Greg Dawe was photographed by Wes Pope in April 2000, as part of the CITY 2000 documentary project. I interviewed him about six months later. He’s shown standing in the CAVE–a computer-generated “automatic virtual environment”–at UIC’s Electronic Visualization Lab, where he works as a design engineer.
My great-grandfather lived on what is now the border between Northern and southern Ireland. He drove a coach for one of the British royalty, who owned the estate immediately south. So it was not exactly a great place to grow up politically. One day in the tavern, a brawl broke out, and soldiers ran in there to quell it, and a pistol ended up sliding across the floor, and my grandfather, who was eight or nine years old, grabbed the pistol and ran. A couple of days later he was walking around on the stone wall that surrounded the duke’s property and he pulled out the pistol and shot a rabbit. Well, poaching on the king’s property was a capital crime. And possession and discharge of a firearm by a southern Irishman was a capital crime. He was like a dead man either way. So they smuggled him out of the country overnight and put him on a steamship. He spent five or six years as a kid shoveling coal on a steamship. When he got to New York Harbor he jumped ship and got a job on the railroad shoveling coal in the locomotives. When he got to Chicago he liked it, so he jumped locomotive. They’d just finished building the first city hall, and he walked in with his coal shovel and they put him to work. He was probably in his early 20s by then. And he retired from that job.
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As a stoker on the boiler crew he was low man on the totem pole–he worked for an engineer. And five of his sons–four of my uncles and my father–became engineers for the city. My father was an operating engineer. Basically he was licensed to run a high-pressure steam boiler. I grew up with a chip on my shoulder because he made it very clear that he was not going to go out of his way to get me a job with the city. It seemed like an entitlement to me. We lived in the neighborhood called Cottage Grove Heights, on the far south side. It was a place where most young men expected to go to work right out of high school. The majority of employed adults there worked for the steel mills. It was walking distance to the mills, and that was the heyday of the southeast-side steel-mill city. But by the time I left high school they were starting to wind down their tonnage.
One of the things we’re doing in this lab, one of the main ways we get our money, is by creating demand for better and faster networks. The first CAVE bought by private industry was bought by General Motors. They were building clay models of car interiors–cars yet to be built. And they built these models so the bean counters, who couldn’t visualize the interior of the car when it was on paper, could actually go and look at it. It would cost them roughly a million dollars to build one car interior out of clay, and then some guy would say, “I don’t like where the radio is, move the radio.” And two and a half months later a team of guys would have moved the radio from point A to point B. Then someone would say, “Change the color.” So when we demonstrated the first CAVE, the prototype, the engineers at GM said, “Why don’t we just show it to them in a CAVE?” That’s what they did. The first job I had when I joined the lab was to go to Detroit and look at available sites where we could fit one of these. So I figured out where it would go, made all the drawings, and then delivered the drawings to GM’s millwrights, who made the parts. Then I arm-waved the installation, and then the other team from the university came and helped put all the computer stuff in. Now they sit an executive down in there and say OK, what do you think? And the guy says, “Uh, make it green.” They go click, and it’s green. He goes, “Wow, we just saved $300,000. Move the radio.” So they move the radio. This is something that used to take six months to a year; now it can be accomplished in less than a day. It used to cost them a couple of million dollars from start to finish, now it costs almost nothing.
But I didn’t know what that meant at the time, I didn’t know you could do that for a living. I later found out that when someone showed me a shop drawing of a widget, I had a widget in my mind that was three-dimensional, and I could put light on it, and then I could draw it in three dimensions. Or if you had a reclined nude on a podium and said put him on the page, I could do that too. I have this ability to visualize things in three dimensions. There are a whole bunch of people who don’t have that.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Wes Pope.
