Aldine High School 1958
| Education | |
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I Graduated from AHS in 1958 like most everybody else here. Also like
many others, I didn't have the money to go to college but I got a
hollow promise from the FBI that they would sponsor my college
education if I'd go to work for it (them). It didn't work out. Before the councilors caught me, I had almost taken as many courses at the University Of Houston as I was interested in, but I was still several hours short of graduating. Additionally, I had taken none of the required grammar, history and physical education courses, so there was no expedient way to finish. So I dropped out of the engineering school and began to concentrate on junior college occupation specific courses in continuing education. Several programming and systems analysis courses later, I decided I'd had enough homework to last a lifetime. |
 Me in 1958 |
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| FAMILY | |
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In 1959 I married one of our classmates - my High School
Sweetheart, Scottie Lynn Jayne. Unfortunately we eventually
divorced.
Scottie and I had three wonderful kids, Mark, Scott and Amy. |
 Joe & Lynn 1959  Scott, Amy & Mark |
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Sharon and I met on the internet in the year 2000. In 2001 we got married and are living happily ever after. |
 Sharon and Joe today |
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| Work | |
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Boy, I've had a lot of jobs. But only one real career.
I went to work for the Texas Highway Department in 1962 as supervisor of
the Repro-Graphics Section. Here I learned how to print new and
make scratch pads out of old letterhead every time the idiotic
legislature changed the agency's name. As time passed, I was
assigned various other sections and by 1980 was supervising all the service
oriented sections. All that changed when the Department began to
get automated. I applied for a new job called, "Automation Administrator." Instead of just getting that job, they simply added that section to those I already supervised. It took less than a year for me to realize that this new "automation" field needed all of my time and effort. Thankfully my bosses agreed. When I began that job, the Houston District had three keypunch operators and a 2400 baud remote card reader... and no interactive equipment. In 1995 when I retired the section (now called "IS") had 22 employees to support over 400 PC's, a mainframe and five mini-computers. With the Houston District consuming a third of the states entire transportation construction budget and the independent attitude required to accomplish solutions for our unique IT problems, some Austin administrators sarcastically referred to the Houston District as HouDOT. We kinda liked it. During my last year, I was one of five TxDOT employees chosen to head up the "Retooling TxDOT" project specifically to create and implement TxDOT's Business Information and Systems Plan. Earlier I supervised the initial IT components of the inter-agency communications, transportation and emergency management system that is now called "TranStar." At the same time, after several years of planning, we were beginning to migrate to a client/server architecture - I just missed out on this upheaval. Thank goodness! |
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| Play | |
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I guess I've always played with cars. Since the early 60's I've
had an off and on relationship with SCCA racing and autocrossing and a variety of toys.
These were the most fun. |
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1961 Corvette
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1972 Datsun 240Z
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1963 Rotary Honda 600
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1986 Pontiac Fiero
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1972 Datsun 240Z
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1983 Mazda RX7
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1975 Datsun V8Z
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