Roscoe Leroy

The first thing to know about Roscoe is this: Don't make fun of his name. "It shows my parents had a sense of humor. Besides," he always adds, "it could have been worse. They could have named me Leroy Leroy."

Roscoe is an old war buddy of my dad's. According to Roscoe, they both served under Patton, although my guess is that my dad served directly under Roscoe, and Roscoe served somewhat remotely under Patton. Roscoe is one of those old salty dogs who have an opinion on just about everything. The annoying thing is that he is right so much of the time. Of course, when he is wrong, the results are not pretty, because he is willing to back his convictions to the hilt. I have seen Roscoe push all his chips to the center of the table, confident that his poker hand was the best. The results were spectacular, but not always in the way Roscoe would have liked.

His wisdom is simple and easy to understand. It comes in the form of very prescriptive advice: As long as you don't probe for deep theory, you'll be fine. Going with Roscoe is a leap of faith, one that benefits us all when the chips are down. With his "been there, done that" swagger, he boasts of having finished the eighth grade, but I have it on good authority that he graduated from an excellent high school some time in the thirties. My dad explained this discrepancy to me simply by saying that Roscoe felt it unnecessary to flaunt his education.

At various times, Roscoe has served in the military, fought oil well fires with Boots and Coots, and been a mining engineer. Those experiences made him a pragmatic kind of guy, but they also taught him how to perform under pressure. He does manage to get all the dirt out from under his fingernails if you invite him to dinner, but you can't expect much use of the salad fork.

Roscoe doesn't do math, really; he does arithmetic. Answers tend to come out of his mouth in whole numbers. When asked about this, his reply is along the lines of, "Well, it always comes down to how many sticks of dynamite you need to make the hole, and how many men you need to clean it up. I don't cut my dynamite in half, and I don't hire fractional people." When he puts it like that, you know you are done with fancy mathematics.

Roscoe has good background, solid values, and a world of experience. And he is a great general manager. From our point of view, his only defect is that he knows very little about software engineering.

We turn that "defect" into a feature. A few years back, when the mine closed, Roscoe decided to go into software engineering. I took on the job of educating him but, of course, he spent a fair amount of time educating me.