On Becoming an Electrical Engineer
Main Control Pulpit of a Hot Strip Mill
During my years in Pittsburgh, I had met a number of people from the Westinghouse Corporation. Years previously Westinghouse, Buffalo, had been an equal competitor to General Electric, at least for the drives and automation of rolling mills. As time went by Buffalo, seemed to fall by the wayside. Their large motor facility in Round Rock, TX flourished as did their Switchgear and many other product divisions.
In the early 1980’s a dynamic, Chilean-born fellow, Luis Enrique Quintino, very well known within the corporation, formerly head of Westinghouse do Brasil, started a mission to revitalize Westinghouse involvement in the rolling mill electrical and automation business. He was successful in persuading Roy Gaevert, the executive head of sales for Westinghouse Corporation, to help sell the idea that a new technology which the Automation Division had developed in O’Hara Township, PA could and should be applied to cold rolling automation.
The automation was a relatively small cost component of the overall installations, but it pulled through millions of dollars of the products of other Westinghouse Divisions. Unfortunately, it was also perceived as being the only part of a project having high technical risk: if it didn’t work, then the rest of the electrical equipment would be incapable of doing anything. On the other hand, other major electrical suppliers, including GE and Siemens, could provide all the electrical equipment that Westinghouse could as well as the automation systems. Needless to say, they used the concept of single source supply and overall responsibility as a lever. Finally Westinghouse realized that and gave Luis the green light. The first project Luis was allowed to offer was to revamp a large and important cold rolling mill facility in Spain.
The project was a success and Luis was allowed to obtain another similar contract, also in Spain. I had known Luis for many years and he had described this new technology to me. I was fascinated and decided I would attempt to join Westinghouse. I found out later that this was almost a mission impossible as the company ‘never’ hired outsiders, let alone mechanical engineers, and particularly not as a pretty senior Division Marketing Manager. Luis’ idea was that I would join his recently formed and expanding Drive Control Systems Department, within the Westinghouse Automation Division. This was not to be, since marketing was a separate function from project engineering. The Divisional head of marketing, an excellent southern gentleman named Marshall Brittain, was to be my new boss and three of Luis’ team were to be removed from his care and planted in the newly created Metals Marketing Department of which I was the new Manager. Luis was not pleased that he was no longer the sole master of his venture.
Luis was a master salesman, used to getting his way and sooner or later his ideas and mine would clash, despite our great friendship. I forget how the clash came, but probably I wanted Luis’ department to apply their technology to a hot rolling mill, a completely different animal from a tandem cold rolling mill. Luis didn’t want to do it. I believed he could and should. Finally, Marshall’s and Luis’ boss stepped in and told Luis and I to go to a small conference room from which neither of us was to emerge until a resolution had been reached. The outcome was that we would, in fact, compete for the modernization of a hot rolling mill near Steubenville, OH. Westinghouse had supplied the original electrics and automation and were, we thought, favorably perceived by the customer.
One of my first assignments as Metals Marketing Manager was to provide a monthly forecast of orders we would be obtaining that year. I explained patiently to Marshall that I would count myself extremely fortunate if I could predict even the year in which we would receive any of the potential orders we were pursuing. Marshall with equal patience explained that even if that might be the case, I was still required to submit a monthly forecast of new orders. Since both of us really did understand that this was a total waste of time, I summed up the orders which might possibly materialize, divided it by twelve and recorded the result for posterity.
Our Division GM was one Anthony A. Massaro, Jr.; every quarter, Tony Massaro–Marshall’s and Luis’ boss, held a Departmental review meeting. Massaro attended as did his Division Comptroller, Marshall, Luis and Gordon Hargreaves, an erstwhile Englishman, plus me. Evidently the information presented by Luis and Gordon was not to Massaro’s satisfaction. He commented to no one in particular that it was no wonder the business was all f***ed up, being run by ‘two Brits and a f***ing Peruvian’. I just to say managed to maintain a straight face. Afterwards and certainly not being in the slightest offended or worried by Massaro’s outburst, I met with Marshall for a post-meeting debriefing and said, tongue in cheek, that I felt we had all been the victim of a racial slur. Oh my goodness! After I left Marshall’s office I noted him hot footing it in the direction of the Division’s Human Resources manager.
Next morning I reached my office to find Massaro seated there with his feet on my desk, coffee in hand and smoking one of his interminable cigarettes. I joined him and the next few minutes of forced small talk led to his expressing the hope that I hadn’t been offended by his remarks of the previous day and he was certainly sorry if I had been even remotely upset and that I fully understood that his had not been a racial comment. I explained that it was perfectly all right and thanked him for his unwarranted concern for my feelings. After he left, I was almost in tears of laughter as I hastened to relate the whole incident to Luis and Gordon although I don’t think Luis, as a blue blooded Chilean, was happy to be characterized as a Peruvian with or without expletives.
The mechanical aspects of Wheeling Pitt’s modernization were to be carried out by a company called SMS Engineering Company, headed up by Jeremy Thomas, my long term friend and former boss at Wean United. SMS was a former licensee of Wean United and most people thought it was the best mechanical supplier in the world. Actually it was! We got the contract with SMS and that opened the door for further modernization projects from Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel.
As a result of our successful association with SMS Engineering at Wheeling an interesting opportunity started to develop. SMS in Germany had been developing game-changing technology for the production of flat hot rolled strip. What is this stuff? It can be 1/10" thick or more and maybe 56” to 84” wide, produced in coils weighing 25 tons or more. There are many applications for hot rolled steel, which do not require a particularly good surface finish, but a large percentage of hot rolled steel is further processed and cold rolled to produce the material from which cars, major appliances and many other products are made.
In the early 1980’s a dynamic, Chilean-born fellow, Luis Enrique Quintino, very well known within the corporation, formerly head of Westinghouse do Brasil, started a mission to revitalize Westinghouse involvement in the rolling mill electrical and automation business. He was successful in persuading Roy Gaevert, the executive head of sales for Westinghouse Corporation, to help sell the idea that a new technology which the Automation Division had developed in O’Hara Township, PA could and should be applied to cold rolling automation.
The automation was a relatively small cost component of the overall installations, but it pulled through millions of dollars of the products of other Westinghouse Divisions. Unfortunately, it was also perceived as being the only part of a project having high technical risk: if it didn’t work, then the rest of the electrical equipment would be incapable of doing anything. On the other hand, other major electrical suppliers, including GE and Siemens, could provide all the electrical equipment that Westinghouse could as well as the automation systems. Needless to say, they used the concept of single source supply and overall responsibility as a lever. Finally Westinghouse realized that and gave Luis the green light. The first project Luis was allowed to offer was to revamp a large and important cold rolling mill facility in Spain.
The project was a success and Luis was allowed to obtain another similar contract, also in Spain. I had known Luis for many years and he had described this new technology to me. I was fascinated and decided I would attempt to join Westinghouse. I found out later that this was almost a mission impossible as the company ‘never’ hired outsiders, let alone mechanical engineers, and particularly not as a pretty senior Division Marketing Manager. Luis’ idea was that I would join his recently formed and expanding Drive Control Systems Department, within the Westinghouse Automation Division. This was not to be, since marketing was a separate function from project engineering. The Divisional head of marketing, an excellent southern gentleman named Marshall Brittain, was to be my new boss and three of Luis’ team were to be removed from his care and planted in the newly created Metals Marketing Department of which I was the new Manager. Luis was not pleased that he was no longer the sole master of his venture.
Luis was a master salesman, used to getting his way and sooner or later his ideas and mine would clash, despite our great friendship. I forget how the clash came, but probably I wanted Luis’ department to apply their technology to a hot rolling mill, a completely different animal from a tandem cold rolling mill. Luis didn’t want to do it. I believed he could and should. Finally, Marshall’s and Luis’ boss stepped in and told Luis and I to go to a small conference room from which neither of us was to emerge until a resolution had been reached. The outcome was that we would, in fact, compete for the modernization of a hot rolling mill near Steubenville, OH. Westinghouse had supplied the original electrics and automation and were, we thought, favorably perceived by the customer.
One of my first assignments as Metals Marketing Manager was to provide a monthly forecast of orders we would be obtaining that year. I explained patiently to Marshall that I would count myself extremely fortunate if I could predict even the year in which we would receive any of the potential orders we were pursuing. Marshall with equal patience explained that even if that might be the case, I was still required to submit a monthly forecast of new orders. Since both of us really did understand that this was a total waste of time, I summed up the orders which might possibly materialize, divided it by twelve and recorded the result for posterity.
Our Division GM was one Anthony A. Massaro, Jr.; every quarter, Tony Massaro–Marshall’s and Luis’ boss, held a Departmental review meeting. Massaro attended as did his Division Comptroller, Marshall, Luis and Gordon Hargreaves, an erstwhile Englishman, plus me. Evidently the information presented by Luis and Gordon was not to Massaro’s satisfaction. He commented to no one in particular that it was no wonder the business was all f***ed up, being run by ‘two Brits and a f***ing Peruvian’. I just to say managed to maintain a straight face. Afterwards and certainly not being in the slightest offended or worried by Massaro’s outburst, I met with Marshall for a post-meeting debriefing and said, tongue in cheek, that I felt we had all been the victim of a racial slur. Oh my goodness! After I left Marshall’s office I noted him hot footing it in the direction of the Division’s Human Resources manager.
Next morning I reached my office to find Massaro seated there with his feet on my desk, coffee in hand and smoking one of his interminable cigarettes. I joined him and the next few minutes of forced small talk led to his expressing the hope that I hadn’t been offended by his remarks of the previous day and he was certainly sorry if I had been even remotely upset and that I fully understood that his had not been a racial comment. I explained that it was perfectly all right and thanked him for his unwarranted concern for my feelings. After he left, I was almost in tears of laughter as I hastened to relate the whole incident to Luis and Gordon although I don’t think Luis, as a blue blooded Chilean, was happy to be characterized as a Peruvian with or without expletives.
The mechanical aspects of Wheeling Pitt’s modernization were to be carried out by a company called SMS Engineering Company, headed up by Jeremy Thomas, my long term friend and former boss at Wean United. SMS was a former licensee of Wean United and most people thought it was the best mechanical supplier in the world. Actually it was! We got the contract with SMS and that opened the door for further modernization projects from Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel.
As a result of our successful association with SMS Engineering at Wheeling an interesting opportunity started to develop. SMS in Germany had been developing game-changing technology for the production of flat hot rolled strip. What is this stuff? It can be 1/10" thick or more and maybe 56” to 84” wide, produced in coils weighing 25 tons or more. There are many applications for hot rolled steel, which do not require a particularly good surface finish, but a large percentage of hot rolled steel is further processed and cold rolled to produce the material from which cars, major appliances and many other products are made.
SMS’s new concept is called Compact Strip Production, CSP. This radical idea was to produce liquid steel, refine it and cast it continuously from a ladle into a thin slab 1” thick, which would be turned from the vertical casting direction into a horizontal direction, pass through a long heating furnace to return its temperature to that required for hot rolling and directly into a series of rolling mills which would reduce it thickness to the right dimension, say, 0.1” and coil it up. There was to be a shear before the rolling mills, which would synchronize at the same slow speed as the 1” slab and cut through it so that a coil of the desired size could be produced. The casting was the key to this new process and it had been tested on a pilot scale but never on an industrial scale. CSP would require an investment of, say $400 million compared with well over $1 billion to build a conventional ‘green field’ iron and steel plant of comparable capacity. The environmental impact of the new process would be minimal compared with the conventional method.
SMS Germany joined with their Pittsburgh colleagues to plan the first industrial installation of CSP in the world. The customer was Nucor, from Charlotte, NC, headed by Ken Iverson and occupying tiny, unpretentious offices in a shopping plaza. Nucor had not previously produced flat rolled steel, only small beams and merchant products. It was a very bold decision. A completely new facility was to be built in a former corn field in western Indiana near the town of Crawfordsville. SMS had recommended to Nucor that three reputable electrical suppliers should be invited to bid for the project: a Japanese company, GE and Westinghouse. The bidding was fine, the negotiating was unlike anything I had experienced. The Japanese were sent home on the first day and only GE and Westinghouse remained in Nucor’s tiny lobby in their Darlington, SC facility.
First, Westinghouse was called to explain why we should get the job; we did so and returned to the lobby. Then GE was called and returned to the lobby. After a while, I was summoned and an offer, substantially below our quoted price was made by Nucor. We couldn’t accept it without decapitation and I called one of my corporate bosses in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile GE had been summoned and received the same offer as we had. We were convinced they would accept it, but they too returned and took up their station in the lobby. There we sat. Nucor came out to the lobby and told us to come back next day.
For some reason, we three Westinghousers decided to check out of the motel at which we had been staying, since we were convinced than GE was spying on us to the extent of finding out if we were still there. We moved about 20 miles away and the next day, we showed up at about one minute to one o’clock in Nucor’s lobby. GE was already there and appeared shocked that we were still in the running. Our psychology was working. Again, as a strong hint from Nucor as to their preferred direction, we were summoned from the lobby before GE and but we had to tell Nucor that we would still could not accept the order; Nucor insisted they really wanted to place the order with us and not GE and would we try harder to get permission.
This time, instead of returning to the lobby we were consigned to a small conference room with telephone and I spoke with Jim Ogden, the erstwhile Quintino/Ascough mediator. Ogden said he would call back as soon as possible. There we sat; in an adjacent room sat Nucor and, as far as we knew, in the lobby sat GE. After what seemed an interminable time, I called Ogden to try to speed him up—no success; we waited some more, until in the late afternoon when finally Ogden called and gave us the OK. I knocked on the door to Nucor’s room and we entered looking very solemn. Nucor’s respective faces fell. After a pause, I said “I’m sorry to tell you that we’ve (pause) got a deal!”. Laughter. There were almost tears, of joy, as Nucor’s President, Dave Aycock , was becoming very impatient that his team in Darlington couldn’t place a ‘simple’ order for $18 million or so, which was likely to hold up the whole project. In this way, Westinghouse beat its industry leading competitors and obtained the first order to supply electrical equipment and automation to the world’s first CSP Plant.
But that was only the first step. Next came the commercial contract. Nucor had a couple of ideas about clauses which they always had in their contracts. Westinghouse had a couple of ideas about a couple of clauses they would never ever have in their contracts: Time is of the Essence and Consequential Liability. For these negotiations, held in Nucor’s tiny Head Office in Charlotte, I had to be accompanied by a lawyer from the Corporate Legal Department of Westinghouse and, I seem to remember, Dick Kimball, our Division’s Contracts Manager. Our lawyer, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, maybe had been given the mission of ‘get us out of this contract’ by the doubters in Pittsburgh; he nearly succeeded. The discussions were held with Sam Siegel, CFO Nucor’s legendary co-founder with Ken Iverson, Dave Aycock and a smoooooth talking southern lawyer hired by Nucor. I was not accustomed to having lawyers involved in contract discussions and didn’t think I would like it. I didn’t. Nevertheless, working for a multi-billion dollar corporation needed different rules from the much smaller Wean United. Nucor’s lawyer didn’t like our lawyer. Our lawyer didn't like Nucor's. I didn’t like either lawyer’s manner or their techniques. Sam Siegel didn’t voice his opinion directly, but Dave Aycock made it clear that the whole deal was off, if we persisted in having our lawyer inside the negotiating room; it would be acceptable for the lawyer to be outside, waiting, if needed and we could consult with him, if needed. Thus we managed to get to a contract that might be accepted by both parties. The solution to the two fundamental differences was to omit the Time is of the Essence clause and dilute the Consequential Liability clause to those cases where Westinghouse was willfully negligent in causing the damages.
SMS Germany joined with their Pittsburgh colleagues to plan the first industrial installation of CSP in the world. The customer was Nucor, from Charlotte, NC, headed by Ken Iverson and occupying tiny, unpretentious offices in a shopping plaza. Nucor had not previously produced flat rolled steel, only small beams and merchant products. It was a very bold decision. A completely new facility was to be built in a former corn field in western Indiana near the town of Crawfordsville. SMS had recommended to Nucor that three reputable electrical suppliers should be invited to bid for the project: a Japanese company, GE and Westinghouse. The bidding was fine, the negotiating was unlike anything I had experienced. The Japanese were sent home on the first day and only GE and Westinghouse remained in Nucor’s tiny lobby in their Darlington, SC facility.
First, Westinghouse was called to explain why we should get the job; we did so and returned to the lobby. Then GE was called and returned to the lobby. After a while, I was summoned and an offer, substantially below our quoted price was made by Nucor. We couldn’t accept it without decapitation and I called one of my corporate bosses in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile GE had been summoned and received the same offer as we had. We were convinced they would accept it, but they too returned and took up their station in the lobby. There we sat. Nucor came out to the lobby and told us to come back next day.
For some reason, we three Westinghousers decided to check out of the motel at which we had been staying, since we were convinced than GE was spying on us to the extent of finding out if we were still there. We moved about 20 miles away and the next day, we showed up at about one minute to one o’clock in Nucor’s lobby. GE was already there and appeared shocked that we were still in the running. Our psychology was working. Again, as a strong hint from Nucor as to their preferred direction, we were summoned from the lobby before GE and but we had to tell Nucor that we would still could not accept the order; Nucor insisted they really wanted to place the order with us and not GE and would we try harder to get permission.
This time, instead of returning to the lobby we were consigned to a small conference room with telephone and I spoke with Jim Ogden, the erstwhile Quintino/Ascough mediator. Ogden said he would call back as soon as possible. There we sat; in an adjacent room sat Nucor and, as far as we knew, in the lobby sat GE. After what seemed an interminable time, I called Ogden to try to speed him up—no success; we waited some more, until in the late afternoon when finally Ogden called and gave us the OK. I knocked on the door to Nucor’s room and we entered looking very solemn. Nucor’s respective faces fell. After a pause, I said “I’m sorry to tell you that we’ve (pause) got a deal!”. Laughter. There were almost tears, of joy, as Nucor’s President, Dave Aycock , was becoming very impatient that his team in Darlington couldn’t place a ‘simple’ order for $18 million or so, which was likely to hold up the whole project. In this way, Westinghouse beat its industry leading competitors and obtained the first order to supply electrical equipment and automation to the world’s first CSP Plant.
But that was only the first step. Next came the commercial contract. Nucor had a couple of ideas about clauses which they always had in their contracts. Westinghouse had a couple of ideas about a couple of clauses they would never ever have in their contracts: Time is of the Essence and Consequential Liability. For these negotiations, held in Nucor’s tiny Head Office in Charlotte, I had to be accompanied by a lawyer from the Corporate Legal Department of Westinghouse and, I seem to remember, Dick Kimball, our Division’s Contracts Manager. Our lawyer, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, maybe had been given the mission of ‘get us out of this contract’ by the doubters in Pittsburgh; he nearly succeeded. The discussions were held with Sam Siegel, CFO Nucor’s legendary co-founder with Ken Iverson, Dave Aycock and a smoooooth talking southern lawyer hired by Nucor. I was not accustomed to having lawyers involved in contract discussions and didn’t think I would like it. I didn’t. Nevertheless, working for a multi-billion dollar corporation needed different rules from the much smaller Wean United. Nucor’s lawyer didn’t like our lawyer. Our lawyer didn't like Nucor's. I didn’t like either lawyer’s manner or their techniques. Sam Siegel didn’t voice his opinion directly, but Dave Aycock made it clear that the whole deal was off, if we persisted in having our lawyer inside the negotiating room; it would be acceptable for the lawyer to be outside, waiting, if needed and we could consult with him, if needed. Thus we managed to get to a contract that might be accepted by both parties. The solution to the two fundamental differences was to omit the Time is of the Essence clause and dilute the Consequential Liability clause to those cases where Westinghouse was willfully negligent in causing the damages.
But that was only the second step. Next came getting Westinghouse’s top executives to sign off on it. At this point I had been a Westinghouse employee for about eighteen months and was comfortably working in middle management below layers of Division Marketing Managers, Division General Managers, Regional Vice Presidents, Group Vice Presidents, Senior Vice Presidents, Presidents and Chairmen. Massaro’s boss was John Yasinsky and his boss was John Marous, President and CEO. Maybe the thing had been decided on in advance, but I was told by Tony Massaro that I would be meeting with John Marous, not even to be accompanied by him, to present the reasons why Westinghouse should accept a contract which contained the evil words Consequential Liability. So, one bright Pittsburgh morning, without the benefit of a dry run to park the car in the garage of the Westinghouse Building and to find my way to the rarified heights of the 23rd Floor, I arrived just in the nick of time to meet with Massaro and Yasinsky prior to being escorted by Yasinsky to the presence of Marous. The meeting was calm, gentlemanly, successful and fairly brief. Thus was I cleared to sign the contract with Dave Aycock in Charlotte a few days later.
The project was a success. During the negotiations, I had established a very good relationship with Joe Gedris, who was nominated to be the new Nucor plant manager. The location of the plant had not been decided at the time that contracts were signed and it was with considerable regret that when Crawfordsville, IN was chosen, Joe had to decline the position, as a medical condition pretty much forced him to live in the warmer climes of the southern USA. The job went to Keith Busse whose methods of dealing with highly sophisticated, if not overly sensitive technology sometimes caused some clashes between us. Overall the project was a great success. The technology was proven. Nucor installed several more similar facilities around the country in the years to come. SMS swept the world with it, leading would be buyers from around the world to Crawfordsville. Keith Busse was passed over for a promotion, when Ken Iverson retired, and left Nucor to form his own tremendously successful Steel Dynamics near Indianapolis, taking with him three of the the key managers from Crawfordsville. Keith's project was, of course, to be handled by SMS. By that time, Westinghouse had traded us to AEG, but our friends from SMS helped us as much as possible during the bidding. Financing for Steel Dynamics was to be arranged by Bain Capital and we had several meetings in their offices in Boston, but never met one of the best known Bain alumni! Our CFO managed to annoy Bain's main man to the extent that we really couldn't risk taking him again; no doubt this did not help our chances of success. Siemens had finally woken up and realized what incredibly important technology SMS had developed and put in a highly competitive bid. Thereafter, Siemens was virtually the only electrical and automation supplier for SMS's CSP sales around the world.
Working at Westinghouse was a great experience. I enjoyed the people, the technology, the fantastic electronics manufacturing facility. I did not enjoy the very long commute, in bad weather from one side of Pittsburgh to the other. For reasons utterly unclear to me, when the time drew near for Marshall Brittain to retire as Division Marketing Manager, Tom Giannopolis, who had taken Massaro’s place as Division GM, summoned me to his office one day and asked if I would like to have Marshall’s job. I was amazed, since, as was the case at Wean United, there were many more long term Westinghouse people, who I felt were better qualified than me to lead the Division’s Marketing force, but I accepted with great pride. Our main market was the very slow speed world of boiler control - data collection and control systems. The second most important market was in the chemical process industries, waste water treatment systems and factory automation. For Metals we needed control systems capable of updating in 2 to 5 milliseconds. The other industries required only 100 millisecond updates. Quite a change. I enjoyed the position; had no crises and was appointed to membership of a corporate level committee charged with selecting the best technologies from throughout the diverse activities of Westinghouse and awarding annual prizes. Nuclear, Industrial, Commercial, Defence and the list goes on. I was fascinated and very content.
The project was a success. During the negotiations, I had established a very good relationship with Joe Gedris, who was nominated to be the new Nucor plant manager. The location of the plant had not been decided at the time that contracts were signed and it was with considerable regret that when Crawfordsville, IN was chosen, Joe had to decline the position, as a medical condition pretty much forced him to live in the warmer climes of the southern USA. The job went to Keith Busse whose methods of dealing with highly sophisticated, if not overly sensitive technology sometimes caused some clashes between us. Overall the project was a great success. The technology was proven. Nucor installed several more similar facilities around the country in the years to come. SMS swept the world with it, leading would be buyers from around the world to Crawfordsville. Keith Busse was passed over for a promotion, when Ken Iverson retired, and left Nucor to form his own tremendously successful Steel Dynamics near Indianapolis, taking with him three of the the key managers from Crawfordsville. Keith's project was, of course, to be handled by SMS. By that time, Westinghouse had traded us to AEG, but our friends from SMS helped us as much as possible during the bidding. Financing for Steel Dynamics was to be arranged by Bain Capital and we had several meetings in their offices in Boston, but never met one of the best known Bain alumni! Our CFO managed to annoy Bain's main man to the extent that we really couldn't risk taking him again; no doubt this did not help our chances of success. Siemens had finally woken up and realized what incredibly important technology SMS had developed and put in a highly competitive bid. Thereafter, Siemens was virtually the only electrical and automation supplier for SMS's CSP sales around the world.
Working at Westinghouse was a great experience. I enjoyed the people, the technology, the fantastic electronics manufacturing facility. I did not enjoy the very long commute, in bad weather from one side of Pittsburgh to the other. For reasons utterly unclear to me, when the time drew near for Marshall Brittain to retire as Division Marketing Manager, Tom Giannopolis, who had taken Massaro’s place as Division GM, summoned me to his office one day and asked if I would like to have Marshall’s job. I was amazed, since, as was the case at Wean United, there were many more long term Westinghouse people, who I felt were better qualified than me to lead the Division’s Marketing force, but I accepted with great pride. Our main market was the very slow speed world of boiler control - data collection and control systems. The second most important market was in the chemical process industries, waste water treatment systems and factory automation. For Metals we needed control systems capable of updating in 2 to 5 milliseconds. The other industries required only 100 millisecond updates. Quite a change. I enjoyed the position; had no crises and was appointed to membership of a corporate level committee charged with selecting the best technologies from throughout the diverse activities of Westinghouse and awarding annual prizes. Nuclear, Industrial, Commercial, Defence and the list goes on. I was fascinated and very content.