UBSC Obituary: Bea Fittler

Jonesy: From "web sources" it is believed Bea was around age 86 when she died.
Tom Mauro: Bea was born in 1930. Her 87th birthday would have been in March 2017.

Marv DeSelm, Rob Reilly, and Roger Pelot remember (in the aggregate) that...

Bea Fittler did Special Projects for president Jerry Slocum.
One project, named Minimum Operating Requirements (MOS) -- to identify UBD's requirements, was in response to the long delay in getting the data base (IHDB) up to the level that would support UBD.

Bill Caffrey relates:

Of the people that came over to UBSC from the NCR banking apps side of the house, Bea probably had the best understanding of the concept of the banking applications integrated under a shared customer system and housed in a common database. I believe she provided initial design specs for most if not all of the mainline applications and led the effort to extract that design info from the people that were still providing the day to day support of those applications. She was instrumental in bridging the divide between the "old developers" and the new developers understanding of the system requirements.
Then she later was the project leader for the actual conversion from the old to the new systems.
Then, it was minibank .

Burt McGregor confirms:

Bea was one of the very early banking analyst to be assigned to the building of the UBC banking banking data base system. She represented the users side and tried to keep us techies in line. It was a heavy load and she (later) migrated to the minibank concepts.

Bea immigrated to the U.S. from Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. She left when she heard the Communists were looking for her. She experienced the horrors of World War II also as a youngster. She came to the U.S. and eventually had a sponsor in Denver. She loved the U.S. and everything about it but after the revolution always went back to Hungary to visit her family that remained. She was a citizen of the world and stood up to oppression wherever it was found. She was fearless and dedicated to her job, her family, her church, and her friends. She worked long hours at UBSC to insure it was successful even during some of the darkest early days. She would never give up on the concept of an integrated data base system. She was a mentor to me and my family. She will be missed.
-- Tom Mauro

Let's see how good my memory is...
When I started in 1962, Bea was already working for Denver US National Bank. She started in the late 1950's after she came to the U.S.A. from Hungary. She was one of the students that rebelled during the 56 Hungarian revolt. In 1963 the Data Center was built under the Sherman street parking lot and Bea with Bill Ditman were right next (to each other) running the IBM Tabulating Dinosaurs. Bea transfer to Programing as a project analyst and one of her early assignments had to do with CCDF which was the online system for balances. Later that evolved to minibank at UBSC.

I got together with Bea and some of survivors from the old days which included the elder DeSelm early last year (2016) and she looked fine. I will always remember Bea as wonderful lady with a gracious personality.
-- Rod Pombo

United Banks Service Company

Memories: Bea Fittler