September 22, 1967: No show

Diary entry for September 22, 1967:

Stayed home and waited on Kubalas, but they never came. Went to grocery store.

You'd think they could have at least sent a text saying they weren't coming, right? Oh, wait, this was way before texting, cell phones, and all that instant communication we take for granted today. What did you do back in the day when plans changed after you left your house and you needed to let somebody know? I guess you looked for a pay phone and hoped the person you were trying to reach was at home. (Some of you youngsters out there may have to google "pay phone.")

Here's another interesting story about Mom and Dad's friends, Ed and Joyce Kubala. In 1980 I started attending The University of Texas at Austin, majoring in electrical engineering. I had been awarded a small academic scholarship from the College of Engineering, something like $500 per semester, which easily covered my tuition and books back then. (A $20 college textbook was considered expensive in 1980.) The only stipulations for keeping that scholarship were that I stay in the College of Engineering and maintain some minimum GPA like 3.0 or 3.25 (on a 4.0 scale), which should have been no problem for me given my grades in high school. Well, college isn't high school. I did fine my first semester but my grades pretty much dropped like a rock my second semester, only in part due to the difficulty of the courses I took. So at some point during my sophomore year I received a letter from Dr. J. P. Lamb, the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the College of Engineering, informing me that I had lost my scholarship. Well, darn. Nobody's fault but my own.

I kept that letter in my folder of semi-important papers that documented my high school and college scholastic career, and many years later I ran across it again and noticed the following below the signature:

JPL/jk

For those of you unfamiliar with business correspondence, that's called the identification initials and is used when someone such as an administrative assistant prepares a letter for the actual sender. The three uppercase letters are the initials of the person sending the letter, and the two lowercase letters are the initials of the person who prepared the letter. So in this case "JPL" is the initials of Dr. Lamb, but who was "jk" and why does it matter? Well, "jk" was Joyce Kubala. Yep, she worked for Dr. Lamb in the College of Engineering and prepared the letter informing me I had lost my scholarship. Small world, eh?