Anna Maria Island, June 10, 1987
The tale of a boy called ‘Pelican’
By Gib Bergquist
If
you travel out State Route 62 to Duette in northeastern Manatee County and swing left onto
State Route 37, you’ll soon reach the small town of Bradley Junction in southwestern
Polk County. Bradley Junction came into being early in this century at the junction of two
railroads: the Seaboard, and the Charlotte Harbor and Northern Railroad which was
completed in 1912.
Great things were once
expected of Bradley Junction — it even had a bank and a Coca-Cola bottling plant.
Progress passed it by, however, and today it is just a pleasant little place to live. In
the days of my childhood a remarkable immigrant family lived in Bradley and in a smaller
settlement nearby, Chicora.
The father came to the
United States from Bulgaria in 1889, when he was 13 years old. He later married an
American schoolteacher, and they moved to Florida in 1912, where the father worked in the
Brewster phosphate mines a few miles north of Bradley.
There were ten children in
the family, and I went to high school with Raymond, one of the younger children. I met
Raymond at the Mulberry High School reunion a few weeks ago and he brought me up to date
on the family members. He told me his mother lived to be 101 years old. And he said life
had not always been easy growing up in Bradley, as the neighbors never fully accepted his
family because of his father’s slight accent and foreign name.
Unfortunately, I must
admit that this was the prevailing Cracker attitude of that day. Little did we realize
that anyone with an accent spoke one more language than we did.
Raymond also told me about
his older brother, John, and proudly showed me newspaper clippings and magazine articles
about this precocious man.
John entered the local
two-room school in 1913. He graduated from Mulberry High in 1920. He worked on a phosphate
prospecting crew until he earned enough money to enter the University of Florida. In
college, he supported himself by working as a campus electrician and by teaching science
in the Gainesville public schools until he graduated in 1925. He picked up the nickname
“Pelican” while in college — probably due to his tall, gangly build.
Pelican went on to Iowa State to earn his master’s degree in mathematics, and from
there to the University of Wisconsin for his Ph.D. in 1930.
He returned to Iowa State
to teach, and in 1936-39, he and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, worked on a new
electronic gadget called the ABC machine.
John left Iowa State to
work in the U.S. Naval Ordinance Laboratory at the start of World War II, leaving his ABC
machine behind.
Now our tale jumps to
1973, when Sperry Rand Corporation is embroiled in a lengthy lawsuit with Honeywell over
patent royalties.
The judge ruled that
Sperry “did not themselves invent the automatic digital computer,” but instead,
derived the subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff — ol’ Pelican
himself.
The ABC machine is the
Atanasoff-Berry-Computer, and its invention, of course, has dramatically changed the
world. It must be ranked as one of the most significant inventions of the twentieth
century. Dr. Atanasoff, now in his eighties, is still very active. He lives with his wife
on a farm near Frederick, Maryland, where he is working on a universal alphabet, among
other things.
From very humble
beginnings, emerged an intellectual giant.
From Cracker's Crumbs, ©1995 Gib Bergquist