as Rich, Kathy, and Frank.

At one visit, he told us he was being interviewed for a new government job in satellite communication. We wished him luck. A couple of weeks later, there was a knock at my door. A 40-something-year-old guy in a gray suit flipped open his ID to show me FBI credentials. He said he was doing a background check on a guy named Michael Leeland. Gregory. He wanted to know did we attend IUPUI together. He said he was just verifying his education and that Mike had used me as a reference. I told the guy a lot of nice things about Mike. I told him he was a standup guy and I trusted Mike with my life which was true. One day when the elevator went out in the K-Building, Mike, Rich, and a couple of other guys had to carry me down a flight and a half of stairs.

I mentioned to the FBI guy that I had just seen Mike a few weeks ago when he was in town. The man suspiciously replied, “Oh… I did not know he had been here “

Okay, that was creepy.

After he left, I called Mike to tell him about it. I said, “I never told him all the dirt I have on you such as certain typing tests you allegedly passed. I could have ruined your security clearance and said something like ‘Yeah, I knew Mike from our days in the chemistry lab making napalm for the local Communist Party’ Whoops, hey FBI… If you are wiretapping us, that was just a joke.“ We both laughed hard. Neither of us ever took chemistry.

Mike had used me as a reference when applying for the job but when I told him about the guy suspiciously saying, “I didn’t know he was here in Indy.” Mike was similarly suspicious. He wondered if the guy was legitimate. I certainly couldn’t tell from a brief look whether or not someone’s FBI credentials were real. Hell, I don’t know if I could tell if they were real from a long look. What the hell do I know about FBI credentials? Mike had just broken up with a girlfriend or a wife I forget which and he thought perhaps the guy might have been a private investigator hired by his ex to check up on him. We never did find out. Mike did get the job.

I don’t know if it was the particular job that this FBI agent was clearing him for but eventually, Mike moved to Florida working for a NASA contractor. He claimed that he had actually spent time crawling around in the lower deck and the nose of the space shuttle swapping out equipment. While Mike was indeed a BS artist and it would not have surprised me if he had fast-talked his way into such a job, I don’t believe he would have lied to me and exaggerated about that particular experience.

We lost touch for many years. He ended up back in the DC area married to a wonderful woman named Ravel. We reconnected several years ago via Facebook and exchanged regular emails and occasional video chat.

He was still an avid photographer and one year as a Christmas present he mailed out customized calendars featuring his own photographs. They were really amazing.

He also was an astronomy buff and had a very nice telescope. He was going to purchase an accessory case to hold lens filters. He discovered that the case he was going to purchase online was 3D printed. He asked if I could 3D print one for him. He sent me the dimensions and I was going to design and build it but then he got to thinking about all the other things he could do with a 3D printer and decided to get one himself. He first bought a cheap Chinese kit, put it together, and couldn’t get it to work. He gave it to a friend who eventually got it working. That kind of pissed him off. In the interim, he ordered an Ultamaker 3 which was about a $4000 3D printer at the time. I was jealous. I had a clunky old Printrbot at the time. I got him into the hobby and now he was running a better machine than I had.

I don’t know if he ever built that filter case but he got into another major 3D printed project. He built an open-source 3D-printed humanoid robot known as the InMoov robot. It consisted of a torso, two arms, and a head. It had cameras computer vision, sound, and pressure sensors. It would respond to spoken commands or commands sent via a webpage. He sent me a YouTube short of the robot where he asked it, “How do you feel?” The robot starts singing, “New York, New York” and it gestures with its arms in time with the music. I have included a link in the description.

When Mike and I first reconnected on Facebook, he was getting a new job working for the Navy writing technical documentation for some sort of Navy project. But after he got the job, he said they really didn’t have anything for him to do. I don’t know how long he stayed in that job but eventually quit because he had health problems.

Mike developed multiple myeloma brain tumors. It was kept under control for several years through medications. He would go in about every few weeks to get some sort of chemotherapy or medication that he said would make him half-goofy for several days. Of course, I replied, “Only half goofy as opposed to the totally goofy you normally are?”

“Okay, smart ass… Goofier than usual.”

We didn’t correspond a lot. It wasn’t unusual that we would not message each other for a couple of months at a time. He wasn’t an avid Facebook user.

I look back over the course of 2020 and 2021 I sent him several Facebook messenger messages saying, “I haven’t heard from you in a long time. I hope everything is okay.” They went unanswered which didn’t worry me too much because as I said, he didn’t use Facebook that much.

In July 2022 he still wasn’t answering messages. I found his wife on Facebook and sent her a private message asking about him. She replied, “Chris, I’m so sorry. I thought I had contacted you earlier. Mike passed away on January 3 (that would be 2022), after being in the hospital with pneumonia and C Difficile. He then came home to Hospice, and died at home. He fought the good fight, but the multiple myeloma was stronger.”

Interviewer James Lipton famously asked his guests, “If heaven exists, what would you say to God when you get there.” I will probably answer the Lipton questionnaire some other time but let me say today that if heaven exists, I know what I’m going to say to Mike. I will ask as always, “What’s new?” Presuming that the equations of physics still apply in heaven, I can’t wait to hear him answer, “c over lambda.”

For now, all I can do is quote Mr. Spock and say that Mike has been and always will be my friend. Rest in peace, my friend.

In the next week’s episode, I finally get to take a programming class in my second semester at IUPUI.

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