Howard Nodell:  

My Maine East high school experience centered around playing football. We seldom won a game, and the losses were always by lots of points. In four years we won three games. Losing all of the time seemed to make us closer as teammates so I ended up hanging around with the other depressed football players. Most of the few of us that kept playing all four years developed a pretty close relationship. I didn't work very hard at my classes and the grades were always pretty average. I developed a liking for Math and decided that Math would be a kind of anchor through college. While in HS I worked at Chernin's Shoes on Dempster next to Korvettes. That job helped me to save enough money for college tuiution, if I kept it cheap. Since cheap was the word, I lived at home and spent two unpleasant years at UIC (Circle at the time). I continued with Math, lots of math. I also played football and continued the losing at Circle. We didn't win a game those two years and the university wisely cancelled the program. Never having liked going to Circle (too cold and sterile) I got a scholarship to Northeastern my junior year, played one more year of football and got my BA in math in 1976. I worked at the Continental Bank downtown on weekends to keep paying tuition and gas for my motorcycle. Rather than look for a full-time job, I got a graduate assistantship to SMU in Dallas to study Operations Research (more math and computers). I graduated in 1977 with an MS and started working on computer modeling for a small company in Cincinnati. I met a great woman named Janet there and we married in 1980 and are still together. That year I was laid off and we moved to Orlando where I became a systems engineer for a telecom company. In ...Expand for more