If you’ve gotten a grade report or a paycheck from the College, you can thank Vera Shutter.
The tireless custodian of the College’s memory banks for nearly four decades is retiring with more than a few memories of her own.
— Like the time her visiting four-year-old daughter, an aspiring keypunch operator, picked up a stack of punch cards and “helped” with a professor’s project.
— Or the time a false fire alarm brought an ax-wielding fireman to her office door.
— Or the time in the early 70’s when she moved her operation to make room for students who were staging a sit-in.
— Or the time she found a live bat in her wastebasket.
She readily admits that she has often finds herself in some unusual situations. “Everyone thinks I’m kidding,” she says of some of her stories. “It’s just that I’m telling the exact truth and they don’t believe it.”
Started with punch cards
Fresh from a job as a keypunch operator at New York Telephone, she joined the College’s Data Center on January 10, 1966. She collected, entered and sorted data on punch cards in the basement of Silliman Hall. She did most of her work for the annual fund and payroll offices.
Since 1968, she has worked in the large computing room of Steinmetz’s Peschel Computer Center. When ITS quarters were renovated two years ago and her colleagues took up temporary residence in North Colonnade, she stayed behind to run the equipment.
Shutter’s small office in the computer center has a view of the room where behemoth machines used to whir and click and hum. Much has changed in 40 years. The machines have gotten quieter and more powerful.
Mostly, though, things have gotten smaller. Shutter recently took a visitor to the ITS “dump room” and pulled out a stack of tapes, state-of-the-art data storage devices until the late 1980s. Today, the common pen-sized 256 MB thumb drive can hold what used to require six or seven of the 10-inch tape reels.
But the job – manipulating data and producing reports, paychecks and grades – has not. Once you get the concept of running the programs, she says, it’s just a matter of learning a new machine every few years. “I’ve never been uncomfortable with the changes. But each time has been a challenge.”
Shutter was feted just before her retirement on April 1 – no April Fool’s joke, she assures – and colleagues presented her with the final printouts and nameplates of machines long gone. She also got a “death certificate” for one troublesome machine.
“Vera was at Union at the beginning of computing,” said David Cossey, chief information officer, who went on to praise her for her early morning arrivals, the quantity of material she handled and her versatility at working with everything from the early IBM punch card accounting machines to the modern windows servers.
Bruce Senn, senior system manager and a close colleague, recalled the way she cared for the large number of student workers, many of whom come back to visit.
Retirement plans
She plans to enjoy time with her four children – Dawn, Cheryl, Chuck and Eve – her three grandchildren – Richard, Heather and Stephen – and great granddaughter, Alexis. She also plans to volunteer as a “cuddler” in a neonatal unit, or perhaps return to her work as a clown and face-painter at children’s events.
Whatever she does next, she promises to make it a long-term commitment. “I’m a long-timer at everything I do,” she says. “I don’t jump in and jump out.”
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