Holocaust Survivor to Retire From JPL Computer Job at 75

For some workers these days, retirement age is 55, or even 50.

Not for Alex Glattstein Stone, who, despite quadruple-bypass heart surgery several years ago, has no intention of turning in his working papers until his 75th birthday, early next year.

Officially a senior programmer/analyst at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena but a self-described “mathematician doing computer programming,” Stone is developing a computerized telephone directory for JPL’s 9,000 workers.

“He’s an excellent worker and very sensitive to people,” said Fernando Alvarez, Stone’s supervisor at JPL. Stone has also written a computer software user’s manual and a recent article for JPL’s newsletter, Alvarez said.

“Maybe his age allows him to understand people much better,” Alvarez said. “He gets along with people very well.”

“What he does is always done well,” added Janet Zadeh, a former boss. “He’s probably more thorough than a lot of the younger workers.”

Stone returned to work only three months after his heart surgery in 1981. “Actually, (my doctor) thinks working is good for the health,” he said. “As long as you don’t work under stress or duress or something like that, and I do not.”

But severe stress shaped his early life. Born in Hungary in 1916, Stone studied law instead of mathematics at the university because anti-Jewish laws made it extremely difficult for a Jewish student to enter the small math program.

Once enrolled, he had to contend with anti-Semitic students. “A couple of times we were kicked out of school--literally--by the students,” he said. “They took us to the top of the stairs and kicked us down because we were Jewish.”

By the time he graduated, Jewish lawyers were not being admitted to the bar in Hungary.

Stone spent most of World War II in forced-labor camps run by the Hungarian army, a situation he describes as tolerable. “We still felt like human beings,” he said. In 1944, however, he was sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich.

“It was, to say the least, subhuman and miserable,” Stone said. “We felt like animals.”

He and his brother Michael survived. But after the war, he learned that his mother and another brother had been killed at Auschwitz.

Stone immigrated to the United States in 1949. He became a U.S. citizen in 1955 and changed his name to Stone, keeping his former surname, Glattstein, as his middle name. He received a master’s degree in mathematics from George Washington University in 1961.

He accepted a job with JPL in May, 1969, and has since helped supervise and implement software projects for satellite tracking systems and the Voyager spacecraft.

He and his wife, Susan Tarjan Stone, owner of a skin-care salon, live in Encino. They have two sons: Peter, 41, and Victor, 32.

Stone, a precise, soft-spoken man with a quiet sense of humor, listed two reasons why he hasn’t retired already. One is financial. The other “is that I like what I’m doing, and when you like what you’re doing you don’t feel like retiring.

“But at 75, I think I’m ready to retire and work at home--not for money but for enjoyment,” he said.

He detailed plans to write a history of his family and said he’ll also play with his two personal computers--and with his 18-month-old grandson, Michael--after retiring at the end of January.