My career with Society For Savings lasted 18 years, from April, 1973 to January 1991.It was a good relationship, doing the kind of work I enjoyed. Al Vitiello and I set up the branch banks for the new teller system that Bunker-Ramo would soon be supplying. During those years, a new system from Bunker-Ramo would again be installed. This was a programmable computer system. The program was entered on Hollorith (IBM punch cards) cards. The cards would then be hand carried to Trumbull, where they would be assembled and entered ina card reader to produce a cassette tape containing the source program. The teller machine had a tape reader that entered the program into the machine's memory, which was initially 9K (9,000 bytes); and later increased to 18K. To keep that in perspective, the memory board for 9K was about 10 x 10 inches. The terminal was state of the art for the time. Aside from the programmable memory, it consisted of a 5 inch crt and a 7 pin dot-matrix print head that printed on both a journal tape and a customer passbook. The computer portion was a series of boards populated with discrete logic chips. In today's computers, each of these boards is now a single chip.
Historically, these systems were expected to have a life of six years. However, in the 1970s and early '80's, the technology curve was ramping up at a faster rate and within 4 years, these systems were becoming quickly obsolete.
Society for Savings began looking for a faster and more programmable system. Such a system was found at a new and small company in Spokane Washington called ISC. This company eventually swallowed up Bunker-Ramo and they in turn were bought and sold by other companies.
We stayed with ISC for two generations of their product. These products were powered by the Zilog Z80 chip. The computers were programmable with the Z80 Assembler language programming tools, and boasted 64K of memory. Even this increase of memory, speed and programming ease was soon rendered obsolete with the introduction of the PC in the early and mid '80's.
All teller machine manufacturers saw the handwriting on the wall and soon geared up to selling PC based terminals. With the advent of the Intel 80386 chip architecture, the PC became a viable system for banking as well as many other applications. However, the PC also became a commodity item, they were all the same regardless of the vendor, as they are today. The main differences in selecting a vendor was in the application programs and the physical attributes of printers and scanners and of course, price.
In 1985, Society for Savings was looking to replace the Z80 system with PCs. With myself as part of the search group, we visited many vendor's sites including Bunker Ramo, ISC, Burroughs, NCR and a company in York, PA called Ampersand (&). We finally settled on UNISYS, whose facility was in Atlanta. We were JETSTREAMed to Atlanta from Hartford on a UNISYS corporate Lear jet and royally treated around town. It was a very pleasant trip.
The real estate boom in the late 1980's saw Society for Savings expand its operations in the state by opening new financial centers throughout the state, while buying up smaller banks in the Fairfield and New Haven county areas. This kept us very busy, removing terminals from acquired banks and installing new terminals in their place, sometimes overnight.
This boom continued until the real estate bust in 1990. Gradually, some of these recent installs began to close.
During these times, as Kurt and Michele were growing up, our two room condo in Naugatuck was getting crowded. So in 1975-76 we had a 3 bedroom home built on a hill in Naugatuck. The difficulty of getting up that hill in the winter soon made Bobbie tire of living there. The big blizzard of 1978 kind of made that official. So, in 1979 we sold the house and bought a 3 bedroom mobile home down in the valley. We lived there for a year, then in 1980 we moved to Meriden where, for a year, we rented a condo at Blackstone village. Moving to Meriden cut my driving time to Wethersfield in half. Wethersfield is where the SFS Data center was located. Then we found a house on Bee street that we liked. It was a small house, though it had 3 bedrooms and only one bath. But it had a huge yard, with a barn, that I enjoyed puttering in. This house we bought for $55,000. We lived there for 10 years.In 1989, both Kurt and Michele had graduated from High School and out of the house. Kurt was in his own apartment and Michele was in the army at Fort McClelland. Alabama. We put our house up for sale and sold it for $130,000.
Evening Star Drive Naugatuck
Our Mobile Home Naugatuck
Blackstone Village Condo Meriden
Bee Street, Meriden
While we decided our next move, we rented a three bedroom apartment in Cromwell. At that time, we figured a condo would be best for us, since there would be no need for grounds maintenance. I was now under the care of a cardiologist, owing to an episode on Bee street. One day, around 1985, while cutting our grass, I felt weak and tired, which was for me, unusual. After a few such episodes and suspecting a heart problem, I contacted doctor Spivak, in Meriden, where it was confirmed that I did have a heart problem. So I needed to cut down on that sort of activity. One thing I did buy was a sit down mower. But of course, that didn't cure the problem.
After looking at the many offerings in the Cromwell area, of which there were many, we finally decided on a new condo project in Middletown. I wanted to wait until spring, but Bobbie wanted to move in as soon as possible. So we had a closing date in late December, 1990, before Christmas.
So we bought new furniture, new appliances and moved in.Two weeks later, just after the holidays, I was summoned to the office of my boss at SFS where I, along with a dozen other employees of the data center, was notified of my (and their) termination. We were hustled downstairs where a room had already been set up with all our necessary paperwork. There was a consultant there informing us of our employee rights and choices. A training session had been set up to assist us in finding new jobs. Severance packages were arranged, and at least for myself, pension and health insurance packages were in place. I have to say, that all things considered, the package I received was better than I had expected, (better than future packages) that we still enjoy today.
Part of my package was 9 months of continued salary. During that 9 month period I attended their classes ( for a 2 to 3 week period) and looked for a new job. This was the period of the real estate bust. Layoffs were occurring everywhere and there were no jobs to be had. We had no luck in selling the condo and eventually had to walk away from it, thereby losing a good deal of money that we had put into it, not to mention suffering a crash in our credit rating. Fortunately, this didn't happen until we were settled in El Paso, Texas. Had I been able to predict this outcome, I would have made the move to Texas much earlier. Another but equally important factor in deciding this move was the fact that living on a limited income would have been extremely difficult in Connecticut and somewhat easier in a milder climate such as El Paso.
By this time, Michele was discharged from the Army and had moved back with us in Middletown, so we fixed up a room for her on the ground level. In July, I decided to take a short vacation. I traveled, alone, to visit my son Roger and family, in N. Carolina and then continued on to Springfield Illinois and visited Claire and her family. They had been transferred there by IBM, Steve's employer. On the way, I stopped in Washington DC where there was a huge celebration of the military, honoring the GIs who had succeeded in freeing Kuwait from Saddam Hussein.
In October of 1991, after my paychecks stopped coming in, we finalized our plan for our relocation to El Paso, Texas. I had always felt that on my retirement, I would retire there, and it looked like this was the time. Still having a few bucks left over from the sale of our Bee street home, we called a mover, packed up all our stuff, said goodbye to family and friends, and the three of us took off in a 3 car convoy, each driving our own car, bound for El Paso on Halloween of 1991. I learned later that this was the day of the so-called "Perfect Storm" in New England. But for us, the day was warm and sunny as we headed west into a late and a very bright October setting sun.
