A 20th Century Bridge
selected memories of a family named Foley
by
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We took pity on the
he corrected his error after profuse apologies, we strolled around town
taking in its rustic charms and relics of better days. Little did I know I
would be a tour guide the following year. Several people confirmed what
we had been told while stranded on the highway. A carpenter’s strike in
To turn around without seeing
decided to gamble on finding work in southeast
northwest of
to construction of the Alcan itself. Cut through the
Range, with peaks almost 20,000 feet high, the road winds through the
for hours on end. Mountain goats can be seen dotting barren high slopes,
so steep it seems impossible they find footholds. Glacier fingers in every
crevice reach toward a valley floor, slowly melting into streams below. Silt
filled plateaus hold towering Sitka Spruce and Hemlocks and, this day, the
sky was as clear and blue as I have ever seen it. Seven thousand feet above
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Book Details
About the Book
A 20th Century Bridge opens with the Industrial Revolution underway. The majority of our citizens are illiterate and telegraphers will soon lose their jobs to telephone operators. The reader is taken on a journey with transportation by steam locomotive and “hoss cars” at the outset. These give way to a chauffeur driven Rolls Royce, an open cockpit biplane and a FedEx Airbus shuttling the world. Early on you learn Major Foley, the author’s father, shaped history during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Along the way you witness a frontier wedding at the gateway to the
About the Author
The Great Depression and a tightly controlled political machine in the city where the author grew up, shaped his youth with lessons in the value of thrift and the dangers of entrenched power. WWII, college, marriage, and wild adventures formed a prelude to his forty year career in manufacturing, electronics, education, biotechnology, publishing and consulting. Inception of today’s information technology (IT) began with pioneers like himself making use of punched cards, chadless tape, teletypes and primitive electronic computers. He continuously infused the following decades of IT’s gestation with software to exploit the speed and memory of succeeding hardware generations and new data processing tools. It was a bumpy ride. Told with many anecdotal stories and much humor, it is a trip worth taking.