Witnessing History…
I’ve hit my mid-fifties. That means I don’t remember a lot about being alive in the turbulent 1960’s, but I’m a child of the 1970’s and 1980’s
As a kid, we had some pretty big things to worry about. The economy was pretty lousy when I was a kid, with Stagflation and all the issues that went along with it, but I never felt a sense that thing went completely off the rails! There were problems that seemed to be event based and ultimately temporary. Business cycles came and went and with decent leadership both at the Federal Reserve and Politically, there was always an underlying feeling that the American Dream was still there and with the right patience and continued effort, you could still jump on board the train and eventually get to your destination.
I come from what would be a “Lower Middle Class” family. My Dad made a decent living as a Waiter in a successful high establishment, and my Mom as a Bookkeeper in a large computer services firm. We never had a lot left over, but we could afford our Co-Op in a good Middle Class Neighborhood in Brooklyn. There was food on the table and clothes on our backs as we needed. Vacations were few and far between, but we managed to save for them and they would happen from time to time (although mostly local day trips).
I was always encouraged to follow my dreams, tempered with “Make sure you can always make a living” the underlying caveat. I followed that advice and studied to be an Actor. I got a taste of it when I was accepted into a Junior High School in Brooklyn for “Gifted and Talented” students.
JHS 239, Known as The Mark Twain Junior High School for the Gifted and Talented was created by the New York Board of Ed to help re-integrate a school in Brooklyn that was in Coney Island before gentrification took over the community to try and bring a demographic balance back to the school by bussing kids from all over the Borough into the neighborhood. I don’t know if it succeeded at it’s mission, since the majority of the kids came in from outside the neighborhood, but it was open to every kid in the borough to test for any of the specialized programs (everything from Science and Math to Music and Dance). I made it in to the Theatre Arts program and thrived there both academically and in my talent and in the end went on to audition for the New York High School for the Performing Arts (the Fame School) and was ultimately accepted.
At P.A., you had to want to succeed academically, or else you would just get by, but you got the best training in your area of talent that was possible. I was an average student, but found my place in Theatre. The school was located on 46th Street in Manhattan, a mere few blocks away from Times Square and the Theatre District. In my second year, I decided to audition for a class being taught by a team of talent managers (Judy Scott and Judy Jordan) who not only accepted me but decided after a few months to represent me. My path took shape as they introduced me to several different Agents and before too long, I was auditioning for TV Commercials and Films (TV was still mostly a West Coast thing in the 1980’s).
I landed a role in a big movie. “TAPS” was filmed on location at The Valley Forge Military Academy in 1980. While not a lead role, I was cast as a member of twelve core characters that would result in twelve weeks of work on-location. This meant leaving Performing Arts, as they didn’t support having students working on location, so I quickly needed to move to The Professional Children’s School, Based up at Columbus Circle, that was populated by kids who were actively working in the arts. What made PCS special was a program of allowing kids to take their classes remotely, while administered by tutors provided by the production you were working on. I would spend half the day with the tutor taking lessons and tests before going off to make the movie. When the project completed, I would come back home to New York and get back into the normal routine of classes at school.
I was a geeky kid. I had a love for Science and Science Fiction. I actually got my first taste of computers in Sheepshead Bay, where I grew up, at a local store that sold a new class of devices called Personal Computers (Remember, this was the late 1970’s, early 1980’s). I would hang out at the store and play with the machines they had on display for as long as they would allow me to. When I made it into Mark Twain, although I was a Theatre kid, I made friends with the computer teacher (because the Math Talent kids had a SOL-20 computer that they used to teach BASIC Programming) and got a chance to play when I had some free time.
While working on ‘TAPS’, I decided to take some of the money I was earning and buy myself a P.C. so I could learn how to program it and maybe write a computer game. I chose a Commodore PET computer as since Commodore was located just down the road from The Valley Forge Academy in a town called King of Prussia, my folks drove me over and I bought one. That would insure I had that career backup when I needed it. I spent the summer of 1980 at sixteen in my room teaching myself how to program in Commodore BASIC and learning how computers worked.
I helped build a computer lab made of Apple II computers the next winter at my High School and that would lead to my first real job after school at the company where my friend David’s mother worked. I worked on Spreadsheets for the company Comptroller with this new fangled software called VisiCalc and then wrote a Bulletin Board system that allowed our customers to dial in with a terminal and enter their orders on-line instead of having to write them, mail them and have someone keypunch them.
Between a broken ankle, another smaller role in a movie and my job, I came up a class short for graduation , and after having a taste of the real world, so I decided to take the GED in June of my High School Senior Year and not make up the French class I would have to pass to graduate. I took a shot at College the following Fall, but after a year in Community College, while already working as a consultant for a company in New Jersey writing a system to put comic books in a couple of large bookstore chains in a language called DIBOL, I decided to use continuing ed for things I wanted to learn (like Assembler coding) rather than go for a degree. Back in 1982, when you were already doing the work, college just didn’t seem that important. Besides, I was an Actor, I just didn’t want to be a Waiter during the struggling years!
In between a couple more movies, a few commercials, a relocation to L.A. and some work in TV, I stayed consulting and learned about Finance as I wrote General Ledger, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivables software. The geek in me has always lead to a fierce intellectual curiosity which in turn had me learn as much as I could about the various businesses I became involved in.
I went back to school when I came to Los Angeles and began a Certificate in Film at UCLA, while I continued the computer work during the day. I would do a part in a Movie for a week and write the Car Rental Reservation System for a large rental company. I traded out pure coding for a shoat Systems Administration on my first major UNIX system made by Sequent. Now I played with hardware, scripting, kernel internals, storage systems and how the General Ledger, A/P and A/R systems worked as well. It was the best business education I could have gotten, practical and hands-on in a real world situation.
When I hit my mid-twenties, the acting work became harder to find and the curse of having something to fall back on took over. I reconnected with my childhood sweetheart back in New York and moved back to get married. Once back in the city, I went to work for a few years on Wall Street and learned the ins and outs for Investment Banking, helping to build out the servers and workstations for a trading system at one bank and then supporting the trading floor at two others. We lived in a nice little 4th floor walkup brownstone in Cobble Hill and in the Summer I would walk across the Brooklyn Bridge for work every day. As much as I loved (and still love) New York City, I lived in L.A. for long enough to not really want the winters, so I found a great company that was based out of Austin, Texas and they sent us back out west where I tried my hand at Aerospace. I led a team of System Administrators who ran the Product Data Management system used for tracking the components to build satellites. After five years and the birth of my son, I wanted something different.
Disney came along. They were looking for a Systems Engineer for the Animation Studio and I fell in love with the work! It was the perfect balance for me. There was a ton of challenging work that challenged me every day and a corporate culture that encouraged everyone to learn everything about the business. I found the blend of the creative and tech perfection and I spent the next eight years working my way up in the studio from Engineer, to Lead of Systems Administration, Manager of Support and eventually to Manager of Systems. In the process, I helped architect and run complex computer networks, server farms, storage and workstations across four studios, two in California, one in Orlando and one in Paris. The best part, was I became a part of making movies that made millions happy! I also learned. Not just about technologies like High Performance Computing clusters, but film production, distribution and marketing. I also helped solve some very compelling problems, like moving and protecting large quantities of data across long distances with what would be considered primitive technology by today standards. We used super computers as large data pumps and created makeshift shared filesystems with a unified namespace before there were good solutions to do that.
In the early part of the 2000’s we acquired a Visual Effects company and started to do Live Action Visual Effects. I helped solve problems like getting film plates from remote distances to the studio while sending back rough animation for view by the production on location. I was involved in the development of a remote digital dailies system and hung on the edges of the development of some of the earliest face replacement animation technology. Some days, I still don’t know why I let my ambition to learn more take me away from that amazing job, but I wanted to learn more, so I took a job up at Disney Enterprise IT and got involved with projects involving Live Action, Consumer Products, Parks and Resorts.
After ten years at Disney, I was presented an opportunity to help build out the Broadcast Center at CBS in Studio City. Along with managing the business technology for KCBS and KCAL I became involved with all aspects of the technology at the Duopoly. Helping the Broadcast Engineers move to a file based workflow, Building out and managing the tech in the graphics department and ultimately helping implement new tech for the news department. The problem ranged from finding ways to protect the archives to building an inexpensive remote HD studio setup fro news broadcasts.
I missed movies, so when the chance arose, I took the Manager of Systems and Infrastructure Operations at Dreamworks Animation. I ran the infrastructure teams for what would ultimately be three studios in California, a studio in Bangalore and helped to create a new studio in Shanghai.
When I decided to move on, it was an opportunity to jump into E-Commerce at Beachbody, a company that produces fitness products. It was a role with great scope at a company that didn’t do technology well and as the management changed, so did the staff. I was one of those changes.
After a summer off I went back to the Entertainment Business at Deluxe, a one hundred year old company that focused on distribution and deep post production services. I took over and built the Network Operations and Media Management Center for distribution of content to Cable and OTT Streaming services. I expanded my teams services to other parts of the company so we could provide tier one support to the Visual Effects division as well. It was unfortunate that the company was having trouble defining how it wanted to run its business (this would lead them to a structured bankruptcy about a year later).
Seeing the writing on the wall at Deluxe, I found myself offered a position at Fandango. (Owned by NBC/Universal-Comcast). While there, I built out the Network Operations Center, Incident Management and Release Management processes, eventually owning the corporate IT functions and jumping in to help the creative side of the house build out and manage their digital assets. I was lucky to get to spend time working with the Enterprise IT group in New York (Fulfilling a childhood dream of working inside 30 Rock for a bit) and with Studio IT at Universal. I really loved my time at Fandango, and I like to believe that I helped to contribute to the success of the company, but the pressures of the box office and the needs for NBCU to tighten it’s belt in preparation for the release of their streaming service ‘Peacock’ lead to my job going away.
I’m still looking for the next challenge, with the added pressures of an industry in shutdown and the economy in the toilet due to the first Pandemic to hit the world in a century.
When I look back on these 30 plus years, I realize everything I’ve learned about Technology, Business and People. No one lives a life without some regrets, but I can honestly say it has been a fantastic ride in which I’ve constantly learned new things and enjoyed the process throughout!
The Pandemic has really thrown a monkey wrench all our lives. As a kid, I remember the fears that someday we could all be wiped out by The Russians, but deep down realizing that calmer heads would ultimately prevail and that America was the place where if you worked hard and were willing to give that extra you had the chance to be a success.
Without a doubt, the sins of the past have come back on us with all the power and weight we deserve! I fight every day to be conscious that being born who I am, I’ve had inherent advantages that others don’t, even if my own life has had it’s struggles. I’ve always tried to have a reasonable respect for authority, but I’ve never had the need to fear it. (I grew up in a time with less political correctness and it was often brutal!) I began to understand the depth of the problems in the L.A. Riots of 1992. To see the injustice at the hands of authority then was staggering to see. I come from Eastern European Jewish stock and knew that there were some who, given the chance would kill me because I existed. But not here in the USA!
As many, I was raised around prejudice and found it repulsive. I’m a subscriber to the idea that you treat others as you would want to be treated!
I can’t claim that I don’t see color, I have eyes like every human does, but I make damn sure every day that I don’t allow denial to take over. I am always aware, somewhere inside that those unconscious biases exist and I try to fight against them! I want to judge those around me by the content of their character and never by their appearance, race or sexual preferences. Black Lives Matter! LGBTQ Lives Matter! The promise of America is that ultimately we all come together and overcome those biases and just work together to make it better for each other. After all, that is what it means to have a society in the first place!
Now that I’m solidly middle aged, with a grown Son and a Daughter recently graduated from High School (Boy, what a year she’s had!) the state of the world we live in is much more complicated (and disappointing). Many are denied the opportunity to make the sacrifices to get that success and those in charge are too busy looking out for themselves rather than the promise of America and the greater good. It would be easy (and devastating) to just give up and go with the flow, but it would only be a matter of time before it all comes back down on me and my family and my friends and my neighbors. I believe we owe the promise of that bright future to everyone willing to put in the work. I owe that the next generation, and the one after to make sure they have their shot at the American Dream!