When Larry Youngren retired from IBM after a 31-year career, he hopped in his car, drove north for six hours, and fished nonstop for a month and a half. Although he would always "rather be fishing" these days, the newness of being a retiree has waned a bit and Youngren is plunging into a COMMON project to turn folks like him into mentors and volunteers.

He has been attending COMMON and teaching award-winning sessions on database, disaster recovery, high availability, and journaling since the 1980s. Not content to "rest in peace," Youngren will spearhead a Retired i5/OS Professionals (RIPs) roundtable at the upcoming conference in Nashville to encourage System i experts at the end of their careers to stay active in the community.

He modeled RIPs after Young System i Professionals (YIPs). "We figured what's good for one end of the spectrum would be good for the other end as well," Youngren explains. "There are a whole bunch of people who have been members of COMMON for a long time. We want to find ways to make it attractive for them to stick around."

Youngren recalls how now-retired Jim Sloan, IBM's well-known CL and RPG tool guy, took him aside years ago and said, "I want you to meet some people." Sloan helped him blend into the organization and encouraged him to offer classes, first as a co-teacher and later on his own. Youngren would like to foster similar pairings.

"We want people to continue to do some teaching and sharing of what they have learned and to take new speakers under their wings. The new folks are thinking, 'This is scary and unfamiliar to me.' The experienced ones can say, 'I've been there, let me help you make sure that your session is the best it can be,'" Youngren explains. "It's good to see the newer ones go back to the lab feeling much better after meeting face to face with the people who use their software."

In addition to encouraging RIPs to be mentors, he hopes to entice them to become COMMON volunteers. "There's a lot that has to happen behind the scenes. It's a significant undertaking to have 500 sessions taught and to recruit the right people," Youngren notes. He has found a niche with the Volunteer Excellence committee. "We are working to solicit more volunteers, retain the ones we have, and make the experience rewarding for everyone."

Youngren never intended to become a RIP or, for that matter, to give a rip about computers. Physics was his game at the University of Illinois until a new adviser recommended that he take some programming courses. "I fell in love," he says simply. A little Fortran and a bit of Cobol later, he knew all kinds of languages. After five years as a junior high teacher, Youngren gained a master's degree in computer science from New Mexico State University. It was there that he became acquainted with IBM.

An IBM manager on faculty loan in the area recruited Youngren and three others to work for the company. One of the new hires was assigned to Hilo, Hawaii. The trio that included Youngren headed for Rochester.

Out of a dozen different job openings at the Minnesota plant, Youngren grabbed one developing the database for what would become the System/38. "I realized that it was a ground-floor opportunity. No other system like it existed. We were the people who got to nurture a truly new design from its earliest days, and that was fascinating. I saw this machine while it was still just dreams and a sketch on a white board," he says. Youngren recalls celebrating at 2 a.m. at a local Perkins restaurant after the development team used his code to add the very first database row to a physical file. "Thirty-one years later IBM is still building enhancements close to the hardware," he adds.

Youngren's IBM career led him around the world to attend conferences and work with customers. He traveled to Australia alone four different times. The trip he remembers most, though, was a last-minute visa-less junket to Paris that pulled him from COMMON in New Orleans. Despite being assured by the company that all would be well without the paperwork, he had difficulty getting on the plane in the U.S. and was physically escorted off the aircraft in France by armed policemen. Rescued in the end by an IBM vice president, Youngren jokes that he barely ended up in "the other French quarter."

He sticks closer to Rochester now, the adopted home he enjoys in the state known for its 10,000 fishing lakes. His brother and sister and their families migrated from Illinois to Minnesota to join him. His parents bought a cabin in the north country and spent six months there each year, welcoming the whole Youngren gang on weekends.

Youngren says he may put together some tuning tools for database and high-availability projects and would also enjoy speaking to user groups, but he's not looking for a full-time job. "Retirement is a good thing," he reminds himself.

Next to fishing, his passion is live theater. "The same adviser who pushed me out of physics into computer science urged me to take a theater course," Youngren says. He treats his nieces and nephews to plays in Minneapolis and marvels about a performance he saw in Denver that featured an actual swimming pool on the stage.

COMMON currently occupies his mind, though. He hopes to count noses at the RIPs roundtable he'll host the afternoon of April 1st and recruit experienced people to stay involved.

Youngren certainly intends to remain active in the group. "I'm footloose and fancy-free," he says, "as long as it isn't fishing season!"