I stayed 8 years at MCIC.  All day, every day, I wrote database programs.  In those days, FoxPro was a very popular way to control data using the new technology of micro-computers.   This language and the community of FoxPro programmers put food on my table for the next 25 years.

At MCIC, I did the same thing I had done for the Center for Urban Development.  I designed something that would secure a foundation grant.   I set out to write The Philanthropic Data Base (PHD), an access system for people doing grant research at the Donor’s Forum of Chicago.  Now I was on my way from “database programmer” to “application developer”.  I do regret that I never was able to practice and learn programming for the Web.  It would have been an even better contribution than the desktop PHD.

In my years at MCIC, I had the opportunity of working with several foreign-born data professionals.  I realize now that I felt a special kinship with them.  It had to do with how hard they worked and how hard I worked.  I had leapt across so many burning bridges in my life.  They had sacrificed mightily to get where they were.  We were on equal footing.  One of my favorite co-workers at MCIC was Rong Zhang.  His wife had traveled from Shanghai to Peking on that fateful day in Tiananmen Square where an unknown number of democracy protesters were shot down.

Another was Mohammad Alsliman, a Syrian from Hama.  His hometown had been the site of a horrific massacre of civilians by the Ba’ath Party of Hafez Al-Assad.  Mohammad drove a cab at night and actually worked with us for free until he was offered a position.  Later in his career he was managing a server farm with twelve thousand boxes for a Fortune 500 corporation.  Pei Tang credits me for giving her a start at MCIC.  She is a daughter of Beijing intellectuals who were sent to work in the countryside when she was a little girl.  She later would be working at high levels of health industry data analysis.

Ruaidry McSharry was a real Irishman, not a watered down one like me.  His favorite saying was “What’s so great about Great Britain?”  John Jiang, our expert cartographer, labored at low pay for years – unable to jump to better jobs in the go-go 90s because of interminable delays in his H1-B visa.  He and Rong did an incredulous double take when they translated to Cantonese my English names for two long- running plays in China, “The White Haired Girl” and “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy”.  They couldn’t believe that I would know the names of two of the very few operas permitted in China during the Cultural Revolution.

One incident from the MCIC days still troubles me.  I had arranged with Chicago State University to provide a paid internship for a computer science student.  Oscar Brown took on the role with a lot of enthusiasm, and he produced great results.  When he started getting interviews in the private sector, I got jealous.  One day when we were deciding who should go to a conference with some bankers, he volunteered.  Not checking my mouth before I spoke, I said, “They’re not serving soul food.”  How could I, the civil rights crusader, have said something so racist?  Oscar didn’t miss a beat – “That’s OK.  I can eat caviar”.