Kindergarten, maybe on Oklahoma University grounds Norman OK
1st, 2nd grade, Madison Elementary School, Norman OK
3rd grade, maybe Jefferson Elementary School, near June’s house, Norman, OK
4th grade, near house near OU Stadium. Normam, OK
4th grade, Ann Darling Elementary, East San Jose
5-8th grade, University Ave School, Los Gatos
9th grade, Los Gatos HS
10th grade, Cambrian HS, San Jose
11-12trh grade, Lincoln HS, San Jose
1st semester Frosh, SJSC, San Jose
Basic Training, Lackland AFB, San Antonio, TX
8 month tech school, USAF San Antonio TX
Problem Solving, Flowcharts, PERT charting, IBM Customer Ed Center, San Jose
New College SJS, Freshman-Junior years, San Jose
EST
Materials Management seminars, National Semiconductor
Management training classes, Negotiation seminar, Boschert
Corporate Ethics, Teledyne
GoldMine, GoldSync Certification STI
SalesLogix Certification, twice, STI and 1st Sales
Microsoft SQL Administrator Certification. 1st Sales
The part of my educational experience that was most special was the New College experience. New College was an advanced educational experiment created I the late 1060s after years of unrest in the California Stage College system. It was founded in 1968, the year of the big San Francisco State “Third World Liberation Front” strike. This five-month strike was the longest student strike ever in the US. It was the culmination of about a year-and-a-half of unrest on the campus. This was a combination of the Viet Nam war protests, and Black Student Union activism. Francisco State College found itself confronted by the idealism of the youth of the 1960s and anger over academic bureaucratic policies. A faculty group at San Jose State decided they could do something about bureaucratic academia, and stated New College. New College was a four-year liberal arts program, unique in several ways. The first way was it was based on the idea that students can direct their own education. To give the students added ability to take educational risks, grades were not letter grades, but rather, “pass/fail.” The feeling was that students would take more risks if they were freed from the need to get a high grade average. Because some students would want to get into grad school, and grad schools required transcripts with letter grades, you could get a “backup grade” that would be in your transcript.
It was designed as a four-year program. It has a special lower division (Frosh-Soph) program designed to meet the State College General Educational Requirements. This was all done in seminars with a cross- specialty team of teachers that stayed with you for the two years of the program. I am not sure how any we had, but I remember at least four or five. There was Jack Pierce, a great professor from the Anthropology department, Lori Helmbold, a young woman professor who later on started the Women’s Study Department at San Jose State, another, more radical young woman professor, a young male science professor, and there had to be more. I remember a seminar with had four of these five, and I know there were a bunch more professors in the school from a wide range of disciplines.
I heard about New College as I was thinking about quitting IBM and going back to school, using the GI Bill to have an income. I heard that the first year, they asked people to live together in a dorm, so they would really have an educational experience where they were together all the time. This was the first ever co-ed dorm in California, with the men and women living together. They were on the same floor, but I think that men and women were assigned to different rooms. Whatever you image could happen in this situation probably happened. And more.
I first met most of these New College people as the new College Retreat, done the weekend before school started in the Los Padres National Forest west of King City, on the Arroyo Seco River. We drove in cars and vans about two house south of San Jose. Near King City we turned west, towards the range of mountain between this area and the Big Sur coast. I had never been in this part of the state before and had no idea what to expect. We stopped in a Forest Service camp, had lunch and got into our cars again for a short trip down a dirt road that followed above the Arroyo Seco River. We stopped and parked in a wide spot and started down a trail, down the hillside, over some rocks and to a river. What a sight! The river was in a gorge, slow-moving with many attractive green pools. When I got down to the river, I found that the water was pretty warm. This made sense. This was a river that flowed out of the coast range of mountains, so not so cold as the Sierra stream that were snow-fed.
When we got down to the river everybody started taking their clothes off – not to put on their bathing suits, but all the way off. I don’t recall if I knew this before I got there, but this group river experience was all “skinny-dipping.” The only exception was an older gent whose name I don’t remember. He was an economist (showing the range of professors in New College), and earlier in his career, one notable thing he had done was to establish a high-quality university of Economics somewhere in Africa. He turned his back to us, undressed, showing his very white butt, and put on a bathing suit. I saw, on the drive down, that at 26 years old, I was closer in age the most of the faculty, not the students. I especially noticed that when we were all naked, the students and the teachers mostly looked the same. I also thought that after we had all been playing naked together in the river, then we would be comfortable with each other in the seminars to come.
I may not write more about it, but this trip started a deep appreciation in this area, and was the first of many trips and adventures that I had here over the next few years. Most of them were with Marcia, so maybe I will add them to that section. Some trips were hiking and camping in the river area, Many were with Marcia in the old VW bus that I turned into a kind of a camper, and painted (a poor paint job I did myself) white and yellow with “traffic paint” (normally used to paint strips on roads) that I got for free from Tom. The VW bus was amazing and would go almost anywhere you could go in a jeep. Marcia and I found a big area, mostly a little-used Army Base, Fort Hunter Liggett, which was California like it used to be before all the Mexican, then Gringo settlers came here. There were broad green valleys nestled in between small hills. The valleys were shaded a big old oaks. And there were dirt roads all through the area, I guess from when the Army held exercises here. They were perfect for Marcia and me in our VW bus. I would drive around, looking for places, find a small dirt road off the main one, and take it around a small hill and cross country over the grass to find a secluded camping spot near a small stream, and invisible from the road. We would stay for a couple of days, and then drive back to the Bay Area. We were all around in that area, including several trips on the road over the coast range to Highway 1 at Lucia, about 20 miles south of Big Sur. We found we had to be careful where we parked, because there were Army MPs patrolling the area, and more than once we were awakened in the middle of the night by Army men with flashlights telling us to move along.
I loved New College and going to college again. This time I was really ready. I did the reading and when I had a paper to do (typed on typewriters at this time), I would start early so I could do a good job. By the time I turned it in, it was at least revision 3, and pretty well thought out. I enjoyed talked at this time in my life, and the seminars were fun. In retrospect though, they were mostly between me and the teachers. Most of the other students were about 19 and it seemed to me that they really had not read or thought very much before they started college. My biggest memory from the first year was a seminar with the whole Frosh class—most of them were with smaller groups—with at least four professors.
There were two young radical women professors and two male profs. They were talking about power, who has it, and how to get it. When the talk moved toward revolutionary rhetoric, one of the men said, to counter an argument about seizing power, “But who’s got the guns, BABY.” This set off the first real argument about feminism that I ever heard, and argued with passion from our women professors. Since I was raised by a single working mother, I never had any doubts about the power and competency of women. I soon learned that my ideas were not common.
The spring of the first year, I was selected (by whom, I don’t know) as Chairman of the “Student Selection Committee.” We (really mostly I) reviewed applications for the college, held interviews and selected the next year’s freshman class. There was not really much selection going on; there were really not the number of applications that we wanted.
The retreat before this year was fun. I knew people and was friends (and wanted more) with a younger woman, Jeanie Dolpf. We took LSD together on the retreat, and spent the day of the river having lots of fun. One big memory was a period where, for both of us, we experienced the river and water what felt like through both of our eyes, such a bigger experience of swimming underwater. I tried to get closer to her, but she rejected me for this saying I was too fat.
The sophomore year, we could take a couple of classes. Some went to “Old College” for this. Others, like me, took contracts with New College profs. I had one with a man, Lew Mangani, a brilliant drunk. One thing he talked about was conditioning, using the example of something traumatic happening that somehow involved a book of matches. Then, years later, you encounter a book of matches lying on the ground, and are set off into the old trauma; you feel it, but don’t understand what is happening. I had another with the ex-National President of SDS. Todd Gitlan (like I said, there was a radical bent to much of the faculty). The contract was not on politics, in was writing poetry. I also figured out this term that while I enjoyed talking to the professors in seminars, this did not get much participation from the younger people in the class So I pretty much shut up, and let them have the class.
This year they (again the unknown “they”) made me Chairman of the “Faculty Selection Committee.” We had positions open. I read resumes, scheduled and conducted interviews and voted on selection. The interviews were group interviews, with maybe 8 or 10 people from New College, mainly professors and me, conducted a group interview. It was a tough interview situation. I influenced the group on one hire particularly, a business MBA with an artist bent for film, Jim Zurr. I thought the business school background would give him a different persp4ective that the other professors and this was good balance. And to add to it, since he was a film-maker, he was not in some kind of “business box,” but a wider personality. A few years later he combined his interest in film with business and opened a successful small chain of art theaters in San Jose, “The Cameras” starting with Camera 1 on First Street in San Jose. He always credited me with this, saying I gave him his first job out of college that led directly to these theaters.
The other big event in this year was that I totally destroyed the marriage with Marcia. I never felt a deep commitment to Marcia, and by the time I was in New College I was on the look-out for possible girlfriends. It didn’t work out with Jeannie. About a year later, I befriended Linda Aldridge, another New College student. We hit it off, and there was something about her that brought out my feelings of protectiveness. And somehow, within a few months Marcia and Linda both agreed to live together with me. We rented an old house in East San Jose, on Aborn Road, next to a wonderful black church that filled a small house with joyful singing. We painted the house and made it our own. I would spend one night with one woman and the next with the other. While it seemed like it would be a sexual fantasy life, it was far from it. It turns out when you are in a threesome, one people is often left out. the dyad if the for of relationship we all know about. Maybe this is OK if everybody is secure. This was not the case. So it felt like I went from one person’s crisis to the other one’s, without time for my own. Marcia had good sense, and so found a long-term student teaching assignment that was needed to finish her Special Ed credential that was out-of-state, in Idaho. After she left, everything else fell apart, and I was living by myself again.
The next year was about to start now. While I loved going to college, I had by that time been in the world, in the Air Force and at IBM for eight years, and these years were pretty rewarding and full. I hungered for actually doing something again. So I came up with a plan; I could do both things, work and go to college. During the summer I looked in the want ads. I did not see anything that seemed suitable, but National Semiconductor had a giant ad for many different jobs. I figured that if they were hiring so much maybe they would have production control jobs, like I had at IBM, available. I filled out an application and in a few days they called me in for an interview, and soon after, offered me a job. I then got Jim Zurr to sign a contract for a work-study project at National Semiconductor. So I was still in college AND I was working again.
Before the school year started, I got to go to one more retreat. At this one I met a new student, about my age, a woman named Jillian Melz. We hit it off because she was tending to a big BBQ, grilling about 50 chickens. She was standing with her apron on, hot and sweaty, and I volunteered to help. Well, that was the right move. After the meal we took out sleeping bags to a hill, a bit away from the main camp. A good relationship followed for a while. It turns out that Jill had an unusual relationship with her husband (yes ,she was married), where he would let her have affairs. We were together for six months, and then she dumped me. This was a typical duration, I later found out, for her affairs. She was an upscale woman, a daughter of a US diplomat, and lived overseas in high diplomatic circles much of her life. She wanted to upgrade me, and talked me into buying a new car. I got a red 1974 Fiat X19, the first new car I had ever bought. I was a great car for me; it was mid-engined, so had great balanced handling and was fast on the small winding roads in the Santa Cruz Mountains I enjoyed driving on. This was the kind of driving that I loved. I also really liked the removable hard-top. When it was stowed, you had the great feeling of a convertible, without the wind, which became irritating after a while in my Alfa Romeo roadster. The car lasted longer than the girl-friend.
I completed one more year at New College this way, but gave it up after that. One thing I did all that year was to join in a New College tradition, a group lunch every Wednesday. This way I was able to continue seeing New College friends for a while longer. They were a good group of people, kind of outside that usual set of people I would meet. I enjoyed their company, but made no real lasting friends that carried on afterwards.
I’ve worked since I was 16. My first job was as a doorman at a fancy theatre. As a junior in HS, I worked 5 days a week, weekends, and weeknights from 6 – midnight.
Next was in the Air Force, as an intelligence analyst, stationed in a small island just south of the Arctic circle, and about 100 miles due west from Nome, Alaska., then in San Antonio, Texas.
I have had several professions. Among them are as a material and operations planner, a marketing exec (with a side of sales), and a software system consultant and designer. I did each for about 15 years, and excelled at each. I started four different companies, two failed (an organic fiber clothing company, and a hi-tech design and manufacturing company), and two consulting companies that bumped along well enough for a while to pay the bills each month.
Highlights include writing a program to analyze usage and forecast demand for IBM when I was about 25. This controlled about $20 million a year in parts procurement. I developed an approach to planning semiconductor wafer starts to maximize monthly income. I had the best first-year’s sales of any product ever at the company where I was a marketing manager, Boschert. When I was a marketing director at Teledyne Semiconductor, I was able to get photo coverage on the cover and a feature article in the primary industry technical magazine. I got a call from the most important potential customer in the world the day the magazine came out We actually got their order for their next generation power supplies. But then … My boss, Mitch Gooze, got fired. Then the new president cancelled the order and killed the project, because it was “too risky.”
I was a sales automation writer for a Bay Area tech magazine, to generate sales leads as a consultant.
Additional highlights include speaking at national conferences in three different industries. I published 10 – 15 papers and articles in 5 different product and business areas. While I was lead consultant at 1stSales they were awarded “Consultant of the year.”, and the next year, “Trainer of the Year.”
I worked for six different hardware and software companies (other than my own, excluding early jobs in high school), and three different consulting companies, in addition to my own. Altogether I worked for 20 different companies, including four of my own.
I’ve enjoyed everything I did. I some ways the best job was at IBM, where, for a while, I drove a fork-lift truck in the warehouse. At the end of the day I could see that I had moved a big pile of stuff from over here to over there, and in the evening, I didn’t worry about any of it.
FOX Theatre
I started basically a full time schedule as a junior in high school. I lied about my age, and got a social security card that also listed me as two years older. At that time you really did not have to show much ID. I worked the door, taking tickets, before the movie started. Once it started, I would walk the floor of the theater, watching people, making sure all is OK. Week nights I would work from 5 PM to midnight or 1 o’clock. It was a fancy theater so we had to wear tuxes, which they provided for us. When there was a big movie, like Psycho, I would often work the line, keeping people orderly. In those days, big first-run movies only showed at one location locally, so it was a very different time for movie-goers. After about one year, the theater manager saw my photo in the paper in an article about two high school boys in a big math competition. They figured out I was underage and fired me. Part of the story there was that I had bought an old car for $100 from one of mom’s friends, a woman named Ivy Jean. It was a 1948 Hudson Commodore 6. It was their fancy model, with nice seats, and maybe 6 ashtrays and many interior lights. I had to use the car to get to work. And I had so much trouble with this old car that it used, I felt like, most of what I earned to keep it running. So I had to have a car to get to work, and I had to work to support the car.
Process Server
For a couple of months in the summer before I started college I worked as a process server. Basically I would deliver court summons and complaints to people involved in civil law suits. Many times the way they found out they were being sued was when I served them. So nobody I served was happy about it. Some people knew about the lawsuit, so would try to avoid me. I remember a man I served at his home on a holiday weekend. He angrily said, “Don’t you ever quit!? Then he sicced his big dogs on me. I had to drive all over around San Jose, the Peninsula, and the East Bay. I don’t think I made much money, and it was painful, too many hours driving around, and a pretty small paycheck.
USAF
I joined the Air Force after one unsuccessful semester at college.
The airmen at the recruiting office loved me. That gave aptitude tests that give results in four different areas. I scored as high as you could score, 95% percentile, in all four areas, which was rare.
The day I reported for duty, they took me by bus to some recruiting center in Oakland, where they gave me a physical, then put us on a plane to San Antonio, Texas, Lackland AFB, for basic training.
Basic training was quite an experience. I was really away from family and home. One part was being in a “guy” society, young men everywhere. I had never really learned much in the way of social skills.
Through much of high school (and before) I led a pretty solitary life, bookish, and spending much time alone. I really didn’t have any friends. So here I was, trying to survive this experience. I wanted them to like me, but felt that they would not be interested in me, so I made up some story about a sports car I said that I had. I regularly read “Road and Track,” the sports car and racing mag of my time. So I made up a story to make me seem cool. It didn’t work. Some guy caught me in the lie. Telling these kinds of stories was harder then real life, since to keep it going you had to remember every other lie you told that person. Too hard for me. That was the end of that behavior. Basic training was mostly not too physically hard, but matching all around, doing PT (physical training), and things like the obstacle course, worked us out physically pretty well. I got out of some of the physical stuff by getting assigned to barracks guard. Officers would come around and ask guards questions, like “What are the general orders?” I could remember this, so they assigned me because I would not make the barracks look bad, and I could stay out of the Texas heat. I was in basic training in April, May and June, and it gets pretty hot and humid. The barracks were old two-story wood buildings, with maybe 20 bunk beds per floor. We had a bed, a foot locker, and a clothes hanging space. There were even evil-seeming TIs (training instructors) who, when you were standing in formation, would come up behind you and whisper terrible things in your ear, to see if they could upset you, or make you mad. A couple of times I came across some man who was huddled up, crying, cracked from the pressure. A few days later, he would be discharged.
I got assigned to Air Force Intelligence, communications intelligence. I had to go to tech school to be trained in this. The school was about 3/4 year. It was in San Angelo, Texas. During the first part of the school, which was only classified as “Confidential” they did an FBI security check. When I went back for leave, several people asked me if I was in trouble saying “The FBI talked with me asking questions about you. What did you do?”I graduated as top man in the class, so I got my choice of assignments. I was happy about this and wanted to go someplace nice. Like England or Germany. It turns out all the assignments were at small remote posts, some in Pakistan, some in Turkey, and the smallest, on an Island off Alaska near the Arctic Circle. They were 12 or 18 months long. The 18 month tour was at Crete, which later I found out would have been a great place to go, an Island in the Mediterranean with lots of American tourist girls! I chose the shortest tour at the smallest place. It was usual for people coming from remote assignments to have their choice of the next assignment. And I figured I would be kept busy at a small place, and maybe learn more. So I chose St. Lawrence Island, Alaska.
While I was there, something that I noticed and reported got the place a Site Commendation from command headquarters. I was on the island for one year, and learned to drink alcohol to the point of stupor. I also had a natural talent to chug beer. The tradition there was in a chugging contest loser pays. I did not pay once that year!
After the year, when it was time for new assignments, I was forced to go back to San Antonio, Texas, to Kelly AFB, command headquarters. Viet Nam was starting to heat up, and the Air Force wanted people at headquarters with field experience like me. So regardless of what I wanted it was back to Texas. I was there only a few months. Mother developed an inner ear problem, labyrinthitis, where she lost all balance: She could not drive, and really couldn’t even walk. I applied for what is called a Humanitarian Reassignment, to a nearby radar station. But, they called me in and said, “Airman Clarke, we can’t grant this transfer, due to the high security work you were doing. So we are going to discharge you, instead. “ And in a few hours I was on my say to San Jose. Fortunately, mother’s problem went away in a few weeks, and I was a free man, ready to start a life.
Bank of America
I applied to several places, including IBM. I got the first call from Bank of America. I started in their print shop. This was in the days before copy machines, so the main job was making a short-run photo-plate for letters and memos and group communications. Sometimes we could get an order to punch out a new credit card (which were pretty new at the time), I would take a blank card, put it in a machine, then punch the name and number from a form, and the machine pressed this into the card. After just a few days I knew everything I needed to know. So this would have been a dead-end. But I was saved. I was washing dishes in Mother’s sink. I dropped a glass, and reached to catch it midair, but I caught it just as it hit, and it sliced up my hand badly. I had to get stitches, and really couldn’t use my right hand. So I called in sick. About this time, I finally got a call back from IBM and they wanted to hire me for their mail room. It was easy to quit a job that where I was not even going to work, due to my accident. This was the end of my banking career.
IBM
The story of IBM actually starts when I was in high school. A friend of Mother’s, Leonard Snowden, was a bit of an inventor. He invented the diamond dust nail file, and had a small business in Los Gatos where he manufactured his Diamond Deb nail file. When I was still in high school he brought me blue prints for his perpetual motion machine. He wanted me to tell him whether or not it would work. The idea was to have a wheel ringed with floats that would float up through little buckets of water that were also on the rib of the wheel, and be powered by the motion of the floating up. The only problems are that it needs energy to break through surface tension, and the water pressure is the greatest at the bottom on the water, and this was greater than any lift generated. Somehow Leonard thought enough of me to ask for my critique. Year later, after my mother got better from her labyrinthitis Leonard was going to help me find a job. He took me to IBM, thinking that he had some influence as the president of a company. He had no pull, but I still was able to fill out an application and take their employment test. I have always done well on tests, and I am sure I scored very high. IBM did not move fast in those days, so I didn’t hear anything, so I took a job with the First National Bank. After a few weeks I got a phone call with a job offer to work in the mail room.
I worked for six months in the mail room. Maybe one reason they hired me was that I had experience from the military with teletype machines. IBM had a teletype, run by the group that ran the mail room, so I was the relief teletype operator. Sorting and delivering mail, I used my communications intelligence know-how to analyze organizational structure by who communicated with whom, and pretty soon figured out the real power structure within IBM San Jose. You could tell by where the mail was addressed. I had a small wheeled cart with a basket on top, with hanging folders for my mail route in it. The day was like in a post office. First we would work the morning’s incoming mail, looking at each piece, and “throwing’” it into a slot for the right mail route for that piece of mail. Then we would take our route’s mail and throw it into slots for our route. We would then load it into our cart and make the rounds delivering and picking up today’s mail. We would end the day making the dispatch of outgoing mail to the post office. After a few months I started making a short comic strip and taping it to the front of my cart, to amuse the people on my route. After six months of this I was promoted to the warehouse.
I was in the warehouse a year or so. I started driving an electric forklift truck, moving incoming material from the dock to the correct isle, where the isle guy would put it away. The material had already gone from the main receiving dock, and through QA. It had a punched IBM card with information like part number, quantity, and stock location. When put in stock, the card would be sent in, keypunched, and in that night’s computer run, then the inventory would be updated.
I enjoyed driving the forklift. There was a railroad-car loading-platform out back of the warehouse. I discovered that if I drove to the very end of this raised platform, and drove back as fast as I could get the forklift to go, I could get it airborne. I move a lot of material every day, and I moved if fast, so fast that after they gave me a different job, they had warehouse repair men come in and straighten out all the shelf legs that I had sideswiped going too fast around corners, and bent. They moved me to Small Parts, an area where small shelves held small items. This was all in the days before computer terminals and workstations. So information on the ca