“The first night we got the Ataris, the bad element in the school thought it was TVs and came and robbed us. And we caught them coming down the stairs with all the Ataris. It was funny. It wouldn’t have been funny, if we hadn’t have caught them. By this time, I had to have a technical assistant in the computer room and I tried to have them add that person to their personnel list, but they couldn’t do it. They had no money. They had to pay so much for cleaning the building and so much for this and for that.
“So I went to the University’s lab for computers and said, ‘Do you have a student in this lab who will never graduate, but who knows more about computer programming than anybody else around?’ They said, ‘We sure do.’ And they introduced me to this sloppy, slovenly, overweight person. He even slobbered when he walked. So I said to him, ‘I have a need for a supervisor of a computer lab. Do you know about mathematics and computers?’ He said, ‘Ask me anything.’ So I asked him about mathematics and calculus. I asked him about computers, how they worked and what they do and he was smarter than hell.
“So I said, ‘Would you take a job, if I can get a slot for it to work with kids in the school system?’ I said we would have to change your appearance a little bit. You’d have to look like a teacher. He said, ‘Yeah.’” So, of course, my Principal said no. I had one friend by this time in the administration in the Denver Schools. He was the deputy superintendent and I said, I got to have this position. He said, ‘Your principal has to ask for it.’ But he wouldn’t do it.
“So I made a form — a liability form for insurance — for $1 million, because I had a non-certificated person running my computer lab in a windowless room about the size of my office. I had 9 or 10 pieces of equipment. I went down to the Principal’s office and gave him this certificate of insurance and I said, ‘I am putting this man in charge of the kids, because it is dangerous not to have a supervisor. And I bought a $1 million liability policy’ — and I showed it to him; it must have been real — ‘and I think you ought to have one, too, because you are responsible for what goes on in this building.’ Well, I thought he was going to tear me apart. He was a littler man than I was, so I wasn’t too worried.
“He calls the Deputy Superintendent. The guys says, ‘Well, do we have another teacher in the building who has access to every TV station, every newspaper, other than Hoffman?’ He said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘So what do you think will happen to us at the school system if you refuse to give him a supervisor?’ I had a paper … we had gone to the library, where they had two teachers, and kept track of how many kids used the library each day. And we kept track of how many kids used our nine-position computer lab each day and we won out. Big time. I have proof that we taught more students per day than the library. That was a no-brainer I got him in and I got the enmity of the principal and I think I got the respect of the Deputy Superintendent, because after that, I had no trouble with him at all. That’s one of the stories that I cherish.”