PC P RO F ILE S radios, speaker systems and amplifiers he made. The yearbook notes that at the Annual Entertainment, a grand event held in Center City and attended by hundreds of people with no connection to Penn Charter, Eckert “presented three interesting and instructive experiments. These were: Electro-Magnetism, Talking Over a Light Beam, and Cataphoresis.” Upon graduating from Penn Charter, he was accepted at MIT. His parents, unwilling to let him go, pretended to have suffered financial setbacks in the Depression and urged him to attend Penn instead, and live at home. Eckert dutifully enrolled at Penn but refused his family’s wish for him to be a business major. He majored instead in electrical engineering. He met Mauchly when he worked as the older man’s graduate assistant.
ENIAC (the initials stand for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was a war-time project financed by the Army Ordinance Department, which was tasked with coming up with booklets of firing-angle settings for artillery. To be accurate, the guns required tables that factored in such conditions as temperature, humidity, wind speeds and altitude. A unit at MIT, using a machine called Differential Analysers (think of a complicated mechanical adding machine), was doing the calculations. But the work was going slowly, despite the fact that the unit had 170 people – who were known as “computers” – to input the data the machine needed to do the equations. The Army wanted a faster machine, and Mauchly and Eckert delivered,
though not until 1945, just as World War II was ending. Following the war, after a dispute with Penn over the patents for ENIAC, the two men left and created their own company, which went on to produce the advanced UNIVAC computer. Later, they sold their firm to the Remington Rand Corp. (which became the company we know today as Unisys) and Eckert spent the rest of his career there. He died in 1995 at his home in Bryn Mawr. He was 76. In 1991, the Penn Charter Alumni Society honored Eckert with the Alumni Award of Merit, given “to a graduate of the William Penn Charter School whose character and outstanding achievement have reflected lasting credit upon this old school.” PC
Courting the Possibilities: Basketball to Common Pleas Roger Gordon OPC ’69 By Aaron Carter OPC ’98 Daily News Staff Writer
Color mattered when Roger Gordon attended Penn Charter in the 1950s and ’60s. And as a high school athlete, the young man who grew up in North Philadelphia was reminded nearly every day. He enrolled at PC in 1956 and may have been the first African-American student to matriculate straight through (kindergarten to grade 12) when he graduated in 1969 and headed for Princeton. Along the way, he developed an unshakable passion for sports that eventually blossomed into a 48-year career coaching various sports. Seated in front of a scrapbook inside the
Elmwood Park Boys & Girls Club in Southwest Philadelphia, Gordon, 62, reminisced on his youth when significance was placed not on his hue, but on his school colors. “Those were good days,” he said, smiling. “Penn Charter only saw two colors – blue and gold.” According to TedSilary.com, Gordon, a 6’ 4” forward, became the school’s first black basketball player to earn first team All-InterAc honors when he was selected by league coaches in 1968 after averaging 15.9 points. He repeated the feat in 1969 (13.6), when PC shared the championship with rivals
Reprinted with permission of the Philadelphia Daily News.
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