Samuel R Glidewell:  

Life Four years in the Navy followed by 10 years of night school to complete my undergraduate degree. I was married for 20 years and have a son, daughter, seven grand children, and four great grand daughters. I lived and worked in Silicon Valley since before it was called Silicon Valley. I was a software test manager for the last 15 years of my career. I spent the last three years of my career living and working in Bangkok Thailand. I am retired now and have come home to stay. I sold my home in Mountain View California and bought a new home in southern Oregon. It's a ten minute drive to the Rogue River. I spend a lot of my time fly fishing for rainbows, steelhead, and salmon with my son and grandsons. If any of my old friends are still alive and should read this I invite them to contact me. School I did not have a steady girlfriend when I was in high school. I was very unsure of myself and dreaded the thought of being rejected so I spent most of my time alone. Of all the pretty girls in school, and there are many that I remember, I thought Betty Hadley was the most beautiful. She was a very sweet girl but, as I said, I was so insecure I could never work up the courage to ask her out. There was also another girl that I will never forget; Gina Bertolucci. She was dazzlingly beautiful but to me, utterly unreachable. I was not a good student. I was lazy and just slid along doing only the minimum amount of work to get by. I can recall a few of the teachers who were able to get through to me. I recall Mrs. Higgins (sophomore year English), Mr. Carter (junior year Chemistry), Mr. Lounsdale (junior year Geometry), Mr. Hansen (senior year American History), Mr. Gonzales (junior and senior year Spanish). If I could "do it again" I would pay a lot more attention and work a lot harder. I don't have many memories of high school. My parents moved to Napa at the beginning of my sophomore year. I had a hard time making friends and felt like an outsider most of the time. The Novelly brothers (Bob and Raymond) were the best friends I had during those years. They were also new to Napa having come from Fresno and Reno before that. I have not seen either of them since a few months after graduation. College When I graduated from high school I wanted to go to CMA in Vallejo but my family did not have the money to send me and it was a resident program so I could not work and pay my own way. My college career started in 1960 after I completed 4 years in the Navy. I attended Allan Hancock Junior College in Santa Maria California. For the first few months I lived with a former Navy shipmate and his parents. After a while his father and I had a falling out and I moved into the dorms. The campus had originally been a WWII Army Air Corp pilot training facility. The class rooms were old barrack buildings, the Chem/Physics labs were in a large Quonset hut, and the gym was an airplane hanger. It was not much of a school to look at but it had a great faculty. We also had a great football team (Bulldogs). For the first time in the history of the school the team went undefeated and won the Junior Orange Bowl in San Bernadino. We had a defense coach named John Madden who went on to fame and fortune with the Oakland Raiders. This was the happiest time of my life. Half way through the second semester I met a girl, Francine Ozols. December 17th we were married. From this point my college education shifted to night school... ten years worth. In 1967 the Cold War GI Bill was passed by congress and I was able to return to school full time and finish my undergraduate degree. After a few months I started Graduate school; first at San Jose State and later at Santa Clara University. After several years I dropped out. I was just too tired of going to school. I remember staying at work all night studying to get ready for mid-terms and finals. I recall, more than once, the maintenance crew that cleaned the offices woke me up when they came to work at 6:00AM. That was pretty tough, not just on me but on my wife and children too. When I look back I think that being away so much was one of the reasons Francine and I grew apart and finally decided to go our separate ways. That was the biggest mistake I have made in my life and one I regret more than any other. The destruction of our family was a terrible price to pay for an education and it was paid by my children as well as by Francine and me. If I could trade one for the other I would... in a heartbeat. Workplace My first job after getting out of the Navy and finishing my freshman year in college was with AMF (American Machine and Foundry). I was a Field Test Engineer running post-installation and System tests on the Titan I missile launching system. This was real Buck-Rogers stuff. If you have seen the movie Fail-Safe you may recall a scene when missiles are being prepared to launch. Huge concrete doors open and a missile emerges from its silo. That is the system I am talking about. It was fun, but crazy. Sylvania Systems Group (26 years) --- My training and experience in the Navy got me a job in the Control Systems section. Ted Koski was my boss. Frank Lord followed Ted. I worked on many interesting Elint and Comint Defense systems. I made the transition to Software Engineering in 1980. In 1981 the VP of Quality Assurance offered me a job as Software Quality Assurance Manager. I accepted and built a staff of six people before happily taking early retirement in 1988. Daisy Systems --- Test Engineer/Manager for Electronic Design Automation system that allowed for the design and debug of ASIC chips before going to silicon. Lots of fun but very difficult to test. The senior management got greedy and forced a takeover of Cadnetix (a competitor). Daisy went into Chapter 11 and I went with them. Very high stress job. But, we made the largest product release in the history of the company while in Chapter 11. Intergraph --- Intergraph bought Daisy. The only thing they did was port Daisy software to their own, proprietary unix box. It did not take long for me to realize that we had no future with Intergraph. I left the company. The Daisy branch folded in less than a year. FXD -- I went to work as a senior test engineer for an old friend and colleague, Jim Romanos. This was a new area for me and I had lots of fun learning the new technology and the intricacies of trading financial Instruments and foreign currencies. Dow Jones -- Bought FXD. Same job but with the added benefit of getting a free Wall Street Journal every morning. My dear friend and boss, Jim Romanos, died of a heart attach. I still miss him. I was asked to take over the group. I did some traveling in this new job. New York City (we stayed at the World Trade Center Marriott, that is no longer there); New Orleans, French Quarter; London, with a side trip to Paris... I love Paris. But, after two years the wheels came off. All the good engineering managers had left the company and the development process fell apart. No more specifications, just fly by the seat of your pants. That made testing very difficult and we started releasing products that were not properly tested. I was made a sacrificial lamb and was forced to step down. I left the company not long after that with a bitter taste in my mouth. I took no comfort in seeing the company go belly up in a bit less than two years. My biggest concern was seeing some of my good friends and colleagues put on the street in a very soft job market. Tibcofinance --- A friend and colleague sent my resume to the TibFX group manager. I got a call to come in for an interview and three days later I had a six figure offer in my hand. This turned out to be the job of my life. My boss told me to do whatever I needed to do to build a test group. I started from scratch. Of the three test engineers that were then working on the project I kept one. She was experienced in test automation. My group grew to a peak staffing of 17 people. The product was an automated foreign currency trading system that allowed company controllers to buy and sell currencies from their desktop PCs. It was fun to work on and had lots of new technology. Reuters --- Reuters bought Tibcofinance. Nothing about my job changed but there were problems where parts of our product overlapped with existing Reuters' products. After two years Reuters decided to close the Palo Alto development center and move the products to other locations. RSTL ---- Reuters Software Thailand Ltd. (Bangkok). Bangkok was a newly established development center. Reuters selected this site because the wage differential for software development engineers was ...Expand for more