Introduction of the New World

I had purchased an Atari 401. It had been advertised as a computer, not a game console, but it was very restricted as a computer, though most expansive as a game console despite the hype. I could play a multitude of game cassettes through the box, which was fun and my kids loved it, otherwise, there wasn’t much to the system.

There was a keyboard and two cartridge slots above the keys. Besides the usual Atari game cartridges you could also use magnetic tape cassettes. This is what acted as your storage device. You see, you could write rudimentary programs using Basic, but if you wanted to use your program more than once you needed to save it on magnetic tape. Those cassettes loaded very slowly. There was no monitor. You plugged it into your TV. There was no printer so you were plain out of luck if you wanted a hard copy of anything. You could buy some software beyond games, such as Financial Planning.

Then one day in the merry, merry month of May I was strolling through the Christiana Mall and entered an Arrow Camera Shop. I had bought film and other photography equipment there and often went in just to browse. There was a new section at the very rear of the store displaying something beyond cameras and film supplies. It wasn’t even a full section, just a corner in the back and the lone sign said, “Apple Computers”. I wandered on back and when I left that store that day I was the proud owner of an Apple IIc. I bought a printer and an extra external floppy drive as well. The whole kit ‘n’kaboodle cost me $1,200.

There was a practical reason to buying the extra external floppy. There was no internal hard drive in the Apple IIc for storage. There was an internal floppy drive built in the CPU Unit. Everything ran off of floppy discs. There was included in the box software on both 5.25” floppies (true floppies because if you held them by the edge they would flop if you waved them) and on 3.5" discs still referred to as floppies, but these were very ridged and didn’t actually flop. My model only took the 5.25 discs.

You would insert a disc into the internal drive that contained the startup and operating system. You then would remove that disc and put in the Appleworks floppy. Appleworks contained three programs: word processing, spreadsheet and data base. I didn’t use spreadsheet so much in the beginning. I did use data base because all my life I made lists. I listed all the books I owned, all the record album and all the pieces I had written. I guess it is my touch of OCD. The pieces I wrote were typed on 3x5 index cards. On the front I put the title, what byline I was using at the time, date written and type. If it was published I put that info on the front as well.  On the back I put the information of my attempts to publish the work. This was the name of the publication sent to, the date sent and the date returned. The data base made this compulsion to list everything so much easier.

What I used most was the word processor. Oh man, this was like magic. If I added or subtracted any parts of a story I didn’t have to retype the whole anymore.   I loved this machine. It was an answered dream. It was so great I retyped everything I had written onto floppy discs. There was no problem with copies, no messy carbon paper to deal with. I could store what I wrote on floppy discs for future use. This was where having an external floppy drive came in so handy. If I hadn’t got the external, then every time I typed something I wanted to save I had to go through a routine that involved removing the Appleworks disc and putting in a blank disc, doing the save and then switching discs again. With the extra drive I could just save my work and not manipulate discs at all.

If I discovered a mistake or made a change or added or subtracted text to a document I didn’t have to retype the whole thing. No longer did I have to bother with messy things like white out to fix a mistype or carbon paper for backup copies.

The Apple IIc was not the first home computer, of course, but was probably at the heart of home computers blossoming in the consumer imagination. Keep in mind Apple had introduced the initial Apple II model in 1977. Steve Wozniak had created the Apple I in 1976 (Gosh, Woz was skinny in those days). There was a lot going on technically in the 1970s that would lead to the home computer revolution, but it wasn’t until the early 1980s that the public really grabbed the concept. Maybe the first hint of what was to come was when the game Pong was released in 1972, you know, the simple digital ping pong you played on your TV screen. I mentioned how a friend, Dave Mason, was one of the first I knew to have this game. How far we’ve come since.

       In 1973 the Wang 2200 was introduced. An Wang, a Chinese inventor was a pioneer in word and data processing. Remember I put the budget of Mercy Catholic Medical Center on a Wang Processor back in 1979. (By the way, as hard as this may be to believe, the Internet was invented in 1973 as well. It wasn’t invented by Al Gore, but from experiments conducted simultaneously by Xerox in the U.S., France’s Cyclades and Britain’s NPL networks).

In 1974, Xerox came out with the PARC Alto (right). They introduced with his machine such things as the Mouse, GUI (graphical user interface), printing that matched the screen called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and E-mail. It was for all intent and purposes the first personal computer. These innovations developed at Xerox would have a profound effect on the Apple people and would next be incorporated into the Lisa and the Macintosh and this changed the world.

WordStar, the first great word processing software was created in 1978. The first great spreadsheet software appeared in 1979. It was called VisiCalc and had been initially developed for the Apple II. (Left is Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, developers of VisiCalc.) Also in 1979 Atari marketed their first computers, the 400 and the 800. The 400 was the first so-called home computer I owned.

It was in the early 1980s that the idea of the home computer burst free out of the laboratories and techies. In 1980 something called the VIC-20 was brought out by Commodore. Commodore had greater success in 1982 when they introduced the Commodore 64 (right). Meanwhile, in 1981, with great fanfare, IBM brought out their Personal Computer operating from a MicroSoft system called MS-DOS. Soon we would know home computers by two family trees, Apple and the PC.

1983 was a banner year, the Compaq Portable found a niche and Apple brought out both the Lisa and the Apple IIc. Then in 1984 an iconic TV Commercial ran once during the Super Bowl (and only that one time) showing a shorts clad woman with a hammer run between a zombie-like audience and smash a giant screen showing a man’s face. The allusion to George Orwell’s Big Brother from his novel 1984 was obvious. This ad brought the attention of everyone to the Apple Macintosh (left). If the gist of the ad was that the home computer set us free from Big Brother, what was missed was the new computerized world would allow for the creation of Big Brother.

Anyway, enough about the history of home computers. This is supposed to be about the history of me. Let’s get back to that.

This stuff was not lost on me. I began by the time I had the Atari 400 to push for the inclusion of desktop computers in our division’s capital budget, even offering to teach the employees Basic. My request was rejected in 1982 and again in 1983. Our Senior Manager, George Craig, did not see any future in such gimmicks. He was a solid Mainframe guy. For a large institution like The Bank the Mainframe was the only way to continuing going. He viewed the home computers as nothing more than that, something that might have some use in the home, but not in business. I fought hard. Frankly, I wanted our division to be the first to utilize such technology, believing once we had some and showed the benefits, other’s would follow. (Mr. Craig died on May 30, 2016, age 85. That is a photo of him in later years on the right.)

Then in 1984 these machines were added to the budget. Not for our division, however. Senior Vice-President of Operations, George Craig had suddenly decided maybe we should take a look at these things, so he created a new Division of Office Automation, or something like that. It was set up as a time sharing operation. Believe me, I was down there signing up for as much time as I could grab. I was using the WordStar to write my documents and spending time learning Visicalc.

This new Division started with four computers, three of which were Apples. But the IBM PC was capturing the business world and Apple was becoming the computer of the educational system. Within a few months George Craig switched all four computers over to PCs. Meanwhile, I stuck the desktop computers onto our 1985 budget proposal and this time it got approved, although at first it amounted to only one machine and I got it, a Compaq Deskpro (left).

It was going to be interesting times ahead.

Me with my son Darryl, 1984.

Me with Noelle and Laurel, 1984.

Lois and I, 1984.

Back to Where It Started

There once was a man between 17 and 80 (I'll explain this strange beginning later) --- There once was a man between 17 and 80, but actually he was 13 and just a boy with a problem called puberty and a lot of ignorance. The "he" was me and the ignorance came because they didn't always tell you a lot about the birds and the bees in the early 1950s, unless it was about actual birds and bees.

But ignorance doesn't impede the body from doing what a body does. I mean a caterpillar might not know why it became a cocoon, but that doesn't stop it becoming a butterfly and suddenly noticing how pretty flowers are. I didn't necessarily understand some of what was happening, but I did notice girls were kinda pretty and for some reason I liked flitting around them.

And their bodies were changing as well, which caused a lot of curiosity. This was to get me into some trouble by the time I was 14, but I am thinking back to a time a little earlier.

In the period of transitioning from grade school to junior high, and from  boy to an adolescent, my friend, Ronald Tipton, and I used to travel by bus west to Coatesville and the Auditorium Theater. We were considered old enough by then to make such an adventurous trip of seven miles from our little borough of Downingtown to the big, little city of Coatesville, just the two of us riding out on a Short Line Bus to the motion picture show.

Oh, we had a movie theater in Downingtown, The Roosevelt, right down a couple houses from the

Methodist Church on Brandywine Avenue. Once upon a time this was the Downingtown Opera House, although I have a hard time associating my old boyhood home town with opera. I don't know if they actually performed Puccini, Wagner or Verdi there, but it didn't matter because that was before my day. I only knew it as a movie house, but it did show a lot of Horse Operas, especially starring Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Johnny Mack Brown. Most of what it showed were B-movies and classic Universal Horrors, all of which was fine with this young lad, but to be able to go the Auditorium or the Warner in West Chester was so much better. Those two theaters ran A-movies in their initial release, woo-ee!

But we're not here to wax nostalgic about movies and theaters. This is about puberty and certain magazines that had to do with  (shall I whisper it) sex.  

My earliest recall about certain magazines occurred on one of those movie jaunts. Heaven knows what film we saw, but after the show we had some time to kill before the next bus out of town so Ron and I wandered into one of the few stores still open along the street, a drugstore. It was a typical drugstore of that time in small city America. It had a soda fountain (a long counter with stools that spun fasten to the tile floor and some booths down one side. The prescription area was near the back and there were some racks of magazines and paperback books along one wall near the front. While

waiting for our cokes, or whatever we were indulging in that evening, I drifted to the magazines and picked out an Esquire to flip through.

Esquire at the time was the elite men's magazine, the one for the more what...sophisticated? Maybe more urban guys and perhaps also the more mature, if not elderly like their bug-eyed leering icon that appeared somewhere on every cover. It was certainly considered of a more intellectual level than the typical man's magazine like "Man's Life" "Male" or "Men's Adventure" with their lurid covers of men in torn shirts fighting off beasts, snakes and nazis or men rescuing scantily clad women from beasts, snakes and nazis.

Esquire sold sex somewhat on its covers, but of a more subtle, almost gentile quality. Their mascot might be bug-eyed, but that was from googling the models, not because he had an anaconda wrapped about his torso.

Esquire also didn't fill it's pages with bikini babes or boa-wrapped strippers, as featured in "Gala", "Adam" and "Cabaret".  No, Esquire had top-notch fiction and articles, cartoons and features on cars, fashion, music, and other "men's interests". They did have something, though, that caught my hormonal interests and that was the little feature of art they always included.

First was "The Petty Girls". These ran from the beginning of the magazine around 1933 up into part of my childhood. The Petty
Girls were airbrushed pinups and a lot of service men carried these off into battle during WWII. They were the creation of George Petty. He eventually had a conflict with Esquire and the magazine then featured a similar art treasury known as The Vargas Girl" painted by Antonio Vargas. (That is a Petty Girl on the left and a Vargas Girl on the right.) I think you can see why puberty-stricken me was attracted to Esquire in that drugstore that night.)

I know these seem rather tame by today's glut of smut, but back then this was

pretty risqué stuff, enough so the government tried to cut Esquire out of the marketplace by taking away their second-class mailing permit over the Petty and Vargas Girl drawings and some of the cartoons. Obviously Esquire survived this.  George Petty, while Antonio Vargas established his Girls in Petty's place, made a lucrative living doing calendars for various businesses, most notably Ridgid Tools, and I ain't going into all the subliminal messages his paintings dredged up in those rendering, you can let your imagination figure that out.

During the period when Petty and Vargas were vying for position at Esquire there was a young man working as a copywriter in Esquire's Chicago office. His name was Hugh Hefner and he was bored where he was and so borrowed and begged $8,000 from friends and family (especially mama) to start his own publication. He really wanted to call it "Stag Party", but an existing magazine called "Stag" didn't

take kindly to that choice and so he named it "Playboy". And here is where my opening statement came from. Hefner wanted Playboy to feature top-notch fiction and articles, cartoons and features on cars, fashion, music (jazz specifically), and other interests that appealed to men "between 17 and 80." These other interests were mainly women, and women more realistic than the Petty or Vargas Girls (although Antonio Vargas was to bring his Girls to Playboy eventually), because these were real girls in really skimpy outfits if any outfit at all.

Now you might be an inquiring mind that really wants to know why was I bothering with some semi-nude drawings in "Esquire" when there was the real thing inside "Playboy". I was 12 when the first issue of "Playboy" came out in December 1953 and 14 a year later, so why didn't I snatch up a "Playboy" and seek out the centerfold.

Because we are talking small town America in the 1950s here and in all honesty I don't remember seeing a "Playboy" gracing my local newsstands in those first years of its existence. It had a small circulation, 175,000 or something like that by the end of 1954, so maybe it just wasn't in some smaller markets yet. I do remember when it did show up it was almost under lock and key more than the other "girlie magazines". Some skinny kid wasn't gonna causally snatch up an early "Playboy". I don't think I got my sweaty teenage hands on a "Playboy" until I was around 16, and then I had to carefully hide it away.

Anyway, why did we even go into this little history lesson about my sexual awakenings and the history of a couple slick publications? Why is this post called "Back to Where It Started?

It is because of a recent news story:

"Opening a copy of Playboy magazine on an airplane or at a hair salon may no longer have people raising their eyebrows.

"Playboy will no longer publish images of fully nude women in its magazine beginning this spring. The move comes as part of a redesign that will be unveiled next March...The magazine will still feature women in provocative poses, but they will no longer bare all when the March issue is released in February,"  -- USA Today, October 13, 2015.

Now I don't know, Hugh Hefner is 89 years old so maybe those interests of men between 17 and 80 don't appeal to him anymore. Maybe it is just nostalgia for his beginnings, but it sounds like he just turned "Playboy" into "Esquire".

Wandering more in the Past of Family: The Wilsons

III

WILSONS

Wilson is another name of great popularity. I know this maternal side of my mother’s family was from Scotland. What is certain is the marriage of William Frederick Wilson I to Esther Helen Bicking; not so certain is the date of the wedding. Esther Bicking's family had come from Winterburg, Westphalia, Germany sometime in the mid-1700s. Her father, Frederick, managed one of the several paper mills started by the family around Milltown, Pennsylvania (later Downingtown).

William and Esther begat six children and here lines began to entangle. Their third child was a daughter named Emma Bicking Wilson. In 1866 Emma married Benjamin Franklin Meredith I. Benjamin and Emma are my Great, Great Grandparents on my father’s side.

William and Esther’s fourth child, Emma’s brother William II, married Anna Margaret Dunlap on March 25, 1879. Anna was the third child of James Evans Dunlap and Rachel Supplee Boyer (pictured on right at the top). William and Anna are my Great Grandparents on my mother’s side.

This means William II is also my Great Uncle and Emma is my Great Aunt. My mother and father are Second Cousins.⁶

 William Frederick Wilson II went by the name Fred. He was a busy fellow. He owned a great deal of land in Uwchlan Township, which he called Marchwood, where he farmed and raised dairy cattle. He sold the milk in Philadelphia where he gained a reputation for honesty. He also was an auctioneer and the proprietor of the Brandywine Hotel that existed once above Coatesville.

William II, as did his father, had six children, the three eldest were boys and the three youngest girls. William Frederick Wilson III, known as Billy, and Samuel Heber (who went by Heber) were long time farmers in Chester County. The middle of the three sons was James Evans (who went by Evans). He was also a farmer, but died in 1931 bringing hay to the barn. He slipped off the wagon and its wheels ran over his head.  James left behind two young children, Mildred and Robert (Bob). Robert Wilson was to later own a number of local hotels, including The Eagle Tavern in Eagle and The Swan Hotel in Downingtown.⁷

The oldest of the three daughters also died young. Her name was Helen (pictured on left) and she taught school. Clara and she married brothers, Joel Ellsworth Downing and Herford Evans Downing, direct descendants of Thomas Downing, who founded Downingtown. Clara had seven children with Ellsworth. However, Helen died from complications in the birth of her second child, Emily Margaret. Helen was 29 years old.

The family was to experience a schism some years later from this death. As is often the case it was a trifling matter. When Helen died, her oldest brother Billy and his wife Lizzie adopted Emily Margaret Downing. Herford kept his son; Herford Jr. Herford Sr. remarried the year after Helen’s demise.

In my youth I attended the annual Wilson Family reunions. I always enjoyed being with my Cousin Audrey June White. She attended with her mother, Beulah Downing White and grandmother Sadie Guest, who was a sweet elderly lady. I was to learn that Audrey was not my cousin. Sadie Guest was the second wife of Herford Downing Sr. after Helen’s death. Beulah had then been Sadie’s child by Herford and thus not blood. ⁸

For whatever reason, some resented Sadie Guest being invited to the reunions and made a “them or us” proclamation. The family elected to continue inviting Sadie, Beulah and Aubrey and so one branch boycotted the reunions for a number of years.

William and Anna’s sixth child was Esther, born in 1899 (pictured right at age 12). She is my
Grandmother.

(The picture captioned Our Family is from left to right standing: Heber, Clara, Evans, Billy and Helen; seated is William Frederick [Fred] Wilson II and Anna Margaret Dunlap Wilson holding baby Esther, 1899)

Footnotes:

6. Wilson Family History

Horace Wilson (pictured right)

1990

7. Chester and Delaware County Families

Volume 2

Chester County Historical Society Library

8. Thomas Downing (pictured right)

Email Concerning Downing family

August 6, 1999