Trumping the System The Utopian Dream

My first memory is watching my family's pig being slaughtered. I watched in fascination as the butcher's heavy mallet came down squarely on top of the tethered animal's head. Once confirmed dead, I helped spread straw on top and around the dead beast and lit the straw on fire. The pungent smell of hair and flesh burning filled the air. Once the flames expired, the butcher's skillful knife began separating the skin from the carcass, gutting the abdominal cavity and carving the rest in large sections, saving a quarter for himself. For the following two days, our family was busy dissecting, packing and making sausage from the carcass. The intestines made effective casings. The meat would easily last through the winter. It was 1948. I was 3. We lived less than a kilometer from Lury-sur-Arnon, a town of about 600 in the Loire Valley farm country. Our small home sat on a hilltop overlooking the town and could be described generously as having three rooms of living space for the five of us. We did have a cellar where wine and canned preserves were stored and another barn-like storage area. A coal-burning stove dominated the living /kitchen area and I cannot possibly imagine it without my mother occupied at it, preparing meals. A room off the kitchen area held the beds where the family slept. We had no running water, electricity, TV, radio, telephone, or car. My parents did have bicycles. In other words, we had everything we needed. I graduated programming school on the day John Kennedy was assassinated - November 22, 1963. A group of us had just returned from a celebratory graduation lunch and given the news. My first response was: "What's the punch line?" More than fifty years later, I recall the details of this event. Three years later, to the day, I reported for active duty in Norfolk, Virginia. Those three years at LaSalle were nothing short of wondrous. Every experience was new and exciting. There were five of us in the programming department and we were all regarded highly by the rest of the employees. This was the bank's first computer and we were assigned to convert manual systems to the current technology. The CPU had 8K of memory, a card reader and punch, a printer, four tape drives and a typewriter console. The equipment filled a glass-enclosed space of about four hundred square feet. Some technology! What fun! .......