Back in the day….

My best friend from back on Northland Avenue, Lakewood Ohio, posted these photos from back in the early 60’s, when I was probably around 11 years old.  ‘Amazing to see it all – it seems so long ago.

‘and today (via StreetView)

A moldy oldie

In 1974, I became Program Director at the The Music Station, WRVU 91.1 FM.  The ‘Werve was a 300-watt powerhouse of a college radio station, and I did afternoon drive as ‘Dashing’ Dave Roberts.  It was a lot of fun and a great community to be part of, I seriously considered a career in Media before heading off to graduate school to study engineering instead.

The station is long gone, reduced to internet streaming and the broadcast frequency sold off.  But a minor storm burst on Facebook today when a YouTube audio track was posted by the PAMS company, who did all of our radio jingles, featuring me as the DJ.  A surprising number of friends recognized me (the hair or the smile?)

Dashing Dave Roberts, On the air

I remember going to Dallas to cut the package: the producer took us to lunch, then into the studio where a group of singers belted out our clips.  They’d do a segment, then turn and ask me how it sounded.  Can they hit the ‘W’ a bit harder?  “Hit the W’ said my producer, the tech miked in the command, the conductor talked to the singers, they hit the W.  Very fun and impressive for a 20-year old.

It also gave me my first experience managing, where I learned the importance of Lucy Kelllaway's basic principles: “Make sure that everyone has a proper job to do. Pays everyone fairly. Make employees feel that their efforts are recognised. Gives folks nice people to work with.”

‘Makes me want to dig out the old airchecks (if the oxide hasn’t fallen off the tape backing).

Monday’s child

This was posted (to Facebook, of course) by my best friend from when I was growing up in Lakewood, Ohio.  It was taken in 1959, when I was all of 5 years old.

‘Third from the upper left, in case you need a pointer.

58, at the zoo, with big eats

T’was a nice birthday.

I had traveled to Chicago to start clinical trials of our new device prototype (which worked fabulously, happily) and managed to hit a (rare) sunny weekend as well.  Easter holidays kept the roads clear and prices low, giving a good choice of places to stay, eat, and relax.

And, since it was my birthday as well, we could indulge.

One of the things I miss whilst in Europe is heart-of-America roadside food.  Pizza (Bill’s Pizza and Pub), Vienna Beef Sausages (Poor Boy on Maywood), Rack ‘o Ribs (Famous Dave’s): this sort of thing just doesn’t happen across the pond.  I stayed with smaller portions and took a doggie bag from each place, but it’s more food than I’m used to eating and I expect a week-long fast in penance upon returning to the Netherlands.

 

At this rate, I won’t make 59 (the “rich and sassy’ part appeals, though…)

On my birthday (Easter Sunday), we drove past two homes where I grew up, remarkably unchanged over the years.  Each had a small addition; all of the houses still looked much smaller than I remember (and it’s not just that I was much smaller back then – these are teen-age years).

 

Brookfield Zoo is the major animal park in Chicago, one of the first to put animals in natural settings instead of cages, organizing by themes instead of species.  It’s got a wonderful collection of bears and bison; amazing to watch the seals and walrus’s swim behind the glass (who knew that their tails did that?).

The giraffes, aardvarks, apes, and wolves were especially good.

 

It’s a smile to see the relentless branding of each exhibit, each animal with someone’s name as sponsor (I remember one particularly horrible nocturnal rodent in Milwaukee with a plaque saying This exhibit is in memory of *** from his friends). 

 

The elephant house is being refurbished, so the megafauna are scarce, and many animals seem a bit stressed to be seeing people again (the polar bear was pacing ten left, ten right, looking especially troubled).

 

But the flowers and birds were out, the fountains playing, a nice breeze blowing the children’s laughter across the greens.  Just a nice afternoon to stroll and enjoy life’s time together,

Wandering old haunts–Campus

I was never particularly fond of Northwestern.

The school was impersonal and indifferent; long winters along the windy lakefront were brutal. The professors were excellent and the facilities were superb, but the program had huge gaps in my interest areas.  I’m a signals guy and the only signals professor was a tenured EE whose passion was asserting that the Holocaust never happened.

It made the path to a degree uncertain.  Where European schools are focused on doing three year’s time and publishing a small collection of papers, our American programs were all about persevering until you’d done enough and wanted out badly enough. Only when a student said “I’ve had it, I’m leaving”, would they get permission to write and defend their dissertation.  Our unofficial mascot was Theodore Streleski, the Stanford mathematics graduate student who bludgeoned his advisor to death with a hammer after failing to earn his doctorate.

    

It’s strange to return to those halls. Our department was at the northwest corner of tech, overlooking the lake (now overlooking recreational sports facilities).  The stairs with red standpipes, the bulky brick walls, the open ceiling full of pipes, wires, and florescent lighting, all were unchanged.  The visual processing laboratory, where I teased out the relationship between brain and vision, was still there; a few familiar faculty names dotted the abstracts along the walls.  An office sign revealed that a former post-doc was now a full professor.  Graduate student spaces had moved from heavy wooden desks to cloth and metal cubicles.

 

The department office was modern; Gwen, our assistant, was long gone.  The same job openings and occupational warnings filled the bulletin board outside.  There was a plaque announcing participation in the Biomedical Education Consortium: it’s eerie how many of those institutions were also waypoints for me over the years.  Maybe it’s inevitable within a small field.

 

Outside, the open spaces, once grass or parking lots, had all been filled in with massive buildings.  The observatory and computer center were gone (quaint, now, to remember going to a Center to do my computing).  Academic halls of Molecular Therapeutics and Diagnostics or Executive Education fill old roadways and footpaths.  It all appears to have grown and connected,like the images of colonizing biofilms that we’re preventing in CamStent.

 

The cafeteria has gone commercial; the bookstore virtual.  The only sign of political awareness is for student activity board president.  The library is busy (for how much longer); a new sculpture garden fills the old summer-stick theater space.  And more buildings- theater, music, art, all named after benefactors and their parents in bold signage.  It looks like the blond brick and sandstone of Cambridge from some angles.

I spent a few hours touring around the campus, remembering places, people, events.  The building where I took a mime class, the paths where I walked on dates, the professor’s house where a mentor reminded me that ideas always have to come before tools.  A lot of the old feel of an academic grove, thoughtful and contemplative, is long gone.  It feels like the buildings shelter and separate departments rather than bring them together for collaboration and fertilization.

It gave me a good launch in life, strong friendships and credentials for the succeeding 30 years.  But it feels like a touchstone, not a home: still someplace I’m glad to have moved on from.

Wandering old haunts–Neighborhoods

I’m visiting Chicago this week, placing our device prototype into surgery at Evanston Hospital.   The facility is four blocks from Northwestern University where I earned my Masters (1979) and PhD (1982) in the department of Biomedical Engineering.

A long time ago, indeed.  But six years of my life, the same that I’ve been expat.

I wrote a couple of days ago about the tidy red brick row houses in Dutch villages.  Evanston also builds with red brick, but each to their own lot; same two or three stories, but with much larger trees.  It’s a style the British call detached, but in America that probably describes the social distance between neighbors more than the physical gap between their homes.

 

The wide streets are a notable change from Dutch villages, al is the profusion of huge, flowering trees, white and pink against the blue sky.  Spring is a bit more advanced in the Midwest, with bright green shoots luminous in the sun (very Hockney-esque).  The play of light and shadow along gardens and brick, was beautiful.

 

The other contrast was the silent emptiness of it all: no cars, bikes, pedestrians.  It was silent except for the birds: no pedestrians, no children, no shoppers.  It’s such a contrast to the constant hum of Maastricht.

I angled off along to the lakefront north of campus, the lighthouse and art center was still there, along with the stately homes that I used to think that I might move into some day.  The waters were whitecapped and turgid green, flags snapping in the cold northerly wind.  The edge of the campus was much as I remembered, the same gothic-letter signs, the industrial bulk of the Tech Institute, the orphan and emerging departments sequestered in neighborhood houses around the main campus.

Funny…the details that I forget after being away 30 years that are nonetheless absolutely familiar once I see them again.  It restores me faith that there is an objective reality that endures irrespective of what we think about it.

Reflecting on ancestry

I arrived back in the US over the weekend, dropping in through Vancouver and avoiding all of the storms blowing in across California.  My daughter and I immediately headed to Denver for a visit with my parents, a chance to catch up on, and to share,  events and rumors throughout the extended family.

When I was in my 20’s, I dropped through my grandparent’s home outside Cleveland each time I flew over on business, probably twice a year.  My grandfather was a lifelong railroader, working his way up from track worker to ‘assistant to the president (Personnel Training)’ of the Erie Lackawanna railroad.  I’ve always been glad that I’d made time to sit and talk with them: as time spent can never be taken away, I didn’t find myself wishing I’d done more once they were gone.  I’ve got lots of good memories.

I put his name into the browser search engine on a whim while typing this, and the Internet popped up a news article from a company magazine, circa 1944.  He must have been in his 40’s at the time, much younger than I am now.  It’s so strange to see him young and hustling: he was distinguished and in-charge years later, as I first remember him.

Our social memory is clearly lengthening as more and more archival material moves online.  Its fascinating what random bits of personal history wash up as a result.  I can forsee social maps being automatically extended into the past, without the need to laborously reconstructing family trees  through public records. And future generations will benefit from the myriad tracks that we leave through the literature, blogs, and facebook postings, almost a daily record of our evolving thoughts and lives.

How will this affect family identity?  Today, family traditions are stories, handed down from grandmother to granddaughter.  We build our backstories through yellow photographs and personal narratives, tailored to matriarchal perspective. How will this change with direct access to the reality of published history?  Will we feel more or less connected to ancestors who speak for themselves? 

I think the blend of fact and legend will make our familial context more vivid, both inspiring and cautionary, than it is today.

And what of these essays?   I write for my own reflection and in dialog with today’s readers, but I’m aware that it also becomes part of the publicly accessible record.  Sometimes, I self-censure slightly for that.  No so, looking to my descendants: I’m happy to be leaving a trail for them to discover, if they are so inclined.

Selling the transmitter

As a Vanderbilt Universtiy undergrad in 1972, I joined the campus radio station, WRVU, as a late night DJ.  Yes, that’s me, Dashing Dave, holding forth from the south tower of Neely Auditorium on the 10-watt powerhouse ‘Rock of Nashville’.

And, today, I got a note from the University asking how I felt about a proposal to sell the transmitter and broadcast spectrum, moving to an Internet-only format.

I feel…a bit weird about it all.

First, I’ve long believed that anyone who is still absorbed with their University teams and activities more than five years past their graduation needs to get a life.  Student activities exist for the students, not the alumni, and there’s no need to fossilize a radio station as a memorial to my formative experiences 40 years ago.  If the broadcast station no longer has relevance to, or interest from, the students, then it may be an anachronism that’s no longer needed.

At the same time, would the media board dump the student newspaper, the Hustler, and go to online format just because newspapers are dying?

The broadcast station never had a lot of listeners: that wasn’t it’s real value.  The signal was poked down into the public-service end of the FM spectrum, barely strong enough to cover the campus and surrounding neighborhood.  The student / educational value was in providing technical and management experience running a media outlet, getting an FCC license (credentials for a broadcasting career), learning the rules and etiquette of public media, and being a part of the broader Nashville radio station community.

The switch to Internet-only takes away those learning opportunities: I suppose that the real question is whether they are still relevant.

The University proposes to use the proceeds to “create an endowment to support innovative student media experiences, facilities and operations at Vanderbilt in perpetuity”.  I’m not sure what the educational mission of that is; it sounds like a concert fund.  And the wording sounds like they anticipate stiff alumni reaction to the proposal.

Already, the WRVU DJs group on Facebook is getting excited:  “WRVU may be up for sale!!! ONLY YOU CAN MAKE IT STOP!!”

I guess I’m a bit more sanguine.  If this is an asset that’s molding in the attic and losing value and student interest by the day, sure, sell it.  If it’s a fad to raise quick cash to hop the Social Media express, it’s probably ill-considered.

I feel….like it’s a long time ago but still an important part of me. I’m sad to see the station sold off and it makes me feel a little outdated along with it.

Blowing around the Windy City

Work wrapped up with intensity approaching the three-day Labor Day weekend in Chicago.  It was a productive week but a busy one, unusual, too, for being in an office again.  I’ve been working from home and hotel rooms for a year, now, and having desks with colleagues nearby, all day, is a change.  I ended up plugging in the earbuds to keep the ambient noise down and to minimize interruptions for alternate hours.

On the other hand, it was nice to go out for the occasional lunch or chat on a break again.

There was also time to explore some of my old haunts  around the north side of the city.  I grew up in Deerfield, along the North Shore, and it’s unrecognizable after (ack!) 40 years away. I suppose there should be no surprise in that, but in my mind it all feels fresh.  That’s the place that I worked appliance repair for three summers (except it’s a carpet store now), that’s the restaurant I used to hang out in (torn down for an office building), that’s the blues bar (vacant), the liquor store (gone), the lakefront park (condos).  There’s always the feeling that an old friend might pop around a familiar corner, but it feels empty when I realize they’ve been gone decades.

There were two nice exceptions.

I drove by my graduate school apartment, and the first place I lived in when I got married.  Both were still there, well-kept, and looking like the day I left them.

And the working town of Highwood was unchanged: the bar that we used to go to was still there, same tables, same sign.  I went in and had a Pabst for old times sake.

 

A Cambridge friend who has started traveling extensively for business asked about the possible effects last week. Where do you still call home?  Where family is; where I was raised.  Those are the things that you never lose, no matter how far and how fast you go.

What I now see that I do lose, though, are the friends and my neighborhoods.

They disperse and change without my even realizing it.  They don’t have the tight connection and frequent returns that keep family fresh, and so it erodes, year by year.  Finally, even the buildings are gone, until only the street names and the memories remain.

And this, despite the seductive illusions of Facebook, promising to deliver up friends as though nothing ever changes.

The four-day work week

I’ve long been accused of ‘living to work’.  Nonetheless, I am a strong believer in value of having a 4-day workweek: I’ve lived it, and I (still) miss it.

In the late 1980’s, I went to work for Physio-Control, a Redmond WA medical device company, then recognized as one of the nation’s 100 Best Places to Work.  Led by W. Hunter Simpson, they had adopted a number of innovative workplace policies that made it a congenial and productive place to be.

There were flexible hours, parental leave, continuing education benefits, and (my favorite) free coffee.   The company was one of the first to have a suburban campus (pix below), although one supplier once compared us unfavorably to the cows grazing peacefully in the valley below.

Information about company performance and problems were openly shared and widely discussed.  Quarterly kickoffs and the year-end rush to ship product were all-company events; the University of Washington band might appear if it was an especially good performance.

Production was on the top floor of the plant, reminding people that the company depended on it’s product.  There were no ID badges.

The fiscal year ended on Valentines Day (fitting for a company developing cardiac therapy); the senior managers came to each Team Members office to thank them and to had them a bonus check personally. (The first time that happened, I thought I was about to be fired).

They kept an ‘open-stock’ area where engineers could get parts for their projects without filling out paperwork. There was a full model shop on premises because Hunter thought that the company should always have people who could build real things using lathes and drill presses.

And they had a 4-day work week.

It was still a 40-hour workweek, but arranged as 4 / 10’s, Monday through Thursday. We had to be around for “core hours’, 9 to 4, but could arrange the whole eight however suited us best as individuals and departments.

I typically stay late anyway, so working eight to six it wasn’t a huge adjustment for me. It encouraged putting sustained effort into a project, invaluable when long periods of sustained focus and thought is needed (I was doing programming, data analysis, and research experiments at the time).

Three day weekends were also wonderful.  There was time to shop and do appointments on Friday, rather than squeezing them into breaks from work, and more trips around the Pacific Northwest were possible.  Sunday actually became the intended ‘day of relaxation’ because everything else was done. Life felt more balanced in all respects.

‘Downside was that if I didn’t put a definite finish to things on Thursday, I’d have completely lost the thread of work by the following Monday.  It was hard to schedule meetings outside of core hours, and lunch felt like it came too late (the day really needed two breaks, not one).

But I loved it.

It came to an end in the mid-90’s as new management rotated the whole company back onto the five-eights schedule. It was ostensibly done to ‘better serve our customers’, who couldn’t understand why there was nobody there on Fridays.  In reality, it felt like a country-club to Bain Capital, who bought us from Lilly.

Whatever: it had several immediate effects.

First, the day felt more crammed: what I used to do in ten hours, I now had to do in eight.  The weekend felt more crowded, as I had to do in two days what I used to do in three.  Meetings took up a larger percentage of the workday; doctors and school appointments shifted to lunches and breaks.  Life felt more crowded and compressed, and there was the nagging sense of management taking something away that people resented

As communities and companies try to deal with budget issues, reduce traffic volumes, raise productivity, save energy, reduce turnover, and give workers intangible benefits, the 4-day workweek idea is making a comeback.  North Carolina and Utah are experimenting with it, along with some schools and companies.  It’s not for everyone, for  every job, or for all industries.  But I think it makes sense for knowledge workers and, like telecommuting and flexible hours, should be part of how we configure our workplaces.

along with free coffee.