The Navy was fun and exiting but now I had to get serious about things. In the summer of 1967, I took one course at Long Beach City College. I said to myself if I can pass College English, I can make it through college. I had been overseas for the last year and didn't really know how much the world had changed. I had a Navy haircut and donned one of the suits that I had just tailored for me and went to the campus. Was I in for a surprise. Most all of the kids there had longish hair and were wearing tattered blue jeans and shirts. There were a few of us "straight" kids but most of the kids looked like hippies.
I took the evening summer session course and got an A. Buoyed up by my recent success, I took two more evening courses for the autumn session, College Algebra and Psychology. The ship's navigator was in the Algebra class and I got to thinking about maybe I knew why we went aground at Midway Island.
Again, I got two more As and ended up on the dean's list. The ship had been in the Long Beach Naval Shipyard for six months so I had a relatively light schedule. We were scheduled for sea trials and other fun tasks right after Christmas so I had to put my studies on the back burner. I was due to be discharged in March and was planning to go back to Cleveland, please hold your guffawing, so I didn't plan on any more college studying until the spring term.
We drove across the USA with our newborn baby who was born in November. We ended up renting an apartment in this huge four story complex. I hated it right away.
I got a job in Cleveland designing nuclear instrumentation at Victoreen Instruments. We bought a house and moved to Cleveland Heights. After unquestionably taking orders in the military for eight years, I kidded that I planned to get fired from my first civilian job. After a year, or so, I came home mid-day and surprised my wife. She asked what I was doing home so early and I told her that I got fired. I had gotten into a verbal altercation with the vice-president of engineering and guess who won and who had lost.
Two days later, I had a new job at API Instruments in Chesterland. I really liked the job and the people and they seemed to like me. I worked in the laboratory for a year, or so, and then had to go out "into the field" and "put out fires". I really liked being out "in the field" and was placed as a field engineer. One morning in May, I went out to my car to drive to work. It was buried in snow. I had to shovel snow for an hour just to get on slippery snow covered streets to go to work. After eight years of California living, I didn't want to cope with the snow and weather in Ohio.
In early 1970, I went out to California to assess some problems we were having out there. API come out of nowhere to become the forth largest builder of industrial instrumentation in four short years and some mistakes and learning were made along the way. I did a fine job out in Temple City, Ca and they liked me.They had a so called field engineer at the office but the poor guy was in over his head. He hadn't received the on the job training at the factory that I had and was kind of a bad tempered cuss to boot. Out he went and in I came and the company moved me and my family to California. About the time I came out West, API merged with a Massachusetts based company who had a line of Beta Gauges. Betta Gauges were a non-contact measuring device that used a radioactive isotope to penetrate paper, plastic or metal. The metal gauges actually used a gamma source to penetrate the metals. These gauges measured the materials as they were being manufactured. They also controlled the process to maintain a target thickness. Not only did I take care of these beasts in the eleven western states, I was dispatched to Mexico City, Melbourne Australia, steel mills in Japan and tire plants in Korea. Somewhere along the way, my wife left me because I was gone so much but I was having the time of my life.
I worked out of my house and traveled all over the world. Win some, lose some. In the summer of 1975, I told the home office that I wanted to take a month off and go to Europe with my German girlfriend. They told me I only had two weeks paid vacation coming so I said that the other two weeks could be unpaid vacation. I was told that I couldn't do that. So I said OK, I quit. They backed down and wished me a safe trip. I bought us 30 day Eurail Passes and we traveled all over Europe.
After I got back, the folks in Massachusetts wanted me to move back to Waltham and I said no. They told me it would pay much better and I told them that the mint hadn't printed enough money yet to induce me to move back to the snow. About the same time, I got a call from Larry my old boss in Ohio. He had moved to Barber-Coleman Co. in Rockford Illinois. He said they would like me to come to the Monterrey Park office and have a talk with them.
The BC folks were offering me a job as their service manager. I told them that I was relatively happy with my LFE job but I wouldn't mind having the Application Engineer's job. They told me the guy had been with them for twenty six years so don't hold your breath. I went winging off to somewhere and when I got back I had a message from Barber-Coleman on my answering machine. They said that their Application Engineer had upped and quit and moved to Colorado and now they were really in a bind would I still be interested.
So after six years at API/LFE I moved on down the road. I really liked the job but the people at the office kind of considered me to be a little too wild and crazy for them. They weren't used to one of their managers commuting to and from work on a motorcycle.
I then met my second wife and she talked me into selling apartment buildings.
But that's another story.
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