The 1960’s – Building and Growing
By the time the new decade (1960) arrived, we were pretty well settled, the kids had new friends and we had become part of the neighborhood. This acclimation included a young beagle puppy named “Nosey Rosie” because of her inquisitive nature. She and the kids bonded almost immediately. As previously mentioned, the three kids loved to pose for pictures, be it for church, collecting horned toads, or posing for what was to become our annual Christmas picture. Whatever the occasion, they were always animated. You know, after almost 60 years, that particular trait has not diminished whatsoever. On another trip to Fairfield in the summer of 1959, my Mom insisted on a family photograph including families of both Dick and me (DIV-1).
Toward the end of 1960, I received a call from Jim Bamping, the young Assistant Prof; I met at Purdue earlier. He told me Al Herrick, Dean of the Purdue Forestry School had accepted a position at the University of Georgia’s School of Forestry and Natural Resources, and he was moving with him. He was very excited about the updated data processing and analysis capabilities available at Georgia, and I might want to drive up and take a look. Since we were still sitting on a pile of data we had recorded from our CFI plot measurements, the opportunity was too good to pass up. Not only that, but shortly before, Bob Elliott was asked to move to Jacksonville, leaving me pretty much in charge of the Pensacola inventory operation. George Park became my supervisor and good friend. George was my first real mentor and he was a real career changer for me. He encouraged me to develop the information technology aspect or our mission. In other words, I was being asked to define the job and write its description. So it was up to Georgia I went. Still no Interstate Highway System, so it was an interesting drive from Pensacola to Athens GA.
About this time, a big change was about to happen. Although I spent many hours stomping around the woods and sloshing through the swamps, I apparently spent enough time home such that Joyce announced to me she was once again expecting. Oh brother, you are kidding. Maybe so, she said, but the little test they did during my recent check-up wasn’t, and he/she should show up about mid-June. I was on my way to one of the many trips to Jacksonville, so it gave me 5 hours or so to factor that in to my thinking. When I got to Jacksonville (Jax), I told George Park the news and he just rolled on the floor laughing. He and his wife Arlene had two, a boy and a girl. A couple of weeks later, I was back over in Jax and scheduled to make a presentation to senior Southern Timberlands management, who were hosting a corporate senior vice president who was responsible for all St. Regis timberlands nation-wide (and Canada). They were interested in the automated data processing we were doing with the University of Georgia, and even some now with the University of Florida. Not only were we processing all our punched “IBM” cards, but we were printing out volumes of tables summarizing the results. All interested were gathered in the conference room when I opened up my remarks by projecting a sample output page showing a standard “stock and stand” table (tree data organized by species and diameter class). My first comment was “can you believe this incomprehensible gaggle of numbers and letters?” All the numbers in the tables were in scientific notation. This was also known as “E” notation for it would appear as a number followed by an E and a long series of numbers. The number proceeding the “E” indicated where the decimal point belonged in the following long series. Man, early computing was a bear. The corporate vice president just cracked up. I guess he appreciated a bit of comic relief after a couple of days of boring reports from a variety of people. Whatever, it did me no harm. As I was preparing to leave, George Park asked me to step into his office for a minute. He announced my report was well received, and was encouraged to proceed in the development of this “new” information technology. To that end, they are expecting me to move from Pensacola to Jax, and be up and running by the end of the year. Oh Boy, what an opportunity!
We decided the actual move would have to be after Joyce delivered our newest addition to the family. Divisional management was happy with this date and with that target set we went about day to day business. We decided it would be wise to engage Bamping as our consultant in this new digital world of data processing. Our facilities in Pensacola and Jacksonville, were overwhelmed with other mill operations to spend much time with the timberland up-starts. I will say the company personnel were very helpful and encouraging in our work, but they had their priorities. On the other hand, the University of Georgia had a fully up to date facility with a staff dedicated to helping us. The downside was a large clandestine government agency working directly with IBM (International Business Machine) the provider of most of the hardware and software available at the time. This proved to be a bit of a bother since all their work was confidential. We felt that we could work around that, so it was arranged that I would deliver all our “IBM ” cards (key punched, porta punched and mark sensed) so we could combine all our CFI data from all regions in one unified database. Sounds easy, huh?
Note: With the possible exception of Union Camp., most of our other pulp and paper competitors considered this new technology as “pie in the sky” and of little value to their current operations, even though most of them had sent people to the same seminars and workshops we attended. In general there is a reluctance for change when feeling comfortable with current operating procedures.
The first challenge was getting all those cards to Athens. We packed them all in one or two big suitcases and checked them as baggage on a fairly new Convair twin engine aircraft with a tricycle landing gear (two basic wheels plus a nose wheel). When we reached Atlanta, all baggage was transferred to a twin engine, two wheel (with small tail wheel or skag.) Southern Airways DC-3. This was a very reliable aircraft made famous by the missions flying the “Hump” during WWII. The Hump was the name given to the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains between India and China. The DC-3 was extensively used to transport supplies in support of the Chinese war effort (against Japan), In spite of its durability, it was not a comfortable ride. No heat, no air conditioning. Coffee was hot at the beginning of its run, and ice cold by the end. In this case, from Atlanta to Athens was fine. Going the other way, the run began in Spartanburg SC. By the time we boarded the plane, we were basically offered ice coffee (minus the ice). When parked, this aircraft sat with its nose high above the ground. A fair amount of luggage was stored in the nose section. In this particular case, that’s where our data was stored. When we deplaned and went out on the tarmac to watch the unloading of the luggage, there was a large metal piped scaffold with an elevated platform pushed up to the nose so the crew could unload the baggage and wheel the whole rig back to the main terminal. In Athens, that was not very far. You can imagine how heavy those suitcases were containing all those cards. One of the crew snatched one of the cases as though it was just another typical suitcase, and whipped it out of the nose, and almost fell off the platform staggering to catch his balance. While his buddies were rolling in laughter, we could hear him shout, “What the hell is in those things!”
We finally unloaded everything and made our way over to the lab where we were going to do all the work, which was reading the cards for integrity, then sorting them by location and then for card type (plot or tree). These processes were conducted on different machines in different rooms, so we did a lot of running back and forth. Bamping had to teach class, so this was my job set everything up during the day, and then we would work into the night until we had a good stopping point. I forgot what day we started the process, but it took us into late Friday, and it was apparent I was going to stay the weekend. Late Saturday night, we heard a loud squeal emitting from the initial card reader. Boy was it loud. Apparently some malformed cards became jammed in the reader which still tried to run so managed to mangle several cards such that we literally had to extract the pieces with a set of tweezers. We worked all night long, and about 8:30 Sunday morning, with both of us on hands and knees trying to reconstruct the damaged cards to the point we could copy the contents and re-punch new ones, Bamping’s wife June, all pretty in her Sunday best and with two kids in tow, appeared in the doorway and simply said: “I guess this means you are not going to church this morning”. I looked up, and if looks could kill, I wouldn’t be writing this today.