Work Hard, Be Kind (eBook)

A Memoir

Jr. Jerome R. Cox (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
269 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-5689-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Jerry Cox traces the story of his event-filled life from his childhood in Indiana, through his brief stint in the Army, education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his illustrious career in Boston and in Saint Louis.

Jerome R. Cox, Jr., was born in Washington, DC in 1925 and throughout his life has been known as 'Jerry.' He served briefly in the armed forces during WWII and then attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), obtaining BS, MS, and ScD degrees, all in Electrical Engineering. In 1955, the famous auditory physiologist Hallowell Davis recruited him to the Central Institute for the Deaf, where he led the development of a special-purpose digital computer used by Davis to create the field of evoked response audiometry. Dr. Cox established the Biomedical Computer Laboratory in 1964, pioneering the application of digital computers to medical research. In that same year, the personal computing pioneer, Wesley A. Clark, moved from MIT to join Dr. Cox at Washington University. In 1974, Dr. Cox became the founding chair of the Washington University Computer Science Department, leading it until 1991. He co-founded Growth Networks Incorporated, a network switching company whose chip designs are found in the world's highest-performing routers. Dr. Cox is a member of both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Inventors.

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In this gracefully told memoir, Jerome R. ("e;Jerry"e;) Cox traces the story of his long, event-filled life: from his childhood in Indiana; through his brief stint in the Army and education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; to his illustrious career in Boston and in Saint Louis. At Washington University, he applied computers in innovative ways to medical research and healthcare, among them the hearing of newborns and the detection of cardiac arrhythmias. Through luck and hard work, he became a key participant in many of the early events in the development of positron emission tomography (PET), a transformative imaging technology that is now essential to the detection and management of cancer. In 1974, Dr. Cox founded Washington University's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, leading it through its formative years. By the time he retired in 1991, the four-person faculty had grown to 24, and its members had been involved in such projects as medical database design and computational genome sequencing. Dr. Cox later participated in national committee work that laid the foundation for the scanning of the human brain and the sequencing of the human genome. Then in 1997, Dr. Cox and two associates created a new company: Growth Networks Incorporated (GNI), based on innovative data-switching technology. Three years later, GNI was sold to Cisco, which then developed the Cisco Carrier Routing System, a technology that dominated the field from 2004 to 2021, generating more than $3.5 billion in sales. In 2015, Dr. Cox founded Q-Net Security, a company that sells an attachment to protect endpoint computers from network attack. Dr. Cox's story also includes the important role that his family, particularly his late wife, Bobby, played throughout his career. He stresses the importance of his motto to "e;work hard"e; and also to "e;be kind"e; as ingredients in a well-lived life.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

The Early Years | 1925-1939

I have said that I value work and kindness as deeply important values and ones that have informed my entire life. As I look back, I think I learned their importance in my early childhood, which contained a good deal of both. On the whole, it was a very happy childhood; I was surrounded by a loving family, a doting nanny, and a group of wonderful friends who stood in as the siblings I didn’t have. My family was prosperous and remained relatively unscathed by the miseries of the Great Depression. In addition to our home in South Bend, Indiana, we had a cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan, where I spent magical days playing in the water, in the dunes, and in the nearby woods. The major and abiding sorrow of my early days came in 1936. When I was 11, I suffered the death of my beloved mother, which changed everything.

But let me start with my paternal grandparents, though I know little about them. My paternal grandfather, Jerome A. Cox, was a grocer who owned the general store in Preston, a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. His wife and my grandmother was Lillian Cox, whose maiden name was Rockhold, the source of my middle name. They both passed away before I could have had any memory of them, in 1921 and 1926.

I know a great deal more about my maternal grandparents, the Rev. Seth A. Mills and his wife, Mary Dunscombe Mills. Mary Dunscombe, who was born in 1852 in County Cork, Ireland, had moved to Canada at age 30. Rev. Mills was born in Quebec, Canada, in 1864, ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1889, and married to Mary Dunscombe in 1890; they moved to Troy, New York in 1905 to take over a church there. They had three children: Ada Mills who died at a young age; my mother, Jane Mills; and my uncle, Harold Mills, who were all born in Canada in 1891, 1893, and 1895, respectively. Tragically, Uncle Harold was killed in the Battle of Belleau Wood, the bloodiest and most ferocious battle that U.S. forces fought during World War I. He was a 2nd Lieutenant in the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, which relieved the 3rd Battalion on 7-8 June 1918. The Germans were attacked in the woods six times by the Marines before they were expelled on 26 June, but sadly Uncle Harold died on 17 June and was buried in France. I know him only through my grandmother. His death was a heavy burden for her, one that I was aware of, even as a child. More about her later.

My mother, Helena Jane Mills, was known to me as “Mom,” of course, but her friends and my father always called her “Jane,” and I did not know about the name Helena until recently. From her diary, I learned that she wanted to be a nurse, but she came back early from an initial year in nursing school in New York City, disappointed that it had not worked out. Her diary was not clear as to why. Instead, she went to the New York State Normal College in Albany where she majored in Household Economics, graduating in June 1913. She took a secretarial job when the family of three moved from Troy to a new church in Hyattsville, Maryland, in 1921. I believe her job was at the State Department near the White House. She joined a hiking club based in Washington, DC, where she met my father.

Because of my mother’s untimely death, I have more stories from my father about these early years. He was sent to Western Maryland University at age 15 because, as he told me, his high school teachers felt they had nothing more to teach him. He did well there and returned to Preston to teach English at the high school. That would have been in 1914 when he was barely older than his students. About that experience, he said simply that it “just did not work out,” but in a few years along came World War I, and in 1917 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He was trained to be an observer in a two-seat biplane, with the pilot in the front seat and the observer, both of them officers, in the rear. The pilot, of course, flew the plane, and the observer took notes on ground movements and conditions. In 1918, my father was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in Arkansas, where he had flight training. He told me that veteran pilots would take advantage of the newcomers by practicing a bit of hazing. The pilot would do a slow roll and, if the observer was unprepared, he would fall out of the plane to the end of his seatbelt, his clipboard trailing to the end of its cord, and the pencil used to record observations yet further down. It was a primitive arrangement that today’s air travelers would find hard to comprehend.

My mother and me at the house in Hyattsville

My father was not posted overseas, and he returned to civilian life in early 1919, determined to find a different career. He entered The George Washington University Law School and specialized in patent law, perhaps because it was technical and allowed him to apply the law to a new and exciting field that he had tasted in the Army Air Corps. During those law school years, he joined a hiking organization, Red Triangle Outing Club, where he met my mother. Their romance blossomed, and they met for lunch frequently at the All States Cafeteria, a mutually convenient spot near the White House. She was working at the State Department, and in 1922, after graduating with his LLB, he interned at the Patent Office, then located in the nearby Department of Commerce building. In 1923 they married, and I was born in a hospital in the District of Columbia on 24 May 1925. Their budget was tight, so my parents lived with my grandparents in Hyattsville, a near suburb of Washington, DC.

My first personal recollection occurred when I was just 3 years old, but that memory was certainly enhanced by my parents reminding me of the event when I was older. I was curious about the commuter trains that stopped at the downtown Hyattsville station, and I took an unaccompanied walk to watch the action. I clearly remember the joy in my parents’ faces once I was collected and brought back onto my grandparents’ grand front porch. That porch was only a couple blocks from the station and had one of the then-popular wide porch swings. I do not remember being chastised—only happiness.

My tricycle and me behind our house in Hempstead

Soon my father left the patent office for a job with Pratt & Whitney, a manufacturer of aircraft engines in Hartford, Connecticut, but that job was short-lived. Within a year, we moved to Long Island so that he could work for Curtiss-Wright, another rapidly growing company in the aircraft business. We lived in an apartment just off Queens Blvd., then in Garden City, and finally in Hempstead, each step bringing increasingly large quarters.

Two adventures there remain in my memory. In the first, my curiosity again led to family distress. I poked a stick into a hornet’s nest on the back of our house in Hempstead. I sustained a number of bites but was immediately comforted by my mother. It was painful—but only briefly. The second adventure was not of my making. My father took me on an airplane ride out of nearby Floyd Bennett Field. It was in a two-seater plane with me in my father’s lap. I am guessing the year was 1929, when I was only four years old. It was exciting for me, but I have no report of my mother’s reaction to this flight, though I can guess.

At some point during these early years my mother suffered a strep throat infection, which led to rheumatic fever and heart-valve damage. I was completely unaware of this illness and of the fact that, if it was not treated with antibiotics, the effect can lurk in the heart for years. In the 1920s and early 1930s, antibiotics were unknown. My mother’s lingering but dormant illness may have been the reason that I was an only child.

In 1930, my father’s work as a patent attorney led him to move the family in order to take a new job with Bendix Aircraft in South Bend, Indiana. We never talked about why he changed jobs, but I expect it was a step up, because we rented a bigger house at 103 N. Sunnyside Avenue about 10 blocks east of downtown. The house is still there, as can be seen courtesy of Google Maps, though it certainly has been remodeled at least once since then. It was and remains a lovely single-story bungalow. South Bend was a manufacturing city of about 100,000 people. Then, in addition to Bendix Aviation, it had Studebaker automobiles, South Bend Lathes, and many other smaller companies. South Bend is also the home of Notre Dame University and its nationally famous football team.

While in Hempstead, I had started kindergarten in the spring of 1930, and I continued in the fall when we reached South Bend, which had a one-room portable school building that contained grades K through 5. I walked by myself or with schoolmates the six blocks east from our house to school. The schoolroom was small: about 25 feet on a side with a single teacher attending to the total of 20 or so students in all the grades. She would give assignments to the three or four in each grade and come back to see how we were doing after visiting the students at other levels. My memories of that time are pleasant. I was eager to move on to the next grade as soon as possible but got in step with schoolmates by spending a year and a half in kindergarten. In later years, I would jokingly tell friends that I had been held back upon moving to South Bend and had to repeat kindergarten. A distinct recollection from that time is the partial eclipse of the sun in August 1932. The family stood in the front yard and observed the event with dark glasses. My father explained what was happening, but I...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.12.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-5689-4 / 9798350956894