Neighbors: Art Sugerman

Art Sugerman always has been on a quest for knowledge.

“I’m interested in virtually everything,” says Sugerman, who now serves as Lakewood Ranch Town Hall’s information technology specialist. “I’m a geek. And a geek is not a nerd. I wear it proudly as a badge. I want to know everything there is to know — history, religion, mathematics.”

Sugerman, who moved in late September to the Sandhills section of the Country Club of Lakewood Ranch, pounced at the chance to become Town Hall’s part-time information technology specialist, after reading the opportunity in the East County Observer.

He had recently retired but wasn’t acclimating well to the change, he says.

“I was sort of bouncing around the house,” he says, noting he called Town Hall about its IT position before the job had even been posted. “I hadn’t applied for a job since 1973. I didn’t know the protocol.”

After going through the proper application and interview process, Sugerman came out as the top candidate for the post. With his extensive background in computers and technology, he proved to be the perfect fit for meeting Town Hall’s diverse and growing technology needs.

“I like working on the government side of (things),” Sugerman says of his new role. “This is a very non-office, politicized environment. It’s an easy-going group to work with.”

Sugerman’s experience with and passion for computers and technology began more than 50 years ago. He had begun studying computers on his own at just age 13, when he and his brother took a class on the UNIVAC Solid State computer.

“In 1961, computers were very exotic,” Sugerman says. “I liked the discipline of it. It’s very abstract and to do it well, you have to worry about things most people never think about.”

Sugerman continued tinkering with computers throughout high school, even teaching classes on how to use them.

Born and raised in Chicago, Sugerman attended college at the University of Illinois during Vietnam.

“I was a major social activist as a teenager,” Sugerman says. “I rode through the South getting blacks registered to vote. I got arrested, beat up — there are some horror stories.”

But that kind of social activism was almost “mainstream” for Jewish teenagers in Chicago at the time, Sugerman says.

In college, Sugerman studied history and psychology, as studying computers wasn’t even an option at the time. He dropped out of college, however, to accept a full-time job at a picture-frame manufacturing company, where he had been working part-time. There, he brought in the company’s first computer and helped automate its processes.

Sugerman held a few other jobs over the next 15 years, automating processes for companies such as Transunion Systems and Standard Oil of Indiana, a parent company of Amoco Corporation, among others, until he and two friends formed their own computer-related business, on the side, in 1982.

“We did it primarily so we could mess with computers and tell our wives were working,” Sugerman says, laughing.

Then, in 1984, he bought out his partners and took the company live. He ran the business until 2011, when he and his wife decided to move to the East County.