Corporate Culture - Part 3 - Howard Hopkins

Folklorists always feel a frisson when they discover an artist working within a recognizable tradition. They’re as scarce as talent ever is, and especially rare in modern corporations. Indeed, I’ve only met one man who bridged his family’s tradition and his work environment. His life and work demonstrate that before there is art, there’s a habit of mind.

Doc Hopkins was a Harlan County, Kentucky, banjo player who moved to Chicago to work the National Barn Dance radio program in 1930. His son, Howard, was a computer programmer at Mark Controls in Evanston when I worked there in the late 1970s. He’s since died of cancer.

Howard betrayed no signs of a southern folk tradition. He was interested in classical music, especially opera and piano. When he talked about his family, he would attribute his and his daughter’s talents to their Welsh heritage. But he also talked about his Catholic education, like the time he joked about business ethics as taught by Jesuits.

He had a storytellers knack for setting up a situation, then leaving it to the listener to complete the tale. He once talked about the time he was at Kraft when they brought people together to announce layoffs. He happened to be holding the company payroll tape at the time. He said, he looked at the speaker, looked down, then looked back up, then looked down.

When he mentioned his father, who was named Doctor Howard because a seventh son was supposed to be gifted, it was so he could improvise the conversation that would occur between two doctors when the older man was in the hospital. He only mentioned the Barn Dance once, and then in a conversation that seemed to disparage country music. To a stranger, he was a cosmopolitan, almost Renaissance man.

In those years, before computer graphics were widespread, the typical computer folklore was a calendar or greeting card made by spacing X’s in a report line. The technique was reminiscent of cross stitch embroidery, and both shared their origins with the cards used to run mechanical looms that were one of the first applications for computer programs.

Howard discovered ways to use IBM’s job control language (JCL) to create dialogues for data entry clerks to enter run time parameters like dates into files read by batch programs. He then played with the macros to produce a primitive flip-book cartoon that was consciously derived from the house that Jack built tradition.

First the word CAT appeared in a single line and started to move across the screen, as he changed it's location in the display line for each display.

Then, the word DOG appeared and followed the word CAT at a few spaces as the word CAT changed it's display location.

Next, the word car appeared and ran into the word DOG as he decreased the spacing between the words as he changed the location, so it became CARDOG

Finally a TRUCK appeared with a hook to haul off the car as TRUCK ¬ CAR

He said, he would try to use the full screen editor next, but couldn’t decide if he wanted to do the sunset from Gone with the Wind or the Red Sea parting.

I’ve only known a few other programmers like Howard who could read a user manual and figure out how to use the commands for new purposes. Most of us can barely read a manual, and go no farther than getting an immediate answer. He certainly would have figured out how to recreate his cartoon within the limitations of HTML as it's constrained by this blog site.

I’ve known one other person who would go the next step, and experiment with the tools for artistic purposes, but he came after graphics were common and anything was imitation, not innovation. His efforts were labored and self-conscious, more concerned with proving what a cleaver fellow he was. Howard’s work always betrayed an enthusiasm for the objects themselves, and he was never the object to admire.

I’ve also knew one other person who could turn anecdotes into folk tales. He was a Texan, who never wasted his narrative talents on computer programs. But woe to his boss who went deer hunting with the boys and talked about what a great day they had holed up in a cabin in the rain reading girlie magazines. Jack had gone hunting with a guy who took to shooting rattlesnakes basking on the rocks. Jack was much tried.

Howard’s the only person I’ve known who like to play with the world of business, not to wax profoundly about bureaucracy, but to find the fanciful. He would say, everything made him hungry. Inventory turns became turnovers. General Ledger roll ups became jelly rolls.

I’m sure the thing that sparked the cartoon, that brought the disparate elements of his heritage together, was the existence of the alien ¬ key. It sat there taking up real estate on the keyboard, with no name. It had to have a purpose, and if he could find no logical one, then he would invent one.

Tradition and creativity are often juxtaposed, the one conservative, the other looking for the new and unexpected. In Howard, the two were combined, with the one structuring the form of the other. Unlike his father who made records, he left no permanent body of work. But then, before electronic media, that was the fate of most oral traditions, when only the structure and subject survived, but not the imaginative performance.

Howard shows folk tradition can exist in the modern world, use it for its context, but not be part of any surviving folk tradition. His creations never spread through the company, would never have been remembered. So far as I know, that company had no shared narrative traditions, no unique culture.

In his way, Howard was sui generis.