Saturday, October 27, 2018

My Work Experience – Part 2



In the summer between my two years of grad school I didn’t go back home to CT.  One of my CS buddies, Terry Opdendyk, had just graduated (in the normal 4 years) but had to remain in the area for the summer since his wife had a couple of courses to take before she graduated.  He had been accepted into the graduate program at Stanford for the fall.  He had contacts with a small computer company, Cascade Data, in his hometown (Grand Rapids, MI) about an hour or so away.  We formed a small business, TOAR Associates, using our initials, and submitted a couple of bids to do some contracting work for Cascade.  We got a contact to write a complete set of business applications for them, in RPG, that they could sell to the companies who bought the small business computer that they made (it was a competitor for the IBM System 3).  I didn’t know RPG at the time, so picked up a manual, learned it over the weekend, and started writing code on Monday.  We wrote a whole series of applications (General Ledger, AR, AP, Payroll, Inventory, etc.)  The company didn’t yet have a working RPG compiler, so one weekend we rented time at a local computer training company who had an early model Univac and spent the entire weekend compiling, correcting, and re-compiling all the programs we had written.

(A few asides about Terry.  I had met him in the fall of 1966 when were both freshmen.  We were taking ATL (American Thought and Language) together.  He told the teacher that he was going to be missing a couple of classes as he had a TV appearance in NYC.  The prior year he had been the National president of JA (Junior Achievement), and he was appearing on the show “To Tell the Truth”.  On the day that the show ran I made sure that I was back at the dorm watching.  We took a number of classes together as we were on the same academic path.)

In the fall, Terry and his wife moved out to CA.  He graduated from Stanford, went to work for a small company by the name of Intel where he started their programming department (it was just a chip manufacturer at the time), rising to become international VP of HR.  He then became president/CEO of a company called Personal Software Inc, renamed it VisiCorp (they produced a product you may remember called VisiCalc), then eventually moved on to become a venture capitalist.

Meanwhile, after the summer ended, I stayed on with Cascade Data as a contractor to help them complete their RPG compiler.  In the late fall the company was struggling financially and they decided to terminate all their contractors.  Since I was using that income to pay for grad school, I almost tearfully went to my grad advisor, Dr. Page, to let him know that I was going to have to drop out as I had no funds to pay for the next quarter.  He told me to wait on the decision and by the end of the week had put together a half-time assistantship running the help desk (a whole room of upper-level CS majors) where all the undergraduates came for help with their programming problems, and a quarter-time research assistantship working for the dean of institutional research.  That saved my graduate school career.



After completing my university education, I was unable to find a job – the recession of the early 1970’s having just begun.  So I once again returned to Uniroyal who was happy to have me.   They had just moved into their new corporate offices in Oxford, CT, just town or so away from where I had worked in Naugatuck those two summers.  My manager was once again Roy Peterson, and his boss Charlie Smith was the divisional MIS manager for CIP (Consumer, Industrial and Plastics divisions).  They made footwear, industrial conveyor belts, etc.  Charlie reported to the [financial] controller – a man who had come from Olin Corporation a few years earlier where he had been an assistant controller in one of their divisions. 

The following spring the controller left Uniroyal and returned to Olin as the VP of Finance (one way to get ahead is to jump to another company in a higher position, then return in yet a higher position – sometimes jumping around others in front of you on the corporate ladder).  Shortly after this, he convinced Charlie Smith to take early retirement from Uniroyal and come to Olin as the divisional director of MIS.  About the same time I felt the need to advance myself and had started looking around.  I had interviewed for jobs at Xerox in Rochester, NY and Lockheed in Bridgeport, CT.  I was about ready to accept the job with Lockheed when I got a call at home from Charlie Smith asking me to follow him to Olin.  He asked if I had thought about leaving Uniroyal and when I said that I was just about to turn in my resignation, he asked me to wait to accept the position at Lockheed until I met with him at Olin.  The Winchester Division of Olin was not all that far from me in CT, so I took a day off from work and drove down to New Haven.  Thus I ended up following on Charlie’s coattails and started working at Olin-Winchester Division.  It always intrigued me that of all the IT folks at Uniroyal, I was the only one he asked to follow him.

Winchester was the recreation products division of Olin.  Besides Winchester rifles (which they made at the New Haven plant), they made ammunition, sleeping bags, tents, lanterns and other camping equipment, Olin skis, and Ramset fasteners.  All the IT was done at the New Haven facility.  IT reported through finance and so was an overhead department and went through periodic ups and downs.  1972 was the beginning of an up cycle and I was in on the ground floor of the expansion.  Over the next 2.5 years I had the opportunity to bring in and install their first online systems, a database, and automate a fair number of areas of the company.  The last year I move from applications to internal systems and helped maintain the operating system, etc.  I got a lot of very broad experience in just a few years.

One of my more interesting experiences, and one which had some unanticipated (positive) implications later, was in-sourcing the division’s operations from their tent company in Statesville, NC.  The Hettrick Tent Company made tents for JC Penney, Sears, and other companies.  They had their own computer, an IBM 360-20, with a complete set of computer applications, all written in RPG.  As they had limited computer knowledge at that small location, the decision had been made to move those operations to our divisional computer facility in New Haven and run it on our larger machine.  It was a three-month project.  I and two others worked in the New Haven office on Monday.  After lunch we carpooled down to LaGuardia airport and flew down to Charlotte, NC (non-stop on Eastern Airlines at the time), rented a car and drove to Statesville, about an hour north of Charlotte, and checked into a motel there (the people in the motel got to know us on a first name basis by the end of the project).  We worked there until mid-morning on Friday, when we drove back to Charlotte and flew back home for the weekend.  We started the project at the beginning of September and finished at the end of November.  The project concluded by us flying down on Thanksgiving afternoon and working 12-on/12-off shifts over the weekend to do the final data conversion.  The following week was a light one as we just had to monitor the operation on the home office computer while the 360-20 stood idle.  In return for working the holiday weekend, the company flew our wives down on Monday for the last week.  We were able to do some sightseeing in the afternoons – spending one day at the Biltmore Estate in Ashville, and another at the Reynolda Estate in Raleigh.

In 1975, the company was starting through another down cycle and IT was bearing the brunt of the cost savings.  I watched many people around me getting laid off – including the other systems programmer with whom I shared an office.  Since the work wasn’t going away, just the people, those of us who were left kept having to pick up everyone else’s jobs as well as our own.  After a few months of this, I decided that I’d had enough and started looking around again.  After securing another job offer, I went to my supervisor to turn in my resignation.  He passed it upstairs to Charlie Smith who said, “Don’t tell me you’re resigning until I get back to you.”  Despite the downsizing going on, he came back to me the next morning with a 20% pay increase if I would stay.  I told him that I wasn’t leaving for the money, but because of the work environment and would be leaving anyway.

As an aside, the places where I worked then are either now torn down or abandoned.  The Uniroyal headquarters which was brand new in the early 1970’s with its open office concept is now a grassy field next to weed-infested parking lots.  The building in New Haven, only two blocks from Yale University, was shuttered about 10 years ago and the buildings are a rotting relic of the bygone days of manufacturing in the U.S.



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