Clyde Phillips was a 1965 student-athlete graduate of Kashmere Gardens Jr Sr High School participating in Football and Track. The Phillips family of Pleasantville, Houston, Texas, has a deep, abiding love and strong ties to Kashmere Gardens High School. Brothers, cousins and a host of extended family members from the St. Luke Baptist Church attended the beloved center of academic and athletic pride. Parents of James, Jr. (Class of 1963), Clyde (Class of 1965), Larry (Class of 1969 Rev. James, Sr. and Mrs. Gladys Phillips ensured that three of their four boys would attend a school that offered a strong academic curriculum and some of Houston’s best teachers. Clyde, the second son, was active in ROTC, football and track. Clyde also attended Morgan State, during the expanded time of James and the Jolivet brothers. majoring in Business and minoring in Psychology. During the time at Morgan in played on the football team before the men at Morgan were attacked and drafted out of school by Spiro Agnew when he was elected as governor of Maryland. Agnew was called out as a crook when he was the county executive of Baltimore County, Md. During this period all the young men were required to go to school year-round or report for the draft, until Agnew was elected to be the VP of the USA.
Clyde took graduate classes at George Washington in data analytics and database management. Clyde has had a long and successful career in the IT industry starting with Gulf Oil of Houston. When Gulf Oil Company decided to close the Houston location, Clyde and family moved back to Baltimore. Clyde joined Baltimore Gas and Electric as a System Analyst and was responsible for creating what is considered one of the first Even Monthly Payment Plan, EMPP, which allowed families to budget the utility cost. As Clyde was promoted up the company as one of the first minority management leaders, Clyde led the team that automated BGE’s huge and antiquated industrial billing system. The most difficult part was to get the accountants and billing analyst to relinquish the manual books that were used for decades. As the opportunities for growth in this new data processing field were limited at the utility, Clyde opted to go to work for Honeywell as part of the new client acquisition team as the technical leader for mid-size companies. Honeywell provided Clyde with a window to different types of hardware and software applications beyond what was used at BGE. With this new knowledge of the growing industry Clyde expanded his career to become a consultant in the financial industry. The next career stop for Clyde was in Ohio as a consultant in the new instant credit and branch banking sector at Bank One. Clyde was a developer on the “instant credit” system that provided credit as the checkout register. This new system provided consumers with instant store credit and was one of the precursors for the VISA system. VISA was a spin-off of one Bank One’s Triumph system. The stay at Bank One was originally set for eighteen months but continued for seven years. While at Bank One, Clyde was employed by three different companies while seated in the same chair. The product that was created during this time was purchased by two companies. The first was Bank One, the second was EDS, and the third was General Motors. Once the product was completed, I moved to Atlanta for eighteen months to work on the upcoming Olympic games of 1996 at the State of Georgia Revenue Department.
As the end of the decade, and while many people were worried that the new millennium was going to end the world as we knew it to be with the new date requirements know as Y2K, I moved to Colorado to continue to upgrade these mainframe systems at TIAA. This was to be a nine-month project that has endured as an operation for nineteen years. Clyde is currently the CEO of Integrity Data Bridge, an IT company that specializes in subscription data aggregation. Clyde volunteered for a decade for The Senior High Rise Food Bank as the Vice-Present, and on the school board for The Pinnacle Charter School as the Treasure, during this time on the board the new high school was built. Clyde is married, wife is Beth, and children are Francello, Clyde II (deceased), James, Sherrie, Michael, Chase, Grant (deceased), and Reid. Clyde has 13 grandchildren, and 9 great grandchildren. Clyde is an avid reader and golfer that like to travel and play golf across the USA and around the world. The Phillips family offers sincere appreciation to all the Kashmere Gardens family— administrators, instructors, staff, parents and friends that have had an influence on their lives.
