Auto-biography of Jerry c russell The Early Years

Once I was sent to a farm to determine why a new motor had failed. It was applied on a silo unloader. I didn’t know what that was until I saw it. It is a conveyor type machine that runs inside a silo, with an auger that moves the silage to the center and then a blower blows it through a channel that goes to the unloading shout in the silo. The unloader runs around in circles riding on top of the silage, and the channel stays in place running from the center of the unloader to the silo unloading shout. The motor is mounted on the center of the unloader. I had to climb up an into the silo in order to put my instruments on the motor, and read them as the unloader was running. The silo was over 50 feet tall and so I was quite a distance from the switch where you turn the unloader on. The farmer stayed down on the ground to turn the unloader on or off when I yelled. I yelled “turn her on” and all hell broke loose. The auger started to go around in the silage and I was in danger of getting run over so I had to move ahead of the auger. The problem was the silage was soft and I couldn’t walk or run in it very well. I yelled “turn her off” but there was so much noise the farmer couldn’t hear me. I was running around in front of the auger as best I could but was losing ground in the soft silage. I was up to my crotch in silage. Finally I reached up and grabbed the channel, lifted myself up and the auger went under of me. This save me for the time being but I still had to stay ahead of the auger. All this time I was yelling for the farmer to turn it off but he never heard me. Finally he shut it down to see what was happening. I was exhausted and pissed. I took my instruments out of the silo and checked the voltage on the circuit coming in. With the silo running it was about 2/3 of what it should have been, which was why the dam motor failed. I told the farmer to call the power company and got out of there.

I enjoyed the work but it was dangerous. We were around extremely high voltage much of the time and you couldn’t be careless. I lost several friends. One of my best friends and I were working a high voltage circuit breaker in a steel mill when he got severely injured. Since time is so important at a steel mill we were working around the clock. He was alone in the motor room one night and reached across a railing to adjust something on the switch. He thought it was off, but it had been turned on, and it jumped to his arm and came out through the railing he was leaning over. He managed to get away but his arm was mangled and he had to hold his insides in with his other hand. He had to walk 200 yards down the motor room floor to get help. He survived but his arm was useless from then on. The steel company hired him and he later became a top manager at the company.

One day I was working on high voltage switchgear , and we had several cubicles open, some energized. I had been working in a dead cubicle when the boss came by and we talked for a half hour or so. Not realizing it we moved down in front of a live cubicle. When he left I turned around and started to grad a stress cone on the entry cable but I felt high voltage flux(very unusual) and jerked back in time.

We were installing a high voltage portable substation at the Maytag plant in Newton Iowa. The station was connected to a line that ran for about five miles under a 500KV line. The line had grounds on that I verified so we were testing out the substation with test equipment. Unknown to me they removed the grounds with out telling us. I reached up to a bushing on the circuit breaker to connect my tester and a arc jumped out six inches or so to my hand. It knocked me down and stunned me for an instant and I thought I was dead as the line must have been energized. In a few minutes I came around however and was not injured. The line wasn’t energized but with the grounds off it had picked up a static charge from the EHV line overhead. It had lots of voltage but not enough capacity to kill me.

In this job you had to be resourceful, one time we had to dry a large transformer which involved building a house around this unit which was as big as a house. We then pumped hot air into it to raise the ambient temperature. The next trick was to pump the oil out heat it and eventually pump it back in. I tried to get a clean gasoline transport to put the oil in, but they were all way to dirty inside even after they were steam cleaned. I finally found a guy who had a transport that hauled milk. We steam cleaned the inside of it and it worked. When we got it back to him he was supposed to steam clean the oil out before he used it to haul milk again, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t. I didn’t drink milk in the area for a month or so.

The last six months I had this job I spent in Gary Indiana working on installing a computer controlled steel rolling mill. It was the first computer controlled mill. The computer was very large and not very reliable, so we had a lot of trouble, all under tremendous pressure from the mill officials. It was in the winter and the motor rooms were not heated. We had to work seven days a week twelve hours a day and it was months in-between short visits home. When I got through I told the boss I had had it with this job. It was interesting but I was tired of being gone all the time. He was good about it and recommended me for several jobs in Pittsburgh working in the new field of computers. I accepted a job working in a new unit that was starting to apply computers in electric utility dispatching applications. This turned out to be my specialty for the rest of my career.

While in Iowa, Mark was born in 1958 at Methodist hospital in Des Moines. I took Toots in and told them to get ready because she has them fast. They pooh-poohed us , put us in a preparation room to wait, and left us alone. Her contractions kept coming faster and faster so I finally went out and told them to get their ass in there much to there irritation. When they got in there they got excited and she had him before they could get her in the delivery room.

Occasionally we would borrow my parents Air Stream Trailer and I would take the family with me when I was working on a job that would be in one place for a week or so. We worked at ALCOA in Davenport Iowa where Mark fell and had to have stitches, it almost wore the doctor out trying to put them in a screaming kid. He swore never again. Also when I was installing generators on the Gavins Point dam in South Dakota, they came and we done some fishing. Went fishing on lake of the woods at the Randals resort several times, once camping with aunt Nell on an island that turned out to be a night mare, the camp stove caught on fire, the wind came up at night and swamped the boat, and the mosquitoes fed on us. Toots has never liked camping since.
The First Pittsburgh years

I wasn’t looking forward to moving to Pittsburgh and went there alone for the first few months to get settled and find a house to rent for the family. I used my ham radio to keep in touch with some hams in Indianola and they would patch me in to Toots. I found a house to rent in Monroeville, a suburb and Toots came out with the kids after two or three months. This was in 1961.

I was working as a design engineer in a group formed to build and sell analog control systems to automatically dispatch electric power systems. The systems continuously adjusted the governors of the generators scattered around the country to keep frequency at 60 cycles, time correct and have a scheduled interchange with neighboring power systems. As it turned out, this was to be my field for the next forty years. We evolved from analog systems to the first of the digital computers as they became available. The Division we formed was small and just beginning, with mostly young people. Morale was very high and we had a great time. They started a golf league and since we were all basically beginners we enjoyed playing every Friday night. I became the project manager on two large systems we were building for utilities in Spain. I also helped out other engineers as I was just about the only one who knew much about utility apparatus. My six years as a field engineer turned out to be very valuable and in fact was for the next forty as most of the people working in this field were computer people who did not know much about the equipment we were controlling.

We built a nice big five bedroom two story house in Monroeville. It was a beautiful place on a wooded lot. We paid 26K for the place which was a lot at the time. One evening when I took the boys to get a Pizza and was coming home, the sky was lighted up red in the area around the house. When I got home we saw that the woods was on fire in the hill behind the house. It had been very dry and there was a forest fire. The trees came right up to the house so we were in danger of losing the place. We and the neighbors went into the woods with shovels and fought the fire, eventually aided by the fire department. It finally was brought under control but just yards from our house. The boys played in little league baseball and went to school within walking distance. We took some fishing trips to northern Pennsylvania but it was nothing like northern Minnesota as the largest natural lake was like a puddle to us. I was still driving the 1956 Chevy I bought from the company that leased cars to salesman in Iowa, so we decided we needed a new car to make the trip back to Iowa on vacation. We bought a new 1963 Volkswagen. They were very popular at this time and you had to wait to get them. The price was 1712$ and not negotiable. We kept this car for ten years and had over 130K miles on it. Our closest friends were Carl and Jane Weis who lived close to our first rental house. We visited them at their cottage on lake Canandota. Mark was up in the attic and stepped on a place where there were no floor boards. He came through the roof into the living room, which was quite a site , however he was not hurt. I went fishing with Carl and caught a 10 pound northern who the locals all claimed was a musky. I new that it was a northern since I had caught lots of them in Minnesota. It sure ruined the lake’s reputation as a good musky lake because all of the muskies they had been getting were now known to be northerns.

One of the projects I was project engineer and manager of was two systems to be installed in northern Spain. After we got them shipped I went to Spain for several months to install them. I rode a train from Madrid, all night to Oviedo, and arrived in the morning. At that time northern Spain was pretty isolated and nobody spoke English, even in the hotels. I had studied Spanish from records a few weeks before I went over, but still had a hard time. I stayed in the Hotel Principado, where the room was 5$ and the a meal in the restaurant was around a dollar. They warned me not to drink the water, so I drank wine which was great and cheaper than the water. From Oviedo I went to LaCoruna, on the northwest coast. The system I installed there was with FENOSA. The engineer they assigned to work with me was Hyme Jouro, who had been a resistance fighter during the war and was a very interesting guy. I had dinner and was invited to the president of the companies house. His name was Quiroga, and he was a lieutenant of General Franco during the Spanish civil war. I was to run across these people twenty years later. We ate in a fancy restaurant and I ordered the same wine I had been drinking for the last month. When the waiter brought it I said casually that it wasn’t the wine I had been drinking. Senior Quiroga became very upset and called the owner of the restaurant over and in the commotion the waiter admitted he had substituted since they did not have the wine I ordered. I wouldn’t have known the difference except that was all I had been drinking for months. About a year later I had to go to Spain again. This time Toots and I flew to London and Paris. We spent a few days at each place as tourists, and then rented a car and drove all over southern Spain. After two weeks I put her on a plane for home and went on up to Oviedo.

I got drawn in to helping sales by working on proposals and making trips to make technical presentations. Scared the hell out of me at first because I had never taken a speech class and had major stage fright. Signed up for Dale Carnegie course in public speaking. It was held at a hotel in down town Pittsburgh. It was pretty rigorous, and required you to stand up in front of the class and scream and yell while pounding the table with a rolled up newspaper. However after a few months of this I was getting better and ended up doing a lot of marketing and making presentations for the rest of my career. In fact I spent the next few years traveling world wide making technical presentations to groups as large as 500.

I had been wanting to learn to fly and had told Toots for years that if I ever made 10000$ a year I was going to. I got a raise so I went out to a flying club in Zelienople Pa. and signed up. They flew Cessna 150’s and it was 15$/hr with five more for an instructor. I flew with a old flight instructor named Pete Tauson. After eight hours of instruction and while we were practicing landings, he said stop the airplane, he got out and said take it around a few times. Everything went fine and I was a pilot. I flew when I had time and could afford it and built up around thirty hours there.

We enjoyed Pittsburgh and came to the conclusion that people are pretty much the same all over, only they operate faster and seem less friendly where the population is more dense. Our Division was having a power struggle with a industrial division of Westinghouse to serve the utility computer market, which we ended up losing. I decided to move on and had the opportunity to become a District engineer someplace in the country. I could choose New York where they wanted me to go or San Francisco. After a lot of urging I went to New York and spent a few weeks to try it out. Finally I said no way and we moved to San Frisco in 1967. Drove the Volkswagen out with the two kids and the dog. Enjoyed the trip, drove up Pikes peak and all over in the Rockies. Stopped in Iowa to see everybody and I rented a airplane and flew around the old homestead. My brother Tom who graduated from Iowa State ahead of me, went in the army, worked for several companies and ended up at Hewlet Packard in Palo Alto was in California by this time. My father and mother sold their place in Iowa and bought a trailer in Sunnyvale when they heard we moving so we all ended up together in the Bay area. Also my cousin Alden and his wife and kids lived in Orinda. We stayed in a apartment for a few weeks and ended up having a new house built in Moraga ( about 30 miles east of SF).

THE SAN FRANCISCO YEARS

As District engineer I had a company car, although since the other engineer Hank Lightec lived nearby, we commuted together. The route involved going through the Berkeley tunnel, across Oakland, across the Bay Bridge and into the city to the new ALCOA building. This took around an hour each way. Most off the time in we took a shortcut over a little road through a redwood canyon and over the mountain on switchbacks. It was no faster but beautiful and we were not in traffic. I had a beautiful office on the 13th floor with a view of the bay bridge, Alcatraz, and the bay. I worked mostly on system operations computers with Pacific Gas And Electric in SF, California Water Resources in Sacramento and Sierra Pacific in Reno. I knew most of the people as I had worked on several systems with PG&E when I was in Pittsburgh. While I was there we sold 13 systems to PG&E worth over 15 million dollars.

I went to a large flying operation in Concord to continue my flying lessons and got my license after a few hours. My check ride instructor was Warren Bogess who was a traffic reporter on the local radio station. I then joined a flying club in Livermore that had Cessna 150’s, 182’s, Caravels and Mooneys. I flew all of them as I made a trip to Sacramento and Reno about once a week and flew myself. As I was working with a local salesman there was always somebody to pick me up and so I got lots of flying hours. The Reno trip was over the Sierra Nevada mountains over Donner Pass and Lake Tahoe. It was beautiful but could get pretty rough on the way back in the evening with a strong west wind. In the winter I had to contend with the valley fog but never had any trouble. One thanksgiving we flew the whole family back to Lenox Ia. to be with Pretzel and Keigh and the rest of the family. Used a 182 and had a great trip, landing at the little grass strip in Lenox.
Toots got pregnant again as soon as we got to SF and David was born in 1967 at the hospital in Berkley. We had a real nice house in a yuppie type neighborhood in Moraga. It was a large colonial two story with five bedrooms. We landscaped the yard and put in a sprinkler system, had a large fenced in backyard and a basketball hoop over the large concrete driveway. Best house we ever had, built it for 43K and sold it for 49K. Twenty years later it was worth 500K, too bad we didn’t rent it. We enjoyed the bay area especially the weekend trips we took up and down the coast. Our favorite place was Point Reys about 50 miles up the coast, rugged beautiful and nobody there. The two boys got involved with little league baseball and basketball. One of my co-workers Chuck Murphy had a son Steve’s age who also played little league and was very good. They had the all-star game at Oakland stadium one year and we took his kid Dale and my two boys. Little did any of us realize that Dale would end up playing in the all-star game 8 times. He grew up to be a famous baseball star, playing most of his career in Atlanta and had the season home run hitting record for five years. Steve got pretty good at basketball as they played it almost year around. We went fishing at some lakes up in the Napa Valley, also Salmon fishing in the Pacific. Brother Tom had three kids by now Laura and Michel and Bruce. When we got together with grandma and grandpa we had quite a family in California. Also included was cousin Alden, wife and three girls.

My job there was very easy and involved lots of flying, entertaining visitors from Pittsburgh and customers via expense account. Got to know every nice restaurant in the bay area and there were many. Spent most of my time working on computer systems but occasionally worked on other apparatus. Sierra Pacific in Reno bought a new electronic circuit recloser and installed it in Winnemucca Nev. It needed some settings that were sophisticated so I flew one of their engineers over to Winnemucca to show him how to do it. We had such a good time that he made sure we had to go back and readjust it about every six months. The job was so plush and easy I got bored after a while. I didn’t have very much responsibility or authority and no boss in California. I finally decided to accept a job back in Pittsburgh as manager of System Development for the Computer Systems Division. So in 1968 we sold the house and prepared to move back to Pittsburgh. This time instead of driving the Volkswagen back we shipped it in the moving truck and we all flew back.

The Second Pittsburgh years

The load flow project went well and we I got a patent for it. Went to Minneapolis to give a technical paper on it at a IEEE conference. While their I was contacted by a personnel manager from Control Data Corporation. They began pestering me to come to Minneapolis and join them. Each time they called they had a better offer. My boss at Westinghouse was Paul Lego (who later became CEO of Westinghouse) and he had been through the same thing, so he advised me how to deal with it. Finally they offered almost twice what I was making plus a big stock option. Paul agreed I could hardly turn it down, so I decided we would go, and if I didn’t like it in a while I could always come back and still be ahead. So we put the house up for sale and I went to MSP to find a place to rent. The house sold fast once the kids of the buyers saw the swing. I flew the 172 to MSP and later drove the Volkswagen out with the dog and cat. Toots flew via Des Moines.

The office ended up out in Plymouth so I had a 30 mile commute for the next 30 years, but nobody wanted to leave Columbia Heights. We had the opportunity to bid on a big Energy Management System at Wisconsin Electric Power. It involved many new programs, such as Load Flows, State Estimation and numerical modeling. The requirement called for a large multi-computer system with both real time computers and large engineering/scientific main frames. We decided to bid our normal 1700 computers in a Quad configuration as a front end and dual CDC CYBER main frames as back end. We had never quoted CYBERs before and at first the corporation wouldn’t let us unless they managed the project. They appointed a bureaucrat as a manager, who I replaced shortly after we got started, when it was obvious he didn’t know what was going on. It was the first large EMS order in the industry and became the system everybody emulated. It put our division at the forefront of the EMS business, and was the beginning of a rapid growth period. At the time it was a great risk however as we had to develop from scratch almost everything. I was the one that made most of the presentations during the marketing phase, and we got the order on the basis that I would be the project Manager. Their project manager was Bill Rades who I worked with for the next four years, and he and his family became close to us and stayed with us many times when they were in MSP. I flew the Musketeer to Milwaukee for one of the presentations, and the president and chief engineer of one of our subcontractors, from California decided to fly with me from Minneapolis. It got late so when we approached the Milwaukee area it was after dark. I was low over the city when there was a big bang up front and a terrible racket. I pulled the power back and looked for a place to set down , the only thing I could see was a lighted football field with a large parking lot. As I turned toward the field I decided to try putting back on power to see if I could at least hold some altitude. There was a terrible racket but I could get enough RPM to hold altitude, I called the Mitchel Field tower and told them I was coming in with a engine problem. They waved off a commercial jet and gave me a straight in approach, as soon as I had the field made I pulled the power to try and save what was left of the engine. After I landed and was taxiing in I figured out what must have happened, sure enough when I opened the cowling I saw a exhaust pipe had broken off and was hanging from the wire with the exhaust temperature probe and banging against the cowling. It made a hell of a racket , but the engine was fine, and I had the exhaust pipe welded the next day. Afterwards I realized that during the incident, nobody in the airplane said anything as they were scared to death. I worked with these guys off and on over the next 20 years, but they would never fly with me again.