A good friend of mine died on July 30, 2009, and I went to his funeral service today. I went because I wanted to eulogize an amazing person. John B. (Jack) Gray. He worked at the Social Security Administration for over 40 years and I worked for and with him for 25 of those years.

I began working for Jack in 1962 and today I met his grandson, Steven, who is starting out at Social Security in the same job I had 47 years ago, trainee computer programer in Title-II Systems! Ain't life great?

Jack Gray was born in Philadelphia and enlisted in the navy as soon as he was eligible in World War II. He was stationed on a battleship in the Pacific at the same time that the Japanese Kamikaze pilots were bombarding our ships. The Kamikaze planes did not have landing gears so they had no way to get out of crashing into their targets.

These planes terrorized Jack's destroyer and Jack was wounded with shrapnel from one of their raids. Jack did not feel that his wound was serious enough and declined to receive a purple heart medal.

After the war, Jack joined one of the Phillies farm teams and made a name for himself (as a catcher, I learned today.) Even though he didn't go through to the big leagues, he retained his love for baseball for the rest of his life. I think that he might even have gotten to like the Baltimore Orioles.

Jack went to work for the Philadelphia Payment Center. This was the office that paid out Social Security benefits for the East Coast. The information to pay those checks was entered into IBM punch cards, and thousands of those cards were manipulated each month to pay the checks.

On those cards was recorded all kinds of personal data about the recipients. This data was passed from "EAM" machine to "EAM" machine, and sorted and compiled and printed every which way. Jack became an expert and a supervisor of these machines.

In the late 1950's the Social Security Administration (SSA) was taxed with the start of paying Disability benefits, increasing the retirement rolls, and many law changes. This meant that the punch card system was about to become obsolete. SSA needed to automate.

A group of experts from around the country was assembled in Baltimore. Jack Gray was one of those experts. These guys worked very hard to get the automation job done. I was hired to help them. This involved lots of travel and long overtime hours.

One day, Jack asked me to get something from his desk drawer. Upon pulling it open, I saw what looked like dozens of green Government checks. I asked him about it and he said that because of going on all those trips, he didn't have time to cash the checks. By the way, trips were categorized by the number of beers that could be consumed on a train ride to the city. For instance, a trip to Philadelphia was only a "one beer" trip. A trip to New York was a "two beer" trip. A trip to Kansas city required "six beers". (Since Jack did not drink beer, I had to drink mine and his both.)

Jack taught me a lot about being an analyst as well as a programer. My first job for him was "taping the FRC cards." FRC meant Federal Records Center. Instructions for SSA personnel was to make up an FRC punchcard whenever the last person who could be paid on an account died. The folder for that account was forwarded to the Federal Records Center in Boyers, Pennsylvania. (This is a massive cave where Government records are stored. The punchcard was kept just in case the folder needed to be recalled.)

Jack sent me to Philadelphia and told me to find the FRC cards and arrange putting the information from them on tape. No problem. I took the "one beer" train to Philadelphia (actually, I had two beers). I asked to see the FRC punchcard file. Nobody had heard of it. Finally, an old guy with a beard said that he thought he knew where it was. He took me into the depths of the building where we found an old storeroom with a hole in the door. Whenever an FRC card was made, it was sent down to that room and stuffed into the hole.

After jimmying the door open, we found a pyramid of ripped, squashed, and mashed punchcards. Utilizing a massive programming effort by Dexter Rasmussen and Dick Eckert, the cards were finally manipulated into readable format and delivered to a taping operation utilizing an RCA 301 computer. Jack was very happy.

Before I wrap up, I want to acknowledge some other people who helped automate all of the punchcard operations formerly done in the six payment centers. John Wachter: Branch Chief; Sid Nibali: the other Branch Chief; Bob Schnick: Section Chief and still today an active member of the SSA Alumni; Paul Deba: EAM equipment supervisor in Baltimore; Hugh Forbes: Genius programmer and creator of the UB code (in honor of Baltimore's Eubie Blake); Bert Mellinger: who became a movie star after he retired and starred as background in the important Porky's movies; and some others whose names I can't recall right now.

But mainly, it was Jack Gray who got all of us working towards the goal of automating the previous punchcard systems. Without that automation, the whole Social Security system would have collapsed.

Lastly, I want to tell the joke that Jack loved: Jack: Did you know that the Bible is all about baseball? Me: No, I can't believe that. Jack: Well, it's true. Look at the first line of the Bible, in Genesis. It says: "In the big inning...".

This was just part of his life at SSA. Jack had other lives: raising a family, helping the disabled, coaching high school teams, being President of civic clubs, etc. Jack was another of those rare beings: someone that nobody could ever say anything bad about, and someone who never said anything bad about anyone else. We need more Jack Gray's in the world.

Farewell, old boss and friend.