RCA decided I should go to Colorado Springs to manage a group reporting on the operation of the BMEWS system for the Air Force. I was to create a small group of people to generate a monthly report of the system performance for the Air Force 9th Aerospace Division at Ent AFB.
The group included Dick Burns, who had been a draftsman and friend at Clear AFS, as well as Dick Feasel, Jim Stryker, and others. Dick is still in Colorado Springs – he has had a great career as an international soccer referee, and docent at the US Olympic training center and curator/docent at the Air Force museum in Colorado Springs.
We lived on Crescent Lane on the mesa, with a picture window looking at Pikes Peak. The house was built by a successful contractor.
Penny got a job with a school and began to be happy with the new setting. We did nice vacations, several times renting a trailer and going to the southwest corner of the state and into New Mexico and Arizona.
One day I was working on a study of the probability of detecting a missile attack. I needed a probability figure for a very rare event. I looked in the library for tables but did not find one that went that far out. I sat down with a Friden mechanical calculator to compute the number. It is an iterative computation, and I wrote down the result of each step but kept making errors and it was going to take a week or more to get where I needed. Frustrated, I took the equation to Gene Finklestein, an Air Force officer friend I knew was a programmer. He wrote out a little Fortran program and took me to an IBM 1620 computer that was available to anyone. Pushed the program on about a dozen cards, put them into the computer. It compiled a deck of several hundred cards. He then put them into the computer and it punched out another huge deck. Loading these in ran the program, which in a few seconds had my numbers. I looked at the program – maybe 12 lines – and said I understood all but the DO and FORMAT statements. He said on my way home I should buy a copy of McCracken’s Fortran manual. I did and fell in love with programming. I even learned to plot and did some high-level spherical trigonometry to draw pictures of the BMEWS detecting incoming missiles.
I joined the Civitan club and eventually was president. I didn’t know it at the time, and I was pretty conservative, but it is a very conservative club. I finally left in a dispute over where the money we raised should go. Bill Laprade and I started a new club, but it never took off.