Who are our thousand members? -
Gary Schweinshaupt – April 1996
by Lowell M. Goldman
When you open your mailbox every
month—a few days before our regularly scheduled meeting —like magic—there’s
always a Monitor in it! Call it what you like, a magazine or a
newsletter. But, the name is The Sarasota PC Monitor, the official
publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. and it’s
packed with forty-eight pages of information and advertisements. And it’s
published by one man, Gary Schweinshaupt and his committee.
Gary has been Editor since May 1988,
and was president of the Sarasota PC Users Group for the year 1990. I’ve
wanted to feature him in this column for over eight months, but he modestly
sidetracked me. I get the feeling he is always so busy thanking other people
for the work they do for our SPCUG that he doesn’t take a lot of the credit
he deserves.
He helped change the direction of our
group seven or eight years ago, when he was active with the Association of PC
Users Groups—to get an idea of what people tried that worked or didn’t
work, so we could rehash only the good experiences of others.
"Several of us went to COMDEX
meetings and talked to others to learn better ways to help our group grow and
provide the needs or our members. I started the SunCoast Regional Users Group
Conference in an effort to provide this type of contact for all of our
leaders. It grew to include as many as eighteen user groups from southwest
Florida. Later, they got together with others to generate a Florida statewide
users group association. However, I feel we still need a Tampa to Fort Myers
association of user groups to enable our prospective officers and committee
leaders to intermingle with experienced leaders from these other user groups
and learn how to become more effective leaders in our group."
Gary and his wife Bobbi met at
Manatee High School. They were married in 1960 and started their family in
Michigan, where he was in the Air Force. Their children, Steven is a
physician in Tampa, and daughter, Carol is a part time accountant and mother.
Gary and Bobbi have five grand-children. As copy editor and proof reader,
Bobbi reads the Monitor three or four times each month, before it goes
out, spending about twenty hours.
Gary has been in high-tech business
almost all his life. In the military, he was in high-tech jet fighter
aircraft, then spacecraft electronic/telemetry design, then sales leading in
electronics and in the computer business for about fifteen years. He managed a
computer center for Radio Shack, then a ComputerLand center, all here in
Sarasota. He’s now a consultant in publishing and for clients on the World
Wide Web. He also publishes The Reporter newspaper for the Sahib Shrine
Temple and is active in Freemasonry.
He spent ten years with Lanier
Business Product, Inc., in mostly high-tech equipment, micrographics,
educational and word processing equipment. When he started with Lanier, IBM
was still selling "Mag-Card" typewriters—Lanier was selling
microcomputer/CRT-based word processing equipment at $20,000 a system.
Gary told me, "I’m getting
enjoyment and education out of publishing The Sarasota PC Monitor, and
now I’m enthused about the Web development. We were one of the first users
groups to have a presence on the Web, and I get two or three messages a week
on our home page from people asking about the Sarasota PC Users Group."
Well, readers, I did it! I crashed
into the private life of Gary Schweinshaupt and interrupted the busy, hectic
stream of his activities to tell you about him. I hope I did justice to
someone who does so much for the Sarasota PC Users Group without offending all
the people he works with by leaving them out. This time, I thought it should
be all for Gary.
Editor’s
Note: The author of this column heads our Writer’s Forum, To recommend
an interesting member as a subject for this column, please write, FAX or
telephone: Lowell M. Goldman, 7087 Fairway Bend Circle, Sarasota, Fl. 34243
(941)351-5252.
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