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Jim Lewis goes into the Army, and my work in WWII After WWII, I venture into fiberglass, Marrying Mike, and my heart problem Getting Dick Newpher to join me at Glastic
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When I graduated from high school Mother wanted me to go to college at MIT but they would not accept me because my high school grades were too low. So she sent me to Ohio State University in Columbus. I had fun there, and got into all sorts of new things: a motorcycle, a scrap-heap automobile, and girl students to date. I achieved poor but passing grades in all my classes so my mother tried again to get me accepted at MIT and this time she succeeded. She requested a dormitory room for me and I was paired up there with Ed Taubman. We got along just fine. During our vacation week I went with him to visit his family in Baltimore. There I fell in love with his sister. She was nice to me, but she made sure I kept my distance. (Many years later when visiting Ed at his home in Baltimore I was delighted to meet again his, now adult and still delightful, sister. She was now married and a happy mother of three. Too bad for me, so sad.)
At the start of my first year at MIT I joined a fraternity. It occupied a tall building on the busy Mass Avenue street in Boston, across the Charles River from campus. New members were required to go through neophyte hazing. They blindfolded me and took me up on the roof where they walked me to the edge where I could hear the traffic way down below. There was a low wall all around the edges of the roof. They stood me on the wall and told me there were some guys down below with a catchall blanket which they were holding for me. They put me on the edge of the roof and told me to jump. I was scared stiff... but I jumped. Well, I fell... nowhere! It was a prank: there was an identical roof on an identical building adjoining ours and instead of jumping down to the street, I was jumping down to that next roof. I almost broke my leg because I fell only two feet on to next door roof instead of the 30 or 40 feet I was anticipating. It was great sport for everyone but me. But that qualified me as a full member of the fraternity so I was happy to have it over with and enjoyed the fellowship thereafter.
I had fun at MIT. My grades were poor, but passing. In my final year I took an optional class where I was asked to try to solve an existing problem with the electrical "spot welding" of stainless steel sheet plates. Spot welding was a process which worked nicely with conventional sheet steel plates, but with stainless steel the heat of spot welding ruined the "stainless" property of the metal around the spot weld, and the metal would rust. I enjoyed the challenge and I was successful at finding a solution. (conduct the weld so quickly that the surface metal never overheated)
Linde Air Products Corp., a division of Union Carbide, was looking for engineering graduates and they invited me to join them. I was delighted and my salary was quite handsome. I was sent to their "Product Development Laboratory" in Jersey City, New Jersey. I met Dick Eide there and we became good friends. After this training course we were sent to entirely different locations. (Several years later Eide and I ran into each other on a Hudson River ferry. Neither of us was still working for Linde. He was then married and living in Indiana. I was then married and living in Cleveland. We both greatly enjoyed meeting each other this way, but we keep failed to keep in touch after that. Two or three years later I learned from another friend of mine that Eide, at age 33, had died of a heart attack. I had considered him to be a very good friend and this news was quite a shock to me.)
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Jim Lewis goes into the Army, and my work in WWII After WWII, I venture into fiberglass, Marrying Mike, and my heart problem Getting Dick Newpher to join me at Glastic
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