I wrote this essay to express the depth of gratitude I feel for my alma mater creating a course of study for something so new that there was no degree plan, and the decade or so I lived and learned in Little D.
Image courtesy University of North Texas.
A stranger knocked on my front door. When I answered, she gave me the name of a bass player and asked if I knew where he was. I did. He was asleep in my spare bedroom.
That moment would prove to be the unexpected opportunity that completed the long arc of my tertiary education.
After high school, education takes many forms. Many people do very well without attending college by establishing their careers with on-the-job experience. Associate degrees and technical schools can quickly get some on the employment track. Others earn a bachelor’s and grab a job that may or may not coincide with their college major. A select pack gets master’s degrees and PhDs to show their proficiency in usually established fields or to research new realms in those fields.
But what if your dream was to do something so new that there were no tech schools, no degree plans, and the possibility of employment nearly nonexistent?
Like a gambler trying to fill an inside straight, I pursued just such a dream. North Texas State University (now UNT) helped me achieve it by employing an innovative approach to teaching. And, the university’s home of Denton, just by being Denton, put me in contact with a unique and inspiring bunch of people. I am thankful for both.
In my high school years, I had been more social than scholarly. It was a lack-of-work ethic I maintained through my first year at North Texas. Before going to the university, however, I enlisted in the Navy. So, after my first year in college, I went to boot camp, dodged rockets at an airbase in Vietnam, and later went for a 28,000 mile ocean voyage aboard an aircraft carrier. I acquired some real (and surreal) life experience, and I learned how to focus my efforts.
Having earned GI Bill’s educational benefits to pay my way, I returned to school in 1972. I took classes to assess my aptitude for business, English, history, journalism, and psychology and learned I possessed a little talent for writing and music and substantially more for visual art.
While plowing through the art curriculum, a part-time job in the campus computing center introduced me to publications that hinted at the untapped potential of computers. I discovered that I roughly understood computing technology and programming.
Soon, I fell into the orb of a few students following their curiosity and independently exploring electronic music and image synthesis, videography, programming primitive computing devices, and ways to present ideas in these new forms. A diffuse group, we usually worked alone or in groups of two or three, comparing accomplishments and failures between classes or in cafes or bars.
Early in its inception, I got involved in a campus political movement called Artists and Outlaws. Started by Dwayne Carter, an artist now based in Dallas, it spread from the art department to all liberal arts students. We felt the athletics department dominated the majority of educational resources and we wanted a more equitable distribution.
Also at this time, I was co-publishing and editing a small art magazine called Prima with Tre Roberts, an artist now living in Portland, Oregon. Beyond the flyers put out by Dwayne, it became the visual center of Artists and Outlaws.
From this organization’s meetings — sometimes in faculty members’ homes — and from Prima, deans of the Liberal Arts schools heard about this small group of students I was a part of who were exploring art and technology.
Out of the blue, as far as I could tell, the Colleges of Music, Science, Visual Arts and Design, and Liberal Arts and Social Sciences decided to formalize our efforts.
Walking into the art building one day, Professor Claudia Betti, the department’s Undergraduate Coordinator, stopped me. A regal woman anyway, she was descending a stairway just inside the entrance. I looked up at her as if she were a colossus speaking to me from on high. She said, “We don’t know what you are up to, but we’re going to help.”
These words were a life-changing moment for me. I still get moved to tears when I think of them and from the unbelievably great educational opportunity that followed.
At about that exact moment, everyone in that loose group of emerging New Media artists experienced a transformative moment similar to mine. Then, over the next two years, we studied and jammed with visiting techno-artists while taking courses ranging from television production to holography. Our dreams and skills flourished.
During this period a good friend introduced me to Ric Speed, now an El Rancho, New Mexico artist. Not a student at North Texas, he was a freelance programmer working on a project for the university’s bookstore. Ric’s intense desire and experimental efforts in computing, music, and visual art exceeded mine. We became great friends. Working with him on and off for the next 15 years boosted my knowledge immeasurably.
After many more than four years at North Texas, I graduated with a general art degree and a profusion of electives. At that point, I knew I needed to learn more about computers. More pressing, I needed to make a living while doing it. Upon graduation, the lovely check provided by the GI Bill’s educational benefits stopped showing up in my mailbox.
I applied for the data control position in the City of Denton’s data processing department. They only gave me a chance due to a recommendation from recent hire and former UNT programmer, Jim Kuykendall. He knew me from my part-time work at the university’s computing center.
As a test of my abilities, Tom Foreman and Cengiz Capan, the department’s director and lead programmer respectively, handed me a printout of their entire accounting and billing application. They tasked me with analyzing and flowcharting it. Understandably, they doubted a young artist applying for this kind of work.
This test was my first experience with RPG2, the language used to code the application, and it was the first time I analyzed application code. Using my design skills, I saw the patterns and then the logic in the code.
It worked. I got the job.
I continued playing in No Sweat, an eccentric latin-rock-reggae-swing band that formed a year earlier. Music kept my creative juices flowing while I absorbed information about data processing.
Before long, I was promoted to programmer.
A little over a year after I started working for the City of Denton, the department’s director, Tom, got tired of fussing with the city manager and quit, leaving for parts unknown. Jim left, too, hiring on with and eventually becoming Director of Data Processing for Moore Business Forms. Cengiz assumed the directorship for a while before returning to UNT to teach at the College of Business and, in due course, became Associate Dean of Operations.
That left me as the only programmer on staff. I was promoted to systems architect and named Temporary Director of Data Processing. “Temporary” because city management wasn’t all that comfortable with a bohemian-looking guy in that role.
After my emergency appointment, the City Manager hired a programmer from the City of Houston as the permanent director. His wife did not want to leave Houston and made his life miserable. He only lasted a month.
The City Manager remained ticked-off at Tom and was even more upset that his Houston hire had not worked out, so he refused to allow hiring any more full-time programmers. However, I had a budget at my disposal and would occasionally hire a consultant to help me with a maintenance load that used to be covered by a team of four.
Before Cengiz left, the Data Processing Department and city management set a plan in motion to build a new computing center. It was now up to me to take the lead in designing and building it, and converting the city’s accounting, customer service, library, tax, and utility applications from our old Univac 90/30 system to a new IBM 4341 platform.
This work load kept me busy around the clock and forced me to leave No Sweat. Yet, even after taking that off the table, I dropped from my slim 135 pounds to a ghastly 118 due to ceaseless toil and subsisting on vending machine coffee and animal crackers.
My old friend, Bob Schloss, still in Denton, came to my rescue. Bob became a Registered Nurse after getting a degree in psychology because he thought he could meet people’s needs better that way. He didn’t urge me to quit my position for my health because he knew that I loved and served Denton and its citizens like he did. Instead, he propped me up with injections of vitamin B-12. He understood that temporarily sacrificing oneself for the greater good was sometimes necessary.
Upon completion the new computer center, installing and testing the converted programs on the IBM and its peripherals, and switching operations to the new location, I trained my chain-smoking, aspirin-gulping replacement and left. Weeks prior, I informed the City Manager of my plan to resign.
I considered those years to be graduate school. My diploma was an official commendation from the Denton City Council in recognition of my efforts.
After two weeks of decompression, I took a consulting job combining the Univac 90/40 computer systems of Colonial Savings and Fort Worth Savings and then converting them to the IBM 4300 series. However, even though earning three times what I made at the City of Denton with much less effort, I was ready for creative work.
At the end of the Fort Worth contract, I heard that the USDA Service Center in Denton needed someone to help them clear out a batch of overdue projects. I jumped at the chance to create graphics and do voice-overs for a series of educational film strips.
I knew this position was just part of a waiting game, but I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for.
Nevertheless, that job was like a vacation compared to my job at the City of Denton. I was informed that I could not work more than eight hours a day and always had weekends off. These parameters allowed me to regain weight and muscle mass by eating better and tooling around Denton County on my bicycle in what I considered to be my copious free time.
In 1982, Neil Feldman, who has since passed, was over a year into being the new, forward-looking owner of Video Post and Transfer, a fast-growing post-production house for film and video in Dallas. While attending that year’s National Association of Broadcasters convention, he was intrigued by a conversation in an elevator. That encounter led to a demo in one of the hotel’s rooms. He liked what he saw and purchased a Dubner CBG-2 on the spot.
That machine, developed for the American Broadcasting Company, was the planet’s first dedicated broadcast-quality graphics and animation computer.
Shortly after the Dubner arrived at Video Post, I heard that fateful knock on my front door. When I answered it, I met Marci Folsom, an artist now based in San Francisco or Chico, California (sightings vary). She heard I was letting her musician friend crash at my place.
Indeed, my former bandmate Greg Hansen, a musician currently based in Denver, Colorado, asked me if I could take in a young bass player. He told me the bassist’s girlfriend tossed him out of their apartment.
Marci later verified this by telling me she dumped him for his inability to do housework and run errands. According to her, he only slept and took showers when he wasn’t playing bass.
While waiting for my houseguest who didn’t help around the house to wake up and shower, she and I sat and chatted. It didn’t take long for us to realize we were who each of us was looking for. Marci was already learning to create with the Dubner for Neil, but they both realized she needed a partner who was a programmer as well as a technologically adept artist.
That was Friday night. Monday morning, I requested and received the day off from work and drove to the Video Post and Transfer studios in the old Braniff Airlines wing of Love Field in Dallas. There, I laid my portfolio and resumé out in front of Neil and his Chief Science Officer, Dan Sokol, last seen living the good life in Los Gatos, California.
They liked what I had to offer.
The team I worked with at the USDA recently eliminated the backlog, so I reported to Video Post the following Monday and immediately began working 100 hours a week. For the next few months, I learned the Dubner CBG-2 and everything I could about the art and technology of video post-production. Total techno-bliss!
Even more exciting, I discovered the thrill of creating with artists working at the cutting edge of high-end video.
Because I have enjoyed the opportunity to work with so many creative associates over the years, my education never ceased. But for now, I’m must stop and express my love for the intellectually stimulating environment and creative response to new ideas that The University of North Texas provided. I received an invaluable education there and made connections that drove my career.
Postscript
All those guys in the experimental cadre at North Texas worked in the field we hoped would be a viable career path — all of us.
Professor William McCarter of the UNT College of Visual Arts and Design informed me of this at a party six or seven years after I started working at Video Post. Bill was instrumental in crafting our unusual coursework and finding visiting artists to work with us.
He said that this educational initiative made him incredibly proud, not only because it is difficult for a student with a degree in the arts to earn a living in their area of expertise but because we did it in a field unique and undeveloped at the time.
The party host was Joe Clark, both then and now a Denton-based artist with fantastic skills. He joined Marci and me in our little animation department at Video Post & Transfer a year and a half after I came aboard.
The experimental group at North Texas included Tim Walsh, a Texas artist now based in San Marcos. He was the original clarinetist/saxophonist for the Grammy Award-winning band Brave Combo and continues to perform with them on occasion. He later started Laser Spectacles, Inc., an entertainment production company specializing in designing, producing, and installing laser shows and related projects that merge sound and light to create stunning effects.
Alas, time has blurred almost all of the names and faces of the others in this group. Don’t hesitate to contact me if it’s you or someone you know.