| Summary: | (4:48) Mr. Ingram discusses his membership in the Exchange Club of Florence, Alabama and his experiences with early computer systems. This interview is part of an oral history project funded by a grant from the Alabama Historical Records Board, managed by the Alabama Department of Archives and History staff, using funds provided by the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with B.M. Ingram
July 7, 2009
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 9 of 9
Clint Alley: Are you involved in any clubs or organizations today?
B.M. Ingram: Exchange Club. Exchange Club is a club that, well, it was one of the earliest clubs that we had here in Florence. It was started in 1921. And the reason I remember that date is because that’s the year I was born, but there was no connection between that. But anyway, the Exchange Club has done a lot of wonderful things, and one of them is that members of our Exchange Club were involved in starting the library. And another, just a side issue, my aunt Ethel Pearson was one of the librarians when, I believe the— you had a Lauderdale and Colbert County organization together and she was involved in that, starting the library. They had Library on Wheels. The buses would go out in the rural area with books and lend it to people.
CA: I’ve just got one more question for you, Mr. Ingram, and then that’ll finish us up. Do you have any advice for generations to come, anything you’ve learned throughout your life that you want to pass on?
[laughter]
BI: Well, I’m sure that my knowledge is, I’m so joyed and appreciate being asked something like that because I’m amazed to see what has happened in some ways, and I’m amazed at the fact that some of the children do not take some of the things serious that I did. One of the things that we did in school was math. Math was so important that we learned how to add and subtract and multiply and all of that was so important. And now the kids don’t need to know that because they can get calculators and, real fast, get you the answer. An interesting comparison, too, was one of the things that I was involved in in World War II was the keeping of the inventory of parts for the armed forces. And IBM had these early calculators; they called it the punch-card system. And they had again about ten of us, the ten that went in together into Detroit. We were sent to the IBM school in Endicott, New York, and we got through that school studying the punch-card system, and we could brag that we were the best in the country. We could really do this calculating with the punch-card system. Well, I come along and I see my granddaughters and all the kids that are four or five years old using the present computers and they can get more out of that than I could ever get out of the punch-card system. And there I knew that early method from front to back, and I don’t know a hill of beans about the computers that they have now. But it’s so wonderful that the kids are updating themselves. They can play these different games that, ah, with the computers and learning, learning what to do. So I’d rather learn from them than to give them my history on the punch-card system. It’s nice to have y’all in and asking me these questions, and at this age, I had a fellow come in and ask me about a house in town, and I told him, I said, “You better find somebody else that can tell you about it.” And they said, “Well, we’ve been asking around and you were our last choice, but we found out that you were the oldest person still survived that might know a little bit about it, and so that’s the reason that we came to you.”
[laughter]
CA: Well Mr. Ingram, we sure do appreciate it.
BI: Well we thank you for the visit.
CA: It’s been a real treat for us.
BI: It’s a pleasure seeing y’all.
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