Started in 1968, BFEC is celebrating its 47th year in business! It all began with Sonny Monosson, known as a true pioneer in the venture leasing industry, who started over 14 companies. After receiving a BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT, Sonny went directly to Harvard Business School and went to work for his father in the Garment industry. After working with the factoring companies that factored their receivables, he realized he liked the business model and decided to start his own factoring company, Berkeley Finance Corporation in 1957.

In the sixties, he started the first computerized finance company, which lead to many inquiries, and he sold his portfolio and started a consulting company with two partners. After consulting and writing many studies on the computer industry, he and one of his partners started American Used Computer, one of the first used computer dealers and along the way became an authorized DEC dealer. This led Sonny to become an “expert” on DEC and so, he sold his factoring portfolio and wrote newsletters MONOSSON on DEC and columns in many of the computer oriented publications of the time.

He soon realized that since he had a vehicle to sell computer equipment, he could lease equipment to risky credits, and if they didn’t succeed, he could simply take back the equipment and resell it. At the same time, American Computer Group leased communication equipment to Fortune 100 companies, while Boston Financial & Equity leased to the early stage and venture backed companies. Sonny passed away in 2003 but he would be proud of his well-trained group of employees who have been working together for the last twenty-five years!

Adolf "Sonny" Monosson, who established a market for leased computers in the United States and was known for his signature red bow ties and forward thinking, died Friday at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

He was 76 and was managing his businesses until his death.

A Boston native, Mr. Monosson graduated from Brookline High School where he excelled in the sciences. At age 16, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His studies were interrupted when he served in the Navy for two years.

Mr. Monosson graduated from MIT in 1948 and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1950. The day after classes ended, he married Gloria Haskins, the daughter of a Brookline doctor, whom he had earlier lost a chance to ask out in a coin toss with a friend. He asked her out anyway.

In his 20s, Mr. Monosson founded American Used Computers, the first such business in the country. The business leased high-tech computer equipment to high-risk businesses.

His first client was NASA, which leased a DEC computer that delivered the first pictures of Mars and Venus from space.

Mr. Monosson was always noticed for his eccentricities and intelligence, said his daughter, Susan Kooper of Somerville. At a 1970 National Computer Conference in Atlantic City, Mr. Monosson took an alternative approach to sales. When most people were inside the conference, he was strolling along the boardwalk wearing a sandwich board advertising his computers.

"I used to tell people, `I've got a great used computer for you,' and they'd say, `A used what?' " Mr. Monosson recalled in a 1984 interview with Inc. magazine.

"He was not a very ordinary man," said another daughter, Debbie of Cambridge. "He was very quirky and spoke his own mind."

But he was a serious business man who ran a finance company, which eventually grew into Boston Financial & Equity Corp. He wrote a column for Digital Review for several years and published the newsletter Monosson on DEC, becoming an authority on Digital Equipment Corp. Mr. Monosson enjoyed taking his family skiing and hiking.

Kooper recalled a time the family had gone skiing and her aunt was bewildered one morning to find the usually raucous children eating breakfast in silence. She soon realized that Mr. Monosson had fed them chocolate cake, ice cream, and ginger ale.

"He was a great father," Monosson said. "He was tough, but kind, and brought us all up to think independently."

Mr. Monosson was also devoted to his Japanese rock garden, converted from a backyard swimming pool complete with steps and a waterfall. Several years ago, he passed a few sickly cactus plants that garden store employees were planning to throw out. Mr. Monosson offered to take the plants home and nurse them back to health. The plants are now alive and well in Mr. Monosson's home, Kooper said.

In addition to his wife and two daughters, he leaves two other daughters, Judith Scherzer of Lexington and Emily of Montague; and four grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held today at 2 p.m. in Levine Chapels in Brookline. Burial will be private.

Bell High teacher Scott Morris helps students in the school’s computer lab. With help from USC’s Information Services Division, Bell has become the Internet access provider for other schools. The university absorbed the annual fee for using high-speed data transmission lines operated by Los Nettos, a consortium that provides Internet access.

Mary Lewis has two characteristics of most great teachers: She is insatiably curious, and she constantly seeks new ways to inspire her students to engage in critical thinking.

Lewis, a sixth-grade math and science teacher at Foshay Learning Center, jumped at the chance several years ago to take Web Masters/Info Masters computer classes offered to teachers at USC’s Family of Five Schools.

The classes “made my searching [the Internet] more efficient, more productive and a great deal faster,” Lewis said. “The time thing is really important because by the time you finish correcting papers after school, it’s 5 or 6 at night and you don’t have time to go to the library. Now I can just get on the computer for any research I need to do.”

Foshay, 32nd Street USC Performing Arts Magnet and Weemes, Norwood Street and Vermont Avenue elementary schools are members of USC’s Family of Five Schools, a public-private partnership that provides special educational, cultural and developmental opportunities for 8,000 children who live close to USC’s University Park campus.

Foshay’s entrée to the Internet – made possible by USC’s Information Services Division (ISD) and its Information Technology Services (ITS) branch and an assortment of other private and public agencies – helps level the playing field for the school’s kindergarten – through 12th-grade students and their counterparts from more affluent neighborhoods, said Lisa Beebe, Foshay’s technology co-coordinator.

USC’s role in helping Foshay and about 16 area schools hook up to the Internet over the past five years “is definitely part of [the university’s] outreach to the community,” said Beebe, who also teaches 10th- through 12th-grade technology classes. “They are bringing us something that is not easy to get and something that most schools can’t generally afford.”

Talks on how to help schools gain access to the Internet began in 1994, said ITS project manager Marty Ruggles.

“Bell High School was the first project,” Ruggles said. “They came to us trying to find a solution for getting Internet connectivity because they were frustrated with the length of time it was taking for L.A. schools to get wired and on-line. They wanted cooperation from us to establish that connectivity.”

And thanks to USC’s participation in a regional consortium that provides high-quality network connections at the lowest possible cost, it was able to help not only Bell High school, but other schools as well.

“We definitely cut them a deal,” Ruggles said of the university’s absorption of the $10,000 annual fee to use the high-speed data transmission lines operated by Los Nettos, the consortium of institutions that provides access to the Internet.

“With our mandate to be working with the community, we initially went ahead and developed a program with Bell, then Roosevelt and Manual Arts high schools, Foshay and Elizabeth Learning Centers and Don Bosco Technical Institute, a private school in Rosemead,” he said. “We actually had several people in our department volunteer to work with each school in the Family of Five Schools to help them figure out how they should set up their network.”

The Los Nettos consortium includes USC, Caltech, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USC’s Information Sciences Institute, TRW, UCLA and the American Computer Group.

Bell High was a natural place for USC to start, said Mike Goldberg, who with his wife, teacher Bonnie Goldberg, and another teacher, Scott Morris, had already set up a computer lab at Bell. In order to advance to a networking system, the three approached the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and USC.

“We told those guys that if we were to get an Internet connection, we could turn around and in three weeks have 200 kids a day doing research on the Internet with good instruction behind it,” Goldberg said. “DARPA gave us two routers and as much professional help as we wanted, and USC gave us the high-speed access to the Internet. This allowed us to hook our network up.”

And an on-line visit to www.bell.K12.ca.us will prove that the school has lived up to its promise, Goldberg said.

“All of our feeder elementary schools feed into our access lines, while we feed into USC’s,” said teacher Scott Morris. “USC has allowed us carte blanche connection. They made it very painless for us to get started, letting us focus on curriculum. It’s been a great relationship.”

Bell – like Foshay, Manual Arts and Roosevelt – has become the Internet access provider for other schools. “BellNet” serves the Bell High Cluster of Los Angeles public schools in the cities of Bell, Cudahy, Huntington Park and Maywood.

“They are like the hub of a wheel, and these other schools are the spokes out from them,” said Ruggles. “They have Integrated Service Digital Network (ISDN) circuits which link the outlying schools to the hub school.”

It’s a sort of trickle-down theory that really does work, said USC Director of Networking James Wiedel.

“We provide a 1 1/2 megabit-per-second circuit to the host schools, which is equivalent to sending or receiving 40 single-spaced pages per second. The feeder schools, using ISDN dial-up, connect to that line,” said Wiedel, who designed and maintains USC’s computer network system. “For instance, schools get to the Internet through Foshay, then back to us and then out to the rest of the world. It’s a seamless approach.”

Each school pays for and maintains its own equipment, but USC “is picking up the bill for the Los Nettos access,” Wiedel said.

Students and teachers are benefiting from USC’s commitment to its neighbors, said Foshay’s Beebe. Math and science teacher Mary Lewis is a shining example. [...]

[...] While Volkswagens form a large portion of [Brian Lewis]' life, his past and present includes a much larger story. He was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Echo Park, a low-income, racially diverse community. The product of the Los Angeles school system, Lewis earned an overall A-/B+ overall average and performed as a top athlete. [...]

Lewis lived in Los Angeles from 1959 to 1992 in a wonderful, diverse neighborhood much like the population of Taos. This experience taught Brian not to judge people by race, color or creed. He developed a love of cultures, especially foods, and by age 7, knew all the possible cuss words in Spanish. He and his California neighbors remain friendly to this day.

After high school, Lewis traveled for six months and then worked for six months, enjoying his love of surfing around the world. Notable sites of special surfing include the following: Australia; Hawaii; Portugal; Bali; Mexico City; France; Costa Rica; New Zealand; and Puerto Rico. He graduated from Cal State LA with a bachelor's degree in physical education in 1983. Other employment reveals Lewis' varied talents and interests. He completed work in the mail order section of an alternative record store, Rockaway Records, until he finished his degree. In 1988, Lewis worked as a programmer and during that time, he lost all his worldly possessions in a house fire. Brian served as assistant manager of a pottery and floral warehouse. For six years, he worked for American Computer Group in Los Angeles. During the Rodney King riots [those were April and May 1992}, he realized the thin line between sanity and insanity and decided to leave the city.

On a more personal level, Lewis met his wife Yvonne at a family wedding on Catalina Island. The couple married 23 years ago. She works at Berkshire Hathaway, and the couple live with five rescue dogs and a gift, a desert box turtle. He moved to Taos to help care for his ailing mother, Sophia Lewis, who taught for 40 years. She passed away in 2001. His father, Dr. Albert J. Lewis, a teacher, psychiatrist and social and political activist, died in 2009. Lewis credits his parents for his varied interests. He also enjoys time with his brother Aaron who lives in Carson. . [...]