Who
are our thousand members? – February
1996 Newsletter
by Lowell
M. Goldman
Saul
Lowitt, the founder and first president of our Sarasota PC Users Group is a
remarkable renaissance man. Now in his early sixties, he became an athlete by
running six marathons in the past five years, including 26 miles in the NYC
Marathon—has a serious interest in music, theater and ballet—an
entrepreneurial ability that stems from owning a pharmaceutical manufacturing
plant for many years, and several university degrees.
He sold his
business in 1972 and settled in Sarasota, Florida in 1973 and then studied for
his doctorate when he was forty, changing occupations and finally entering
retirement as a busy volunteer.
He humbly says he
could only do this because of the wonderful family support and encouragement
of his wife, Phyllis, a professional singer and teacher of voice, and their
successful adult children, Dr. Mark Lowitt, an assistant professor of
dermatology at the College of Medicine, University of Maryland, and Paula
Lowitt, a New York City attorney with the prominent legal firm of Weil,
Gotschal & Manges.
“I bought an IBM
PC for $6,600 in September of 1982 and I didn’t know what to do with it,”
he told me.
“I was desperate!
ComputerLand was the only vendor of IBM under Cy Shedelbower. I asked him for
his customer records for a mailing list to start a users group. That was
before PC Magazine and PC World were published. Cy Shedelbower said, “Sure
you could”. And I asked Dr. George Petrie, my friend, who was a
Vice-President of IBM and knew Tom Watson, senior, junior, and Arthur K.
Watson, if he would come with me to ComputerLand. And we went to ComputerLand,
and compiled a mailing list.”
“Then I wrote a
letter to everybody using EDLIN, because I didn’t have a word processor. I
didn’t even know about WordStar.”
“The first
meeting was at my house with five people attending. And for the second meeting
we had a salesperson from ComputerLand talk about BASIC.”
“We continued to
have meetings and luckily, there was a wonderful guy who wrote the newsletter,
because the newsletter writing was a very important part of creating the
user’s group.”
“I resisted
staunchly things like dues, formation of a 501c3 charitable organization,
officers. I resisted anything which meant an organization because that
wasn’t me. And that’s certainly in contrast with today.”
“I functioned as
president from October 1982 to May 1983 without any other officers, just a
newsletter chairman—and without dues. Any expenses came out of my pocket.
The biggest meeting under my tutelage was about fifteen members,”
“In the interim,
I had gotten my Assistant Professorship at USF College of Medicine, and I
realized that all day long I was in Tampa, and nobody in Sarasota wanted to
call me during business hours in Tampa.”
“So I resigned as
president April or May 1983, continued as a member, but I couldn’t run the
organization because I was in Tampa. Immediately, in Tampa I found a dearth of
knowledge about PCs. Therefore, I formed, and became the
first president of
the University of South Florida PC User’s Group, which still exists.”
“At the medical
school nobody knew anything about computers. So I became the computer expert
from 1983 until 1993 at the College of Medicine, where everybody came to me
for information and help.”
“The Sarasota PC
Users Group accomplished what I wanted for it by its very existence—through
its perserverence! I never imagined twelve, thirteen hundred members. My
vision was a hand-full of people.”
“Of course, the
SPCUG can improve with more teaching. This enormous membership warrants twenty
or thirty special interest groups and forums, where people learn about what
they need to know. All our presentations are very informative, but we tend
to use only two or three different programs in most of our work, and
that’s where special interest groups could hone our skills, and improve our
abilities to use these programs.”
“Generally, I
function by only using ten to thirty percent of the functionality of any
particular program, like SAS or Microsoft Access or Lotus 123 Release 5 in my
work. Special interest groups (SIGs), where you have enough people who are
daily users, is where you learn everything.”
“So I feel that
the most important facet of our user’s group is additional encouragement
beyond where we are now, in the formation and nurturing of many small SIGs and
forums. Additionally, it would be wonderful, if at some point, with
appropriate financing, we could have a classroom with five or ten PCs, rather
than our Bispham classroom, where only
the instructor has a PC. Learning is really done when you are typing away and
clicking with your mouse, rather than watching an instructor.”
Here’s what Saul
Lowitt told me when I asked him how his experience helped him. “Now,
reminiscing back to the beginning, I always considered myself the worst public
speaker. My fear of crowds hindered me. Yet, because I felt such a driving
need to establish the Sarasota PC Users Group, it committed me to speak in
front of large audiences, without going into cardiac arrest! Additionally, I
transferred what I learned about PCs in this environment, at the Sarasota PC
Users Group, to my medical school experience, where computers were half of
my work day. Managing experiments in the experimental lab was the other half,
but computers were a very important part of my everyday life at the College of
Medicine.”
“Now that I am
retired from the College of Medicine, I am no longer doing pharmacological
research, because there is nothing like that in Sarasota, and all my
interesting volunteer activities have to do with computers—volunteering at
the Sarasota Memorial Hospital, currently spread sheet SIG leader and teaching
spread sheets.”
“I am using and
teaching WordPerfect, Microsoft Access, dBase for Windows, Paradox for DOS,
Database Management, and Lotus and Microsoft spreadsheets.”
“I do enjoy my
email correspondence with my son and daughter, both residents in the north.”
“My other
interests are marathoning (completed twenty in four years) and music. We’ve
been opera-goers, subscribing to NY Metropolitan for eleven years.”
Dr. Saul Lowitt was
raised in Queens, New York. In 1972 after
selling his business he researched where to move to. With a statistical
abstract of the United States he and his family chose Sarasota, Florida. They
arrived in 1973.
He became a
pharmacist at All Children’s Hospital and loved it. But at the age of forty,
he applied to USF College of Medicine to pursue a Ph.D. With young children,
he continued to work and commuted to Tampa to study, before route I-75 was
available. To avoid the three-hour commute, he would stay over when necessary.
And with the enormous support of his wife, Phyllis and his two children, he
completed five years to reach his goal of completing medical school.
Then, at age 45, he
couldn’t get a job, a harbinger of what happens now to people in the
forties, fifties and sixties. So he did a post-doctoral research, at the
College of Medicine, and received his Assistant Professorship in the
Department of Pediatrics and proceeded to perform eleven years of dedicated
research in the complications of diabetes, and worked hard and loved it, and
then was retired in 1994.
Dr. Saul Lowitt
told this interesting story. “On January 7, 1996, when I ran in the Walt
Disney Marathon, as I was running through EPCOT, they were playing the very
familiar Richard Wagner’s “die Walkurie”. This was music I’d heard a
hundred times before. It cut right into the aria in the flute (an interesting
contrast) and then they cut into Beethoven’s Ninth.”
“I was singing
the music, when suddenly I realized the people around me didn’t know that
music. And they were asking me what it was. I asked a teenager next to me,
‘What do you listen to?’ She said ‘the classics’. I asked, ‘Which
ones?’ She said ‘Mostly the Beetles”.
I think now you
will agree that Saul Lowitt is a remarkable renaissance man! And we can be
grateful for the time, energy and sacrifices he encountered starting our
Sarasota PC Users Group.
Editor’s
Note: To recommend an interesting member as a subject for this column, write,
FAX or telephone Lowell Goldman, (address
changed).
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