Last Trip?

So where to begin? I was born May 29^th, 1939 ------- Nahh.

Along about 1985 we met a 17 year old French guy named Oliver Amicel. It was a very casual meeting at the house of one of Marilyn’s co-worker. Cut to the chase, Glenn.  We became friends with Oliver, his sister Catherine and their parents Michel and Michele. Marilyn does very well in French now but 30 years ago we didn’t have a common language with the parents. So the friendship blossomed anyway. They came here, we went there. We toured California and France, and then we went to Italy together. 29 years passed.  When we went to Europe last Fall we had it in mind that it was the last trip. When we flew out of Rome and Paris there were more than a few tears. Michel is four years older than I am. He turned 80 Saturday the 16^th of January. We were invited to the party, we made some jokes about going and surprising them but it wasn’t really in the financial cards. ……. Until …..  our stockbroker called. Seems we didn’t take enough money out of the retirement fund last year. The check just covered the air fare and we had to go. Flew to London, changed planes and went on to Paris Orly. Now I’ve said before that I’ve been lucky all my life and this was no exception. I had a window seat on the right side of the Airbus and there was Paris, the air clear as crystal and the whole city spread out like a magic carpet of lights. I teared up again. In all the times we’ve landed in Paris I had never seen it like that.

We hid out with Oliver and his wife Francine, had a Friday night party with his friends, went shopping Saturday and Saturday night we went to the Amicels neighborhood restaurant for the party. The surprise went perfectly, I’ll remember the looks on their faces until the day I check out. Then we had a week in Paris to get acquainted with the family again.  

What’s the point of all this? What I have said over and over again. All we had to do was open the door. Marilyn did the heavy lifting,  We had the right house at the right time, we were the right age and I got that wonderful final approach to Orly airport. And a hell of a birthday party.

Celia Williams

I haven’t posted in a while. Need to. Anybody who reads this probably already knows I was born in 1939 in Houston, Texas. I wouldn’t trade being a Texan for just about anything but that’s another subject. Here’s what you don’t know. When I was 3 my mother got pregnant with my little sister. Complications developed and she died 24 hours after birth. It was something that would not amount to much today with sonograms and modern medicine, but that was then, not now. Mom got to hold her, and name her and later they buried her in a formal grave.  All I remember is all the fuss in the house and Mom and Dad finding a “domestic” to come take care of me. I’ve been lucky all my life and this was some of the first of my luck. A lady showed up who may have changed my life. Her name was Celia Williams, at her request we called her Ciel. Pronunced Seal. Celia was Black, She wasn’t especially pretty  Mom was a College grad, she had a degree in home economics and decided to go to work in one of the many defense plants that found a home in Houston. She became a quality inspector in a factory that made binoculars and gunsights for the Navy. We only had my Dads company car so Mom left the house at about 7AM, took the bus to a collection point where she was bussed to the factory. Celia rode the bus from North Houston coming the opposite way. She arrived about a half hour after Mom left. Dad waited for her to show up and then hustled off to work. Then Celia went to work. She washed and cleaned and cooked and made me walk the straight and narrow. I didn’t know it at the time but her life had been a series of disappointments. She was married young and kicked her husband out in the street when she caught him being unfaithful. She was unable to have children so I became a surrogate son. There’s no nickname for Glenn so because my middle name is Dean I became Denny (gotta have a nickname in Texas). Ciel called me Mars Denny. When I prowled around the wall outlets she’d say “”Mars Denny, you leave them alone, that lectricity be dangerous. When I found out for myself she said “See what Ah tole you, doan be doin that again” Then she would tousle my hair and head for the kitchen to fix lunch. Which was something like ham and beans with cornbread,  She was there when I had my tonsils out and when I toddled off to kindergarten. She was there when Mom got pregnant again and my sister Valerie was born. When we moved to what was then the suburbs Ceil found other work for a while. It was too far to come on the bus. About a year after we moved Mom got a job running the kitchen at one of the big hospitals and called Ciel with a more generous offer and she came back to work for us. Mom worked until 7PM or so and my sister and I were old enough to be on our own so Dad would get home from work, dinner would be ready, we would drive Ciel to a bus stop downtown, go pick up Mom and and head for home. This worked really well until 1953 when we came to California. I’m going to gloss over some stuff, Mom and Dad split up in 1957-58, in 1959 I joined the Coast Guard, while I was in boot camp Mom and my sister went back to Texas. They hired Ciel back to keep house and in 1961 I had a chance to go visit. Drove a car to Texas for friends, got to Houston on Wednesday, slept all day and all night. Ciel was working two days a week, she got to the house about 10AM Thursday.  Hadn’t changed a bit, when she saw me she said “Mars Denny, you is all growed up” I wanted the worst way to have her tousle my hair or hug me like she did when I was 5 but we both understood our place in the system. I came back to California, Mom retired and moved into an apartment. Really didn’t need a maid but kept Ciel coming 2 days a week. When my sister complained about the money Ciel cost Mom said “She was there when we needed her, now she needs us.”  That was Mom. I said I was lucky, a big part of my luck was being surrounded by people with strong work ethics. Dad, Mom, my grandparents and a modest, strong willed hardworking African American lady named Celia Williams. She is responsible for a bunch of what I became. I don’t know if in their morning coffee conversations Mom told her. I hope so.

Drawer Guides

 

Our Italian friend Chicco  Franchini  posted an absolutely hilarious  video on Facebook today. Titled “The Expert” it’s about being the only engineer in a business meeting where a department of an unnamed company has been assigned to draw  vertical red lines with green ink. When the only engineer in theroom  points out that this can’t be done chaos ensues. Hence this post. So my engineer friends won’t think that they are alone.Now I’m a long way from being a real engineer but I know that 2+2=4 so I have an unfair advantage over lots of people.  Including a wonderful but slightly  disorganized group of co-workers.

Along about 1992 the company I worked for had almost completed the change from multi product  wood products to  making exclusively furniture.  Everything else we did was a commodity and the business was well over capacity so margins were small to non existent. So furniture it was. We developed  two lines of furniture based on wide use of common parts and featuring a unique (for us) roller drawer guide.  The guides had become common in kitchen cabinets and were spreading into furniture business so it made good sense to use them. That’s when the fun began. We sold one of the lines to our biggest customer. From the proposed ship date we worked backwards and made a timeline for finalizing the design, producing ,checking and distributing  the production drawings, sizing the boxes and getting everything in house to make shipment on time.  We had regular status meetings on the commitments we were making and everybody was sure they had their area under complete control. The guides became an object of some dispute because of the costs involves so there were endless discussions about who to buy them from and how much to pay. I was the QC guy and I wasn’t normally invited to the meetings but one day I was asked to sit in. We were 9 weeks from making shipment. The endless discussion of the drawer guides began anew. “These cost $1.05 a set, those cost $.95 a set, these have 5 mounting holes, those have 6, they aren’t interchangeable one vendor toanother”.Etc, Etc. I was fast running out of patience so I asked “What’s the lead time?” the purchasing agent consulted his notes and said 8 weeks, so I said “Sounds like we need to quit talking, make a decision, and place an order” Later that afternoon the CFO called and asked me to come to his office. He gave me the whole project and that morphed into running  new product development for about 8 months. Wonderful learning experience and it gave me the opportunity to promote a really fine young man into the department after I had it up and running. I also learned to do the costing, took over keeping the production drawings in order and took the instruction sheets in house. This allowed massive reductions in development time and kept us competitive against the Chinese imports for 10 years.

 

After the successful launch of the new line we decided to replace our economy line of furniture with a completely new design. In the past developing a new line usually took a year to 18 months and the sales guys had become very good at making excuses when we had to postpone shipment. I like to do what I say I’m going to do, so I decided keep to the schedule and deliver on time. We went from designer sketches to packaging product in 6 weeks. There was an unwritten protocol that design changes had to be formally evaluated and put into the system  after the costing process. So we were two days from packaging when UPS delivered a package addressed to me with a note and a pair of incredibly cheap galvanized drawer guides, they had rough edges, sharp corners and were clearly unsuited for use in a product the customer would assemble. Additionally they weren’t available in the volume required for our production. The note from the sales manager said,  “Please include these guides in the first shipment of Etc. scheduled for shipment later this month”  I put the note and the guides back in the box, took it to the operations manager, said “I think this belongs to you” turned around and left. We laughed about it later but this was unfortunately one of the problems you have as a (quasi)engineer.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

The title is Phillip Seymour Hoffman but this could be a post about any number of famous and creative people who have drunk or doped themselves to death in the last 40-50 years.

Around 20 years ago, I’m thinking it was our 30^th wedding anniversary, Marilyn and I spent a long weekend in San Francisco. We stayed in a boutique hotel near Union Square,  had dinner Saturday night at Absinthe, went to North Beach, hit Biordi for some window shopping, and had a wonderful time. I don’t remember where else we ate except that the hotel had a breakfast deal with a café on the corner.  When we finished breakfast I think we had plans to shop Union Square, have lunch and head home.  We walked out the door  of the café and started toward Union Square. About mid-block a small crowd had gathered. They were watching a guy who was lying on the sidewalk in obvious distress. Clearly one of San Francisco’s many homeless and probably addicted to something that served him badly, he was shivering and semi-conscious. Someone in the crowd had gone to phone for help. I advised the other bystanders not to touch him (you never know with druggies and I had some experience at work with people whose chemical balance was unbalanced)

I don’t know who this guy was, I don’t know if he was ever a beloved son or brother or worse a father, He was too young to be a Vietnam Vet and likely too old for any of the Middle East conflicts. I don’t know if he lived or died. The EMT crews in big cities call them frequent flyers because they take them to the emergency rooms so often. In many cases they know them by name or at least by some street name. Fifty years ago they abused alcohol, the police picked them up, judges sent them to work farms and once in a while they got sober and became productive members of society. Now we give “support groups” grants to “help the less fortunate”. Every medium to large city has a population of the “less fortunate”. They don’t have to work, they receive better medical care than the working poor, and their “helpers” make good salaries helping them. It’s a win-win. Except when they are lying on a sidewalk in the center of one of the most beautiful cities on the planet possibly dying of a drug overdose. Surrounded by visitors  to the beautiful city.

How does this relate to a brilliant actor who at the age of 46 with three children put enough Heroin in his arm to kill himself. Except for one thing it’s exactly the same. Millions of people loved Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s work, nobody that we know of loved the homeless guy on Geary Street. And nobody cared enough about either one of them to make them stop, or find out who was selling them the drugs and make that person stop. It’s our loss.  We lost both their work products. We don’t know what those products would have been. We just can’t afford to keep doing this. And it doesn’t have anything to do with helping the “less fortunate”.

I Saw Her and She Saw Me and That Was That

Many years ago I found on the remainder table at Barnes and Noble a book called “The Tuscan Year” by Elizabeth Romer.  The book is a combination cookbook, travelogue and tribute to the Tuscan family who rented Ms.  Romer  and her archaeologist  husband a farmhouse on their property near Cortona in Southern Tuscany while he worked on a dig in Turkey.  The best line in the book is the title of this post.  I can’t tell you the names of the Italian farm family who were Ms. Romers landlords  but the wife described meeting her husband at a country dance as “I saw him and he saw me and that was that”. I like that line.  If you ever see a copy of the book at a used book store or yard sale buy it. Marilyn didn't need the cookbook and never will but every recipe is one of those simple seasonal dishes that Marilyn is legendary for.

Kingdon Drag Strip, February 3^rd, 1963

 

 

 

My buddies and I had a car club called the “Slicks of Stockton”. For those of you who don’t know slicks are a type of untreaded tire used in racing. The Slicks were well represented at racing events all over Northern California but our home track was Kingdon Drag Strip north of Stockton on DeVries Road. Racing started there in 1951 or so and continued until the track was converted to a private airport in 1972. February the 3^rd  1963 Kingdon staged a regular event with the addition of demonstration runs by a jet powered car built by a Bay Area racer named Romeo Palamides. I was walking down the return road checking out all the racers when a gal who was dating one of the club members drove up. Sitting shotgun in her car was a cute brunette with dancing eyes and a mischievous smile. I found out she was Italian-American and her name was Marilyn Bertolli. I didn’t want to admit it but I was smitten. Later that evening I saw her doing the cruise on Pacific Avenue and tried to climb in her car and give her a kiss. Not the best first impression but we got over it. I asked her to marry me about 4 months later and the following year April 25^th 1964 we married. So 50 years ago Feb 3^rd was easily the luckiest day of my life.

 

 See what I mean about the eyes and the smile. I kinda go monochromatic.

 

Marilyn would never tell you this but she's  a special person. She's one of two her age or younger in her Stockton family who speak Italian. And she speaks fluent modern Italian not a dialect. She went to school to learn and made the school a big part of our social life. She was the one who got us involved with exchange students (worth a post or two all by itself).  That made 30+ trips to Europe possible and let us meet the most amazing group of people you could imagine.

 

I was  going to do this post on the third but events and my limited blogging skills conspired to stop me. So Valentines Day it is.  Later I get to take my sweetie to lunch.

The Car That Sang To Me

I always wanted to have a car that was a little special. A hot rod or a sports car or something just a little out of the ordinary. Because I worked in a factory it didn’t make much sense to buy something really expensive so after my management career was pretty well set I started looking around at the possibilities. I dismissed all the British MG’s, Triumphs, and Austin Healy’s. A Jaguar was totally out of the question and I wouldn’t have driven one into the factory anyhow. My Dad had an MG and a Lancia Appia Zagato. The MG was a little pedestrian and broke down a lot. The Lancia was way cool but had something like 63 HP. FIAT’s were still around, by 1986 they had quit selling new ones but I started watching the newspaper and after driving some 1600 and 1800 Spyders I found a 1979 2000cc FIAT Spyder. It was metallic blue with a tan interion, 48,000 original miles from the first owner. She bought it right out of College, drove it for 6 years, got married, got pregnant and had to sell it. I drove it, we made an offer and got a cashiers check from the bank. I think the girls name was Susan, when I handed her the check and started the engine she buried her head in her husbands chest and cried. The car was almost perfect, it had a scratch on the right side door made by the original owners Golden Retriever. Couldn’t wait to get in the car one night. And there were a couple of stone chips on the nose. When I found that the standard fuel pump had been replaced with a Bendix electric I went to the dealer and got an original. I had the timing belt replaced and after a few thousand miles the water pump got noisy. That was it, the car ran like a top until it had 105,600 miles. The engine was designed by Vittorio Jano. He was one of those brilliant Italian engineers who designed everything from the Alfa Romeo 8 cylinder Grand Prix engine for the 158-159 series to a slew of standard production engines. He gave the 2000 a soul. When you shifted from 3^rd to 4^th his engine gave a little bark and really started to pull. The gear ratios were perfectly chosen, you could drive all over town in 2^nd and 4^th but when you hit the road 3000 rpm in 5^th was 70 mph and it would cruise there all day. 30 more hp would have been nice but the engine would pull your head off without getting all stressed. We took it everywhere, it put a smile on the face of everybody who saw it. Pininfarina built the body in their factory and if they hadn’t made the deal to build the ill-fated Atlante for GM they might still be building them. It was classically Italian, it sang when you drove it. The hum from the tires, Pirellis natch, the bark of the 4 cyl engine and the whine from the gearbox in the lower gears. I’ve had some nice cars since the FIAT, the only one that came close to getting me emotionally involved was a Mitsubishi 3000GT but it was a sexy appliance. The FIAT was a car. People designed it, People made it. It had soul and a heart. One of these days I’ll dig out the pictures and scan them so you can see it.

Trains Planes and Automobiles II.

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When I was a kid WW2 was in full swing. The news papers and newsreels were full of stories about the heroic fighter and bomber pilots who carried the war to the Japanese, German and Italian heartland. Guys like Colin Kelly, John Cunningham, Jimmy Doolittle and a host of other brave men fought the Battle of Britain, bombed Tokyo and became the fabled greatest generation. Until the Germans deployed the jet powered Messerschmitt ME-262 near the end of the war the fastest planes barely topped 400 mph. A bunch of forward thinking German scientists created the V weapons and wreaked havoc on Britain until the Allied armies pushed them out of Holland and put London out of range of the launch sites. I followed all the news on the radio, in magazines and newspapers. I was hooked on flying and more particularly rockets. I had model airplanes and when a British company started selling solid fuel rocket engines under the name Jetex I saved my allowance and bought two of them. When I was in 8^th grade there was a space club at the school. There were three of us who wanted to learn about rockets, everybody else wanted to read Sci-Fi stories with Bug-Eyed monsters menacing scantily clad space girls. I built a flying saucer from plans in one of the model magazines and almost got kicked out of school and the space club banned when we flew it on the ball field. Seems it was designed for the smallest Jetex motor and I scaled it up and put the big one on it. Go figure. I actually saw the math for going to the moon, everybody knew what it was going to take, it was the technology that was hard. The metals didn’t exist, the electronics didn’t exist. Most of the stuff that took the Apollo guys to the moon was some engineers dream. People don’t realize that you can go down to the Verizon store or Best Buy and get a phone or a computer with orders of magnitude more computing power than what Apollo had. We moved to California in 1953, the rocket motors and the model airplane engines went in a box in the garage and I got interested in California girls and hot rod cars and drag racing. I had followed Chuck Yeager and Scott Crossfield and the duel between the Bell X-1 and the beautiful Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket but all that pretty much went in the box in the garage till the space program came along. You can see the whole story in the movies “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13” The run up to the moon missions was a wonderful time. Even the newscasters were chosen because they knew what was going on, not because of their “Q” factor. Some of them actually had degrees in hard sciences. We got up early or stayed up late and watched the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launches. Cried when *Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed in the Apollo One cabin fire and sweated bullets when one of those flying bombs climbed out on that column of flame and smoke.

Fast forward to July 20^th 1969. Marilyn and I took the kids to the Italian Gardeners Picnic at Micke Grove near Lodi Ca. We went every year, Marilyn’s family all came, everybody cooked and it was a real party. We lived about ten minutes from the park so I went early in the morning with Marilyn’s uncle Ralph and got a prime table just across from entrance to the dance floor and stage. I took my portable radio so I could listen to the progress of the Apollo 11 landing. Lots of people remember Neil Armstrong’s famous words “That’s on small step …. etc” I remember “Houston, Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed”. Because anyone will tell you takeoffs and landings are when stuff can really go wrong in a hurry. We went home to our modest first house that evening to watch the first moonwalk. One of our guests was an elderly Italian lady who was Marilyn’s surrogate grandmother. Octavia was a great friend and poker partner who treated our kids like her own. She was wonderful. We were explaining what was happening on TV and she pointed up and said “You mean that moon? Marilyn, you think this is real?”

The kids grew up and moved out. We watched as many of the shuttle launches and landings as we could, When Challenger blew up shortly after launch and the crew was lost our plant engineer came to find me and tell me so I wouldn’t hear it on the radio. People knew I was a space junkie. There came a time when the launches became so common that the networks quit carrying them. The reporters that knew what was going on retired and were replaced by talking heads with high “Q” factors The space program was normal if going into earth orbit can be considered normal. I followed the Mars Lander program, watched press conferences on the NASA Channel with reporters trying to “gotcha” scientists and engineers who were maybe twice as smart as the reporters.

That gets me to today. The shuttle fleet has been retired, they’ll be put in museums. Discovery is going to the Smithsonian Annex near Dulles Airport in Washington. She was delivered today. I happened to be at the gym warming up on a stationary bike in front of the big screen TV’s that carry CNN and Fox. Both had the arrival of Discovery at Dulles. I can’t report what the Fox folks were saying but CNN has an on-screen text service. As the 747 which carries the shuttle piggyback was approaching Dulles it was obvious that they were going to do a flyby. They were at about 1500 feet, wheels up, straight and level right over the airport. Panic ensued in the CNN booth, “They don’t have the landing gear down.” “Flying awfully low to not have the gear down” etc. About halfway down the main runway, still at 1500 feet or so Wonderchin and Blondie figured out what was going on. Then they made all sorts of cover remarks but when the 747 tooled off toward the center of Washington they got all excited again. I was laughing so hard I had to stop pedaling.

I think the journey from P-40’s and P-51’s and 400mph to 18,000mph space shuttles and orbiting space stations and all the technology that came from the space program is probably the reverse of the journey from ABC’s Jules Bergman and NBC’s Frank Reynolds to the pretty boys and girls whose only skill is to make palms sweat and read a teleprompter. It all happened in my lifetime and I got to see a whole bunch of it.. Just might be another allegory of America.

*Marilyn’s favorite Astronaut.