When my oldest son graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in computer science…
..earlier in May, he signified the kind of intergenerational momentum I discussed in a 2020 blog post. To state that part of his momentum comes from his grandparents is perhaps to state the obvious. What wouldn’t be obvious is the specificity of a connection that he shares with one of his grandmothers.
You could argue that Spencer found his own way to computers. Like many children who play with the tools that parents leave out, he found his way to the computer and mouse.
Yet, he never smacked the keys or yanked the mouse. He would gently climb into the chair with purpose and try to make something happen, while his younger brother assisted.
His grandmother on his mother’s side (seated next to mom) represents the kind of traditional support that gives the honorific, “grandmother”, its meaning. Still vibrant and still working, she could be collecting social security by now if she had wanted it. Instead, she continues to invest a part of salary along with her adoration into her grandsons.
His grandmother on his father’s side has a different story. Her career and her life were cut short by disrupting circumstances. The pinnacle of her education was high school. Yet her aspiration for more was yet to be satisfied.
Somehow she got a job at Raytheon, the defense contractor, as a computer technician. If you recall the movie, “Hidden Figures”, she could have been among those eager to be trained to work on the new “IBMs”.
Though I was quite young at the time, I remembered this because I recently found this card among her personal items I retrieved from my childhood home. This card was a kind of “shortcut” sheet given to their technicians to load “jobs” or functions into computers like the one that initially confounded technicians depicted in the movie.
To confirm my beliefs, I reached out to my mother’s friend, whom she met at Raytheon. She said that indeed, they were both “working in the computer room” and for them, it was “love at first sight”.
More evidence came in the form of these “punch cards” which I would rummage through in the basement (only a snippet is shown) as a child. These cards have gone the way of the floppy disc, monochromatic monitor, and terminal. But back then, you might know that one needed to feed these cards into computers to run algorithms–or to process information.
50 years later, her grandson is using a personal computer in place of the mechanical behemoths that could take up an entire room. He is also using Python and Java in place of Cobol and Fortran.
If none of his parents or grandparents had ever touched a computer, Spencer’s success would be still notable in a world where Black boys face a Herculean task to even rise above the downward pressure of history.
Seeing a clear link, however, between his path and the ones initiated by grandparents suggests again that even if a grandparent doesn’t have a lot of money or professional success to give–the stories of their lives can help grandchildren enhance their purpose.
Let’s celebrate all the students whose graduation demonstrates the kind of determination that can persist from generation to generation.
