Shortly after graduation I went to an airline school in California and was
hired by Eastern Airlines in Miami. I continued to work for Eastern for 8
years, moving after 6 months to New York City and then to Chicago in 1964.
I traveled every chance I had and was fortunate to visit many countries in
Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico as well as different areas of the US. I
was intrigued by the computers at Eastern and decided to go back to school
to learn how to program them. After completion of my classes I was hired by
SCM Corp. In less than a year the division I worked for was merged with
Control Data Corp, a manufacturer of computer equipment, mostly super
computers. All the people acquired from SCM were trained on a new
technology that CDC was selling in the optical character recognition field.
As a Marketing Applications Analyst I demonstrated to potential customers
how those systems could be used by their company. I also was technical
support for several large accounts, one of which was Sears. In 1970 I went
to work for Sears, National Data Processing Dept., responsible for software
support, installation and training of in-house programmers, for the Control
Data Systems. I loved the job as I traveled to all the Sears computer
centers and spent a lot of time in Atlanta, Dallas, Boston, Kansas City and
the Washington DC area as well as Chicago.
I met my husband, Richard Waltz, while at Control Data. We were married in
1969 and will celebrate our 40th this August. During Dick's 27 year career
as a customer engineer and engineer-in-charge with Control Data we were
transferred from Chicago to West Lafayette, IN (Purdue University) for 5
years, Indianapolis for 5 years (1980-85) and then back to West Lafayette
till 1994. We also spent a lot of time living in Minneapolis while Dick
attended new computer classes. With Dick working on the Purdue University
campus many years and living only a couple blocks from Mackey Arena and
Ross-Ade Stadium, needless to say we are Purdue Boilermaker Fans.
We have one daughter, Marla, who graduated from Purdue with a degree in
Consumer and Family Sciences. She also has a master's in school
administration and works for the Lee County school system in Ft. Myers, Fl.
Marla married a fellow Purdue graduate and has two daughters 10 and 5, which
are the "light of our life". After graduation she interviewed with SHS but
they were so late in calling her back with a job offer, she had already
accepted a position with Charlotte High in Punta Gorda, Fl.
In 1994 we moved to Fort Myers where we both worked for Sony for a few years
until we retired from full employment in 98. After visiting friends in
Central Florida we moved to a very active retirement community in Clermont,
Fl (near Orlando) in 2001. I stay active with neighborhood committee
assignments, gourmet cooking and sewing. Cooking and sewing are my arts.
Dick and I belonged to gourmet groups in each city that we moved to. Also
as time permits, I design and sew heirloom baptismal dresses, as well
as, other types of sewing that are my expression of art. Dick and I love to
travel and enjoy visiting all the friends we've made and maintained in our
moves over the last 50 years.
As I was going thru pictures to send I ran across the one of me at SCM. Boy
have we come a long way in technology. That paper tape that I am inserting
in a tape reader is the program for that machine. Some of the first
computers I worked on had only 4K of memory and when it increased to 16K on
the next system I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I remember the
complete awe when Sears acquired an IBM360 with 48K of memory. That system
ran 24/7.
