A son reflects...

This morning we lost our father, Elbert Gray, at the age of 89. But being LinkedIn, this is not a post of personal loss, but rather a reflection of lessons given and applied. My father grew up poor in Boston. So poor, he was part of the famed Harvard Study of disadvantaged inner city youths. From the age of 3, he endured multiple operations for arthritis that would eventually fuse his left leg straight. The disability lasted into this young adulthood when, after finishing his daytime job, he would hobble on crutches through the streets of Boston to Northeastern University, where in 1955, he would eventually earn a bachelor's of business administration, concentrating in engineering management.

Eventually landing at Honeywell, his computers were composed of vacuum tubes, filling rooms, and generating huge amounts of heat. Once, years later, when I sent him a photo from the Smithsonian's American History Museum of a section of the ENIAC, widely regarded to be the first computer, he replied, "You know that's not all of it."

As times changed, he did as well. When vacuum tubes were on their way out, he taught himself transistor theory and became an expert in semiconductor thermal dynamics. Well into his 80s, he could still rattle off the equations necessary to ensure the right amount of electricity would pass through the silicon to enable the device to do its job.

As a child, I still remember him handing me a comic book from work: Captain Zilog. If I remember correctly, it was marketing material for a new chip that Honeywell had developed. As I asked about it, he did his best to explain to a grammar schooler what Zilog was and what it did. To this day, it's proof positive to me that there's nothing so technical that it can't be explained.

He would work at Honeywell for well over 30 years, rising to principal electronics engineer. When that segment of Honeywell would merge with Groupe Bull and eventually begin winding down, he took early retirement in the hopes it would save someone else's job.

Later, after moving to Florida, he worked well into his 80s for L3 Communications, assembling electronic circuit board components for event data recorders for aircraft and ships. It wasn't engineering, and he sometimes chafed at not being able to weigh into the design of what he assembled, but he stayed busy. What's more, he was excited about the finished product and the good it could do.

What's most important to me, is the fact he never stopped reading, never stopped adding to his knowledge. He read IEEE Proceedings and Business Week until he was just physically too old to do so. As he lay in the bed that would be his last, hardly able to speak, I asked him if he wanted me to read the newspaper to him. He said yes, almost excited. It was the Christian Science Monitor, and it was a story about the city fathers of Florence, Italy, pushing back on a new McDonalds in a historic square. Even then, hardly conscious, it was as if he was trying to soak up this new piece of knowledge.

So the moral of the story is this. After 20 years in the Army, transitioning to IT over a decade ago, and now dealing with the challenges of cybersecurity, whenever I wonder if I should take one course less, read one paper less, or learn one thing less, I think of a young man hobbling through the streets of Boston en route to make something better of himself, and the family he would later raise.