I'm pretty quick on the technical end of things, but when it comes to people I'm a
Ground Hog Day kinda guy. I get to know people slowly, and only eventually do I get the breadth and depth thing happening. With this in mind, I stayed at Cloyne for 8 years, starting as the newest of newbies, finishing as the workshift manager, well-known for years by all 155 people living at Cloyne. For me, who had never been much of a people person, really, this was a great accomplishment and a revelation. Then a year or so in a co-op apartment on LeConte. Now, 40 years later, I'm happily living in north Berkeley, selling software that I write out of my home. Anyway, here's my story, starting from the beginning.
Cloyne: first six months or soI was born in the city of Alameda, but my family left Oakland when I was six, and I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When I first arrived at San Francisco airport, I was picked up at the airport by my uncle, Jack Russell, and taken to the home of another uncle, Clfford Nickell, in south Oakland. I stayed there for a week or so while waiting for the campus to get in gear, and for my room to open up at Cloyne. I visited campus most days, taking the bus from Oakland along MacArthur Street, down College Avenue to campus."Free the Park" was spray painted in black on the north side of the base of the Campanile, also know as Sather Tower. Due to bullying, I had had a poor time in high school in Pennsylvania, and was (and still am) glad to be far away from all of that.
In spite of, or perhaps because of the changes and revolution brewing in Berkeley, had a great sense of being back where I belonged, far from Pennsylvania. This feeling only increased as time passed. To my delight, although I was the same pencil necked geek that I was in high school, and everything was new and a bit scary, there was not a bit of bullying from anyone. Rather, in the all mens house that Cloyne was, people were inclined to offer me advice and help on everything from Carlo Gardin helping me with physics equations, to Jerry Kaplan advising me on how to bulk up a bit. The closest brush with bullying I experienced was helpful advice from Gordon Green on how to be impolite to David Witt, the house alcoholic.
When reg day finally happened, I registered for my classes, doing a rather poor job of it in a last minute scramble, with my Chemistry and English classes overlapping at 8am in the morning. Berkeley had been the first campus to switch to the quarter system (no double causing havoc with the other schools, what with mid-year transfers, credits, etc). Some years later, after the other smaller campuses had followed suit, Berkeley would also be the first campus to switch back to the semester system. LOL.
Anyway, back to checking into Cloyne. I was pleasantly - and mistakenly - surprised when I checked into room 10B at Cloyne, and thought for a few blissful hours that I had the most worldly roommate in the world, with beautiful furniture, and above all the most fantastic stereo I had ever seen. Alas, this was not to be - these were the belongings and furnishings of Karl Lingenfelder, an upper classman who had occupied 10C because he had enough points to score a double for the summer. I remember, with a pang, the nice furniture being moved out, and - vividly - the falling of the speaker wire from the molding along the ceiling, as Karl un-installed his wonderful stereo system, and moved to the adjoining room 10A. Ah well - not to be. For my entertainment, I made do with an AM tube radio given me by my Aunt Zelma in Stockton, and a small "picnic player" that I scraped up somewhere.
Workshifts. Someone, probably Richard Deight (who had an even more bitchin stereo system next door in 10C), gave me the advice to try to get on a crew. Deight being on switchboard, I started by taking an orientation class at Hoyt Hall on how to use the switchboard. At that time, Cloyne, like the other co-ops, had PBX switchboards that hooked to a phone shared by each suite of three or so rooms. I was fascinated with the notion of learning how to use it, the layout of the trunk lines between the houses, etc. In later years, I would work switchboard, and be rather amazed that I knew all the names of everyone in the house, and many of their suites, and ring codes. In addition to switchboard, I applied for a spot on the maintenance crew, and was beaten out by my (still) good buddy Bob Sharp, who had significant experience installing electrical conduit, whereas my experience was limited to simple plumbing. So this, like the stereo system, was not to be. For the time being I would work mostly at Central Kitchen, washing pots and preparing mass foodstuffs with Andre, an elderly, muscular Philipino ex-boxer. I recall the recipe for gravy, which was water heated in a great stainless steel pot, flour, and caramel coloring from gallon bottles. No trace of other ingredients. Great guy though.
People. There were no end of cool-looking people at Cloyne. I was fairly outgoing for a basically shy person. Initially I just hung around people's rooms and made some effort to do what ever was happening at the moment. I had trouble at first making friends. My roommate, Eugene Loh, was an agreeable fellow who's parents lived in the Sunset district in San Francisco. I went on occasional visits to his home, taking the F bus across the bay (BART was just a large ditch in the ground running down most of the main streets in the area. Eugene's family house was immaculate, and he was like a royal prince there. We would be served beautifully prepared Chinese food. His father was a somewhat format, but kind man, and we would go on small trips, he in his rather large shiny car, and me following in my TR-4, which I received as a graduation gift later that summer. Gene was a good roommate, though he was not a deeply technical person, and had a habit of saying the exact opposite of what he meant that I found frustrating, and I sometimes grew impatient with him. He had a young friend, still living at home, who would start next semester, named Alex Kumjian. Alex rode around with us in my car, and became rather a bit of a pest, wanting to be with us all the time. Later on this little fellow Alex would become a Cloynie of the first order, wandering the halls, unshaven, in his bathrobe like any good upper-classman, as well as a dear friend. My best friends were Ed Samario, and Vural Altin, a soft spoken and thoughtful Turkish engineering student who is now a professor at Boazici University in in Istanbul. We played pool for hours each day, and watched, while smoking, Alfred Hitchcock reruns every night at midnight on a tiny television in the basement. Pool playing is a tangible skill that I retain to this day. Other names: Tariq Kadri: house manager, Mark Fiss: garden manager, Mark Gary: council member, Jim Diestel: assistant house manager, Bill Symes: pipe smoking intellectual and laundry manager. Other movers and shakers: Lance Rucker, JW Thrasher, Mike Belo, Peter L. Montgomery: dog fearing math genius and candy manager.
Stuff. Besides my interest in the switchboard, I had an irresistible urge to use the computers on campus. I had an armload of teletype printouts from my programming days in high school (that's another story, that culminated in my being kicked out of the computer class for part of my senior year for hacking), and literally shopped door to door with the professors to try to get computer time on the big CDC mainframes in the basement of Campbell Hall. My greatest accomplishment at that time was a computer program that played tic-tac-toe, via massive table lookup. I had no notion of any other way to accomplish this, but wanted to write a program that would learn to play tic-tac-toe by playing against my other previously written program, and had a design in place to do so. I recall one professor, with an eastern European accent, explaining that, while most students would not even figure out the idea of an evaluating function and how to use it, this was not the sort of programming or research that he was interested in devoting his budget to. I finally located Professor Maurer, who was finally the one to grant me, laconically gesturing in his messy office, CPU time on the big mainframe - I recall it was the unheard of amount of 5 or 10 minutes of CPU time. The average job used a few seconds at most, so this kept me flush with computer time. I basically camped out in the small lobby of Campbell hall, running jobs one after the other. I was astonished to meet someone who knew Pi more decimal places than I did (100 or more to my mere 23 digits), and there was no shortage of people who knew more about computing than I did. One of the more astonishing was Jay Jaeckel, still a friend today, who showed me the secret of using a 59 bit mask as a -1, saving microseconds of CPU time. I remember the first time I saw Don Curry, one of the computer operators, patiently tearing off and stacking printouts. I was an incredible newbie then. Later, when I worked at the computer center in its new home in Evans Hall, I would get to know him, and others very well indeed.
Other stuff consisted of my car, a 1964 Triumph TR-4. All of my spare time, and most of my budget, went into that baby, which I loved, and kept for decades, spending thousands on maintaining it, finally giving it away to someone eager to restore it. Lacking the points to keep my car at Cloyne, I rented a space behind Stebbins, and met an important figure in my car life: Maitland Churton. He, too, owned a TR-4, in beautiful mechanical condition. He was a major figure in my life, and what a pest I was. I imposed on him shamelessly, destroying and losing his tools, coming to him when my car would die on the other side of town, and so forth. He repaid me with patience and kindness. What a great guy. I still a nice pair of parallel jaw pliers that I stole from him. Drugs, particularly marijuana, were common, but I did not participate, being still rather straight-laced, believing all the stuff I had heard about how dope was evil.
So, this covers getting a life together again, with friends, new activities, a car, and above all a new place to live, Cloyne. I did not do superlatively in school. As I mentioned, my english and chemistry classes were early in the morning (8am or so) and overlapped. I dived in, my second quarter, confident that I could take on upper division organic chemistry, and crashed and burned. I was also distracted by recreation and computer programming activities that had nothing to do with classes. I did very little studying, but being basically pretty smart, I did well in other classes, including english, calculus, lower division sciences, and poly sci. Add to that the politics of the time, the riots and demonstrations, and it was a very confusing and distracting but also a very rewarding time of my life.
(to be continued)
