Who is don wetzel

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Land base was substantially reduced as our tribes became part of this new republic. Chief White Calf was our last Blackfeet War Chief and fought in many battles with the scars to prove it. In , he died of pneumonia in Washington, D. He received transferred knowledge and guidance to support his life journey as he was a prominent leader for his people. The honorable gift exchange began. Chairman Wetzel fought tribal termination and supported tribal self-determination and governance.

During Montana's biggest natural disaster, the flood of , he and his fellow council members secured funding and support by bringing the political brass out to witness the damage while revealing the resiliency of our people. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall were front and center during his chairmanship. They met with our Elders and fought with us for the benefit of many. Blackie was the first Montana Tribal Leader to sit as President of the National Congress of American Indians from to , meeting with President Kennedy at influential times of great change and direction.

It was a subtle move at an impactful time of change in our country and it created an opportunity to influence all of America showing the marginalized indigenous tribes of this land have something to say. What I would like to emphasize is this: The logo will now be returned to our people, but at that moment in time in the '70s until now, my grandfather pulled the coup of the century.

It was often assumed the team used the imagery of Chief White Calf for their benefit, when instead Blackie used them for our Blackfeet benefit and we introduced that power into the minds of our nation and world. Our Blackfeet people are universally intelligent. We are powerful. We are honorable. Past to present, we have made a tremendous impact on the world. We influenced Abraham Maslow with our philosophies of self-actualization.

Once you got up there you didn't know what was going to happen to your career after that. So I asked them if I could stay in Houston.

After a short period of time they said, "Nah, you really need to move on. We have people coming along, you need to move on and get some more of this staff training. So they said, well, OK, "then what we'll do is, we'll give you a specialized territory in Houston and you can be a salesman again. And that wasn't bad.

Looking back now, that probably was a very good job. But I didn't take it. I moved from Houston to Dallas. That was in David: Before we got off this, you had been in a mid-level position. This was a boom time for IBM from sort of a mid-personnel or mid-level position, talked some about your early training and things of that sort.

This was a boom time for IBM. What was it like to be in a company that was growing through the early days of the computer era? Was business just booming or did you have some significant problems in getting computer-based acceptance in all these industry sectors? Do you at this point sort out a lot of different things? A lot of satellite industry was moving in as well. A lot of people were moving in.

So all industry was growing. Houston was a gold mine -- these computers were coming in, everybody was involved with the idea, the businesses were there, and business was booming. I guess our biggest problem was trying to get the equipment in faster. We had delivery schedules as long as 30 months. After somebody placed an order, our quotation was "you get it in 30 months.

So we really didn't have any major problem. As I said, it was a gold mine. We were making excellent money, getting a lot of business. I happened to be in the right place at the right time. A lot of this was going on in other cities as well but not all cities. So I was in good shape down there.

I was very happy. But IBM at that time was growing at a tremendously rapid rate. They were hiring a lot of people and as I said earlier they loved to train you and move you and see you move up in the company. And that was the reason for my prior moves, you know -- everything was always better, more responsibility. And that's why they wanted me to go to headquarters. David: I've actually met a lot of people who were on the IBM path for a while and then stepped off for a variety of reasons.

Was there a lot of resistance in part of the company to their notion of what it took to develop people, or were you unusual when you had to make that decision? Don: I think most of the people who left IBM left because they were the best people in IBM, and other companies were looking for that type of person. They weren't unhappy, they were getting offers that were just tremendous, and so they were taking them.

A lot of them were big-management jobs, a lot more money, more responsibility, and they were the cream of the crop in IBM. Those were the ones that were leaving but it wasn't because they were unhappy. And I wasn't unhappy at all, I was very happy when I left. Don: I spent a lot of time with the operating people as opposed to the executives, although I did talk to executives too.

I talked, however, to many more of the operating people. I just thought their input was more finite and I could grab hold of some idea and run with it. At that time there was such an allegiance to whomever they bought their hardware from. Whatever those companies recommended, that's what they were buying. You have to remember also that any foreign terminal that was going to work on this computer of theirs, that was anathema at that time. And the major manufacturers' salesmen didn't help the situation at all because they were selling their own terminals.

So it was not an easy task to get any help. Don: Well, the idea came into my mind very quickly. I went back to our people at Docutel and told them what was going on and I thought that we could build a machine that would perform at least 90 percent, perhaps more than 90 percent, of all the transactions processed by a teller. Don: It was verbally. Every week we would have a committee meeting, if you will. We didn't have many people at the company in my division at that time, so it was just a few of us the president, the executive vice president and myself.

We had a v. We talked about, well, what happened last week? We did this weekly. Finally I suggested the idea of this machine that would do most of the work of a teller. In Docutel it was well received. I don't mean people were jumping up and down saying, "Yea, we finally got a terminal" but at least they were willing to sit down and study it further.

So we had a lot more work to do to determine whether it's worth proceeding with or not. I mean, we weren't close to designing anything or building anything, we were talking functions.

Then we had to determine what the economics were. How many of these machines could we sell if it was any good at all? So we had to look at the marketplace and determine the potentiality of the machine.

And then any other things that might crop up as we got into building it. So we made a feasibility study. At that point in time we never even thought of having off-premise ATMs as we see them today, you know, in shopping centers and supermarkets, universities, places like that.

We were talking machines strictly located on bank premises. We didn't even feel that we would have one in every branch. We thought we'd get some key branches and the home office. But even then, the potential was very large and remember nobody else had a machine like this at this point in time. We determined that if we were the first ones out there, with the potential that the market presented, we would have a good product line for at least five years.

David: By experience you mean that you approached this, as you describe it, really from a functional perspective and not from a technical perspective at all. Do I understand that correctly? David: That you sat down with your planners and looked at the market structure, the functionality. At what point did you begin looking at technical issues? When did that part of the discussion come in? Don: Once we determined that the marketplace was large enough to warrant us getting into that market with this machine, then we got down to "well, what kind of machine should this be, and how will it work?

In those years there was very little on-line to the host computer; almost none, because those computers were used in a back-office environment. There were no such things as teller terminals and things like that as we know them today. So it was going to be an off-line machine.

We determined that because we could not get them on line. Software wasn't there or anything like that, and the banks were not interested. They were, you know, literally up to their ears just converting from the old hand systems to the computerized version. So it was going to be an off-line -- yes, this is the process of deduction, I guess: if you can't do it, then you do it another way. It was going to be an off-line machine.

Knowing that, we had to build into it the necessary security because we weren't checking balances to see if you had the money in the account. Not only was it a technical problem to overcome, it was a problem in the minds of the banker to issue a card to somebody and not know whether he had the money in his account or not. But we thought we could get around that particular aspect of things. Then we faced the problem of what is going to be the activating device for this machine?

When we were at this stage in late '68 and early '69, credit cards had started to come out, and these were just credit cards -- there were no magnetic stripes or anything like that.

We needed to store some data on this card in order for the ATM to do the functions that we wanted it to do. Data such as account number, checking account number, savings account number, credit card account number, the bank's routing and transit number because we had to identify the bank.

We had to put a limit on the amount of money they could get out of the ATM. Since we didn't know how much they could get, we translated that into the number of times they could use the card per day, and at that juncture the machines only dispensed a certain amount of money.

We had to have the ability not only to read that stripe but then we had to update that stripe to record the number of times it was used. We also felt very firmly that people could decode the information on a stripe if it were not encrypted in some form. Fortunately, we had an engineer at Docutel that had worked for the government at one time and he happened to be in the right place and knew quite a bit about encryption.

But I'm getting a little bit ahead of the game. At that point in time, we couldn't find a credit card producer who could put a magnetic stripe on a plastic card that would work in our machine. There was a hot-stamp process which as heat was applied to the stripe, it bent the stripe in the card.

So we had a little bend and as we encoded it, then we couldn't read it. We had a heck of a problem finding somebody who could produce, especially in volume, a card that would work, and that almost became a calamity. We had a machine, and if you just hand-made some plastic cards, the machine would work, but if you went to a manufacturer and asked him to run off 5, cards for you, most of them didn't work.

David: You got this idea in late '68, you did your marketing surveys, determined the potential here, and then you began developing a prototype in-house with your engineers?

Don: We did one thing before we started a prototype. There was one other issue that we thought had to be resolved: if we built this machine and the banks were interested in buying it, would the banks' customers use it? Because people, up until this time, had never interfaced directly with a piece of hardware, especially one that dealt with their money. So we took those students who were getting a Master's degree at the University of Dallas and asked the department there if they would make this a part of the program.

They would make a national study to determine, or help us determine, whether people would use the machine, what kinds of people would use it, its demographics, age, females, etc. They came back with a report that basically said most people would use it, some won't.

It turned out that younger people were more likely to use it and the older people probably would not. These were the years when consumer banking was really running rampant. Banks were converting from commercial banks to retail banks, so they wanted to offer something to younger people, especially the younger people because they were reaching that age beyond college, starting their first job, and banks wanted them as customers.

They felt like "we have to offer some services that we haven't been offering. So they were really trying to attract new business. That study told us that there were enough people out there that would use the ATMs. And that's when we really got into the details of the plastic card. We were "going" now. We'd made a decision that this is what we ought to do. The only thing we had to do along the way was to convince the board of directors of Recognition Equipment, our parent company, that this was the product that Docutel ought to market.

So we prepared the usual things you do when you give a presentation. As I recall, there was only one gentleman on the board who objected strongly to this particular product. The rest said, "You know, it seems to make some sense. There's risk here but let's go ahead and try it. We proceeded to build the prototype while we were looking for that manufacturer of the plastic card. David: What were you asking them for -- investment capital?

Or was this software capital? Recognition Equipment capital? You were going for outside investors? Where would you Don: No.

REI would go out to the community of bankers where they got their money and get the funding for this program. Don: Yes it was. It was a risky thing they decided upon. We thought we backed it up with our studies. We did a lot of homework, we really did. But the mentality of people at that time was, remember, "we want to deal face-to-face with people. People are not going to walk up to a machine and use it. In fact we don't want them to do that, we want them coming to the bank and talking to us, because then we can sell them on some other things.

The truth of the matter is, that statement really wasn't true. The tellers never cross-sold to anybody. Their mentality was: "You have a check, I'm going to give you some money, and I hope you go away. And that way, if you move fast, I'll get to the next person and everybody will be happy.

David: So the data you got from your marketing study was that consumers want speed and convenience, not personal attention Don: That's true. The customers did not agree with the bankers. The bankers always said, "Our customers, they know Susie, they've known her for a long time, and they feel very comfortable coming in and talking to her.

And Susie likes to talk to them. Susie didn't know the customer. I didn't know my teller. I didn't go to the same teller, especially if this line over here was shorter. I went over there and I couldn't have cared less who the teller was. So their thinking was not on target. And once we got past the hurdle of convincing our own people that people would use this machine because of the convenience factor, then we were able to move forward as fast as we could.

Don: Well, once we had approval to go ahead, then we really didn't have any major issues at that time except to go ahead and build this machine and make it work. In the machine there were, I would say, three major components besides the physical security of the unit. We had to develop a card reader that would read this card. We had to develop a dispensing unit that would dispense the dollar bills.

And we had to develop a printer that would print the transaction, give a copy to the customer, and a copy retained in the machine to be processed in the back office as they did a check -- that's how the account was debited. We had to develop those components. There were card-readers out there that we found, rather quickly, that if we had a card that was manufactured properly, it could be read very reliably. It was the mechanical things that gave us the most problems. If we had problems at all, they came from the dispensing unit and the printer.

We had to get a dispensing unit that would dispense only one bill at a time -- we didn't want a double feed because people got more money than they were supposed to and we didn't want one that would jam the money. Both relied on bank cards with magnetic strips, which stored account information.

The reason it rolled out on Long Island? Docutel was a subsidiary of a company named Recognition Equipment, Inc. At the time, they never considered international use — mainly because it would have been difficult for banks to access money from international accounts. Bankers were wary that a machine would make them lose money, or they would be targets for frequent robbery.

But Wetzel, a salesperson by trade, convinced them the ATM would allow for the creation of new accounts, and more business.