Upon graduation I applied to General Electric for a job and also took the physical and mental exams to become an apprentice. I was hired as a messenger but had to wait until after the Labor Day holiday to start because of the holiday pay.
On September 4, 1947 I started work as a messenger for International General Electric in an office on Lafayette Street owned by a law firm. They had offices that I had to visit twice a day. Our office, under G.E. Kendall, composed the publications while the translation bureau, in the Patton and Hall Building on Lower State Street, translated the documents into Spanish. My next stop was the I.G.E. building 37 in the main plant and, occasionally, building 6 where the art work and photographs were composed. All work was done on manual typewriters and passed on to our special man who used a “Vari-Typer” to type the text in equalized columns (He first typed the line, the machine counted the characters and then typed the justified line). Other groups then cut out the text and rubber-cemented them and photos, etc. in the final form. It then was photographed to make the master for printing. When I had no errands to run I was assigned to select brochures to send to South Americans who had written for information on G.E. products. They were stored in the attic in boxes and I spent many hours selecting them.
After a few months I received word that I had been accepted as a Machinist Apprentice. I was to start in February, 1948 after my 18th birthday. Mr. Kendall asked me to re-consider going on the course – he offered to create a position for me. In Draper I had taken a college entrance, not commercial course so I couldn’t use a typewriter or other office skills to be useful. I thanked him for the kind offer and told him I was committed to becoming a toolmaker. The staff had a very touching going-away party for me. Within a short time I heard that the operation had been moved to another city and my group broken up. A shame – they all were very special friendly and intelligent people.
Our basic apprentice training was accomplished in old building #9 in the main plant. It was one of the original Thomas Edison buildings and was constructed of large wooden beams. My first assignment was in Walt Mowers hack- and band-saw operation. We had to saw test specimens out of billets of steel to be tested for their metallurgical content. To keep the operation as thrifty as possible apprentices had to re-sharpen the power hacksaw saw blades by hand on a grinding wheel instead of using new blades. The result was, naturally, blades that wouldn't saw straight or stay sharp for long due to the tempered steel being over-heated or "burned". It was very difficult but we managed to cut out usable blanks. The charpies - small approx. 3" long square cross-section pieces were shaped to rough size and then ground on a surface grinder to a precise dimension. The GE Works Lab used them to test the metal by measuring the force necessary to shear the piece. Our other main-stay job was the pieces for tensile test - measuring the force necessary to pull the piece apart. We learned to turn these on lathes for the final precise grinding of the test diameter and grinding the threaded ends. I also had to learn operation of milling machines, centerless grinding, the sand-blast operation (not my favorite - hot, dirty and shocks from static electricity), shapers and sharpening tools on grinders. Three nights a week we had to go to Mont Pleasant High School from 4PM to 7PM for courses designed to further our education. Their we learned shop math, college physics, blue-print reading and drawing (particularly in regard to the GE standard "right-angle projection"), and electricity - working with motors, generators and learning basic electricity.
We were allowed to request from our Superintendent where we would like to spend the rest of our Apprentice Contract 3 1/2 year period. I had gone a few times to the Works Laboratory in Building #5 (which became the Knolls Research Lab) and thought I would really like to work with their toolmakers. No such luck! One of my friends, Bob Kopp, got the assignment the very next month after I was assigned to Building #46 - Aeronautics and Ordnance. I can still remember the first day I went to my new job. It was early on a dark morning (I was on the production shift of 7:00 AM - 3:30 PM) with the tall, narrow, reinforced five story concrete building looming through the fog. Very surreal. Working for the Navy required a security clearance which was being processed. I had to wait at the guard station while someone came downstairs to escort me with my temporary pass to my work area. All apprentices started in the drill section: drilling, reaming and tapping (threading) small lots that the pieceworkers really didn't want to perform and small repair jobs such as finishing incomplete operations. Not a lot of fun but it was a real job.
Apprentices were supposed to follow a procedure of going to different manufacturing sections for six months at a time. My next assignment was to the lathe section, foreman Ted Hess, where I struggled to hold .0005 and .0002 inch tolerances that, rumor maintained, was impossible to hold on the machines. The bearings in the Monarch Lathe headstocks were only guaranteed for .0005 inch runout but they regularly did better (more precise models were available but, of course, more expensive). I spent a short time in the cylindrical grinder group and then, skipping the gear cutting section and final assembly (fifth floor), went to the toolroom on the second floor. George Groschke was the general foreman - an authentic German with a heavy accent and a real talent for tool design. My foreman was Don Shade, an apprentice graduate (as were most of the toolmakers). The shop was run by four Toolmaker Leaders - Matt Cervenka, Fritz Bernadt, Al Mortka and Jim Uncher. I worked for Al at first, later a short time for Jim Uncher. The leaders gave you job assignments by designing and then drawing scaled sketches of fixtures and jigs to be constructed. The most popular type of job was making special vise jaws to hold parts for machining. The object was to make tooling as simply and cheaply as possible. The emphasis was always on the least expensive - surprising since most contracts with the government at that time were "cost plus" with a 10% profit guaranteed. I was then assigned to Foreman Rudman's group to assist Johnny Stoll, the leader of our "Model Shop" which made prototypes for submarine reactor parts, gun directors, fin actuators for missiles, and other Navy ordnance. This was a tricky assignment because of refusal of some persons to take orders from a young apprentice when Stoll was absent.
I also worked on the bench making small lots of small parts in the model shop. Occasionally I was assigned to one of the senior toolmakers. One from Cohoes, Bill Irvine, a very talented toolmaker, was involved in a project making nylon bobbins for electrical coils. He made the die parts and I had to assemble the die, add the proper amount of nylon granules and melt it in the oven. Removing the part from the die I then had to drill holes in the bobbin in a drill jig. It was great experience and I learned a lot. We were also involved in the "fin actuator" project which had many hydraulic parts - pistons and cylinders made in a production area in the front of the toolroom. Final assembly, done in the model shop, required hand lapping and fitting the parts with diamond dust compound. Another large amount of work was from Project SIR (submarine internal reactor). Our parts went to the West Milton site where the first submarine nuclear propulsion system was designed and built. One assignment, with Class A toolmaker Len Truax, was concerned with a gun director prototype installed at the GE hanger at the Schenectady airport for testing. They had discovered an unbalanced condition. Bill Irvine set me up to machine lead plates in the toolroom. Taking portable tools, Len and I, using the GE bus service went to the airport and installed the balancing plates on the director.
I eventually returned to the toolroom proper on a sort of special assignment in Tool Room General Foreman George Groschke's office. George, with a ruddy round face and heavy German accent, was typical of the "Bull of the Woods" general foreman - wearing a vest and tie (and habitual cigar) in the shop he directed. We had a elder toolmaker, Frank Bigwood, evidently a very important person who wore a Masonic emblem on the gold chain on his vest (Masons were an important group in the GE of the time; key in the process of selecting promotions within the executive groups). Frank was concerned with tooling for gear cutting (all gun directors had gear trains in place of today's electronics and electric step motors). He was retiring and I was to replace him. The job consisted of making mechanical drawings of tooling to hold the gear blanks for the Fellows gear shapers and shaving machines, getting gear section foreman Joseph Dominelli's approval signature on my drawings, finding older tooling which could be re-machined if possible and starting the process of manufacturing. These were very high precision gears - run-outs of .0002" on the pitch diameter made possible by the Fellows gear shaving machines. We also made all types of bevel gears, hypoid and helical, spur gears with gear teeth cut in a spiral on the face of a blank - unique in the United States (only two machines existed).
After a period of time, a dispute arose in the Union area. I had joined the United Electrical Workers union (UE) while I was still an apprentice. They were accused of being dominated by Communists by the AFL-CIO which set up a rival union - the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) headed by James Carey. Our local union leadership, under Business Agent Leo Jandreau, joined the IUE in the second representation election. In the midst of this turmoil, I was elected shop steward of the toolroom until the representation election was held. The IUE won; I had supported the UE and was out as shop steward. In the mean time General Foreman Groschke moved me back to the tool room (he couldn't have a union rep in his office) and selected young apprentice Maloney to replace me. I then worked for Al Mortka on drill jigs and holding fixtures, eventually getting my Toolmaker Class B rating from foreman Don Shade.
| Memoir 1:1932-1947 Birth to Draper HS | Memoir 2:1947-1957 Apprentice to Bldg.46 | Memoir 3:1957-1966 LSTG to LAC |
|---|---|---|
| Memoir 4:1966-1972 LAC to Foundry | Memoir 5:1975-1977 Layout to Toolroom | Memoir 6:1977-1990 Bldg.285 Toolroom |
Original: February 8, 2006.