The IBM 557 Alphabetic Interpreter

The relationships between sons and fathers is full of import and mystery. In my case, I’ve spent most of my life working in my father’s fields. This might seem like a biblical metaphor. In fact, it is a simple ‘truth of the matter’ statement. My father was a professional electronics technician for IBM during his life as an employee. He was also an avid amateur musician. By day, he kept the federal and local business machines running. On certain evenings and Sunday mornings, he sang with enthusiasm in the church choir. He worked in both of these fields in other ways: he used his electronics knowledge and parts scavenged from IBM discard piles to create all sorts of creative and useful homemade devices; he played trumpet passably and the violin just enough to make the dog howl. Just as he hated to see anything go to waste, he also had a good ear for wrong notes.

Once my own mind was established as a separate entity from my father’s, it became apparent to me that we had very different temperaments. To make the long and subtle story short: I inverted Dad’s career path. Although he had, as I am fond of mythologizing, taught me to solder before I could read, – and he tried to teach us kids semaphore and morse code on any number of occasions – I was not very much interested in electronics theory. It has lots of – ugh – math! Attention to details was never my strong point; nor have I ever been obsessed with the “literal truth” or consensus reality. Both of these things were Robert Beck strong points. He was systematic, careful, and full of facts and figures. He liked to do crossword puzzles for crying out loud! So to cut to the chase, by way of adolescent rebellion and a perverse sense of defying the culture and trying the impossible, I decided to become a composer and ditch the electronics.

Now that Dad’s gone and I’m no spring chicken, it seems almost possible to assess certain effects of my father’s influence and tutelage. Music making is an act that invokes Dad continually. First of all, it does require attention to detail. Despite my relentlessly creative approach, if I’m trying to play something accurately and fail, I literally hear Dad’s voice saying “that’s not how it goes!” Then there is the matter of choice of repertoire. Dad had a thing for what my college mates called “cheesy” music. An earlier generation would call it “corny.”

I recall meeting Peter Tramontana, former music director of Good Shepherd Methodist. I, the young composer, was playing something of mine for the older, more experienced professional. As Dad looked on – he’d set this informal encounter up, after all – Tramontana took his fist and smooshed it down on the piano keyboard and said “that’s what music sounds like these days.” Now I’ve forgotten Dad’s reaction. I can imagine one. He would have been both sympathetic and satisfied that I’d been shown up, but he would have been aware of the cynical, almost anguished nature of the lesson regarding “modern music.”

In fact, Dad would hear something modern and say something like, “is that what they call ‘twelve tone?'” Dad’s sense of humor, mostly ironic, was legendary. The fact of the matter is that I liked most all of what he liked musically. I play Sousa; I hang out at the Sousa archive on the campus where I work. I took to collecting records by the Merry Macs, an obscure 40s-50s singing ensemble that had once been Bing’s back up group on Decca. (I think that’s true: I could Google it, but hey. I’m not the fact guy. Dad was the fact guy.) I shared Dad’s love of John Maunder’s “Olivet to Calvary,” a decidedly sentimental, emotional cantata that deals with Christ’s passion only up to the point of the death on the cross. This makes it tricky to work into to the liturgical year. It is really very cheesy by the standards of “the great music of Western Civilization,” but it has formed the backbone of my harmonic language. I persist in mining this vein. Sure, I can write or improvise atonal music. But I just as often play (or invent) things that sound like hymns. As a record collector, I have amassed quite the collection of church music. It goes without saying, that as one who hated waste, my father either had or passed on the urge to collect things.

Electronics, of course, did not stay renounced. First of all, one can’t be a musician nowadays without electronics knowledge. The ability to strip wire and solder, the skill I picked up from Dad, has never gathered any dust. My work at the university of Illinois has involved so much electronics that in this respect alone I’ve been in my father’s head more often than not. It started with fixing VCRs and cassette decks, and reached an absolute apogee with our reconstruction of Tricia Brown’s “Astral Convertible.” That orgy of soldering, not to mention actual circuit design on my part, tested my ability to channel Dad to the utmost. I consider my work on that piece an homage to him, one that puts his tutelage in a lineage that includes some very renowned artists of the recent past. (Cage, Rauschenberg, and of course, Brown.) In between, perhaps as a result of all of this soaking in things electronic, the basic theory of the vacuum tube amplifier made sense to me. The knowledge seemed to arrive in a set of dreams. I read some books. I started drawing and then wiring.

Of course, as I have said, as much as I have worked in my father’s fields, I have not exactly done it his way. How often I’ve wished I could! I would hook things up and when I went for what Dad called “the smoke test,” I would sometimes be standing amidst a shower of  exploded electrolytic capacitor bits and, well, smoke. Then I’d be forced to do some math. On occasion, I’d call Dad for advice. In recent years, as he declined, he sometimes could not be made on the phone to understand my questions. When he did, his answers were perhaps hesitant, but he was always accurate. My old man knew what he was doing.

I consider some of Dad’s esoteric vacuum tube projects to be art. I don’t know exactly what they do, despite my occasional queries, but a few of them look very cool. Dad was not tempted to call things he made art. He was more pragmatic and humble than I’ll ever be. He was there for many of my misadventures. He was with me when I negotiated for (and paid way too much for) my first car. He was beside me in that VW bus when I was trying to get the hang of the clutch. He came with me when I moved to Illinois, rode shotgun in the truck and stood by as I signed up for my first tiny apartment in Champaign. After we carried all my stuff in from the car, we sat at my freshly minted dining room table (though there was no dining room), and he asked me if I had taken care of my spiritual needs. I tried once more to explain what being an artist meant for me. I went on about how it had a spiritual aspect. He never had to explain what being a father meant to him. He just practiced it.

As a musician, his enthusiasm and taste are indelible for me. Though very hard to achieve for a person like myself with an endless number of ways to fake or recreate a piece, Dad’s freaky ear and sense of accuracy also keeps me at it. When he knew the piece, as he did with seemingly all the Sousa marches past, not to mention other less well known marches, he had the music in mind from top to bottom and if I faked it within his earshot, well, whether he said anything or not, he knew “that was not how it went.” That is a very handy voice to have at hand. The odd thing is that now that he’s gone, that voice is all the louder. That voice is inspiring me as a musician now to try to finally get it right.

Finally, I’d like to share a novelistic vision of my father’s personal Moby Dick. Dad was complicated, as we all are. For him, his nemesis wasn’t human. It was an IBM machine called a 557. Its full name was the 557 alphabetic interpreter, and it was a big (by today’s standards huge) rectangle of metal. It sorted punched cards. This was back when computers were the size of large rooms and had a tiny fraction of the memory that you find now in any dumb phone. I went with Dad on an IBM service call and got down and dirty with the 557 alongside him. It was one of the last two in service. This was late fall of 1986, and he got the call to the campus of Georgetown University to confront the beast. I was having lover troubles, so I kept putting quarters into a pay phone to connect with my latest potential mate. In the meanwhile, Dad got the covers off the interpreter. It was big, gray, and filthy. It’s insides were complicated and plenty greasy. It smelled like congealing grease. Dad, as I’ve said, knew what he was doing when it came to electronics. I’d seen him walk into one of those room-sized computer installations with all of those whirring tape drives and blinking lights and waltz over to a machine, pop open its cover, pull a relay, insert a new one and say, “that’s the clinker.” I have a mess of those relays in my basement. Guess from whose basement I filched ’em?

The 557 was more mechanical than electronic. That was why Dad hated it. It had this diabolical mechanism for feeding the cards over a set of bushes that made contact or not with metal rollers depending on what was punched into the card. It was able to sort the cards into trays. This was what was meant by “alphabetic interpretation.” Years of exasperation with this thing had made it some sort of evil symbol of his job, which I gather he detested by this point. His retirement was neck and neck with that of the damned 557. He hated it when the digital clock read 557. It always seemed to do that on the way to 6 o’clock. To see Dad more or less stumped was one of those mysteries, one of those moments of import I mentioned in my first sentence. I remember clearly getting down on my hands and knees and starting to figure out the mechanism. I’ve always been better at mechanisms than with math. I hate to get all greasy, and I was far more worried about my love life than this antique business machine. I wanted to get off this campus ASAP. So I puzzled out the 557, and between the two of us, working side by side, we got it running. That late afternoon was unique as it turned out. Dad retired, to his certain relief.

Believe me when I say I’ve had my 557s.

I’ve been stumped out in my father’s fields plenty. Hitting the oom-pah just right; getting the melody as written – these are challenges that are decorated with Dad’s memory. As for the smoke tests, there will be more I’m sure. I’m sure there’s plenty more math to do up front. I’m quite sure I won’t do it in that order, and I’m equally sure that my father’s memory will lurk behind whatever results.

Dad, like his own father, lived a good long time and died in his own home with his wife at hand. If ever there was a final lesson to be mastered, that’s it. The import and mystery of fathers and sons is bound up in this for me: where luck of the draw leaves off, having lived right, set a great example, and been true to one’s core makes a powerful heritage.