The phone buzzed with the fury of a bumblebee chomping into a Bit-o-Honey candy bar. A baritone voice reminiscent of Sherill Mimes’ dulcet tones purrs into the receiver, "Good morning, I am a computer."

In this chapter we honor a man, not a Rube Goldberg crafted machine. Time magazine recently presented a resume on a sampling of commencement speeches given to our graduating seniors. A theme common in many of these speeches is about the dangers we face in a big, impersonal society which treats people as things and things as people.

George Orwell’s Big Brother relished treating people as numbers whose names were not important. Sometimes we treat Dad as if he were a machine; a machine we crank and dollar bills fall into our hands with the ease of a bank money machine user; a machine that he…