Hannula
Computer science professor, Reino Hannula, passed away September 7, 2001 at the age of 83. Professor Hannula, known as an expert in IBM 360/370 Basic Assembly Language, (BAL) and IBM 360/370 “Job Control Language” wrote textbooks used in universities throughout the U. S. on “BAL” and “JCL”. A colorful character, whose life varied from berry picker, to businessman, to professor, to writer and publisher, Reino Nikolai Hannula, impacted the lives of many of us in the department. We dedicate this chapter to his memory.
[Editor’s Note, Elmo Keller: When I first came to Cal Poly, I had office 212 in the mathematics building. Directly across the hallway was the office of Reino Hannula. We had philosophical discussions about almost every topic imaginable. Reino loved to take an issue and then analyze both sides. Some of my most enjoyable times at Cal Poly were in these discussions with Reino.
Reino felt that his home town historians didn’t bother to include the Finnish-American community in their histories, even though at least 10% of that city’s population had a Finnish background. So in his own words, “I had to write a story about my Finnish background as I remember it, the first generation Finnish-Americans, who, way ahead of their time, struggled to make the United States a more equitable society”– hence his third book, Blueberry God, The Education of a Finnish-American.]
Janice Zoradi, Lynda Alamo, Reino Hannula, and Haley Landis.
We quote from a San Luis Obispo, Ca. Tribune article of March 21, 1981, the year that Reino retired from Cal Poly.[^7]
Reino Nikolai Hannula is a man with sisu.
Ask any of the 60 or so Finnish-Americans living in San Luis Obispo County what that means and they’re likely to grin and say that the word sisu (pronounced sis-ooh) is untranslatable.
If you press them, the Finns may tell you that sisu is a highly complimentary word closest to the American slang “guts.”
Hannula, a 62-year old computer science professor from Cal Poly, is a gutsy guy – though you would never guess it if you passed him on the street.
He looks slightly like the late Albert Einstein: slightly baggy sweater; horn-rimmed glasses; white moustache, bristling eyebrows, and hair windblown into a balding halo. An absent-minded professor image is reinforced by a vaguely European accent, a preoccupied air and a habit of answering questions with questions.
Don’t attempt to judge the book by its cover. Hannula has demonstrated his sisu most recently by taking a $12,000 gamble–acting as his own publisher for a book he’s written titled “Blueberry God.” It’s 280 pages of colorful reminiscence, outspoken opinion and 40 oldtime photographs. And it is selling to first and second-generation Finnish-Americans like hot cakes in a lumber camp.
It’s the latest episode in a life marked by hard work, persistence in the face of odds and a fierce independence of spirit – traits characteristic of many Finnish-Americans.
The child of immigrant parents, Hannula worked from childhood. First it was in the Massachusetts blueberry patches, where a whole summer’s work might net a youngster $20.00. As a teen-age admirer of socialist Eugene V. Debs and the Finnish apostle of the epic poem “Kalevala,” Matti Kurikka, Hannula found himself embroiled in politics and religion in equal measure.
These influences persisted during the dozen years he worked with consumer cooperatives in the East and during World War II, which he spent as a conscientious objector in a Quaker-run fire fighting camp in the Southern California mountains. He stayed in California after the war, marrying his wife, Alice, and trying to be successful as a candy salesman and grocery warehouseman.
At 37, Hannula set out to carve a new life. He studied mathematics at UCLA–where he earned B.S. and M.S. degrees. Hannula first taught mathematics at Cal Poly in 1962, switching to computer science after doing advanced work at the University of London.
His two prize-winning textbooks, each dealing with an aspect of programming on the IBM 360/370 computer, published in 1971-1972, paid him royalities of about $7,000.00 this year; but he says depreciatingly: “Anyone can get a textbook published.”
When he attempted to sell the manuscript of “Blueberry God,” he found the going tougher.
“Houghton-Miffin kept it three months and then said, ’no.’ I sent it to Harper and Row. They kept it nine months,” Hannula recalled, “and then they said ’no’.”
Then Hannula paid $35.00 for an extension workshop in “How to Self-Publish Your Book” run by Lachlan MacDonald of San Luis Obispo. Some 3,000 people have taken the class statewide, says Macdonald, and more than 50 on the Central Coast have tried their hand at self-publishing.
“He taught me about the picas and ems,” recalls Hannula, “but the most important things were that I should form my own company and sell my book for seven times what it cost to print it.”
“Blueberry God” – two-thirds a story of his own growing up and one-third Hannula’s view of the hard lives of most Finnish-Americans in the U.S. – is hardbound proof of MacDonald’s teaching skill: Hannula formed his own company, Quality Hill books, and now has invested about $12,000 in 2,500 volumes with a dust jacket price of $12 each.
Surrounded by two tons of books in cardboard packing boxes, the professor spends every spare minute writing personal sales pitches to people with Finnish surnames in communities that stretch from British Columbia to Florida. He’s going on the road to promote sales. He’s even thinking about returning to Finland for the first time in 18 years to see if he can get “Blueberry God” translated into Finnish.
That, as they say in the old country, takes a bit of sisu.
Many times Reino would tell us, the younger faculty, “you have a great job here at Cal Poly working with young people, don’t ever forget it!” Then he would tell us of his early life as a second generation Finnish-American growing up in Gardner, Massachusetts and of his work in the camp picking blueberries. He would reiterate the quote “man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow”, and then he would tell us how great we have it in the Csc Department. Let him tell you in his own words from a quote in his book.[^8]
``Work meant work with your back, your brawn, and your hands. Saw, dig, shovel, push, carry, and chop. That’s work. Even today I find it difficult to believe that I am working when I prepare a lecture, write a chapter for a book, or give a talk. Work? A sense of guilt surges forth. Most of the tasks I do I would do for free, but they pay me! I just don’t earn my livelihood by the sweat of my brow.
...
The people who grew the things we eat and the people who made the things we use – the very people who lived by the sweat of their brows – were the ones least rewarded by our society. Those who ate bread by the sweat of their brows ate the worst. And they always had the poorest homes, too. Pastori Nurmi himself, I thought, does not earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. He invariably – on cold days or hot days – wore his huge black ministerial frock coat which made manual labor (although not sweating) impossible. Several Finnish ministers had been guests at our blueberry camp, but never had any one of them entered the blueberry pasture to pick, not even a “bottomful” just for good luck.’’
In almost all programming classes that Reino taught, he assigned this problem, stated in one way or another. Take as input a list of strings, determine if any of them are palindromes and print them out. This problem had special significance to Finnish-Americans.
A newspaper account in Gardner, Ma., pointed out that a Finn living in Reino’s parent’s boarding house has the most euphonious name in all of Massachusetts. Quoting again from his book, p. 103.
A palindrome is a word, a verse, or a sentence which is spelled backwards and forwards in exactly the same way. The first sentence spoken by a man to a woman may well have been a palindrome.
“Madam, I’m Adam,” may have been Adam’s greeting when he spotted Eve.
``Eve was not outdone. She simply replied, “Eve.”
The Finnish language has the longest known palindrome word ever discovered – saippuakivikauppias (lye merchant). Palindrome enthusiasts of every nationality are searching their native tongue for a palindrome word longer than saippuakivikauppias. They even go to such dubious practices as to manufacture artificial words in their desperate attempt to snatch the honor away from the Finnish language. May their endeavors be in vain!
Proper names that are spelled the same backwards and forwards are considered the most elegant palindromes. They are rare. Most of the ones known and printed are made up. I did not make up our boarders name – it was Otto Motto.
Did Otto’s parents give him that name or did some emigration official – a palindrome enthusiast – who in processing Otto’s papers, shorten some incomprehensible (to him) Finnish last name to Motto? One last question: Do you think the palindrome Otto Motto is euphonious, too?
[
Editor’s Note: I just finished giving a final exam Spring quarter 2002, in the course, Csc 454, Operating Systems II. The content of the course involves the internals of the operating system, Linux. I kept thinking about Reino and the Finnish people. What would Reino think of the latest computer phenom, Finnish student, Linus Torvalds and his accidental revolution – writing an open source operating system, Linux. Thanks to the World Wide Web, the project has grown to be the largest collaborative software effort in the world. The open source philosophy behind it all is simple: Information, in this case the source code of the operating system should be free and freely shared for anyone interested in improving upon it. But those improvements should also be freely shared. This same concept has supported centuries of scientific discovery. Will it find a place in the software corporate world?]
Jim Daly, Reino Hannula, and Janice Zoradi at Reino’s retirement dinner on December 11, 1981.