Memories of My Father on Father's Day
My father, Abraham Isaac Pressman, grew up under different circumstances than my mother experienced in Frankfurt, Germany (see post of May 14). His long life, which was filled with many successes and a few failures and disappointments, is too complex to write about here, so I attach a link to his eulogy that our family wrote, which is worth a read.
His father Nathan emigrated from Berdychiv, Ukraine, in 1906. Berdychiv was more than half Jewish, but that population was wiped out by the Nazis in 1943. His father was a carpenter, skilled at building circular staircases, and lived in Brooklyn at 573 Rockaway Parkway. Nathan's wife Mary was from Warsaw. The Pressmans were not poor, but they lived in a two-bedroom apartment (my Pop and a younger brother shared a bed).
Abe went to PS 186 and Samuel J. Tilden High School, and then Brooklyn College. He got a Master's in engineering at Columbia. Unable to find a job as the Depression lingered on, he lived at home until he found an ad for a job as an engineer in Cincinnati, where he moved in 1940. Soon after, he saw an ad for engineers to enroll in an Army Corps of Engineers class in the then-new technology of radar.
He was in uniform at a bar in England in December, 1941, when a British soldier came up to him and said, "We are all in this together now!" referring to the attack on Pearl Harbor. He commanded a company that installed radar in the south of England. He met his future wife Lotte at a synagogue dance, but several months later he was sent home to supervise radar installations on Catalina Island in California. When he returned to England in 1943, he married Lotte.
Returning to America in 1946, he had trouble finding a job in the emerging electronics industry, partially because he was Jewish. He "settled" for a job at Brookhaven National Laboratory, working alongside Ernest Courant and Nelson Bleckman, physicists who built the world's first particle accelerator. From there he went to UNIVAC in Philadelphia, and designed the electronics for the world's first high-speed printer (click for a link the the paper he wrotre about it) working along computer pioneers Eckert and Mauchly.
He became an expert on computer logic and in 1958 published a technical book, Transistorized Circuits for Digital Computers, which sold more than 20,000 copies and went through ten printings. It was the computer age’s first book on printed circuits, which were the forerunner to today’s computer chips. Previous circuits like the ones on UNIVAC used vacuum tubes. He later became an expert in digital power supplies and wrote three books on that subject, for which my brothers and I continue to receive royalties more than twenty years after his death.
The death of his wife Lotte in 1965 left him with three young boys and little money. He was fired from his job for speaking out about management and took a new one in Boston, where he fortunately met and married Anne Sheehan, a senior Treasurer at New England Life, one of the highest positions any woman held there at the time. She was his companion until his death. Anne edited his remaining books, and was his business manager for a series of courses that he taught in the United States, Europe and Asia.
My brothers and I have had our own successes, but we stand on the shoulders of our Pop.