theholtsite

Glen is a very smart friend of Jill’s dad (Rick). He went to MIT with Rick, and had straight A’s in every class (physics major I think). He aborted his career path to becoming a professor to go to Bible college at Gordon Conwel Theological Seminary. It was there that he had a mental breakdown – if you’ve ever seen the movie “A Beautiful Mind” it’s much the same, except Glen never got married. Due to this breakdown, Glen has been schizophrenic for many years since his MIT days. He’s over 60 now and has been living in the same house for many years.

For all those years he was able to drive and function normally, but recently he went to live in a home due to his age and condition. He was a member of Jill’s family growing up, and even when Jill and I were dating he was over every Sunday to eat lunch with us, watch TV, and take walks with Marge/Rick. You can’t really hold a long conversation with him, but you could tell from the snippets of what he said that he is very intelligent about computers, Christianity, philosophy, physics, electronics, etc. He remembered everyone’s birthday and always gave money and presents for Christmas.

Glen’s house is now empty. It was built in 1935 and is rather run-down. Stuff from Glen’s entire life is there. He was very into computers when the PC era was beginning. He has old Commodore systems, an Apple Lisa (fairly rare), and a few other complete systems that have been sitting there with dust covers for years and years. It’s almost like a museum there – record and tape collections, old printers and typewriters, lots of old books, etc.

Jill and I got permission to sell some of this, as the house needs to be cleaned out gradually and then sold. We are also thinking of buying the house (mostly for the land) and paying Glen (via his trustees) over a period of years.

Here’s a few pictures of what we have recovered so far:

1) A graphic equalizer (I decided to keep this one to make my Bose speakers sound decent)

2) A high-quality record player and many records (the one playing now is full of “twist” beach-party-type music, and the one shown is the story of Johnny Appleseed)

3) Two Atari systems (for those of you that don’t know, it was one of the FIRST console gaming systems – see here for details) with multiple games and controllers.