• Nov 30th - Steve Lampen of Belden Wire & Cable will present a short history of wire and cable. Do you know when rubber was first cured? Do you know how recently most of the available wire was made from steel instead of copper?

The local angle for us is that Huffman coding is used in high definition television.

Dr. Huffman earned his B.S. and M.S. from Ohio State and his Ph.D from M.I.T. He was the founding faculty member of the computer science department at UC Santa Cruz.

Gene Zastrow is a man we all respect and admire so it was nice we could show him some small measure of our appreciation.

Thanks are due to Art Leberman for handling the banquet details.

He was a humorist who would develop a theme and then proceed to improvise on it, not unlike a jazz musician. One piece I recall from one of his records was about being a deprived child in a non Ovaltine drinking household who desperately wanted a secret inner-seal from an Ovaltine jar so he could get his Little Orphan Annie decoder badge.

Another extended piece had to do with a state of boyhood as realized through the desire for and eventual possession of a Daisy air rifle.

The man could conjure up a half hour of mental theater starting with a phrase like "skate key". He wrote several books. One was based upon a sign he saw behind the counter in a deli, "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash".

In the movie "Network" the bit where the Peter Finch character urges his listeners to yell out the window was borrowed from Shepherd. It was a regular feature of his known as "hurling the invective". He'd have his listeners open their windows and turn up the volume of their radios at which point he would say something provocative.

In 1975 he ended a broadcast by saying: "Can you imagine 4000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty."