I told IBM I needed a couple weeks to get my affairs in order, so I could return to Michigan and move my stuff south and most importantly, to see if Karen was still speaking to me. So, I went back home to face her. I tried to explain what I was thinking, but it didn’t come out very good. There was some crying and some hugging and some forgiving. And eventually, she accepted that if we were to get married, she would be moving to New Orleans. Once again, I left Michigan, this time with people waving goodbye to me and, hauling most of what I owned, moved to New Orleans. I rented an apartment, moved in and started work at IBM.
This was in the spring of 1966, so we had about 6 months to wait until the wedding. Karen was pretty much left to arrange the whole thing. I think that sometime that summer, her and my mother and Martin and Laura came down to visit me. I was able to show her the apartment. As it turned out, we didn’t live there long. I’m not sure why, but we moved to a four-plex kind of house shortly after we got married.
A customer engineer is another name for a glorified repairman. Back in those days, before the days of computers, we had IBM cards that contained the information a person was storing instead of a hard drive. You would punch a pattern of holes into the card and then certain machines could read those holes, thus reading the information. The machine used to punch the holes, surprisingly enough was called a Key Punch machine. There was a companion machine called a Verifier which was used to verify that the person who punched the card the first time, did it right.
In short, my job was to fix those two type of machines when they broke down, which was often. I had a “route”. Like a milkman. I would travel around from place to place and fix the machines. It didn’t take long before all of the regulars on the route knew me and I could just walk right into their offices and do my job. The only company in New Orleans that I remember was the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They had over a 100 keypunches and 100 verifiers and there was always 5 – 10 down at any one time. I got to the point where I thought I could take a key punch apart into it’s smallest piece and then put the whole thing back together again. Maybe blindfolded. We carried a tool bag which looked like a briefcase. So, since IBM required you wear a white shirt and a suit, even though I was just a repairman, I looked like a businessman. This got me into a lot of places it would have been difficult to get into if I was dressed differently.
More tomorrow….
Dad