Yes I was the geeky guy who grew up in Northeast Portland, Oregon and attended
St. Charles elementary school graduating in 1959. That’s me,
5th from the right in the bottom row.Tom’s Home Page
Do you know me?
If you are checking this page because you think you might know
Tom Sawyer from the past, here are a few clues to help out.
School Days
Yes I was the geeky guy who grew up in Northeast Portland, Oregon and attended
St. Charles elementary school graduating in 1959. That’s me,
5th from the right in the bottom row.
Yup, I hung out in the
Amateur Radio club and Math
Club during my years at
Central Catholic High School
where our class 
whooped ass around the state in the National Math Contest in
1963.
You might have suffered through the class I taught in “Elementary Computer Programming” at the University of Portland in 1966 or 1967. The Computer Center Director, Peter
Knoblach, 
had bigger agenda items to deal with (“What we gotta have, is…”) and turned part of his teaching load over to an untrained
Junior/Senior.
You might have suffered through any of the freshman math classes
I taught 
at the University of Minnesota
where
the Math Department turned over most of the undergraduate teaching load to untrained graduate students. This was a very stressful job so a good many of us had to relieve it with daily games of “Volley Wad” over an improvised net strung across the TA offices in the Main Engineering building.
We’re in the Army, Now! We might have met during my two years in the U.S. Army.
We could have gone through basic training together at Fort
Bragg, North Carolina.
We might have trained together in the Advanced Infantry
Training program at Fort McClellan where we carried baseplates, tubes and
bipods over the hills of Alabama in the mortar platoon.
We could have run into each other when I was a keypunch operator
with the 1st Infantry Division in Di An.
Or, we might have crossed paths at the 25th Infantry Division headquarters at Cu
Chi 
where I was still keypunching away in the Administrative Machine Branch.
Or possibly we met at Fort Hood, Texas while I was serving
with the 1st Armored Division, still doing computer related
work as the army struggled to implement an UPSCR (Uniform Personnel Status
Change Report) system that never quite seemed to balance to the company
Morning Reports.
Working for a Living
We could have met at The Pillsbury Company where I held a variety of jobs in Management Information System (IT to you youngsters) over the years from 1972 to 1986.
Or we might have met at Dayton Hudson Department Stores where I was the manager of MIS Planning from 1986 to 1992.
We might have met while I was at Pioneer Power in the years between 1992 and early 2003 when I retired to take up travel, fishing and golf (or, as Linda would say, became a full-fledged Internet Addict!)
