Contributors

Pete D'Luhosch — Pete is a retired IBM program/manager who lives in upstate New York. He graduated from Union College (Schenectady, New York) in 1963, with a degree in English Literature. Pete's 38-year IBM career, at their semiconductor development and manufacturing facility in East Fishkill, New York, spanned the time from punched cards and hard wired “unit record” machines being the norm, up to the time when computers were populated with chips containing millions of transistors that were “printed” on 12-inch silicon wafers.

Pete's introduction to computers came on an IBM 1401 computer that was as big as a refrigerator and had an astonishing 4k of memory. Pete then learned IBM 360 programming and for many years worked on application programming at IBM East Fishkill. He eventually moved on to systems analysis and then held various management positions in support of chip manufacturing and statistical analysis. When he retired, Pete was a programhim/analyst in a staff department supporting the Director of the East Fishkill Semiconductor Laboratory.

Pete's interest in card collecting came, as many did, with baseball cards in the early '50s. The 1951 Bowman baseball card set is still his favorite. Sad to say, all Pete's cards disappeared while he was in college. He rekindled his love of cards in the late '70s, working on Topps baseball card sets with his kids, and attempting to re-create some of his sets from the '50s. When baseball cards became too expensive, Pete remembered another set he once collected: the 1952 Topps Wings set. On a whim, he bought a couple of them on eBay, just to see if they were still as cool as he remembered. Naturally, that led to years of trying to complete the set in the best condition he could find. Today, Pete's collecting interest lies almost exclusively with airplane cards from the World War II and Korean War periods. Some of Pete's card sets can be found on the SGC Registry.

Pete has written articles on the 1951 Bowman baseball card set for Sports Collectors Digest and articles on Topps Wings and Card-O Aeroplanes for The Wrapper. He has developed his own website that contains a lot of airplane and baseball card reference material. The website can be found at https://www.pjdenterprises.com.