Naming Names and Kicking Ass

 Naming Names and Kicking Ass

We used to be a nation. We used to believe in working together as a team for the good of our nation. When hard times occurred or war was imposed upon us, we sacrificed our freedoms and fought together to make this country not only survive, but prosper.

When World War II loomed before us, there were individualists who advocated joining the Axis, Fascists countries, including Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. They preached the futility of opposing such military power as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini had built up. In spite of such naysayers, millions of people volunteered to join the US military, give up their freedom and years of their lives to help their country win the war.

 We lost all that somewhere along the line.  

Now we have millions of people who are so concerned with their personal freedoms that they refuse to do anything to help their nation as it might cause them a little loss of comfort. They wave flags of the losers of our wars as they claim to be “patriots.” They attack the very foundations of our government, and invent fabulous conspiracies to cast doubt on the institutions of government, such as free and fair elections. None of them will lift a finger to work to make our elections better. They would rather stand outside and bitch about stolen elections.

In the 1980’s Ronald Reagan was our president. Instead of leading our nation and inspiring the nation, he abolished the rule that required news organizations to present both side of any issue. Long ago that rule was instituted because they realized that if only one side is presented it was not news but propaganda.

He allowed Rupert Murdoch to immigrate from Australia and conferred citizenship on him and allowed him to start his own media empire, with Fox News, Sinclair radio and many newspapers, all right wing conservative, with never any positive coverage of the liberal teamwork that made this nation invincible.

He disparaged the concept that Abe Lincoln propounded, the we are a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” and instead insisted that government was the enemy of the people.

He elevated such people as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, who spoke against the idea of following the leaders of our government to maintain the strength of our nation. They preached the ideologies of Ayn Rand, whose insidious philosophy excluded any motivation except what is good for yourself, to hell with everybody else.

Altruism is now the worst evil.

Franklin D.. Roosevelt had sons in WWII. Harry Truman was a GI in WWI, Eisenhower was a leader in WWII. The Kennedys lost a son in WWII. Even the powerful and rich considered it their duty to sacrifice for the nation.

Now too many make a hero of a man who dodged military service, and whose family has never served in the military for five generations. He is lauded for his ability to conduct a business that mostly involved screwing others out of their money and property. Yeah, Donald Trump.

Now our country is in chaos. It’s every man for himself. Kill everyone that doesn’t agree with you. Make up conspiracy theories that tear down the nation and our government and our elections.

The Lord help us when China decides they are big enough to take over the number one spot. We gave it up years ago. They march together. We run in all directions. 

That’s as plain as I can make it.  

In 1943...

 In 1943…

In 1943 when I was born, the government required my parents to vaccinate me against Smallpox.

I never got Smallpox. In fact, nobody in the world has caught Smallpox in many years. It’s eradicated.

When I started school in 1948, I had to have inoculations against Diphtheria, Pertussis, and Tetanus. I never caught any of those, either.

In 1955, I was required to get inoculated against Poliomyelitis. I knew several people who had caught that disease before there was a vaccine. One boy in school had braces on his leg, as did one man and a woman in our church. Our church “Singing Band” went on Saturday afternoons to sing hymns to a lady in an iron lung, because polio had paralyzed her from the neck down, and she couldn’t breath without the help of a machine.

I was happy I never got polio.

In 1961 I got another vaccination against polio. The first one, the Salk vaccine worked well but not perfectly. It was administered by needle. The new ones by Sabin and Cox in 1961 were more effective against all three variations of the virus. They had the vaccine in sugar cubes that were flavored like cherries. Tasted good, and they came in three doses a month apart.

Polio is eradicated everywhere in the world now except Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s too bad, but they don’t trust Americans anymore. Can’t blame them I guess.

In 1965  the US Army shipped me to the Orient. We were required to have shots for Typhus, Typhoid, Cholera, Influenza, and Yellow Fever. The only reaction I had was to the flu shot, probably because I already had the flu. Nobody else got the flu.

I didn’t get any of those other diseases.

In 1968 I was a regular visitor at the house of a family in southern California. I had gone to college with him years before, and learned a lot about mechanics, machinist stuff, and common sense.

One day a girl staying with the family, named Darlene, came down with mumps. It was well known that sometimes the mumps “went down” and left men sterile. So Laverna, the mother, called the doctor and arranged for several of us men to go down and get shots. Don, Kenneth, David, and myself all got in the car and drove to the doctor’s office and got Gamma Globulin shots to try to prevent us from catching mumps.

The inoculations must have worked because we never got mumps, and some of us have had children in the years since.

In the rest of my life, I have gotten several “booster” shots for Tetanus, because of minor injuries acquired due to working in a machine shop and on a ranch.

Last January and February, I got vaccinated against the Covid virus. I personally know two people, not that old or decrepit, who were hospitalized due to that virus. I also know of a couple of acquaintances who died of it, but not close friends. Luckily. Yet.

I still take precautions not to spread the virus, because one of the wild cards with this disease is that it can be spread by those without symptoms. That includes the already vaccinated. It spreads fast and hits some people really hard.

As most of us do, I have friends and relatives who prefer to believe paid propagandists rather than doctors and scientists who have studied infectious diseases all their lives.

Stupidity abounds!

 

My Class and My Life, Part II

 We drove east for a few miles down the road to the Hayden power generation plant, where the gate guard was expecting us. He directed us to the parking lot and explained that the Plant manager’s office was on the top floor, and he was waiting to meet me.

He rose and came over to introduce himself and ask if my wife was with me. I told him “Yes, she’s out in the car.”

He said, “Go back out and bring her in. I need to talk to her, too. We don’t have much trouble with the guys leaving, because they like the hunting, hiking and fishing, but we lose more men to unhappy wives than anything else.”

I went back out to the car and got Carolyn, and he introduced himself again to her. His name was Wayne Butz, and I remember thinking with that name he would be angry all his life, or have a great sense of humor.

I never met a jollier man. After we sat down he went over my experience and qualifications. Then he came to my test scores. He frowned a little, then smiled a little as he asked, “Are you sure you’re not here for my job?”

I laughed and reassured him I came for the Maintenance Machinist job. Not interested in sitting behind a desk at all.

He explained that because this was a union company, there were procedures that had to be followed. The job was posted to all the other power plants in the company for ten days, to allow any other machinists in the company to bid on the position first. After the internal bidding process was over, I was first in line for whichever power plant needed me.

This was not what I was expecting, but I was glad to find that it was a union job. More than the higher pay and benefits, having a contract spelling out what is expected of the employee and what is expected of the company takes a lot of the worry out of the work. 

I got the phone number to call, and told him I would keep in touch and I hoped to see him in a couple of weeks.

Carolyn and I were just about out of money, so we filled up the little Toyota and carefully drove to Oklahoma, where Carolyn’s family lived. Our daughter Darlene was staying down there and was not with us during the month of homelessness, living in a tent in park campgrounds.

We arrived at Carolyn’s mother’s home in Durant and had a glad reunion with our daughter there. Then all three of us were invited to travel back towards Colorado to Carolyn’s brother Larry’s home near the Air Force Base in Altus. I don’t know what we would have done without the help of family. They not only fed us, but loaned us some money for gas back to the job.

 I was pretty sure I had the job nailed down, but I called every couple of days so they wouldn’t forget me.

On day eleven I drove up to the Colorado-Ute Electric Ass’n headquarters in Montrose and asked if the job was mine yet. They laughed and told me they were going to have to give me the job so I’d quit calling!

Then they explained that the machinist from the Nucla power plant had bid on the job in Hayden and would I be interested in a job at the Nucla Station. I had never been there, but I said sure, so they arranged for me to interview in Nucla the next day.

We didn’t have enough money left for a motel room, so we camped out near a stream on the Uncompahgre Range between Montrose and Nucla. Darlene remembers putting the sodas in the stream to cool that evening, and also remembers that the next morning when I cooked some Vienna sausages over the campfire for breakfast, Carolyn got sick and they came back up. From that day until the day she died, she never ate a Vienna sausage again. 

We had no doubts now she was pregnant. She soon got over the morning sickness and was ecstatic to be carrying a baby at last.

At the power plant I was greeted warmly and given a tour of the facility, and especially the machine shop. It was fairly complete, except for the lack of a milling machine. When working in remote towns, parts to be machined can’t be shipped hundreds of miles away for work, so I resolved that if worse came to worse, I could cut a keyway on the lathe, with some adapting.

They all knew my name before I was introduced. We soon found out that in small towns, word gets around fast. Not many new people move in and we were the biggest news of the year, I think.

We went into the little town wondering how we were going to find a place to live. There was no daily newspaper, so no want ads were available, and the internet hadn’t been invented yet.

On a hunch, we stopped at the little laundromat downtown and sure enough, there was a bulletin board inside. I found a note listing a two bedroom house to be rented. “Inquire at the barbershop” it said. Well, the barbershop is just across the street, so that was easy.

I entered the barbershop and asked the barber about the house for rent. He asked if I was the new machinist at the power plant. Like I said, word gets around fast in a small town. 

After I said yes, and introduced myself, he apologized and explained he was just finishing a new house for his family, but they were still living in the rental house for a couple of weeks yet. He had just posted the note on the laundry room wall that morning.

He proposed we could share the house for a couple of weeks rent free, if that would be OK. We could come back that evening and meet his family after work. Wonderful! I quickly agreed, as that solved the problem of finding the first month’s rent up front. 

When I reported for work the first day, The supervisor and manager both talked about my experience and capabilities. I was much younger than the former machinist, and they had some doubts I could handle the requirements of the job. That suited me just fine, as I would rather be judged on my abilities rather than some certification or degree.

The plant was small, and the maintenance team had one welder, one machinist, one electrician, and one mechanic. So being able to do the work was essential because there was no backup.

Of course, I got plenty of teasing by the rest of the crew. Every time I started working on some machine, somebody would say, “That’s not the way Tillman did it!” 

At first I would ask, “Who is Tillman?” 

Later I replied, “Well, he must have not done it right, or I wouldn’t have to be doing it again.”

Eventually, after a few weeks of seeing my skills, they started asking me for advice sometimes. One day the welder and the mechanic came in to the shop and asked if I could help them remove a cast iron sprocket on the traveling chain screens out at the river. It was rusted hard to the shaft, worn out and needing replacement.

After I looked at it, I said I thought I could remove it in ten or fifteen minutes. They said, “Bullshit! We have been using pullers, and heating it with torches, and beating it with hammers for over two hours, and it’s stuck tight!” 

I went to the shop, put a big cold chisel in my pocket, and got a sharp 1/4 inch drill bit and the drill motor. While they watched, I started drilling a line of small holes, starting just above the keyway, on a radius out to one side. After the first hole I could tell the iron was fairly soft, so I said, “Ten minutes, no problem.” When I drilled the last hole near the teeth on  the outside, they asked if I was ready for the puller.

I said, “No, I’m pulling this off by hand”. They laughed again, until I took the cold chisel out of my pocket, picked up a hammer nearby, and hit it hard just once into the line of holes I had drilled. As I knew it would, the sprocket split to the key and expanded just enough for me reach up and slide it off the shaft by hand.

I just smiled and said, “Call me anytime!” as I handed them the sprocket.

Years of experience is worth more than any amount of book studies. I knew that trick because I had done it many times before. When I was just a boy I remember watching my grandfather remove a timing gear from the camshaft on an old Chevrolet the same way.

I’m not opposed to studying the books. I collected a stack of books through the years - mostly reference books, and I used them when necessary. 

For instance, I had to install seal sleeves in the end housings of boiler feed pumps. They are an interference fit, and cannot be pushed in without damage. Early in my machinist training, I looked up the coefficient of expansion of iron and steel, and using my trusty slide rule, calculated a handy rule of thumb for chilling or heating those parts so they would slide right into place.

On any round part, whether sleeve or bushing or throttle valve seats on a turbine, the numbers to know is 1/2 thousandths inch change per 100º F. per inch of diameter. If a bushing is .004” bigger than the bore in the housing, and the bushing is 7 inches in diameter, then putting the bushing in liquid nitrogen will chill it to about -350º F. That will shrink it 3.5 x 7 / 2 = .012.2” At that temperature it will rattle right into the hole and then expand tightly in about a minute.

Of course, since the nitrogen is so cold, insulated gloves, face shields and other protective gear is required. Care is also needed because the steel part will be brittle and must be handled gently. Every time I did this in the shop, people would come to watch and play. An apple at that temperature will shatter like glass if dropped on the floor.

That formula works the same whether heating or cooling. When putting a bearing or sleeve on a shaft, the expansion is the same. 

My Class and My Life

 This will be long, and I’m not sure where to start. I’m sure I will be doing a lot of editing, and I may have to split it into two or more parts.

 I was raised working as a small boy in my Father’s Kaiser-Fraser auto repair shop until he left the family when I was eleven. I was already by then a fairly skilled auto mechanic, and with the help of my relative and close friend Gleason Appling, who was studying diesel mechanics, we were able to keep the cars running, at least.

I studied a college prep curriculum in high school, taking every math class they offered, aiming at becoming a Mechanical Engineer. I graduated in 1961, but didn’t have the money to go directly to college, so I stayed out one year and saved my coins.

I was accepted at Walla Walla College into an Engineering major, and had trouble immediately, due to my rusty math skills on the year I was out working as a ranch hand for money. However, I enjoyed much of the classwork and practical skills taught in that school. Part of the trouble was I was having to work afternoons as a machinist helper to supplement my funds to pay tuition. While I learned a lot in the machine shop as a helper, it did not count toward my credits.

After the one year of college, I found work in a carburetor rebuilding shop in Fremont, California, due to the efforts of my cousin Jim Russell, who lived in San Jose. I worked there for about a year, becoming familiar with every kind of carburetor that ever existed, and getting a little practice on the Clayton dynamometer that they used to test each carburetor before boxing them up for shipment to various parts stores.

I quit that job, moved back to Merced, and went to work for Montgomery Wards, in their repair shop as a gas engine mechanic, working on mowers, chain saws, and rototillers. In my spare time I helped the TV repairman put up antennas, or assist the refrigeration guy install air conditioners.  

At the beginning of 1965 I was told by the management that they did not want to train me for the new year, because of my 1-A draft status. When my unemployment ran short, I went down to the Selective Service office to find out when they were going to draft me. I knew it was inevitable, because the war in Vietnam was escalating daily. They told me I could request to be moved up the list to the top, and said I guess I better do that or starve, since nobody would hire me.

I got my Greetings letter from President Lyndon B. Johnson in just a couple of weeks, and I started Basic Training at Ft. Ord on April 7, 1965.

The base was nearly empty, as they had had a spate of spinal meningitis cases with several deaths in the months before and had closed the base for training for six months. I was in the second training company after the restart, and we were quarantined to the immediate barracks area the whole eight weeks of training.

I first got to use some of that college training before the first company inspection. We were instructed to have our field equipment arranged on a towel in front of our foot locker in a certain configuration, but the instructions were kind of vague. I suggested to my sergeant that I could draw a picture to make the layout clearer, and he said go for it. I used the year of Engineering Drawing I had acquired to sketch out how the articles should be arranged for inspection, and after the sergeant suggested that I change the label “washrag” to “washcloth”, he took it to the company commander. He was duly impressed and made enough copies for every soldier in the company.  He shared it with other company commanders, and I found that my drawing was being used all over the post. Of course, we got top marks on our inspection!

At the end of Basic, they posted the orders for every soldier on the company bulletin board, and the vast majority were destined for more training - AIT - Advanced Individual Training. I wasn’t on the list, so I inquired and was told because of my skills and experience, I was going to an engine repair depot in Granite City, Illinois, directly bypassing any more training.

However, they offered me Officer Candidate School, because of my high scores on the battery of exams they gave me, but I turned that down because I didn’t want obligated to be a Commissioned Officer until 65 years old.

They also offered me a chance to go to Ft. Rucker, Alabama, and become a Warrant Officer and helicopter pilot. I would have loved to become a pilot, but the prospects of surviving over the jungles of Vietnam in a helicopter were not enticing, so I turned that down, also.

I reported for duty at Granite City Army Depot to the 185th Engr. Co. (HM) and in a couple of days they sent me out to the shop for an interview with the shop officer in charge. He brightened up when I mentioned my dynamometer experience, and asked what kind of dyno? I told him a Clayton 250, and he just about jumped out of his chair. He told me he had three of them out on the floor, and only one soldier qualified to operate it. 

I was assigned to one of the dynamometers, with a Specialist 4 as my assistant. Since I was still a buck Private, I was a little nervous, but after we were introduced, I showed him the third dyno and let him know he would soon have it for his own, with a little patience.

For the next couple of months I spent eight hours a day testing newly rebuilt engines, and setting hot valve lash on each when done testing on an hour and a half card at different loads and speeds. Most of the engines were flat head Dodge sixes for 3/4 ton weapons carriers, but we did a few GMC truck engines and even tried a a 1260 hp. Allison engine for the M-60 tank, but all we could test was startup and idle. 

In the fall of 1965 we got word that the whole company was being moved overseas to get closer to the action in Southeast Asia. All our men and equipment were loaded aboard the old troopship Gen. J. C. Breckinridge and chugged across the Pacific Ocean to Okinawa. There we opened up a base that had been mothballed since the Korean War. It had originally been a Japanese airfield during WWII.

There were several big hangers that were divided up between the different sections of the company. One was the Fuel and Electric Section, and that’s where I was sent, to become the carburetor tester. My Military Occupational Specialty was 63Golf, which is Fuel & Electric Repairman, so my job was pretty obvious.

However, the immediate problem for me is that they had lots of carburetors coming in for testing from lots of different engines, and we only had two engines to test them on, a small GMC and a large Chrome Moly. (I don’t remember who made that one). The shop officer said they were going to try to find other engines for carburetor testing. I asked if they couldn’t just make adapters to fit any carb to the engines we had.

He replied that they didn’t have that kind of ability in the shops on base. I volunteered to design and make patterns so the fabrication shop could just cut and weld the parts together. He seemed a little skeptical but he gave me time and a drafting table, so I designed three different adapters for four barrels to two barrel, two barrels to one barrel, and one with a 90º bend to test M151 side draft jeep carburetors. It took me a couple of days to finish. I made cardboard patterns outlining the shapes and hole details, and in a week or so they had cut, bent and welded them together beautifully, and even painted them OD to match the engines. They worked wonderfully well, and I was presented with an award for “Zero Defects”. I still retain the certificate in my military papers.

Not long after we started testing the M151 carburetors, the shop ran out of parts. The accelerator pump was a diaphragm and spring affair in the bottom of the bowl, and when the diaphragm failed, the fuel flooded the vacuum port to the manifold and the engine would not start. They told us that the whole vehicle was made to be disposable, since they lost a lot of expensive Jeeps in the Korean War, and so the carburetor only had two moving parts - throttle and choke - and all the rest was diaphragms. Since the carb itself was disposable, we weren’t supposed to have to repair them, but they needed them in Nam, and no replacements were available from the manufacturer. 

So I asked the shop officer to check locally for diaphragm material and rivets to match the ones we needed and we started manufacturing parts for these little carburetors. We were able to put out several thousand repaired carbs this way, and I am pretty sure our parts were better than the originals.  

When I was separated from the US Army in 1967, I wasn’t able to find work in my hometown of Merced, California, so I went down to Los Angeles to find a job. I applied for a job at the West Coast Racing Division of Champion Spark Plugs down by the harbor near San Pedro, and although he liked my experience, he said he couldn’t give me the job because they were looking for someone with a college degree. 

That was the first time I realized that it wasn’t your qualifications they were looking for, it was was your certification from higher education they wanted. My class disqualified me, even though I could do the job. It wasn’t the last time I ran into that wall.

With the help of a family friend, John Price, I found an apprenticeship opening in a large manufacturing facility in Downey. The job was training as a Maintenance Machinist. The name of the company was Olympic Screw and Rivet Company, but after I left, I found the owners had changed the name to Fastener Specialties Company, after they heard too many jokes about being on the Olympic Screw Team.

I had only worked there about a month, when I got a call from Milheim Motors, a Pontiac agency in Merced, where I had put in an application for a job. They needed a Tune-up man, and were paying more than a dollar an hour more than where I was. The next day I went to my supervisor and  gave him two weeks notice, and explained why, since I loved the work in the machine shop.

The next day I was called into his office, and my foreman was already there. My supervisor explained that my foreman had told him I was the one he could send out to a broken machine, and I could diagnose the problem, make new parts if needed and repair the machine without needing a lot of help. He offered to move me up in the apprenticeship schedule two years and raise my wages well above what the Pontiac agency was offering.

I accepted the offer and called Mr. Milheim Pontiac that evening. He wasn’t surprised, and laughed as he told me to call anytime I needed more help in negotiations.

I stayed there for two more years until I topped out and was rated Journeyman. Not long after, I became unhappy with the LA life and quit and next found work at John Kimzey Welding out in the country in Woodland, California. The pay was much less, and the benefits were nil, but the work was varied and challenging. I repaired and machined parts for everything from tractors, airplanes, ditch diggers and trucks. Each day was different and exciting. 

I had gotten married before leaving LA, and taking on a family was requiring a little more care in moving from job to job. Even though I liked the work, I had to quit and look elsewhere for a better job. I didn’t find it right away!

My next job was in Silver Springs, Nevada, for Sierra Rotary Engine Corp., a small shop that was making experimental engines for an inventor, Bill Turner, who had patents on twenty seven different engines, he said. Some were steam driven, and some were internal combustion engines, including a scissor piston engine that looked intriguing to me. 

The pay was even worse, but was offset by the cheaper rents in the area. We found a cheap house for rent a hundred yards behind the shop, allowing me to walk to work and save on gas, too.

I don’t think I ever worked in a place that valued my contribution to the company as Bill Turner did. He would explain in the morning what we needed done that day, and was always surprised when I finished the work before he expected. He was almost joyous when we got the machine assembled and rotating at last. (Or maybe it was that fifth of Black Velvet he drank every day!)

He had a dynamometer installed for testing, but unfortunately, due to errors in the design materials, we could not start the engine on the evening he announced it to the investors. Bill told me the next Monday that there was no money in the bank, and he couldn’t guarantee a paycheck at the end of the week. I thanked him for his courtesy and went back to LA, where I knew I could find a job quickly.

I found a job the next day at M-K Products in Santa Ana, as a production machinist making hundreds of small precision parts every day for dental drill motors. I could handle the work, but I hated it. After a month of making the same parts every day, and contending with the LA lifestyle and traffic, I quit and started looking for work someplace else, outside the city. 

After a month of homeless camping in national and state parks across the west, I found an ad in the Grand Junction newspaper for a machinist in Hayden, Colorado, at a power generation plant. I went into the headquarters in Montrose and inquired, and they asked me to take a test to qualify for the job. I had no trouble acing the skills test with my years of experience and training. Then they gave me a psychological test to see if I could stand the isolation. I loved this one as there was nothing I wanted more than to get far from the big city. 

After a perfunctory physical by a company doctor in Montrose, they sent me up to Hayden to interview the next day with the plant manager. We dipped into our meager funds and got a motel room for the night in Craig. We both needed a bath in a bad way!

When we awoke the next morning, my wife Carolyn said her nipples were sore and she didn’t feel like eating breakfast due to nausea. I told her it sounded like she was pregnant. She was shocked but happy, since we had been trying for four years to make that happen. Things were about to turn around in a big way for us.