CHAPTER 4: workaday world
Though idleness is necessary too
It's work that satisfies the soul in you.
It's work that satisfies the soul in you.
One's reaction to work is as varied as the number of people asked. Some are never content unless keeping very busy. Others are busy figuring out what to do with their time. Jerome was probably close to the mark when he said, "It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do."
In my world, the work ethic was always strong. For the industrious Swiss the word fainéant carries an odious opprobrium.
In our family, making constructive use of time was second nature. The example set by my parents and other relatives was ever before each one.
Early on, the need for earning a few cents was certainly part of the incentive for the scramble for odd jobs. There was so much more joy in being able to buy a gift for a loved one if its price had been earned by self.
My earliest recollection of entrepreneurial activity outside the home involved the sale of Christmas and Easter cards. My cousin Dan and I, each bolstering the courage of the other, cautiously made our way from door to door — hoping to avoid dogs, hoping for a kindly reception, and, as the undertaking on occasion bore little fruit, hoping that nobody was home so we could quit.
While still too small to compete for wage-earning jobs, my brother Pete and I would divide up downtown territory and, on Saturdays, peddle Hershey bars to office workers, thus doubling in a few hours our original investment of a few dollars. Here the bugaboo was not dogs, but the watchful eye of building custodians enforcing the announced policy engraved on the No Solicitation sign. Pete generally did better than I did. He was two years younger, and then, as indeed throughout his life, he had a gentle manner which invited those with whom he came in contact to want to help him.
While in our first year of high school (age 13), cousin Dan and I got part-time jobs with the Western Union. We donned our green uniforms (dark brown puttees), got on our bikes and, having been told what office needed a substitute that day, rode off (usually in different directions) to put in our half-day's work. By doing this and working on Saturday and often Sunday, we could earn $9.00 in a week (whereas boys on full-time earned $16.00).
Thus we got to know the city rather well. Good weather or foul, we delivered, not unmindful of the motto of our slower competitor, the U.S. Postal Service. Our hope was always that our next assignment would not be miles away, and that our deliveries would from time to time include the more profitable multiple-message. I still have a sense of the offensive smells generated by various stockyards and paint manufacturing firms. There was the time also when I had earned enough to permit me to acquire my first brand new bicycle, only to have it wrecked when a car alongside of which I was peddling turned right while I continued on a straight course. Miraculously, I was but little hurt.
Across from Western Union headquarters was a Barber College. There I got my haircuts. How good they were depended on how much I felt I could pay at the time. Newly enrolled members of the school gave free haircuts; those halfway through the course charged 15 cents; near graduates felt their effort to be worth 25 cents. This at a time when regular shops charged 35 cents to 50 cents.
Once the Junior High was built, school hours were increased and the time available for work outside school hours reduced. Then I became an errand boy, in succession working for Edwards-Ludwig-Fuller Jewelry Co., the Green (Manufacturing) Jewelry Co., Pattison-McGrath Dental Supply Co., and my father's firm, Jules Borel & Co. I picked up parts and supplies needed by my employer, delivered items to customers, and made myself useful around the office.
On my rounds I delighted in stopping by the Myron Green Cafeteria bakery counter and, for 5 cents, picking up a newly baked, still warm, raisin-filled cinnamon roll. From my meager earnings of $3.50 per week, I bought for $25.00 a fumed oak glass-enclosed bookcase which my daughter Julie has to this day.
Occasionally I undertook special projects. One such was to produce a Borel catalog of watch parts (a copy of which is still in my possession). Using my newly learned skills as draftsman, I scribed and lettered identifying information on ground glass plates. The appropriate watch parts were then placed thereon and a photograph was taken over a light table yielding silhouettes. Against these, broken parts could then be matched thus supplying the identification number of the needed replacement.
In that period the Borel Company was located on an upper floor of 1009 Walnut Street, a block away from the Home Trust Co. One day sounds not unlike those heard on July 4 brought me to the window, and I witnessed a gang of bank robbers shooting down two policemen who had been directing traffic on successive corners, killing one and crippling for life the other. For this deed, once caught, the five involved were hanged.
It was clear that Father hoped I, as eldest son, would increasingly be involved in his business. But, even at the expense of suffering caustic remarks by his elder brother (who put his girls to work as soon as they had completed the legal requirements for attending school) Father, with Mother's strong assist, was ready to help me prepare myself for a career of my own choosing.
The year spent in Switzerland following graduation from Northeast High School (on Van Brundt Boulevard) in many ways made it easier to set myself on an independent course. I came back the Spring of 1930, with the notion of either following a career in journalism (in which case the University of Missouri seemed indicated) or one in engineering (in which case the University of Kansas seemed best to me). This course of action was endorsed by my parents, and I elected engineering, largely, I think, because I had particularly enjoyed my courses in drafting.
At K.U., my part-time jobs included dishwashing, accounting, parking cars and, during the summers, as lifeguard and as iceman. My father's business suffered, along with everyone else's, the setbacks of the depression. It was therefore important to earn money from others rather than look to his firm as a place for summer employment.
Through the good offices of a minister friend, the Reverend Alfred D. Grey, I was able, on graduation, to go to work immediately for the Sun Oil Company's Toledo refinery as a laboratory assistant. The Roosevelt administration had inaugurated the National Recovery Act (NRA) as one means of combatting the depression. A feature was to reduce working hours for those who had jobs in order to provide work for those who did not. Our workweek was thus limited to 36 hours, six days of six hours each. This meant shift work for me because an oil refinery is a continuous operation running night and day. Each week we changed working hours.
The work laboratory assistants were assigned consisted of running standard API (American Petroleum Institute) tests of products during the various stages of the refining process. The simplest tests were distillations and vapor pressures. Distillations reproduced in the lab what went on in a distillation or fractionation column. The process was simple enough. Heat was applied to a stream of crude oil passed through a still (a boiler-like furnace). The hot stream of crude oil released into a multi-layered tower whose trays are perforated with bubblecaps resulting in a separation of fuel components. The lightest (methanes and ethanes) go to the top, and the heavier ones (gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil and tars) are sorted out throughout the length of the column (perhaps three or four stories high). Thus components can be drawn off and pumped from column to storage tank. From these tanks, chemists decide how much of each to mix with another to get the desired petroleum product wanted.
The distillation test plus other tests give the chemist the data necessary to make these determinations. Another test was the determination of vapor pressure: How many pounds per square inch is generated by a given quantity of the sample heated to a given temperature.
Lab assistants were responsible for collecting their own samples. Thus, day or night, ice or heat, rain or shine, we would burden ourselves with carriers holding bottles, wrap around our neck bombs on which pressure gauges were mounted, making sure we had sealer with which to paint the bomb nipples to prevent leakage, and head for the tanks to be sampled (three samples per tank — top, middle, bottom). Then we struggled up the steel ladder welded to the side of the tank to its top. Opening the hatch, a great wave of pent-up gases would hit us in the face. Don't forget to hold your breath. And watch the ice, it's a long way to the ground.
In time, I was moved to a new job involving two functions, one daytime in the lab, the other elsewhere, at times unpredictable. The lab aspect was to calibrate the various instruments used to insure that results obtained from their use were meaningful. In short, to make sure the instruments could be relied on as accurate. The other aspect was necessary because Sun Oil shared with Pure Oil a pipeline through which products of each were pumped from Toledo to Detroit (Hamtramck, the Polish neighborhood). When a change from one company to the other was pending, I would get a call, told when to be in Detroit and into what tanks to direct the flow once Sun products began to arrive.
A reliable Chrysler coupe was provided for my transportation. I would take my lab instruments to detect the change in the specific gravity of the product (a slug of dye was also used as a visual indicator but was not always reliable because of a tendency toward dissipation). On my signal the pumper would turn his valves and switch from a Pure Oil tank to a Sun Oil tank. Then I would head back, a distance of some 60 miles. All told, the round trip would average the rough equivalent of a six-hour tour (as a shift was called).
In any event the Sun Oil job permitted me also to take some graduate work at Toledo U. I was paid 60 cents/hour for the test job, then 80 cents/hour for the calibration job. And I made arrangements with the chief engineer to do some work, gratis, in the drafting room in hopes this would give me an edge when he had an opening there for a job more related to my civil engineering degree than was the laboratory of the chief chemist.
I should also mention that during vacations, lab personnel would replace men working as part of the team running a still. Periodically, a still had to be shut down for maintenance. Time down costs money, so it was to be kept to a minimum. Primarily involved was the cleaning out of coke caked on the inside of the tubes through which oil was pumped over the hot fires of the still furnace. We did not wait for things to cool before we started our cleanup. We donned asbestos suits, and with our compressed air-powered centrifugal knockers broke loose the coke from within the tubes, creating in the process a cloud of soot-like dust which soon turned us black and entered every exposed orifice of the body. Once the job was done we would be days removing traces of its marks upon us and as many days regaining our normal hearing.
But I was very glad to have my job in an era of joblessness for so many.
With prudent management of my finances I was able to pay off some school debts, buy for $125.00 an old but reliable Willys roadster, which I converted to a convertible. It even had a mother-in-law seat in the back. And for a time I even took piano lessons.
After 15 months, I took a vacation to Kansas City. While visiting the K.U. campus, I ran into Professor George Hood who asked if I would be interested in joining the faculty of the engineering school as an instructor of two courses: descriptive geometry and engineering drawing. This I accepted since the terms would permit further graduate study in the field of sanitation engineering. So I began teaching, and studying bacteriology, the while living in the Theta Tau house, since razed and serving as parking for the Betas. Weekends often found me in Kansas City. On one such, not long after the inauguration of my new routine in Lawrence, I dropped in at Black & Veatch on the Plaza to rendezvous with a classmate who worked for this elite firm of consulting engineers. A year or more earlier I had applied there for work, but nothing had materialized. While waiting for my friend Dan McKim to clear his desk I fell into conversation with the firm's chief draftsman. Within a few minutes, he surprised me by offering me a job. On my return to Lawrence, the head of my department said that, such job offers being so scarce, if I really wanted to make the move he would get a teaching replacement for me. So I moved to K.C. and lived with my parents, brother John and sister Ruth in the house they then occupied at 7122 Grand Avenue.
It was at this time that I met Miriam Eleanor Chesham, the girl who would become my wife. Her parents and her brother Howard had moved to Kansas City from Minneapolis. Miriam, somewhat reluctantly, followed them. By the time of her arrival, Howard was dating my sister Toni. Howard had a party to welcome Miriam, to which my brothers, Pete and Johnny, and I were invited. All three of us were much impressed by the beauty, charm and conviviality of this newcomer. She had class. For a time she had dates with each of us. Eventually I edged out my brothers, but three years would pass before we were married.
When I joined Black & Veatch in October 1935, the organization had 125 professional engineers. (At this writing, 1986, they have over 3,000 working worldwide.) We were busy on municipal projects funded in part by the PWA (Public Works) program of Roosevelt recovery efforts. These, largely in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, involved drawing plans and writing specifications for waterworks, sewage disposal plants, power plants, roads, and valuation studies for public utility companies. I was finally doing civil engineering work. Some of my colleagues were in the field, supervising the construction of contractors who had successfully bid on the jobs we had designed. But I stayed in the drafting room.
As the scope of PWA programs expanded, our work increased. We began to work overtime, then additions were made to the staff. My brother John also came to work there helping out generally by running off specs on the mimeograph machine. They were happy days for us all.
Still, as I looked around, it was clear that my field of activity was a narrow one. And I decided to broaden it by returning to graduate school – this time setting my sights on Harvard as soon as I could save enough to give me a running start. Harvard's master's program in sanitary engineering was the most respected in the field.
By chance an associate at Black & Veatch was visited by a brother, Professor Edmund Learned of the Harvard Business School. We had lunch together. The outcome was a plan to attend HBS in the fall of 1936, having been given some assurance that part-time employment and scholarship loans would be forthcoming. I would therefore chance the shift from a one-year program in sanitary engineering to a two-year program in industrial management. HBS then had the highest tuition in the country, $600 per year. My budget would be $1,600 for each of two years.
I started out with $500 cash. The school loans were indeed forthcoming, but a job was not. I found a job as dishwasher in a small restaurant off Cambridge Square. However, the smells and sights within its kitchen took their toll, and I found myself unable to eat the very meals I had by my labors earned. If the Lord wants me to attend HBS, I told myself, other employment will be forthcoming. I quit. Two days later I was waiting on tables in one of the school's dining rooms. The following semester I moved to the collating and binding division of the HBS library, then to the circulation desk.
The summer between school years (1937), I worked as draftsman for the United Light and Power, holding company for Kansas City Power and Light, designing foundations for electric generating equipment and power plant structures.
During my second year at HBS I was busy with three jobs. That of associate editor of the HBS Yearbook called for an intensive effort, but this lasted only until the book was out. Secondly, I worked in the corporation records room of the library – a quiet place where my duties infringed but a limited degree on my studies while on the job. Thirdly, I was a research assistant in Harvard’s Fatigue Laboratory for Industrial Research, a Rockefeller-funded group of distinguished scientists brought together to study the phenomenon of human fatigue.
My work at this third job consisted mainly in preparing charts and graphs which, as engineer, I could ably do and, as a former trackman, subjecting myself as guinea pig for the conduct of assorted experiments. This involved pumping stationary bicycles, treadmills, running dashes timed every five yards by photoelectric cells (with various pieces of football gear on and lead weights added to arrive at improvements in design). For this I was paid $1.00 per hour (half again as much as the library job). Thus, financially, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel – and it wasn't a train coming the other way. If my studies suffered as a result of having to work, suffer they must, but I was on my own and not in debt beyond my ability to handle following graduation in June 1938. My father early on had sent me a check. This I had returned. Years later he told me its return made for a proud day in his life.
But I was undecided about what to do next. My trip from Boston to Kansas City was financed by Armco – The American Rolling Mill Corp. Armco's president (Hook) had interviewed me shortly before graduation. I was to stop off in Middletown, Ohio, and talk to his staff. This I did. They seemed interested, as was I, but did not come up with a firm offer. To mark time, I went back to work for Black & Veatch.
My old college roommate, Charlie Spahr, was by then working for the engineering department of Phillips Petroleum. He arranged some interviews. As a consequence I took a job with the natural gas and gasoline department, the primary manufacturing division of the company, reporting as a process engineer early in 1939. (Within days I got an offer from Armco, which I, having made a commitment to Phillips, declined.)
Work was underway to design, build and operate in Phillips (near Borger), Texas, an isomerization plant to manufacture a new product – neohexane – made from waste gas now being burnt at the existing refinery's torch. This involved high temperatures (1,000°F) and high pressures (1,500 Ibs/sq. in.). Though much of my work was design of structures – buildings, pipeline supports, walls shielding existing plant from damage from potential explosion – I was, as I had been at Sunoco, again working closely with chemists and chemical engineers. Talking to them I often felt out of my depth, and, indeed, dealing with a subject in which I had no abiding interest. I liked management, working with people to get a job done. Still it was good training and experience.
The interminable casting around for the "right" job must seem to the reader, as it did then to me, to have some negative implications. My difficulties were reflected in a letter I wrote to Miriam some months before we became engaged, that is, from Bartlesville on March 26:
My indecision about the future is owing to my anxiety in wanting to get started in a job where I will like the work as well as do something useful. I feel that if I can ever sink my teeth in the right job I could do something worthwhile. It is so very difficult to reconcile oneself with what is apparently trivial and unimportant. A professor at Harvard [Professor Doriot] once told me that for a man to be happy he must be steeped either in religion, home life, or his work. Perhaps there is more truth in his observation than I was prone to give him credit for at the time. There's certainly something to getting the right job since it is necessary to spend most of your waking hours at it. To many people religion becomes a shelter. I've always looked upon this as a manner of cowardice. I'm probably wrong there again.
With the completion of plans and construction in progress, I was assigned to Phillips, Texas, but sent first to Oklahoma City to familiarize myself with an operating unit in that area. It was during this interim that Miriam and I were married (in Kansas City on October 28, 1939). After a short honeymoon in Mexico we made our temporary home in the home of the Leslie Paris family, where we also took our meals, biding the time we would be in our "own" rented apartment in Borger, and later in our "own" company house in Phillips.
On the move from Oklahoma City, I preceded my wife in order to find housing, all company houses being then filled to capacity. Here was my report:
Phillips, Texas
December 4, 1939
Here I am writing you my first letter since we were married. Oddly enough I am writing in bed. Not because I'm lazy but mainly because there is no other place which I may use. This is one of many bunkhouses. In here are 16 double deck beds. As luck would have it, being a latecomer, I have a top berth.
We had an uneventful trip here and after having been assigned a bunk, we had supper and went to bed. Worked today until about 4:30 p.m. Not having any place to put my things I have part of them in a friend's locker – there being four lockers all together – some on the floor, some at another house where the door may be locked, and the rest still in the back of a fellow's car trunk.
What a joint this is. Everybody flying around – a regular madhouse. The first thing after work I went apartment hunting . . . our most pessimistic sounding friends were too optimistic. So far I haven’t seen the semblance of a place to live in. Haven’t seen a vacant one with an inside bath.
There are a couple of nice places but they are very expensive. Even then it wouldn't be bad, but these have no vacancies. . . .
The engines in the plant are so close to the bunkhouse that the building shakes like a steamship. I've got to find a place right away. It's too lonesome without you. Here there are about 30 men all around me, in the same room, and several hundred within a block or so, and I'm lonesome. Does that make sense? . . . .
Phillips, Texas
December 6, 1939
I have an apartment. It's brand new – never been lived in . . . . We'll need only linens and dishes. It's a small place on a dirt street, though only one block off Main: one of four apartments in a one-story building, each unit having a living room, kitchen and bath. . . . The bed is one of those you fold up and keep in the closet. Cost: $40/month, all bills paid, and, should we be there next summer, it is air-conditioned. I just happened to see them building it and was lucky enough to get one – three out of four having already been rented.
There was a mishap at the plant yesterday. Lot of people got plenty dirty, very few hurt, and I didn't even get dirty. So you see our luck holds out. . . .
It was here that we spent the year leading up to my call-up by the Navy as part of America's awakening to the menace of Germany in Europe and Japan in the Pacific.
My work in Phillips followed the natural progression of building, testing and operating the plant of our recent design effort, a testing of its products, and a determination of costs on which to base prudent decisions on the part of management.
The new plant was built amidst already existing mazes of stills, towers, tanks, pipelines, and laboratory facilities. The rude landscape gave the impression of being unconquerable, and our not inconsiderable layout seemed so small when gauged by its surroundings. We were playing, it seemed, with a giant Tinkertoy, and at times I wondered if indeed things would ever work out as they were meant to. But other more experienced heads had no such qualms. And they were right.
Once operational, I again found myself on shiftwork (this time an eight-hour stretch) as part of a team doing its "tour." Men much the same as those I had known at Sunoco performed smoothly the intricate business of refining petroleum in what was a potentially hazardous environment. On occasion we would learn how hazardous it was, as when two welders were caught in a flaming, gas-saturated field, their potassium permanganate covered bodies shocking me during a hospital visit. With smoking forbidden, chewing was relied on, some never spitting even once between cuds. One try of such sufficed for me.
Again, each week we changed shift, working either from midnight to 8 a.m., from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., or from 4 p.m. to midnight. Each brought his lunch bucket and ate on the job as work permitted. Orders were shouted above the din and roar of furnaces, boilers, pumps; men scurried to check gauges, turn valves, climb fractionating towers, collect samples for testing and performing the myriad chores required to get the job done properly.
Some of the regulars on the tour were college men, but most were not, tolerating our inexperience with equanimity. These were good, solid, hard-working and hard-playing types. Come hunting season (deer, elk, duck) nothing could keep them away from hunts planned for months in advance.
When I had become familiar with plant operations, I was moved into the laboratory. There products being made were tested. The set-up was much the same as the one in which I had found myself four years earlier.
One day the plant manager called me in. "I understand you've had both engineering and accounting training," he said. "I'm giving you an assistant from the accounting department and a secretary. I want you to tell us what it's costing us to make this new product."
So I became an engineering cost analyst. I explored the separate and different worlds of the accountants and the production people, sometimes shuttling back to headquarters, in search of elusive and illusory figures drawn from data kept for purposes other than those answering my need. I sought figures I could justify to myself; more importantly, that would stand the probing queries of my superiors. It was a great job, and I loved it. I had an unusual degree of independence, no one else was doing it, and it was considered important.
I was indeed moving in a direction that all must seek but so many never reach, so commendably described by Kipling in a portion of "When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted":
And only the Master shall praise us,
and only the Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money,
and no one shall work for fame;
But each for the joy of working,
and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It
for the God of Things as They Are!
At the point of being moved back to Bartlesville to assume broader responsibilities, the United States Navy intervened.
In my world, the work ethic was always strong. For the industrious Swiss the word fainéant carries an odious opprobrium.
In our family, making constructive use of time was second nature. The example set by my parents and other relatives was ever before each one.
Early on, the need for earning a few cents was certainly part of the incentive for the scramble for odd jobs. There was so much more joy in being able to buy a gift for a loved one if its price had been earned by self.
My earliest recollection of entrepreneurial activity outside the home involved the sale of Christmas and Easter cards. My cousin Dan and I, each bolstering the courage of the other, cautiously made our way from door to door — hoping to avoid dogs, hoping for a kindly reception, and, as the undertaking on occasion bore little fruit, hoping that nobody was home so we could quit.
While still too small to compete for wage-earning jobs, my brother Pete and I would divide up downtown territory and, on Saturdays, peddle Hershey bars to office workers, thus doubling in a few hours our original investment of a few dollars. Here the bugaboo was not dogs, but the watchful eye of building custodians enforcing the announced policy engraved on the No Solicitation sign. Pete generally did better than I did. He was two years younger, and then, as indeed throughout his life, he had a gentle manner which invited those with whom he came in contact to want to help him.
While in our first year of high school (age 13), cousin Dan and I got part-time jobs with the Western Union. We donned our green uniforms (dark brown puttees), got on our bikes and, having been told what office needed a substitute that day, rode off (usually in different directions) to put in our half-day's work. By doing this and working on Saturday and often Sunday, we could earn $9.00 in a week (whereas boys on full-time earned $16.00).
Thus we got to know the city rather well. Good weather or foul, we delivered, not unmindful of the motto of our slower competitor, the U.S. Postal Service. Our hope was always that our next assignment would not be miles away, and that our deliveries would from time to time include the more profitable multiple-message. I still have a sense of the offensive smells generated by various stockyards and paint manufacturing firms. There was the time also when I had earned enough to permit me to acquire my first brand new bicycle, only to have it wrecked when a car alongside of which I was peddling turned right while I continued on a straight course. Miraculously, I was but little hurt.
Across from Western Union headquarters was a Barber College. There I got my haircuts. How good they were depended on how much I felt I could pay at the time. Newly enrolled members of the school gave free haircuts; those halfway through the course charged 15 cents; near graduates felt their effort to be worth 25 cents. This at a time when regular shops charged 35 cents to 50 cents.
Once the Junior High was built, school hours were increased and the time available for work outside school hours reduced. Then I became an errand boy, in succession working for Edwards-Ludwig-Fuller Jewelry Co., the Green (Manufacturing) Jewelry Co., Pattison-McGrath Dental Supply Co., and my father's firm, Jules Borel & Co. I picked up parts and supplies needed by my employer, delivered items to customers, and made myself useful around the office.
On my rounds I delighted in stopping by the Myron Green Cafeteria bakery counter and, for 5 cents, picking up a newly baked, still warm, raisin-filled cinnamon roll. From my meager earnings of $3.50 per week, I bought for $25.00 a fumed oak glass-enclosed bookcase which my daughter Julie has to this day.
Occasionally I undertook special projects. One such was to produce a Borel catalog of watch parts (a copy of which is still in my possession). Using my newly learned skills as draftsman, I scribed and lettered identifying information on ground glass plates. The appropriate watch parts were then placed thereon and a photograph was taken over a light table yielding silhouettes. Against these, broken parts could then be matched thus supplying the identification number of the needed replacement.
In that period the Borel Company was located on an upper floor of 1009 Walnut Street, a block away from the Home Trust Co. One day sounds not unlike those heard on July 4 brought me to the window, and I witnessed a gang of bank robbers shooting down two policemen who had been directing traffic on successive corners, killing one and crippling for life the other. For this deed, once caught, the five involved were hanged.
It was clear that Father hoped I, as eldest son, would increasingly be involved in his business. But, even at the expense of suffering caustic remarks by his elder brother (who put his girls to work as soon as they had completed the legal requirements for attending school) Father, with Mother's strong assist, was ready to help me prepare myself for a career of my own choosing.
The year spent in Switzerland following graduation from Northeast High School (on Van Brundt Boulevard) in many ways made it easier to set myself on an independent course. I came back the Spring of 1930, with the notion of either following a career in journalism (in which case the University of Missouri seemed indicated) or one in engineering (in which case the University of Kansas seemed best to me). This course of action was endorsed by my parents, and I elected engineering, largely, I think, because I had particularly enjoyed my courses in drafting.
At K.U., my part-time jobs included dishwashing, accounting, parking cars and, during the summers, as lifeguard and as iceman. My father's business suffered, along with everyone else's, the setbacks of the depression. It was therefore important to earn money from others rather than look to his firm as a place for summer employment.
Through the good offices of a minister friend, the Reverend Alfred D. Grey, I was able, on graduation, to go to work immediately for the Sun Oil Company's Toledo refinery as a laboratory assistant. The Roosevelt administration had inaugurated the National Recovery Act (NRA) as one means of combatting the depression. A feature was to reduce working hours for those who had jobs in order to provide work for those who did not. Our workweek was thus limited to 36 hours, six days of six hours each. This meant shift work for me because an oil refinery is a continuous operation running night and day. Each week we changed working hours.
The work laboratory assistants were assigned consisted of running standard API (American Petroleum Institute) tests of products during the various stages of the refining process. The simplest tests were distillations and vapor pressures. Distillations reproduced in the lab what went on in a distillation or fractionation column. The process was simple enough. Heat was applied to a stream of crude oil passed through a still (a boiler-like furnace). The hot stream of crude oil released into a multi-layered tower whose trays are perforated with bubblecaps resulting in a separation of fuel components. The lightest (methanes and ethanes) go to the top, and the heavier ones (gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil and tars) are sorted out throughout the length of the column (perhaps three or four stories high). Thus components can be drawn off and pumped from column to storage tank. From these tanks, chemists decide how much of each to mix with another to get the desired petroleum product wanted.
The distillation test plus other tests give the chemist the data necessary to make these determinations. Another test was the determination of vapor pressure: How many pounds per square inch is generated by a given quantity of the sample heated to a given temperature.
Lab assistants were responsible for collecting their own samples. Thus, day or night, ice or heat, rain or shine, we would burden ourselves with carriers holding bottles, wrap around our neck bombs on which pressure gauges were mounted, making sure we had sealer with which to paint the bomb nipples to prevent leakage, and head for the tanks to be sampled (three samples per tank — top, middle, bottom). Then we struggled up the steel ladder welded to the side of the tank to its top. Opening the hatch, a great wave of pent-up gases would hit us in the face. Don't forget to hold your breath. And watch the ice, it's a long way to the ground.
In time, I was moved to a new job involving two functions, one daytime in the lab, the other elsewhere, at times unpredictable. The lab aspect was to calibrate the various instruments used to insure that results obtained from their use were meaningful. In short, to make sure the instruments could be relied on as accurate. The other aspect was necessary because Sun Oil shared with Pure Oil a pipeline through which products of each were pumped from Toledo to Detroit (Hamtramck, the Polish neighborhood). When a change from one company to the other was pending, I would get a call, told when to be in Detroit and into what tanks to direct the flow once Sun products began to arrive.
A reliable Chrysler coupe was provided for my transportation. I would take my lab instruments to detect the change in the specific gravity of the product (a slug of dye was also used as a visual indicator but was not always reliable because of a tendency toward dissipation). On my signal the pumper would turn his valves and switch from a Pure Oil tank to a Sun Oil tank. Then I would head back, a distance of some 60 miles. All told, the round trip would average the rough equivalent of a six-hour tour (as a shift was called).
In any event the Sun Oil job permitted me also to take some graduate work at Toledo U. I was paid 60 cents/hour for the test job, then 80 cents/hour for the calibration job. And I made arrangements with the chief engineer to do some work, gratis, in the drafting room in hopes this would give me an edge when he had an opening there for a job more related to my civil engineering degree than was the laboratory of the chief chemist.
I should also mention that during vacations, lab personnel would replace men working as part of the team running a still. Periodically, a still had to be shut down for maintenance. Time down costs money, so it was to be kept to a minimum. Primarily involved was the cleaning out of coke caked on the inside of the tubes through which oil was pumped over the hot fires of the still furnace. We did not wait for things to cool before we started our cleanup. We donned asbestos suits, and with our compressed air-powered centrifugal knockers broke loose the coke from within the tubes, creating in the process a cloud of soot-like dust which soon turned us black and entered every exposed orifice of the body. Once the job was done we would be days removing traces of its marks upon us and as many days regaining our normal hearing.
But I was very glad to have my job in an era of joblessness for so many.
With prudent management of my finances I was able to pay off some school debts, buy for $125.00 an old but reliable Willys roadster, which I converted to a convertible. It even had a mother-in-law seat in the back. And for a time I even took piano lessons.
After 15 months, I took a vacation to Kansas City. While visiting the K.U. campus, I ran into Professor George Hood who asked if I would be interested in joining the faculty of the engineering school as an instructor of two courses: descriptive geometry and engineering drawing. This I accepted since the terms would permit further graduate study in the field of sanitation engineering. So I began teaching, and studying bacteriology, the while living in the Theta Tau house, since razed and serving as parking for the Betas. Weekends often found me in Kansas City. On one such, not long after the inauguration of my new routine in Lawrence, I dropped in at Black & Veatch on the Plaza to rendezvous with a classmate who worked for this elite firm of consulting engineers. A year or more earlier I had applied there for work, but nothing had materialized. While waiting for my friend Dan McKim to clear his desk I fell into conversation with the firm's chief draftsman. Within a few minutes, he surprised me by offering me a job. On my return to Lawrence, the head of my department said that, such job offers being so scarce, if I really wanted to make the move he would get a teaching replacement for me. So I moved to K.C. and lived with my parents, brother John and sister Ruth in the house they then occupied at 7122 Grand Avenue.
It was at this time that I met Miriam Eleanor Chesham, the girl who would become my wife. Her parents and her brother Howard had moved to Kansas City from Minneapolis. Miriam, somewhat reluctantly, followed them. By the time of her arrival, Howard was dating my sister Toni. Howard had a party to welcome Miriam, to which my brothers, Pete and Johnny, and I were invited. All three of us were much impressed by the beauty, charm and conviviality of this newcomer. She had class. For a time she had dates with each of us. Eventually I edged out my brothers, but three years would pass before we were married.
When I joined Black & Veatch in October 1935, the organization had 125 professional engineers. (At this writing, 1986, they have over 3,000 working worldwide.) We were busy on municipal projects funded in part by the PWA (Public Works) program of Roosevelt recovery efforts. These, largely in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, involved drawing plans and writing specifications for waterworks, sewage disposal plants, power plants, roads, and valuation studies for public utility companies. I was finally doing civil engineering work. Some of my colleagues were in the field, supervising the construction of contractors who had successfully bid on the jobs we had designed. But I stayed in the drafting room.
As the scope of PWA programs expanded, our work increased. We began to work overtime, then additions were made to the staff. My brother John also came to work there helping out generally by running off specs on the mimeograph machine. They were happy days for us all.
Still, as I looked around, it was clear that my field of activity was a narrow one. And I decided to broaden it by returning to graduate school – this time setting my sights on Harvard as soon as I could save enough to give me a running start. Harvard's master's program in sanitary engineering was the most respected in the field.
By chance an associate at Black & Veatch was visited by a brother, Professor Edmund Learned of the Harvard Business School. We had lunch together. The outcome was a plan to attend HBS in the fall of 1936, having been given some assurance that part-time employment and scholarship loans would be forthcoming. I would therefore chance the shift from a one-year program in sanitary engineering to a two-year program in industrial management. HBS then had the highest tuition in the country, $600 per year. My budget would be $1,600 for each of two years.
I started out with $500 cash. The school loans were indeed forthcoming, but a job was not. I found a job as dishwasher in a small restaurant off Cambridge Square. However, the smells and sights within its kitchen took their toll, and I found myself unable to eat the very meals I had by my labors earned. If the Lord wants me to attend HBS, I told myself, other employment will be forthcoming. I quit. Two days later I was waiting on tables in one of the school's dining rooms. The following semester I moved to the collating and binding division of the HBS library, then to the circulation desk.
The summer between school years (1937), I worked as draftsman for the United Light and Power, holding company for Kansas City Power and Light, designing foundations for electric generating equipment and power plant structures.
During my second year at HBS I was busy with three jobs. That of associate editor of the HBS Yearbook called for an intensive effort, but this lasted only until the book was out. Secondly, I worked in the corporation records room of the library – a quiet place where my duties infringed but a limited degree on my studies while on the job. Thirdly, I was a research assistant in Harvard’s Fatigue Laboratory for Industrial Research, a Rockefeller-funded group of distinguished scientists brought together to study the phenomenon of human fatigue.
My work at this third job consisted mainly in preparing charts and graphs which, as engineer, I could ably do and, as a former trackman, subjecting myself as guinea pig for the conduct of assorted experiments. This involved pumping stationary bicycles, treadmills, running dashes timed every five yards by photoelectric cells (with various pieces of football gear on and lead weights added to arrive at improvements in design). For this I was paid $1.00 per hour (half again as much as the library job). Thus, financially, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel – and it wasn't a train coming the other way. If my studies suffered as a result of having to work, suffer they must, but I was on my own and not in debt beyond my ability to handle following graduation in June 1938. My father early on had sent me a check. This I had returned. Years later he told me its return made for a proud day in his life.
But I was undecided about what to do next. My trip from Boston to Kansas City was financed by Armco – The American Rolling Mill Corp. Armco's president (Hook) had interviewed me shortly before graduation. I was to stop off in Middletown, Ohio, and talk to his staff. This I did. They seemed interested, as was I, but did not come up with a firm offer. To mark time, I went back to work for Black & Veatch.
My old college roommate, Charlie Spahr, was by then working for the engineering department of Phillips Petroleum. He arranged some interviews. As a consequence I took a job with the natural gas and gasoline department, the primary manufacturing division of the company, reporting as a process engineer early in 1939. (Within days I got an offer from Armco, which I, having made a commitment to Phillips, declined.)
Work was underway to design, build and operate in Phillips (near Borger), Texas, an isomerization plant to manufacture a new product – neohexane – made from waste gas now being burnt at the existing refinery's torch. This involved high temperatures (1,000°F) and high pressures (1,500 Ibs/sq. in.). Though much of my work was design of structures – buildings, pipeline supports, walls shielding existing plant from damage from potential explosion – I was, as I had been at Sunoco, again working closely with chemists and chemical engineers. Talking to them I often felt out of my depth, and, indeed, dealing with a subject in which I had no abiding interest. I liked management, working with people to get a job done. Still it was good training and experience.
The interminable casting around for the "right" job must seem to the reader, as it did then to me, to have some negative implications. My difficulties were reflected in a letter I wrote to Miriam some months before we became engaged, that is, from Bartlesville on March 26:
My indecision about the future is owing to my anxiety in wanting to get started in a job where I will like the work as well as do something useful. I feel that if I can ever sink my teeth in the right job I could do something worthwhile. It is so very difficult to reconcile oneself with what is apparently trivial and unimportant. A professor at Harvard [Professor Doriot] once told me that for a man to be happy he must be steeped either in religion, home life, or his work. Perhaps there is more truth in his observation than I was prone to give him credit for at the time. There's certainly something to getting the right job since it is necessary to spend most of your waking hours at it. To many people religion becomes a shelter. I've always looked upon this as a manner of cowardice. I'm probably wrong there again.
With the completion of plans and construction in progress, I was assigned to Phillips, Texas, but sent first to Oklahoma City to familiarize myself with an operating unit in that area. It was during this interim that Miriam and I were married (in Kansas City on October 28, 1939). After a short honeymoon in Mexico we made our temporary home in the home of the Leslie Paris family, where we also took our meals, biding the time we would be in our "own" rented apartment in Borger, and later in our "own" company house in Phillips.
On the move from Oklahoma City, I preceded my wife in order to find housing, all company houses being then filled to capacity. Here was my report:
Phillips, Texas
December 4, 1939
Here I am writing you my first letter since we were married. Oddly enough I am writing in bed. Not because I'm lazy but mainly because there is no other place which I may use. This is one of many bunkhouses. In here are 16 double deck beds. As luck would have it, being a latecomer, I have a top berth.
We had an uneventful trip here and after having been assigned a bunk, we had supper and went to bed. Worked today until about 4:30 p.m. Not having any place to put my things I have part of them in a friend's locker – there being four lockers all together – some on the floor, some at another house where the door may be locked, and the rest still in the back of a fellow's car trunk.
What a joint this is. Everybody flying around – a regular madhouse. The first thing after work I went apartment hunting . . . our most pessimistic sounding friends were too optimistic. So far I haven’t seen the semblance of a place to live in. Haven’t seen a vacant one with an inside bath.
There are a couple of nice places but they are very expensive. Even then it wouldn't be bad, but these have no vacancies. . . .
The engines in the plant are so close to the bunkhouse that the building shakes like a steamship. I've got to find a place right away. It's too lonesome without you. Here there are about 30 men all around me, in the same room, and several hundred within a block or so, and I'm lonesome. Does that make sense? . . . .
Phillips, Texas
December 6, 1939
I have an apartment. It's brand new – never been lived in . . . . We'll need only linens and dishes. It's a small place on a dirt street, though only one block off Main: one of four apartments in a one-story building, each unit having a living room, kitchen and bath. . . . The bed is one of those you fold up and keep in the closet. Cost: $40/month, all bills paid, and, should we be there next summer, it is air-conditioned. I just happened to see them building it and was lucky enough to get one – three out of four having already been rented.
There was a mishap at the plant yesterday. Lot of people got plenty dirty, very few hurt, and I didn't even get dirty. So you see our luck holds out. . . .
It was here that we spent the year leading up to my call-up by the Navy as part of America's awakening to the menace of Germany in Europe and Japan in the Pacific.
My work in Phillips followed the natural progression of building, testing and operating the plant of our recent design effort, a testing of its products, and a determination of costs on which to base prudent decisions on the part of management.
The new plant was built amidst already existing mazes of stills, towers, tanks, pipelines, and laboratory facilities. The rude landscape gave the impression of being unconquerable, and our not inconsiderable layout seemed so small when gauged by its surroundings. We were playing, it seemed, with a giant Tinkertoy, and at times I wondered if indeed things would ever work out as they were meant to. But other more experienced heads had no such qualms. And they were right.
Once operational, I again found myself on shiftwork (this time an eight-hour stretch) as part of a team doing its "tour." Men much the same as those I had known at Sunoco performed smoothly the intricate business of refining petroleum in what was a potentially hazardous environment. On occasion we would learn how hazardous it was, as when two welders were caught in a flaming, gas-saturated field, their potassium permanganate covered bodies shocking me during a hospital visit. With smoking forbidden, chewing was relied on, some never spitting even once between cuds. One try of such sufficed for me.
Again, each week we changed shift, working either from midnight to 8 a.m., from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., or from 4 p.m. to midnight. Each brought his lunch bucket and ate on the job as work permitted. Orders were shouted above the din and roar of furnaces, boilers, pumps; men scurried to check gauges, turn valves, climb fractionating towers, collect samples for testing and performing the myriad chores required to get the job done properly.
Some of the regulars on the tour were college men, but most were not, tolerating our inexperience with equanimity. These were good, solid, hard-working and hard-playing types. Come hunting season (deer, elk, duck) nothing could keep them away from hunts planned for months in advance.
When I had become familiar with plant operations, I was moved into the laboratory. There products being made were tested. The set-up was much the same as the one in which I had found myself four years earlier.
One day the plant manager called me in. "I understand you've had both engineering and accounting training," he said. "I'm giving you an assistant from the accounting department and a secretary. I want you to tell us what it's costing us to make this new product."
So I became an engineering cost analyst. I explored the separate and different worlds of the accountants and the production people, sometimes shuttling back to headquarters, in search of elusive and illusory figures drawn from data kept for purposes other than those answering my need. I sought figures I could justify to myself; more importantly, that would stand the probing queries of my superiors. It was a great job, and I loved it. I had an unusual degree of independence, no one else was doing it, and it was considered important.
I was indeed moving in a direction that all must seek but so many never reach, so commendably described by Kipling in a portion of "When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted":
And only the Master shall praise us,
and only the Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money,
and no one shall work for fame;
But each for the joy of working,
and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It
for the God of Things as They Are!
At the point of being moved back to Bartlesville to assume broader responsibilities, the United States Navy intervened.
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