Lt. Colonel Robert George Cole
Lt. Colonel Robert George ColeIt was somewhat of a culture shock but since we went to the high school on the military base, the kids were generally not natives either. It was ostensibly a normal civilian high school except all the kids there had military parents. The valedictorian almost always went to "West Point".
An example of the culture soon hit me in the face. My best friend hated the military, and tried to be as much like Bob Dylan as he could. However Shortly after he graduated (ahead of us by one year) he enlisted in the army and we never heard from him after that. Oh did we tell you that his father was a Major General? His family did tell us many years later that he was living in Belgium and teaching music.
On of our other classmates was Alan Keyes, who recently ran for the US Senate as a Republican and formerly ran for President.
A basketball player named Oneal also went to our school much later. At the class 1A (smallest) He was the whole basketball team.
Being good at math, we got along well with our algebra teacher. Somehow computers and programming came up, probably because programming involves very logical processes like those a mathematician would use. The teacher (his name is Mr. Lynn, never did know his first name) gave us a set of books from IBM called Programed Learning Manuals (PLM) for Fortran. Of course Fortran was one of the early computer languages but still used today.
Over a few months we learned Fortran from the books (no computer of course). Eventually we where able to really test some programs on the IBM mainframe at nearby Trinity University because Mr. Lynn enrolled in a computer intro course for teachers.
Along came the annual Key Club Dance. A theme was needed. At the time computer matching of couples was occasionally in the news.
So we proposed a Computer Dance. Everybody would fill out questionnaires and the Computer would match couples, the results not given until the dance.
Naturally, being young (and with the usual hormone problems) we wanted to write the computer program (so we could of course match up the right pretty young things with the right person, guess who?). And we did.
Don't know what happened at the dance because we did not attend.
Our band 'The Baker Street Case', yours truly the organist was told we couldn't play because we had a "Long-Hair" in the band. The "Long-Hair" was a high school student from the adjoining neighborhood.
At our high school long hair was absolutely not allowed. The rule was rigorously enforced by "Skin Head", our name for the assistant principle, last we heard he was still alive and still being called "Skin Head".
In disgust at not being allowed to play (and a rival replacement band hired at last minute) we threw the list of matches down and stormed out.