Remembrance

Walt would not like all this adoration about him. His face would have more red on it than usual. In fact he would not approve of the technology being used to record it. Unless he could sell it, of course. I will be forever thankful to have been one of his friends for nearly forty years.
I met him at a Cincom "seminar". It was his favorite kind of venue. I am sure his bosses expected him to bring back orders for their flagship product, at that time a state the of art database management system, called Total. We were way too arrogant to be interested in a product similar to a database product project which we had been working on for a couple of years. What did interest us was a new, for both of us, teleprocessing monitor. When Walt described the software paging (Virtual memory paging was the really hot technology of the time) in the system, we were hooked. I doubt that Walt really understood or cared about the technology. In those days, it was considered that moving away from IBM hardware or software in any major way was hazardous to one's career health. The marketing manager for our account turned out to be one of Walt's best friends at IBM, Bob Pelstring. We survived and moved on.
That decision could have been disasterous for us, except for a couple really bright programmer types (at the time), named Mike Benson and Dave Clements, both of whom later became Cincom employees (I should have sued). That project brought me to Cincinnati many times over the next few years and it was all the back and forth that contributed to Walt becoming one of my lifelong best friends.
Walt was single in those early years, but I do not think that made much difference. When Miss Vicky came on the scene, Walt remained the same person we (and she) had learned to love and we all loved her, as well.
When Walt moved to Manhattan Beach and Teradata he was, if anything, easier to see more often. When I later was commuting from Orange County to Santa Monica and West LA, I had to stop every Friday, waiting for the traffic to clear, at Sausalito South and later at Sunsets, both in Manhattan Beach. There surprisingly was a period of time when we became partners in a new Venture. Unfortunate, our timing was awful as one of our down markets scared off all the venture capital guys just when we thought we were ready to close.
Walt was responsible for broadening my scope of friends. I made friends and
acquaintances at Cincom. I grew to know all the other principals in Teradata, as well as a group of social friends from Manhattan Beach. Unfortunately they were mostly Cal Berkeley alumni, but I like them anyway.
As we reached our more "Golden Years", we tried to keep up our friendship but less frequently. I no longer was at Sunset's every Friday, and he and his friends no longer came to Newport Beach for haircuts, etc., by the girls at the Balboa Bay Club barbershop. We tried to keep up each year at the Long Beach Grand Prix, but that got old so we just met at Clancy's for gambling and refreshments before and after the races.
The bottom line is that Walt was a very important part of my life and I thank God that He gave Walt to us in exactly the way that he did !