Startup: Recollections of a Field Engineer

It is just a plain, battered, twelve-ounce, three-piece steel can, filled with water. When new, it was snow white, but now, forty-eight years later, the can is a distinctly dirty white. On it, written with a felt-tip marker, is the faded inscription: "Columbus, 4/28/68." For twenty-nine years, it sat on my various desks in my offices at Anheuser–Busch; now it sits atop the file cabinet in my office at home. It has been so positioned since that long-ago April day as both a reminder of a personal milestone which I passed in my professional development and as a memento of the accelerating growth of Anheuser-Busch as it surged to become the world’s largest brewing company, because that old container was the first can to pass all the way from the Bulk Can Depalletizer to the Hi-Cone Packer on Can Line 10 in the new A-B Columbus, Ohio, brewery. That achievement required an enormous effort by a multitude of people over an extended period of time, and it was the first of a number of similar efforts in which I participated for the next eight years. For Anheuser-Busch, it was merely one step of many. For me, the can calls to mind one of the most difficult, yet most rewarding, periods of my professional career.

(Merrimack NH brewery, stock photo)

 

Hired by Anheuser-Busch, 1966

On February 2, 1966, Anheuser-Busch hired me to work as a designer in the Electrical Design Section of the company’s Engineering Department, because the company was already moving into its program of massive expansion which would require literally hundreds of engineers. As it happened, on that first day I knew very little of what would be required from me, but I had left a dead-end job for one with better benefits and what promised to be more interesting assignments. Aside from summer jobs with a power company, all of my prior work experience had been in rocket guidance electronics in the U. S. Army and in aerospace electronics at McDonnell Aircraft Corp., prime contractor for NASA’s Gemini space project. Consequently, I had not the foggiest idea about industrial electrical controls. It turned out that they were vastly different from anything that I knew about anything. "Learning by doing" became my modus operendi, and it took some time for me to reach the knee of the learning curve. However, work on the Columbus project zipped me along that curve faster than I could have ever imagined, had I tried to do so.

A-B Engineering Major Projects Group

The Major Projects Group of the A-B Engineering department was responsible for working with outside consultants and contractors to design and build whatever Management had defined as the goals of a given project, whether large or small; that is, to provide the consultants and contractors with directions and to monitor their progress. Once the project had achieved, or was reasonably close to achieving, its designed operational output, Engineering would accept the work, or some part of it, from the contractor and turn it over to the Plant to begin production. Engineering subsequently provided whatever assistance was needed by the Plant to achieve operational goals. For Columbus Can Line 10, that figure was about 1,200 cans per minute. The Design Section was divided into Mechanical and Electrical Sections, the former designing the physical systems, and the latter designing electrical controls to automatically start, stop, or change the speeds of the machinery which comprised the packaging lines.

For prior major projects, such as the breweries in Newark, Los Angeles, Tampa, and Houston, I believe that A-B had utilized Sverdrup and Purcel, of St. Louis, as the consulting firm; and general contractors had been hired to do the construction, with S&P serving as project manager. S&P also handled the Newark expansion which was in progress at the time I came on board. A-B always did have engineering personnel in the field, working as described above. However, A-B Management apparently had decided that such two-step arrangements took too long to bring on line, because the new brewery at Columbus was to be designed and built by the H. K. Ferguson Company (HKF) of Cleveland. That allowed design of the brewing and utilities sides to be completed and construction initiated while design of the bottle shop and warehouse was still in progress. Ideally, Packaging would come on line by no later than six weeks after the first brew-in, to take advantage of the aging time of Budweiser.

Basic Construction Project Schedule

Broadly described, all construction projects follow a similar schedule; Engineers and architects design what is to be built, construction contractors build it, the project is checked out to make certain it is operational, it is accepted by the owner, and it is subsequently put into service. Typically, the check-out shows a number of minor deficiencies which must be resolved before the job is complete but which do not prevent at least limited operation, the problems being itemized on a “punch list” for completion by the contractor during operation. In the case of an A-B can, bottle, or keg line, the final checkout was accomplished by means of a water run. That is, instead of beer, water was fed from the stock house to the filler, containers were closed and run through the packaging line, and conveyed to the ware house, all as they would be with beer. Assuming everything worked close to specifications, A-B accepted the line, subject to a punch list, and production of salable product started. The water run was thus a major goal for construction, and it set the stage for subsequent start of production. In that sense, the water run was the critical point in the progress of a project; it was the summit of the hill over which the construction phase of any project had to pass. Hence, the significance of that battered can of water in my office: It represents the first crest of many that I eventually had to negotiate.

Control Designs for the Columbus Ohio Bottle Shop and Warehouse, 1967-68

In mid-1967, my boss, Leo Esswein, assigned me to do the controls design in the Columbus bottle shop and ware house. John Patterson, who had been with A-B for about ten years, would be my mentor. John was just finishing the "as-built" drawings for the recent the Newark Brewery expansion, so he went through them with me, explaining what the various symbols meant and describing the logic of their arrangement. There were no solid-state devices used; the controls were all achieved with relays, motor starters, etc. The Columbus line layout configurations were different from those in Newark, so my task was to grasp the essentials of the Newark logic and apply them to the Columbus lines. However, someone up the chain of command had decided that it would be a good idea to convey operating criteria to HKF via the use of Boolean Logic diagrams, so Leo put me through a crash course in the use of AND, NAND, NOR, NOT gates, etc., after which I drew out the controls for the packaging lines by utilizing such symbols. It is possible that I did the conversion poorly, although John and Leo checked my work, but the first schematics which HKF sent for my review indicated that the HKF designers had no idea what they were supposed to do. Using felt tips, I bled all over the drawings, and sent them back. Their next submittals showed little improvement, with the same result. At that, HKF sent a designer to St. Louis to look at our Newark schematics, but the next submittals still showed serious flaws. The Boolean scheme was dropped, never to be seen again, and I went to Cleveland with a roll of Newark drawings.

By then, Milt Gaebler, head of Major Projects had become somewhat distressed about the slow progress of the Packaging drawing. Consequently, I made a number of trips to Cleveland during the next few weeks. HKF's performance quickly improved, and, by mid- February, 1968, control schematics, conduit plans, and wiring diagrams were being sent to the field. While in St. Louis, between trips, I worked on descriptions of operation (operating instructions) which were intended to instruct the Plant how to operate and maintain the lines. Eventually, I learned that Plant people are like the rest of us: They never read the instructions first, but they never read them when all else fails, either. Instead, they call Engineering.

Field Engineering

Standard A-B practice was to have a group of field engineers on site to make certain that construction proceeded according to plans and specifications, on schedule, and within budget. They usually worked out of a field office sized to accommodate both the permanent field staff and short timers. Some people, such as the Resident Construction Engineer (RCE) were permanent for the duration of the job, while designers and other support came as needed and departed when their role was finished. Thus, construction was well along when, starting in March, I made several trips to the site to monitor the installation of conveyor motors, motor controls, wiring, and vendor-suppled equipment. Each of these categories presented its own set of problems which had to be overcome before a line could run smoothly at design speed. Over the years, I worked on three new brewery startups and three major expansions, and the field problems remained essentially the same, although the kinds of problems changed with the different electrical crews and plant locations. The number and nature of the problems depended upon various factors, but the quality of the craftsmen had the most immediate impact of the quality of workmanship. About ten per cent of the electricians were excellent workers, abut ten per cent were nearly useless, and the others were in between. In Columbus and Jacksonville, outright sabotage was a problem, while it was rare in Merrimack, where the ratio of good workers to sluggards was considerably above ten per cent.

New vendor-built equipment was usually set up by field service people called erectors or vendor's reps. Some knew their machinery inside out, while others seemed to have no familiarity beyond knowing where the ON-OFF switch was located. For example, the air and carbon dioxide piping on the can filler-closers was complex and included a number of automatic valves to control the flow of gasses or to protect the machine in case of jams or other failures. On Columbus Line 10, the initial number of "stop" signals was so excessive that we could not get the machine to even run. I traced the problems to that array of piping, called the gassing tree, which supplied the gasses to the filler-closer, whereupon I asked the vendor's rep to isolate the problem and fix it. "That's an Anheuser-Busch design," he said, "and I don’t know how it works." I advised him that his company had built the thing and if he wanted A-B to accept it, he should make sure that it ran per spec, and I walked away to tend to other problems. By the next morning, the filler-closer was working properly.

Wiring Errors

The wiring errors in Columbus were seemingly endless. Those initial design problems noted above were evidently reflected forward to the field as installation mistakes, and they had to be corrected before lines would run at specified speeds – or even run at all. Motors were incorrectly phased, control wires were landed on the wrong terminals, or they were not landed at all. Mechanical problems frequently resulted in apparent controls problems, and the project Beer Packaging and Shipping (BP&S) engineer, Don New, occasionally thought that changes to controls could solve mechanical problems. For example, as cans were conveyed around a ninety-degree corner, they passed over a dead plate known as a "pork chop" due to its shape. If the pork chop were not absolutely level with both infeed and takeaway conveyors, cans would stumble and fall over, causing jams downstream. Don wanted some kind of sensing device to stop the line until the jam could be cleared, but eventually, the conveyor bottom side rails were bowed out, allowing the down cans to fall into a collection basket. Other physical problems included electric eyes, limit switches, and other devices which were improperly located, not adjusted correctly, or both.

Operations Problems

There were operational problems which no one had anticipated, the solution to which required redesign of controls. For example, the use of two-flap cartons allowed for quick cleaning of returned cartons, in that a man had only to open the flaps, turn the carton upside down over a trash chute, (It was amazing what came back in used beer cartons; it might be a tidy fortune or something really disgusting) and place the carton on a takeaway conveyor leading down to the packers. Two-flap cartons had always been made of a heavy, expensive compositions material, so the decision had been made to use a cheaper, corrugated material to make the cartons for Columbus. However, the lightweight corrugated flaps flopped around, making it difficult to handle the cartons, and the cleaners couldn’t keep up the pace. The return carton conveyors would back up until they jammed, and the packers would stop for lack of cartons into which they could drop beer bottles. After various stratagems failed, the two-flap cartons were replaced with new four-flap cartons, but they created a new set of problems at the packer infeeds, which necessitated a new set of controls designed in the field after production started. That entire fiasco required weeks to solve.

Sometimes, it seemed as though problems came from every direction. One almost led me to believe that the shop was haunted or otherwise cursed. New cans came into the plant arranged in layers on pallets. I don’t recall the numbers, but there were several thousand cans on each pallet, which was unloaded automatically in a bulk can depalletizer (BCD). From there, the cans went through a rinser and into the filler. After production started, I began to hear in morning meetings of entire pallets of empty cans being dumped onto the floor. The BP&S manager was not happy, and he made his unhappiness very clear to me. I examined every electrical device that had any remote connection to the BCD, but could find nothing wrong. That was probably when my hair started turning white – or was it falling out? Finally, one of the machine operators remarked to me that the spills occurred at almost the same time every morning. BINGO! The forward motion of the pallet was intended to stop when it blocked an electric eye. However, the summer sun had moved so that it was shining in through a window early in the morning, thereby flooding the electric eye. The eye could not "see" that the pallet was in its stop position, so the pallet continued forward and onto the floor. The sunlight thus defeated the purpose of the eye until the sun moved higher. A quick re-positioning of the eye solved the problem.

On another occasion, as the contractor's electricians were leaving at the end of the day, I happened to see one stand up next to a junction box on the overhead empty can conveyor. The wiring on that conveyor had been checked out, so there was no reason for the man to be up there. After the electricians had all departed, I opened that same junction box, and I found the ground wire removed from its terminal strip and bent back, thus opening the ground circuit. With all of the empty can conveyors controls grounded by the same wire, trouble shooting might have taken hours to locate the problem. Why did he sabotage the wire? The prevailing theory was that sabotage would delay completion of the work, which would extend the time for which the electricians would be needed. Union travelers were usually blamed, but nothing could be proved, although the overall cost of sabotage had to be significant.

As I struggled to correct wiring problems and to make field changes to the designs, I kept Leo apprised of what I was doing. For example, in a March 18 report, I informed him that fifty-two wiring mistakes had already been found in the keg washer system, alone. In early April, Milt Keller, an electrical foreman in the St. Louis Brewery, was sent to help. He proved to be a godsend. Initially, I made whatever design changes were needed, and Milt, working on the night shift, had them installed before 8:00 AM. Still, it became obvious that the can line and first bottle line were badly behind schedule, and Dan Wilson, the RCE, was pressured to speed things up. Eventually, John Patterson was sent to Columbus to help with the work load. He was there for about two weeks, and he was a huge help. Still, after he left, I was as busy as ever. Years later, he told me that he had been sent to observe my performance to determine if I were doing my job; he reported to Leo that I was, but I really was up to my backside in alligators.

Mechanical Problems and Other Issues

Not all of the problems and delays were due to electrical issues; the mechanical side was equally chaotic. Once Joe Rhodus was finished at Newark he was assigned to work on all non-electrical problems in Columbus. Joe and I worked together on a number of jobs in years to come, and he was always a pleasure to work with. Most of the A-B engineers were good men to work with, and, although emotions occasionally reared up, such episodes were rare. Most men were there to get the job done, although a few were exceptions. One was a notorious womanizer, and his fixation did sometimes create snags for the rest of us in that he would be A.W.O.L. when needed. Another, a mechanical designer, was readily willing to be wined and dined by vendor sales reps, and extended lunch hours often interfered with project progress when his inputs were needed.

A bottle shop and warehouse covers a lot of territory, and in Columbus, we had to traverse it by walking. I carried a complete set of drawings with me which were absolutely essential to allow me to trouble-shoot problems. A packaging line is essentially a system which conveys cans or bottles from place to place, filling them with beer, pasteurizing them, placing them in cases, and placing the cases on a wooden pallet. Kegs follow a similar route. Everything is in motion, and any troublesome event at one place along the line eventually affects the entire line. Ultimately, the line will stop, which means no product to sell, and that really upsets Production Managers. So the automatic controls of a line must provide for safety of personnel and safety of the equipment, but they otherwise must keep filling containers for as long as possible. Hence, once production started, when a line stopped running, I had to get it moving again as fast as possible. In addition to the roll of 33-in. X 44-in. drawings, I also carried a set of basic tools, i.e., channel locks, screw drivers, wire cutters, tape, and, most important of all, a Wiggenton volt meter – a "Wiggie." Once apprised of a problem, I would walk to it, spread my drawings open on the floor (it was summer, and sweat would drip off my nose, making pink spots on the Ozalid paper), analyze the problem, and either repair it or call an electrician to do so. On later projects, I was able to obtain sets of half-sized prints, which were vastly easier to carry and use.

Job Site Communication

In new plants, the employee's vote to join the union would not take effect for ninety days, so I did much of the post-acceptance craft work myself, unless I could find someone to whom I could explain what needed to be done. After the ninety days, I had to turn such work over to a plant electrician, telling him what he needed to do. For weeks during construction, startup, and production, I worked up to sixteen hours each day, seven days a week, in the plant, so by August, 1968, I was exhausted to the point of approaching disorientation. I tried to manage my pace more efficiently and to stay in one place as much as possible; but I still covered a lot of territory each day. In later projects, a number of golf carts or three-wheelers were assigned for use by the field crew but we still walked a lot. In Columbus, our only means of communication was by shouting, which was usually ineffective due to the nose of the equipment, so we used signs to convey information at a distance. Starting in Jacksonville, we had access to walkie-talkies, and we even received cell phones on later jobs. Such devices greatly reduced the distance which we walked each day. But there were still places which were inaccessible to wheeled vehicles, so we climbed a lot of ladders and crawled under or over operating equipment every day.

Safety Risks

Construction work sites are almost always more dangerous places in which to work than are static sites, such as factories. For one thing, construction environments are always changing as buildings are erected and equipment is installed. The place is literally different this morning from what it was yesterday; hence it is difficult to design safety into a changing work place. Instead, safety is directed mainly at work practices. Further, a bottle shop is filled with moving machinery which poses one set of risks. The presence of so many electrical wires and connections poses another set. A-B control systems utilized 120 volt, 60 Hz power, while motors ran on 460 volt, phase-to-phase, power. That is, any single wire was either 120 volts to ground, i.e., the floor, a steel support, a catwalk, or a piece of machinery, or 230 volts, phase to ground, both of which voltages could be fatal. All wires were connected by means of terminal strips located inside enclosures, but the terminals were exposed. As equipment was brought on line, whether for testing or for operation, every enclosure thus had exposed power inside, so reaching in to check for voltage or to manually operate relays or motor starters – essential for trouble shooting – put one's hands in close proximity to fatal voltages. Knowledge of the possible consequences did tend to aid one's concentration on the work, but I was still shocked a number of times on every project. The risk of fatal shocks was in addition to the need to crawl around on overhead conveyors or under moving machinery, there to open small enclosures known as junction boxes. Field work was definitely not for the faint of heart, and the scars carried by many of the craft workers emphasized that fact. The eventual use of programmable controllers solved many field problems and improved safety by eliminating many wires and making trouble-shooting a matter of looking at monitors, but it induced some new ones.

The first such controller at A-B was furnished by a vendor for an empty can system, and it was installed during the addition of a can line in Jacksonville in the early 70's. I designed the controls, but did not spend much time in the field. The drawings showed a conduit coming down into one end of the steel enclosure which housed the computer. For some reason, the box was rotated 180-degrees from what the drawings showed, but the conduit entry was not changed. Thus, when a hole was drilled in the box for the conduit, the steel grit from the drill-bit fell down into the ferrite-core memory of the computer. The thing forgot everything which it ever knew, and it would accept no new program. Subsequent attempts at checkout provided great entertainment until the controller was removed and a new one was mounted inside the box.

The Home Front

As I mentioned earlier, I, like most of the design engineers, made a number of trips back and forth from St. Louis to the job site until we were needed full time in the field. Company policy was always to fly us home every other week-end, but we were eventually urged to move out of the motels in which we stayed and to rent an apartment. In lieu of travel expenses, we were then reimbursed on a per diem basis. Usually, several men rented one apartment together and shared expenses, and I did so in Jacksonville and Merrimack, but the Columbus schedule permitted me to rent a place by myself and to have Adrienne and the children join me as soon as their summer vacations started. It was a nice place, but one week after we moved in, someone broke into our house in St. Louis and set it on fire. Adrienne, who was pregnant with Elise, returned to St. Louis with the children, and they all stayed with her parents. Adrienne had to give her mother a lot of help, for Mrs. Aguado had fallen and broken a leg. Elise was thus born in St. Louis rather than in Columbus, Ohio. In her spare time, Adrienne oversaw repairs to our house. We agreed that my presence in Columbus was critical to my future at A-B, so I returned there once things in St. Louis were arranged. It could have been harder for Adrienne, but not much: I might have been aboard a Nineteenth Century whaler for two years at a time.

The Glamour of Business Travel. Not.

The company normally provided transportation via commercial airlines, but Columbus was so close and the travel schedule was so regular that we often flew on one of the airplanes in the company’s fleet. That was pleasant, because the planes were stocked with Product and snacks. On the Jacksonville projects, I often boarded an Eastern red-eye which originated in Seattle, made a stop in St. Louis, and continued on to Atlanta. There I had to change to a different flight, truly an adventure in the "old" Atlanta terminal. Travel to and from Merrimack was always through Boston. There, the challenge was getting from Logan to Merrimack, and getting back into Logan, because the Boston street grid had much in common with any Medieval European city. Travel schedules were handled by Engineering Department secretaries, but advance money was handled by Treasury. Unfortunately, those people in Treasury still thought of travel on company business as a privilege, and they had no concept of how aggravating it was to not have enough advance cash or to settle per diem accounts; so there were frequent, serious conversations with clerks in Treasury about advances and re-payments. One of our mechanical engineers had an addition, personal problem with travel from about 1970 on. The man was a Cuban refugee. It was in the early '70's that a number of commercial airplanes were hijacked by men who forced the pilots to fly to Cuba. Eventually, the engineer requested that he not be assigned to work that required him to fly, as he definitely did not want to have to deal with Castro’s thugs.

Making Progress

I applied myself diligently in the school of hard knocks, and my subsequent designs and field work improved significantly on the basis of what I learned in Columbus. HKF's experience enabled them to improve their design, scheduling, and field management practices as well. That said, it must be kept in mind that any construction project will be beset by problems, which result in confusion, delays, and added costs; but while practice does not make perfect, it can improve performance.

Almost every night, before we left to site, the A-B staff gathered for a short time in the field office to sample some of the product brought in from other breweries, to discuss events of the day, and to plan activities for the next day. The scene was no doubt much like similar gatherings of Stone Age hunters as they assembled around their campfire at the close of a long day's hunt. Aside from the work done and acknowledged, companionship was bonded, and we probably shared the emotions of Henry V's men on St. Crispin's Eve.

Jacksonville, FL, 1969

So the work went in Columbus in 1968. In Jacksonville in 1969, Nick Dalba did the controls design. He started the project with more experience than I had started Columbus, and HKF was the on its second A-B project; so design and construction went better that had been the case in Columbus, but the same old wiring issues were abundant. However, Mr. Gaebler responded to my recommendation that a second electrical engineer be assigned to a BP&S startup: He sent me to Jacksonville to assist Nick. Further, he assigned Al Litteken, a brewing controls designer, to work with Nick and me to check out every wire before any system was energized. We thereby eliminated a lot of the turmoil which had bedeviled work in Columbus. But, as I noted above, construction projects are never without problems. Labor issues resulted in a number of stoppages, and some ocean fish caused another. I don't know what kind of fish they were, but one day, the entire site was almost devoid of craft workers: Those fish were running in the rivers and creeks, and the workers dropped their tools and went fishing!

Merrimack New Hampshire, 1970

John Patterson was the designer for the Merrimack Brewery, but, following Leo’s promotion to a new position, John was promoted to lead the Electrical Design Section. Mr. Gaebler thus needed a "fireman" at the job site; so I went in early 1970. It turned out to be a generally pleasant experience, because, after I rented a house in Concord, MA, Adrienne and the children joined me for the entire summer. While the job did keep me busy, the generally smooth progress made it possible for the family and me to do a bit of sight-seeing around southern New England and to absorb some of the local culture. I think that, if I could have had my family with me as I did in Concord, I would have asked to join the ranks of the full-time field staff, which would have taken me to Williamsburg, Ft. Collins, Fairfield, and Jackonville again. But Adrienne and I thought it best to provide stability for the children and their education, so I remained in the Design Section.

Law School

I started evening law school in the Fall of 1970, and graduated in 1974.

Back to Jacksonville, 1975

In 1975, I was back in Jacksonville on the Bottle Line 60 project, which included the first programmable controller programmed by A-B. I designed the controls logic and loaded it into the computer.

Progress went more easily, but I still had to deal with unanticipated problems which sometimes were simply bizarre. For its monitor, the programmable controller had a 14-inch CRT on which were displayed the internal controls in schematic form, much as they had previously been drawn by hand. One Friday, as we were nearing start-up, I had to make some minor revisions to the controls. As I was peering at the monitor, the image suddenly began to shrink! Smaller and smaller it shrank until I could not read the symbols. I was dead in the water! Several Plant electricians were well-trained in electronics, and a couple of them devised a way to jury-rig a small CRT to substitute for the regular monitor. That worked for a while, but the image started to shrink again. With that, I could only work off my field design notes to revise the program without seeing what I was doing. Since it was my week-end to go home, I finally left, arriving home at 1:00 AM, to find Adrienne waiting up for me. A new controller and monitor arrived over the week-end, progress resumed on Monday afternoon, and the start-up was on schedule.

Of course, and as always, wiring problems abounded. One Sunday, I spent the entire afternoon trouble-shooting an existing carton conveyor system which had been modified and which would not feed cartons to the correct palletizer. Finally, as the approaching cases on the already-moving conveyors came around the last ninety-degree turn, Ray Porter, the HKF engineer with whom I had worked on all my projects, and I found the bug. A few quick turns of the terminal screw, and the cases flowed into the palletizer as though nothing had been amiss.

In June, 1975, Adrienne and the children joined me in the apartment which I had rented. That turned out to be an interesting residence, because, while the facilities were nice enough, many of the occupants seemed to have lived in trailer parks just before moving into the apartments. It was educational for Adrienne, for the children, and for me to observe the life styles and the cultural mores of such people. No doubt, they found us to be interesting, too, as when a group of children sometimes stood outside the glass patio door and watched us as we sat at together at supper, said grace, and used table ware.

The Word of God on the Monitor

One evening, the apartment telephone rang. Ken Gibbs, there to work on the startup, called to let me know that some Plant person, who evidently knew quite a bit about programmable controllers, had typed a long message onto the controller monitor. The man was definitely a Fundamentalist Christian, because the message gave glory to God and exhorted us to heed the words of Jesus Christ. As a Christian, I had to admire the spirit of the message, but as an engineer, I had to think about the security of the controller; so I went over to meet Ken at the controller. We erased the message, confirmed that the controls had not been compromised, and I went back to the apartment, shaking my head at yet one more bizarre startup problem.

Promoted to Management, 1976

In February, 1976, I was promoted to the ranks of management as John Patterson's assistant, and in June I was promoted again to the position of project manager. In that capacity, I went through a long list of startups, but in a different role from that which I had performed in Columbus and the other breweries. I traveled more often, but the trips were of shorter duration, and I did not carry tools with which I could fix things. There was no doubt in my mind that being a project manager was a better station than I had previously occupied, but there were times, every so often, when I missed the satisfaction of moving a wire from here to there, or adjusting an electric eye, and be rewarded by the sound of a motor starting up and the clanking of containers jerking into motion on a conveyor. Few things are more satisfying than to see and hear a 100-valve filler-closer roar to life with the clatter of empty cans rattling through its infeed gate, or a conveyor changing speed when so commanded by an electric eye. It matters not if the containers are filled with water or with beer: The satisfaction is immense. The battered can on my file cabinet thus reminds me of the good times as well as the hard times, the noise, sweat, confusion, rewards, and loneliness of working on a startup in the field.

R.W. Collins
December 23, 2016