Larry Toth:  

I grow up in Monroe, Michigan. It was really La Salle, Michigan. I went to Custer Elementary School and Custer Junior High School. I took part in 4H and Little League. Some of my favorite memories growing up were of Otter Creek. We lived on North Otter Creek Road and behind our house was a woods. There was a hill leading down to the creek. During summers my brother and I enjoyed playing in the woods with our neighborhood friends. We would hike either upstream or down. Upstream we found a tiny little island which we named Turtle Island. It wasn't much of an island, on two sides there might have been two feet between the island and the main bank of the creek, but we liked it. It was probably only 10 or 15 feet across. Occasionally we would take a sandwich or something and have a picnic on Turtle Island. I also remember trying to build a raft. It sank. I could have used better building material and more knowledge. There probably were better approaches than trial and error. In the winter we would ice-skate on the creek. That was great fun but at least a couple of times I had a wet foot when the ice wasn't quite thick enough. Of course this would happen when I was some distance away, but things always turned out alright. There would be interesting patterns in the ice. I think this was due to the current of the creek. You could see the flowing creek in spots under the ice. There sometimes were little caverns formed in the ice. We would sled down the hill behind our house. We would see bobsled competitions on television and tried to mimic them. After a snowfall, we would start sledding down the hill. We wouldn't get too far. So we had buckets which we filled with water from the creek and dumped on the hill and the path leading to the creek. We would run and jump on our sleds and fly down the hill. Again this was great fun but there were a few exceptions. The next day we would frequently have some interesting looking bruises from jumping on our sleds. On the best of runs we could make it all the way down onto the creek. Since we were getting water from the creek, it wasn't always fully frozen and again wet feet (or more). Finally since we had the path through the woods iced down, our sleds weren't too maneuverable. I remember hitting my hip once so hard I could barely move. In spite of these exceptions, we had fun. With heavy rains the creek would flood. What was normally a little stream with little current would quadruple in size and rush through the woods. Water would surround trees and made them part of the creek. Some of our neighborhood friends would go a mile or two upstream and ride inner tubes down the creek. I never did this. Based on the strength of the current and the high water, this always seemed too dangerous. Not going was probably a good choice. I could have ended up on Lake Erie; maybe Cleveland. I started playing guitar and taking lessons when I was eight. I joined my first rock band when I was in Junior High School. I played in bands for the next 6 years. We played mostly at local Junior High School and High School dances. There was an occasional wedding and we did play a time or two at St. Mary's Park. We played in talent contests at the Monroe County Fair, the Monroe Armory, and the Monroe Radio Station. We also played at The Club, which was a night club out in La Salle close to our house. This was cool because other bands that played there were Bob Seger and Ted Nugent when he was with the Amboy Dukes. I started working when I was 15. I worked at Famous Recipe Fried Chicken in Monroe for a couple of years. I made $1/hour. I saved and bought my 1968 Les Paul Custom guitar. I left Famous Recipe and went to work at McDonalds. This was a large restaurant. I started out working register. Over the next few years I worked most positions, fries, grill, shakes, buns, sink, lobby and run caller. Although I worked at McDonalds for several years through college, I did leave McDonalds for a couple of years to be manager back at Famous Recipe. While back at Famous Recipe I met Lorlyn (Lori) Straub. Our first date was at a drive-in theatre where we saw "Billy Jack." She talked through the whole movie. Although Lori and I went to Monroe High School and were in the same graduating class, we didn't really know each other. I should have been in the Choir. I went to Monroe Community College and earned an Associate's Degree in Electronic Technology. I remember a life decision moment. I graduated from Community College in 1973. My Dad and I went to a music store and were looking at HiWatt guitar amplifiers. I had saved about $2,000 and the decision I needed to make was should I buy the amplifier and go into music as a profession or should I buy a better car and go on to more college. Dad let me decide and more college was my choice. This was a good decision. Although I enjoy singing and playing guitar, I really wasn't too talented. I bought an almost new 1971 Chevy Nova. It had a 3 speed manual transmission with a floor shift. I moved to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and attended Lake Superior State College. I lived my first semester in a dorm on campus. After that I lived off campus in a house with four other guys. I got a part time job at Burger Chef. I earned an Associate's Degree in Computer Engineering Technology and B.S. Degree in Electrical Engineering Technology. During one summer I worked at the Ford Plant in Monroe where I worked on an assembly line building shock absorbers for bumpers. Another summer I worked at the Union Camp Paper Company in Monroe in the maintenance department. I cut weeds, painted, stacked boxes and drove a fork lift. When I graduated from LSSC in 1975, I had sent out resumes in hopes of getting a tech job. The job market was not good. I had three interviews. One was for Texas Instruments where I would work on an oil rig. Another was for U.S. Steel where I would work as a supervisor in Gary, Indiana. My last interview was for Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. They offered me two positions. One was in hardware development in New Jersey and the other was in software development which was moving to Naperville, Illinois in about a year. I took the software assignment. My first software development assignment was rewriting a memory content print utility. After that I worked on one of the very first Unix applications, the Automatic Intercept System's File Access Subsystem. I lived in an unfurnished apartment in Eatontown, New Jersey. I had a stereo, a toaster oven and not much else. I bought a cot at Kmart to sleep on and a stool to sit at the kitchen counter when eating meals. While in New Jersey I eventually bought a hide-a-bed, a kitchen table and chairs, a mattress set and bed frame. At this point my work moved from Holmdel, New Jersey to Naperville, Illinois. At this same time Lori and I were married. Our wedding was in Monroe. We went to Toronto, Canada for our honeymoon. We moved to a one bedroom apartment in Lisle, Illinois where we lived for 3 years before buying our house in Naperville. At Bell Labs, I worked on internationalizing the 1AESS telephone switching system for use in Saudi Arabia and South Korean. Next I worked on a government project for secure voice communication. At this same time I went to Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois in the evenings for 5 years and earned a Masters in Computer Science and was promoted from a Senior Technical Associate to a Member of Technical Staff. At this point at Bell Labs I worked internationalizing the 5ESS switch for use in South Korea, Europe and China. We had a joint venture with Philips Electronics. I worked in project management and had the opportunity to travel to Hilversum in the Netherlands three times for development planning meetings. I was able to tour Amsterdam by boat; I saw several really old windmills and had some wonderful food. For a project in China, I worked one month testing in Beijing. We had Sundays off and were able to walk on the Great Wall, see several palaces, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and pandas at the zoo. Around 1990 I started taking guitar lessons again. I had been practicing a little guitar off and on over the years. Lori, who had also been working at Bell Labs left Bell Labs and started singing out professionally. When going to Lake Superior State College I had taken a piano class. I also decided to take piano lessons. While I was at it I also took a few voice lessons. At work I then transferred to domestic 5ESS and worked on Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) features. I helped with first office application testing in Phoenix and had a chance to travel to St. Louis, San Francisco, Baltimore and Concord as a resource person answering technical questions. I then worked on expanding the 5ESS to support more lines and trunks for the SM2000 project. I also worked on a project adding Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) capabilities to the 5E...Expand for more