Farewell to John Fox

John Fox did a lot at Radford, including service as a volunteer at WVRU.

John Fox was everybody’s friend at Radford, but anyone responsible for a Mac computer lab will tell you he was a lifesaver. Saint John of Cupertino, I once called him, and he said “pssshawww, Ive never even been there.”  And smiled that famous smile of his.

His death Aug 12, 2021, was unexpected.

I met John back in  the late 90s at a time when each department was responsible for its own set of those fragile little electronic boxes,  John was hired to be the IT guy for Mac computers, and one day he showed up with a pair of pliers and a multi-headed screwdriver. He asked how things were going,  and then sat around and fixed things and told jokes and passed along some wisdom of the digital kind, and otherwise.

One of his favorite tricks before we had individual screen logins in the labs  — Im sure this doesn’t matter now — was to use the number 1 as a password.  Imagine the time we’re saving, not having to key in complicated passwords, he would laugh. We could spend a weekend fishing with all this time we saved.  I was over in IT a few weeks ago in July, 2021, and told that story, and all the old timers broke out laughing. Yeah, that was John, they said. He was remembered fondly.

Which brings me to this story:   When we did start using full logins in the Media Studies Mac lab in the basement of Porterfield, suddenly, one day in early fall of 2003, nobody could log in. The spinning wheel  would just keep on spinning on the screen, and entire classes would go by, watching the little wheel. For anyone teaching with computers it was a very serious crisis, although the local department heads and sundry administrators found an endless source of humor in it all.

Using computers to teach photography and writing is just a crutch, they would sniff. Try teaching without the computers for a while, they would suggest helpfully, trying to hold back a schadenfreudian smile.

Digital photography and web design, which is what we actually were teaching,
was of course impossible without computers. To my great relief, at least John and Ed Oakes took the problem seriously.  They realized that the firmware in the router was not talking with the part of the university mainframe that parsed the password routine. (At least, that’s the way my semi-technical understanding recalls it). They tried calling the router manufacturers. No luck.

So they got on the phone to Apple Inc of Cupertino California and talked them into sending a few tech gurus  back east to a little college town called Radford.

They argued that this was going to start happening in other universities, and that Radford  (actually this was true at the time) was pretty far ahead of most other universities, so it would be worth their time to understand the problem.   It took the guys from Cupertino two days to figure it out, and write the software to fix it, but it could have taken Radford months and months, for all that the  administrators cared about this newfangled fad of internetwebs and those expensive, complicated and bothersome little computer thingies.

But thanks to John (and Ed) we were back in business. John would insist on making things right when they needed to be fixed, and he did it with a famous smile and ferociously upbeat demeanor, which at that time, served as a great role model for those of us on the often – frustrating front lines of Radford’s computer revolution.  I don’t know how he kept smiling. It must have been better than working at the ammo plant, but I think it was just the way he was built, with that  gentle, problem-solving, step-by-step attitude.

He was terrifically informal.  When I needed a new computer not so long ago, he found one for me, and just told me drop off the old one, and said he’d take care of the paperwork. Oh, and it has the usual password, he grinned.  1.

After he retired a few years ago,  I’d see him at city council meetings with other VFW members, leading the pledge.  With a light in his eye,  he’d ask how we were doing at the uni. The light, and I’m guessing here, was something of a sense of relief to not have to be working in the IT department which, (despite his many friends),  had by then graduated from neglected stepchild to the very serious indeed  side of the administrative priority scale.

John would just roll his eyes and keep on smiling.  All for 1.

There’s a wonderful description of a favorite character in the Dickens novel “Barnaby Rudge” and I thought of John right away when I read it:

“Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour. With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow’s hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.”

I know I’m not the only one who feels  gratitude for his faith and his public service.