Pamela Jean Owens off-line

Yes, it was bound to happen. I learned Fortran at SMU School of Engineering when I was a senior in high school back in 1965, when the Engineering faculty hadn’t figured out yet how to teach Fortran to their Freshman Engineers. So they enlisted our Honors Math teacher from Hillcrest (High School, Dallas), Mrs. Lee Ellwood (beloved she will ever be by all her students, Amen) to teach us and then teach their teachers how to teach them. I fell immediately in love with the whole idea of a Flow Chart. I reveled in searching down and fixing bugs. I giggled with glee as page after page of computer paper flowed over the spindles of the printer, with its beautiful alternating green and white pattern (oh, be still, my heart!).

Then I strayed from the world of geeks, save for a brief foray as a college senior taking statistics in my Sociology Methods class and again writing a program to do a factor analysis of a set of data for my senior paper. Once again I marveled at the Flow Chart. I passionately swatted and thwarted all bugs in my program. I caressed that print-out and eagerly consumed my results. (more…)

A lot of the time I can’t decide if I have great life or a crappy life. If I have to ask, does that say what the answer is? Just now for some reason I couldn’t get the “A” key on my keyboard to work. I kept trying over and over and then it would work, and now it is taking anywhere between one and 3 hits to get an “a” to show up on the screen. Being one of the most frequent letters in the alphabet, a sentence with no “a’s” in it looks pretty strange.

Am I just missing some small but essential “A” key that would make me intuitively know how to do life? Usually, in typing, you only have to backspace when you have made a mistake. When you hit “d” instead of “s” or you reversed “en” and typed “ne”  instead, which I regularly do typing my own last name, “Owens,” you just hit “backspace” enough times and you get a “do over.” But not being able to count on the “A”  key is different. You know you hit ll the right keys nd yet you look bck nd it appers you didn’t. See? So you have to keep backspacing and redoing it, even when you know you did it right. A lot of the time, that’s the way I feel about my life. And at 59, I am starting to also feel that if I don’t get it right pretty soon and have it stick, I’m going to be out of time, and life in the physical sense will be over.

Sure, I believe I’ll get pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, and chocolate cake and strawberries and meadows full of flowers too, and even streets of gold if I want them. And a mansion with all my loved ones will be waiting for me, shining with light. But I want pie now too, the good old mouth-watering kind like Mamaw used to make, and like she taught me to make.

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Could RFK + MLK = Barack? or maybe BaRacK?

I don’t know who first made the analogy between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, but the analogy doesn’t work for me. Obama himself admits he isn’t old enough to remember John Kennedy, but I am, and Obama is no John Kennedy. However, after what I saw yesterday in Nebraska, I have concluded Obama isn’t less than JFK; I think he may be more. I think Obama may be the sum of two dreams, the Kennedy dream and the King dream and, more importantly, I think the Obama movement may finally be the movement that can unite multiple sets of dreamers.

I am suggesting, if I may be so bold, that Obama = RFK + MLK. Because after what I have seen in Nebraska this past week, I am reminded not of 1960, when I was only 12, but of 1968, when I turned 20. And since 1968, until last week, I had not seen or heard or felt or known the press of the crowd, the smiles and laughter that can only come from hope, the feeling of being in an enormous family of the human race, finally united with one voice, a voice of peace and of justice — I had not again been in the realm of a sense that “yes, the time is now,” since 1968, until last week.

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Being only 20 in 1968, I was not yet old enough to vote. But I was old enough to campaign, old enough to protest the war, old enough to work for civil rights, old enough to see men I knew go to Vietnam and come back crippled in body and, as we soon saw, even more crippled in mind and spirit.

I was old enough to have heard Martin Luther King speak at my college in 1967, the only time he ever appeared on stage with Black militant Stokely Carmichael. (more…)

PREFACE:

I grew up in Texas where we always chose our delegates in caucuses — precinct caucuses. I didn’t know exactly what they were, but my dad was precinct chair and I remember going to the caucus with him. They were in the evening. I somehow don’t remember Mother going — maybe my brother was too young to go, or maybe I just don’t remember it all. And then I was an adult in Austin, and we caucused not for candidates but for platform plank issues. Many people don’t realize that the party platform does get presented, argued, and approved at the convention. First the county convention, then the state, then the big D-N-C.

When I was growing up the convention was always in the summer, when school was out, and I spent a lot of time with my Helton grandparents in the summertime. In those days, Walter Cronkite and Huntley-and-Brinkley, and the rest of the guys on TV and radio covered both conventions “gavel to gavel” and were they ever proud of it! That was long before cable, of course, and we only had 3 channels, then we got “educational tv,” and then we got a local station that wasn’t one of the big 3. All 3 covered the conventions and would never have dreamed there would come a day when they wouldn’t — I’d never have dreamed of it either, and I still forget every 4 years that it’s not going to be that way still. I keep wondering if we should get cable but I just can’t imagine paying for tv — that’s just…. wrong ….. that’s unAmerican ….. they pay for tv in England …. we get our tv free, don’t we? That’s what I remember learning. I think pay tv was right up there with socialized medicine and the queen.

TODAY: WOW!!!

Today NEBRASKA held a caucus. Its first caucus. (more…)

I was first introduced to computers in my senior year of high school, Hillcrest High School in Dallas, Texas. I graduated high school in 1966. As a young math whiz, I was part of an honors math class that learned so much Calculus that I placed into the third semester of Advanced Calculus as a freshman at Vanderbilt University, and during that semester I tutored the sophomore science and engineering students in the class with me. And we didn’t get to anything that was new to me until most of the way through the semester.

Our amazing math education was not just because we were young prodigies, although some said we were. More important than who we were had to be who our teacher was, Mrs. Lee Ellwood, a genius of a teacher who had taken every math course offered at S.M.U., undergrad and graduate, but wasn’t interested in writing a dissertation so they couldn’t give her a doctorate. But the math profs at S.M.U. were in awe of Mrs. Ellwood, so when they kept bombing out trying to teach Fortran, the new computer language that was so important in the early days of serious computer use, to their freshman Engineering students. They appealed to Mrs. Ellwood to figure out what they were doing wrong. The deal they offered her was that she would learn Fortran, which she was bound to do anyway, then she would bring us out to S.M.U. once a week for an evening class and teach us Fortran. (more…)