Carlos A. Cuadra

Carlos was a pioneer in the field of Information Science and the search business. Long before the Internet era and the search engines that we take for granted, he fostered the creation of the commercial online search industry, with developments ranging from a world-wide dial-up search service to a microcomputer-based storage and retrieval system. He was also a prolific author, traveler, and conference speaker, what today is called an influencer.

CHILDHOOD

Carlos began life with very little. His parents separated when he was very young, so he was raised by his mother. They were poor, and young Carlos worked a series of jobs: soda pop seller, grocery clerk, delivery boy, paper boy, telegraph messenger, and box packer.

Ten-year-old Carlos escaped disaster when his bicycle brakes failed going down a very steep section of San Francisco’s Washington Street. By luck, he was not hit by the Powell cable car, and he crashed into a parked car after three blocks without being badly hurt.

Carlos’ mother had him take piano lessons from age 5, hoping that he would perform on the Ed Sullivan TV show. That never came to pass, but Carlos became an accomplished life-long piano player. He could play a song just by hearing it, complete with accompanying chords, and without sheet music. If he heard a tone, he could tell you what note it was. As a teen, he had a brief job playing piano at a live theater, before he was let go for being underage.

Starting in his pre-teen years, Carlos loved going to the movies. Every week he rode the street car to a neighborhood theater, usually seeing a movie but sometimes a vaudeville show. He spent time with his older half-brother Rudy, who took him to parties, religious events, and bingo games.

SERVICE AND EDUCATION

Carlos served in the Navy during World War II, stationed on Manus Island, south of Japan. He was a radio operator, decoding Morse code transmissions, and then was appointed Dean of the College of the Admiralties, managing the on-island school and teaching bookkeeping and photography. His title was Dean Cuadra, a name he later gave to his second son.

After his discharge, Carlos returned to California and attended the University of California, Berkeley under the G.I. Bill. He was a top student, and a psychology professor hired him as a teaching assistant in his freshman year. Carlos earned a bachelor’s degree in 1949 and a doctorate in Psychology in 1953. He interned at the Veterans Administration neuropsychiatric hospital in Palo Alto, and then worked as a Research Supervisor at the VA Hospital in Downey, Illinois, training clinical psychology interns and conducting research.

Carlos met his wife Gloria in a Public Speaking class at U.C. Berkeley. They were both elected to Phi Beta Kappa as juniors, one year earlier than most students. They married on May 3, 1947 and were together until her passing 72 years later on April 24, 2020. They began their marriage living in a boarding house with one twin bed and little money beyond school scholarships. They remembered the day they had a fancy dinner because they found a 50-cent coin on the sidewalk.

INTELLIGENCE WORK

In 1956, Carlos was recruited to join the RAND Corporation, helping the U.S. Air Force to train radar operators to watch for incoming Soviet Union planes or missiles. When a division of RAND was spun off to form System Development Corporation (SDC) in 1957, Carlos moved to the new company, where he prepared trainers for the U.S. Air Force’s Semi- Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) automated air defense system.

After Carlos was appointed head of SDC’s Intelligence Systems Branch and granted a Top Secret clearance, he participated in an intelligence-gathering project in West Germany and studied the information processing operations of the CIA. He also undertook one of the first studies of automated fingerprint identification.

INFORMATION SCIENTIST

The field of Information Science was originally called Documentation, and the American Documentation Institute (ADI)’s leading publication was called American Documentation. When Carlos asked industry professionals whether there was an annual review of literature, akin to the Annual Review of Psychology, he learned there was none. The ADI asked him to create it himself. Cuadra launched the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology and served as editor for its first 10 years, 1966 to 1975. It is still considered a primary forum for scholarly articles in Information Science. Based in part on Carlos’ chosen nomenclature, the ADI renamed its journal to The Journal of the American Society for Information Science and changed its own name. It is now the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

It was at SDC where Carlos became a pioneer in the information industry. Under his direction, SDC developed successive retrieval systems: the Centralized Information Reference and Control System (CIRC) for the Air Force, ALPS for automating libraries, AIM-TWX, MEDLARS II, ORBIT, and ELHILL. The MEDLARS software powered the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE system, the predecessor of PubMed, NLM’s public medical search system.

In 1972, Carlos surveyed industry professionals, asking if they would use an online bibliographic retrieval service if one were available. Most respondents answered no. Carlos decided that they simply didn’t know that they needed such a system. He locked the survey results in a desk drawer without showing them to his managers, and then launched SDC Search Service, providing search access to scientific and technical literature over dial-up phone lines. His primary rival was Lockheed’s DIALOG system, which ironically had been created as a result of Carlos’ claims about the need for such systems. Carlos later conducted the first formal study of online retrieval services, showing that users experienced dramatic improvements in productivity.

After leaving SDC in 1978, Carlos founded Cuadra Associates, Inc., first as a consulting company and then as publisher of the first directories of online and portable databases. In 1982, he launched STAR®, the first multi-tasking multi-user knowledge management software for microcomputers. STAR is still in use over 40 years later, and is the software behind the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Carlos served presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter as a member of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, declining to serve a fourth term when invited by President Reagan. He served on the boards of the Information Industry Association, Chemical Abstracts Service, American Chemical Society, and the Annenberg School of Communications. He consulted for the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Scientific and Technical Information. He taught UCLA’s computer-based retrieval course as an Adjunct Professor in its Graduate School of Library and Information Science. In 1976, he wrote a speech about information science for former Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Carlos authored dozens of technical papers, became a popular conference speaker, and won numerous awards from organizations including

• The ASIS&T: Award of Merit, Best Information Science Book, Distinguished Lecturer of the Year, and Pioneer of Information Science

• The Information Industry Association: Information Product of the Year and Hall of Fame

• The National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services: Miles Conrad Award and Honorary Fellow

• The Association of Independent Information Professionals: Roger Summit Award

Over the 30 years from 1970 to 2000, Carlos took over 300 business trips to 20 countries for conferences, speaking engagements, board meetings, and product exhibits. His first business trip was in 1957, his last in 2012, a span of 56 years.

A German Who’s Who publication once called Carlos “The Pope of Information Science,” a title he found especially amusing. An archive of Carlos’ papers is housed at the University of Michigan’s Special Collections Research Center.

FAMILY

By the time that Carlos settled in Los Angeles for good, his daughter Susan was in high school. His sons Neil and Dean were younger. Carlos built the boys a 14-foot spaceship playhouse. The playhouse launch party made national news. He also built his sons a large model train table and a soapbox racer.

Carlos invented a game to delight the boys. He would disappear from view around a corner and out would crawl the Ruff Ruff, which looked like Carlos but said only “ruff, ruff.” The boys would squeal and pounce on the Ruff Ruff. When the Ruff Ruff had had enough roughhousing, it would lumber away, after which Carlos would return. The Ruff Ruff also appeared for Carlos’ grandchildren.

After 21 years at SDC and 34 years running Cuadra Associates, Carlos retired in 2012. Rather than relaxing, he launched a business named Cuadra Enterprises, with his family’s help, to sell his inventions, such as an instruction booklet to help other industrious families build their own spaceship playhouses. He had sold his inventions before, in the 1960s, including Port-O-Pong, a miniature ping-pong table that he built himself.

His hobbies included the game of bridge, skiing, photography, moviegoing, jazz music, carpentry, family vacation trips, and playing the piano most evenings. He and Gloria attended the annual Sacramento Jazz Jubilee for 42 consecutive years. In the 1970s, he and his sons performed as a musical trio, with Neil on trumpet and Dean on drums.

By his 90s, Carlos realized that most people didn’t recognize the old standards that he liked to play. He solved the problem by volunteering to play piano at senior residence facilities, where his audiences knew and enjoyed his songs, sometimes singing along. He bought himself a baby grand piano in 2007, somewhat concerned that he wouldn’t have many years left to enjoy playing it. The last song he played was the birthday song, 15 years later.

Carlos always had a whimsical side. As a child, he wrote and sold a humorous newspaper. In college, he directed two elaborate comedies starring fellow members of the U.C. Berkeley honor societies. As an adult, he sometimes played practical jokes on his coworkers. At industry conferences he would wear a mask and purposely play piano badly, before revealing who he was and playing properly. Starting in 1952, he and his family made humorous homemade holiday cards and mailed them annually to friends and family. The tradition lasted for 70 years, with the last card sent only months before he passed away.

He claimed that his proudest moment as a father was when his sons played a practical joke on him. Neil and Carlos were evenly matched at chess, while Dean didn’t play chess at all. Yet one day, Dean challenged Carlos to a game. Carlos was going easy on his novice son until he realized that Dean was winning. The kids revealed that Neil had been watching the game and whispering moves into a microphone while Dean listened with an earpiece. Dean still didn’t know how to play chess, but he had learned to follow chess move instructions.

Carlos and Gloria are survived by their children Susan Nielsen, Neil (Ruth) Cuadra, and Dean Cuadra, and their grandchildren Craig Nielsen (Evie Sandoval), Jimmy Cuadra (Leah Scampoli), and Dan (Helen) Cuadra.

Their ashes were interred at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Rose Garden in Los Angeles. Their combined memorial service will be held there on Saturday November 5, 2022 at 11:00am.

Donations in memory of Carlos or Gloria may be made to the Aplastic Anemia & MDS International Foundation (aamds.org) or to the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org).

The obituary for Gloria N. Cuadra can be found at https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/los-angeles-ca/gloria-cuadra-9152431