“There was a gasoline shortage in the United States — some kind of embargo went on and the kids asked me if they could write a carpool program, if they used good mathematics, so they could go to school. None of them wanted to stay home, the students I had. School was way too much fun. And so we discussed it and I didn’t have to ask permission, because I was designing my own curriculum. Our computer carpool program, which we wrote to get kids to school, used concentric circles, until we captured ten addresses that we digitized. And we used straight-line distances for people who lived so far away they couldn’t group together with anybody close.
“In essence, I was so excited, because it was such beautiful mathematics that we wrote. And the kids divided into groups and each had a certain portion they had to put together and we finally got it together. When the All-School Council of Officers — or whatever they are called — was meeting one night and we offered all the high schools in Denver our carpool program. Now, this was still during the day of Hollerith punch cards. And I remember that it appeared on page 37 or 38 of The Denver Post, in about one-half-inch article one night.
“And, lo and behold, the next day, the phone in the office rang off the hook, inquiring about using our carpool program. Everybody was calling and this lasted for two days. I couldn’t even begin to return all the calls during work hours and the Principal complained to the Superintendent and the Superintendent says, ‘Hell, if we’ve got a school that grabbed the City’s notice, let’s exploit that.’ And they hired my father, who had just retired, as my substitute teacher in the middle of the semester and relieved me of all instruction, except computer class instruction and I had to carpool the city.
“We carpooled Lowery Air Force Base, we carpooled three computer businesses up in Boulder. We carpooled hospitals and then apartment houses of people going to work, and we were busy teaching secretaries of all these business how to digitize the addresses of their employees. And in fact, on the account of you [Jacquie}. Her business was the first one we car pooled — [Jacquie: “I worked for the Great Western Sugar Company”] — and they were willing to allow you to carpool their operation.
“In those days, there wasn’t a lot of memory in computers and we could digitize and run a program for 5,000 people who worked in a company on the Burroughs that the Denver Public Schools had, and the school gave us nighttime to do it. They hadn’t gotten to the point where they had to program twenty-four hours a day. Well, so then, I had to change my curriculum, I had to have a briefing committee who would brief the committees — the Mayor set them up — he set up groups of people for us to go downtown to, to brief them about carpooling. He would come and sit in on a bunch of them, just smiling from ear to ear.
“And the kids had to learn to brief people and to communicate what it was all about and not use fancy words that lost them. The funniest one was when the State Legislature came to me and said, ‘We need one of your kids to tell us about the legality of carpooling with insurance of cars.’ So they had to research that. So my kids were all over the city.
“Finally, Washington, DC’s Department of Transportation called and they wanted me to come and tell them about the carpool system. Well, I never ever gave a briefing to anybody; I had the students do it. I figured that it was part of their learning experience, so I got what I thought was the best explainer in the program and told him he was going to Washington, DC, with me to explain to the Department of Transportation what it did and how it worked. And he got the Denver Public Schools to close their computers to close their computers down for one morning, in the middle of the week, to teletype — which I never thought of doing—the data. He somehow figured out how to transfer the data from keypunch cards to teletyping, all of Jacquie’s company’s [data] to Washington, DC. And used the Denver computer to carpool her company. Well, he sat there with a long stick and a blackboard and he lectured those people from the federal government like you’ve never seen in your life. He answered every one of their questions. How fast the machine was. How much capacity did it have? Why we didn’t stick it in a more complicated way, etc., etc.
“And [after] we got back home and in about three weeks, there was a publication that came to every business in the United States from the Department of Transportation. And they said they have studied and examined carpool programs around the country and those that would be given away — wouldn’t cost anybody — and there were four. One was written at MIT, one was written at Caltech, one was written by the City of San Francisco, and one by George Washington High School of Denver, Colorado.
“Well, it ended with the best one for portability and simplicity was George Washington High School of Denver, Colorado. I got so many requests for the raw program so they could stick it in their computers, you can’t imagine. They had to put a phone in my room, because I was driving the school crazy. And all the other teachers thought, ‘What’s the hell is going on here?’ They thought I was crazy and this was in the seventies. The guy who went to Washington with me was nominated for Boy Scout of the Year and won second in the country. I don’t know what the first one did. He got the second trophy for being the outstanding Boy Scout in the United States and he is now a doctor somewhere.”
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