THEN NOW
THEN NOWHere's what's happened since graduation, June 1957: in the first week afterwards we got married, took our honeymoon (in Canada), moved to New jersey, bought a car (TR-3), and I started my first job. After that, the pace picked up ´; -) .
CAREER
My degree was a BS in course XV and my entire career was in manufacturing management, all of it with Procter and Gamble. I started in P&G's New York (Staten Island) factory as foreman in the detergent-making department (round the clock, shifts changing every week = chronic jet lag!), at last making it to department manager (day work!), in which capacity I was, in November 1961, transferred to P&G's plant in Belgium (in Malines, just North of Brussels), where the atmosphere was as sweet as the NY plant's had been tough. A year and a half later, I was posted to Germany in that same capacity for the start-up of P&G operations there. The factory was on a green-field site in Worms, a rural town famed for Luther and Liebfraumilch, and far, far from corporate headquarters. The freedom was heavenly, and when the startup proved successful, I was made responsible for the plant's production and warehousing operations. The business went well, and in 1967 I was moved out of the warm camaraderie of plant operations to the alas more formal company headquarters near Frankfurt, there to be Manufacturing's liaison with surrounding company functions (Marketing, R&D, Buying, Finance, manufacturing in other P&G subsidiaries), coordinating production scheduling and administering capacity and capital planning. In 1970 I was transferred to P&G's European headquarters in Brussels to perform these same functions, now for the European division.
In January 1978 I was transferred to corporate headquarters in Cincinnati, again to do manufacturing liaison and coordination, this time for paper products (primarily disposable diapers: Pampers and Luvs) for all the company's international businesses. The logistics of moving massive amounts of such light, bulky, goods around the globe proved formidable - at one time we were the biggest single shipper of sea-vans on both oceans - and the company moved rapidly to build on-the-ground capacity in each market, obviating within five years the need for international manufacturing liaison. And for me.
In 1983 I was gathered up with half a dozen similar white elephants, people whose functions had evaporated but who were too senior to fire and too mavericky to be inserted atop an innocently bystanding part of the business, and told to go off and invent the "factory of the future". We pondered and finally worked out that first we needed to know the business strategies of the individual categories of products to be manufactured. We discovered that not only did we not know what they were; neither did anyone else in the company. Forget factory design; there ensued the most intense learning period of my life, and the most exciting segment of my career, as our group set out to learn what a strategy was, then to learn how business teams could be led through the construction of one, and from there, how to help work groups understand the systems in which they were immersed, then align themselves so as to be able to master these systems. It was a sort of organizational psychiatry, and profoundly satisfying, but I must admit that it was coincident with my retirement in 1989 that P&G stock took off.
FAMILY
Offspring consist of a daughter, Susan, and three sons, Arthur, Richard and Peter.
After Sue graduated from the University of Cincinnati; she made her way into the Human Resources department of GE's plastics plant in the Netherlands, where she met and married Jan Willem van der Werff, who runs the Lexan operation there. They have two boys.
Arthur graduated from MIT as a real (unlike his daddy) engineer (mechanical) and also went with P&G. He's based in Cincinnati but operates in other parts of the world most of the time (currently commuting between Switzerland and China).
Both Arthur and Sue were born in the US, but Richard arrived in Brussels, and Peter in Heidelberg. After graduating from Tufts, Richard too went with P&G, eventually becoming marketing manager of the company's subsidiary in Egypt, where he met and married Ishraq (think Nefretiti), who was with Saatchi & Saatchi in Cairo. Richard since left Procter and is now General Manager of Benckiser's (a German consumer-goods company) Israeli subsidiary in Tel Aviv. Their son will soon have a sister.
Peter became enamored with computers in his mid-teens, and still is. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon in Applied Math, he continued to work in the university's computer department, but is now with a private software (networking) company in Pittsburgh. He is to be married this summer.
LIFE HIGHLIGHTS
The formative experience of my adult life was having worked and lived for sixteen years in Europe. It is a very good deal indeed to enjoy the cultural relaxation that comes with being an American while at the same time still living amid all that elegance in Europe, elegance which is achieved exactly by not allowing its practitioners culturally relaxation, since elegance requires that things always be done the Right Way.
Life in Europe proved to be a most educational experience for our children as well. Inasmuch as they were brought up in several different cultures, they were able, early in their lives, to make the liberating discovery that there may indeed be more then one Right Way of doing things.