Career, Family And Living For The Lord
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A Twenty-Five Year History

When I was released from active duty, I had mixed emotions about leaving Norfolk and the Navy. I had enjoyed my work at COMOCEANSYSLANT, I had enjoyed going to and graduating from William and Mary, I had been pleased by the work that I had been able to do for my Graduate thesis, and my family had found a spiritual home at Fairmount Park. In fact, as I surveyed my situation, I had to acknowledge that everything in my life had become pretty stable, despite the fact that I had had such a shaky start into adulthood.

It was difficult for us to leave our utopian-style environment in Norfolk, but life often does not give one a choice. In our case, we were moving on with some sadness in our heart, but we were also moving with wide-open eyes and a spirit of expectancy. Dale Burden had instilled in us the belief that we, just like all Christians who are required to relocate, were being sent into the uttermost parts of the world to be Ambassadors for Christ, and we were excited about that challenge! I had secured a job for a Department of Defense (DOD) contractor in Washington, DC, Planning Research Corporation (PRC), and we would soon be working out of and living in the Northern Virginia area.

When Linda and I first drove to Northern Virginia to look for a home, we did not know anything about the area. It was then, while driving and trying to mentally prepare myself for our new location and the challenges of a new job, that I drove passed a sign on Interstate-95 which said, "Dale City," one-mile ahead. Linda saw the word "Dale," immediately equated that town to our pastor and friend, Dale Burden, and instructed me to pull off. We drove from one end of that small town to the other, and on our way out, we passed a real estate office, where we inquired about and rented a house. That was in October 1975, and we lived in Dale City from that time until employment considerations forced us to move again in July 1989.

It is often difficult to begin a new job, and I started my new job in the Nation's Capitol with a certain amount of fear and self-doubt. Would I be able to do the work? Would I be able to make my new boss and company happy? Would I be able to please our DOD client with my technical skills? I was not sure about the answers to these questions, but like anyone else in that situation, I set my mind towards the work and did my best. As a Christian, I felt that the Lord had been making good my path. I believed that He had led me to PRC, in general, and to the Navy Computer Software Support Activity (NAVCOSSACT) in Washington, D.C., in particular. So, I pretty much expected everything to go well.

During my first day on the job, I was introduced to my Government Point of Contact. His name was Joe. He was probably about eight to ten years older than me, he drove a sports car, and I could tell that he was the type of person that most people liked. For sure, he was very popular in our office, and while he did not come across as much of a scholarly type, I also knew that he was very intelligent. For my first assignment, he put me on a system called the Geographic and Alphanumeric Display System, or "GADS" for short. This program, which had probably been around for maybe as much as twenty-five years, was executed on an alphanumeric terminal and a TEKTRONICS geographic terminal. An operator would fill in a one-page graphic request at the alphanumeric terminal, press TRANSMIT, and then the information would be processed and sent to the display program. This display program, which was called "DDS" for Data Display System, was responsible for displaying the graphics information on the geographic terminal.

DDS could display geographic information in one of three different map projections - Mercator, Gnomonic, and Polar. When I started working on GADS, though, there were some significant technical problems. First, if the operator wanted to draw a map of the whole world, he or she would have to always select Mercator as the projection. That part was all right, but the problem was that it would then take DDS about four minutes to draw the map. That was much too long! The second problem was that the Polar projection capability was very flaky. The operator might choose to use this kind of map projection, and for no apparent reason, the program would get to a certain point and hang. In those instances, GADS would have aborted and sometimes even the graphics terminal would have been disabled. Then, a complete system reboot was usually necessary to recover, which made this particular problem especially critical.

During the middle seventies, having a geographic display capability like GADS was very important to the Navy side of the Department of Defense. Therefore, Joe frequently had to give presentations to high-level Naval Officers from the Pentagon. Unfortunately, GADS was so unreliable that our presentations had to be carefully scripted according to a very strict format. We drew only a few specific maps, we put only certain data on those maps, and we only performed a few very "safe" functions once the data had been displayed. For a long time, Joe did not vary his presentation from this rigid format because he was not sure what would happen. Even worse, when he had to give a presentation to a group from the Pentagon, our office would usually have to make everyone else get off the computer so that GADS, which had been written very inefficiently in COBOL, would not have to compete for computer resources.

Even with all that was done to try to make the presentations go smoothly, though, most of the time they never did. Something would always seem to go wrong, and those who had come to our office, expecting to see a smart, efficient graphics system, would often leave in disgust. Joe had not developed GADS, but because he had assumed responsibility for the program, he many times had to take a lot of the grief for its obvious failures.

In the middle of one set of challenges, namely that of establishing my career and raising our family, life confronted Linda and me with another challenge which turned out to be one of our hardest and most difficult. In late 1975 or early 1976, I came home from work one day, in the middle of my work on GADS, to learn that our oldest daughter, who was about fifteen at the time, had not come home from school. We did not know exactly what had happened, but Linda thought that Debbie might have run away, and we were both horrified!

From my perspective, her running away was especially difficult because I had thought that she might be running away from me, the so-called evil stepparent. I had not wanted to be a bad parent, and I had not even thought that I was a bad parent. But Debbie's expression and apparent frustration at least made me feel like maybe I had been. Earlier that afternoon, Linda had received a telephone call from the mother of one of Debbie's classmates. Apparently, our oldest daughter and one of her school friends had run away with a carnival which had just left town that morning. The other girl's father, who was a pastor at a church in Dumfries, had gone after both of them and was bringing them back to his home.

That evening, Linda and I drove to the Pastor's house and awaited their return. This part of our life happened over twenty years ago, but I will never forget the look on Debbie's face that night when she walked into the room. She had an expression of deep hatred in her demeanor, and I had never seen anything like that before. I did not know if her hatred was being directed towards me, towards Linda and me, or just towards life, in general. But as I looked into her eyes, I saw a person whom I did not feel like I knew, and I was devastated. Parenting is always hard, but for Linda and me, it was about to become a little more difficult.

I will confess, however, that to Linda's credit, she always stood by me. When others in our family attacked me as being too mean and too much of a disciplinarian, which by the way really was not true, Linda backed me up and told them that this thing was not my fault. The event of a daughter running away from home could have destroyed our marriage, but it did not. Instead, Linda and I became closer than ever, and we joined together to deal with this particular difficulty. Problems often separate couples, but for the two of us, they were and have been almost like super-glue!

I did not think that I had been guilty of bad parenting, but I did think that Debbie resented having me as her parent. Stepparenting is difficult for the stepparent, but it is also difficult for the child. As I viewed the situation, I felt that my feelings were not the more important, so I approached Linda and talked to her about a possible solution. I did not think that Debbie liked me, and I did not think that she wanted to be a part of my home. At the same time, though, I did not want her to be running all over creation just to get away from me. Because of my concerns for our daughter, I told Linda that perhaps we should consider letting her live with her "real" father in Florida, at least until she was ready to come back home to us. That decision was not easy for either of us, but for what we thought was Debbie's best good, we both agreed! When Debbie walked out of our life that day, Linda and I were very sad, but we let her go, hoping and praying that the new surroundings would somehow help her outlook on life.

People often ask why, and I think that I was asking a lot of whys about Debbie, work and other things. Linda and I very much wanted a Christian home. She and I also wanted to serve the Lord. But it seemed like we were running into some really difficult obstacles. The words that I have just written concerning this time in our life tell the story, but they certainly do not convey all of the emotions which we were all feeling. In the midst of it all, though, Linda and I remained faithful to each other and also to the Lord. Even though we were feeling like complete flops as parents, she and I tried to captain a bus route for our church, which was Marumsco Baptist Church in Woodbridge, Virginia. We were doing our best to tell others about the Lord, and He was blessing both of us.

In February 1976, our pastor at Marumsco Baptist got the idea of having something which he referred to as a "whole hog offering." He promoted this offering for several weeks prior to the scheduled event so that he could try to generate some enthusiasm within the church. This offering, which was meant to raise extra money for the church, had a very simple premise. Each church member would take their whole pay check and drop it into the collection plate. Instead of the customary ten percent of one's income being given for the Lord's work, this offering was intended to take one hundred percent. And like the fool that I have so often been in my life, I went along!

Linda and I were trying to raise our large family, my salary was good but not good enough for our large family, Linda was taking in baby sitting jobs, and here I was trying to give my whole paycheck away. In February 1976, which was the time for this special offering, Linda and I were confronting another critical economic problem, as well. Our car had to be inspected by the end of the month, and we needed four tires to pass. Not only that, but the only possible check that we could have used to buy the tires was the very one which the preacher was wanting. Therefore, I was in a real quandary as to what to do. Should I give away my paycheck to the church, not buy the tires and start walking, or should I not support the Lord's work and use my money to hoard this world's goods? I think that anyone can see the decision which I was about to make, and in that regard, I must point out that, once again, Linda did not complain. She let me do exactly what I thought was the right thing to do, and at that time, I thought the right thing to do was to support the church.

The day before the big offering, which was also only a few days before the end of the month, I left the house to go buy the four tires. I did not have any money, but I had sort of determined to just charge them and then try to figure out later how to actually pay for them. I did not have much credit, and I also did not have enough free money in my paycheck to take on a new bill. But I thought that I had to do something, and I did not know what else to do. So, charging the purchase seemed to be the more logical way to go. While driving down Dale Boulevard, however, I felt moved to pull over to the side of the road before I actually did anything to pray about what I was about to do.

In responding to that feeling, I turned into a KMart Shopping Center, took out my Bible, and began to pray. I knew that I really could not afford to buy the tires even on credit, plus I did not have complete peace about what I had set out to do. Therefore, I just sat there in that shopping area, very early in the morning before any of the stores had opened, and talked to the Lord. What I did next may or may not have been a good thing, but I did it anyway. I opened my Bible and read the very first verse that I saw. It was Psalms 40:1, and it said, "I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry." After reading those words, I decided to not buy the tires. I did not know if that would mean walking or not, but I decided to take a chance.

The next day at church, Linda and I did as the pastor had requested. With a car that had four bald tires and a family that needed our financial provision, we trusted the Lord and dropped our check into the plate. A couple of days later, I took my car to be inspected, and it failed!!! A couple of days after that, February ended, and we started walking.

I suppose that most people live their life within all the so-called safe boundaries of life, so they probably do not often experience a genuine, spiritual blessing. My life has never been like that. As a teenager, I had flunked out of college with just about all "F"s. Then, as a newborn Christian, I had watched the Lord turn all that around, get me back into school, and set my feet on solid ground. I had messed up terribly, but what a blessing it was to see how He could work from within that situation! As a Junior Officer in Norfolk, working at a local Department Store, I had watched the Lord defend my cause when I had refused to participate in a Sunday inventory. And in February 1976, as persons who had literally given their all to the Lord, Linda and I were again about to experience a very rich, very special spiritual blessing.

For the first week in March, I walked to my bus stop, a walk which was about three miles each way from our home. This meant that I had to get up about an hour earlier than usual each morning and also that I got home about an hour later each evening. On Friday evening, at the end of that first week, Linda and I got a phone call from our neighbor, asking if we had had some work done on our car that day. We did not know what she was talking about, but apparently, someone had been working on our car. After the conversation, I went outside to see if everything was all right. It was then that I discovered that someone had bought and put four new tires on our car.

To this day, I do not know who had done such a wonderful thing, but behind the whole experience, I knew that it was really the Lord Who had been making good on His promises to us. We had waited patiently on Him! We had even walked for a week. But when all was said and done, we had complied with our pastor's wishes and had still gotten our much-needed tires! What a blessing all of that was, even though the experience had also carried with it a certain degree of anxiety and frustration.

Back at work, after having worked on GADS for probably about six or seven months, I got the idea in the Spring of 1976 to completely redevelop DDS. I had studied the three types of map projections for a while, plus I had also looked at the database structures of our world map. I felt that I could redesign and reprogram the entire system, in FORTRAN, and have an operational prototype in just a couple of months. My objectives were to eliminate any unnecessary functionality in the display component of GADS, to speed up the time that it took to draw a world map, to fix the problems with our Polar projection capability, and to make the overall display program much more robust and less susceptible to failures. I pitched my ideas to Joe, and he agreed that something had to be done. He also told me that I could be the one who would try to do it. So, once again in my professional career, I was about to travel down a path which would be very exciting and professionally rewarding, and I could hardly wait!

I enjoyed a lot of success with my "new" GADS venture. I developed most of the code at the TEKTRONICS graphics terminal using an interactive type of FORTRAN as my programming language. With that setup, I could enter a few program instructions, type RUN, and instantly see the results. I had great fun doing the work, so much so that I almost hated to see the weekends come. Finally, after a couple of months, I was able to give Joe a demonstration of what I had done, and he was very pleased. He told me that he thought that I had accomplished each of my objectives.

By redesigning the world map database, I had reduced the time to draw a world map from about four minutes to just under forty seconds. Basically, our map file had been designed to plot the world map on a Calcomp plotter, so what I had done was remove all of the redundant points. On a plotter, the pen redraws many of the points two, three, and even four or more times so that the print will be of a good, consistently dark-ink quality. For our electronic display, however, that redundant drawing was not needed, so I got rid of it! I also re-ordered the points in the database so that the display would be produced in a more orderly fashion, from left to right and top to bottom, instead of jumping all over the screen plotting points in different places. These two major changes led to the increased speed which we saw in drawing maps.

I also rewrote all of the display programs, cleaning up sloppy mathematical equations and trying to make the program more robust. As a result, GADS went from being a system that had been almost completely unreliable to being one that could be run with a fair amount of confidence. Joe was very pleased by what I had done, and he presented me with a special Letter of Commendation. Unfortunately, before I had gotten done with all of my upgrades, the Pentagon pulled the plug on GADS, and my work was set aside. We stored everything that had been done and moved on to the next program. I never got my official letter from the Government. But I did get special recognition from my own company, plus I was on my way to building a solid, technical reputation among my peers. Everyone knew that I had done something very good on a very bad, very inefficient program, and they also knew that I had done it in a fairly short amount of time. Therefore, I felt good about the whole experience, despite the fact that nothing had really come from it at the time.

During the middle seventies, our life was full of contrasting emotions. I was doing pretty well will my career, but at home, we were still having to deal with the challenges of raising our "four" children, plus take on the added challenge of having had to let Debbie go. In the midst of all of these matters, Linda and I were doing our best to remain faithful to the Lord, even though it was not always easy. Then, just when it started to look like things might slow down a bit, Linda and I had to deal with another special situation at home, on this occasion with our son, Michael.

I rode a commuter bus to work in D.C. each day, and Mike drove me to the bus stop. This way, he could use the car for school. One day, he and some of his friends had decided to skip school. That was bad enough, but what made the whole matter even worse was that one of the kids had thrown an empty bottle out the car window and almost hit a perdestrian. The enraged pedestrian wrote down the license plate number and turned the information into the police. On July 23, 1976, Linda and I had to go to court with our son. We were very upset and embarrassed by the situation, but we still stood by him as he stood before the judge. As it turned out, the judge did not really do anything, so Mike and his friends got off lucky. While that may not say much for our Judicial System, Linda and I were thankful that Mike had been given another chance. That would not be his last spell of trouble, but it would be the last time that Linda and I would ever have to stand beside him in a court of law. For the most part, whenever he did get into any kind of difficulty, he always took care of it on his own and did not ask for or require our help.