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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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Jim Lewis was a US army reserve officer, and when World War II began he was called into service and assigned to a military training camp in Texas. He put me in full charge of the company. Our business was making many war-essential products, and as manager of the company I was excused from military service.
We had an excellent factory manager and my efforts were directed primarily toward sales, which I had been doing quite well. Lewis had been operating with two lady secretaries. When he left they became my secretaries. One of them was Anne Meyer, who called herself "Mike". I soon began taking her to lunch. And then sometimes to dinner, or a movie, or both. I fell in love.
In fact, I liked both of my new secretaries, and I had a two-seat Piper Cub airplane at a private airport in Solon, a suburb of Cleveland. After work I would occasionally take the two ladies on airplane rides, one at a time. Often I would take these ladies to dinner afterward. The business was lively and I thought I was doing a good job of managing, but one of our board members told Jim about my "womanizing." Jim called a meeting of his board members where he was stationed in Texas. I was not invited. At that meeting he designated one of his board members to take over as president of the company. I was distraught. I flew in my Piper Cub plane to his station in Texas to discuss the matter, but he would not see me. I was not fired; my pay was continued, but the new boss gave me absolutely nothing to do.
After a week or two of this non activity I went to New York City and I got a job with a firm called "Business Management Incorporated". They put me to work immediately as a "Business Analyst". My first assignment took me back to Cleveland, to examine the management systems of a large manufacturing company there. I found a lot to criticize. I put together a list of recommended changes. The management there was very pleased with my work. And my new boss in New York was also very pleased.
Then I was sent to another war products company to inspect the building of the first ever underground gasoline storage tank. I was very thorough, very critical, and very insistent that they fix what I considered to be defective work. This time, however, I was not as well received. The managers called my boss to get me "off their back", and he called me off the project. He gave me a lecture about being so unreasonable, and told me I should have consulted him before tackling the company management directly.
Then, in 1944, I went on a trip to New York City. On the ferry from Hoboken (there was no tunnel at that time) I encountered Dick Eide, a long-time, no-see friend. He was working on the then secret atomic bomb project (Manhattan Project). Eide insisted that my skills were badly needed "right now" on that project. I was delighted to accept his offer.
It was essential to the Bomb Project that we promptly find a way to form a very brittle, egg-shell-like, sheet material into long lengths of hollow tubing. Literally miles of this tubing were to be required for the atomic bomb project. The current plan was for a large multilevel building to be built in suburban Chicago where several hundred women would be put to work at a process of manually wrapping brittle sheet material into hollow tubing. I looked for a better way to make this, and I canvassed numerous tube manufacturing companies.
The deadline date for this arrived and construction of the Chicago building was released. Just two weeks later I found a steel tube manufacturing plant which could have handled this job promptly and very much more efficiently. The company used a sort of laid-open window shade to roll up the metal sheet into a tube shape, which then could be slid out endwise, and welded. It was a slick process.
Too late! The deadline had come and gone. This whole very secret atomic-bomb project was on a rigid schedule for completion of the bomb by a specified future deadline date. I was flabbergasted when I found that my vastly better method was no longer of interest. Each step of this atomic bomb schedule, once approved was final and could not be altered.
(One of the ways of separating U235 from U238 is by pushing uranium hexafluoride gas through miles and miles of capillary-sized passages. The U235 molecules, being slightly lighter, will move through the capillaries faster than the U238 molecules. One way of making these capillary passages is by sintering powered metal into porous sheets. The sheets then needed to be made into tubes and the seam welded. This was tricky to do because the sintered metal sheets were very brittle and would crack rather than bend. Porous sintered metals are also hard to weld.)
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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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