Stories – Page 2 – Dennis C Merritt

My Professional Dance Career

Back in the 1970s in Cambridge Mass. a recent Harvard MBA graduate had an idea for a business. Serious dance lessons for non-serious dancers. Instructors that taught jazz and ballet dancing in studios with wood floors and mirrors and bars. But for ordinary people.

He called it “The Joy of Movement Center” with a number of studio locations through out the city. It was a huge success, all sorts of people signed up to learn the sort of dance serious dancers did, including my wife and I.

We thought we were a pretty good dancers, what knowing how to do the Mashed Potatoes and all, and were fairly athletic 20 year olds at the time, so we signed up for Intermediate Jazz because, clearly, we were past beginner.

Huge mistake! There were 5 6 7 8s coming at us faster than we could process, and isolations and moves and complex choreography. We quickly developed a lot of respect for serious dancers.

Our instructor had a professional dance troupe, “Becky Arnold’s Dancing Machine,” and she’d just lost one of her male dancers. Male dancers were hard to find and she needed a replacement for one number in her show and I showed some promise.

So she asked me to be in her show.

Well what a trip, of course I said yes. And she worked with me on the moves and the choreography but I had such a hard time remembering the sequences, and even when I did, well I got the moves but probably not with the pizzazz I should have.

Then came the night for our performance, at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston. It was lightly attended, but still, there was an audience. I made it through all the moves, so no great embarrassment, but that’s probably all I can say.

Becky came up to me after the show and gave me $5, my share of the gate. And told me I wouldn’t be needed any more.

But still, that makes me a professional dancer, right?

Epilog — We remained friends with Becky and her husband, and took a number of other courses with other instructors and enjoyed them all. But then, sigh, people, there were arguments between the young business guy who started it and the instructors and battles over money and the whole thing fell apart.

Showdown over Star Occultation

A story of a workplace bully

I was a programmer working at what was then called the M.I.T. Instrumentation Lab. It serviced various engineering contracts, mostly large D.O.D. ones, but other, smaller ones, as well.

My group was working on a contract involving atmospheric study from space. One small part of that small project was Star Occultation.

Looking at a star from space, as it sets behind the earth, the light changes as it starts to get obscured by the atmosphere. Given equations for how various atmospheric components affect the light, it’s possible to work backward from the dimming star light to deduce the make up of the atmosphere it settled behind.

This project had only two people. Myself, the programmer, and Terry, the lead scientist, a PhD student at M.I.T. Terry was to provide the equations, I was to write the program implementing them.

Terry was, well a bit arrogant. I remember him showing up at our offices one day complaining about how unjust the world was, that, for example, a plumber could go out and get a job that would pay more than he might make, he, that is, an extremely intelligent person with a PhD from M.I.T. How could it possibly be a mere plumber might be worth more than him?

You might guess where he thought a programmer should fit on the hierarchy of worth, compared to a PhD. It showed.

Well Terry gave me the equations to program up and we had some test data (from the X15, the space rocket that preceded satellites).

So I did, but when I ran the program the results all came up zero. I showed it to Terry. Controlling his irritation he patiently explained I’d clearly programmed it wrong and I should check my code.

I did. The next day (those were the days it took a full day to get the results of running a program punched into a deck of cards) the results were still zero.

I heard him go into my boss’s office and vent for all around to hear about how incompetent I was, how could it be we didn’t have a programmer who could code up a simple set of equations, and how I should be fired and replaced by someone who could handle the job.

That was Friday.

As a scrawny, quiet, geeky sort of kid, I’d run into bullies in school. I’d learned (different stories) that bullies don’t like it when you fight back.

So that weekend I went home with his equations and looked at them from a pure mathematical perspective. And on Monday morning asked if my boss would call Terry over.

The three of us sat in his office and I went to the white board. Oh yes, I was all wired up. I then proceeded to prove, mathematically, that the equations Terry gave us would always generate a zero result.

You should have seen Terry. He didn’t say a word, stood up, shoved his chair out of the way, and stormed out slamming the door as he left the room. (We never saw him again.)

My boss and I sat in the quiet left behind for a moment. He then looked at me and said, well I guess you’re now lead scientist on Star Occultation.

Bicycle Racing with John Allis

I started racing bicycles in the mid 1970s, a time when the sport was really small and most of the racers were runners with bad knees. I like to brag that I was a category I rider, which I was, except that back then, that was the only category. You simply paid your dues and you were a licensed bike racer.

I was extremely lucky to have lived in the Boston area when John Allis was one of the top riders in the country. He was on our Olympic teams and national champion a few times. And a super nice guy. And an evangelist for the sport.

He trained twice a day on a forty mile loop through the hills West of Boston. Anyone who wanted to ride with him could, so there were usually about 2o of us just tagging on. He’d ride hard up the hills, but then easy on the down sides so people could catch up before the next hill.

One year the state championship was 11o mile race on a 10 mile loop with a big climb on it. After a couple of laps I just thought it was going too slow. So I went off the front.

[The way bike racing works is there is a lot of drafting. The peloton/pack stays together, because it’s easy to ride as a group. Going off the front, you lose that.]

Nobody respected me, by that I mean, no-one came with me to try to make a break away of a small group of riders.

Except after not too long, John Allis did. He broke away from the peloton, caught up to me and as he passed me said “Let’s go.”

What a thrill, me and John Allis off the front. Well that scared a lot of people and some other riders caught up to us and it was a fast and strong break. It lost me after about 70 miles. But still, I finished around 10th and what a thrill to have created the winning break with John Allis.

In New England at the time, there were a number of races that drew the best riders from around the country with their prizes. Somerville NJ, Fitchburg MA, and Allentown PA. Riders today are impressed that I rode those races, which are now just for the elite riders, but, as I said, back then, anyone could play.

The current national champion was a Californian named John Howard. He came to race in Fitchburg and I was there. I marked him, I waited for his move, I wanted to be there when he went.

Boom! He exploded from the peloton and I was right on his wheel. It was me and John Howard off the front. He led out and then moved over to see who was with him and let them take the lead. I charged past ready to work with him.

He looked at me, sat up in his saddle, and with a look of complete distain stopped peddling. He let the pack catch up and waited until he could get someone better to ride with him.

What a blow. He did go off again, and got some other better known riders, and won the race. I finished 10th or so and won a tire. Still, what an asshole.

Then there was the big 170 mile race in Canada. Everyone who was anyone from Boston went up there, along with all the big names from across the country. John Howard was there. John Allis was there.

Now John Howard had the better sprint of the two. And was more arrogant. John Allis was all about riding hard over the distance, but if anyone was with him at the end, he often lost the sprint to the finish.

Anyway, it was, as I said, 170 mile race. 20 miles into the race John Allis went off the front. By himself. Everyone else was pacing themselves, knew that a lone rider couldn’t out pace the peloton for 150 miles.

So they let him go. And the miles passed. And they didn’t see him.

Somewhere around the 120 mile mark, John Howard got worried and decided to go after him. He chased and chased, but never caught him.

John Allis drove home in the Volkswagon Micro Bus which was first prize.

Me? I had stayed home and it was a strange lesson. Everyone better than me had gone to that race, meaning I was the best rider left in Boston. At the weekly race, I went off the front, and one guy went with me.

We lapped the pack. I went off the front again, by myself this time.

I won easily. It was really boring.

Well the sport started to grow. I raced for three years getting stronger and faster each year, finishing further and further back. It was kind of discouraging, so I quit as the sport left me behind. But what fun to have been there for those years.

Apollo 11 Memory

1969 — The country was split between conservatives and liberals, maybe even more so than it is today. The Vietnam war was huge in our lives, and many college kids were actively protesting against it. M.I.T. was no exception.

Doc Draper — Doc Draper was a legend at M.I.T., he drove a little sports car and always parked it facing out. The story goes that was a habit he got when he was running bootleg liquor to fund his M.I.T. education. He made a major contribution to WWII with his invention of an inertial gun platform that provided a stable base for gunners on warships.

The story goes that when they first tried them he was on the ship, and when some Japanese Zeroes attacked the ships, the gunners fled for safety. Draper ran out to take their place and the horrified admiral had to hold him back. The platforms made a huge difference in our ability to defend against those suicide planes.

M.I.T. Instrumentation Lab — Doc Draper started the Lab based on his inertial guidance technology, which was then used in guidance systems for missiles. (It’s basically a gyroscope attached to something that detects motion.) The Lab was funded with government defense contracts and provided work for M.I.T. students and faculty.

Apollo — The Lab got the contract for the guidance system work for Apollo.

The Protests — Students protested the Lab, said there was no way a peaceful university should be funded with military contracts. Lots of bad PR for the Lab and M.I.T.

The Suits — As Draper had gotten older, the running of the Lab wound up in the hands of more serious business types, wearing suits among the engineering techies. They were very much aware of the bad PR of the military contracts and spent money publicizing the Lab’s work on Apollo and a few other minor peaceful projects. They worked hard at downplaying the military contracts.

Me — I worked at the Lab, my M.I.T. friends got me a job there, working on the backup Apollo navigation system, an optical sextant.

Which brings me to the day Apollo 11 came back to Earth.

It was probably Draper’s idea to have a large truck full of champagne show up. We started drinking and celebrating and drinking and celebrating. The news cameras showed up in a large room with tables.

The suits were there.

We were there.

The news was there, the cameras were rolling.

And Draper was there.

Draper, drunk, climbed up on a table, the cameras were rolling, the suits were afraid…

“When I started this lab we built war machines, and we still build war machines, and I’m damn proud of it!”

Epilog — The M.I.T. Instrumentation Lab divested itself from M.I.T. and changed its name to Draper Lab. The divestment agreement was long and complex and basically said that all of the connections between M.I.T. and the Lab would still be there, except at the very top it would be a separate entity. So it could pursue military contracts without giving the school a bad name.

First Man – An Extra’s Story

I’d always said I wanted to be an extra in a movie, to be able to say at so many minutes into such and such a movie that was me walking across the street. Last February I finally had my chance.

First Man, about Neil Armstrong’s trip to the moon, was shooting a scene at the Kennedy Space Center, near our home in Florida. They were looking for men to be boring old geeky white guy NASA executives. I could do that!

I was amazed by the amount of energy and attention to detail that went into what I’m sure will only be a few seconds of the final movie. They were shooting the scene where the astronauts were leaving the space center for a shuttle van to take them to the rocket. Here’s a photo from the actual 1969 event that they were using in setting the scene.

By a stroke of good luck, my friend Theresa worked at the Space Center and got some pictures from the offices across the way. Here’s what the scene in the movie looked like.

We must have shot the scene 20 or 30 times. It took most of a day. That poor guy playing the kneeling photographer on the right, he kept trying to get a more comfortable position and they kept telling him, no, look at the picture, you need to be kneeling, with your arm up like so.

Where am I? Well you can’t see me in the picture above, and there’s a good chance only my right arm will get in the movie because the main camera was set up on the left (looking at the picture). In the historic photo I’m the guy in the suit up on the ramp to the astronaut’s right and I walk down the ramp following them. Here’s one of Theresa’s shots that shows me waiting between takes.

The other extra people are NASA techs, security people, and a gaggle of photographers.

We spent time a few days earlier getting dressed for our roles. I didn’t find out until afterwards that the person doing our costumes, Mary Zophres, the one who fitted me for my suit, had been nominated for an academy award for her work on La La Land. She clearly enjoyed her work, taking pride in the period authenticity she brought to movies. I came out with a greater appreciation for that aspect of movies and now finding myself enjoying the scenes and costumes in movies I watch, even if the story line is dumb.

They insisted we wear suspenders. Why? Nobody today is willing to hitch their pants up to the height they were worn then, so we had suspenders, under the jacket, to hold our trousers to the correct period height.

I had hoped to be the exec in the primo position by a post on the right of the picture, and I was, for a little bit. But James Hansen, the author of the book on which the film is based, wanted a cameo in the film and took my spot. So, before I wound up on the ramp, they moved me to behind him, which was interesting because I got to talk to him for a while.

He made the observation that we didn’t have the technology to fake a moon landing back in 1969, but we do now. He said the images in the movie are amazing, and were mostly shot with physical models, rather than computer graphics, in Atlanta.

Well look for my right arm in that scene when you see the movie. Although… if they use some of the footage they shot from behind as the astronauts were leaving the building I’ll be very visible.

In summary, it was a very long boring day, but I’m glad to have had the chance. It was especially fun for me because in 1969 I was actually working on Apollo. (I was doing computer support for the backup navigation system, which, maybe interestingly to some, was an optical sextant.)

For those who don’t know the history, here, from America’s most reliable news source, is the headlines from the day.

Here’s James Hanson’s book that inspired the movie:

First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong

Schwarzenegger & Pumping Iron

We watched The Long Goodbye (1973) last night, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger was in one short scene where he took his shirt off. Amazing. It reminded me of one of my favorite movie viewings, seeing Pumping Iron at a pre-release showing in Boston.

When Pumping Iron (1977), a pseudo documentary on body building starring Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno, came out the sport was still relatively misunderstood and looked down upon. (Note the physiques of the male heroes back then compared to now.)

The producers decided to market the film as an art film (it is, after all, about sculpting the human body), and did advanced publicity to both artists and body builders in various markets. A friend of ours, who was an artist, got tickets for the pre-opening night showing of the film in Boston.

About five or six of us, sort of artsy kind of people, were sitting in a row. Behind us were seated a number of guys with no necks, some of whom had trouble fitting into movie seats.

The movie opened with one man standing on an empty stage. His body was oiled and he was wearing a posing suit, but he looked pretty much like an ordinary guy, nothing really special.

Then the music started. Thus Spake Zarathustra. The music builds and builds and finally hits that awesome crescendo – tah DAH!

At that moment the guy on stage in the movie flexed every muscle in his body and BAM! every tendon and vein popped out. UGH! those of us in the artsy row reeled back in disgust.

At the same time, the guys behind us started hooting and hollering, ALL RIGHT!!!

From there the movie was fascinating, providing all sorts of insights into the sport. Like Schwarzenegger could add another inch to his bicep easy, but he’d have to also add an inch to two other muscles along his arm and shoulder, which I’m not sure I even have, in order to maintain the symmetry required to be at the top of the game.

What made the movie especially enjoyable was Schwarzenegger’s personality. There was a captivating edginess about him, a sense of humor, and a bit of a mean streak. Like the left handed complements he gave to his competitors, sowing doubt, and the young German body builder who asked him for hints and was told that the latest trend was to make low pitched grunts when posing low, and high pitched squeaks when posing high.

Armed with this gem, the young German did just that in a competition.

Schwarzenegger is also shown smoking dope at one point in the film, as I said, a likable sort of character.

Here’s the sad news. Seeing that movie with the artists and body builders was one of the memorable movie experiences of my life. Years later I was telling some people about it and of course had to find a place to rent and play it. In anticipation I waited for that opening scene to see the reaction of the people I was with.

It opened with shots of Schwarzenegger working out in Gold’s Gym. Wait a second… That’s not right, it wasn’t Schwarzenegger and the guy was on stage with Stauss setting the scene…

So I researched it, and it turns out that as Schwarzenegger’s political aspirations were growing he bought the rights to the film, edited it so it started with him instead of that other guy, and took out all those edgy bits and the dope smoking. Sigh.

–Dennis

Beauty as a Curse

Bob was an engineer at the first company I worked for. He had cerebral palsy. If you ever made cruel jokes as a kid trying to imitate such a person, well that’s what Bob was like. He walked with a shuffle, his hands were contorted and not that well controlled, he drooled a bit, and his speech was stuttering and slurred. But, as I’ve been told is common, he was smart.

When you first encountered Bob, if you had never worked with such a person before, it was uncomfortable. For about five minutes. Very quickly you learned to understand his speech, grasp the content, realize you’re dealing with an engineer about engineering things, and his whole physical handicap disappeared. I mean it was there, but no longer commanded attention.

Nobody had a problem with Bob, he was just one of the engineers.

One day our group hired Kathy. She was a programmer with a master’s degree in mathematics, and an instrument pilot. A bright, talented woman. She was also fashion model beautiful.

The men at the company simply couldn’t deal with her. Unlike with Bob, many of the typical male engineers never got comfortable talking with Kathy. They couldn’t get over being in the presence of her beauty. Guys would detour past our offices on the way to coffee, just to get a look.

There was a phone network set up and when Kathy showed up to work in her sports car, word quickly spread and many ran over to the side of the building with windows to watch her get out of her car.

It wasn’t just that she was a woman. There were other women at the lab and they got along OK, but they were, well, ordinary looking people. Kathy’s physical beauty was more of a handicap than Bob’s cerebral palsy.

Marketing Phone Sex

This is a post about the importance of having a rapport with the customer.

A number of years ago I knew someone, D, who was dyslexic, MIT smart, a phone hacker, and a cross dresser. He was straight, and that’s important for the story, but wanted to live his life as a woman.

This was back in the day when people like that tended to stay in the closet. Yet he yearned to be able to talk to others with similar interests. He had an idea.

Being a phone hacker he went and bought around a dozen phones, wired them together so multiple people could call in and talk to each other, and put a small ad in the back of a local paper saying people who wanted to talk about cross dressing could call this number and chat with others of a similar bent.

Well he was swamped and added more phones, and fast forward, he wound up making all sorts of money, buying a used MCI phone switch (that means a large room full of tiny wires) that let him become a phone company in his own right.

He’d expanded his chat lines to include other interests of his, such as a foot fetish and a love of overweight women. (That line was called Large and Lovely.)

His ads, his positioning, everything grew his business. The point is, he wasn’t exploitive, but rather someone who genuinely was interested in the service he was providing, a place to meet and talk with others interested in things that weren’t openly discussed at the time.

As he grew his company, a gay man got involved in the business and tried to help him grow into those markets. He started all sorts of gay chat lines, but they didn’t catch on. The two wound up having a parting of the ways, and the gay man went on and built his own company.

That second company became successful in the gay markets, where the first one hadn’t. D simply wasn’t gay. He didn’t know how to connect to gay customers.

There’s a sort of funny, maybe for software people, aside to this story. I actually knew D through my wife at the time. She was a brilliant programmer and did consulting for D’s company maintaining their billing system, which was quite complex.

I enjoyed telling people my wife worked in phone sex, and, here’s the funny part. She was a very open person and had no problem being associated with a phone sex company, but was most embarrassed by the fact that the programming she did for them was in Basic, a simple programming language that no respectable programmer would want to be caught dead using.

My Favorite Super Bowl Experience

It was 1985, Super Bowl XX, the first for the New England Patriots, playing Chicago, also their first. I was living in Boston at the time, and a friend of mine from Japan was visiting the country on business and asked if I could have dinner with him on Sunday. Super Bowl Sunday.

He didn’t know.

Well I told him he was in luck, that I was probably the only Caucasian male in Boston willing to go out with him, so he, my wife and I made plans for a night on the town in Boston.

We made reservations in the North End at a nice Italian restaurant, I think Trattoria, but first went for drinks to the rotating bar on the top of the Hyatt Hotel overlooking the Charles River.

There were only three parties there. Us, a group of women, and a group of Asians. Huge room, almost empty.

We looked out over Storrow Dr and Memorial Dr., the two main roads running along either side of the river. There was no, and I mean no traffic. The streets were deserted. I’d never seen it like that.

Finished our drinks and drove to the North End. Went to the restaurant and, well, we didn’t need to have made a reservation. There was one couple just finishing when we got there. We were the only ones there.

The wait staff tried to conceal their disappointment that we had showed up. We could hear them watching the game in the kitchen, cursing as Refrigerator Perry and the Chicago defense crushed the hapless Patriots. I think they took out their frustration on our food. It was terrible, and the service was, well he tried to be civil and professional.

They were glad to see us go.

Were we mad? No, mostly amused. And amazed at what the Super Bowl could do to a city like Boston. And glad to have shown my Japanese friend a slice of American life.

–Dennis