I was asked not long ago to name the one person who was most influential in my choosing the career that I have.

This was a simple question that didn’t really require any contemplation.    It was definitely my dad.

For many years, dad headed up the “Electric Shop” at AP Green, the largest employer in my small hometown of Mexico Missouri.  AP Green was a manufacturer of “Fire Bricks”, which are a refractories product.  This means that the bricks, etc., that were made by “Green’s”, were able to withstand extraordinarily high heat, and still maintain their physical properties and integrity.  So these bricks were used to line kilns, industrial ovens, iron ore blast furnaces (the steel industry was the single biggest driver of sales of these bricks), reactors, etc.   Perhaps the coolest thing of all though …. and every school kid in Mexico Missouri knew this tidbit …. was that the launch pads at Cape Canaveral (later Cape Kennedy) were made from AP Green Firebrick.   Yep.   Every time we watched those great big rockets on TV launch into space… from Alan Shepard to John Glenn to Neil Armstrong and beyond, they all took off on a little piece of our hometown.   And just as cool, we all knew that we lived in the “Firebrick and Saddle Horse Capital of the World”.   But that’s another story.  Several more stories actually.

So, given my dad’s job at “the plant”, whenever a new piece of equipment or automation, etc., would be installed out in the factory, it was “his guys” who did the work, and it was his job to see that it all worked properly.  He didn’t have any formal education beyond high-school, but through hard work and dedication and being a life-long learner, he got a good job that he stayed in and did with pride and a sense of responsibility for almost 45 years.

On countless occasions when I was a kid, he’d need to “run down to the plant” on an evening or weekend to check on something, and he almost always would offer to take me along on those trips.  I’d jump at the chance to go along.

Imagine:  this skinny little kid wearing a hardhat, cinched up tight so it sat high on my head …. yes, it WAS surely a funny sight.  Even better, it was a WHITE hat.  At the plant, the folks who were in management wore white hard hats, and other workers wore green, blue, or yellow depending on what their job function or department was.   Some of those jobs were TRULY “heavy lifting” jobs.

As the bricks would come out of a brick press, some of those workers would lift and stack the as-yet un-fired bricks from the press to stack them on a rail car brick skid to go into the kiln ovens where they would be baked into the final product.   The job of brick-setter there was surely one of the hardest-working jobs ever.

Walking through the plant wearing my white hardhat, I had to endure the smiles and little jokes from guys down there in one department or another on late shift saying to dad, “Uh Oh guys, here’s the new boss!”   Or often, “Hey, Shouse! I see you brought your “helper” along.”   There little joke always brought some laughs.   But to this 10 year-old, yeah, it DID make me feel proud.

One thing I saw from my dad repeatedly was that he always treated those guys who worked the machinery and the heavy-lifting jobs at the plant with respect, always took time to share a laugh or a kind word with them.  He’d gotten his own start that way, out on the floor, and he appreciated the job they did and the difficulty of their honest physical labor.

I can remember going with him to check out the new kiln temperature controllers and data-loggers (as he would look through mountains of pen-and-ink charts showing the temperatures that had been recorded in the ovens).   I remember going down there to check the new controls on the transfer trolley system that carried skids of bricks after they came out of the kilns.  The new controls in what was called the stiff-mud department.   Climbing the tower at the calcine kilns.  Checking out the ball mills, and on and on.  Sometimes those trips involved climbing up harrowing expanded metal steps to walk on catwalks out to where the controls were.  Other times it was going to the relative cool and clean Engineering lab to see how construction or testing of a new control panel was coming along.

Sometimes it was going back to the Electric Shop, where he’d show me what new projects  “his guys” were working on, or show me something on an oscilloscope.  An oscilloscope he had built himself from a kit.   And on most of those trips,  I also got to go into his office.   I loved sitting in that big leather chair at his desk.   I can still remember how that office smelled.  With electrical books and catalogs piled high, and almost always with his slide-rule laying on top of a pile.  I have that slide-rule in my own office now.

I loved every minute of those trips with my dad  …the sounds, the smells, the sights of that big busy factory. I didn’t know how lucky I was back then to have had that opportunity to spend that kind of time with him.

I know it now.`

It wasn’t just the fascination with “the plant” though.   It was that, through it all, he made me feel so important.   Being a geeky kid, always interested in the “techie” stuff  I’d ask a million questions.   “What does this do?”, or “What’s that thing over there.”, he was always, ALWAYS patient and explained things in such a way that I understood.  And he valued the questions, and let me know that he appreciated my asking.   And on those occasions when I’d ask a particularly good question, I knew he was proud.   He’d smile and say, “Hey, you know, that’s a really good question!”    Then he’d proceed to give a fabulous explanation.

I’m an engineer now, certainly due in no small measure to the interest in “how things work” that he helped nurture.

But MORE than that…. MUCH more than that, he taught me, by his patient example, to value my own kids above all… and to work hard every day to let them know how special they are, and to teach them to have high expectations for themselves.

I fear I fall short of that example all too often.

Sometimes I think there’s nothing I wouldn’t give to have another one of those late night trips “down to the plant.” with dad. Not because I have a burning curiosity about the refractories industry.  And not because there was really anything that was left unsaid between us.

It’s just because I miss him every day.

love,
John