Thanks JP for the birthday wishes!
Re: World Affairs Board. I post this thread on five forums. Each reaches a different audience. World Affairs Board got me started when I built my 3rd (and best) Missouri model in 2012. Wanting to replace the plastic prop shafts with metal, I wanted to know what color they were. I put the question to Google which directed me to that forum. Most of it is military/government guys talking about various topics, but I was specifically sent to the Battleship Board. On it was a guy who’s handle was “Rusty Battleship” who explained that they were white having been coated with an anti-fouling compound. And then he suggested that I blog my build on that forum. Turns out that Rusty’s real name was Dick Langraff, and he was the Long Beach Naval Shipyard superintendent during the 1980 refits of the Iowas. He knew every bolt, tank, plate on the entire ship. He and another fellow, who was a docent on the Big J, guided me to a spectacular build of that ship. I continued to blog models on there ever since. I stopped for a while because their photo upload was ridiculous. They’ve fixed all that.
Re: My Backgroud. (p.s.: you may not want to read all this following drivel, but it tells the story about why I appear to be informed about so much).
My design leanings come from wanting to be an industrial designer and going to Michigan State for that major. Wanted to design cars and this was the early 60s. As things have it, partially due to my immaturity and ADD, I got into a bit a jam with the Industrial Design Dept and had to switch majors. If you want to know more about it, we should take it off line.
This was first term junior year so I already had a lot of $$$ invested as a full-tuition out-of-state student, and I was the founder of a fabulous R & B band that was doing great. So I had to pick a different major. Viet Nam was raging and I lost my student deferment and went for a draft physical in Detroit and passed.
I had a terrific major in high school; industrial arts college prep. I had all the shops and all the academics for college. It was a “pre-engineering” curriculum. My MSU advisor looked at my high school transcript and suggested that “Since I did so well in shop class, did I ever consider being a shop teacher?” I thought she had lost her mind! I didn’t like school that much and teaching was literally the last profession that I ever considered.
She suggested that I talk with Dr. McClean, the dept head, and see what’s what. Dr. McClean was a wonderful man! He laid out what shop teaching entailed and how it can help kids. I switched majors, and my miserable grade point went up from like a 2.2 to 3.5 gpa. I had forgotten just how much I loved working with my hands. I graduated and had a job teaching inner city middle school shop. At that time, there was a shortage of teachers willing to work in under-serviced city neighborhoods and as an incentive gave an occupational deferment. I was married three weeks after graduation to the Philly girl I was dating, long-distance, through my college years.
I taught public school industrial arts for seven years. The first 3 months replacing a long-term substitute metal shop teacher. Then I was offered the first Power Technology position in Philadelphia. I taught power tech for three years during which time I earned my Masters Degree at Temple University. I then moved to the suburbs for more pay and taught Power Tech AND Metal Shop in two different rooms.
Having to master both of these subjects already was making me somewhat of a Renaissance Man. As a married man with a mortgage and baby, teaching salary was not enough and I worked six hours after school running a lathe in a machine shop.
In 1975, I had the opportunity to teach a night ship class to production workers a world-leading maker of industrial instrumentation. During my plant visit and interview I asked “what’s going to happen a the end of this 10-week drill press course?” The answer was, “We never did anything like this before. If the program succeeds you have a blank check.” On the drive home, I envisioned running the training function in two years. My wife thought I was nuts. “You’re quitting a $4.00/hr job that has no defined end, for a $10/hr job that last 10 weeks.” I convinced her of my vision and was the head of the technical training center in two years. That covered both in house skills training and customer maintenance courses. And I now knew a whole lot about instruemtation to the point of writing articles about it in techncial publications.
One job led to another. Got a job at ARCO Chemical, first in technical training and then graduating to management training. The trouble with being a trainer is that every time the business cycle slumps you get laid off based on the erroneous belief that “We’re not hiring so we don’t need training.” After ARCO was Engelhard, where I moved from training manager to training director and leaned about catalyst, precious metal refining, minerals mining.
Then came Henkel, where I was first training director for US operations and then moving to German HQ to become Chief Learning Ofc. In this capacity I ran knowledege management programs, participanted in plant studies and reengineering, executive leadership development and on and on. Due to business changes in their US operation, I was offered early retirement and returned to the States. Started my own consulting company, but the ecomony had already started to show some cracks. Then in 2005 got a job as the National Training Director for Toll Brothers, a national home builder, and learned the home building business too.
We all know what happened in 2009. Toll Brothers laid off 3/4 of their 8,000 person work force. And I retired for real, moved to Louisvile to be near the grandkids, and began to build really cool models. I’ve been reading Scientific American since I was a kid so that level of knowledge is piled on all the career stuff.
It’s said that a specialist is a person who knows more and more about less and less until he/she knows everything about nothing, And conversely, a generalist is a person who knows less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. I’m heading in the latter direction.
They also say, when a person dies, a library dies with them. Part of the reason I blog all this stuff is to spread my knowledge about the things I do to others before I die.
