Eruption of Mount Saint Helens viewed from my home near Seattle
California – slight return
I left Florida in late spring and moved to Santa Maria, California, where I lived in the unfinished attic in Hollyโs parentsโ house for a while. The first thing that happened was I got sick โ to be later diagnosed with hay fever. This condition plagued me for the next 10 โ 15 years.
I immediately hooked up with the local dive shop and started diving with the guys that worked there. After getting a custom wetsuit made, I spent that Summer diving and getting to know California. I did find California fascinating after living in Florida my whole life. They only had coastlines in common, but that was about it.
I traveled to California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo shortly after arriving. In the building I found myself in, there was a rack of pamphlets on the wall describing the degree programs they offered. I took a bunch that looked interesting, sat down, and started to read them. I will never forget when I started reading the Mechanical Engineering pamphlet. It described what MEs did in industry โ design and build stuff. The immediate connection was made to all those years of working with my Dad on stuff, building stuff, and repairing stuff. That was all that it took. Later in the year, I got accepted to start in January 1976. I was set.
I went with Holly to attend her cousin’s wedding in Seattle in August. I was fascinated by Seattle and thought it might be an interesting place to live after college.
On the first part of this trip, we traveled with the guys who ran the dive store and dove in Crater Lake in Oregon. Crater Lake is the main feature of Crater Lake National Park and is famous for its deep blue color and water clarity. The lake partly fills a nearly 2,148-foot-deep caldera formed around 7,700 years ago by the collapse of the volcano Mount Mazama. Very few divers had gone before us. The one-mile hike in and out of the lake with a tank, wetsuit, and 40 pounds of lead weight was particularly memorable.
A few months after I moved, my Dad, Mom, and younger brother Dave moved to the Los Angeles area โ south in Orange County in Irvine. The whole time I lived in California, they were there โ first in Irvine, and then later, they moved to Lancaster in the high desert northeast of Los Angeles.
The Space Shuttle was designed and built by Rockwell (in Los Angeles), and they constructed the prototype (The Enterprise) in a hanger at the United States Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale. I visited on all the major holidays and breaks at school.
The fall before I started college, Holly’s parents kicked me out. I rented a tiny studio apartment in Santa Maria. For two weeks, I worked the fucking worst job in my life at McDonald’s. Luckily, K-Mart sought people to help stock the shelves for the winter holidays. I worked with this guy who literally stank – it would give me a headache if I stood next to him for too long!
I discovered much later in life that I also suffered from acute anxiety attacks in the months leading up to my departure from Florida and the first six months in California. I can only attribute this to the magnitude of the changes I underwent. Eventually, it was not a factor anymore, but it was pretty scary when it happened.
I could not get into the dorms on campus, so I found an apartment near the campus in town. About three months after starting school, Holly dumped me โ which I think was perfect since all I had to do then was study. I lived in that apartment for the next year and one half while completing six semesters โ in a row โ at Cal Poly.
A remarkable thing happened when I started with my courses โ I totally and thoroughly enjoyed learning and would spend hours โ sometimes until 3 in the morning โ studying and doing homework. I was obsessed. I was meticulous about my homework, using rulers and scale to draw things out and a TI SR-56 programmable calculator. I also started taking computer classes, first with punch cards on the IBM Mainframe and then more interactive stuff on a DEC VAX. I would spend hours tweaking my programs and totally dug going to the computer building at 3 AM to run one last time!
But that was not all! In my childhood, I had always enjoyed reading but was never a ‘recreational’ reader per se. I enjoyed the few classics I did read but did not seek out to spend my free time. I remember that Tolkien was big at that point as an underground (as opposed to mainstream) read. Led Zepplin had even woven it into their early songs about Mordor and the Evil One. So I picked up book one of Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring. I was dumb-struck and in awe. Quickly, I became a huge SciFi and Fantasy fan. Throughout college, I read the best-known books like Dune and the Foundation series by Asimov. Later, I branched and sought out the avant-garde like Kurt Vonnegut. I was hooked for life then and have read constantly, if not consistently, throughout my life.
A significant event occurred shortly after breaking up with Holly. I needed to buy a car. We purchased a Datsun station wagon with both of our money. I took my part of the money and bought a 1966 Sunbeam Alpine. My first โ but not last โ sports car, my last British sports car! I loved the car, but buying a rare car that had not been well kept up was a grave mistake. I did a poor job of painting it blue and drove it until I worked in the oil field in the summer of 1977. I dumped it when it started having electrical problems.
I also got to know the next-door neighbors โ a couple around my age, Jane and John (seriously). I would play cribbage with them โ especially John โ for hours on end, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer when I could afford it. He got certified, and we did some diving later โ especially a memorable trip to Monterrey. I got a roommate about halfway through my stay there. His name was Randy; he was a bit older โ perpetual college student type โ and dug electric guitars โ especially Fender Stratocasters.
I was doing so well at school that I made the President’s Honor Role in June of 1977 with my grades in the top 15% of my school.
I went to school through the summer of 1976, and in the fall, I was invited to join Tau Beta Phi โ an Engineering Honor Society.
The Mechanical Engineering building on campus was where fledgling MEs would hang out between classes. The front of the building had some open spaces where some students worked on the Baja Dune Buggy that would compete against other ME departments in the state and region.
When I first got there, I explored the building and came across a small nuclear reactor placed at the very back of the building. I was intrigued! For some reason, I can not quite recall anymore, so I decided to look into the program. Nuclear power was very unpopular in the mid-1970s – thank you, Jackson Browne! – but I decided (and still believe) it was a superior alternative to fossil fuels.
A nuclear reactor was being built at nearby Diablo Canyon with all the old hippies up in arms. I was also interested in science, albeit somewhat intimidated by the complex mathematics. I talked with the instructor and decided to pursue it.
Quite by chance, at the end of the spring quarter, I interviewed with Union Oil for positions they were filling in their college recruiting program. They offered me a three-month job in an oil field in the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley, about 3 hours from San Luis Obispo.
I lived in an apartment with two other guys โ Doug from San Luis Obispo, who had turned me on to the job, and another guy from Los Angeles, who rebuilt his sisterโs car engine on our living room floor. Daytime temperatures got above 110โฐ. We rode around in pickup trucks with the guys that worked on the wells โ a tough crowd, but it was great once they got to know you. After I had my pants pulled down and left stranded out in the middle of nowhere, I was initiated into the club! I remember stories about how, in the 1920s, the fields produced so much oil that they had to burn off the natural gas, and you could see the light from the flames in Los Angeles.
Working that summer gave me two things: A camera and another car. I had long wanted a real camera and bought one mail order from Los Angeles โ a Canon AE-1 with a 50 mm lens. I also bought a book on photography. Later, after I moved back to San Luis Obispo, I bought my first underwater camera โ a Nikonos II complete with a bulb-flash gun. So, I started another hobby I have kept up with all these years. (PS. The car was a jacked-up Mazda pickup truck with a roll bar and spotlights, which was even bigger than the Sunbeam and not nearly as fun!)
Before leaving for school, I had found a new place to live when I returned โ near the ocean in a town called Los Osos. I lived there with two other mechanical engineering students, Steve and Jeff, and we were all going to graduate at the end of the year. The house โ we called it Aspen House โ was several blocks from the Back Bay of Morrow Bay and just a short drive to Montana De Oro (Mountain of Gold) state park on the ocean. What a great way to end my time at Cal Poly.
It was a miracle I graduated because of the distraction. I also met my first wife, Margaret, another ME graduating in the spring of 1978. By then, I was also interviewing with different companies (Shell Oil, Bechtel, Westinghouse, General Electric) and flew to other places for interviews. I also applied to several graduate schools in Nuclear Engineering. It was a good time for graduating engineers, and I got offers from everyone I talked to!
Throughout the year, I got a research assistant position at the University of Washingtonโs Nuclear Engineering School, and Margaret took a job with Weyerhaeuser in Tacoma, Washington. I just made it across the finish line, getting my senior project done with the help of Margaret’s father, Ralph, who happened to be a very talented machinist!
Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering
I ended up graduating Magna Cum Laude with a GPA better than 3.8.
After graduation, Margaret and I took a cross-country trip. We drove from her parentโs home in Silicon Valley north along the coast until we arrived in Seattle. From there, we headed east across the top of the US, visiting places like Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore. From there, it was up to Niagara Falls, east to Massachusetts, south to Florida, and then west across the lower part of the US back to California.
We were married on August 12, 1978, in Sanborn Skyline State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains and moved to Seattle.
The Tale of the Disco Priest
Margaret, like myself, was from a Catholic family. Before I met her, she had been more or less betrothed to a nice Christian boy (whose name was on some of my hand-me-down drafting tools)โJeff Lynn, as I recall.
She had rebelled while in college and dumped the chump. When we met, we were both more or less antagonistic towards religion (me more and she less). However, when we got engaged, I took a selfish stand (as usual) and wanted nothing to do with it. Little did I know!
Before getting married, we saw her parents’ priest, affectionately known to both of us as the Disco Priest. He was right out of Saturday Night Liveโa real-life Guido Sarducci! It seems her mother, Norma, was upset about our plans.
While in Florida earlier that summer, I went to the Church there and asked about some mysterious catholic process called dispensation from form. In short, if you give the church enough money, they will say your marriage is valid even though you are a heathen. Since I was baptized in the church, it was a big fat fucking no-go. So be it.
The Prest said we were screwed, and we got married under a ring of giant redwood trees in the mountains between Silicon Valley and the Pacific Coastline. It was nice, and the singer sang Billy Joel’s I Love You Just the Way You Are (Ha! Fucking BULLSHIT!)
We went on our honeymoon and returned to move to Seattle. Margaret told me we needed to see the Disco Priest one last time before we left. We went to the church with her parents. I distinctly remember wearing flip-flops. We got there, and the Priest said, “Follow Me.” The next thing I fucking knew, I was getting married again! Her mother was particularly embarrassed standing there in her house clothes!
Oh well – wasn’t the first time she fucked me over like this – no warning – boom! But ultimately, I got the last laugh as it is the only marriage left in the books for me. Apparently, getting married in the fucking Catholic church is forever.
At least I got to meet the Disco Priest!
Washington
Margaret had an Aunt who lived south of Seattle in the Tukwila area. She knew a woman at church who had a house we rented for the first six months. It was close to SeaTac – the sizeable regional airport serving Seattle and Tacoma. Right after Margaret started at Weyerhaeuser, the plant workers at their pulp and paper mills in the Northeast went on strike. They operated the plants with people from headquarters, including Margaret. She did a lot of hard work and even injured herself badly. However, it brought in a windfall in extra pay, which helped us buy our first house.
In undergraduate school, I became very interested in power generation using nuclear reactors. Cal Poly had a very small (and I mean very small) nuclear reactor that I had worked with my senior year. UW had a much bigger one in a glass-walled building on campus. It was a graphite-moderated reactor built by AMF โ the same people that made bowling balls! My research assistantship was funded by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and involved monitoring nuclear reactors during emergency conditions.
I worked under Professor Robert Albrecht to build an experimental system to simulate emergency conditions and study the response of detectors placed in the reactorโs core. I used a computer system built by Hewlett-Packard to analyze the signals in the frequency domain. My research was published, and I gave a talk at a conference in Las Vegas in 1980.
My research involved building an assembly that would position four neutron detectors next to an aluminum pipe in which air and water were pumped in a loop. The detectors dynamically measured the neutron flux at the point they were positioned. This was measured by very sensitive pico ammeters converted to an analog signal recorded on an FM tape recorder. I started building the device towards the end of my first year of coursework and through the summer into the fall.
The testing involved varying the amount of air to simulate different types of two-phase fluid flow. In a reactor, the mixture would be steam and liquid water. Still, the different absorption characteristics of the air and water would simulate a Loss-of-Flow condition. That was the idea, anyway.
Fourier analysis provided a different way (frequency domain) to look at a seemingly random signal for patterns. It’s sort of like the graphic analyzer on a modern receiver.
I used the Hewlett-Packard 5451B Fourier Analyzer to analyze the signals. Sure enough, different patterns emerged based on the air in the mixture. This was significant because it had never been shown before, only mathematically postulated. Hooray for me!
The accident at Three Mile Island happened in March 1979, during my first year at UW. I remember flying with Professor Albrecht to Portland to attend a briefing at the NRC office. Subsequently, my interest in nuclear power waivered, and I became more interested in my work on the Hewlett-Packard computer. The technique we were using to monitor the reactor signals had broad applicability in the study of the vibration of mechanical devices. Professor Albrecht had hired an expert user of the system – Gary – who taught me this and computer programming. One memorable side project was testing a K2 ski (they were made on Vashon Island outside of Seattle) for the way it vibrated. Gary later left and went to work at Boeing’s Structural Dynamics Laboratory. I followed him several months later.
We used the money Margaret had made and some help from her parents to buy a house in Northeast Tacoma. It was close to Weyerhaeuser, and I was able to ride the bus into Seattle. Mount Saint Helens blew when we were there, and we had a great garden in the backyard. It’s incredible how big plants get with 18 hours of sun daily in the summertime! It had a carport, but I built a small workshop in a storage room!
After Margaret left Weyerhaeuser and started working in town, we moved to Issaquah, east of Seattle. We had a house on an acre of land adjacent to a lake. I finally got a garage and was able to start building my workshop! We got involved in making stained glass windows, which I enjoyed a lot. I also started building some of my first actual woodworking projects.
My work at Boeing was exciting. I was a part of the Structural Dynamics Laboratory, a small group that provided testing and analysis primarily for the Commercial Airplane Division. If it involved vibration testing, we did it all.
I was involved in the vibration analysis of aircraft or part of the aircraft. We would test scaled models in General Dynamics’ slow-speed wind tunnel in San Diego. From there, we tested the actual aircraft on the ground (Ground Vibration Test or GVT) and in-flight (flight flutter testing).
Gary and I built a state-of-the-art large-scale data capture and analysis system using Hewlett-Packard computers. I won an award for writing a program to automatically control the tape recorders on which we recorded the vibration signals and analyzed hours of vibration data with little human interaction.
And best of all, I got to fly around in the new model aircraft doing flight testing. They did maneuvers that would make you temporarily weightless or alternatively pull two gโs (not as much fun).
Professional Mechanical Engineer
๐
When I graduated from Cal Poly, I took the Engineer In Training test and, after three years, was eligible to take my Professional Engineering exam. I took some refresher courses at UW in preparation. I remember taking all my books to the Seattle Center, where the exam was administered. I was proud to pass the test, although I never used the license professionally.
I had been driving a Toyota Corolla SR5 that Margaret had and her first car, a 1964 Pontiac Tempest Lemans. The Pontiac was a very unusual and rare car, and we ended up selling it and trading the Toyota for a BMW 318i. I quickly fell in love with the styling, the car’s driving and handling, and the (overall) engineering quality. The early fuel injection systems were plagued with problems, and the air conditioner was a lemon. Despite that, I was hooked and have owned BMWs ever since ๐คฃ.
I had kept up my diving while living in Seattle, although the freezing water was never much fun. Despite buying a dry suit, I yearned for the warmer tropical waters. I took my first overseas dive trip in 1983, traveling to Cozumel, Mexico. This was before Cozumel became a popular cruise ship destination. The diving was fantastic, and I got hooked on dive travel over the following years and dove the Caribbean and Pacific extensively.
Because of my specialized knowledge of the Hewlett Packard computer system, I interviewed for a job at Hewlett Packardโs new plant north of Seattle. They were making the successors to this system at this new plant, a combination of people from Santa Clara, California, and Loveland, Colorado. The job would involve marketing and supporting the sales of these systems. It also involved international travel, which greatly appealed to me.
I remember sitting in the lab at Boeing when I picked up a call from one of the guys who worked at the new plant. He was looking for Gary but took the opportunity to ask if I would be interested in interviewing. It was really out of left field as I had never dreamed of being a person associated with marketing or sales. However, Hewlett-Packard at that time was regarded as one of the premier companies in the world. How could I refuse? Little did I know how it would change my life (once again).
I joined and commuted one hour to the north between Issaquah and Marysville. My first job was supporting sales activities in the US and Asia. We also trained new sales and field engineers on our products. We hosted monthly training sessions, the objective of which was to wine and dine the primarily recent college graduates. It involved a lot of drinking, among other activities! In retrospect, it’s not necessarily a good thing ๐.
In the winter of 1984 โ 1985, I extensively toured the US and Europe to support launching a new product. A year later, I spent a month in the Asia Pacific region, including India, which was an incredible experience. I also did very well at work and got a lot of recognition.
During my first year at HP, Margaret and I got divorced. She got tired of me wrestling with my demons ๐น. We had to sell our house ‘By Owner’ because the market was so bad then. I moved north into an apartment for six months or so. In the fall, I moved to the town of Mukilteo, the very first house I owned. The HP factory was relocated from its temporary digs in Marysville to Lake Stevens โ a 15-minute drive away. In the year I lived in Issaquah, it took me an hour to get to work and back โ the longest commute I have ever had until moving to Atlanta.
While doing a major new product training, we took one of the groups north to Vancouver, British Columbia, to ski at Whistler Mountain. I had done some cross-country skiing and liked the sensation of going downhill. However, I had tried skiing once several years earlier and had a thoroughly unenjoyable time! This time, I took a ski lesson (my only ski lesson) and immediately got hooked. I would spend the next few years learning to ski in the Cascades and Whistler. On Friday afternoons, a group of us from HP would take a bus to the Stevens Pass to ski at night. I also skied in Vermont on a business trip. Something else to get hooked on!
The Tale of the Chinaman
The group I belonged to at HP was fondly known as DSAโshort for Digital Signal Analyzers. Hewlett-Packard’s strategy was to have its sales and technical sales support representatives specialize in different technologies like ours. The result was a global group of salespeople who formed a tight-knit community. Many of the players, like myself, had grown up with the heavy iron I used in graduate school and at Boeing. However, many were young and new to the field.
Around Christmas of 1985, we held a three-week training at the Everett Pacific Hotel near our offices. At that time, I was responsible for Asia-Pacific territory, including China. For the first time, a Chinese technical sales rep will be attending.
He was a young guy who could barely speak English. I tried my best to make him feel at home and enjoy his time with us. I remember visiting him in his hotel room. He was anxious to visit America while here. He showed me a pamphlet that was given to him before he left. It discussed what the Chinese visitor to America would experience during their stay.
It told him that the average American is a good person but has been corrupted by capitalism. It told them to be wary of Americans because they are greedy and selfish. I was stunned!
Over one of the weekends, while they were here, I got a call at home from someone at work. Seems like the local police department had caught my Chinaman shoplifting at the local mall! I talked with several managers at work, and they hired a Chinese translator to help me figure out what happened.
It turns out my Chinaman had decided to visit the mall and called for a taxi at the hotel to take him there. When they arrived, the taxi driver told him he was owed $20 for the cab ride. For my Chinaman, this was a huge amount amounting to a significant fraction of his monthly income!
He was incensed and proceeded to walk into the nearby Sears store. He walked over to an item he found on the shelf for $20, picked it up, and headed out the exit. They caught him immediately and called the police.
The poor guy was completely distraught. The interpreter explained what happened and how the propaganda influenced him. Someone managed to expedite a hearing, and I went with him and the interpreter. The judge tried to ask him what happened, but he was inconsolable. Finally, the Judge ordered that he leave the country immediately and pay a fine. HP paid the fine and put him on a flight back home.
I never did hear what happened to my Chinaman. I hoped he was OK, but I expect that he was pretty well fucked for what he did.
At that point in time, HP was starting to make UNIX workstations โ costly but powerful (for their time) computers. The only problem was that very little software ran on them outside of research and university settings. Computer-aided design and drafting had been around for quite a while at that point, but the cost of entry was high in terms of the price and expertise required to use it. HP had the idea to take people with industry experience and computer-aided design expertise and form business units in mechanical, electronics, and software design. Because of the large number of mechanical engineers, Lake Stevens became the US focal point for mechanical CAD and partnered with an operation in Bรถblingen (West) Germany that had developed their CAD applications that ran on the workstations.
I talked to management and moved from the instrumentation I was working with to this new line of business. I had enjoyed drafting in college and had even built my drafting table. After this organization was created, several people I worked with were offered two-year assignments working for the group in Bรถblingen. I expressed interest, and in late 1986, I flew to Bรถblingen to interview for a sales support position. I moved there in early 1987.