O1B1F7E. LOUIS AND THE CAPE 1967

MOMENTS IN OUR LIVES-1 2026-02-18

O1B1F7E. LOUIS AND THE CAPE 1967

THE PRETORIA YEARS AND LOUIS' PASSION (1967 – 1968)

This is a fascinating record of a very specific period in my life. The narrative of the late sixties and early seventies captures not only personal milestones, but also the technological and social atmosphere of that time.

Because Dad was so academically inclined, he wanted all his children to obtain university qualifications. He enrolled Louis as a millwright at Iscor in Pretoria, which is a very good qualification. Dad knew that Iscor sent its promising apprentices to Tukkies for a degree course. Louis came to stay with us for a while until he could arrange his own accommodation. He sometimes drove somewhere in the Renault.

1968. At the end of 1967 Louis signed himself out of Iscor and enrolled as an apprentice for 3 years at a small auto-electrical one-man firm in Pretoria North. His craftsman was Hannes Verster. He always bragged about whatever car he owned - first a Datsun 1200, then a Beetle, then a big Alfa Berlina six-cylinder, which was a lovely car. Louis had always loved cars and wanted to make it his career, not what Dad wanted him to do.

Louis bought himself a second-hand Beetle. He later sold it to a crook who gave him 3 post-dated cash cheques of R150 each. The guy made Louis believe that a cash cheque was as good as cash. When Louis wanted to cash the first cheque at the United Building Society’s main branch in the city centre, it was refused because there was no money in the guy’s account. Louis immediately went to a smaller branch where his first cash cheque was cashed. At that time, the computers of the banks and building societies were not yet interconnected.

THE ART OF THE DARK ROOM

At that stage I was a very enthusiastic photographer and bought myself an Opemus enlarger with everything that went with it, such as photographic paper, large rolls of 35mm black-and-white film, a black bag to load about 36 frames of film at a time into empty film containers, or to take out those that had already been exposed, a tank, bowls and chemicals.

Periodically, on a Friday or Saturday evening, I would prepare the kitchen to develop films and print photos, because it is a long process. After Heléne went to bed, I would hang thick dark blankets in front of the kitchen window and close the door tightly, even with masking tape. I screwed in a darkroom bulb. Now the light is turned off and it is pitch dark. Next, the developer chemical is poured into the black tank and a roll of film is wound into it on a spiral so that the film does not touch anywhere. Then the lid is tightly closed and the dim red light can be turned on, because the film is now in total darkness. The container is shaken gently for the correct time to develop the film. Then the developer is poured out into its bottle and the stop bath is poured in, which stops the development. Shake again. Next, the stop bath is poured out and the fixer is poured in and shaken. The film is now developed. You now pour tap water into the tank and rinse the developed negative, and repeat the rinsing process a few times. Now you can take the film out of the tank and look at the frames. Dry the film carefully and hang it up to dry completely.

When all your films have been developed this way, you can proceed to exposing the negatives on photographic paper. The photographic paper is also light-sensitive, but not as sensitive as film, so you can use the darkroom bulb which gives off a very slight red glow. The desired photographic paper is loaded onto the easel at the bottom of the enlarger's base. It does not react at all to the red light. The negatives are now pulled one by one through the film holder of the Opemus. The film is called negative because white (transparent) on it comes out black on the photographic paper and vice versa. When the enlarger's light is turned on, it projects the image of the film frame upside down onto the photographic paper. By turning the focus knob you get the image at its sharpest. The red bulb is used so that you can see the developing process. Then the photographic paper is placed in a developer bath and the bath is gently shaken. Gradually the image appears on the photographic paper. It is like magic. When it is fully developed and clear, you take out the photo paper and put it in a fixer bath and shake it for the right amount of time - this stops the development and your photo is finished and can now be hung up to dry.

The whole process can easily take all night to process a few films. To load fresh film into a film holder you use the black bag again. You put empty film holders in it plus the large roll of fresh film sealed in a light-tight tin plus a small scissors. Now in daylight you can wind the estimated length of fresh film into empty film holders and close each one's cap. Then you seal the large roll of film in its light-tight tin and you now have a few loaded films to take pictures with.

I took beautiful pictures of Heine, one when he was jumping up and down in his cot with a mischievous smile while holding on to the railing. At that time the “Jolly Jumper” was very popular. We tied Heine to a harness that worked like a nappy, to which there were ropes on both sides connected to a bar. This was again connected with a long round rubber to a device that you hooked on either side of a door frame’s top. You then adjust the length so that Heine's feet just touch the floor. When he kicks, he jumps up and down and he enjoys it immensely, because now he can make something happen himself, while you can get on with other work. Sometimes when you go to check, he is hanging in his harness, fast asleep. He was quite safe in his Jolly Jumper.

THE MOVE TO THE CAPE (1968)

I continued working at Statistics. Heine had a lot of chest problems, which were later diagnosed as his tonsils poisoning him. They were then removed and his chest problems disappeared completely within months.

I wanted to go back to the Cape again, because I grew up there. I sent application letters to all the computer companies and asked for lists of users of their equipment in Cape Town and surrounding areas. From these lists, I then wrote letters to, among others, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Mobil (now Engen). They had an opening and the head of their computer department, Mr. Dell, had an interview with me when he flew up on business. I got the job as a programmer. I gave notice to Statistics at the beginning of February and got ready to leave by the beginning of March.

We sold everything we had. My Hi-Fi set and my photography equipment were also advertised in the Pretoria News. Then an uncle came along who wanted to buy both for his daughter. I drove with him to his shop, on a stretch of tarmac in the bundus on the way to a black township. So it was mainly blacks who walked past his shop, a We-Buy-and-Sell-Everything, even sponge for mattresses.

To keep him company, I asked him if he was doing good business. He told me he was making about R600 a month! At that stage, as a programmer I was getting R200 gross a month, with my B.Com degree! Just show you, don't judge a man by his jacket.

Sintie, unlike Swart Piet, was very nervous when she had to drive in the Renault, and I got a sedative for her from the vet. Just before we departed, I gave her some calming medicine. It made her limp, but she whined softly the whole time. We drove at night and stopped a few times in case she wanted to pee, but she just fell over when I let her go. I think we drove all the way to Caledon, because Sintie was having such a hard time. We drove the 1500 km in about 16 hours, so we probably arrived in Oukraal around lunchtime. After such a long drive, everyone is certainly very tired. We stayed on the farm for the weekend and I drove to Cape Town alone on Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Dell booked me a place for two weeks at the Metropole, a three-star hotel in Loop Street, within walking distance of Mobil’s offices. It was heaven for me, my own en-suite room with a thick carpet, and three delicious meals a day, especially in the afternoon and evening. Their kingklip was out of the books. It was so much more luxurious than what I was used to. In those two weeks I had to look for accommodation and I looked everywhere in the newspapers and drove around, even to Hout Bay, where I wanted to stay, but it was too expensive.

Eventually I found accommodation in Kraaifontein, a three-bedroom rental house from Billy Wright, for R50 p.m. It was opposite the cooperative, and next to an open plot. Heine loved to play in the sand there. I went to pick up Heléne and Heine at Oukraal and we bought the most necessary furniture second-hand. I took the suburban electric train into the city every day. At first Heléne did not work, because Heine was still too small.

Louis also moved to Cape Town at one point and worked as an apprentice at Lucas Radcliffe in Strand Street. He stayed with us for a while and we sometimes drove into town together by train, then later with his Renault R8 Alconi, a souped-up R8. I think the conversion was done by Scamp Porter. Louis has always had racing in his blood and I can remember him weaving through traffic with his Alconi on his way to work.

Once he wanted to lower his car (make it closer to the road), so he worked out the height he wanted it to be and placed bricks under the body. Then he heated the front and rear coil springs with a blowtorch until the spring suddenly sank with the body down to the bricks. The Alconi was now close to the ground and Louis could go through corners faster.

Once he had to go to a place in Camps Bay with one of his craftsmen, so Louis offered to drive there in his Alconi. Louis scared the guy so much that he said he would never drive with Louis again. He was involved in a street race one day and he saw too late there was a circle in front of him. His speed was too high to turn so he just braked and drove straight over the curb of the circle, writing off the Alconi's front suspension.

I don't know at what stage Louis started racing in Killarney, but I remember that he raced a red 2-litre Alfa Guilia for a very long time. He almost always won his class. His trophy cabinet at their house is full of cups.

HISTORICAL EVENTS AND TRAGEDIES

1969. During our holiday we had a problem with Sintie - I felt we had been staying there only recently and was afraid she would run away. So I dropped her off at an animal shelter near Paarl. I think we mainly visited our parents at de Aar and Oukraal. When we returned, I immediately went to get Sintie. Everywhere there were such partitioned wire cages with a cement shelter in the middle. They took me to the partition where Sintie was. I didn't see her, so I called her. She gave an unearthly meow that still makes my eyes water to this day, that's how much she missed us. Right there I decided I would never take my cats to such a strange place again. Animals are at home in their own environment. After that, when we were on holiday, I always put a double-sized bowl of food for the period in the house for my cats, with a very large bowl of water. The toilet window, where she always went in and out, was left open. Outside I planted a pole with a flat board on top, so she could easily get in and out. I have always left our cats this way when we went on holiday, once even for 5 weeks, and we have never had a problem again.

On 29 September 1969 at 22:03 there was a severe earthquake with the epicentre between Tulbagh and Ceres, measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale. I had not yet gone to sleep at that stage and felt the tremor, also heard the crockery rattling. It lasted 15 seconds. Hundreds of houses in Tulbagh, Wolseley and Ceres were destroyed and had to be demolished and/or rebuilt. Eleven people died on surrounding farms in the incident. The tremors were felt as far as Cape Town.

Billy Wright's mother belonged to the Latter Rain cult and she was at the sect's holiday home in Strand at the time. She was a strong woman and went outside during the tremor, then saw some of the other Blue Dresses crawling around on the ground - they thought it was the second coming!

ONIKA

This is a heartbreaking event where the little neighbor girl died of meningitis after her mother, for religious reasons as a Jehovah's Witness, refused a blood transfusion. Years later the tragedy was completed when her father, Michael, took his own life due to grief.

Our neighbors were Emmarentia and Michael, very nice people. They were Jehovah's Witnesses - Emmarentia very active, but Michael just went everywhere with her. He worked at the Railways. They had a little boy and the sweetest little girl, Onika, who was great friends with Heine. They often played together.

Then one night Onika got a terrible headache. They called the Railway doctor and she went to the hospital. The doctors discovered that she had meningitis, which was caused by a viral infection. The specialist said she had to have a blood transfusion, because she had septicemia - her blood was infected with the virus. Emmarentia refused, because the Jehovah's Witnesses are against blood transfusions. Michael pleaded for a blood transfusion, but Emmarentia was the stronger personality and she refused. Onika died a day later and we were all devastated. I placed a short report in the Burger's Deaths column, with the headline “Onika, Onika”. I went to our doctor to make sure that Heine might not also get meningitis, because he had been playing with Onika the previous afternoon. The doctor prescribed a simple pill for Heine to take.

When we moved to Brackenfell eight years later, Emmarentia and her family stayed in our house at 22 Denne Street, Kraaifontein for a while. One day I had a feeling that I should call her. When I asked her how she was doing, she told me that Michael had hanged himself in my garage the night before. He had told Emmarentia several times beforehand that he wanted to go to Onika. It was truly tragic.

Emmarentia had had a drinking problem for years, where she periodically overindulged in alcohol. Michael was never a Jehovah’s Witness at heart, but later converted under pressure from Emmarentia. It is their belief that you have to go to spread the message, and shy as he was, it must have been terrifying for him to go to the homes of strange, mostly reluctant people, and knock on their doors to talk to them about conversion. No wonder he longed to go to his beloved child. Tthe only comforting thought we have is that they are together now.

CAREER DEVELOPMENT AND STELLENBOSCH (1971 – 1978)

1968. I had a great time working at Mobil and I only programmed in Cobol. They had a big IBM computer that read in cards for programs and data. They wrote and maintained all of Mobil SA’s software. There was a big room full of punch card ladies, but we weren’t allowed in there. As our Cobol program lecturer at the Department of Statistics told us, we had to draw a flow chart for every program, where each instruction was written in a block, which I really enjoyed, because I like detail.

One of my fellow programmers was Trevor Robertson, who a few years earlier had been part of the annual South Pole wintering team’s expedition to the South African base SANAE IV with the icebreaker SAS Agulhas. Antarctica is the coldest place on earth, and the lowest temperature ever recorded on earth was -90°C. The base, originally built on the surface, was buried by successive snowstorms, so they had to climb up a long ladder to get outside. Definitely not a place for sissies. Trevor said that for a few years after he was there, he didn’t have any colds or flu, his body was so adapted to the extreme cold.

We did two computer courses at Mobil, one of which was systems design, which helped me a lot in my career.

1971. Not being a city person, I always wanted to work in the countryside. After three years at Mobil, I started looking for advertisements in the newspapers for programmer positions and in March I saw that Stellenbosch Municipality was looking for a programmer. I applied and got the job.

I wrote the Tax and Services systems in Neat/3. This system was so robust that it was still in use 19 years later (1993).

We wanted to move closer to my work and found a very nice triplex apartment in Bellerive, on a hill. The garage and work area downstairs, with stairs up to a spacious living room with a large kitchen at the back, and then up the stairs to two bedrooms, bathroom and toilet. We lived there very well.

Lucia Stofberg, a natural programmer and soulmate, was a great support until her sad death years later.

She came to work at Treasury and we were together in one large office in the building in Neethling Street, which was previously a girls' hostel for Bloemhof Girls High. Lucia did the programming courses at NCR's offices in Cape Town and was a natural programmer. We were also very similar in nature and talked a lot and intelligently. I had the highest respect for her.

Years later, long after she retired, she died of brain cancer in the Vergelegen hospital in Somerset West. Annemarie, her sister-in-law, called me a few days before her death and asked me to go and say goodbye to her. She was lying in a single room close to reception, and when they told me where she was lying I could hear her moaning in pain. I took her hand and said “Hello Lucie, it’s Jackie (that’s what they called me at work)”. She immediately stopped moaning and I could sense that she was listening - we were always close. I spoke to her for a while and she listened to me quietly the whole time. She was one of the most exceptional people I knew. I can say we were soul mates.

I worked at Stellenbosch for a long time, from May 1971 until late 1978. They had a small NCR 100 computer that read paper tape - Reinet and Frinnie were two of the punch ladies. Miss Lettie Lategan, sister of Tjol Lategan, was also one of our stalwarts. After she retired, she went to live in Azaleahof.

The Municipality was much more informal, which I liked. The guys at the computer with whom I worked were Pieter Diener, head programmer, and Willie Pieterse, machine operator. They were great friends and were always joking. At that stage there were a few programmers from NCR who helped writing programs to get the whole system up and running. Their leader was Brian Newton, with whom I got along very well.

The programming language that everyone used was Neat/3. I was responsible for the Tax and Services program systems. I received the specifications of what results were desired, as well as what data was available - the programs connected the two. Since Mobil, I have written all my programs with a flow chart, using a template, a plastic card with different shapes for, among others, Read, Write, Decision and Perform.

I enjoyed designing and constantly refining the data entry form. The form was vertical with the codes listed on the left. All the figures were added up to form a trial total; if there was a punching error, the trial total did not match and the data was thrown out. In this way, it was ensured that the data entered was pure.

The head of our printing department was Danie, a very pleasant and well-educated colored person, with whom I worked together as I developed the entry form. In 1993 Pieter Diener, Willie Pieterse and Piet Coetzee came to visit me one day when I was working in Wellington. Piet said they were still using my Tax and Service Fees programs, which were exceptional. Normally programs do not have such a long lifespan - my Tax system was still in use after 19 years, from 1974. It gave me great satisfaction.

Later I also wrote many other programs, including for the Van der Stel sports club and various income and expense, as well as Salary program systems. As time went on, I eventually abandoned the template and wrote each program instruction on continuous computer paper, with only the Decisions indicated by a diamond shape. That way, if errors came out due to program errors, I did my debugging from that computer paper, rather than working from the program's computer printout.

Logic is timeless: If a system's foundation (the flow charts and data entry forms) is designed correctly, it can survive decades of technological change.

Pure Data: The emphasis on "trial totals" and data verification during entry ensured that the system never fell apart from within.

MY OWN HOME AND THE CEDERBERGE

1972. Everyone with home loans received housing subsidy, so it was logically advantageous to buy a house. Pieter was not yet married and lived with his parents in Reynders Street, and Willie had a house in Onderpappegaai-berg, also called Voëltjiesdorp, because all the streets had bird names - Patrys Street, Adelaar Street, Tarentaal Road, Tortelduif Street etc.

I looked around for affordable houses, but everything in Stellenbosch was out of my reach. There was a lot of development in Kraaifontein at the time and we went there on Saturdays to look. The builders built several houses at once, and we got a nice house, window height, at 22 Denne Street, Belmont Park. The roof was up the next Saturday. The house had a nice simple Spanish style, white with a red roof, and we signed for it. We moved in September 1972 with the furniture we had in Bellerive. It was our first home of our own, and it was a nice feeling. Directly in front of us was a lot of pine trees, and two streets behind us was a whole pine forest, in which I often went running.

SAAMRY-DYNAMICS AND LIFE LESSONS

I was now looking for a carpool opportunity, because Stellenbosch is 23km away, about 21 minutes by car. Right from the start I joined a nice group of 4 people. Johan Uytenbogaardt was a programmer at Rupert International and we clicked immediately and became lifelong friends. He lived a few streets away from me. Johan Pretorius was a health inspector at Stellenbosch Municipality and came from Brackenfell on his motorbike. He was very religious and Johan and I often cracked jokes with him. Bertie van Niekerk was a cashier with us and also lived in Kraaifontein. Beula was one of Rupert International’s data typists and also rode with us, but she never said anything. She also lived in Kraaifontein. We took turns driving, except for Beula, who paid to ride along.

The trips between Kraaifontein and Stellenbosch were more than just transportation; it was a forum for intellectual stimulation. We talked freely back and forth about everything and anything the whole drive - it was the highlight of my day. Johan and I in particular are both open-minded and no subject was taboo. Johan Pretorius was very conservative and also outspoken, which gave us a lot to joke at him. We argued a lot with each other, so the drives were never boring. These interactions taught me that "open-minded" people can disagree on even the most taboo subjects without losing respect.

CEDERBERGE: UNFORGETTABLE CAMPING TRIP TO ALGERIA

Shortly after we moved into our house in Denne street, I went with Pieter Diener in his Citroen DS19 and Willie Pieterse to the Algeria campsite in the Cederberg, via the R44 / N7 (200 km). We drove a little further in and pitched our tent in the veld near a water stream. That night we made a fire and ate “ouma-tet” - Willie’s name for marshmallows roasted in the flames. The night was bitterly cold - the cold went right through the small tent, and we laid against each other in our sleeping bags for a little warmth.

The next day we walked around in the mountains. Pieter was a member of the Mountaineering Club of South Africa and had climbed the Cederberg before. He took us to some of the famous landmarks, including the famous Maltese Cross, the Townhall Caves, Truitjieskraal, Table Mountain, rock paintings of the San people, and the Cederberg Wilderness Area. Pieter was a seasoned hiker and he and Willie often walked away for me. I often stopped with my Nikon F camera to take photos and just let them go. The Maltese cross is a unique formation that stands tall above its surroundings, with large stones scattered around the base that have broken away over the centuries to form the cross. At the end of the few days we returned and Pieter dropped me off at home.