Today's Featured Biography

 
Wayne Kerley

After high school, I went to work for the FBI in Washington, DC in the Files and Communications Division where I actually delivered mail to J. Edgar Hoover for my first three months. After my stint in the mailroom, I was assigned to security in the Filing Section working midnight to 8 A.M. where I had access to all of the Bureau's investigative files. There I was also trained as a Name Searcher and File Locator. Name Searchers were responsible for verifying that the subject of an investigation was also the subject of any files with the same name mentioned in them. File Locators were responsible for finding missing files and literally had the authority to search anyone's desk for the files, including Hoover's.

After 2 years in the Filing Section, I was reassigned to work security in the Cryptanalysis, Gambling, Translation Section of the Laboratory where I was trained as a Cryptanalyst and learned to program computers in IBM 360/370 Assembly Language. This Section is also where I met my wife who became the Bureau's first female Gambling Examiner.

I took a year off from school while I was adjusting to life in D.C. and then went back to school starting at Prince George's Community College in Largo, MD before transferring to the University of Maryland in College Park. My first year I took 12 hours each semester, but dropped that back to 6 to 9 hours per semester after that since I was still working full-time at the Bureau.

I initially thought that I would make the FBI a career, but after I learned to program computers, I quickly learned that I could make a lot more money elsewhere, and since I was a newlywed trying to buy our first house, I decided to leave the Bureau and went to work for Communication Workers of America as a programmer/analyst after 4 years at the FBI.

I stayed at CWA for another 4 years during which time our daughter Jackie was born in Annapolis, MD which was the closest major hospital to our home in Crofton, MD. After that, I went to work for Sperry Corporation in Baltimore and later transferred to their office in Tulsa and we bought a home on a small acreage outside of Beggs. It was good to be back in Oklahoma!

After working for Sperry for seven years, I decided it was time to try going into business for myself so I started a consulting firm consisting of myself and my wife. Our first customer was Centrilift-Hughes. Our other major customers were the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. It was a lot of fun travelling all over the State working at the various VA hospitals training their staff on the software I implemented and maintained for them. I also had to spend a lot of time in OKC at the Court where I wrote a Criminal Appellate Tracking System for them.

Of course, I started this business just before the price of oil dropped from $32 per barrel to about $10 back in the 80's, so almost as soon as I started working with Centrilift-Hughes they quickly cut back on all new projects. Fortunately, my State business kept me going for several more years until the Governor froze all non-essential State spending and essentially put me out of business. Of course at that time a lot of businesses were either cutting back or going out-of-business, so I ended up calling some people that I knew in Washington and was introduced to someone in California who wanted to open an office in Washington, so I merged what was left of my business with Union Friendly Systems, Inc. and became their Vice President of Eastern Operations and we moved to Falls Church, VA. We really hated leaving our home in Oklahoma!

UFSI had several programs that a number of the International Unions in DC used. They also had their own line of PC's that we built and sold to the unions. Cathy and I also established a Learning Center in DC to train the union employees on Microsoft DOS, Wordperfect, Novell Netware, and MS-Office products. I eventually wanted to expand the business to do some Federal contract work, but the company President didn't want to do it, so we went our separate ways and I went to work for Sysorex Information Systems where I had an opportunity to work on several multi-million dollar Government contracts.

After three years of writing proposals in response to Government RFP's, I went to work for CMS Information Systems working on several Government contracts. I worked as a project leader in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense / Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (OASD/C3I). We were responsible for maintaining and supporting both the classified and non-classified systems there. Later, I became the project leader for a project to convert and support a Novell Netware system to a Microsoft NT Enterprise System for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and finally became the Group Manager for the Advanced Integration Team at CMSIS where I still had responsibility for OASD/C3I and BMDO, and also picked up responsibility for projects in the Office of the Under-Secretary of Defense/ Acquisition and Technology (OUSD/A&T), the Joint Chiefs Staff, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and also a Department of Justice contract to implement the Justice Consolidated Office Network (JCON2).

Just before our daughter was born in 1978, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and it is something I've had to deal with ever since. I had my first operation for it shortly after we moved to Oklahoma in 1981. I had four more operations while I was working for Sysorex, and had one more just after completing the first phase of the JCON2 project. At that point, my doctor and I decided that I needed to find something else to do with my life, so I retired on disability and we moved to Fort Worth where our daughter was attending Texas Christian University.

While we were in Fort Worth, I did a lot of volunteer work for both the Police and Fire Departments, and even worked part-time for a couple of years for the Fire Department as the Citizens Fire Academy Coordinator which basically was a volunteer management position. I also became a Community Emergency Response Team instructor for the Fort Worth Police Department.

In 2014, our daughter who received her PhD in Astrophysics at TCU got tenure at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, TX where she teaches physics and astronomy, so we all packed up and moved to "The Falls" as it is known here.

We have a four year old grandson named Aston although on any given day he may say his name is Indiana Jones, McGyver, Tarzan, or whoever else he has been watching on TV.

At least once a year we try to get back to Tulsa. It's still our favorite of all the places we've lived. When we're there, I always look for anyone I might know when we are out and about. Of course its been a few years since I last saw any of you and while I know you all still look just like you did in high school, my memory just isn't as good as it used to be so I'm not sure I would recognize any of you anymore.

Hope you all have had as interesting a life as we have and that one of these days I will get to see you all again!

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