Work Adventures

 During my 28 years at Tulsa Winch, I had a lot of boring times but I also had a few adventures.  Let me tell you about four of them.

The Inclined Railway

In chronological order, the first one was probably my trip to Pittsburgh, PA.  We got  a call from the maintenance foreman at the Duquesne Incline in Pittsburgh who needed some help with one of his Tulsa gearboxes.  The only way I can describe this apparatus is that it is like a trolley built at an extreme angle and it traverses a mountainside in Pittsburgh.  Here is a picture of it.

Fortunately, our gearbox wasn't used to raise and lower the trolley but only to change out the cable every so often when the maintenance schedule calls for it.  I don't remember today the frequency the cable was changed but you can imagine that it was often.  It has been in operation since May, 1877 and they have gone through a bunch of cable in that 150 years.

The Coal Mine

The next memorable trip was into a coal mine in southern Utah.  Again, the maintenance people were having problems with one of our products and called us to help solve them.  My memory is somewhat sketchy but I believe the mine was operated by Utah Power and Light.  Of interest was that the coal traveled by conveyor belt directly to the nearby power plant and thus was never hauled by truck or by train.

We entered the mine through a horizontal mine shaft and were riding in an Isuzu diesel pickup.  My escort told me that the reason these pickups were used is because, being diesel, they had no ignition, thereby  eliminating a possible source of coal dust explosion.  We had to drive about half a mile back into the mine and, every so often, we would stop at a call box where my escort would call in and report our location.  The maintenance man told me this was in case there was an explosion or cave-in, the approximate location of everyone would be known.

Before we went into the mine, we had to go through a 30 minute orientation on how to use supplemental oxygen generators.  Fortunately, we needed none of this and I soon had their problem resolved.  I sure was glad to get out of that mine though!

The Drill Ship

Another exciting adventure was my helicopter ride 120 miles out into the Gulf.  Again, we were having a problem with one of our gearboxes on a semi-submersible drill ship, the Diamond M Century.  Diamond M was the name of the drilling company operating the platform.

This journey began by me driving to Houma, Louisiana, and catching a ride in a Petroleum Helicopters Inc. (PHI).  It was a Hughes 500 model and was extremely loud.  In order to talk to the pilot, I had to use a headset.  We landed about halfway out on an unmanned platform to refuel and the pilot told me that I had two choices: either get out and pump the fuel or he could do it but, if he did, we would have to wait 20 minutes for the turbine to cool down.  I decided I could pump the fuel.

We got to the drill ship, I looked at the gearbox and approved their proposed fix, and flew back to Houma.

The Nuclear Power Plant

The last adventure that comes to mind is my trip to Arkansas One, a nuclear power plant located in Russellville, Arkansas.  Once again, they had a Tulsa Winch, in this case a TP1 planetary model, which they were having problems with and asked us to come down and look at it.

In a couple of days, I drove from Tulsa to Russellville and met with the man who had called me.  That's when I found out that the winch was at the top of one of their two reactors, some 200 feet in the air!  The only way up was by climbing a ladder up the side of the vessel (while it was running).  At least there was a landing every 50 feet where you could stop and rest.

Before making the climb, I had to lay in a stainless steel tub and be scanned for nuclear waste.  This scan was repeated after coming back down from the reactor.  We made the climb and, when we got to the top, I discovered that the winch I was supposed to look at was at the end of a 15 foot I-beam hanging from the top of the reactor.  NO way was I going to shinney out on that beam to examine the winch.

I told the maintenance guy that the only solution was to get a crane in there, take the winch down, and send it to our plant in Tulsa.  That's what they did and a couple of weeks later, we got the winch and repaired it.

Misadventures as Art

A while back Louise and I were down in the shop and I showed her my "collection of shame", parts which had been damaged due to my negligence or stupidity.  A couple of days later, she asked me if she could have some of them for a project.

I had no idea what the project was but I said "yes".  After 48 years of marriage, I know the correct answers to most of her questions.  What she did was to use these as art to decorate our bathroom!

I must say that it is a very unusual choice of items to use as art.  I must describe each of these items.

On the upper left is a 32 penny spike which I accidentally left in the yard south of our house.  Years later, our neighbor, Roy, was doing us a favor by mowing that area.  He ran over the spike, which was at least 75 yards from the house, and threw it through our glass block window in the bathroom.  It traveled across the bathroom into the water closet where it left a deep gash in the sheet rock wall and landed on a small glass table in front of the stool.  Roy felt horrible but I was the one who left it in the yard and he was mowing our grass after all.

The nut in the lower left box was what was left from a trailer hitch which I grossly under designed.  We were returning home from a fishing trip to Lake Taneycomo in Missouri when the hitch failed, letting my boat and trailer come loose and almost roll over.  Ironically, my insurance agent, who was also my fishing buddy was following me at the time and almost had a heart attack!  The nut, which was holding the hitch ball on took the brunt of the incident and was ground almost nearly in two.  It took weeks to get all the asphalt out of the boat!

The large center frame holds a bent connecting rod from our '46 Chevy cabover, known as Butt Ugly.  I drove it to work at Tulsa Winch one day and a rain storm came through.  Well, the engine sits in the open behind the cab but I had no idea that that much water could get through the air cleaner!  When I went out that evening to start the truck, it turned over about twice, fired and then locked up.  The cylinder that that rod was in was full of water and it "hydrauliced", bending the rod.  A week later and some mechanic work and it was good as new.

The item in the right box is the only one not caused by my stupidity but I found it very unusual.  My neighbor, T.J., asked me to replace the PTO seal on his old Ford 600 tractor.  When I got the old seal out, I looked at it and was amazed!  The seal had the original Ford logo on it and the wiper on the seal was made of rawhide.  Early seals used rawhide as the wiper but I had never seen one.

If you get a chance, come by and look at the museum in our bathroom.

Autobiography, Chapter 7

Bob Langston worked in Personnel when I was hired at Vickers.  He told me that they were really looking for a graduate engineer with three years of sales experience but, since they were only paying $590 per month, they would take me.  That really made me feel loved and wanted.

Pres Whitson was the Personnel Manager, Bob’s boss.  Pres interviewed me as well and kept asking me if I would transfer if the occasion arose.  I kept telling him that, of course, I would.  I found out later that he was against hiring me because he was convinced that I would not move.  A year later I proved him wrong.  On June 4, 1970, I went to work for Vickers.

Louise and I had moved into a very nice house at 43^rd St. North and Cincinnati Ave. in Tulsa when we first moved there.  It was much better than we had expected to be able to afford and, sure enough, we couldn't.  After about 90 days, I had to tell our landlord that we couldn't afford to make the $125 per month rent and that we were going to have to move.  We moved into an 8’ by 46’ trailer house  at 6619 East King Street.

Before we moved, however, we had one experience which was somewhat funny.  Kenneth Moser, the guy I had tried to join the Police Department with, had a beat which covered my home.  He called me one night and asked if he could come by and drink a cup of coffee.  I told him I would be delighted and he said that he would bring one of his cohorts by.  In a little while, Kenneth showed up in his black-and-white and his partner followed him in in another black-and-white.  We all went inside and sat there for about 30 minutes drinking coffee when Kenneth announced that they had to go back to work.  When we opened the front door, the yard was full of people!  All the neighbors saw the police cars and thought that these white people had done something terribly wrong!

My first job at Vickers Tulsa Division was inside sales.  This company had started out in 1929 as the Tulsa Winch Manufacturing Corporation by Mr. Harley Pray.  It had been on the east side of downtown Tulsa for many years and had moved into the former Hale-Halsell warehouse on East Pine Street in December, 1968.

Mr. Pray started Tulsa Winch by making winches out of the rear ends of Model T trucks.  The gears used on those rear ends are very similar to the gears made today by Tulsa Winch.  When he ran out of used gears he had to start making his own.  The company grew and prospered and, in fact, won the U.S. Navy’s coveted “E” award for excellence during World War II.

In 1946, Mr. Pray decided to retire and sold the company to Vickers Hydraulics, a division of Remington Rand Co.  Harry Vickers had pioneered automotive hydraulics in Detroit and had built Vickers into the World’s premier hydraulics company.  Later Remington and Sperry merged and formed Sperry Rand Corporation.  Sperry Rand was most noted for building the World’s first true computer, the Eniac.

Enough of company history.  My job was to answer phones, take orders, expedite customer shipments, and field complaints.  There were four inside guys at the time: Garry Strouse, Fred Lamar, Bill Lewis, and me.  We had a supervisor, Johnny Kirk, and two secretaries, Janice Bain and Sherry Richardson.  It took me about two weeks to get up enough nerve to start answering the phone but I caught on quickly after that.  I’m convinced that having a farm background really helps in learning mechanical things.

There were three outside guys who worked out of that office as well.  They were Bernie Jiles, Jack West, and Chuck Bookout.  Bookout probably knew more about the technical aspects of our product line than anyone else.  When I would get a tough call, I would ask him to take it and he would always refuse.  It infuriated me but it did cause me to have to go to engineering and find out the correct answers for myself.  I became a better salesman because of his attitude.

Our general manager at the time was Russ Dupuis, an old-school manager who came into our sales office every day and looked at the sales sheet on Garry Strouse’s desk.  Russ had been with Vickers for many years and at Tulsa for about 10.  He retired in 1971, just a year after I went to work there.  The Marketing Manager was Chet Lenik, a Polish guy from Detroit.  When I first went to work at Vickers, he called me into his office and told me that if I heard any good Polish jokes he wanted to hear them.

Louise and I really enjoyed this time in our lives.  We were newlyweds, out on our own, and having a good time.  Louise worked at the Braum’s Ice Cream Store just around the corner from our trailer and I was having a good time in my new job.  We also met our good friends, Jerry and Marlene McCain, while living in the mobile home park.

Like us, they were just good country people, he from Jackson, Tennessee, and she from Jacksonville, Florida.  Jerry had been in the Navy and had met Marlene while stationed in Jacksonville.  After they married, they moved to Tulsa so he could attend Spartan School of Aeronautics.  He wanted to get his A & P (airframe and powerplant) license so he could become an aircraft mechanic.

We had a wonderful time living next door to Jerry and Marlene.  One Sunday morning, Louise made some biscuits from scratch and they didn't come out quite right.  In fact, they were terrible.  Well, I called Jerry and told him to meet me out in the yard.  We played a game of catch with the biscuits and not one of them ever broke!

Eventually, an opening in outside sales came up, this time in Detroit.  This was a major promotion and most people would have killed for it.  Of the four of us, one, Garry Strouse, had made it clear in the past that he would not transfer.  For some reason, the company didn’t want to offer Bill Lewis the job, so that left Fred Lamar and me.  Fred had seniority on me so they kept offering the job to him.  I wanted it badly so I kept badgering Estill Sherrill, the Sales Manager, for the job.  Finally, they decided that Fred just was not going to move, so they told me I had the job.

Being transferred from Tulsa to Detroit meant a raise from $690 per month (I had gotten a couple of raises) to $850 per month.  All of our friends told us that we would hate living in Detroit but the job opportunity was too good to pass up.  In early June, 1971, while the company was on strike, Louise and I moved to Detroit.

We found a small apartment at the corner of 14 Mile Road and John R., in Troy.  If you are familiar with Detroit, you know that the northernmost boundary of the city is 8 Mile Road, so we were six miles north of there.  Troy was a fairly young, growing suburb, and we were happy to be living there.  There was a giant mall across the road from our house, Oakland Mall, and just about everything you could think of was within close proximity.

Louise quickly got a job at a card shop in the Mall, Memory Lane, and developed a bunch of new friends.  I am convinced that this was the reason we liked Detroit so much.  We both had new jobs and were meeting new people and everything was right.

The apartment complex we moved into was named Canterbury Square.  It consisted of several buildings, each with eight units in it.  The day we moved into our building, not a single neighbor knew any of their neighbors.  However, within two weeks, Louise and I knew everyone In the building and, within six weeks, everyone in the building knew everyone else.  I really don’t give us credit for anything except being stupid enough to want to meet everyone.  Some of the neighbors included Chuck Schiff (our accountant friend who lived upstairs), John and Mary Bone, and Chuck and Sue Mowat.  Mrs. Cooper, a lonely widow, lived next door to Chuck Schiff.

One problem we had was that Louise did not know how to drive.  I’ve kidded her forever saying that the next time I get married, the first question I’m going to ask the prospective bride is whether she has a drivers license.  Louise did not want to learn but I wanted her to.  We set a practice time for every evening at 5:30 p.m. when I was in town.  After about 90 days, she was ready and took her test.  She passed it with flying colors.

I was in outside sales and my territory was Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia.  I worked out of an office at the Vickers Warehouse in Ferndale, about five miles south of our apartment.  I was assigned to train under a fellow by the name of Dick Karr, who had been in outside sales for Tulsa Winch for several years.

In retrospect, I was a very poor salesman at this time.  I was definitely not assertive, which you need to be, and I didn’t know the product line as well as I should.  I was reluctant to travel much, because I didn’t want to spend the Company’s money so I didn’t see my customers as often as I should.  In spite of all this, my bosses thought I was doing a good job so they were happy with me.

After about a year and a half, we had a reorganization in Tulsa and Jack West became my new boss.  Jack called me up one day and said he needed to talk to me and would meet me at the airport that evening.  Well, if he was going to fly over 1000 miles just to have a meeting with me at the airport, it had to be important!  When I met with him that evening, he told me that I was going to be transferred and had my choice of Chicago or Tulsa.  Inside I was screaming “Tulsa” but I played it cool and told him I would have to talk to Louise.

Of course, Louise wanted to move back to Tulsa as well so we took the transfer home.  In October, 1972, we moved back to Tulsa, into an apartment building on Harvard just south of Pine Street.