index for Wayne Strnad

Childhood
Education
Teaching and Program Development
Computer Development

Wayne was born and raised in Chicago.

The first 14 years of his life were filled with excitement and experimentation in mathematics and astronomy.

By age 10 Wayne had built his first optical telescope under the guidance of the staff at the Adler Planetarium. This was during a period when they offered mirror grinding for the general public. He also attended several adult classes held at the planetarium.

In the mid 1960’s his interest diversified to include physics and philosophy, reading books that were previously banned from reading by such authors as Bertrand Russell, who later came to be called the Father of Set Theory. In his youth, Wayne would devour Math books at a rate of about one every two to three weeks. He had a quest to learn as much as a could about math, physics and astronomy.

Also, in the first half of the 1960’s he became aware of the disparity between races and how people were not being treated equally. For him, the point of confusion was that the priests in the church preached about Jesus Christ and love. Yet, the same people that attended these services who apparently agreed with what they were hearing because they would continually come back for more, were themselves part of a problem. Remember, the year is around 1963.

Dr. Martin Luther King came to the forefront of a movement that was later to be called the Civil Rights Movement.

High School

In 1964 Wayne started high school. He attended Gordon Tech High School.

During his first year at the school he worked on a woodworking project that was entered into statewide competition held in Normal, Illinois. His project, a hand carving, won an award.

At age 15 he was asked to teach his fellow students and upperclassmen how to use a slide rule - not by the conventional "scientific notation" method but by a method he discovered himself.

He graduated magna cum laude in 1968.

College

In the fall of 1968 Wayne attended DePaul University. His major was mathematics and his minor was physics although he was only a few credit hours away from a double major.

During his first year in college he noticed that there simply was not an organization that was composed of both males and females. At that time there were organizations that were for men only, called fraternities, and for women only, called sororities. So one day Wayne and two other people decided to create an organization composed of men and women - a fratority. It's name was Tau Omicron Kappa or TOK for short.

Unlike the purpose of other groups, it was set up to help people. We ran food drives, clothing drives and other activities that helped the community. Individual members also worked with Little Brothers of the Poor and DePaul's food pantry.

In 1972 Wayne graduated from DePaul University. He graduated magna cum laude.

Teaching and Program Development

After graduation he went into teaching. His friend and colleague, Dr. Robert Ogden, found a small school in the Humboldt Park area that was in dire need of a mathematics teacher. The school was named Rafael Cancel Miranda High School. Bob was volunteering his time at the school besides teaching at DePaul.

Realizing there was a need for education at every level in the community, mainly located in and around the Humboldt Park area, Wayne helped organize a curriculum for adult education classes. This later evolved into college credit classes with Central YMCA Community College. The adult education program became known as Borinqueña Campus. Both these programs were run by the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. The math program became one of the strongest in the area with Dr. Ogden and Wayne.

After a year or so we needed to find additional space. Arrangements were made to purchase an old Walgreens photo processing facility that was located on Claremont Avenue, here in Chicago. This became the new educational facility and resource center for the community. A great deal of work went into that center to make it presentable and it was all done on a volunteer basis by the community.

Toward the second half of the 1970's Central YMCA was going through financial problems and eventually had to close its doors. Before closing though, Wayne had designed, implemented and directed what came to be known as a "Learner Center" at Borinqueña Campus. The Learner Center serviced both the High School and College. It was the very first in the area and probably all of Chicago. The materials took years to write and eventually culminated in a book about mathematics.

After this book was release, Wayne started work on another book for the adult learner. It to was a book on mathematics that incorporated algorithmic thinking to solving problems.

Computer Development - A Curriculum

Around 1978-79 microcomputers made their debut. Actually, the term microcomputer was a misnomer because they were really microprocessors. Most had 16K (1K=1024 bytes; 1 byte = 1 character) of memory. Remember the TRS-80's, Commador and Atari systems?

Wayne purchased a TRS-80 system and tape backup so that students could learn how to program in Basic - a computer language developed at Dartmouth University. He also purchased some other software for writing and later, database development.

As time went by Wayne eventually invested in another disk based computer system called the Model II. It was classified as a business system because of its processor - a Motorola based chip - and the storage - 500K. That was a big deal back them. Later the hard disk made it debut and along came the unix¹ operating system (actually a clone that was named zenix).

Having all this "sophisticated" equipment, Wayne decided to offer courses in computer programming for the students. Our's was the first school in Chicago to have a course for high school students that taught Unix, C language, Compiler Basic and a host of other computer related subjects. Classes were held at Wayne's house.

The concept of networking was brought down to an affordable price so that the school could make an investment in a computer network. Languages could be taught, learning plans could be designed, student papers could be worked on from the computer room, and so forth. We had come a long way and it was a hard struggle.

In 1985 the High School was given an honor as being an exemplary school in the United States. We, who worked so hard to make that possible, felt that finally all our devotion, sweat and even tears, finally came to fruition. However, as quickly as it came, it was taken away by a man named Bennett, who was in charge of the Department of Education. Guess the Department of Education wasn't ready to give an exemplary school award to a Puerto Rican High School.

By the middle of the '80's Wayne had finished writing and copyrighted a computer program consisting of around 10,000 lines of code that he called Rainbow News. People were leaving messages, posting other information, etc. Wayne then had the idea to put this information to press. Rainbow News, the newspaper, was then created. You can go to the Chicago Historical Society to get a sneak peak of what it was about. The subhead for the paper read "The Paper Smart People Read."

Wayne appeared in Crain Chicago Business as well as other noteworthy publications.

The late '80's brought about the publication of Wayne's second book.

In 1987 the Belmont-Cragin area suffered through another terrible flood. History will show that ten years later it was struck again with even heavier rains.

The start of the '90's Wayne used as his personal research and development period. The school and the programs had the blueprint for success and succeed they did.

1. Unix is an operating system that was originally developed by two gentlemen working out of Bell Labs. The language "C" came into being because of their work. The most familiar and perhaps honorary accolade attributed to these gentlemen is the first program most people learn to write that says, "Hello World."