III IIII IIIIII IIII I IIII III II IIII

Looking around this room I search for a more prevalent icon of modern culture and one cannot be found. "What is he yammering about now?" you ask. Bar codes. They are on everything. Everything that gets bought has one. Parts that need identified and inventoried have one. Every shipped package that needs tracked is emblazoned with one. This list goes on.

What if these little innocuous series of black short unevenly spaced bars were to illicit a strong emotional memory every time you saw one? This is my imbroglio; an entanglement of fond memories and tragic loss.

I suppose I should give some history.

If you are of my age, you would remember a time when a visit to the grocery store checkout line would take a bit longer than it does today. Clerks used price sticker guns on every item that was stocked on the display shelves. The cashier had to find the price of each item and manually type them in to their adding machine. Since cashiers didn't get paid a lot there was turnover and it was habit to get in the line that you knew had an experienced checkout attendant, even if it was longer since you knew they typed faster and knew more prices.

George J. Laurer is considered the inventor of U.P.C. or Uniform Product Code, which was invented in 1973. In June of 1974, the first U.P.C. scanner was installed at a Marsh's supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The first product to have a bar code included was a packet of Wrigley's Gum. The first store in our area to have a bar code reader was Kroger's. This was an amazing advancement in the grocery industry and my mother immediately recognized how she could apply this same technology to her trade, libraries.

At the time Mom was the head librarian for South Bend Community School Corp. She worked in the administration building no longer actually running a school library. For those that don't remember we had to go to the humongous card catalog, that took up about 100 square feet of space storing the alphabetized 3x5 cards, to find any book the library may contain.

Her idea was to bar code every book and check them out to patrons tracking their rentals. Have a computer that listed every book in the library. Customers could go to a terminal and search electronically to see if the library housed this book and even find out if it was in stock. The program could track late fees too. This simple idea brought our house into the forefront of technology. Mom bought a computer to write this program.

I was one of the first kids to have a computer at home, as they were expensive and not readily used. Me being the first kid having anything was very odd indeed, and sort of cool, as my father didn't like change of any kind. Here is an example: in 1968 he bought a black Valiant (a black box on wheels), in 1972 he bought a black Valiant, in 1976 they discontinued the Valiant so he went the replacement, the Volare' (a model without the rich Corinthian leather).

Mom was no computer whiz but she learned enough to put a program together and traisped it about to the appropriate people withing the Library of Congress offices in Washington DC. They got her message and understood the value of what she was trying to do. My humble mother was not looking for credit, she just wanted make all libraries work more efficiently (since they were always under budget constraints), and librarians jobs easier (since they were always meagerly paid). The powers that be in the Library of Congress took up her charge, and her visionary ideas came to fruition. She was an integral and instigating factor in changing the way libraries operate today and it was all because of bar codes.

It was Christmas some 20 years ago. I was supposed to be heading up to South Bend to see my parents that were now divorced. The weather turned bad so I had to wait to travel. Before I was able to make the trip my mother was killed as a passenger in her friends car. The accident was caused by a drunk driver. They were returning from doing some volunteer work, helping set up a library. I opened her gifts to me that Christmas posthumously.

With this being the approximate anniversary of her death my thoughts are of how much life she was robbed of. In a few more years I will be the same age in which she died. I know I have so much more to do in this life, I see how much she has missed. She was a beautiful, loving, angelic mother. I miss her dearly.

I sorry to lament, but I saw a U. P. C. bar code and its that time of year.