Listen to Hocek Interview, Part 2
Tony Candela: You mentioned that when you were at university, you didn't deal with PCs. A lot of us who predate, let's say 1980, '81, '82, of course remember that the PC was something that only appeared maybe in someone's Heath Kit supply, or something like that.
So when did you see your first PC?
Saba Hocek: The first PC I saw was actually when I came back from college. What my brother had purchased. It was a dual floppy drive and then he upgraded that to put a hard drive in it, which was, if I'm not mistaken, a 5-mg hard drive.
Huge, huge. I mean that was like real advanced and you could store just about everything in the world on that five megs.
Of course the floppy drives were the 5-1/4 inch. And they weighed a ton.
The PC's, when we used to go to shows, we'd put it in a Samsonite suitcase. The suitcase would be 50 pounds. And we just prayed that when we got to the show, because obviously you couldn't come on board with that, it was going to arrive in good condition. And that is why we never took the monitor with us also, because we had enough to carry without having to bother with the monitor as well.
Tony Candela: I'm sure they were heavier as well.
Saba Hocek: Oh yes.
Tony Candela: There is a famous quote that Bill Gates is purported to have said. Something like, "Why would anybody want more than 64K of RAM at any one time?"
So these things, well they were smaller than the computers that took up an entire room or the size of the desk, but they were still heavy.
Saba Hocek: Yup, and then in probably about '81. Some time around then, we found this computer that was called a Lunchbox Computer. We had one that we actually threw away maybe about four years ago. My mother used it for word processing up to then. And one of my clients still has his Lunchbox.
And the thing was, if you can imagine one of those portable phone machines. So it's maybe about 15 inches wide by around 7 inches deep and probably about another 15 inches high. Had a little handle on it, but that was everything. That had the keyboard and a screen. It was the laptop of the day.
And there were very few of them around. So when we found this one, we loved it. And not only did it give us the flexibility to actually carry this thing to the shows, but also at the same time, a company out of Japan, came out with a hand-held scanner. And the scanner was 11 inches wide and it was only I'd say 3 inches deep. That was about it.
So you literally placed it over a piece of paper and there was a button on top and you held down the button, and you glided it down the page. And that would go directly into the computer. It's just like a regular scanner, except that you are actually gliding it and of course you had to glide it straight and you did have to do it slowly. But this was the first system that gave portability.
So we were actually the first to also introduce a portable reading system.
Tony Candela: What's ironic is, most of those systems are not what blind people know. They know the standard flatbed system and the Kurzweil folks currently are working with The National Federation of the Blind to develop a portable scanning system. So the concept of the portable scanner is on the return. The technologies that will be used will be a lot smaller and more powerful now, 20 years later.
Saba Hocek: Right. And there were, I think, after that there were a number of other attempts that were made at portable scanning devices to be used by blind people, but the biggest problem was that you had to be so exact with it. You couldn't move it quickly and you did have to keep it straight. And that really introduced a major challenge for people.
So we had done a sort of platform that you would put the clipboard, per se. You would put the paper on so that you would have a guide to run it down. But even that, we didn't realize that for some people it was even difficult to make sure that the paper was aligned properly on the clipboard.
And again, this goes back with just a learning curve that unless you are out there and have the time to really do the research, every individual is different. And so you have to really test a broad range of people in order to see what the challenges could be.
Tony Candela: In retrospect, do you think it would have saved time and money in the end to have done more of the up front research than you were able to do or do you think you just couldn't have done it anyway?
Saba Hocek: No, I think money makes a big difference. If we had, and this is what I really think is needed for most start-up companies, in general, is that you need a minimum of a half million dollars. To really start up you need the people, you need to have a few employees, you can't be working 20-hour days every day. You pay the price for it.
You pay it not only in your mental health, in your tolerance level and so forth, but also you get burned out. So now you're starting to make mistakes. So there's that issue.
At the same time, it's very important that you be able to have enough research out there. Advertising issues. When there's no money in the pocket, if you can't advertise, it's very difficult. And this is why, although we were pioneers in the industry, and we really did come up with some pretty interesting technology for the time, there are actually very few people who know about it, who remember us. It's not a name that carries through.
Because the money wasn't out there, as it was with other companies, to be able to be doing...to be having that kind of exposure.
We did the shows as much as we could, occasionally advertising here and there but we really couldn't do too much. So yeah, it would have saved us a tremendous amount of time. We could have come out with better products, faster, had we had more start-up money.
But we didn't. The result of it is, [you] just end up coming out a much stronger and a much more knowledgeable person when you end up doing it all yourself.
Tony Candela: Well there is something to be said for hands on and, to some extent, learning by doing. Because you do know more intimately then, the details of what it takes to move a product forward and move a company forward.
Saba Hocek: Absolutely.
Tony Candela: Did your systems have a favorite PC that they liked to connect to? Or did it just fall to whatever the market had available for people to use?
Saba Hocek: It didn't really matter what the PC was. The only thing that we strongly suggested was to go with either a Phoenix or an AMI BIOS. Otherwise you came across some really quirky problems when you had these clones, no name BIOS and stuff.
Other than that, no. We sold PC's as well. Again, we realized that just the reading system on its own was not going to put bread on the table and keep our doors open. So we would sell PC's and we built those ourselves. So yeah, it was pretty flexible in terms of whichever PC was being used.
Tony Candela: What made you decide to build them yourself, as opposed to getting them off the shelf?
Saba Hocek: In those days, it was actually more cost-effective. Today it's probably not. As a matter of fact it definitely is not more cost-effective.
The only benefit today of building it yourself is that you can be very selective with which components you're using. But the market has become so incredibly cutthroat that depending upon what you're needing, if you're looking at a full system and you can go through a company like let's say Dell, who's going to give you the support, who is going to give you a package deal and then they'll throw in a printer or something like that, it doesn't pay. At least they have the warranty in that case. With the home made one you don't have that warranty.
Tony Candela: I actually have noticed, over the years, companies that call themselves integration companies who started out (these are companies where you can buy the PC and the assistive technologies and they would put them all together for you), started out building their own and now have shifted over to buying off the shelf.
It's probably because the PC industry evolved so that you can do that now.
Saba Hocek: Also, I think also what happened was that back in the days of the '80's, the Taiwanese market had really hit a boom with clones. So there was a lot of equipment out there that was no name brand or unknown, not brand name.
And what happened was that you never knew what you were getting. So you could find really great prices in the catalogues, but if you looked a little closer, you had no idea what you were getting. Even the motherboard was not a name brand motherboard. So it made a lot more sense, this is the way we did it at least, when we built our system, at least we knew that we were getting Toshiba floppies and Seagate hard drives and so forth and we could selectively specify which components we wanted.
I think over the years people have learned through experience that going through the really inexpensive catalogues of no name brands is not worth it in the end. The market has shifted a lot more to the name brands.
Tony Candela: So tell me what happened with Ad Hoc Reading Systems. You were building your business, selling more than one product. It's around 1990 or so. Sounds like Adam got out and you continued on and you brought in some other people. What happened after that?
Saba Hocek: We started to do quite well. It was probably around '91 I want to say at this point. And as I said, we had a few people working in the office. Even at that point we sort of branched out because we wanted to get a little bit more into the commercial market and somebody had offered a partnership with us for doing a statistical package that was coming out of England.
So we were doing that also, which somebody else was taking care of in the office but it was at least generating some other income. And we probably did about half a million dollars that year and I was very happy. It was finally seeing the growth after all the work that we had been through.
So the Optical Character Recognition was actually a hardware design. It was a company that we decided to use, as well as...If I may backtrack for a moment, in the beginning of the interview I mentioned that we were using a company out of Pennsylvania and we liked their software.
As time went on, this was now roughly about 1990 or so. Actually, it was earlier that that when we started to use a company that was out of California. The name is failing me at the moment so for the time being we're just going to call it OCR Systems until I can recall what it is called.
Their optical character recognition was actually done in hardware. It was a much more sophisticated system, with very, very good optical character recognition, and it was able to read not just monotype faces but also book fonts. And in a much greater variety of sizes, because that was also a limitation at the time.
So I think this probably was about '89, I want to say, when we started using them. Initially they had one board and so your computer had to be an AT. It couldn't be an XT, because it was a 16 bit board, excuse me, a 32-bit board. So it had to be an AT. And it had 8 megs of memory on it. And so we were purchasing this and at the time it cost, it was $8,000. That was the street price for it. And we were able to get it for I think something like $6,500 through our dealer.
Then, over time, they also came out with another board that had 4 megs on it and I'm saying 4 megs and now that I'm thinking about it it couldn't have been, probably 4K, considering the time. But in any case, it was less memory.
And that was on the market for $6,000 and we were able to get it for something around $4,500. So it was great. Now we were able to offer, not just a high-end system, we were also able to offer a lower end system.
So our systems at the time I remember we were selling them for $8,000. We were getting the board for $4,500. Then we would also put in the scanner, as a complete system, less the computer. And then our software.
And the scanners at the time, they were roughly about $2,000, so, in other words, we weren't making a huge profit on it. We were doing a reasonable amount, enough to keep our doors open.
[Our] systems were going for $8,000, which was still not a small amount for your average consumer. So when our California OCR company came out with a lower end board design for their OCR, we were delighted. So we went with that and this time we were able to offer a system also for $6,000.
Well, it was right around that time when we were finally seeing the fruits of our effort and things were going well. People were starting to really get to know the name Ad Hoc Reading Systems, when a company by the name of Arkenstone came out, excuse me, just prior to that, prior to Arkenstone coming out, we started having a hard time getting the boards from our supplier. They were not available and also the prices had gone up.
So we said, you know what, we're doing enough at this point. And our overseas market was starting to do quite well. We said, "We're doing enough. There's no reason why we shouldn't try to go directly to the company and work out something with them." Because in the beginning, when your fund needs are that small, the company is not going to talk to you directly, but now our fund needs were good enough.
So we were in touch with the California company and they said, "Well, we were very selective on who we're going to sell directly to. So we need to see what your intentions are, how you're going to be using this board."
So I said, "Okay." It sounded a little bit strange because, at the same time, I can get it from my supplier. This is a product that is not a license only product. It is an off the shelf product.
Additionally, they sell it with software, of course. But when we purchased it, we literally threw the software out because that wasn't how we could use it. What we needed was simply the hardware.
It was a very nice design because it was open ended, meaning that you could, as long as you were programming in C++, you could design so that you were actually communicating directly with the board. You could tell it to stop scanning, to do the OCR this way, that way. It was very programmable and very suitable for our needs.
So they wanted to see a Business Plan and they kept us hanging for a very long time, dragging the process out. We were holding off on sales in the interim because they were promising that they would be able to do a better price for us as well than what we were seeing up to now, from our supplier.
And so time was going on and they kept on wanting more information from us and so forth. Than one day they just turned around and said, "Sorry, this isn't the type of company that we want to deal with." And literally just stopped right there.
And within one month, lo and behold, there was Arkenstone. Jim Fruchterman was one of the CEOs of that company who opened up a non-profit organization, selling this hardware, in the same office. He never moved his office.
So here he's in probably what was free office space, they prevented us from continuing our use of the hardware — well, to purchase directly through them. They've disallowed that. We could still go through our supplier, of course, but the price had gone up.
And they're non-profit. So not only is Arkenstone benefiting from this, so is the OCR Corporation, because they can donate their hardware to this non-profit, do it as a tax write-off and Arkenstone can sell it and whatever they sell it for is pure profit.
Meanwhile, they got Hewlett Packard to donate I believe at the time it was 200 scanners. So now they have 200 free scanners and what I am assuming, 200 or whatever, an endless number of OCR boards that are marketing for $6-8,000.
And they got some guys out of, I believe they were like out of college or whatever, who were very dedicated young men (they themselves were also blind users) to design software for this equipment.
And, as I understand, to work for ridiculous amounts of money, meaning very, very low so they're basically donating their time. And Jim is doing quite nice at this point.
So they were selling it for $2,000.
Tony Candela: $2,000.
Saba Hocek: $2,000 for the system. I could not buy equipment for that price.
And I would live with it, if it was a limited number, but 200, first of all, is a huge number for the blindness industry. Secondly, it was being advertised as, he would go to shows and state how unjust these profit making companies are. Look at the prices that they're trying to sell at. Well, it can actually be in your hands at only $2,000. And that destroyed us.
Tony Candela: That destroyed you?
Saba Hocek: It totally destroyed us, because we did not have the financial backing that Jim had. He had money. He was CEO of a company that had done very well. So he had the money to be able to do the advertising, to be able to do the shows, to be able to have the big booths, this, that and the other.
And, his overhead was at a minimum. And his hardware costs were zero to minimal. There's no way I could compete with that. It cost me $15,000 a month to keep my doors open.
So, at that point, I had to start cutting back on employees. At one point I got very frustrated and I just felt that this isn't right. It's cheating. You can't take a profit making company and right under the same roof, use a label of non-profit. And destroy other hard working people's business.
It's like the street vendors who are out there without a license, who are selling handbags that fell off of a truck. It's not right.
So I called the Department of Business, or whatever it's called. And I spoke with a number of lawyers and the result was basically, the truth of the matter is, because they're servicing a market, a disability market, nobody is going to touch it.
Tony Candela: So did his 200 pieces of hardware and 200 pieces of software, never run out?
Saba Hocek: The thing is, after the 200 had run out, he made a deal with Hewlett Packard. So he still did quite well with that. He did raise his prices, but, even so, the OCR boards were, what we were buying them for was $4,000-$6,000 or $6,500. And there's no way we could compete. So our profit literally was -- we brought the price down to the point that we were making $200 on a system. It didn't make any sense.
There's just no way that the company could survive, at that point. And yes we had the Refreshable Braille and we had the Stat Package and we sold the computers and things like that. But our real bread and butter was in the reading systems. Everything else was small percentages. It was 10% off of selling this, 5% off of selling a screen reader, and that sort of thing.
So, unfortunately, in the end, I decided to close Ad Hoc. It was just, it was 8 years into the company and basically, while in that 8th year, my father passed away. And it was sort of a slap in the face to realize, life ends just like that. And I'd put in, for the past eight years, day in and day out working in this industry and it only took one crooked person to come and smash it and influence a hungry industry, hungry for affordable technology to believe that, "Yes, this man is right. All these profit making companies have been cheating us up to now and this is the first one that is charging us a fair amount."
And at that point, now my efforts had to be focused on justifying our position, justifying our prices. And rather than improving the product and making sales, somewhere along those lines is when Laurie Converso and I wrote a booklet on understanding OCR, understanding screen readers and also PC's. And knowing what to purchase and what to look for.
Not by any means was that intended to blow our own horns, but rather simply to try to educate the market, so that people make a good choice, an educated choice, in their purchase and don't end up throwing away $8,000 or whatever the amount might be.
Tony Candela: In the interim, you have remembered the name of the company that made that board in California.
Saba Hocek: Yes, the name of the company was Calera. Calera was later on bought out by a company called Care Corporation, and I don't know what the name of the company became thereafter. I believe, as far as I know, they're probably still alive and kicking quite well.
But those two companies were the leaders in OCR. But Care Corporation was a Windows, if I'm remembering correctly, was a Windows based system and it was software. I think initially they had hardware and then it was software only, which was great, but it was Windows based, and at that time, the adaptive technology was not Windows based. So it wouldn't work for us.
So our only choice was Calera.
However, what happened with Arkenstone with the introduction of Arkenstone, there was just no way that at that point we could continue to use Calera's OCR boards. And that's when we turned to Europe and found some products over there that we tried to use.
Once again, every time a product, you're switching products, that means a complete revamping of the software, because every product has its own specifications on how it gets designed. So, once again, it was revamped and we took one last effort at the European company. As I said, it was during this time that my father passed away and I just realized that life is too short to be spent on 20-hour days in an office.
I stopped sales. I didn't want to sell anything to anybody, considering that I knew I was closing the company. And I just continued to do the support while I was slowly closing off the company and starting to look elsewhere.
Tony Candela: Did you lose a lot of money during this period?
Saba Hocek: We lost a tremendous amount. There were months that we literally had like $200 income. I had $15,000 of expenses. So, when I officially closed the company, I was in $140,000 in personal debt.
Yeah. Frankly, I worked very hard, took four jobs at the same time doing four jobs, and paid back.
And again, it's on one hand a little disappointing, the way things turned out. But on the other hand, it gave me what I have today and it gave me the experience and the knowledge that I have today, to be where I am.
And I always felt that at least, if anything, I did have an impact on doing something within the adaptive technology and doing something that was outside the mass market. So, I can sleep at night.
Tony Candela: Now I know that you've talked to your brother Adam, reminiscing about these days in preparation for our interview. What did Adam tell you his thought was about how you might have been able to keep the company going, if only you had a certain element? But you didn't have that element.
Saba Hocek: I think that we both agree that the main element that we were missing was really money. It would have made a huge difference.
It makes a difference, not just in advertising and so forth, but also just in terms of being able to have more influence in buying licenses and things like that.
Additionally, I think that in retrospect you can not go into the disability market or any type of very small market area, without also having something in your mass market. And this is why today, even the larger companies like PSI or Artic, these were much stronger companies with more money, more foundation, longer history, that even in the end they too all ended up uniting because the industry is too small.
So you either have to collaborate effort or you have to have it almost like a sidekick and then to focus on the mass market.
Tony Candela: And today we see large companies, like Pulse Data, Humanware and Freedom Scientific, which are conglomerates, and they have even folded Arkenstone into themselves, Freedom Scientific. The industry figured out what you knew ten years earlier, that the market is very difficult when it's small.
Saba Hocek: Yes.
Tony Candela: You mentioned something off tape, about how had you owned your own OCR board, that might have helped.
Saba Hocek: I think one of the most difficult things is having to rely on other companies. Because, one way or another, they can pull the plug on you. Whether intentionally or unintentionally. They could go under and by no poor intent, once they go under, that's it.
And yes you can have contracts and so forth, but again, all of that, depends on what the volume of your sales are. So, not having our own OCR made it sort of difficult in that that's the core of a reading system.
Eventually, in the very, very end of our operating systems, we were actually selling just our software. Because now people were saying, "I've got my own computer. I have my own scanner. And I also have my scanner came with OCR. Either they got the Calera board or perhaps what we were getting a lot of was that they purchased Arkenstone. But because they weren't satisfied with Arkenstone software they wanted our software. So we were selling that for like $200.
But again, you can't sell $200 software to this small of a market and expect to make a living.
Tony Candela: What year did the company officially close?
Saba Hocek: '94.
Tony Candela: Ten years ago just around now.
Saba Hocek: Right.
Tony Candela: Sorry to be reminding you of all this right now. Glad you're willing to talk with me.
Since then, Windows came on the scene. The assistive technology to handle Windows came on the scene. Different types of interfaces have come on the scene. So now you don't even have to install a card in the back of your computer anymore.
These days you can buy from Arkenstone or you can buy from Kurzweil, and what you're buying is a $900 software package now. Things have changed,.
Saba Hocek: That's right.
Tony Candela: I suspect Arkenstone was reacting directly to you in doing what they did, developing what they developed, which just further reinforces what you're saying about how you influenced the business.
Saba Hocek: Oh yeah. I'll never forget on one occasion, it was about a year or maybe a little bit over a year later that at one of the shows, again, Arkenstone came out and introduced a hand held scanner, which was the duplicate scanner that we were using.
And I couldn't help but laugh. They asked if any questions and Jim, no it was a woman that was working with him and I forgot her name. I stood up and of course I was ignored. "You over there," and "You," and so forth. And finally, she realized that I wasn't giving up.
So I said, "Can you explain the difference between that one and the one that Ad Hoc Reading System's came out with a year ago?" She got all flustered.
Tony Candela: So what did you go on to do?
Saba Hocek: After that I had a year of very tough work, because I had a lot of debts to pay off. At that point, I had an office in East Brunswick, down the block from where my family home was.
So I closed that office. Kathy and Laurie had left, prior to that. And actually both had started their own businesses. And I started doing basically Ad Hoc part-time. I moved to the city and half the week I would be in New Jersey, taking care of any support calls that were necessary or anything like that. And the other half of the week, I was in Manhattan. I was teaching at two different schools. I continued to consult. I was getting some consulting work so I was doing some training, here and there.
And during that time is when I got this permanent consulting job, the job I'm still consulting for, at the Mental Health Clinic.
So I managed to juggle those four jobs for about probably about a year and a half. And once I came clean with all my debts, after that it was time to have fun. And I've been doing that ever since.
Tony Candela: Now I understand why having the free time and definitely the lack of debt is so enjoyable for you.
Saba Hocek: Absolutely.
Tony Candela: After what you've been through.
Your name, Hocek, h-o-c-e-k, what nationality is that?
Saba Hocek: The name itself is a typical Czech name, however, I'm Turkish, both my parents were Turkish, are Turkish. We assumed that the name is probably a result of the Ottoman Empire and during that time, since they had such a large area, that's where the Czech came from.
Tony Candela: Were your parents both born in the United States or were they born overseas?
Saba Hocek: They were both born in Turkey. And they actually came here on their honeymoon, by boat. And it just ended up being a very long honeymoon and they actually stayed for 20 years, before we ended up leaving.
Tony Candela: We know you have Adam. Is he your older brother or your younger brother?
Saba Hocek: My oldest brother. And then there's one more after him, Ali, who's my middle brother an architect and then myself.
Tony Candela: Three of you.
And you grew up in guess we'll call that middle New Jersey.
Saba Hocek: Oh no. No, we weren't brought up there. That's my no, no.
Tony Candela: You did leave after awhile. Tell us the story.
Saba Hocek: I was born in New York. Lived in Long Island till I was 10 and then my parents decided that they were ready to go back to their home country.
So we went back to Turkey. During this time, my father was an architect for Hilton International so he needed to finish up some work he was doing here, so we moved ahead of him. And during that time, there was one of these laws, like many countries have, that just never got changed because nobody ever needed it to be changed. Well this law stated that unless the head of the household permanently is residing in the country, you can't get your furniture out of storage.
And my father was on a green card so there was no way he could show permanent residency in Turkey, yet, until he finished what he was doing in the States.
So we lived initially with relatives and we got an apartment. And some relatives gave us three legged chairs and whatever, a few pieces of furniture because my father was going to be arriving, any day now.
One month led to two, three. And anyway, a year and a half later, with our three legged chairs, my father had finally finished what he needed to do. During this time, when we initially moved to Turkey, they said we could go to English speaking schools, because our parents had never taught us Turkish.
However, once we got there, that wasn't the case. They said, "No, your children are full-blooded Turks. They will go to Turkish schools." So we struggled with that and my brothers being older than me, it was of course more difficult for them to try to learn the language at that educational level. And so my parents realized this is not working.
So literally, my father arrived. My father was going to work independently. That was also his dream. So he found a way to open an office in Vienna, Austria so he arrived. The boxes never left storage. And right from there they went off to Vienna, and so did we.
So we went to the American International School there and lived there for about four and a half years. During this time, my father received a project in Iran, for one of the princesses of Iran to do a palace. And also a summer villa.
My brothers, in the interim, graduated. One of them, my younger brother, Ali, the architect and Adam went to a university in England, to study Engineering.
Tony Candela: Around what year is this?
Saba Hocek: This is now '76.
So my parents and I moved to Iran. During this time, the princess gave us one of her many apartments, to stay at. And I went to an Iranian International school, which was based in English. And after having finished school there, I really wasn't ready to go to college yet. I just was not.
And so I told my parents that I wanted to stay and my father was, I always give him credit for this, bearing in mind that first of all he was an older parent, let's just say. So there was like 40 years difference between us. So there was basically a generation in between and he was also from a very different culture. To an American, Turkish culture is more conservative.
So he said, "You know, Saba, you can do whatever you want to do. Not ready for college or you're not ever going to go. That's fine. The only thing I ask of you is that you can never rely in life on somebody else. Just make sure you can stand on your own two feet and make your own way. You can get married tomorrow, but you don't know if that's going to last or not last. That's all I ask."
And I always thought that that was a very wise and open-minded way of looking at his daughter, who was now turning around, where education is so important to my father.
So, in any case, I had a couple of jobs, a few jobs actually, in Iran. I was teaching in elementary school, English, and then in an adult school as a second language to English again. And I was a secretary in an office. And during this time, the revolution broke out.
Tony Candela: What was that like, the revolution breaking out?
Saba Hocek: It was fascinating, but honestly, it was amazing to see the people who had nothing to fight with but fire. They would burn sticks. And they had their voices. And the Iranian Airforce, and those are very, very strong, especially the Air Force. They were not hesitant at all to use machine guns. And they said that they had the rubber bullets, and so forth, in the machine guns, the way the news would portray it. However, people died and I saw them die.
It was basically a routine of every night there was an 8:00 curfew. So you made sure, come hell or high water, that you were inside by 8:00, and if you were at a friends' house then you just stayed. There was no way you were going to take that risk, of being outside.
And we lived all the way uptown, which beyond that was where the palace was, where the Shah and his family lived. From downtown, you would hear a little voice yell, "Allah...," which means "God is great." And "merg-ber-shah," which means kill the Shah." Death to the Shah.
Then that voice would be joined by another, and another. And meanwhile the roofs in Teheran were all flat, so they would put tape recorders up on the roof. And they would blast these boom boxes. So now you're starting to hear it from various different locations. And that sound would just grow and grow. And then in the distance, we'd look off the balcony and you could see a little glimmer of fire, and that was the sticks of fire that the people would be holding. The men, the women and then the children.
And that crowd would grow, and grow. And usually, by the time they got to midtown or so, you would start hearing the gunfire. And then you would start hearing the screaming. And this would just continue on, throughout the night and then slowly, the sounds would start dying out, and in many cases, literally dying.
And the next day, early in the morning, is when they would come and clean out the streets. There were dead people. On the buses, they would actually write like so many people died. It was graffiti, on the buses, because there was no communication. Basically, the overseas phones didn't work at all. It was only local phones that you could use.
So in the interim, my brothers had no clue about what was going on with us. Bearing in mind also that we were in the Princess's house and my father is linked now, although it wasn't one of the more influential princesses, but she is still part of the royal family and the building is all royal family, politicians and whatever.
Then the news report would come on at certain times of the day. That was something that you got. It was news. And the news would come on and say, "Three people died in last night's clashes.
It was this huge controversy of information. Meanwhile, of course, there was not much food around. When there was food they just bought like crazy. Some people just knew what was behind all this.
It was on one hand, obviously sad to watch, but on the other hand it was fascinating to see how people can come together and be more powerful.
There were a lot of scary moments. One day coming home, there were tankers. There were tankers all over the place. They'd be there with the machine guns pointing up. I was coming home and some of the soldiers on the tankers made some comments and I continued walking on. And then they all pointed their machine guns at me. They were just making comments.
At that point, I thought, "You know, there's nothing I can do." They've got the total power. They can do whatever they want. And I just shivered and whined.
Tony Candela: Were you dressed differently from the other women?
Saba Hocek: No, actually, in the days that I lived in Iran, during the Shah's time it was very liberal. We found people with Western clothing and then you found people who wore what's called "the Chadur," the veil and cape that goes over.
Both types of clothing were perfectly acceptable. We stayed there for quite a while. It started getting a little dangerous. I remember one time, my father was traveling at the time, and all of a sudden there was pounding at the door. My mother and I looked through the peephole and there were probably like 15, 20 people in the hallway, men and women who were all dressed in these traditional Muslim outfits, screaming and shouting slogans at us. Obviously, they had learned our connection.
They were a little bit on the scary side, but it's funny, while you're living in it, it's what you have to do. And so, did it stop me from going to my jobs? From having a certain amount of fun? No. Because life goes on and you think you're all right with it.
It followed me for a while after that. If I heard a car backfire, I would jump out of my seat. But during the incidents, you get used to it. I'd be teaching and one of the schools that I taught at was known for being a place where they rallied and so forth. So in one of the times that there was a demonstration, again the military came. Those machine guns are going off, whatever. And they would climb up the trees to escape. And I was on the second floor and there they were, on the tree, staring out at me and saying, "Sh, sh, sh. Keep quiet."
Tony Candela: Wow. How long did you stay there, while this was happening, before your family decided to leave?
Saba Hocek: Well, the Shah had left. Khomeini came and very shortly after that is when I left. Because of the type of traveling that we did, and because my parents had a green card and being that we were now away from the country for close to ten years, he no longer had the green card.
We had dual citizenship, so I could go to Turkey or I could go back to the States. But I was also 19 years old. Where am I going to? I don't know a soul there, except for one friend from college.
Nor do I have, all I have is I just finished high school. The place my parents picked out, at that point, was Turkey. So they decided to go to Southern Turkey, where we had a little summerhouse. I knew that I couldn't do that. I would just go crazy in the middle of the winter settling down to a summer cottage type of place.
So I convinced them, and to this day I don't know how I managed to do this. I convinced them that I needed to find elsewhere to live. Somebody in Iran knew somebody in Germany, who was going to talk to me about a job. And another person knew somebody in England. And my brothers lived there. And, as I said, I did know somebody down in Colorado Springs, a dear friend of mine.
It took about a week to ten days to leave Iran. Because you never knew when they would open up the borders. So you just went to the airport every day. You left at 5:00 in the morning. Or you had to be at the airport at 5:00 in the morning. And you'd take one suitcase. And if you think the New York subways are crammed, it was nothing compared to the airport.
And every day you just hoped that maybe you can get on. And maybe you can get on without an incident, also. Meaning that, anything could happen during this time. Like any country, once you put people in authority and they can do a lot of mischief they care to,
So I left and after about a week or ten days, I went out to the Fir country. I went to Germany. I went to England. Scared the living daylights out of my brothers, when I arrived there...
