Blood-Born

Tributes - Rev. Thomas Jerome Reibold - Part 2

When I first discovered that Mr. Reibold was a Catholic Priest, I assumed that he must have retired or otherwise left the church as he seemed just far too non conformist and cool than I assumed at the time that your usual run of the mill priests would have been otherwise.

To be honest, I do not ever recall having seen him in the robes of a priest but in retrospect we were a public school and rules being rules he may not have been allowed to as he would have had it been a Catholic school.

Perhaps another reason was that I got to know him not as a priest, but rather as an instructor who just seemed a little more odd and perhaps forthcoming than the many other math teachers that I had enjoyed in the past.

For those who may wonder who have read this book and recognized my tip of the hat to both men, he really did often exclaim "Hrmph!" as his way of showing that he was displeased with something.

His love of computers was clear from the get go when I arrived in eleventh grade trigonometry class, not entirely sure of what I planned to do once I had graduated high school.

Along with mathematics he managed to get us and keep us interested in computers – particularly his Model I TRS-80 (according to the Smithsonian the legit first affordable home microcomputer) that he used to show us what computers could do then and what they were likely to do in the future.

The teletype terminal (for those not in the know, it was a paper based terminal connected by three hundred baud modem) that allowed us access to a Digital PDP 11/70 at the University of Wisconsin – Superior, where several years later I would appropriately get my degree in Mathematics and Computer Science.

While I am sure, as amateur teenaged hackers in our class managed on several occasions to shut down the university computer that I would later learn was affectionately known as "Gertrude" due to an old saying that one of the instructors had brought up one day that there was never anything as slow as a Gertrude, we thoroughly tested Mr. Reibold's patience while I am sure that secretly he was proud that we had listened and learned what he taught even if it wasn't entirely used as he would have liked.

Of what and who that about saying about Gertrude may have referred to has apparently been lost to time, but the name stuck.

To the point, that years later another student at the college caused great confusion with his parents when he began to spend considerable late nights with Gerty whom they thought of as an actual girlfriend rather than a PDP 11/70 named Gertrude.

And for the record, for those who may actually be reading this and wondering, I was not that student as my friend Jerry, wherever he may be today, would undoubtedly attest to as much as he may be embarrassed to admit that it was him.