Bob Schmidt:  

Story I am not sure what information I am supposed to provide in this “Story”, so I will wing-it. My name is Bob Schmidt and I was a faculty member from 1975 – 1978. I was hired as a Math teacher, starting when Vernon Township High School was first opened. I mainly taught pre-algebra, algebra1 and algebra2/trigonometry. I also taught a couple of senior classes. Finally, I coached 3 years in 8th grade basketball. I was the worst basketball coach in history but no other faculty member was willing to coach 8th graders. My sport was baseball but there were no openings for any of the baseball teams. After I left VTHS, I coached 2 baseball teams > 13 – 16 year olds, not related to VTHS. In 1979, my team came within 4 games of winning in the NJ state tournament. Most of the 1980 graduation class students were in my 1975 math class. I also had quite a few students in class in my 1976 math class. A few of you were unlucky enough to be stuck in 3 of my math classes – lol. I really enjoyed teaching math, giving advice to students or giving math help after school (even if the students were not in my class) and helping students who had such problems that I had to convince more than one to not run away from their parents, etc. What I didn’t like in VTHS was the following: 1. The NEA (Teacher’s Union). The NEA spent more time trying to get teachers 2 minutes out of school early instead of trying to get more resources for students. 2. The very few parents would not support the teachers if their students were disrupting the class or if the student got a B+ grade for 1 semester instead of all A’s. 3. I didn’t like either of the 2 principles in the time that I was teaching. 4. After 3 years, my salary was only $8,000 per year before taxes and NEA dues. We were promised salary increases but my 4th year salary was going to be $8,000 per year again. Without a 2nd job, it was almost to pay my bills. So, I decided leave teaching and I first owned a restaurant in Hamburg and then a restaurant in Vernon. I never made a real profit. My Vernon restaurant gave me a place to live and all I could eat (which was not healthy). For those reasons and others, I needed to sell the 2nd restaurant and to move to any location that would give me a chance to make a good salary and to have the chance to be promoted to a really good position. I was interviewing as I was trying to sell the restaurant and an offer for renting my restaurant for 1 year with the plan to get a loan to pay off the rest. Then I had to quickly get a new job so that I could have the cash to pay 2 ½ months rent, moving my furniture and other items, etc. I had 2 interviews with a company which owned restaurants in NJ and Staten Island. They also built houses and owned 50 supermarkets. The owner was looking for someone who knew the restaurant business, knew how to teach employees and to have a computer background, especially Point of Sale systems for the restaurant servers. My background was exactly what the owner was looking for. So, he said if I would work 7 days a week for approximately 2 years, he put me in charge of all of restaurants. When I asked for the starting salary, he asked me what I was making, when I was teaching. When I told him $8.000, he told me that he would start me at 8 times my teaching salary and a company car. I jumped at the offer, quickly got an apartment that was closer to my office and left Vernon within a couple of weeks. It was a chaotic move from Vernon at the same time closing the rental/sale of my restaurant. My new owner eventually decided to semi-retire. I saw that when he fully retired, I would not like the person who would own the companies. I had time to prepare for moving on, so I taught myself to code computer software. I did that because over the years, I saw that all of the many Point Of Sale systems (POS) who did the coding, knew nothing about restaurant computer systems. Therefore, the coders were real smart and very logical but restaurant owners weren’t that smart or logical and they did not like the user interface for all of the major POS systems. I left the company and purchased a franchise for one of the POS systems in NJ and parts of Pennsylvania, Staten Island & Connecticut. That gave me a decent living and I started to write the code for a new POS system. It took 5 years until I could do a demo. It was not completely finished but it was close enough to demo at a large trade show for restaurants and hotels software in Manhattan. In 1997, the owner of a company, who designed hotel software, got a demonstration of my POS system at a large trade show in Manhattan . He sold hotel software & interfaces all around the planet. His company was in Stowe, VT. For all my life, I always wanted to move to Vermont, New Hampshire or Maine, because I loved to ski and I wanted to live in deep snow. The owner loved my software and he asked for my partner & me to come up to VT for a week to demonstrate our application. He put on a big show and reserved an entire fancy restaurant for our first dinner. We were impressed. He had very good hotel software and interfaces but his restaurant POS software was terrible and he knew it. For 2 years the owner had promised that he would have a new restaurant software ready to go by next year. He was under great pressure, since his trade show was a month away and he had not even started the development process. He would have lost a lot of his customers if he could not even do a least a demo. So the owner made an offer for cash up front to my partner & me to buy a houses, and he offered a percentage of each sale of my software and he offered a very competitive salary for 3 years. Twenty seven years later, I was still working for this company, until I semi-retired and then I made a little more money as a consultant until Covid hurt shut down sales. The house I bought was in the back bay of Lake Eden in Northern VT, near the Jay Peak Ski Resort and ½ an hour from the Canadian Border, and I will live in this house until I go to my grave. Please see the photos that I posted Album view. The house and property has 7 acres and g...Expand for more