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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