In 1963, The M.W. Kellogg Company began sending me out on field trips. I
had started working there in 1961, just after my arrival in the US, as a
design engineer in their heat exchanger department. These devices were
used mostly in the refineries and chemical processing plants which
Kellogg designs under contracts. When contracts were not forthcoming,
the employees found themselves on the street.
In 1962 I got to experience such a dry time. On Fridays I watched one, or two of my colleagues called to the division manager's office, and after a few minutes come out with a long face, quietly return to his desk, pack up some personal items and leave before quitting time without talking to anyone. When I found out what all of this was about, I went to my boss and declared that I was not used to sit like a duck on the pond with the hunters standing around and waiting to get a shot at me. Either Kellogg would transfer me to a department with a bit more job security, or I would quit.
Those were the days when I was still living with the famed Swiss hard-headedness and independence filling me up and open utterances of that sort were quite possible, because the consequences would fall solely on my own shoulders and affect the lives of nobody else. I was somewhat surprised that the company did not take me up on my word and let me go. Instead, I was called to an interview with Charlie Voelker, Chief Welding Engineer. I got my new desk there and a new title and a totally new portfolio of duties. I was now assistant welding engineer and was expected to "investigate and possibly improve construction methods."
Charlie was one of the line of great bosses I came across during my career. He left me alone. He basically, in the beginning, instilled in me the knowledge (!) that if a thing could be done, I was the one to do it. He would help if I asked, or got stuck. For instance: Ultrasonic testing of materials had taken foot in the medical science and in laboratories. There was some experimentation going on at Sperry Rand in the US and at Krautkraemer in Germany, to look into metals. Charlie wanted to know if that had any application for us, testing welds in pipes and structural members in the field. After a while of research in the market, the answer was yes and the charge was "get us set up". In the course of that, the field trips began.
This picture I took during one of my very first tours of the construction sites in Texas. I had heard so much about the Texas longhorns that I firmly believed the pastures would be flooded with those animals. Believe me, I drove far and wide on weekends to finally come up with that picture below: one set of horns.
Along the way I got an invitation to a Texas BBQ. One of the job managers of one of the Kellogg sites was a local man and had a small ranch operation on the side. Since his current work site was close to home, he invited his supervisors and other assorted guests to this affair. It was unlike anything I had seen in the way of BBQ. along the drive to the house, they had built a long strip of wood fire, burning big hunks of trees. Over this fire, they had set up four young trees, rammed into the dirt behind the fire and leaning over the flames. Onto each pair of these trees they had lashed one half steer carcass (the body split along the spine like they do in slaughter houses) and the meat roasted slowly in the radiant heat, while the fat ran along the meat and dripped into the grass next to the fire so that one never saw any big flair-up. I don,t know when they started that operation, but I suspect it was many hours before the guests arrived. When time to eating came, one went to one of the ranch hands tending this setup and pointed to the area of the roast where one wanted one's meat cut and would receive a slab on a paper plate. With black beans and baked potato - what a meal.
Of course eating BBQ beef was not the main thing I did in Texas. Most of those memories are rather technical and I don't want to bore you with that. Perhaps some other time, a little bit ;-)
********************************************************************************
Sunday, December 9, 2012 at 11:02 AM
By the way...
Talking about Texas and not wanting to bore you with technical things: At the time, this was our main business: Kellogg had developed a very efficient way of synthesizing ammonia from natural gas and these plants popped up all over the south and south west. Of 10 plants being built, Kellogg would get 8 contracts with two getting into the competition's hands mostly because we were up to capacity. I got into those plants because of material testing, assembly of high-rise pipe systems, instrument tubing.
On the left, you see that rusty looking structure going up. When
finished, it would reach some 250 feet into the sky. On top sat a huge
drum, which formed the heart of Kellogg's efficiency system. The wall of
that drum was almost 2 inches thick and the piping that delivered
fluids into the drum and out of it again was about an inch thick. The
system operated under extreme high pressures up there and throughout the
plant. There were some 15 pipes connected pipes going up into and
coming out of these drums. All that piping was held up and in place by
the structure of that tower.
We - i.e. Charlie and I - dreamed up a scheme where much of that piping were to be assembled in the piping contractor's plant, tested and approved, then hauled to the field and threaded into the tower and welded to the drum and into the growing plant system. The pre-assembly would save much time in the field and lift quality to a higher level. Saving time is equal to saving money. Improving quality saves one's name and in some cases one's freedom (see BP in the Gulf).
I'm proud to say we did it. I'm also proud to say that we gave mostly only guidance to engineers who had first to be 'brought over' to our side, because normally people feel that things are done in one way and not in another and if the known way leads to the wanted end then don't fool around with it. But we found believers in the engineering departments and in the cost estimator's ranks and in the transportation department and, of course, at the Trades on the construction sites and in the Unions.
There were some special problems: the two-inch thick drum welds had to be proven to be sound. X-ray was no good, because the x-ray picture had to be taken through two walls (You could not get the film on the inside and simply shoot through one wall from the outside) and became so fuzzy from scattered rays it showed nothing. We developed a way to do it with ultrasound. Then, when the pipes were at the plant, they could be assembled only to a length that allowed transportation on public roads. We organized some wonderful night-time trips of length of pipe reaching toward and above the 100 foot range.
These pre-assemblies came to the sites in Mississippi, in Texas, in Louisiana from Ohio and Pennsylvania and Indian. Then, those long pipe sections had to be threaded into the steel work of the towers by cranes, and cranes are very expensive to operate, so we had to find ways to cut those cranes loose as quickly as possible. We designed and built a device that allowed us to hang the individual pieces up after the threading, and then manipulate them without a crane into the position in which they were welded to the nozzles of that drum up there in the sky.
Finally, the testing of the welds was done by x-ray. I was in charge of obtaining and managing the Iridium 192 that we used in the field. I got licensed by the Atomic Energy Commission and carried those pills in their heavy spent Uranium cases all over the south, trained the operators and read thousands of film strips. And spent many a night working with my technicians taking pictures and making sure their procedures were safe and continued to be safe. Nobody would allow us to show up for work with that radioactive stuff before every soul had left in the evening, and nobody would come onto the job site until we opened the gates; and woe onto us if we had them still closed by the time the first soul showed up in the morning.
Somewhere in the treasures of the garage there is a movie I took of this piping assembly stuff I mentioned here. I used my own camera and when I showed the movie at the office, the Company wanted to buy it and the camera. The movie became a winner. We showed it to each department in rotation and from everywhere we got shouts of surprise: most of our people in our NYC headquarter had not the vaguest idea what we were doing to earn their living.
The story also helped our (Charlie and mine) names. Whenever we came up with another crazy, out of the box idea, people we wanted to harness to our projects listened and helped willingly. When we showed the movie, we highlighted the areas where specific employees and specific departments had left their mark. I think emphasizing the team idea is the only way to get complex jobs done well. And looking back to this now, you know, the greatest satisfaction comes from being able to say 'we' did it.
In 1962 I got to experience such a dry time. On Fridays I watched one, or two of my colleagues called to the division manager's office, and after a few minutes come out with a long face, quietly return to his desk, pack up some personal items and leave before quitting time without talking to anyone. When I found out what all of this was about, I went to my boss and declared that I was not used to sit like a duck on the pond with the hunters standing around and waiting to get a shot at me. Either Kellogg would transfer me to a department with a bit more job security, or I would quit.
Those were the days when I was still living with the famed Swiss hard-headedness and independence filling me up and open utterances of that sort were quite possible, because the consequences would fall solely on my own shoulders and affect the lives of nobody else. I was somewhat surprised that the company did not take me up on my word and let me go. Instead, I was called to an interview with Charlie Voelker, Chief Welding Engineer. I got my new desk there and a new title and a totally new portfolio of duties. I was now assistant welding engineer and was expected to "investigate and possibly improve construction methods."
Charlie was one of the line of great bosses I came across during my career. He left me alone. He basically, in the beginning, instilled in me the knowledge (!) that if a thing could be done, I was the one to do it. He would help if I asked, or got stuck. For instance: Ultrasonic testing of materials had taken foot in the medical science and in laboratories. There was some experimentation going on at Sperry Rand in the US and at Krautkraemer in Germany, to look into metals. Charlie wanted to know if that had any application for us, testing welds in pipes and structural members in the field. After a while of research in the market, the answer was yes and the charge was "get us set up". In the course of that, the field trips began.
This picture I took during one of my very first tours of the construction sites in Texas. I had heard so much about the Texas longhorns that I firmly believed the pastures would be flooded with those animals. Believe me, I drove far and wide on weekends to finally come up with that picture below: one set of horns.
Along the way I got an invitation to a Texas BBQ. One of the job managers of one of the Kellogg sites was a local man and had a small ranch operation on the side. Since his current work site was close to home, he invited his supervisors and other assorted guests to this affair. It was unlike anything I had seen in the way of BBQ. along the drive to the house, they had built a long strip of wood fire, burning big hunks of trees. Over this fire, they had set up four young trees, rammed into the dirt behind the fire and leaning over the flames. Onto each pair of these trees they had lashed one half steer carcass (the body split along the spine like they do in slaughter houses) and the meat roasted slowly in the radiant heat, while the fat ran along the meat and dripped into the grass next to the fire so that one never saw any big flair-up. I don,t know when they started that operation, but I suspect it was many hours before the guests arrived. When time to eating came, one went to one of the ranch hands tending this setup and pointed to the area of the roast where one wanted one's meat cut and would receive a slab on a paper plate. With black beans and baked potato - what a meal.
Of course eating BBQ beef was not the main thing I did in Texas. Most of those memories are rather technical and I don't want to bore you with that. Perhaps some other time, a little bit ;-)
********************************************************************************
Sunday, December 9, 2012 at 11:02 AM
By the way...
Talking about Texas and not wanting to bore you with technical things: At the time, this was our main business: Kellogg had developed a very efficient way of synthesizing ammonia from natural gas and these plants popped up all over the south and south west. Of 10 plants being built, Kellogg would get 8 contracts with two getting into the competition's hands mostly because we were up to capacity. I got into those plants because of material testing, assembly of high-rise pipe systems, instrument tubing.
On the left, you see that rusty looking structure going up. When
finished, it would reach some 250 feet into the sky. On top sat a huge
drum, which formed the heart of Kellogg's efficiency system. The wall of
that drum was almost 2 inches thick and the piping that delivered
fluids into the drum and out of it again was about an inch thick. The
system operated under extreme high pressures up there and throughout the
plant. There were some 15 pipes connected pipes going up into and
coming out of these drums. All that piping was held up and in place by
the structure of that tower.We - i.e. Charlie and I - dreamed up a scheme where much of that piping were to be assembled in the piping contractor's plant, tested and approved, then hauled to the field and threaded into the tower and welded to the drum and into the growing plant system. The pre-assembly would save much time in the field and lift quality to a higher level. Saving time is equal to saving money. Improving quality saves one's name and in some cases one's freedom (see BP in the Gulf).
I'm proud to say we did it. I'm also proud to say that we gave mostly only guidance to engineers who had first to be 'brought over' to our side, because normally people feel that things are done in one way and not in another and if the known way leads to the wanted end then don't fool around with it. But we found believers in the engineering departments and in the cost estimator's ranks and in the transportation department and, of course, at the Trades on the construction sites and in the Unions.
There were some special problems: the two-inch thick drum welds had to be proven to be sound. X-ray was no good, because the x-ray picture had to be taken through two walls (You could not get the film on the inside and simply shoot through one wall from the outside) and became so fuzzy from scattered rays it showed nothing. We developed a way to do it with ultrasound. Then, when the pipes were at the plant, they could be assembled only to a length that allowed transportation on public roads. We organized some wonderful night-time trips of length of pipe reaching toward and above the 100 foot range.
These pre-assemblies came to the sites in Mississippi, in Texas, in Louisiana from Ohio and Pennsylvania and Indian. Then, those long pipe sections had to be threaded into the steel work of the towers by cranes, and cranes are very expensive to operate, so we had to find ways to cut those cranes loose as quickly as possible. We designed and built a device that allowed us to hang the individual pieces up after the threading, and then manipulate them without a crane into the position in which they were welded to the nozzles of that drum up there in the sky.
Finally, the testing of the welds was done by x-ray. I was in charge of obtaining and managing the Iridium 192 that we used in the field. I got licensed by the Atomic Energy Commission and carried those pills in their heavy spent Uranium cases all over the south, trained the operators and read thousands of film strips. And spent many a night working with my technicians taking pictures and making sure their procedures were safe and continued to be safe. Nobody would allow us to show up for work with that radioactive stuff before every soul had left in the evening, and nobody would come onto the job site until we opened the gates; and woe onto us if we had them still closed by the time the first soul showed up in the morning.
Somewhere in the treasures of the garage there is a movie I took of this piping assembly stuff I mentioned here. I used my own camera and when I showed the movie at the office, the Company wanted to buy it and the camera. The movie became a winner. We showed it to each department in rotation and from everywhere we got shouts of surprise: most of our people in our NYC headquarter had not the vaguest idea what we were doing to earn their living.
The story also helped our (Charlie and mine) names. Whenever we came up with another crazy, out of the box idea, people we wanted to harness to our projects listened and helped willingly. When we showed the movie, we highlighted the areas where specific employees and specific departments had left their mark. I think emphasizing the team idea is the only way to get complex jobs done well. And looking back to this now, you know, the greatest satisfaction comes from being able to say 'we' did it.
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