Here is dad in his office/lair/man cave. Tucked into the primary bedroom’s walk-in-closet, it is where he lived much of his last thirty years. On the occasions that I visited him; I could walk in unannounced and sometimes find him playing solitaire on his computer. Calling him on this behavior, he would retort that he was enjoying his golden years. A revelry that I too have taken up in my own golden years. Like father, like son. He did a lot more there than just play solitaire though, he ran a business.

JP Axe ID was originally my mother’s business. JP were her initials and ID stood for Interior Design, her vocation. Not wanting to let the investment made into incorporating her business go to waste, he decided to repurpose it. Initially, an industrial design division was added. That saved the ID portion of the name, and I guess JR was close enough to JP to let it slide. Besides it still worked with the original logo.

Dad’s business was in computer consulting. Using his first PhD in mechanical engineering, he wrote programs that performed structural analysis, also-known-as structures. At that time the market was dominated by expensive, computationally intensive, general-purpose programs that any old engineer could use to calculate a device’s structural stability. Dad jumped in on the personal computer revolution and using his expertise was able to fashion software that was individually tailored to specific applications. His approach usually involved a lot of customer handholding, was low cost, but not particularly profitable. Still, it was as much a labor of love as a business.

Going through his files, Anne found one correspondence that he had written to one of his customers. In his letter he explained to this customer that he had not cashed his check for the software purchase, because he had left it in his shirt pocket and it had been washed. The check was now a soggy wadded up ball of paper. The customer graciously wrote dad a new check, knowing full well that the software was worthless without dad’s consulting.