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Continued from previous page
Friends from the 50s
Curley and his good friend Tom Jones,
WG'58, have deep Philadelphia roots.
They grew up in the same neighborhood,
were roommates at Penn, and
belonged to the same fraternity. Jones
attended Penn as an undergraduate,
majoring in engineering.
After graduating, Jones and Curley
went to work at an up-and-coming
company called IBM. Both men also
served in the armed forces. Jones has
lived in New York for a long time, but
the two remain as close as only men
who have known each other since the
second grade can be.
"Jack tries to pretend he's a curmudgeon,
but he's a young curmudgeon,"
says Jones, a former vice chairman of
the Wharton Club in New York City.
Jones says Curley still tells the same
jokes that he did decades ago.
Of the three job offers he received,
Curley took the one from IBM. "IBM
was a growing and expanding company,"
Curley says, even though computers
had yet to become a significant
part of IBM's business. "IBM was in
the business of time-clock punch-card
machines and electric typewriters.
Computers started to come in the late
'50s and early '60s. IBM was not as
well known as it is now."
Curley's era has a black-and-white-
photo feel to it. He graduated
two years before Dick Clark became
host of American Bandstand at the old
WFIL-TV studios at 46th and Market
Streets in Philadelphia. During Curley's
time at Wharton, trolley tracks dissected
the campus, and classes moved from
Logan Hall to a new building called
Dietrich Hall.
As for international exposure – to
fellow students, cultures, and business
issues – Curley's was limited. One of
his teachers was an assistant professor
of geography, Michael Dorizas, a
"burly Russian" the students called
Big Mike, who periodically hauled out
a projector and showed movies he had
taken behind the Iron Curtain using a
16mm camera. The quirky photography
reminded Curley of Hollywood's
silent films. Still, Curley says, the
teacher's movies "showed you a world
beyond 34th and Spruce."
Curley today is president of E-Z
Tax, a startup company that installs
computers in poor neighborhoods so
that low-income people can file tax
returns directly with the IRS and avoid
paying fees to tax preparers.
If Wharton's international curriculum
in 1954 was not as extensive as it
is now, it would be unfair to say that it
did not exist.
"I was one of the few people who
majored in what was called international
commerce in those days," says
Jones. "I became an officer of the
Propeller Club, a club for international
business students. The club's name
related to the propellers of freightliners,
because international commerce
up until that time was mostly at sea.
In fact, I did my thesis on IBM and its
international business."
In 1966, Jones was selected to be
a White House fellow. Jones' interest
in things international grew partly out
of his experience serving in the U.S.
Army's Second Armored Division
in Germany in 1955 and 1956.
Ironically, Jones says, "When I went
to work at IBM, I was advised not to
work overseas because I would get too
lost in the shuffle and not be able to
move ahead."
Jones today is president and CEO
of Fifth Generation Computer Corp.,
which designs and assembles servers
for telephone companies and universities
for use in speech recognition.
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