I have been fortunate, or lucky enough, to lead a pretty interesting and eventful life, wandering through 60 countries, and 49 states (Missed RI somehow) while holding a series of interesting and improbable jobs. Often when relating one of my “War Stories” people would urge me to write it all down. So, after years of procrastinating, here goes.
NOTE: Some portions of this tale may appear elsewhere on my web sites, in various forms. So if you see some of this material elsewhere on the site, I am not getting senile, I just missed it in the editing.
I was born in Deer Lodge Montana, June 20, 1932. My father, also named John, was an itinerant Methodist minister, although he usually called himself a preacher. He was born in Lake City , Iowa in 1894, but moved to Hamilton, Kansas at an early age. He had served in the First World War, had later gone to divinity school, pioneered in Montana, and met my mother through an ad she had put in a magazine. My mother, Jenny Lind was born in Missouri, in 1893, and always fancied herself as a Southern Belle. Her name, Jenny, was the same as the word jenny, which in the Missouri vernacular was a female mule. So she went by the name of Jenne, pronounced Jean.
She was a highly educated woman for her time, having earned a masters degree at Columbia University in New York. She then had an uneventful series of jobs teaching school and doing social work in the mid western United States. She was moderately successful in her work, but apparently frustrated in her love life, witness the magazine ad at age 35.
My dad was a true Westerner, and Montana in the nineteen twenties was still the Wild West. He really loved the country and the people, although he usually had to serve two to six communities in order to make a living wage. In the summer he would make his rounds by car, in the winter with team and sleigh, and in spring and fall, on horseback. If there was no church in the community, he would preach in the saloon, after persuading the cowboys to check their guns with the bartender.
His situation in those days can best be summed up by a quote out of the book, Across two Centuries.
Intrigued with tales of the Wild West spun by Reverend Charlie Cole, John hit the trail for Montana and in 1923 he accepted an appointment with the Montana Conference in the northeast part of that state. If he was looking for adventure and a chance to serve he wasn't disappointed. A series of back woods parishes served by automobile in summer, a team and sleigh in winter, and a horse in spring and fall. Kept him busy for the next seven years. During this time his activities came to the attention of that great missionary, the Reverend Doctor Ezra Cox. Dr. Cox visited his parish, and later felt moved to eulogize John's work as a latter day circuit rider.
By 1930 the roads had improved to the point where one could drive a car year round, but otherwise things were still pretty wild. The movie “A River Runs Through It” aptly describes Montana at the time.
1930 was also the year my folks finally got married, after a lenghly long distance courtship. Nobody is sure what negotiations were involved , but we do know there were several trips over a considerable time period, and that they finally did get married in Montana, and settled down in the town of Drummond. Quite a change for the Southern Belle.
The term settled, as used here, is also relative. My dad would get itchy feet after two to three years in one place, and would move on to save a church somewhere else.
But let’s move along with the story. In 1935, I was joined by twin sisters, one who died shortly after birth, and the other, Mary Kathryn, who also had health problems, and was later diagnosed with cerebral palsy.
During these years the country was deep in the Depression, with Montana (and our family) seeming to be particularly hard hit. Nine hundred dollars in salary was all that came in during some of those years. Farmers who could not sell livestock or crops at a profit certainly could not pay the minister money they did not have, but they could and did give him beef, pork or chickens, all of which were welcome. (But to this day, I cannot stand the sight of chicken.)
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It turned out to be a good thing that my dad was really a frustrated farmer. When we moved to a new town the first two orders of business were to borrow a cow from some parishioner, and a couple of acres of land for a garden from another. That way, we at least had vegetables and milk. My dad also raised rabbits (to eat, not for pets), and we sometimes swapped a rabbit with a neighbor for one of their chickens. This relieved the monotony, which comes if either rabbits or chickens are the sole meat supply. My mother also made all of our own bread, everything from scratch. My dad sometimes supplemented our food supply by fishing through the ice on the river for whitefish in winter, and fly fishing the many streams for trout in the summer. Also during this period my mom made all of us children's clothes, and continued doing so until I was about eight years old.
Speaking of clothes, my mother seemed to have unusual tastes. One time when I was in first grade, she sent me to school in knickers. Can you imagine that, in the Wild West? I assure you that this never happened again.
One sign of the times was out-of-work men, including some college graduates, riding the freight trains through town, with many of them seeming to stop at our house. We had a woodpile, so when the men (they were called hobos or 'bos) came looking for a handout, my mother would ask them to cut some wood. They would work at it, usually in a desultory manner, but when the next freight train whistle sounded, they would come to the door and say, "I gotta go." My mom would then give them a sandwich, and they would be on their way. This got to be an everyday occurrence, perhaps due to the (unsubstantiated) rumor that these hobos would put an inconspicuous mark somewhere near the front of a house whose occupants would give them food. I always believed that our house must have had such a mark.
Aside from all this, Montana was a neat place for a young boy. There were cowboys, prospectors, and other interesting folk. There was lots of open space, one could go barefoot all summer, there were gophers to trap, kites to fly, fish to catch, lots of dirt to dig in, always a dog for a companion, and even a .22 to shoot once in awhile. When I was about five, though, there were a series of real bad earthquakes, which made quite an impression.
Speaking of impressions, one of my first recollections was sticking my finger in a light socket to see what would happen. Needless to say, that also made a great impression. I guess it also got me an early start on electrical engineering. Another early impression was in 1937 or 1938, when Orson Wells put on this really scary radio show, called War of the Worlds. This was a simulated newscast, which had Martians invading the earth. It panicked adults, so no wonder it scared a little kid. Speaking of radio, I clearly remember sitting around the one radio set in the house, listening to the election returns as Roosevelt beat Wilkie,
My dad was great for building kites, which we then flew together. The string ball in the kitchen, however, did not yield enough material to get our creations very high, and there was no other suitable string to be found in the town. We solved the problem, though, by getting a giant ball of carpet twine by mail order from Monkey Wards in Spokane. It seemed like it took forever, but one day the package containing the string arrived. A whole 4000 feet, almost a mile of string. We had already built a giant kite, and lost no time hooking up the string and getting the leviathan in the air.
As the string paid out, bystanders and neighbors gathered, and soon we had quite a crowd. Then disaster struck. I had to stop to tie my shoe, so I handed the string to a lady standing nearby, telling her to hold it for a moment. You guessed it, she let go. Kite and string, including what was left on the ball, departed into the wild blue yonder, and was never seen again. Probably ended up In Iowa.
But my mother, the Southern Belle from Missouri, was getting more and more frustrated and unhappy. She didn’t understand, or try to understand the people, and the generally rough and ready nature of the frontier really got to her. Of course, moving from one tank town to another every two to three years really didn’t help. Not to mention the occasional gun fight in a saloon.
(Bet you didn't know that Last Chance Gulch, the main street of the state capitol, Helena, was layed out with a jog every block or so, in order that stray bullets from the gunfights wouldn't travel the length of town.)
Needless to say, her generally poor attitude was beginning to affect my father’s work. But let me give you an example. In the Methodist Church, the local preacher reports to a District Superintendent, popularly called the DS, who reports to the Bishop. Once a quarter, the DS showed up in town, listened to the preacher preach, conferred with the church elders, and thus judged the minister’s performance. For years, incidentally, I thought that this meeting with the elders was called the Quarrely Conference, based on the conversations I overheard. I finally found out that it was the Quarterly Conference, but I thought the former name to be more appropriate. But back to the story. Since there were no decent hotel accommodations in these towns, it was the custom for the DS to stay with the preacher during these visits. My mother, however, took a strong dislike to one DS named Rev. Wampler. She refused to have him in the house, and told him he could take a room in the establishment over the saloon. Certainly a great way to make points with the boss. She also endeared herself to the females in the church by making it known that anyone who didn’t belong to the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution), or the AAUW (American Association of University Women) was not really civilized.
Anyway, back to my mother. The Montana situation was deteriorating and something eventually had to give. My father tried to get a transfer, but as you could imagine, Montana was easy to transfer into, but almost impossible to transfer out of. Things finally got to the point where he quit the ministry, put the two kids in the car, loaded all our belongings in an old truck, (Driven by a parishioner he had conned into the job) and headed west into the sunset.
You can read more about the Montana frontier, my dad's early days in Montana, and tales of my early life, in the story "Montana Homestead" in my book "Growin Up 'Round the West", also on this web site.
We landed on a small farm near St. Helens Oregon, just up the Columbia River from Astoria. My dad tried to make a living peddling Fuller Brush stuff and Watkins patent medicines to the farm ladies in the region, while my mother, and sometimes us kids, helped farmers harvest produce in season. (Until recently, we still had one of these Fuller brooms up at our summer cabin, so they must have been good) We somehow scraped up the money to buy a cow (whom I promptly named Betty), so we had milk, and I believe that we accepted a bit of charity from the local Masonic lodge.
My sister and I were promptly enrolled in the nearby one room grade school. She in the first grade, and me in the fourth. Of course I had to fight every boy in the school, a pattern that repeated itself every time we moved, but after that, things went reasonably well.
For a closer look at those days in Oregon, take a look at the story "Wartime Oregon" in my book "Growin' Up 'Round the West, also on this web site.
From December 7, 1941 on, of course, the War was in full swing. Due to the shortage of manpower, my dad (who had already been in one war) landed a laborers job at the local paperboard mill, at a very decent wage, and my mother got in an occasional few days of substitute teaching.My dad also continually kept feelers out for a permanent ministerial job with the Methodist Church. This spadework finally paid off, and he landed a decent appointment at Prosser, in the Yakima River valley, in Washington State. So again we loaded our belongings in an old truck and headed for a new adventure, a couple of hundred miles east.
Prosser turned out to be quite a place. A metropolis of about 2000 souls, and County Seat as well. Also my dad experienced quite a change in social status, from an itinerant peddler and day laborer to a respected member of the establishment.
We stayed in that town five years, an eternity it seemed, and after the obligatory fight with every kid in the school, I settled down to a pretty interesting life. The Superintendent of School’s kid, Billy , (who later turned out to be gay), the prosecuting attorney’s kid and myself, who were all the same age, formed an alliance and really started to beat up the town. What one didn’t think of, the others did, and we were all ready to try anything.
Meantime, my mother found a full time job as a caseworker with the county welfare department, so my sister and I were left in the care of a nice old lady who came in every day. This lady and I quickly came to an unspoken understanding. She would let me do pretty much as I pleased, in return for me not ratting her out to my mother. Also, at this time, my folks were becoming almost totally preoccupied with my sister’s health and her health care. I think that they visited every quack doctor in the West, she had several sojourns to the Shriner's hospital in Portland, and there was a never ending regimen of different appliances and exercises. Needless to say, I was pretty much left to fend for myself.
And fend, I did. Actually, I have chronicled a number of the adventures, and misadventures, we had in that town, in my story "Adventures in Prosser" and several follow on tales, in my book "Growin' Up 'Round the West, also on this web site.
During my time in Prosser, the “Manhattan Project” was building its Hanford Works, on the other side of Rattlesnake Mountain, about thirty miles away, to produce plutonium for the Atom Bomb. This provided a large number of well paying jobs, fueled a lot of rumors, and seemed to be the source of a few unexplained illnesses, which may or may not have been radiation sickness. The consensus around town was that it was some kind of test facility for a new wonder weapon, a guess which was not far off.
Approximately thirty years later, BCS, where I worked, won a contract to provide all the computing for the Hanford Works, and I did visit the place a couple of times.
I could go on and on about Prosser, but you get the idea. Anyway, after five years, my dad moved on to greener pastures, literally. A dairy farming hamlet called Allen, in the Skagit
This was a very interesting community, and had been settled by many different nationalities. Scandinavians (collectively called Swedes) were predominant, however, and they were a clannish lot. They stuck together socially, and others who were not Scandinavian had a tough time fitting in. Usually, if there was part time work to be had they made sure that a “Swede” boy got the job, making it difficult for someone who was not Scandinavian to get work. Despite this, I finally found work in a newspaper office after school hours, but it wasn’t very challenging or interesting.
Another interesting sidelight. Over 50 years later, it turned out that a golfing buddy of mine in Palm Desert, CA, had a best friend named Charles, who turned out to be the son of one of our good parishioners at Allen, and whom as a kid I had known well.
One thing though, I did start getting interested in cars. You can get the straight scoop, and all the details, about these cars in the story "Old Cars" in the book "Growin' Up 'Round the West, also on this web site.
As you have probably figured out by now, compared to Prosser, and despite the cars, this Allen place really sucked. After a year of high school there, I figured out that because of different scholastic requirements in Prosser and my current school, I could finish high school in one more year, for a total of three years, if I took some correspondence work.
I decided to do this, taking courses in automobile engine theory to get the required number of credits, and graduated from high school in 1949 at the ripe old age of 16.
At this point I took good long look at my options and made a couple of decisions. I had a reasonably steady girl friend in a nearby town, and I thought that relationship was worth maintaining. As a preachers kid, I also had a scholarship offer at the then College of Puget Sound in Tacoma, so I decided to take them up on that. The final decision was to leave home. This wasn’t as tough a call as it sounds. As mentioned previously, I had been pretty much on my own since twelve anyway. Besides, my folks were now even more preoccupied with my sister’s health problem, so my departure was kind of by mutual agreement. Anyway, I stowed my excess gear here and there, upgraded my transport from the 1936 Ford to a 1938 Pontiac, enrolled at College of Puget Sound for the fall term, headed to Eastern Washington to earn some money as an itinerant farm worker, and never looked back.
I didn’t make much money that summer, but had some interesting experiences, and met some really weird characters. The best job was contract apple thinning for a farmer in Peshastin, where I made $12 to 15 dollars a day, plus a free cabin. (The cabin, incidentally, is still there, but now has electricity and running water.) Weekends I would sometimes head for my Mount Vernon girlfriend, to get a decent meal and the laundry done. This was quite a trip in those days, as Stevens Pass was still a gravel road.
Come fall, and I headed for Tacoma and my college adventure. In those days, the colleges were full of World War II ex GIs, who had seen the world, and were as much interested in hi jinks as in getting an education. This, of course, appealed to a teen age kid, and together we had some interesting adventures. Panty raids on the girls dorm, burning our college initials in the cross town rivals front lawn, chasing the Dean of Men across the Quadrangle with a car, and fire hose fights in the dorm halls, are some of the things which come to mind. But let me tell you of one interesting but harmless prank I particularly remember. It seemed the dorm rooms had the room number on the wall beside the door rather than on the door. So, the night of the big game, when everyone was absent, we purloined a passkey, and switched all the room doors. Later, when everyone arrived home half smashed, they found that their room key would not fit, and it took a couple of hours to settle down the confusion.
Washing rats in the Bendix automatic washer, and getting free pop from the dorm vending machines were other relatively harmless pastimes. Truth is, the only thing which kept me from getting kicked out, was my dad’s personal friendship with the college president, Dr. R. Franklin Thompson. During this time I supported myself by being the night man in a dog hospital, (plenty of time to study) working in a Dairy Queen, (Lots of free food) and running the cafeteria dishwasher for an hour in the morning. (Free breakfast)
Next summer there was still no decent work to be found, (Boeing, for example, was down to about 4,000 people, and you could shoot a cannon down the shop aisles without hitting anybody.) so it was back to the “fruit tramp” circuit. The start of the Korean War coincided with my eighteenth birthday, so I registered for the draft and was promptly classified 1-A. (The most eligible category.) Nothing immediately happened, so in the fall I traded up to a 1940 Plymouth coupe, with a 1948 Dodge Police Special engine, (That car would do almost100 MPH) and headed back to school.
School didn’t seem so interesting that year, and I really couldn’t hook up with a decent job. To top it off, about a month into the term I got into a horrendous car wreck. The accident was clearly not my fault, but the other driver was the son of the mayor of Gig Harbor, a nearby town, and after some political pressure, the cops tried to pin it on me. Ultimately I had to hire a lawyer and take the other guy to court. This resulted in all charges against me being thrown out, my car being fixed for free, and a nice cash settlement, even after I paid the lawyer. This was my first, but not my last, experience with the legal profession, and I was impressed.
All this trauma really raised havoc with school, so I decided to sit it out for a while and get a real job. Besides, by this time the Korean War was in full swing and I would probably get drafted any day anyway.
So, I jumped into the ol’ Plymouth, and headed for Seattle. Highway 99 was the road, the freeway being still in the future, and Boeing was the first business after entering Seattle, so I decided to try my luck there first. And yes, they had a job for me, a production worker on the KC-97 assembly line, and the pay was a fantastic $1.05 an hour. What could be better? They did say that I had to go to school for a couple of weeks, and they would also pay me for that. So on October 17, 1950, I reported in for school, and started an association with Boeing, which off and on, (mostly on) would span almost the next fifty years.
School was mostly drilling and riveting, and at the end we took a test. And guess what, my grade was high enough to get me into another school, this time for a month. When this was over, there was another test and, would you believe it, this time I got sent to a real school. And got a five cent an hour raise. So started six months at Broadway Edison Technical School’s aircraft branch, where I was supposed to learn how to be a Sheet Metal Bench Mechanic. This school was really fun, and I did learn a little.
Eight months, and one raise, after starting at Boeing I finally got assigned to a real job. I was going to be a Helper General, in the Experimental Shop, in the old Experimental Division. These guys made one off airplane parts and assemblies, and many times worked with the engineers to test or otherwise check them out.
The shop was in the old seaplane hanger at Boeing Plant 1, where the Boeing Clipper airplane was built. I reported to a snoose chewing Assistant Foreman, who directed me to a large pile of cables, gave me some rags and can of ketone, and told me to clean the grease off them. After a couple of days he showed back up, and seemed surprised that I was still there.
I then graduated to sweeping the floor for a week or so. At least on that job, I could look around and see what was going on. Ultimately, they attached me to an old sheet metal mechanic named Rascke, and I actually began doing some useful work.
This place turned out to be great for a young guy just starting out. It was staffed by real craftsmen who could do almost anything with metal. In those days there was no retirement at Boeing, so you worked till you dropped. There were a number of guys in their seventies, and even eighties, and, believe me, they really knew their stuff. Max Stockinger, an ancient German who could do anything with sheet metal. Ivanoff, an old Russian who could beat out an aircraft cowling with a hammer, and Mallet, a first rate machinist. (Actually, in later years I was privileged to visit most of the aircraft factories in the free world, and never again saw all those capabilities and skills in one shop.)
Almost all of these guys, also, were willing to share their knowledge with a young kid who was willing to learn, and I soaked up a lot. Steve, the shift Foreman, kind of took a liking to me, and kept giving me more complex work, and more importantly, raises. Boeing’s hourly grades went from 10 to 1, with one being the highest, and eventually I became a grade 2, making $2.75 an hour, all in a little over a year and a half. In fact, I became kind of an informal supervisor, being responsible for the work of six other mechanics. Although we put out almost as much work as the rest of the shop combined, it got so that I seldom opened my tool box, unless it was to loan a tool to one of my guys. In the course of business I also figured out how to offload jobs to other shops, and still get credit for the work done, and that really helped our production.
Along the way on this job, something happened which made a lifelong impression. One day a guy wearing a tie showed up, said that he was a Union business agent, and started asking questions. At that time, incidentally, Boeing was an open shop. This meant that whether or not you joined the Union was pretty much up to you, and I had elected not to join. After we talked for a while, he told me that I was doing an “A” man’s work (An “A” man was kind of a journeyman, and I was, at that time, a B or C man, kind of an assistant or a helper.) He then explained that if we put in a formal grievance, there was a good chance that I could get paid for the “A” man work I had been doing, and maybe even get promoted. When I discussed this with the other shop guys, they really urged me not to do this, saying this would surely put me on the Boss’s s*** list. Besides I didn’t belong to the union. When I told the Business Agent that I wasn’t a union man, he said that it didn’t matter, so I finally told him to go ahead with the grievance. Well, there were papers to fill out, then a big investigation. The final result was that I kept doing “A” man’s work, got retroactive “A” man pay and got promoted to “A” man in the bargain. This really made me a believer, and I joined the union forthwith.
The point of this long and rather rambling story is that this gave me a pro union, rather than an anti union slant on life. Unions certainly have their problems, but I have always found the majority of Union members and Union officials to be honest, hard working people just like anyone else. Over the years, I had the opportunity to work with and supervise hundreds of union members belonging to dozens of different unions, and I can honestly say that I never had a union grievance, or any other significant problem. All you have to do is know the rules and stick to them. I was even once tagged to serve on a grievance committee, hearing and ruling on union grievances. Sometimes we found for the union and sometimes for the company, but the decisions were always unanimous.
Meanwhile, all was not work. I was still going with the girl from Mount Vernon, but her folks were strongly hinting of marriage, and this made me a bit nervous. Anyway in February of 1951, I was invited on a ski trip with a guy I worked with, whose name was Art, along with his girl friend Mary. Afterwards, the girl friend invited me in to meet her roommate and lifelong friend, a young lady named Pat.
Turned out that Mary and Pat grew up in Grand Forks ND, worked for the Great Northern Railroad, and at age 21, set out into the big world to seek fame and fortune. Both fame and fortune eluded them, and they ended up in Seattle, eking out a living working for the same old Great Northern.
So, I said goodbye to the Mount Vernon girl, and the four of us started hanging out together.
At this point in time, I was living in an old hunting lodge, practically under Snoqualmie Falls, on the side of the river away from the road. A real idyllic and isolated spot. It was 35 miles to work, but there was little traffic, and I could easily make it in 45 minutes. (Even though Highway 10, now Interstate 5, was two lanes, all the way to Lake Sammamish.) To save money, I was burning tractor gas (no tax), which was delivered in bulk to my place, for something like twenty cents a gallon.
After a bit of this hanging out with the guy and gals, it was becoming a real chore to drive out to the lodge, catch a few hours sleep, and then drive back to town. So I said good bye to the hunting lodge, and along with a couple of my working buddies, rented a big old house, just off fraternity row in Seattle’s University District. This cut down on the commute, but led to more parties, so I suppose things were about a tossup.
About the same time I said goodbye to the Plymouth, and upgraded to a 1948 Nash Ambassador. This Ambassador was kind of a sleeper. It looked almost exactly like a Nash 600, which had an anemic flat six, and could not get out of its own way, but the Ambassador was heavier, had better suspension and a big overhead valve six cylinder engine. It was one of the three 1948 cars, which, stock, would do an honest 100 MPH, clock. (I eventually put a built up stock car engine in it, and then I really had a bomb, but that is a story for another time.)
As I said, Mary and Art, and Pat and I, were hanging with each other quite a bit, but soon Mary and Art got married. This seemed like a reasonable thing to do, so we followed suit, and were married on June 20, 1951. We moved into a basement apartment on Roosevelt Way, were both working, and were enjoying a pretty good life.As I said, we were both working, but we did experiment with a couple of small businesses. The first was "Digger's Delivery", Named after "Digger" O'Dell on a then popular radio show.
In this improbable venture, we bought low grade coal from a local mine for around six dollars per ton, then sacked it at about ninety five pounds to the sack, and delivered it residents of a local housing project for one dollar per bag.
Problem was, neither my partner or I wanted to do the manual labor involved, so the venture collapsed from inertia. All was not lost, however, as I sold the truck for enough to buy Pat a brand new top of the line Singer sewing machine. Which we still have, by the way.
Our next venture was Kuller Metal Products, producing cast metal toys. The metal casting died a quick death, but we secured a patent for a kid's pounding toy made of wood, called the Young Pound-Around.
Pat's dad stood us for $500, I recall, and with this infusion of capital, we leased a shop building under the University Bridge in Seattle, and bought the necessary woodworking and painting equipment. Our sales and marketing could not deep up with our production, and we soon had considerable inventory. We were just learning how to peddle the stuff when, as explained below, I had to put the business in the capable hands of my partner, who destroyed it in about six months. But again, the machinery served me well as a home workshop for years and years. Matter of fact, son Mark still has some of it in his shop.
By early 1952 the draft board was again breathing down my neck, so Boeing wangled me a deferment as an essential worker in a critical industry. I finally decided to join the US Air Force, so I took a leave of absence from Boeing, left the toy business to my partner, and joined up for 8 years. Four on active duty, and four more in the reserves.
In this narrative, we will skip the four years in the Air Force, as my adventures there are adequately chronicled elsewhere on this web site. Namely, the book "Air Force Adventures 'Round the World". The "Life in Post War Germany " stories in the book "Livin' 'Round the World", and in the "Wings Across the Pacific" story in the book "Airplanes 'Round the World.
But to go on with this story. I got discharged from the Air Force, collected the family from North Dakota, and moved back to Seattle. We settled in a big old house close to the University District, with Mary and Art living upstairs, and us down. I returned to Boeing, and since I had been on Leave of Absence, I went back into the same work at the then current pay rate, with four years more seniority. With all this accumulated seniority, I soon got a promotion to the highest hourly labor grade in Experimental, an Experimental Aircraft Mechanic. This was a different shop than I had been in, but was doing essentially the same work, and the fellows couldn’t figure out why this new hire comes in at a high pay grade, and gets the next available promotion. I didn’t really enlighten them. In this shop also, I became friends with Bob, a fellow mechanic, and we have remained so for over 50 years.
During this time I was working nights and pursuing engineering studies at the University of Washington, full time during the day. I also found time to apply for, and pass the US State Department Foreign Service Officers test. The State Department people were incredulous, because hardly anyone without an Ivy League school degree ever passes, and me, with three years of Political Science and engineering credits, aced it. Anyway, after several interviews and considerable research, I decided that being a diplomat was not the job for me, so I closed the book on that one, and continued with Boeing. At that time, incidentally, I could have gone to work for the CIA, but I had had enough of that business as well.
Boeing was at this time experimenting with a management training program to train potential shop foremen, and eventually I was asked to become a trainee. I accepted, and even though l I would be making $5.00 per week less to start, I thought that the long range potential was worth it. So I closed my toolbox for the last time and started another new career.
After some rudimentary classroom work, my first management job was being a kind of intern, shadowing a shop General Foreman while he performed his duties. My title was Junior Staff Assistant. Not very impressive, I thought, so I lost no time in getting the “Junior” deleted from my badge.
This intern stuff proved to be a colossal waste of time, and I almost immediately moved to the position of Assistant to the Staff Assistant who was Assistant to the Department Superintendent. Don’t even try to figure all that out. What it amounted to was that I was in charge of several lady personnel clerks, and doing the hiring and firing for the Department.
Turnover was high, and we were always short of people. The drill then for getting a new person into the shop was to write a requisition, give it to the personnel clerk, who processed it through the system to the employment office, who eventually hired someone, who eventually showed up, and often proved so incompetent that you would have to let him or her go and start over. The whole process never took less than two weeks. Pretty soon I had 50 open requisitions in the system, but no new hires, and as the Superintendent was tearing out what was left of his hair, drastic action was called for. So, I signed a stack of twenty new requisitions, went down to the employment office, picked up twenty blank applications, went out in the employment office bull pen (waiting room) and passed the apps out to the twenty most promising looking guys. When my twenty guys had filled out their applications, I gave the completed apps and the requisitions to the employment office weenie, breathed down his neck while he processed the paper, then told the guys they were hired, and to report to me the next morning.
This instant solution to his personnel problem so impressed the Superintendent that he promoted me to Assistant Foreman, and gave me a crew, until he could get rid of the Staff Assistant who was Assistant to the Superintendent, and give me that job instead. This sounds convoluted, but I the point is that I was now working for a guy who was a forth level manager, responsible for several thousand people.
This Superintendent, Red , was really a good guy, and one of the few who had some sense. I learned a lot from him about how to run an organization, but after about a year it was time to move on. By then, we were just starting production on the 707 Airplane. As always happens with a new commercial Airplane program at Boeing, production was totally screwed up, costs were out of control, schedules were slipping, and delivery dates were in jeopardy. The standard Boeing factory response to a problem like this was to throw more people and money at the problem, and then yell a lot, so this is what they did. After all, this is how they got B–17 production up to 16 a day a decade earlier, and these, buy and large, were the same guys who had managed that program. Needless to say, they obviously hadn’t learned a thing in the meantime.
Things finally got so bad, that in desperation they brought in a hot dog big shot named Otis, from Boeing Wichita, to take over the Production Control organization and try to get things straightened out. Boeing Wichita, incidentally, had built thousands of B-52s and B-47s so they kind of knew what they were doing. Production Control, by the way, is the logistics organization responsible for getting the right quantities of the right parts to the right place at the right time, to keep the assembly line running smoothly.
This guy turned out to be really good, and was starting to get things sorted out. I liked his style, and thought that working for him would be interesting, so one afternoon I dropped into his office, unannounced, for a chat. I figured I had a maximum of five minutes before he threw me out, so proceeded to give him a quick pitch on why he needed my help. He looked at me like “Where the Hell did this guy come from”, asked me a few questions and told me to drop back at the same time the next day. I did, and he put me to work tracking engineering changes. But let me digress a moment to explain. In the course of building an airplane, there are things that do not go together properly, and also there are product improvements to be made. Engineering figures out how to fix the problem or incorporate the improvement, then throws the solution (called a fix) over the wall, metaphorically speaking, for the shop guys to implement. Incredibly, on the 707 program, nobody was checking to see if the shop guys actually implemented the fix, at the right time and on the proper airplane. Otis had intuitively figured that there might be a problem here, and a little investigation proved him right. So I set up an organization to monitor this activity and make sure that things actually got done at the right time and on the proper airplane, etc. My guys got this situation under control in fairly short order and I went on to a series of other similar production control tasks.
By this time, a number of 707s had been delivered and were in service. It turned out, though, that the rudder boost system (a kind of power steering) was inadequate, and that the extensive use of magnesium in the vertical stabilizer itself (The triangular doohickey which sticks up in back.) was proving unsatisfactory. The upshot of this all was that it was decided to replace, in the field, the vertical stabilizers on the first thirty 707 airplanes which had been delivered.
After helping plan this total activity, I became responsible for logistics at the locations where the airplanes were being modified. What this amounted to was making sure that the right parts in the right quantities were in the right place at the right time. If everything worked out as planned the Boeing and airline mechanics doing the work were not delayed, and the airplane was out of service for the shortest time possible. This latter was particularly important, because an airplane out of service continues to generate costs without bringing in any revenue. Besides, this was the dawn of the jet age, and jet airliners were in high demand and short supply. Since Boeing had never done anything remotely like this field service activity before, we kind of wrote the book as we went along. Hopefully learning from our mistakes.
The airlines I was responsible for were Pan American in Miami, American in Tulsa, TWA in Kansas City, Continental in Los Angeles, and improbably enough, President Eisenhower’s personal planes, three converted KC-135s, which were based at what is now JFK in New York. A guy named Phil Jones was actually responsible for the Boeing mechanics on this overall project, and he did a hell of a job. Also since we were the only Boeing guys around, we also offered the airlines other technical assistance as required. An interesting sidelight on these Eisenhower airplanes was that Lockheed had underbid Boeing for the maintenance job, but was running into trouble. But the Boeing guy brought in to help, which was me, did not have the proper clearances to work on the President’s airplane, so my role was limited to furnishing parts and giving technical advice to Lockheed. A prime example of government inefficiency.
Anyway, in the course of this assignment, which lasted about two years, I ended up living in both Miami and Kansas City for several months, and in Los Angeles, with my family for about six more months. During this time I also was more or less continually traveling to all the above mentioned locations, and between these locations and Seattle. Also, at this time, we were blessed with another child, a daughter named Michelle.
An interesting story about my living accommodations in Kansas City, "Stewardess School", is in my book, "Livin' 'Roud the World", also on this web site.
Since Boeing was starting to sell its 707s to foreign airlines, it was only a matter of time till this activity of mine would also involve oversea assignments. And this didn’t particularly appeal to the young family man. Besides, I was beginning to get a little fed up with the Boeing Commercial Airplane Division management style. It was an autocratic hierarchy, with many levels of management, and patterned after the military. The senior management had made their way up from the working level in whatever job they were doing, and although they knew everything there was to know about how to do their particular job, or more accurately, how Boeing had always done that particular job, they knew very little about anything else. They had developed triple redundant fail safe systems, where it was impossible to screw up, but equally impossible to accomplish anything above mediocrity. They were not interested in new ideas, or new methods, because they were absolutely convinced that they already ran the best manufacturing operation in the business, and maybe the world, and didn’t need any help from anybody. This attitude, which was prevalent up to the mid nineties, I believe to be the primary reason why Airbus has managed to bring their market share from zero to about sixty percent in less than twenty years.
Along with this, the place was rife with bureaucracy. But let me illustrate with one particularly ludicrous example.
Someone in the Facilities Department, with apparently nothing better to do, had drawn up a detailed table of precisely how managers of each rank must furnish their offices. Desks, tables and chairs, and on down to wastebaskets. Since there were, at that time, six levels of managers, and four grades within each level, that made 24 different office plans. And I am not exaggerating.
A slow witted facilities manager, who we will call Joe, was put in charge of implementing and policing this absurdity. He had a file card for every table desk and chair in the facility, as well as lists of precisely what furniture was authorized for each office holder. Depending on his or her place in the pecking order, of course.
Eventually, my office got furnished with a serviceable desk, along with chairs, bookcases, etc. My desk was a plain steel affair, as I was exactly one level below those authorized a more spacious “conference top” desk. My crew decided that this was an affront to their boss, and decided to set things right. Midnight requisitioning was out of the question, because Joe knew the exact location of each conferences top desk in the facility. But my boys were resourceful, and one Monday morning, as if by magic, my regular desk had been replaced with the conference top model. Eventually Joe showed up, checking his office plans, found my conference top desk and demanded to know where it came from. He was particularly puzzled because he found no such desks missing elsewhere. So he confiscated the new desk, replacing it with a standard model. But two weeks later, the same thing happened again, a conference top desk appearing in my office, as if by magic. And, of course, was confiscated by Joe. After this happened 4 or 5 times Joe was becoming visibly disturbed. Not only was I violating the rules, but was also fouling up his books of account, as a steady stream of conference top desks was coming into his domain.
Finally Joe told me that he had a particularly nice desk in his warehouse. A potential furniture supplier had given it to his as a sample and it did not fit any of his office schemes. He offered to give me this desk for my office, if I would stop making conference top desks appear, and I agreed.
So how did we do it? It was really simple. There were many library tables, of various sizes, around the facility, and Joe had noted all of them as just library tables. What my boys did was simple. They located a library table, which was the same brand as my desk, and with a top the size of a conference top desktop. They would then get busy with screwdrivers, switch tops, and presto, a new conference top desk. Poor Joe never did catch on.
Another similar absurdity was the struggle one had to go through to get replacement batteries for wall clocks. Requisitions in triplicate, and an inspector visiting to assure that the batteries were really dead, were only part of the procedure.
Anyway, at about this time, the newly reorganized Aerospace Division, which was handling all military and space activity was looking for people, so I moved to a Production Control job over there.
The big project at that time was the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile, which was being rushed into production to fill a supposed “Missile Gap”. This missile gap, incidentally, later turned out to be about as illusionary as Bush’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Anyway it was pedal to the metal, balls to the wall, and get out of the way if you couldn’t keep up.
So where did I end up? Patric Air Force Base, at Cape Canaveral, in Florida
You can learn more about my life at "The Cape" during this time, in my tale "Cape Canaveral" in my book "Livin' 'Round the World", on this web site.
Out at the base, (All this activity was taking place on the Patrick Air Force Base facility at Cape Canaveral, so it was almost like being back in the Air Force.) testing the first Minuteman missile prior to firing was going full bore. My piece of this action was a supervisory job called Night Production Engineering Manager. This basically involved running all logistics on the site from 4:00 PM until the day’s problems all got resolved. Usually someplace between 12:00 and 6:00 AM.
Normally, each piece of ground support electronics is tested, then the subsystems are tested and finally the total ground support electronic system is tested as a whole. Likewise with the missile. Minuteman was a three stage missile, so normally all three stages would be tested and fired separately, before a test firing of the complete missile,
But we had to close the “missile gap” and there wasn’t time for detail testing. So the whole ground support installation was to be hooked up and tested at one time, and when this had been done, the entire missile would be trundled out and lit off.
In practice, this didn’t work out too well. When a new piece of electronics arrived, it was immediately plugged in for what was called the “smoke test”. If it didn’t immediately catch fire, which happened a good share of the time, it was hooked up with the other components and turned on. Usually, this caused some component, somewhere in the system to burn out. So, day after day, using brute force and awkwardness, we plodded on, with the day for the complete missile test getting closer and closer. My part in all this was theoretically pretty simple, but in practice not so easy. When we came to work at 4:00 PM, we would get a list of what the engineers had screwed up, burnt out, or otherwise destroyed during the day. Our job then was to repair the damage, replace the bad parts, and order any new stuff specified by the engineers. Then the next day we would go through it all again.
Eventually the big day came. The support equipment was all hooked up and working, and the missile assembled on the pad. At about 10:00AM, somebody pushed the button and the missile roared off the pad in a symphony of flame, noise, and smoke. Miraculously it performed perfectly. All three stages fired at the proper times, as they were supposed to, and 20 minutes later the missile landed right on target in the impact area near the Ascension Islands. So, we shut the place down and partied for two days.
Getting the missile to work right the first time was something of a miracle in those days. Lockheed, right next door, was perfecting the submarine launched Polaris, and some of their tests turned out to be rather spectacular. Missiles firing from both ends after launch. Missiles running amuck and heading for town, and so forth. During this period, we also saw the launch of Ham, the chimp who was the first live space traveler.
It was not all work and no play however. Everyone worked hard and played hard, and everyone was in it together. The Space Program was getting a start at the “Cape” during that time, as well, so we had real life astronauts around the place. These early astronauts were really just hotshot fighter pilots, and they hung in the bars with everyone else. This, of course, was before NASA Public Relations got their act together and turned the Astronauts into gods. Speaking of bars, I had the telephone numbers of all 17 Cocoa Beach bars on my desk, and when I needed a guy at night, I would start down the list, and eventually I would find him. For more on the Cape and the early astronauts during that period, I refer you to the book Gift of Life, by Henri Landwirth.
Also, the money was pretty good. I was actually putting in so much overtime that I couldn’t spend all the pay, and was forced to bank it. Upon our return to Seattle then, I bought a house down the street and used it as a rental unit. This was the second and last time in my career when I was making more money than I could spend, the first being when I was an Intelligence Agent.
Well, they really didn’t need me any more at the Cape, so we headed back to Seattle using a real interesting form of transportation. We found a little 14 foot travel in reasonably good shape, which we bought for $400. We got it so cheap, because at that time, on the East Coast, there were no travel trailers, and the guy didn’t really know what it was, or what to do with it.
And as I said before, we had this pretty good running, but totally trashed looking Mercury. The paint was rust streaked, it had large holes rusted in the sides and floor, and the upholstery was in tatters. We hooked up anyway, and started out, looking like Okies leaving the dust bowl in the 1930s. For the first 500 miles, people just shook their heads when we told them we were headed for Seattle. After that, they just marveled that we had gotten that far. On the bright side, people felt so sorry for us that they let us stay in their parking lots and hook up to their electricity for free, and when the generator gave out in San Bernardino, the guy fixed us up with a new used one, for practically nothing. We took two weeks to make the trip, taking the southern route from Florida to Palm Springs CA, then up the west coast to Seattle.
This was the first time we had seen the Palm Springs area, where we eventually had a second home, almost 40 years later.
So we settled down in Seattle, and I settled down into a mundane Production Control assignment.
In early 1957 we had bought a house on Ravenna Blvd. in Seattle. It was a great location on a tree lined Boulevard, next to a real nice city park, with a shopping district just a couple of blocks away. The house, though, was built in 1907, and had had very little tender loving care since. By now, we felt that we would be staying in that house for a while, so spent some time and money fixing it up. We modernized the Kitchen and bath, fixed up the two upstairs bedrooms, built a rec room in the basement, did some other improvements, and painted the place inside and out. When the boys came along we converted the basement rec room to a bedroom, and put in a basement shower, which later came in very handy as a dog bath. The back yard was postage stamp size, and eventually we put in a swimming pool, which took up the whole yard, except a ten foot square area we used as a patio. And we were right about staying there awhile. We lived in that place for 32 years.
On the job, I was getting bored, was ready to get out of manufacturing and in casting about for something interesting I found out about Materiel, which was the organization that bought everything Boeing used. This was a lot of stuff, because at that time, over half the value of anything Boeing produced was component parts and materials, which were purchased by Materiel. Moreover Materiel and Finance jointly operated an organization called Receiving. That was where the parts came in and were processed before going to the warehouse or to the users. Receiving was a stepchild of both organizations and was not being run very well. And I knew Receiving. Again, I paid an unannounced visit to the right guy, a Materiel Section Manager named John. And just like that, I was transferred to Materiel, in Receiving, of course.
About that time though, some supposed genius decided to computerize Receiving and I got on his team. So instantly, I was a System Analyst in the computing organization. This was a real good place to be in 1961, at the dawn of the computer age. Predictably, the project went nowhere, but I learned a lot about computing, and got a good grounding in computer basics. Incidentally, in later years, I seemed to gravitate into computing situations a lot, and this early knowledge paid off big time. Anyway, after returning to Materiel, I proceeded to consolidate my position, and before long I was running a big part of this John’s organization.
About this time, our first son, Mark, came along, making us a family of five. The old house on Ravenna was beginning to fill up.
Myself, and a couple of other guys were making John look so good, that when the guy who was running the whole Materiel Division got promoted, John got the job on a temporary basis, and he took me with him. Instantly, I was Chief of Staff to a Division General Manager who had 2000 people working for him at 14 geographic locations in North America. I quickly consolidated my position by taking over all internal audit, budgeting, personnel, and employee compensation functions for the Division, including assignment and compensation for all management people. So now my staff and I essentially decided who worked where, how much they got paid and how many people they could have, then audited their work in the bargain. I was running the place, and nobody knew it. Eventually John left, and a guy named Gene came in. Gene was smart enough to see who was really running things so he kept me on. This was unheard of in those days, because new division general managers generally brought in their own staffs. Gene lasted until he got into an argument over a whore in the French Quarter of New Orleans, got beat up, and unwisely checked into Boeing medical to get patched up. If I had been with him it wouldn’t have happened. I had got him out of worse scrapes before, and he owed me big time. So back came John, so for four more years I ran the place, made him look good, and picked up a couple of promotions in the process.
I did a lot of traveling on this job. As I mentioned before there were Material offices in fourteen locations scattered throughout North America, and I tried to visit each one about once per quarter. This way I kept up with what was going on in the Materiel offices, but more importantly I got a very good feel for how the entire Aerospace Group was doing. I also make contacts in those travels, which did me a world of good later on. I managed to hit the factory in New Orleans for Mardigras, (For some reason there were never hotel rooms available out by the factory, so I was forced to stay in some expensive place on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter) and got to Florida and Southern California in the winter. There were also Minuteman missile tests to witness, seminars to attend, and other general goofing off.
Early in this period, Whalen, our second boy and final child, made his appearance. It was touch and go with him for about six months, but he then grew up to be a strong and healthy boy. Later in this period we obtained our summer place on the Stilliguamish River east of Arlington, and spent a lot of time up there. It was a really great place for kids, especially boys, to grow up. We will talk more about that place later.
It wasn’t all work either. During this period I was active with the Boy Scouts, starting as Scoutmaster for the troop at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, graduating to UW District camping chairman, and for years ran the best Camp-O-Rees in the Chief Seattle Council. As a result of this and similar activity I was asked to serve on the Executive Board of the Chief Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts of America, and also on the Candidates Investigating Committee of the Municipal League. Incredibly, Boeing, while giving lip service to these civic endeavors, actually discouraged this type of activity, and did nothing to help. I guess these assignments were supposed to be reserved for the staff weenies at Headquarters. Due to the press of business and travel I got to doing less and less of this kind of activity and finally gave it up altogether. Pat though, got interested in United Cerebral Palsy, and served that organization for over thirty years, being, among other things. President of the woman’s committee, and serving for years on the King/Snohomish County Board of Directors.
Two examples of Pat’s presence on the Seattle scene come readily to mind. Once, while hanging out in the Eastern Airlines First Class lounge in St. Louis, I ran into the then mayor of Seattle, Wes Uhlman. When I introduced myself to hizzhonor he remarked, “Why, you must be Pat’s husband.” Another time at a cocktail party downtown, we ran into the guy who ran the entire Boeing Aerospace Group. This guy had known Pat for years in her charity activity, and was my big boss, but that night, finally figured out for the first time that we were related.
Also, I was still plugging along in school. I had transferred to Seattle University. (Where one of the Dominican professors became my lifelong friend) I was taking Mechanical Engineering, had gone through four years and was within a few hours of a degree. I was also taking some graduate MBA business courses. At that time, you may remember, MBAs were all the rage, and a few of those courses looked good on the resume’.
The Dominican Professor’s name was Fr. John. Among other things, he became the Assistant Scoutmaster of my scout troop, was a frequent attendee at our parties, and we shared many interesting experiences together, including joint tenancy in a houseboat which was illegally moored in Seattle’s Lake Union. Even after leaving Seattle, his paths and mine often crossed, and we had many more interesting experiences together. He even returned to Seattle from time to time to participate in our families major life events, but unfortunately, he drank himself to an untimely death.
I could, in fact, write a whole separate book about my adventures with Fr, John, but some bizarre examples do come to mind. Like the night we found the guardhouse at Benicia Arsenal (CA) where General Grant was imprisoned for drunkenness when he was a young Lieutenant. Or the great dinners we had with the Christian Brothers at their lodge in Moraga (CA). Not to mention the sailboat races from our houseboat to the Elks club, when we were all three sheets to the wind. Or the many times I bunked in the priory at his Benicia parish as Fr. John visiting from Seattle.
Finally, and maybe most importantly during this period, I learned to fish. I got started by an old Canadian friend of a friend named Horst. Horst got me up to some neat trout lakes in the British Columbia interior, and taught me the basics, after which I learned considerably more on my own. From then to this day, I have made the British Columbia fishing scene at least twice each summer, sharing my experiences with kids and grandkids as they came along. But more on that later.
Meanwhile, back on the job, times were changing. The space program was winding down, airplanes were not selling, and Boeing’s business really hit the skids. There were massive layoffs in both the Commercial Airplane and the Space divisions, and the famous billboard about would the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights, appeared. John, my boss, left again, and the guy who took over from him didn’t look like my type.
John, incidentally, after retirement had lived for years in an RV park in Indio CA, about five miles from our home in Palm Desert.
In order to stay alive, Boeing was heading pell mell into diversification. In fact they were so hung up on diversifying, that they would give anybody with a good, or even a harebrained idea a pot of money, and tell him to have at it. Things which were seriously considered during these times included a gambling casino in the West Indies, A dam and power plant in Chad, turning chicken manure into hog feed, (Can you believe shit fed hogs) and shipping coal slurry to Japan in converted oil tankers. There were many more, as well, I just can’t think of them all now. Anyway, this diversification rush seemed to me like a good place to hang out till the storm blew over, and incidentally have a lot of fun. So I hooked my wagon to this star, and got a real wild ride for the next ten years.
The first place I landed was an outfit, which was improbably named Resources Conservation Co, with no period behind the Co, and commonly called RCC. It was a joint venture set up by Reading and Bates Offshore Drilling Company, El Paso Natural Gas Company, and Boeing, and was staffed by people from all three organizations. This operation was doomed to failure from the start, if for no other reason than the difference in culture between the companies. El Paso was an extremely conservative and hidebound highly regulated public utility. Reading and Bates was a bunch of go go oil well wildcatters, used to taking immense risks in the hope of a tidy return, and Boeing was a rather stogy manufacturing operation. They had teamed together to develop and market a machine called a Henderson evaporator, which could extract fresh water from salt water, clean up cooling tower water, and even rub your back, or so it was said. Interestingly enough, this machine had been invented by a Boeing guy, named Henderson, several years previously, and then sold to Reading and Bates, because Boeing at the time was not really interested. Reading and Bates had got Boeing back into the act because they found that they didn’t have the engineering expertise to make the thing work. El Paso was just along for the ride, and soon bailed out.
This RCC company had decided to go after the salt water desalination business, and I signed on as a salesman. Although they had never built a full size plant, our engineers calculated that their baby could operate about three times as efficiently as any other desalt system then in operation, and that selling them would be a slam dunk. So the market research guys picked three target opportunities, and the salesmen went to work The targets were, incidentally, Key West FL, Coupeville WA, and a resort on St. John Island in the US Virgin Islands, called Caneel Bay Plantation, which was owned by the New York Rockefellers. One salesman was assigned to each opportunity, with me drawing Caneel Bay. The plan was for us to go balls out to make the first sale, then drop the other two prospects and concentrate on building a demonstration plant at the location first sold.
So we all went to work. After a cursory investigation of my prospect, I found that Laurance Rockefeller ran their operation, they owned several luxury hotels all over the world under the RockResorts brand, and an engineering firm in New York handled most of their technical activity.
My strategy was simplicity itself.
First, and most important, I figured that the Boeing brand was so well known and respected that it could be used to sell refrigerators to Eskimos, as it were. (That supposition proved to be right, and I based a lot of successful sales activity on it later on, as you will see.), Next, I thought that the novel approach we were taking to desalinate salt water would appeal to the engineering firm they were using, and I was right there as well. Lastly, to prove to the Rockefellers that we were really operating in their league, I borrowed a DeHavilland 125 business jet from Reading and Bates to further impress them.
Anyway, I sold the concept to the engineering firm, and they pretty much convinced the Rockefellers. Then, by liberal use of the Boeing name, and by judicious use of the DH 125 jet, we convinced both the Rockefellers and the Engineering firm of our credibility. Despite the fact that we had nothing tangible other than a stack of concept sketches, some slick brochures, and a lab model, I managed to ink a contract with the Rockefellers to build and operate a desal plant for their resort, and we were in business.
At this point I would like to share one interesting sidelight, which I think greatly influenced, the Rockefellers. It seems that on our first trip on the private jet from New York to the Virgin Islands, we had a planeload of Rockefellers and their senior staffers. And, I found out early in the flight that, improbably, every one of them had either been an intelligence agent or an FBI agent. And, of course, I had also belonged to this fraternity, and to make a long story short, I really believe that this did more to cement my credibility with the Rockefellers than anything I had done before or did since. If interested, you can read all the gory details in my tale "Spy Stories", in my book "Airplanes 'Round the World. also on this web site.
At our victory party in a New York hotel room, the General Manager of our little RCC company asked me if I really thought we could deliver what we had promised. I told him that I doubted it, but anyway it was not my worry, as my only job had been to sell it, I and I had done that. The told me that I was wrong about that, and on the spot appointed me as Project Manager, with responsibility to build and run the plant.
I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing, or how to go about it, so I said OK. The plan which I then developed, was to get Boeing to build the plant, and then get a big engineering and construction firm like Bechtel to do the installation. Turned out that neither company was interested. We finally got moving on building the plant, using a mixture of Boeing and Alaska Copper and Brass Corp people, working in an abandoned Boeing facility in Seattle. The installation at St. John though, proved a bit more difficult. We could just not get any legitimate construction company interested, for a reasonable price.
Finally, after spending several frustrating weeks running around the West Indies and the US east coast, without tangible results, I decided that we would do the job ourselves. To do this, I put together a consortium, consisting of the RockResorts maintenance organization, our New York engineers, an outfit out of Seattle called Turbo Energy Systems, and our own RCC. We called this unlikely outfit RCC Virgin Islands Inc. and incorporated it in the USVI, with myself as President. We then got moving on the site work, and surprisingly enough, things worked out very well.
Well we got the plant built, and test ran it in Seattle, then broke it down into modules and trucked it to West Palm Beach, along with associated parts, materials, and supplies. At West Palm, we loaded the whole works onto a RORO ship, and set sail for Saint John. (This was a roll on, roll off, ship, not unlike a WW II LST, and like an LST, it could disgorge its cargo onto an undeveloped beach.) We stopped in St. Thomas to pick up some heavy equipment, then hit the beach in St. John, unloaded the whole works, and trucked it to the job site on big four wheel drive oil field tractors which we had brought along. I’ll tell you, the island had never seen such a sight.
Now, we needed a water intake, and this is a story in itself. Finding nothing commercially available that would do the trick, I finally invented one, with the help of my engineering friends in NY. (Later, I even got a patent on the thing, but Boeing never followed up.) The basis of this contraption was an eight foot square concrete box, with hundreds of holes all over its surface, which was to be floated into place, filled with rocks, and sunk in the bay near the plant. A pipeline to the plant, and a pump, completed the installation.
So now all we had to do was build the box and get it in place, not such an easy task on that remote island. Well we built it in the village square, but one thing that stumped us was how to float this box into place, since it was to be perforated with hundreds of holes. The holes were about the same diameter as a Heineken bottle, so Alex and I came up with a novel solution. We would cast hundreds of Heineken bottles into the sides of the box, and after towing it to the proper location, would break out the bottles, and let the box sink. But how to get the empty bottles. We finally decided to let the resident natives help us, and we threw a great party, offering all the free beer they could drink. So we got the bottles, built the box, and then came the launch. An ancient front-end loader was the only piece of equipment on the island, the box was heavy, and we barely avoided launching the front-end loader, as well, in the process. According to our calculations, the box should have had plenty of buoyancy, but we must have slipped a decimal someplace, because it would barely float. Not to worry, we just lashed on a number of oil drums to improve the flotation, and the thing rode high and dry. (There are always plenty of old oil drums kicking around on a tropical island. Where else do you think that the natives get the instruments for their steel bands?)
So we tied it to our Bertram (boat) and started off. As we chugged along, drums started slipping off, and the contraption started riding lower and lower in the water, finally losing so much freeboard that waves started slopping in. We solved this problem handily, by putting some natives aboard the box to bail like mad. Then disaster threatened. Around the point came the mail boat, at a twenty knot clip, and throwing up a monster bow wave. It looked for all the world like a miniature tsunami coming our way. We blew the siren, fired off all the distress rockets, and madly waved our shirts, all of which seemed to be to no avail. But at the last moment the boat slowed to a stop, and we were saved. After that, the rest of the installation was more or less uneventful.
Well, after these and a lot of other interesting trials and tribulations, we got the plant set up and running. I came out of the adventure relatively unscathed, except I picked up a tropical ulcer, which didn’t heal for 10 years, and a nice case of malaria.
You can read more about trials and tribulations at Caneel Bay, in my "West Indies Adventures" stories in my book "Airplanes 'Round the World" , and the story "Caneel Bay Plantation" in my book Livin' 'Round the World", both on this web site.
The modular design proved to be a great success, but the plant itself, turned out to be not so successful. Although the plant produced lots of good water, and did turn out to be as efficient as planned, it was still more expensive to operate than conventional plants. This was because our system required a big electric motor running a monster blower, while conventional plants used a simple boiler. The only practical way to get electricity to run the big motor, in the backwaters of the world where we wanted to operate, was to make your own, using a diesel electric generator. This immediately negated all the savings from the efficient plant, because a diesel engine, at best, is only about thirty three percent efficient, and the boilers used in the conventional plants ran an efficiency of about ninety five percent. Oh well, live and learn.
Eventually, the engineers and marketing guys figured out that the only practical application for the machine was cleaning up cooling tower water at electric power plants, where the electricity required to run the apparatus was essentially free. Boeing eventually sold its share to Reading and Bates, and they went on to do very well in this niche application. During this time, I did a bit of preliminary work on the Navajo coal fired power plant at Page AZ, working with the Bechtel people who were actually building the plant, and the Arizona Salt River Project electric utility, which owned it.
With the water business disappearing I was out of a job, but not for long. I landed in the Minuteman organization, as a Program Manager on the Minuteman Vice President’s Program Management staff. I had known this guy briefly in my previous chasing around the country for Materiel, and I thought him one of the best managers in the Boeing Company. He also thought that I was OK, hence the appointment to his staff.
My new boss told me early on what he expected of me, and it was really simple.
First and foremost, give the customer exactly what he has contracted for, no more, no less. Second, use every opportunity to try to grow the account, and third, and most important, keep my troubles out of his office. These all turned out to be excellent points and served me in good stead in various subsequent assignments.
So what did he have me doing? Fixing a problem, of course. It seems that at this time, there was considerable trouble with a particular Minuteman system, and I was detailed to find the problem and fix it. Problem was, a radio link was unstable, and nobody could figure out why.
So, I assembled a team and went to work. And after a bit of investigation it became obvious that the problem was with the antennas. The gain, or ability to receive and amplify an incoming radio signal, seemed to vary for each antenna, and sometimes even varied at different times for the same antenna.
In checking further, we found that the difference in the antennas’ individual performances was caused by variations in the antenna manufacturing process itself. These antennas were being built by Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical, at an ancient brick plant, which they had just acquired, near Mexico Missouri, and their production process was totally out of control. So we started to painstakingly detail and standardize the manufacturing process, documenting every step of manufacture in excruciating detail. We then shipped each completed antenna assembly to the US Bureau of Standards antenna range near Denver, for extensive testing. Eventually, through this procedure, we figured out how to build an antenna, which performed acceptably, but we couldn’t seem to get repeatability in the manufacturing process.
Kaiser had just purchased this facility, and had staffed it with Southern California management types. It soon became obvious that part of the problem was friction between the Missouri pig farmers who were actually doing the work and these managers Kaiser had brought in to run the place. These guys didn’t understand each other at all, and that was not helping things a bit. Incidentally, although these Missourians worked in the factory, and maybe had for twenty years, they still thought of themselves as farmers, only working in town till they could amass a small stake.
It so happened that I had some Missouri pig farmer relatives, Charles and Margaret, who lived about 100 miles up the road. So I consulted with them and they suggested some things that I could do. I implemented most of their suggestions, and the situation immediately improved. First, we wrapped ourselves in the flag. This blatant appeal to patriotism would have fallen flat in cynical Southern California, but it worked here. We told them basically that what they were doing was important, and vital to the defense of the free world, and they bought it. Second we started company softball teams, giving the Missourians a chance to beat up on the So Cal guys in sports. We made a big deal of this, combining the games with picnics and other such events. Finally, my research indicated that due to shift starting and ending times, none of the boys thought that they were given adequate time at home to slop their hogs. We fixed this easily, by adjusting shift times. The upshot of all this was that the So Cal management and the Missouri farmers got to better know and feel comfortable with one another, and started working together as a team. They could then attack the manufacturing repeatability problem together and eventually we got it solved
This was all really a lot harder than it sounds, and in the course of events we actually took over the plant from Kaiser and ran it for a few months, eventually building them a whole new antenna production facility. Sometimes it takes some unusual efforts to get people to work together, and this time it paid off.
I also spent considerable time at the Kaiser materials labs in Pleasanton CA, just down the road from Benicia, CA, where my old buddy Fr John (who you met earlier) was ensconced at the time. Since his priory had good food, good booze, good entertainment, and was essentially free, it made eminent good sense to stay there, rather than a hotel. Problem was, since I would disappear right after work, and not show again till the next morning, I couldn’t convince my traveling companions that I was not shacking up with some woman. But hey, maybe they were just jealous.
During my travels for Minuteman I had occasion to meet a charming young lady named Jackie, who was running the Boeing office at Norton Air Force Base. I used to hang around Norton AFB a lot, not because of Jackie, but because Norton was Minuteman headquarters, and heeding my boss’ exhortation to grow the account, I spent many spare hours walking the halls, visiting offices, and successfully doing just that.
Now, many years later, I live just down the road in the Palm Springs area (Which I first got to know in my Norton AFB days), Jackie is a very successful real estate broker near Vista CA, and I play golf with her husband several times in a season.
This Minutemen program was mind boggling. Hundreds of missiles, each in its hardened silo, ready to rain death and destruction on anyone foolish enough to cross us. Even the missile itself was awesome to behold. Crouching there in its silo, emanating an odor just like cat poop (The smell was caused by the solid propellant continually boiling off), and humming softly. All this together was eerie in the extreme, and gave the impression that the thing was alive. A visit to an operational launch control center was also an awesome experience. Underground rooms full of equipment and electronics racks, the lights on the consoles glowing green, showing that the missiles were locked onto their respective Russian targets, and two Air Force Officers sitting at consoles several feet apart, ready, upon command, to simultaneously turn keys which would launch the awesome beasts.
Anyway, we had the problem almost solved and things were winding down. So, with nothing much else to do, several of us thought up a really improbable scheme. We would use our construction and system integration expertise to clear the Suez Canal of ships sunk there during the recent Arab Israeli war. The more we brainstormed this, the better it sounded, and we proceeded on to detailed planning. Now Boeing is a big company, with people from everywhere with all kinds of expertise. So we started investigating, and guess what, we found a painter in the paint shop, who had been a lieutenant in the Egyptian Navy, and a Suez Canal Pilot. This guy really thought that lightning had struck when he got pulled out of his painter job and made a manager in our operation. He, needless to say, was a big help and things were proceeding smoothly until we invited the Egyptian ambassador to visit us and listen to our plan. The visit went fine until the ambassador happened to mention what we were doing during a courtesy call on the President and CEO of Boeing, a crusty old Missourian named T Wilson. Wilson, of course, when hearing of this cockamamie scheme, was not pleased at all. Particularly as Boeing Commercial was trying to sell airplanes to these same Arabs, and any misstep on our part could probably queer that deal. His subsequent discussion with us started out with “You assholes….” and went down hill from there. The only guy who emerged relatively unscathed was the Egyptian lieutenant, who retained his management title and ended up in some engineering organization. At least though, Wilson now knew my name, and with any luck, he might someday forget why he knew it.
About this time, and for several years after, my buddy George, who you also met earlier, myself and one or two other guys, organized fishing trips to the backwoods of British Columbia for our boys and ourselves. We would literally haul truck and trailer loads of boats, outboard motors, food, boys and assorted gear up backwoods dirt roads to some out of the way lake, set up camp, and fish for several days. Everyone got on famously, we caught numerous fish, drank a lot of beer and gave the boys adventures, which they talk about to this day. One ritual which the boys particularly enjoyed, was their evening drink of Canadian Pop, which in reality was Kool Aid laced with Rye, which put them to sleep in a hurry, so the guys could get on with serious drinking. I describe one of these camps, and a pretty exciting adventure, on one of these trips further in the story "Canadian Fish Camp" in the book "Fishin' 'Roound the World" on this web site.
Fortunately, as I was contemplating my future after the Suez fiasco, I got a call one day from a guy at Bechtel, who I had known when working with them on power plants, and this set me off on another wild adventure which lasted for several years.
It seems that Bechtel had won the contract to build the north half of the Alaska Pipeline, from Fairbanks Alaska to Prudhoe Bay, and were just getting started on this project. They were having difficulties though, figuring out how to build, transport and install the installations they required in the Arctic, and having heard of my success with modular construction in the West Indies, and my logistics expertise, (which I personally didn’t think was all that great) they asked me if I could help them out on a consulting basis. I checked with Alford, and since things in my shop were winding down, and he could sell me for big money, he agreed, and I found myself in Alaska. I had always said that I would go anywhere in the world if somebody would pay for the trip, But Prudhoe Bay Alaska in the middle of the winter was a little much.
Well, I did manage to give Bechtel some help with the camps, but more importantly, saw a lot of business opportunity for Boeing. (Remember, they were still on this diversification kick.) I couldn’t get anybody at Boeing Seattle interested, but there was a minor subsidiary, Boeing Computer Services Inc. that had a small office in Anchorage. Ed was a hotshot salesman out of this office, and had already been knocking on Alyeska’s door. (Alyeska was a joint venture between six oil companies, and was the company, which actually built and operated the pipeline.)
So Ed and I teamed up, going after both Alyeska and Bechtel, and were successful beyond belief. We sold them on us running all their logistics and supply operation north of Fairbanks, as well as their MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operating) purchasing. We also snagged all their timekeeping in the camps, and other miscellaneous logistics work. Then, of course, we needed some people to manage the thing.
And guess what, almost all my old team at the “Cape” were available. They were really hotshot logistics guys and would work anywhere.
Between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay, most of the pipeline is above ground, due to permafrost. Ed and I saw an opportunity here, and won the contract to design the supports, which actually held the pipe itself. These things were more complicated than one might suppose. Many of them actually had built in refrigeration units, for instance, to keep the steel support from getting hot in the summer and melting the permafrost. This was also my first exposure to computer aided design, and I quickly became a believer. As an interesting sidelight, the environmentalists were worried that the caribou would be afraid to cross the above ground pipe, so at considerable expense, e every few miles, a section of the pipe was buried underground, thus providing a crossing place for the aforementioned caribou. Turned out that the pipeline didn’t bother the animals one bit. They would graze right alongside, and when they wanted to cross to the other side, would just duck their heads and walk under.
During the actual construction, incidentally, an Eskimo lady from the North Slope checked into the hospital in Fairbanks with a social disease. When questioned, she admitted that she had been servicing the pipeline workers, who had given her their paychecks in payment. To prove her point, she dug out a fistful of Alyeska paychecks, which on closer examination, turned out to be only the check stubs.
When this project was beginning to look like a full time proposition, I had asked my boss and mentor, Lionel Alford, what he thought of the situation. He said that a subsidiary was a good place to ride things out, and that Boeing Computer Services, or BCS as it was called, was the best of the lot. He also said that he would find me a job anytime I needed one. A lot of good that did really. Shortly thereafter he took over the Wichita Division, then he died on me.
So I transferred from Minuteman to BCS, and shortly became a Contracts Manager. That wasn’t as bad as it sounds, for a couple of reasons. First off, in BCS in those days, unlike the parent Boeing Company, Contract Managers, probably through some oversight, had unlimited authority to commit the BCS company, and had papers to that effect. Second, my immediate boss was a bumbling sort, who never really knew what was going on, and didn’t much care. He was a Harvard MBA graduate, but must have been kicked in the head by a horse after he graduated, because he was dumber than a box of rocks. Incidentally, flaunting his MBA, he married some breakfast food heiress who was supposed to be loaded. Turned out that she was broke, and he was dumb, but I suppose they deserved each other.
How I got to be a contracts Manager is also an interesting story. It seems that BCS had a resident Contracts Manager in Alaska, who we will call Dan, who was a nice enough sort, but not really a legal genius. In those days at BCS, incidentally, even though the contracts manager could commit the company, a wanna be lawyer in BCS headquarters, who had the exalted title of Vice President of Contracts, insisted in approving every major contract, as to form and language. Alyeska also had a resident Contracts Manager, a big guy (about 250 pounds) named Bill r. Bill had both an engineering and a law degree, along with an exceedingly short fuse. Although he was competent, he had a worse problem than we did. He had six Vice Presidents of Contracts, one for every oil company in the joint venture, who had to also approve every major contract as to form and language.
So, Dan and Bill would make a deal, it didn’t matter over what, then Butler would give it to his lawyers to draft the legal language. Then our VP of Contracts, the staff weenie, would take a look at it, and suggest changes. You know, back and forth, the way contracts are usually negotiated. The problems came when our VP, after everything was agreed upon, and ready to sign, would decide to move some wherases and hereunders around a bit more, and Dan, being a good troop, would pencil in the changes and trot off to see Bill. Bill, understandingly, got annoyed after this happened a couple of times, because each time, he would have to go to his six lawyers all over again. But what would get Bill really upset was when Dan, who knew nothing about law, would try to justify the changes. One day, predictably, when Dan was trying to sell some particularly asinine change, Bill snapped, picked Dan up bodily by the seat of the pants, and physically threw him out the front door, onto the sidewalk, with exhortations never to come back. So guess who got to be the new Contracts Manager. With some trepidation I called on Bill, found out what his problem was, and promised I would never do that to him. I didn’t, and we became good friends. As to how I handled our VP of Contracts. I ignored him. I had to put up with a lot of noise, but Alaska was a long distance, and five time zones away, and besides, it beat getting thrown out on the sidewalk. Incidentally, some time later, after I had saved the BCS Alaska operation from certain disaster, I was selected as the BCS Manager of the year. The VP Contracts was proud to come to that award dinner, but I told the General Manager that if that guy came, I wouldn’t, so he was told to stay home. But I am getting ahead of the story.
During this period in the 1980s and early ‘90s, the kids were grown up, and we had some money for a change. So Pat and I did a considerable amount of personal travel, including a couple of cruises and several trips to Europe and the West Indies. These are pretty well chronicled elsewhere on my web site, in the books "Crusin' 'Round the World", and Travelin' 'Round the World", so there is no use in going into those details here.
But this is probably as good as a place as any to talk about some interesting friends
I mentioned earlier that in the nineteen sixties I was active in the Boy Scouts. Actually I was recruited into that organization by the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church scoutmaster, Dave. Dave was an Army veteran, who had spent 8 years in the military, and was just starting a job with the City of Seattle, when we first met. Dave did not last long as Scoutmaster, but he and his wife Angie, became fast friends. Angie, incidentally, had a brother Horst, who had immigrated to Vancouver B.C. soon after the war. (Horst incidentally is the guy who taught me to fish.) Angie grew up during WW II in East Prussia, which is now part of Poland. It is not widely known, but in the closing days of the war, as the Russians were overrunning everything east of the Oder River, the German Kriegsmarine, or Navy, spent considerable time and effort ferrying German civilians out of East Prussia and into what is now West Germany. Angie was one of those fortunate people who the Navy helped. And, after a number of harrowing adventures, she and her sister Lilo hooked up with their brother Horst, who had been in the Luftwaffe, been captured by the Americans, and was now working for the Americans at an ordinance depot near Darmstadt. Dave, at the time was stationed at the same depot, and eventually, through Horst, Dave and Angie met. Military circumstances, though, precluded any serious involvement, and eventually Dave returned to the states to be discharged.
Meanwhile, Lilo married a German, who had a good job, and they lived happily ever after.
Dave, now being a civilian, went back to Germany, married Angie, and brought her and her daughter Marianne back to the States. In the meantime, another daughter, Christine, had been adopted by a kind German couple named Schaefer.
Fast forward 15 years. Our youngest daughter, Michelle, then a teenager, was really interested in Germany, and wanted to go there between school terms. So we made arrangements with Lilo and off went Michelle for the summer. She soon met Lilo’s niece Christine, and although they are over 10 years apart, become fast friends. In fact, Michelle spent several more summers in Germany, both with Lilo and with Christine.
During this time as well, Christine and Angie got to know each other again and everyone became a big happy family. Who says truth is not stranger than fiction. Now, all the old folks except Angie have died off, and everyone else is engaged in new interests, but it still makes quite a story.
After all those tales, I guess that now I had better get back to the story of how I saved the BCS Alaska operation from certain disaster.
The pipeline was winding down, but our BCS Alaska operation had been diversifying, as it were, and was growing at a good clip. We were becoming the largest computer service company in the State of Alaska, with a large part of our business being with the State itself. We gained most of this business by backing Jay Hammond in his bid to be elected governor, and working tirelessly for his election. When he did get elected, he showed his gratitude by throwing a large part of the state’s computing business our way, and before long, we were the state’s largest data processing and computer services supplier.
We were particularly favored by the state Department of Ecology, which was run by a Hammond appointee, Bill. Bill had been sent to Alaska ay the Republican National Committee to help Jay in his reelection campaign, had fallen in love with the state, and had stayed on. Bill also had recently partnered in a commercial salmon fishing venture with an Aleut native. This enterprise was based in a tiny fishing village in the Aleutians, named Nelson Lagoon, where the Aleut lived. Bill was attracted to this Aleut, mostly because he (the Aleut) owned a commercial salmon fishing license. These licenses were extremely valuable, and impossible for an outsider like Bill to obtain, thus the partnership.
In the meantime, unbeknownst to us at BCS, or any one else in Boeing, it seemed, another Boeing outfit named Boeing Engineering and Construction, (BE&C) had sold another State of Alaska department on the value of windmills for electric power generation in remote Alaska villages, and had contracted with the state for a pilot program at four remote sites. At some point along the line though, McConkey got into the act and made sure that Nelson Lagoon was one of the sites.
To make a long story short, the boys at Boeing Engineering and Construction didn’t have a clue as to what they were doing, and after scattering equipment all over the Aleutians, and blowing a substantial amount of Boeing money, they abandoned the operation and disappeared. Incredibly, we at BCS Alaska still didn’t know what was going on, and though I had heard rumors, I had been too busy to follow up.
Eventually the State figured out what had happened, and were they pissed. Bill in particular, as he had promised his buddies in Nelson Lagoon free electric power, and they were now asking him what happened. The Governor, who was a buddy of the judge who was sleeping with the Nelson Lagoon village chief’s white girl friend, (did you get all of that?) also started leaning on Bill, and really putting the screws to Boeing. These State guys didn’t know or care that we in BCS had nothing to do with the problem. All they knew was that we were Boeing and that Boeing had screwed up big time. Hammond, despite being our alleged friend was now threatening to pull our contracts, and the Alaska Attorney General was considering legal action.
Needless to say, this had the BCS Alaska management running around in circles, while BCS senior management in the lower 48 was calling for someone’s head, and Boeing Engineering and Construction was nowhere to be found.
At this time I was running a small construction operation in Alaska, under BCS auspices, and was also selling computer services to both the State and to commercial customers in Alaska. At the same time, as mentioned previously, I was a Vice President of BCS Canada, Ltd. On top of that, I was still a Contracts Manager and the closest thing BCS had to a legal expert in either Alaska or Canada.
While Boeing and BCS were locked into an argument about how we got into this mess, I started looking quietly for a way out. Eventually Boeing and the Boeing Engineering and Construction organization disclaimed all responsibility, and threw the whole mess into our laps. But by this time I had a plan. We needed to discredit wind power for electrical generation, but this was not too hard. BE&C had already done most of that work for us, and I finished the job by conducting a study as to the feasibility of wind power for remote villages. The conclusion, of course being that it was not feasible. This study resulted in a report (written by me) explaining that wind power generation would never work. I even got the state to pay for this dissertation.
But the State still had to have something to show for their involvement, so I proposed that we electrify Nelson Lagoon village, by installing a diesel power plant. I then sweetened the deal by offering to build an underground distribution system to pipe the electricity to every house. Bill jumped on this, as it would pacify his buddies in Nelson Lagoon, and incidentally save his fishing license. It would also get the Gov off his back. So Bill and the Gov said OK and now all we had to do was perform.
Since nobody else in BCS Alaska had a clue as to what to do, and since I already had the construction company, was still a Contracts Manager with authority to commit the company, and was the resident legal expert, I was drafted.
The first thing I had to do was negotiate a contract between my construction company (which was a subsidiary of BCS) and the state, agreeing to electrify Nelson Lagoon with diesel power, voiding the old contract with BE&C, and giving me $75,000 for the aforementioned paper discrediting wind power. We were having some difficulty making this a sole source contract, and not subject to competitive bid, till I got an old buddy, who was an assistant AG for the State, to legitimize the deal by using as precedent, some old fur trading cases, dating back to when Alaska was a territory.
Incidentally, over thirty years later, on a flight from Palm Springs to Seattle, my seatmate was a neat Alaskan lady, who had retired after many years with the Alaska State government. We were reminiscing over old times, and in the course of the conversation she said that she had always wondered how we pulled off that sole source contract.
I then joint ventured with Emerson GM Diesel in Seattle to furnish the equipment and an engineer, and for an Anchorage electrical contractor to do the actual work. The part with Emerson was a bit tricky, as I wanted Caterpillar diesels, but they finally agreed. (I had big problems with GM Allison Diesels on a previous Minuteman project, and was not about to take a chance on them here.) The contract clause which stated that Contractor would provide own sleeping bags, was also a bit unusual.
All this amid constant carping and second guessing by the VP Contracts, and other lower 48 naysayers. This finally got so bad that I had to retain a prestigious Seattle law firm to keep the VP Contracts under control, and borrowed a senior staff guy from the president of BCS to rein in the others. My management in Seattle was no help at all. They ran for cover at the first hint of trouble, and didn’t surface till the job was done, but then tried to take all the credit for its success.
So we chartered planes, airlifted the equipment to Nelson Lagoon, flew the crew out as well, and went to work. Later, a legend sprung up around Boeing that I had built a power plant in the Aleutians with nothing but a DC-3 load of whisky and a duffle bag full of twenty dollar bills. I did nothing to discourage this story, and actually the part about the whisky and the twenty dollar bills was mostly true, except that there was not quite an airplane load of whisky involved. As to the job, it proceeded well, as we had some really good guys who knew what they were doing and an excellent construction boss, me. Remember, I had built a desal plant in the West Indies, and compared to that, this job was a piece of cake.
The natives, aside from drinking all my whisky, were really neat people to work with, and furnished a lot of the labor. The Village Chief, incidentally, was a great help. He was a neat old guy named Gunderson, who claimed that he was half Aleut, half Swede, half Russian, and half Coast Guard. He also groused continuously that in the old days, nobody wanted to be an Aleut, but now that there was money in it, everyone wanted to be one. . There were many other interesting characters around town, like Richard, the town drunk, who I had to keep supplied with whisky, as a bribe not to work. When I gave him a bottle, he would disappear for two days, thus giving me a couple days of relative peace and quiet.
Our equipment and supplies were shipped in via a converted PBY seaplane, or a Cessna 185, landing on the village street. There was an abandoned oil company airstrip about five miles from the village, but an enterprising native had somehow gotten title to it via the Native Land Claims act and was charging landing fees. It really didn’t matter though, because there was no road from there to the village anyway. There was a satellite telephone system, but nobody had figured out how to hook it up, and radio communications were unreliable due to interference caused by the Northern Lights. The weather, while not really cold, was just genuinely awful, which limited flying to an average of one day out of three. Since everything was tundra, our two principal means of transportation in and around the village were an old airplane with wings and tail removed and large tires fitted, and an ancient army surplus weapons carrier equipped with wheels and tires salvaged from DC-3 airplanes.
The only civilization anywhere near Nelson Lagoon was a girl watchman at a deserted cannery at Port Moller, about 20 miles away. She, though, did have a radiophone, which worked most of the time. So the way to send messages was to get on the CB to her, and have her relay a message on the radiophone. Of course the whole village monitored the CB, but I finally got even with them. It was just getting dusk the day when the installation was finally complete, and I was ready to throw the switch. But before I did, I got on the CB to the lady in Port Moller, told her I was going to throw the switch, and asked her to watch the western sky for a big explosion. This really shook up the natives.
These are just some of our experiences in the course of this job, but it got done, the village had lights, the Governor was happy with BCS again, and I was a certified hero. Of course the previously mentioned story about John building a power plant in the Aleutians with no resources other than a DC-3 load of whiskey and a duffle bag full of $20 bills also helped spread my fame.
Incidentally, you can hear more improbable stories about Nelson Lagoon and some of my other Alaskan adventures, along with some real Alaska lore, in my "Nelson Lagoon" stories in my book "Airplanes 'Round the World, and the stories "Alaska" and "Nelson Lagoon" in my book "Livin' 'Round the World,
This led to a couple of promotions, and I settled down in BCS Western District headquarters in Seattle with one of the best jobs I ever had.
First off, I was assigned as head of all BCS telecommunications in North America. I also sat on the Bid Board, which decided which of the many opportunities brought in by the salesmen we would pursue. And, improbably, I was still a Contracts Manager, as no one had remembered to cancel that out. But most importantly, I was head of a small BCS division, with carte blanche to pursue computing and construction opportunities all over the world, the only caveat being that I had to make money.
And did we move out. We turned down a power plant in Chad, but bid a job in Cabo San Lucas, which we lost. We did, though win a computing job from the Army Corps of Engineers in Saudi Arabia. We then branched out into the Police Dispatch and Command and Control business where we invented Mobile Digital Terminals. This essentially was putting computers in cop cars and linking them by radio with a central dispatch center, as well as appropriate databases. In this product line alone, we modified a police dispatch system in Oakland, built and installed a brand new command control and dispatch system in Portland, and had work lined up in several more cities.
Technically, this setup was a fairly primitive computer coupled with a police radio in the cop car. Since the computer was digital, and the radio was analog, we needed some kind of a conversion box. This, of course was a modem, a normal part of any telecommunications computer interface. But one that worked in this type of application had not yet been invented, so one evening I sat down in a hotel room in Portland and designed one. It functioned as anticipated, and we were off and running. Incidentally, we needed a name for this entire contraption, so we called it a Mobile Digital Terminal, or MDT for short. A name, which has stuck with cop car computers to this day.
What we were doing here was nothing less than revolutionary. The cop on the street could now instantly access relevant databases, like arrest records, stolen car reports, vehicle registrations, etc, from the comfort of his car, and without cumbersome radio checks. The Sergeant supervising a shift at a precinct now knew precisely where his men were, and what they were doing. The Captain in charge of an entire shift had a real time graphic display of exactly what was happening crime wise, in the entire city, and could deploy resources as appropriate. And finally, we could spit out reams of statistics, everything from manpower utilization to crime trends, by category.
Working with cops and city officials was particularly interesting. Wending one’s way through city politics, a necessary part of the job, was sometimes more challenging than the technical aspects. As to cops, they are used to throwing their weight around, and I was not about to be intimidated, so confrontations were the norm.
I remember one particularly contentious meeting with police senior management. Now these guys usually dressed in civvies, but for this meeting, they were all in uniform, and armed to the teeth. I walked into the room, sized up the situation and remarked that it looked like I was outgunned.
I further announced that there would be no meeting till they got rid of the hardware, which of course, they were not about to do. So the meeting was cancelled. But when it was rescheduled for the next morning, all the cops showed up in civvies, with nary a gun in sight.
I also had to put up with some pretty crude cop humor. Like when I asked to be picked up at the airport, and was met by two beefy cops, who proceeded to make a big thing of “arresting” me right there in the concourse, then laughing about it later.
We also, for awhile, had our very own cop car, complete with lights and sireen. This came about because we needed a prototype to test our equipment, so the cops loaned us a car.
This car though, wasn’t as much fun to drive as one might think. If one traveled at anything over the speed limit, police dispatch would get calls saying that car so and so was speeding on such and such street. If we were good boys, and obeyed the limit, cars would pile up behind us in a massive jam. So one couldn’t really win.
There were also crude attempts at bribery, like when a Captain I was working with decided that he liked my new leather jacket. But we always seemed to get the job done, the systems worked flawlessly, and the senior commanders had better visibility and control than they had ever dreamed possible.
While all this was going on,, we were continuing our construction business in Alaska, gearing up to handle a contract we had won to provide all telecommunications for a major gas pipeline, and getting our feet wet in the ATM business, which was just getting off the ground. In this venture alone, we set up a computer system for The Exchange, in Seattle, and an ATM system for a bank in Patterson, New Jersey. We also were dabbling in computing for the Canadian oil industry, and doing some miscellaneous computing and business consulting in various places.
I ran this empire with a small technical and business staff in Seattle, and a BCS manager or two for each specific operation. The balance of our staffing, which fluctuated substantially depending on workload, was accomplished with contract programmers, systems analysts, and hardware and software engineers. This staffing method was a first for any Boeing operation, but it served us well.
My personal time was roughly split as follows: Forty percent working alone or with salesmen to corral new business. Twenty percent on administrative and personnel activity in Seattle, five percent on telecommunication problems, fifteen percent on monitoring costs and schedules for ongoing operations, including monthly or quarterly program reviews, and a final twenty percent, actually managing the day to day operations of the various projects. And I hope that adds up to one hundred percent. I was my own boss, traveling a lot, making BCS some money, and generally having a good time.
You can read more stories about these times in tales from my books "Airplanes 'Round the World" and "Livin' 'Round the World" both on this web site.
But then disaster struck. The Boeing Commercial Airplane Group was launching a new airliner called the 767, with approx fifteen percent of the structure work to be done in Japan, by Japanese companies, and approx ten percent to be done in Europe. The business arrangements for both these ventures were undefined, but were planned to be something between a conventional procurement contract and a joint venture. Costs had not been determined either, but were estimated to be in the neighborhood of three and a half billion dollars for the total first five hundred airplane contract.
Hw did I fit into all this? My work at BCS had come to the attention of some Boeing Commercial big shot. And he decided that if I cold handle hundred thousand and million dollar projects so efficiently, that I should have a chance to handle really big money. He also decided, with typical Boeing Commercial logic, that since I had lived in, and had experience with Europe, that I should be tapped to run the Japanese operation.
I was not at all interested in this opportunity for several reasons. First, I was not impressed with the Boeing Commercial management, for reasons, which I discussed earlier. And second, I liked the job I was doing, was reasonably good at it, and was managing to make a little money for BCS. So I told them no thanks. A bidding war then ensued between Boeing Commercial and BCS, which BCS won, and which gained me two more promotions. Finally though, a very senior Boeing executive,
intervened and decreed that I was going to work for Boeing Commercial. And that was that.
On the plus side though, Boeing was just getting into the business of buying big chunks of airplane structure overseas, I had substantial purchasing experience, and it looked like I might be getting in on the ground floor of something interesting.
So here I am, running an operation charged with buying two billion dollars worth of airplane structure, practically the entire body of the 767 airplane, from three companies in Japan. (Two billion was the Japanese share of the three and a half billion total.) I am working, incidentally, for a guy Named Fred, a Luxemburger with an interesting European past.
It turned out that the Japanese companies were as good or better at building aircraft structure, than the shops in Boeing Commercial, and had nothing to learn from us, so at least I didn’t have to worry about getting quality hardware, delivered on time to support the production line. Just to be sure though, Boeing senior management decreed that we would assign large teams of Boeing experts at each company to teach the Japanese how to build hardware the Boeing way. Again, in Boeing Commercial’s inimitable way, these teams were generally staffed with rejects and misfits that their parent engineering and manufacturing organizations were only too glad to get rid of. The Japanese soon figured out as well, that these teams were useless, so they put them up in fancy offices, and fed them reams of meaningless data, but otherwise pretty well ignored them. The teams themselves figured out pretty quickly that they had little value to add, and generally treated these assignments as paid vacations.
My real job then, was developing and negotiating contractual arrangements with the Japanese, then administrating the contracts. Which was basically making sure that they would build the stuff they had agreed to, for the agreed price. This was really tough to do, because the devious little bastards kept at least three sets of books, and would cheat anyone, including their own government, if they thought that they could get away with it. To make matters worse, they insisted on setting up a quasi governmental organization, CTDC, which all the business arrangements ran through, thereby further muddying the water.
But let me digress a moment to emphasize this flexible bookkeeping point. One time I was riding first class on an airplane from Seattle to Wichita with the President of one of the Japanese companies. As the scotch flowed freely, we began talking finance and labor rates. He eventually came around to telling me not to worry, that he could cook the books to give me any labor rate I wanted. A boast, which he conveniently forgot, as soon as he sobered up.
The Japanese companies were given low interest loans by their government to tool up for our work. These loans only had to be paid back, if and when the Japanese companies showed a profit, which was expected sometime in the future. Incidentally, they had hit Boeing up for a couple of hundred million for tooling, as well, and this money did not have to be paid back. Anyway, the Japanese companies consistently whined that they were losing money, would trot out figures to allegedly prove it, and would continually want to renegotiate.
They would peddle this bullshit to anyone who would listen. The Japanese government, top US government officials, senior Boeing executives, and any other big shot that they could corner. They also spread the fiction, which was eagerly swallowed by Boeing sales people, that all Asian airlines looked to Japan Airlines for guidance, and would buy any airplane, which JAL did. This was an obvious falsehood, as the rest of Asia, remembering the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, generally couldn’t stand the Japanese.
The result of all of this, of course, was that the Boeing Commercial big shots, continually told me to take it easy on the Nips, because if I pissed them (the Japanese) off, they might stop buying airplanes.
But it was not all work and no play. Pat and I got an audience with Emperor Hirohito, and I got to know a real neat Japanese movie star named Maki. (Yes, a real movie star.) I also hung in a lot of expensive Geisha houses, but my best drinking companions were friends I made in a small Tokyo bar, as I was the only foreigner who ever frequented the place. I also traveled around Japan quite a bit, climbed almost to the top of Mount Fuji, and was finally able to strike off on my own to really explore the country. I did meet some other interesting people. Hideko Tojo, a designer of the Zero fighter and son of the wartime premier, a couple of Japanese I class submarine captains, and a pilot who had flown Zeros in combat during the entire war, are guys who immediately come to mind..
I also developed many Japanese “friends” but when I was no longer in a position to pass out money, most of them kind of disapeared. I must have made some impact though, because when I met a young Japanese businessman at an air show in 2004, he said that he had read about me in a Japanese history book.
My eight years of involvement with the Japanese was both interesting and frustrating. Along with most others who really worked with and understood the Japanese, the better I knew them, the less I liked them. Suffice to say that the stereotype portrayed in WW II propaganda, may not have been far from the truth. Although I never actually lived there, I made dozens trips to Japan, had a large staff working there, traveled extensively in the country, and dealt with senior industry and government officials on a daily basis. Through all this, I believe that I became as “expert” on Japan as any non oriental could be. Many in Government, industry and academia must have agreed, because I was routinely asked to share my expertise with the CIA, the Commerce Department, and several universities. . My visitors also included esteemed professors from various universities, including the U of W Jackson School of Far East Studies, and the MIT Sloan Institute.
One significant happening in this regard, was that I called the early 1990’s collapse of the Japanese stock and real estate markets, and the subsequent Japanese economic slide into deflation, right on the money. In the nineteen eighties, you may remember, Japan was heralded as the new economic miracle, Japanese management and industrial practices were considered the best in the world, and the experts were telling us that it would only be a matter of time before Japan assumed world leadership. I held a contrary view, basically believing that the Japanese industrial miracle was an illusion, the economy was grounded in sand, and that soon it would all collapse upon itself. Many illustrious personages beat a path to my door to hear these heretical views. Among them being CIA agents, Department of Commerce functionaries, and various consulting types. I never did convince anyone, but you know who turned out to be right. You also know that a prophet is not honored in his own country.
During this Japan period, I also expanded my activities to take in Southeast Asia, The diverse cultures, religions, and people in these countries made life really interesting and I found them more than willing to do business with an American firm. I even found the Moslems in Pakistan and Indonesia, although challenging, to be reasonably easy to work with, and willing to tolerate western ways
Make no mistake though. Asians are different. Their religion, culture, environment and life experiences vary greatly from ours, as do their values, their work ethic, and their general outlook on life. That is not to say that Asian ways are bad, they are just different. For example, Americans and Europeans generally have the “hunter” mentality. They will go out and slay the savage beast, and if they do not like their surroundings, they will try to change them, or move on. Asians are more like “farmers”. They are more likely to adapt to their surroundings, and accept what life offers them.
Anyway I stayed on that job until Nov 1988. During that time I visited Japan about 75 times, and filled up two passports with visa stamps from there and other East Asian countries. South Korea, Nationalist China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Thailand, to name those, which come immediately to mind. I even very briefly was in North Korea, but didn’t get my passport stamped for that one. I even took time out for a heart attack, about halfway through. The attack didn’t turn out to be real serious, and left no aftereffects at all, but did earn me a 90 day leave, and a respite from travel for a few months. Anyway, my experiences on that assignment, and in that part of the world would fill at least one large book, which I might write some day, if the mood strikes me.
Meanwhile, you can read some of the more humoristic aspects of those times in my stories "Tales of Southeast Asia" from my book "Airplanes 'Round the World", and the tale, "Japanese Tour Guides" in the book "Tidbits from 'Round the World" both on this web site
Anyway, I eventually parted company with the Japanese and the assorted other East Asians, and found myself on the staff of the Vice President of Materiel, as a kind of roving ambassador without portfolio.
This was really an interesting job. I checked out potential suppliers, mostly in Europe, did a study on out of production spares, which went nowhere, and had a few other interesting experiences, some of which I will recount.
One story particularly is worth repeating. You may remember that British Aerospace, the major British aircraft and Aerospace Company, had in the mid eighties, bought Rover Motor Car Company, the major British motor car producer. After the acquisition, and in the course of their housecleaning at Rover, British Aerospace rounded up all the malcontents and misfits, transferred them to a small aircraft factory British Aerospace was running near Southampton, and then sold the whole shebang to an unwary investor, under the name of Aerostructures Hamble. The CEO of Aerostructures Hamble turned out to be an old con man, the ex President of Rover Motor cars.
So this guy decided to fill his plant with Boeing work, and proceeded with his marketing plan, which incidentally was one of the best con jobs I have ever seen. First for a retainer of 50,000 pounds a year, he signed on the Chairman of British Airways, as the Chairman of the Hamble Board. Now British Airways was and is one of Boeing’s biggest customers, and Boeing senior management would do anything to please the Chairman. My sources in England at that time though, told me that this guy was getting senile, and was losing his grip, or otherwise he never would have gotten mixed up in this wild scheme. Our Hamble friend’s next step then was to wine and dine some very senior Boeing Commercial executives, including my boss. He pulled out all the stops on this, bringing them and their wives to Britain, not once, but several times, first class on British Airways, , of course, for rounds of London theatres and shopping, also riding to the hounds, shooting over the dogs, and other veddy British activities. Our friend even got the British Royal Family to join in the festivities, (This was not hard to do, as I will explain later) and this really wowed the hicks, especially the ladies. Almost none of the Boeing senior management guys, incidentally, could ever resist an expense paid boondoggle like this. We even coined a phrase for it, Industrial tourism.
After a few months of this softening up, the Hamble guys ready for the hard sell, and CEO and his entourage showed up at our offices looking for work. I was skeptical about the whole thing, but seemed, at that point to be the only one.
Partly because of this, I guess, my boss asked me, on my next trip to Europe, to take a look at this Hamble operation, which I did. And in my report. I said, essentially, that although the lads in the shop were OK, the management was universally incompetent, and some of them seemed to be crooks, who would probably loot the company and disappear. The other guy who my Boss asked to check the place out was the head of our British Operations Office. He, thinking he knew which side his bread was buttered on, took a look, and came back with a glowing report that the factory was great, the management was outstanding, and we should fill the factory with work forthwith. At this point, my boss asked if we had both looked at the same factory, and proceeded to fill it with work regardless of my report. My friend, Sam, who should have managed this activity, would have nothing to do with it after hearing my story, so first mistake, the boss assigned the project to another director who was far from the sharpest knife in the drawer.
One could write a Harvard Business School case study on what went wrong from there on out. As I figured, the management at Aerostructures Hamble had no idea what they were doing, The incompetent Boeing director who had the assignment for Boeing then put in a team of incompetent Boeing guys, and gals, to manage the factory, and things got worse. In the meantime some of the senior management, as I predicted, ran a big embezzlement scam, but fortunately got caught. Anyhow nothing got produced for years, the Boeing guy who wrote the glowing report got fired, and ended up making sausage in Seattle. His successor also got fired, along with the unfortunate director who originally took the assignment, and most of the resident team. While this was going on, British Aerospace was sitting on the sidelines, more amused than anything else.
The thing finally got fixed, kind of, when a senior executive talked Sam into running the project. By this time I was working for British Aerospace as a consultant, and I finally convinced them that it was in the best interest of both British Aerospace and Boeing to get things fixed. So Sam, myself and British Aerospace, between us, forced some serious management changes at Hamble, and at last got some production going.
You can read some of the more humorist aspects of this fiasco in my tale "Fine British Workmanship" in my book "Brits 'Round the World" on this web site.
Another assignment, which was kind of interesting, was fixing the 747-400 cabin management system. The 747-400, which was just going into service, had a state of the art electronic cabin management system, which was produced by Hughes Aircraft, in Mission Viejo CA. This system turned the lights on and off, monitored the level of the water in the lavatory tanks, played the movies and the in flight announcements, and did most everything else, except scratch your back. Problem was that it didn’t work very well, and the airlines were really getting pissed. After conventional remedies, including putting a team of Boeing experts resident in the plant, had been tried and failed, my boss, getting tired of taking the heat, dispatched me to California to take a look. Well, to make a long story short, a three day fact finding trip turned into a six month project, but we did get the problem solved.
About four hours into my first visit, it became apparent that the Hughes Vice President running the place was a big part of the problem. It took another two days to get him replaced by a very senior Hughes troubleshooter type, who at least had an open mind, and we were off to a good start.
To get some of the heat off, so that we would have some time to figure out what was going wrong, I came up with this novel approach. Over Hughes objections, I ordered them to assign a Hughes tech rep at every airport where 747-400 airplanes were landing in commercial service. The rep’s qualifications were not important and his task was simple. Wearing a white jump suit with Hughes Aircraft emblazoned on the back, and carrying a flashlight and screwdriver, he was taxed with meeting every 747-400 airplane landing at his assigned airport and interviewing the Capitan and Purser or chief flight attendant. He would introduce himself, and then ask if there had been problems with the cabin management system. If the answer was in the affirmative, he would poke around in the electronics with flashlight and screwdriver, and mutter humm…. a lot. It was all stagecraft, as most of the so called experts didn’t know a transistor from a resistor, but it had the desired effect. Complaints immediately dropped to about 20 percent of the previous level, giving the Hughes guys some breathing room, and time to figure out what was going wrong. We then started some systematic trouble shooting, and quickly found that the difficulty was multiple manufacturing process problems. We identified and fixed them one at a time, and eventually developed a stable repeatable process, which produced acceptable cabin management systems.
About the second thing I did after arriving at Hughes, (First thing was firing the Vice President. Remember?) was to send the Boeing resident team experts home and replace them with a smart, and incidentally, attractive, young lady buyer by the name of Jeanie. Her assignment was general helper, maintainer of the records, and most importantly, keeping the Hughes Vice President who was now running the plant under control. I’ll tell you, I couldn’t have done the job without her.
You can read more about Jeanie and the Hughes saga in my story "Newport Beach" in my book "Livin' 'Round the World" on this web site.
Anyway, we got the job done, and managed to have some fun in the process. In the course of this project Hughes began to think that I was some kind of a genius, because I could fix problems in their supply chain before they even knew they had a problem. They were particularly impressed when I could get previously unobtainable parts from Japan to appear like magic. None of this, of course, was any big deal, as I had been doing it for almost half my life.
Hughes, in fact, was so impressed that they offered me a job as their Director of Materiel. This sounded OK to me, as I was about to retire from Boeing anyway. The base salary of $100,000 per year sounded OK, and I got them to agree to throw in an expense paid apartment, and a car. (Remember, Hughes was a division of General Motors, and had lots of cars.) The deal foundered though, when they declined to pick up the car insurance, which is expensive as hell in the L.A. area. Oh well.
Thinking of retirement, on weekends I sometimes explored Southern California, including the Palm Springs area, looking for potential get away spots. But during the latter part of this assignment, I begin an erratic schedule of travel to Seattle, sometimes as often as twice a week. When questioned, I was kind of evasive and noncommittal, but finally my boss, the VP, braced me and I had to tell him the truth. Which was… that I had been diagnosed with Prostate Cancer and was trying to decide on treatment options. Boy, did he feel like a jerk. Anyway, I finally decided on an operation, and then ended up with six weeks of radiation, which all in all made me a pretty sick boy. But everything was successful. The cancer went away, never to return, and the side effects were minimal.
It took quite a while to recover from the radiation, so the VP gave me a pretty good goof off job. The 777 program was just starting, and he put me in charge of Materiel liaison with Engineering. This mostly consisted of nosing around the engineering department seeing what was going on, and hopefully making a helpful suggestion or two
I soon got bored with this, and in fact was staying home about half the time, but I was feeling better every day. Anyway, about this time, Airbus was beginning to sell airplanes, and even though they had managed to sell a few in North America, was not perceived by Boeing management as any real threat. After all, what did a bunch of Frogs, Limeys and Krauts know about building and selling airplanes? (Quite a bit, as it turned out.) Boeing was king of the hill and would stay that way till the end of time. These guys even believed that Airbus had a considerable number of planes parked on the hardstands at Toulouse, which they had built but were unable to sell. (Which turned out to be an unfounded rumor) But I, in kicking around in the world’s aircraft factories, had seen Airbus parts being produced, and was impressed with their design. My work with 777 engineering was also starting to raise my level of concern, as they were basically designing just like they had ever since the B-17, and were not really interested in any new ideas.
I got to thinking more and more about this and finally asked my boss, the VP, if I could go to Europe, muck about the Airbus plants a bit, and see what I could sniff out. He said, OK, and that he would get me some contacts, a task at which he failed miserably. So, giving up on him, and brushing off my old intelligence skills, I headed for Airbus country. To make a long story short, in the space of six months, I managed to penetrate the shops and engineering offices of all the German, English and Spanish partners, and even visited several major subcontractors.
The more I saw, the more alarmed I became, and returned home to write a six page summary report, which basically said that the Airbus people, on the whole, were bright, dedicated and hard working young people. Also, in my opinion their engineering was better, manufacturing was more advanced, production costs were lower, they were beginning to learn how to sell, and their customer support expertise was starting to approach Boeing levels. My conclusion was that they were eating our lunch, and that if we didn’t wake up, in ten to fifteen years they would be the dominant civil aircraft producer in the world. The boss liked my report, and sent it to every Division General Manager in the Boeing Commercial Airplane organization. The result, nada. No one was interested. It didn’t change anyone’s mind one iota. I even offered to bring a couple of Airbus structure designers over to Seattle, on my own budget, to work with our engineers on the 777 design, but the Chief Engineer said that he didn’t need any of that kind of help. Even the CIA was not interested in my findings, as they were hung up on the Japanese threat. Which, as I mentioned earlier, was non existent as far as commercial airplanes were concerned.
About this time, our family made a major change in our living arrangements. The old house in the University District of Seattle was showing it’s age, the family was scattering to the four winds, and it was time to make a move. So, we sold the place for about ten times what we had paid for it, put the money in the stock market, and moved into a real nice mobile home park just south of Everett. (About 25 miles north of Seattle) Coincidentally, at about the same time, our division general manager decided to move our organization from Renton, about 15 miles south of Seattle, and a 40 mile drive from my new home, to an industrial park only three miles away. Talk about luck. I got some flack at work about living in a “trailer park” but generally things worked out well, the stock market flourished, and we lived in that place for the next ten years.
During this time we also fell heir to a dog, “Summit”, a real laid back but smart golden retriever. He lived with us, and with our son Whalen, for several years.
Now is probably as good a time as any to talk about Cottonwood Terrace Colony, colloquially known as “The Property” or “The River”.
In the late sixties we had been looking around for a piece of recreational property, but could find nothing that really suited us. Finally we heard of a development on the Stilliguamish River near the town of Arlington, where, it was said, one could rent a campsite. We checked this out, and yes it was true. Seems a reclusive Seattle multi millionaire, named John Hauberg, who Pat just happened to know from her charitable activities, had bought much of the land north of Arlington, between I-5 and the National Forest boundary to the east, and was developing it in various ways.
The development we were interested in was on the north side of the Stilliguamish, about three miles east of Arlington. It consisted of 28 lots strung along the river for about a mile, renting for $150 per year each. So we immediately signed up for one of the upper lots and started to develop the place.
First improvements were a 16 foot trailer and a shed, but a 24 footer almost immediately replaced the 16 footer. There was no electricity, but ample piped in water, so we made do with propane lights and heaters, and later, solar electricity. Eventually, we ended up with a park model RV 40 feet long, with two tip outs. A 400 square foot mansion.
We were just starting to enjoy the place when disaster struck. The County threatened to shut the place down for numerous code violations.
It seemed that Hauberg deliberately hired incompetents to manage his holdings. Maybe he was trying to lose money, or perhaps he wanted to give the bottom quarter of the class gainful employment. In any event, anything those folks touched turned to you know what, including our project.
Well, after long soul searching we offered to take the project over and run it ourselves, and Hauberg finally agreed. So we made peace with the County, and set up what amounted to a Homeowners Association. The Association leased the entire property from Hauberg on a long term basis, and then subleased lots to individual members. This actually worked well for 34 years, and we really made good use of the place.
We were always in residence there during summer weekends, and I often commuted from there to work as well. Our kids, especially the two boys, loved the place, and along with enjoying themselves on the lot, roamed the surrounding tree farm afoot, on go karts and later, on motorcycles.
We make several lifelong friends among the other members, and there was always something going on at our lot. I, incidentally was active in management of the place, and held several offices, including president a couple of times.
After we settled in California, things changed. Originally inhabited by mostly Boeing executives, the member mix changed over the years to mostly bread truck drivers and grocery clerks. They were basically OK people, but kind of slobs in maintaining the place, and not too bright in dealing with the property owner.
Hauberg died in about 2002 and his son in law, who took over the place, had a somewhat different management philosophy. This along with some serious miscalculations, and some really stupid owner relations blunders on the part of the Board, caused us to lose the lease and have to vacate in the summer of 2005. At least by that time the kids were grown, most of our friends from the place had passed on, and we had pretty much lost interest. Anyway, a good time was had by all for 37 years.
We can’t really leave The Property without a discussion of go-karts. Seems that when Mark was about eight I built him a go kart, and this started a kart frenzy, which lasted about five years. We built better and better machines for each of the boys, and they would pack a lunch, and then disappear to the surrounding tree farm to ride the fire trails till late afternoon. If we really needed them, we rang a bell which could be heard for miles. The boys finally graduated to off road motorcycles, totally wearing out two in the process, and ultimately learned to drive our truck on these fire roads. All in all it was good clean fun, and kept everyone occupied for years.
At this point though, I need to tell you about the ultimate go kart. I built this machine from scratch in our go Kart shop at the Ravenna property, and was it a beauty. It had a 125 cc motorcycle engine, a four speed syncromesh transmission, a differential, just like a car, automobile type controls, gas, clutch, brake, and all, and to top it off, it had sliding pillar independent front suspension, just like an old Morgan sport car, and rack and pinion steering. This Kart was amazing. It would go about fifty MPH, had awesome acceleration, and handled like a racecar. Ill tell you, going into four wheel drifts on the corners of those dirt roads was a real blast. It’s a real wonder that someone didn’t kill himself.
One activity, which was an offshoot of the Property, was a mini vacation group. Len and Ann, Bob and Roberta, and Duane and Elizabeth, who were all residents at the Property and owned travel trailers, as well as occasional others, along with us, would take five or six mini vacations per year, trailering around the Pacific Northwest, camping, fishing, or just hanging out. We bought a 1963 Aloha 16 foot travel trailer, and used it for years in this activity. Along the way, we totally restored it, and finally used it as a bunkhouse at the Property when the group broke up.
But back to the job. As I said, the 777 was starting up, I knew my way around the industry and was not very busy, so they asked me to develop sources for all the major structural items. Body panels, tail, landing gear, wing parts not built by Boeing, etc. As I was going to do most of the sourcing they also appointed me as the contact for anyone wanting to get a piece of the action on the 777. The main purpose of this appointment, incidentally, was to keep bothersome salesmen out of everyone else’s hair. Anyway, I put together a small staff, and went to work. First, we figured out everything we needed to buy, and then we sorted these items into about 40 major work packages. We next found a potential supplier for each work package, and got senior Boeing management approval. We then qualified the supplier, and turned the package over to a buyer to negotiate the actual contract. The only exception to this was with any French company, where I retained authority to complete the entire deal.
This assignment turned out, among other things, to be a free ticket to travel anywhere in the world I wanted to go, to chase down a potential supplier. I made the most of this, and managed to hit such interesting places as Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, and even Gibraltar a couple of times, along with multiple trips to most of the major European countries. I spent a lot of time in France working with potential French companies, particularly Dassault, which was located in a real nice resort area on the French Spanish border. In my wanderings along this border, incidentally, I met some interesting Spanish smugglers, and some real picturesque Basque fishermen. And yes, the Dassault guys several times provided me with a plane and pilot. No wonder that I spent so much time around Dassault.
You can read more about these smugglers in my tale "Basque Smugglers", in my book "Tidbits''Round the world, on this web site.
In the course of these travels, naturally, I also found time to visit my good friends in Germany and Austria.
Speaking of friends, we have been blessed with many, over the years, some of whom I have mentioned earlier. Due to my international activities, these friends are all over the world, and we still keep in touch with many.
One of the packages we were sourcing was landing gear. Now there are were at that time two excellent US companies which built gear, but I was not satisfied with either one’s engineering capability. I felt that this was important because, at least in my view, Boeing was also weak in this area. Needing more information, I grabbed my credit card and suitcase, and proceeded on a whirlwind visit to every landing gear manufacturer in the world who I had not visited previously. In a couple of weeks I got quite a bit of information and even had a little fun, particularly in Liverpool.
You can hear more about this fun in my story "Liverpool and the Beatles" in my book, "Brits 'Round the World" on my web site.
Anyway, when I got home and analyzed the data, it seemed that the two US companies were as good as anyone at manufacturing, but that a French company, Messier-Hispano-Bugatti did have outstanding engineering capability. Incidentally, that was the same company, which produced the legendary Bugatti and Hispano Suiza automobiles in the twenties and thirties, and their people were amazed when I remembered those cars. In fact, I still have a large picture of a 1936 Hispano Suiza roadster, which was given me by the president of the company. The car, incidentally, was alleged to cost upwards of fifty thousand British pounds in 1936, when the exchange rate was about four dollars to the pound. But I am digressing again.
Since the French company’s engineering was so good, or at least good enough to fool me, I proposed to each US company that they join forces with the French. One company would have none of it, but Don, the sales manager of the other company, and a good engineer in his own right, thought the idea might have merit. This led to Don and I traveling to France several times, to explore this proposition further. In the end, Messier and Don’s company teamed, got the contract for ALL the 777 gear, and made Don a big hero.
But to get back to the point of this tale. Our family and Don’s family eventually became fast friends, and after I retired we accepted an invitation to visit their home in Palm Desert. We immediately fell in love with the place, and bought a similar home in the same Country Club. We are still fast friends, and see each other at least once a week. By the way, I think that the home in Palm Desert was the only major decision upon which Pat and I totally agreed in over 40 years.
But back to Boeing. Time was marching on, and speaking of forty years, it was time for my Forty Year Party. But let me explain.
At Boeing one gets service pins every five years, which are awarded at a modest award ceremony. Except for the forty year award. There they pull out all the stops. You and your family are invited to a cocktail party hosted by the president of the company. The president, amid a lot of hoopla, then presents the award. There are only two or three persons receiving awards at each party, but when you add in their families, their bosses and bosses bosses, as well as assorted horse holders, it becomes quite a crowd.
Since the president has usually never heard of the awardee, the personnel department digs up some dope on him or her, such as what shops he or she has worked in and any particular career highlights. Well, in my case, after the personnel guy had talked to me for a few minutes he knew that he was in over his head, so he sent for a public relations reporter. The reporter interviewed me about my career, and then drafted an article spelling out my employment history, which we subsequently edited and corrected.
Anyway, the big night arrived, and I showed up, along with Pat and my bosses. When my turn came, and the president read off my history, he remarked that this was the most varied, interesting, and improbable Boeing career that he had seen in his entire time with the company. But all was not over yet. The president then called Pat (who he knew slightly) up to the dais, and presented her with a special award. This award, basically, was for putting up with me for forty years. Anyway, we still have both awards, and the article spelling out my history, all bound into a nice book, at our home in Palm Desert.
By this time work on the 777 was almost done, and the VP was tiring of having me on his staff. Fortunately for me, as it turned out, the Senior Manager who was responsible for all European procurement got shipped out over some minor proboem, leaving the group with no leader. But here I was, with nothing to do, and knowing a little about Europe, so I got the job.
I won’t bore you with a detailed description of the next three years, but it was basically spending most of my time in Europe, seeing my old friends and making new ones, exploring exotic cities like Rome, London, Lisbon, Seville, and Munich, and incidentally getting a little work done. I don’t know how many times I flew across the North Atlantic, but it must have been at least fifty.
We did take some time out in August 1993, for a real stellar event, my mother’s one hundredth birthday. We held an all day bash at a Park Department field house in Everett, and relatives and well wishers came from far and wide. My mom really had a ball, she partied for two days and nights. To top it off, I gave each of the guests a copy of a book I had written, “Across Two Centuries”, chronicling her first one hundred years.
I had always wanted to restore an old car, and now I finally got the chance. Son Whalen had a total beater 1972 Volkswagen. However, if was a fairly rare 1972 Super Beetle, and it had a completely rebuilt engine and front suspension. He owed me some money, but I got the car instead. Son Mark, an accomplished custom car builder, also owed me some money. So I let him work it off restoring and customizing the VW. When he got through with the frame up restoration, I had an immaculate restored and customized VW, painted Porsche Guard’s Red, no less. Incidentally, we will hear more about this Volkswagen later.
But back to the job. I was getting tired of traveling, and I did have substantial computing experience, so I got assigned as the Materiel lead on a project to completely revamp the entire Boeing Commercial manufacturing and engineering computing systems. Also, by this time my projections about Airbus were starting to come true, the Boeing sales staff and president were down to juggling statistics to obscure the fact that we were rapidly losing market share, and I was seriously thinking about retiring, come the right moment.
This computing project was called by the unlikely name of DECAC/MRM, and the plan was to develop a totally new system and cut over to it with one big bang. Now the difficulty of drastically changing a computing system is approximately the square of its size. Or to put it more simply for you non engineering types, if a system is twice as big, it is four times as hard to change, three times as big, it is 9 times as hard to change, but you get the idea. This system was approximately 10 times larger than anything ever tried before, anywhere, so it was obvious that the whole scheme was totally impossible. The leading business software distributor at the time, SAP, wouldn’t touch it, and several large consulting companies looked at it and ran the other way. Finally, Booze Allen, seeing a way to make an easy hundred million or so, took it on, teaming with Oracle, and a Dutch outfit called Baan, and Boeing started to spend big money. Hundreds of computing types were assigned and hundreds of millions were being spent, but progress was slow and success elusive.
At this point, I went to the Senior Vice President running this project, and told him my concerns. I even suggested that if he didn’t believe me, he should set up a task force of knowledgable computing guys with no experience on the system, and run a complete review. He told me that this would be impossible, and that he had to proceed, since he had already promised the Boeing Company Board of Directors that the system could be implemented. Incidentally, and unbeknownst to any of the DCAC/MRM senior management, a guy on the Board named Peterson, who was a big shot at Ford, and no dummy in his own right, had planted his niece in the middle of the organization, as a spy, and was getting close to the straight scoop on a regular basis. Anyway, I ended up telling this Senior VP that my professional ethics would not let me continue on a project which I believed had little chance for success, and that he had better find someone else to integrate the Materiel portion.
So, what happened with DCAC/MRM? After spending about a billion dollars (really), they finally came up with a watered down system, which was implemented over a period of eight years, as “big bang” implementation had proven impractical. They then declared victory and moved on. The Senior
Vice President who originally ran the operation, of course got fired, and the Dutch company went broke.
2008 update: In August 2008, Aviation Week announced that Boeing was replacing many legacy manufacturing and supply systems, including specifically DCAC/MRM, with a Siemens PLM system named Teamcenter, and would use Teamcenter on all future new airplane programs.
Now I was really out of a job, but was 62, ready to retire and not too worried. Anyway I put out a call to Sam, (who you will hear more about later) who was now running Outside Production. He took me on and I did some interesting stuff for him, while we jointly figured out my retirement strategy.
My big project was with the Brits. Sam felt, mostly by intuition, that we should have a good British subcontractor, and asked me to check it out. So I nosed around in Britain a bit and found out that British Aerospace, (Now known as BAE Systems but still commonly called BAe) not only wanted to be a Boeing subcontractor, but wanted to generally expand their presence in the US, as well. This looked promising for both sides, and the next step was to get an idea of BAe’s capabilities. I did this by spending two weeks visiting every BAe plant in Great Britain. And since their plants were scattered all over the British Isles, I decided to make this project kind of a working vacation. I thought that the best way to see the country in style might be by train, so I rode Britrail, first class, rather than flying. This turned out to be a neat trip and I had a lot of fun, along with finding out what I needed to know about BAe.
Often retiring Boeing executives consult for a year or so after leaving Boeing. This eases their transition to retirement, and also brings in a bit of money. I had considered doing this myself, and now saw my opportunity. I could be just the guy to help BAe get work with Boeing and also expand their presence in the US. Since I couldn’t solicit BAe directly while working for Boeing, I helped an old friend and pretty good consultant, Curtis, to get the BAe consulting account, and further arranged to partner with him after I retired.
Meanwhile I was biding my time till retirement, and in spring of 1995 my chance came. Boeing was offering Senior Managers like myself, on a one time basis, some pretty good incentives for early retirement. And with Sam’s help I finally negotiated a pretty good package. Retirement pay based on 50 plus years of service, plus an approximately one hundred twenty five thousand dollar severance package. Of course, I also had my 401k, which by this time was approaching seven figures. Not bad, considering that I had only 44 years service on the books, and had actually worked only about forty.
Anyway, I bought a brand new Thunderbird, and on April 30, 1995, I walked out of Boeing for the last time, a free man, and prepared to start a new phase of my life. The Thunderbird, incidentally, was a V8, and would go like squat. Unfortunately, due to the lack of racing tires, it was governed at 105 MPH, which it would easily do in third gear.
That first summer, I busied myself with rebuilding an old 22 foot boat which Mark and I had bought, doing some major refurbishment on our Stilliguamish River property, and developing my consulting company. I also took some time out for fishing with my old half Indian buddy, Ray Helling.
Ray was a great guy. Typical Indian. No money, a real affinity for the sauce, and not much interested in work. But, he was the best fishing partner I ever had. We made a couple of trips to British Columbia that summer in the old Explorer, with boat on top and camping gear in the back. I was looking forward to years of such activity, but unfortunately he died on me that winter.
Anyway, by September I was ready to go with the consulting, with BAe as my first client, and Curtis Hamilton as a kind of partner. And so, my consulting company was born. Very quickly I picked up a couple of more international clients in addition to BAe, and formed loose alliances with two other consultants, Kevin and Larry.
My company did well, and before I knew it, I was again spending considerable time in Europe, working and visiting with old friends. Not only was I getting paid handsomely, but was flying first class, courtesy of my clients, and to top it all off, I was charging off all my side trips to business development. What a deal!!
Since I was working for BAe, who was a twenty percent owner of Airbus, and sometimes worked on Airbus stuff, I could honestly say that I worked for Airbus. This, I believe, makes me one of the very few people in the world who have actually worked both for Boeing and for Airbus.
In the spring of 1996, as I mentioned earlier, we accepted an invitation from Don and Bobbye to use their home in Palm Desert for a couple of weeks. And since the Consulting Business was doing so well, we bought a place in the same Country Club for essentially cash. The original intent was to use this place as a vacation hideaway, but during the next three years we found ourselves staying there more and more, until we were living there about nine months out of the year. And I was even learning to play golf, although not well. For a closer look at our place, if you are interested, check the "Virtual Tour of Palm Desert" elsewhere on my web site.
This Palm Desert life was really at odds with the consulting business, as I needed to spend considerable time with Boeing in Seattle, as well as with my clients overseas to take care of their interests. Besides, I was 65, and getting tired of traveling so much. Also, five years is about the limit for that kind of consulting, because after that time you are out of touch with latest industry developments, and your contacts start disappearing. I think what really did it though, was when I changed planes in Chicago on a trip back from Britain. Although I was traveling first class, I was too physically exhausted to make my way to the first class lounge at O’Hare, and spent the time between planes in the general waiting room. So, I gave my clients to my partners, liquidated the business, and retired to Palm Desert.
If you do want to hear more about consulting, there are several more stories in my book "Brits 'Round the World, on this web site. Otherwise, back to my personal life.
About this time, we also gave up the old mobile home in Everett, and bought a neat condo in Edmonds Washington, the first town north of Seattle. It is in a high rise, just a block from the waterfront, and right down town, within walking distance to everything. It even has a mini view of the ocean. Edmonds is a neat little town, with a real small town flavor, and lots of interesting stuff to do. We have been there now for several years, and like it more and more as time goes by.
Since I had some spare time now, I decided to take up fishing in earnest, but the problem was that all my old fishing partners were either dead (remember Ray), too decrepit to fish, or broke. But then along came my old friend Sam, who you met previously. Sam had retired kind of precipitously, and I asked him, mostly on a whim, if he would like to join me on a helicopter fishing trip. He said OK, we really hit it off together, and have been fishing weird spots in the word ever since. You can read more about our fishing adventures in the book Fishin’ ‘Round the world, which is also on my web site.
Pat and I, about this time, also made a couple of major trips. One was a month long tour of China, and the other was an almost month long trip on a beat up old freighter, through the most remote regions of French Polynesia. Agin, if interested, you can read more about these trips in my books "Crusin' 'Round the World", and Travelin' 'Round the World"elsewhere on this web site.
Meanwhile, life was proceeding in Palm Desert. We attended jazz concerts with close friends, and started an informal little bridge club. Pat became very active in the Lady Putters Club at the Resort as well as filling in with the Country Club Bridge Club. I served on the board of the Homeowners Association, and played golf a couple of days a week with close friends.
We also managed to do a little four wheeling in the Mojave Desert, as you can read in the tale, "Desert Four Wheelin'" in my book, "Tidbits 'Round the World" on this web site.
And speaking of cars, remember that Volkswagen we talked about a while back. Since we had two other cars, the VW mostly sat around rusting in the Western Washington rain, till my grandson Ryan and I drove it to our Palm Desert home. There it served well in stylishly transporting me around the Country Club, in performance of my various duties. Reluctantly, I finally sold it at a custom car auction in 2002, and replaced it with a Mustang Bullit convertible, which I will mention later. If anyone had any doubts about the progress of automotive engineering in the thirty years between 1972 and 2002, all he had to do was to drive both cars around the block, and he or she would become a believer.
Probably, at this point, a little discussion of our Palm Desert situation is in order. Our home, along with 960 others in the development, is one side of a duplex, which we actually own, along with the ground underneath it. It is not a condominium. The homeowners association, (Palm Desert Resorter Association) in which we have a one nine hundred sixtieth share, owns all the land around the house, the streets, and greenbelts, along with twenty pools, and maintains the exterior of the houses. The association also is responsible for all of the landscaping, and internal and external security, along with a number of other things. Our development coexists, on 320 acres in the heart of Palm Desert, with Palm Desert Resort Country Club, a private, for profit organization which operates a regulation eighteen hole golf course, a large clubhouse, with bar and restaurant, and several tennis courts. All homeowners are automatically members of the Country Club, and pay Country Club dues, along with the Homeowners Association assessment. If you have a hard time figuring this arrangement out, don’t feel bad, there are people who have lived there for twenty years, who don’t understand it.
The place had actually started life as a hotel, in a mode similar to the Ceramar Beach Resort in Puerto Rico, but had fallen upon hard times, even before it was opened, and had been taken over by the Homeowners Association and the Country Club. It still, though, retains its resort flavor, as approximately 40 percent of the homes are rented out to visitors who come to the desert for a week, a month, or a season, to golf, swim or just lay in the sun. It is definitely not an old folks home. There are lots of young people and kids running around, and there is a fair amount of action in the restaurant and bar, particularly on weekends. Around town, the place is collectively referred to as The Resorter, or just The Resort.
The Homeowners Association itself is a big operation, working somewhat like the government of a small city. And it performs many of the same functions. We have our own police force, (Rental Cops), housing code enforcement, building permit process, and building inspectors. We also have about twenty five gardeners, nine full time guards, six maintenance people, a four person office staff and a number of specialized subcontractors. We have our own rules and regulations, supported by a quasi judicial system, which can levy fines for infractions, all backed up by a set of specific California laws, about the size of a phone book.
This whole thing amounts to about a four million dollar per year operation, managed by a full time General Manager reporting to a five person Board of Directors, chaired by a President. In addition to the association’s basic job of maintaining home exteriors and common areas, and providing security, the association represents the homeowners in dealings with the City of Palm Desert, and the Country Club. It also maintains a social program and strives to maintain property values and improve the quality of life for all the homeowners.
I went through all this boring detail as a preamble to what I am going to talk about next, and its relevance will soon become apparent. I was getting bored with golf and fishing, and thought that a little community service might be just what I needed. So I ran for the Homeowners Association Board, and got elected. I worked as Finance Chairman for a couple of years, then migrated up to President, a position I held till I recently stepped down to the position of Vice President, Treasurer, CFO, and Chairman of the Finance Legal and Contracts Committee.
As you can see from the previous description, the Homeowners Association is a big operation and the Board jobs are a handful. Almost full time. And while by law, there can be no pay, the expense account aint bad. Another thing to say for it. It certainly keeps one young.
2007 Update. I served one more year as President, then retired from the Board. Currently I am working as a Docent at the Palm Springs Air Museum, specializing in leading youth tours.
What with all the activity going on in Palm Desert, we still managed to take time out for a few trips. But let me give you an example of my travels one summer. In a six week period, we drove from Palm Desert to Edmonds, then I drove to Yellowknife NWT in the Canadian arctic, then back to Edmonds, from where I flew to Orlando, drove to Gainesville FL, then drove to Pittsburgh. From Pittsburgh I flew to Palm Springs, then, after a few days, to Seattle. Almost as bad as when I was working.
The drive from Gainesville to Pittsburgh was a really interesting experience. I was driving the support van for a 10 day bike hike on back roads through the deep South, from Gainesville FL to Pittsburgh PA. On this trip, I saw places which I never dreamed existed in the US, where the landscape looked like somewhere in the third world, and the people spoke a totally incomprehensible dialect.
Hugh and I would also go camping every spring, and a bunch of us always went to baseball spring training, either in Peoria, Arizona or Tucson. Some other times we would gather a few friends, and take off on a mini adventure. Some of the most interesting of these trips are written up in my book "Travelin' 'Round the World, also on this web site.
Oh, I almost forgot. I was going to tell you more about the Ford Mustang convertible. This was a GT V8 with Bullit modifications, which pumped out three hundred horsepower, and would do an honest 140 MPH. To tell the truth though, it scares me to death to drive it over 125. Must be getting old.
And, we should maybe talk a bit more about my work at the Palm Springs Air Museum, leading kid tours. This involved guiding groups of little kids through our local air museum one or two days a week. They are all good kids, but sometimes it got interesting. For example:
A little kid was intently walking around my Mustang the other day. When I asked him what he was doing he said that he was counting the horses, (Mustang logos). When I asked him why, he said that he wanted to see how many horsepower it was.
Then there were the two pre teen girls, who were convinced that my convertible really belonged to my grandson.
Not to mention the six year olds touring through the museum, who were convinced that I was much older than the airplanes.
Number one question from little kids looking at the airplanes. "When do we eat?" Number two question "How do the pilots go to the bathroom?"
One day I lost a four year old in the B-17. He was sitting in the pilot's seat "flying" the airplane, but was so little I couldn't see him.
Some eight year old girls gave me a pretty good show the other day. They were pretending they were show girls accompanying Bob Hope on a WW II visit to the troops.
I had a group of six year olds engaged in finger painting an airplane. I got distracted for a minute, and before I knew it, they had fists full of paint, and were painting each other and everything else in sight. After I restored order, I ran them into the rest rooms to clean up. This, of course, resulted in liberal amounts of paint being transferred from the kids to the restroom walls, fixtures, etc. Which, understandably, didn't please the management.
Anyway, within a month the story had grown to: "Fifty kids with no supervision, running wild, throwing buckets of paint around the place, with the cops having been called to restore order." My comment, when told this tale, was "Wow. I'm sorry I missed that"
And to prove that I am still "with it", I just raised the money for, and supervised a complete 2.7 million dollar exterior remodeling of our Edmonds condo. At 79, no less. Incidentally, this took over a year, almost fulltime. If you are interested you can find all the gory detail at "Tale of the rusty condo". also on this web site.
It now looks like I am up to about 100 pages on the old computer so I guess I had better wind it up. But first, a couple of words about our kids, where they are, and what they are doing.
From youngest to oldest. Whalen is an up and coming lawyer in Atlanta, He and Allison had four kids, but unfortunately lost Blake. Mark lives in Marysville Washington, works in an auto body shop in Seattle, and also has four kids. His current loves, along with his kids, are a Ford F150 pickup, a 27 foot boat, and an off road motorcycle. Michelle is a successful life insurance Underwriting Consultant, working out of her home. She lives with husband Hugh, a Senior Manager for FedEx Freight, and their two Labrador dogs, Belle and Cal, in Edmonds, and in Harrison Arkansas, near FedEx headquarters. Finally, LaRene is a research scientist at the University of Washington, and lives with her four cats in a nice townhouse in Mountlake Terrace, WA. To get a further idea of LaRene’s work, log on to Google, and click ”LaRene Kuller”.
This all adds up to a total of 4 kids and seven grandkids, with everyone working, nobody on drugs, and nobody in jail. What more could any proud grandparent ask?
As for Pat and I, we are blessed with good friends and reasonably good health, are both doing fine, are getting by financially, and have at least twenty more years of major activities and excursions in various stages of planning.
And a postscript to this tale.
In April 2010, all my heart and lung problems caught me at once, and after a ride in the red wagon, I ended up in a hospital room, with a Priest administering the last rites, and some doctors standing around waiting for me to die.
Well, I decided I was not ready for that, and over the next few days. got better, got out of the hospital, and went home.
Aside from erasing most of a month from my memory, I was not quite as strong as before, but no other real effect. In fact, within a month, while in Hospice, I was working full time.
The doctors say that it was a genuine miracle, and have no other explation. The fact that I became a Catholic shortly before, might have had something to do with it. Anyway, who knows?
We will see how much longer I am good for. One year, five, ten, who knows?
John, Palm Desert CA, December 2005
APPENDIX A
EULOGY for Rev. JOHN, John’s father
John was born in Lake City, Iowa on January ll, 1894, and grew up in the towns of Hamilton and Emporia, in the Flint Hills of Kansas. While his father crafted custom shoes and harness in his small shop, John roamed the hills and streams, gaining an appreciation of the great outdoors and an understanding of the working man's life, which never left him.
John once mentioned that if in his teens he could have raised two hundred dollars he would have bought a team and gone to farming, but when that didn't work out he decided to get an education. Some of us think that the world is a little better place today because of that decision.
After graduation from Emporia High School he enlisted in the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of Sergeant First Class. At war's end he finished work for a B.A. at the College of Emporia and having decided upon his life's work, completed his education at Drew Theological Seminary.
Intrigued with tales of the wild west spun by Reverend Charlie Cole, John hit the trail for Montana and in 1923 he accepted an appointment with the Montana Conference in the north east part of that state. If he was looking for adventure and a chance to serve he wasn't disappointed. A series of back woods parishes served by automobile in summer, a team and sleigh in winter, and a horse in spring and fall. kept him busy for the next seven years. During this time his activities came to the attention of that great missionary, the Reverend Doctor Ezra Cox. Dr. Cox visited his parish, and later felt moved to eulogize John's work as a latter day circuit rider.
In 1930 John married Jenne (outdoors incidentally) and they were soon blessed with two children, John and Kathryn. A series of parishes in the depression years tested his will and faith, but he stuck by his calling and his Montana friends. Among Montana parishes he served in those years were Drummond-Hall, Forsyth, Townsend, and Chester.
In 1942 he transferred to the Pacific Northwest Conference where he served a series of small town parishes during the war years and until his retirement seventeen years later. Among parishes he served were Prosser, Allen, Eureka-North Bellingham, and Satsop.
John was the country preacher personified, equally at home behind the pulpit, chatting with the boys down at the store, or helping a parishioner get in the hay. He was extremely effective in setting a weak struggling church on its feet, He understood the average man and could motivate him to work with his fellows in effective group action.
John was an excellent teacher as well as a preacher, In classes on the Bible, adults sat expectantly, as people, places, and actions came alive. He knew the esoteric words, but didn't need them to get his message across.
John loved and understood young people, He wasn't turned off by their newfangled ideas, and they in turn didn't turn him off. In fact, he turned several to them on to the extent that they followed him into the ministry.
It was his love of people that gave zest to his message. He could listen to endless talk about problems, and finally, when talk subsided for a moment, he would comment with a sense of conviction, of authority and dedication. He was tenacious in holding to his convictions, but with this tenaciousness he did not offend, but rather he won others to his viewpoint.
His dedication to his call to the ministry could not be swayed by other events. During the Hanford-Richland development when men and women were needed for secular jobs with wages beyond belief and in a honorable cause, John, encouraged by his wife and family, continued to share with a small group of dedicated laymen and women in holding high the cross of Christ. Out of this dedication a debt ridden church at Prosser gained strength and emerged as a thriving congregation. Likewise, Benton City, discouraged and weak, emerged as a self sustaining group.
John loved the out of doors. His vegetable gardens attracted wide attention and his flowers he shared with great pride. One of his chief joys was working with youth camps; counseling, teaching, and managing. He gave many years of such service to camps in both Montana and Washington.
Perhaps the greatest tribute we can pay to the man is that he did his life's work as best he knew how, and inspired others to continue in that work in the days to follow. We thank God for John's life and our memories of him. We dedicate ourselves anew to continuing to build on earth the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of our common Father.
John died on February 19, 1971 at Wesley Gardens in Des Moines, Washington. Memorial services were conducted February 27, 1971 at the First United Methodist Church in Everett, with the Reverend G. Richard Tuttle, Dr. Frederick L. Pederson and Fr. John Fearon, O.P. officiating.
The above eulogy was read at these services by Dr. Frederick L Pederson, and excerpts were published in the minutes of the United Methodist Church, Pacific Northwest Annual Conference, June 1971.
APPENDEX B
JOHN’S BOEING CAREER
Written by Boeing Public Relations on the occasion of John’s Fortieth Company Anniversary, October 15, 1990
John has had a variety of responsibilities in a number of locations around the company.
Because he worked as a service representative on the first three 707s for Pan Am and the U. S. government, the 707 is John’s favorite airplane. After a couple of years in the Air Force, he was a shop foreman for the KC-135 airplane.
As night Production Engineering manager at Cape Kennedy, he helped out with the first Minuteman launch. Later on, he worked on operational missiles in the field. Going down into “live” Minuteman missile silos was one to the most memorable points of his career.
After that he served as a marketing manager on a Boeing joint venture called the Resources Conservation Company. He sold a desalination unit to the Caneel Bay Plantation, a resort owned by the Rockefellers. John spent a year at the resort in the U. S. Virgin Islands as the construction project manager. It was a fun job that included skin diving and hosting parties at the resort’s bar. While there, John met Billy Graham, several Supreme Court Justices, and many other interesting people. John “fooled around with a power plant down in Arizona”. Then migrated into the Minuteman program. He was program manager on the Flying Command Post, working on the transmitter antenna and receiver that make the missile fire on command.
He was in and out of Alaska over the next 4 years working for Bechtel and Boeing Computer Services. John worked on the Alaskan oil pipeline, developing logistics support systems (timekeeping, receiving, accounts payable, etc.). Afterward he stayed in Alaska to install an electric power generator in an Aleut village. John made this improbable proposition work and was named Boeing Computer Services Employee of the Year.
He moved from Alaska to head up Boeing Computer Services North American Commercial Telecommunications. His team sold several police dispatch systems and installed the first computer terminals for U.S. squad cars and the Portland Police Department. John returned to Materiel in 1979 to manage the major structural contracts for the 767. He helped negotiate the contract for the 767 body panels with CAC (Fuji, Kawasaki and Mitsubishi) and managed it for 10 years. He then went to work for Jim Blue in the Materiel division. For the past year, John has been managing the major outside production activity for the 767-X program.
Retirement isn’t a serious consideration yet for John. He’s having too much fun to think about that. The 777 program is the best example of teamwork he’s ever seen. And now that it’s officially launched, John has years more work to do.
APPENDIX C
COMMENDATION GIVEN PATRICIA BY DEAN THORNTON, PRESIDENT OF BOEING COMMERCIAL AIRPLANE COMPANY, ON THE OCCASION OF JOHN’S FORTIETH COMPANY ANNIVERSARY
CERTIFICATE OF OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE
PRESENTED TO
PAT
During the past forty years your husband has contributed greatly to the overall success of the Boeing Company. His professionalism and devotion are part of the reason Boeing built airplanes are recognized as the finest airplanes in the world.
During this period you have been called upon to make sacrifices when assignments have taken him out of town or caused him to work long time periods. Your response to these situations has also contributed to your husband’s success and the success of Boeing.
You have earned grateful appreciation for your unselfish faithful and devote service during your husband’s career. Your unfailing support and understanding helped make possible his lasting contribution to the Boeing Company.
I would like to express my personal appreciation to both of you for helping Boeing Commercial airplane Company become the world’s premier manufacturer of commercial jet transports.
Dean D. Thornton
APPENDIX D
Eulogy for Jenne, John’s Mother
Jenny Lind, the daughter of Orange Lemon, and Sylvia, was born on August 31, 1893. She was named after that great contemporary singer Jenny Lind. Her fathers somewhat unusual name, by the way, was that of the famous evangelist, Orange Lemon. (Not a joke, honest). Speaking of names, Jenny eventually changed her name to Jenne, since the boys made big sport of Jenny being the name for a lady mule. Anyway, Jenne grew up like most girls on a 19th century Missouri farm. She attended a one room school, rode a horse to town to get the mail, and did her share in the kitchen and fields. The family was deeply religious, as were many others in that simpler time. Her grandfather had been a Methodist lay preacher, and her mother and father were both active church people. On Sundays she rode in a spring wagon to the Presbyterian church with her mother, while her father and the boys went to the Methodist services. Sometimes they compromised and all attended the Methodist Episcopal Church South.
There was really no shortage of churches, there being two Methodist, one Methodist Episcopal South, two Southern Baptist, two Presbyterian, and one Disciples of Christ within four miles of the farm. Many times they invited one of the preachers home for Sunday dinner, and on one such occasion, Jenne caught one of them smoking a corncob pipe behind the barn. Shocking!! As could be expected, social life revolved around the churches, and traveling revivals furnished excitement and a window to the outside world. One of the highlights of Jenne's childhood was when she entered a church contest for memorizing the most bible verses and won a Bible with gilt edges and a silver clasp, as first prize. She had memorized the verses by reading her Bible, while tending sheep.
After working her way through college, Jenne received a graduate scholarship at Columbia University under the auspices of the Baptist Missionary Association. For several years she pursued her social religious studies at Columbia, while doing field work with recent Italian immigrants in disadvantaged areas of New York City, ultimately earning a Masters Degree. Quite an achievement for a woman in that day and age.
Jenne almost became a missionary in Central America, but instead, went into youth work in the Midwest. She always felt that one of her greatest achievements was her work as the Director of Youth Services for First Christian Church in Kansas City, Missouri. This church was in a downtown low rent district, and as she used to say, the neighborhood had more than its share of problems. Understanding this, during her several years there, she ministered to all the area youth, both in and out of the church. At one point, she even hosted a radio program on a local station. As proof of her good work, the juvenile authorities documented a substantial decrease in delinquency in the area, during her tenure.
By this time Jenne was nearing forty, and decided that it was perhaps time for marriage. She approached this situation with her usual energy and dedication, and soon had the field narrowed down to three elgibles. An accountant, a five foot tall mortician, and a six foot tall Methodist preacher, John. She really liked John but there was one problem. He was a country preacher in Montana, and Montana in those days was still the wild west, with cowboys, Indians and a real frontier mentality. Remember the movie, "A River Ran Through It". John fit right into this scene, serving his parishioners on horseback, if necessary, and preaching wherever he found a congregation. He had even been known to shut down the saloon while he held services.
This was quite a change for a Southern Belle from the big city. Nobody is sure what negotiations ensued, but we do know it involved several trips over a considerable time period, and that they finally did get married in Montana.
The conference cooperated by assigning John to a reasonably civilized place, Drummond Montana, and they got settled in just in time for the Great Depression. This was, literally a time to try men's souls, but they ministered to a series of backwoods parishes the best they knew how. Compensation was up to $900 per year-if you were lucky, all the chicken you could eat, and the knowledge that you were, hopefully, making a difference. As if the economy wasn't problem enough, it even seemed that Nature conspired against them. They went through the Helena earthquakes of 1935, and a plague (probably a virus) which decimated the small town of Townsend. During this time they were also trying to raise a family. John, Kathy, and another who died in infancy.
Through all this, Jenne always had compassion for those who were less fortunate. She was always willing to share what little they had with parishioners who were down on their luck, and no hobo was ever turned away hungry. She thought that it was beyond the call of duty, though, to board a particularly difficult District Superintendent, overnight, on his quarterly visits, but she handled it with good grace, thus saving the church a few sorely needed dollars.
Came the War, and they moved on to the Pacific Northwest, where John served several more small churches, and Jenne continued her career in social work and education, both religious and secular. An example of Jenne and John's dedication came early in this period when they were serving Prosser, Washington during the Manhattan Project development, just down the road at Richland. While men and women were needed for secular jobs in an honorable cause with wages beyond belief, Jenne continually encouraged John to share with a small group of dedicated lay men and women in holding high the cross of Christ. Out of this dedication, a debt ridden church at Prosser gained strength and emerged as a thriving congregation.
Retiring with John to a mini farm south of Everett, Jenne became an active member of this church, continuing to serve in many capacities until advancing age forced a curtailment of her activities. I'm sure that Rev. Martin can vouch for the fact that Jenne kept him on the straight and narrow on many occasions when he was the pastor here. Jenne was also as an active member of the Order of the Eastern Star for over 50 years, and a tireless worker with the American Association of University Women.
She treasured her family, which grew to six grandchildren and nine great grandchildren, and spent much quality time with them, in both Seattle and California, particularly in her later years.
Perhaps the best tribute which we can pay Jenne is that she set high standards, followed them the best she knew how, and inspired others to follow her example. We thank God for Jenne's life and our memories of her, and we dedicate ourselves anew to continuing to build on earth the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of our common Father.
APPENDIX E
COUNTRIES AND TERRITORIES VISITED BY JOHN
ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA
ARUBA
AUSTRIA
BAHAMAS
BARBADOS
BELGIUM
BRAZIL
BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS
CANADA
CHINA (PEOPLES REPUBLIC OF)
CHINA (REPUBLIC OF)
COLOMBIA
COSTA RICA
CZECH REPUBLIC
DENMARK
DOMINICA
DUBAI
ENGLAND
FRANCE
FRENCH POLYNESIA
GERMANY
GIBRALTAR
GUAM
HAWAII (When a US Territory)
HONG KONG
HUNGARY
INDONESIA
IRELAND
ITALY
IWO JIMA (When Occupied by the US Navy)
JAPAN
KOREA (NORTH)
KOREA (SOUTH)
LIECHTENSTEIN
LUXEMBOURG
MALAYSIA
MEXICO
MOROCCO
NETHERLANDS
NETHERLANDS ANTILLES
NORTHERN IRELAND
OKINAWA (When a US Trust Territory)
PAKISTAN
PANAMA
PORTUGAL
PUERTO RICO
SCOTLAND
SINGAPORE
SLOVAKIA
SLOVENIA
SPAIN
ST CHRISTOPHER-NEVIS
ST MARTIN (FRENCH)
SWITZERLAND
THAILAND
UNITED STATES
US VIRGIN ISLANDS
VATICAN CITY
WAKE ISLAND
WALES
YAP (FEDERATED STATES OF MICRONESIA)
