Toby O’Brien and Doing the Impossible
Favorites Post #18
Originally posted May 23, 2014:
There were three times when I was an electrician at a coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma when, according to others, I had done something that they labelled “impossible”. One of those times began when a Plant Engineer Toby O’Brien came to me and asked me if I could find a way to connect to the Prime Computer down at Corporate Headquarters so that he could edit some Engineering drawings he had worked on when he was working at Oklahoma City. That in itself wasn’t what was impossible. That came later, but it pertained to a similar subject.
Somewhere in Corporate Headquarters stashed away in an isolated room was a Prime Computer just waiting for Toby.
Prime Computer
Toby knew that I had an account on the Honeywell Mainframe computer downtown, since I was always getting myself in trouble playing around on it. Since I could connect to that, he wondered if it would be possible to connect to the Prime Computer where his Medusa CAD drawings were kept. He gave me some information about how he used to log into it when he was working downtown…. before he was banished to the Power Plant Palace 70 miles north out in the middle of the country.
Toby had a CAD tablet and a disk to install the driver on a computer. This would allow him to work on his CAD drawings. For those of you who don’t remember, or have never seen such a thing. It is like a very fancy mouse…. or should I say, Mouse Pad. Since you used a stylus to draw and point and click on a large pad called a tablet. Not anything like the little tablets we have today.
CAD Drawing Tablet
At the time, the only connection we had to the Honeywell Mainframe from the power plant was through a router called a Memotec. The bandwidth was a whopping 28,000 baud. A Baud is like bytes per second, only it is measured over an audio line as an audio signal. Like the sound that a Fax machine makes when it first connects. Toby had talked to some guys down at IT and they had a copy of the same Honeywell emulator called “GLink” we were using at the plant, only it would connect at a super whopping 56,000 baud. Twice as fast! They wanted someone to “Beta Test” it. They knew I liked doing that sort of stuff, so they were willing to give us a copy to try out.
This is GLink today. Back then it was for Windows 3.1
Toby and I decided that the best place to try out our “Beta Testing” was in the Chemistry Lab. The main reason was that it had one of the newer 386 desktop computers and it was in a room right next to the data closet where the Memotec was talking to the mainframe downtown. So, if I had to run in there real quick and spit in the back and “whomp it a good ‘un”, I wouldn’t have too go far. That was a trick I learned from watching “No Time for Sergeants” with Andy Griffith. Here is the lesson:
If you have trouble viewing the video from the picture above, this this link: “No Time For Sergeants Radio Operator“.
To make the rest of this part of the story a little shorter, I’ll just summarize it to say that by logging into the Honeywell Mainframe using my account, I was then able to connect to the Prime Computer using Toby’s account and he was able to edit his CAD drawings from the Chemistry Lab at the Power Plant 70 miles away from Corporate Headquarters. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but in those days, this was “new technology” for us Power Plant guys anyway.
Before I continue with the “impossible” task, I need to explain a little about how electricians kept the Electrical Blueprints up-to-date at a Power Plant. This was a task that I was given when Tom Gibson was the Electrical Supervisor. I was supposed to take all the blueprints that had been revised because of some change that had happened at the plant, and make sure they were properly updated. Then I had to go through a process to make sure they were permanently updated, not only on the three copies that we had at our plant, but also with the “System of Record” set of blueprints at Corporate Headquarters.
So, let me tell you the process, and I’m sure you will be able to relate this task to something you encounter in your job today. Even if it is preparing the Salads at a Sirloin Stockade before opening time.
The first step happens when someone in the electric shop has to rewire some piece of equipment or something because the equipment was moved, removed, upgraded to something else, or someone thought it would work better if we did it a different way. Then whoever made the change to the electric wiring would go to the prints that were kept in the electric shop and update them so that the new wiring job was reflected in the Blueprints.
This is important because if someone a week later had to go work on this equipment, they would need to be able to see how the equipment is now wired. If they were working off of an old print, then they might blow something up, or injure or even kill someone…. most likely themselves, if it ever came down to it.
The other two copies of prints also needed to be updated. One was in the Instrument and Controls shop, and the most important copy was in the “Print Room” right next to Tom Gibson’s office.
The second step was to send off a request to Corporate Headquarters in Oklahoma City for a copy of all the blueprints that were changed so that the change could be made on the copy and sent back to Oklahoma City.
The third step is when a fresh copy of the blueprints arrived at the plant from Oklahoma City a few weeks later. These were updated with the changes and sent back to Oklahoma City.
The fourth step is when the blueprints are reviewed by an engineer downtown and the changes are made permanently by a drafter downtown.
Step five: Then three copies of the permanently changed prints were sent back to plant where they replaced the three marked up copies.
This process generally took two to three months given that the drafter downtown had to take the Original drawing, scan it in the computer, make changes to it, and then save it, and send it to the printer to be printed.
Toby and I had “petitioned” our plant management to buy us a copy of AutoCAD so that we could make our own revisions right at the plant, and send the changes directly to Oklahoma City, all complete and ready to go. The only problem with this was that AutoCAD software did not come cheap. It was several thousand dollars for just one copy.
Oh. Here is a picture of Toby:
Toby O’Brien when he was young
Even though this was before the World Wide Web, I knew where I could get a pirated copy of AutoCAD, but since neither Toby or I considered ourselves criminals, we never really considered that a viable alternative. Tom Gibson was pitching for us to have a copy, but it was figured that if we had a copy, the company would have to buy a copy for all six main power plants, and they weren’t willing to dish out that much money.
Somewhere along the line, after Tom Gibson had kept pushing for the importance of having up-to-date Plant Electric Blueprints in a timely fashion, a task force was formed to address a faster way to make print revisions. Because Toby and I (and Terry Blevins) had been pushing this at our plant, Tom asked Toby and I (actually, that should be “Toby and me”, but “Toby and I” makes me sound smarter than I am) to be on the Task Force with him.
So, one morning after arriving at the plant, we climbed into a company car and made the drive to Oklahoma City to the Corporate Headquarters. When we arrived, we sat in a big conference room with members from the different power plants, and a number of engineers from downtown. I was pretty excited that something was finally going to be done.
I don’t remember the name of the engineer that was the leader of the task force, I only remember that I had worked with him once or twice through the years on some small projects. When the meeting began, I expected that we would have some kind of brainstorming activity. I was all ready for it, since I had all sorts of ideas about how we could just edit the prints directly from the plant on the Prime Computer where the prints were stored, just like Toby had done.
When the meeting began there was no brainstorming session. There wasn’t even a “What do you guys think about how this can be done?” No. The engineer instead went on to explain his solution to the problem. I was a little disappointed. Mainly because I was all fired up about being asked to be on a task force in Oklahoma City to work on…. well…. anything…. to tell you the truth. And here we were listening to a conclusion. — Sound familiar? I knew it would.
This engineer had it all figured out. Here was his solution:
Step 1: A request was sent by company mail to downtown (same at the old second step) for some blueprints that need to be updated.
Step 2: The prints are downloaded onto a floppy disk (3.5 inch High Density – which meant, 1.44 Megabyte disks).
Step 3: The disks were mailed through company mail back to the Power Plant.
Step 4: The Power Plant receives the disks and loads them onto their computer at the plant and they edit the blueprint using a pared down CAD program called “RedLine” (somewhat cheaper than AutoCAD).
Step 5: The print revision is saved to the disk and the disk is mailed back to Corporate Headquarters using the Company Mail.
Step 6: The print is reviewed by the engineers for accuracy and is loaded into the computer as the system of record.
Ok…. this sounded just like the previous method only we were using a “RedLine” program to edit the changes instead of using Red, Green and Gray pencils.
It was evident that the engineer in charge of the meeting was expecting us to all accept this solution and that the task force no longer had to meet anymore, and we could all go home and not ever return to consider this problem again. — Well, this was when I said the “Impossible” (oh. I should italicize that like this: “Impossible!”).
I raised my hand as if I was in a classroom. The guy knowing me to be a regular troublemaker asked me what I wanted. I said, “Why mail the files? Why not just put them in a folder and have the person at the plant go there and pick them up?” — In today’s world the idea of a drop-box is about as easy to understand as “Google it”. Back then… I guess not. Especially for some engineers who had already decided on a solution.
So, the engineer responded, “Because that can’t be done.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “It’s impossible. Someone in a power plant can’t just go into a computer at Corporate Headquarters and access a file.”
Well, that did it….. I told him that we were able to edit CAD drawings on the Prime computer from the power plant. He said, “No you didn’t. That’s impossible!” I looked over at Toby who was sitting next to me with a big grin on his face. So I said, “Who is the IT guy in the room? He can tell you that you can get a file from the mainframe from the power plant.”
The engineer replied that he didn’t invite any IT people, because there wasn’t any reason. Everyone knows that you can’t copy files on a Corporate computer from a power plant. So, I said, “Invite someone from the IT department to the next meeting. I’m sure he will agree with me that this can be done. — Shortly after that, the meeting was adjourned (but at least I had managed to convince the team we needed a second meeting – which meant a second trip to OKC with my good friend Toby).
You should have heard me rant and rave all the way back to the power plant that afternoon. How could he possibly be so naive to make definite statements about something and basically call me a liar when I said that we had already done it. I’m sure Tom Gibson was glad when we arrived back at the plant and he was able to get out of the company car and into the silence of his own car for his drive back to Stillwater. Toby on the other hand carpooled with me, so he had to hear me rant and rave to Scott Hubbard all the way back to Stillwater that day.
Needless to say, we had another Print Revision Task Force meeting a few weeks later. Tom, Toby and I drove back to Oklahoma City. I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen.
The meeting began with the engineer in charge of the task force saying, “The first thing we are going to address is Kevin Breazile’s statement about sending files to the power plant. We have invited someone from IT to answer this question.” Then he turned to a guy sitting at the table. I don’t remember his name either, only that I had worked with him also through the years (oh yes I do. It was Mike Russell).
The engineer turned to the IT guy and said (using a sing-song tone that indicated that I belonged in a mental institution or maybe kindergarten), “Kevin seems to think that he can somehow get on his computer at the power plant and access a folder on a server here at Corporate Headquarters and download a file.” He stopped and with a big smirk on his face looked at the IT guy. Mike just sat there for a moment looking at him.
The engineer just stood there with an evil grin on his face waiting… Mike said, “So? What do you want to know?” The engineer said, “Well. Is that even possible?” Mike replied, “Of course! It’s actually easier for him to do that than it is for someone on the 3rd floor of this building to access the mainframe on the fourth floor.”
The engineer’s jaw dropped and he eked out a meager little “what?” Mike asked if that was all. When he was assured that this was the only question, he stood up and walked out the door. As he was leaving he turned a side glance toward me and winked at me. I was grinning ear-to-ear. I could tell, I wasn’t the only one that had a beef with this particular engineer.
So, you would have thought that it would have been a quieter ride back to the plant that day, but leave it to me…. I kept on going on about how that guy was so sure of himself that he didn’t even bother to ask the IT guy before the meeting began just to check his own erroneous assumptions. Geez! That was the most surprising part of the day. If he had only asked him before the meeting, he wouldn’t have made a fool out of himself with his snide comments just before he was put in his place.
So, Toby and I proved that doing the impossible isn’t all that impossible when what someone thinks is impossible really isn’t so. This stemmed from a lesson my dad taught me growing up when he told me, “Don’t ever say “can’t”. There is always a way.”
UPDATE: Toby died January 4, 2020, I wrote a post when I found out: Reference Letter for Toby O’Brien – Power Plant Engineer
Comments from the original post:
Something Is In The Water at the Muskogee Power Plant
Originally posted: April 15, 2013:
“Something is in the water in Muskogee.” That is what I used to say. Something that makes people feel invulnerable. That was what I attributed to David Stewart’s belief that he could jump up in a falling elevator just before it crashed into the ground and he would be saved (see After Effects of Power Plant Drop Tests).
There was another story at the Muskogee Coal-fired Power Plant where this one mechanic believed that he could stick his finger in a running lawnmower and pull it out so fast that it wouldn’t cut his finger off. Of course, True Power Plant Men tried to reason with him to convince him that it was impossible…. Then there were others who said… “Ok. Prove it.”
Think about it. A lawnmower spins at the same rate that a Turbine Generator spins when it makes electricity. 3,600 time a minute. Or 60 times each second. Since the blade in a lawnmower extends in both directions, a blade would fly by your finger 120 times each second. Twice as fast as the electric current in your house cycles positive and negative.
Typical Power Plant Lawnmower
This means that the person will have to stick their finger in the path of the lawnmower blade and pull it out within 8/1000th of a second…. IF they were able to time it so that they put their finger in the path at the precise moment that the blade passed by. Meaning that on average, the person only has 4/1000th of a second (or 0.004 seconds) to perform this feat (on average… could be a little more, could be less).
Unfortunately for this person, he was not convinced by the logicians that it was impossible, and therefore proceeded to prove his case. If you walked over and met this person in the maintenance shop at Muskogee, you would find that he was missing not only one finger, but two. Why? Because after failing the first time and having his finger chopped off, he was still so stubborn to think that he could have been wrong, so later he tried it again. Hence the reason why two of his fingers were missing.
Upon hearing this story, I came to the conclusion that there must be something in the water at Muskogee. I drank soft drinks as much as possible while I was there on overhaul during the fall of 1984.
As I mentioned in the post Power Plant Rags to Riches, in 1984 I was on overhaul at Muskogee with Ben Davis. An overhaul is when a unit is taken offline for a number of weeks so that maintenance can be performed on equipment that is only possible when the unit is offline. During this particular overhaul, Unit 6 at Muskogee was offline.
Ben and I were working out of the Unit 6 Electric shop. Ben was staying with his friend Don Burnett, a machinist that used to work at our plant when I was a summer help. Before Don worked for the electric company, he worked in a Zinc Smelting plant by Tonkawa, Oklahoma. Not only was Don an expert machinist, he was also one of the kindest people you would run across. Especially at Muskogee.
I was staying in a “trailer down by the river” by the old plant. Units one, two and three. They were older gas-fired units. I think at the time, only Unit 3 was still operational. The first 2 weeks of the overhaul, I stayed in a rectory with the Catholic priests in town. Then David Stewart offered to let me stay in his trailer down by the river for only $50 a week.
After the first couple of weeks it was decided that the 4 week overhaul had turned into a 9 week overhaul because of some complications that they found when inspecting something on the turbine. So, I ended up staying another month.
When they found out that they were going to be down for an extra 5 weeks, they called in for reinforcements, and that is when I met my new “roomie”, Steven Trammell from the plant in Midwest City. He shared the trailer for the last 4 weeks of the overhaul. From that time on, Steven and I were good friends. To this day (and I know Steven reads this blog) we refer to each other as “roomie”, even though it has been 29 years (now 35 years) since we bunked together in a trailer…..down by the river.
I have one main story that I would like to tell with this post that I am saving until the end. It was what happened to me the day I think I accidentally drank some of the water…. (sounds like Mexico doesn’t it?). Before I tell that story, I want to introduce you to a couple of other True Power Plant Men that lived next door to “roomie” and me in another trailer down by the river (this was the Arkansas River by the way…. Yeah… The Arkansas river that flowed from Kansas into Oklahoma… — go figure. The same river that we used at our plant to fill our lake. See the post Power Plant Men taking the Temperature Down By The River).
Joe Flannery was from Seminole Plant and I believe that Chet Turner was from Horseshoe Plant, though I could be mistaken about Chet. I know he was living in south Oklahoma City at the time, so he could have been working at Seminole as well. These were two electricians that were very great guys. Joe Flannery had a nickname. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I think it was “Bam Bam”.
Yeah. This Bam Bam. From the Flintstones
Joe was very strong, like Bam Bam. He also reminded me of Goober on the Andy Griffith Show, though Gary Lyons at our plant even resembled Goober more:
Goober from the Andy Griffith Show (played by George Lindsey)
Chet was older than Joe by quite a lot, but I could tell that my Roomie and Joe held him in high esteem… So much so, that I might just wait on the story I was going to tell you about the time that I drank the water in Muskogee to focus more on Chet Turner… otherwise known as Chester A Turner.
I first met Chet when my roomie asked me if I wanted to go out and eat with him and our two trailer neighbors. On the way to dinner, we had to stop by a used car lot to look at what was available because Chet loved looking at cars. He had gray hair and was 60 years old at the time.
During the next 5 weeks, we went out to eat almost every night during the week with Chet and Joe. We explored Muskogee as best we could. That means that we visited about every car lot in the town. We also ate at a really good BBQ place where you sat at a picnic table and ate the BBQ on a piece of wax paper.
One night we were invited by another electrician (I think his name was Kevin Davis) to meet him at a Wal-Mart (or some other similar store) parking lot where his son was trying to win a car by being the last person to keep his hand on the car. He had already been doing it for about 4 days, and was exhausted. It would have reminded me of the times I had spent adjusting the precipitator controls after a fouled start-up, only, only I hadn’t done that yet.
I was usually hungry when we were on our way to dinner, and I was slightly annoyed by the many visits to car lots when my stomach was set on “growl” mode. I never said anything about it, because I could tell that Chet was having a lot of fun looking at cars.
If only I had known Chet’s story when I met him, I would have treated him with the respect that he deserved. If I had known his history, I would have paid for his meals. It was only much later that I learned the true nature of Chet, a humble small gray-haired man that seemed happy all the time, and just went with the flow.
You know… It is sometimes amazing to me that I can work next to someone for a long time only to find out that they are one of the nation’s greatest heroes. I never actually worked with Chet, but I did sit next to him while we ate our supper only to return to the trailers down by the river exhausted from the long work days.
Let me start by saying that Chet’s father was a carpenter. Like another friend of mine, and Jesus Christ himself, Chester had a father that made furniture by hand. During World War II, Chester’s mother helped assemble aircraft for the United States Air Force.
While Chet’s mother was working building planes for the Air Force, Chet had joined the Navy and learned to be an electrician. He went to work on a ship in the Pacific called the USS Salt Lake City. It was in need of repairs, so he was assigned to work on the repairs.
While working on the ship, it was called to service, and Chet went to war. After a couple of battles where the ship was damaged from Japanese shelling it went to Hawaii to be repaired. After that, it was sent to the battle at Iwo Jima. That’s right. The Iwo Jima that we all know about. Chet was actually there to see the flag being raised by the Marines on Mount Suribachi:
The Iwo Jima Monument
Chet fought valiantly in the battle at Iwo Jima and was able to recall stories of specific attacks against targets that would make your hair stand on end to listen to. After it was all said and done, Chet was awarded the Victory Medal,
The Victory Medal
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal,
and the Philippine Liberation Campaign Ribbon.
Philippine Liberation Ribbon
As well as others….
At the time that I knew Chet, I didn’t know any of this about him. Isn’t that the case so many times in our lives. Think twice about that Wal-Mart Greeter when you go to the store (well, I heard that Wal-Mart is no longer going to have greeters, so my long term retirement plan has taken a turn). When you see an elderly old man or woman struggling with her cart to put her groceries in her car…. You may be looking at a hero.
I was looking at Chet thinking, “boy. This guy sure enjoys looking at cars…. I’m hungry.” This past week I was thinking about writing tonight about an event that took place while Ben and I were on overhaul at Muskogee. I thought it would be a funny story that you would enjoy. So, I asked my roomie, “What was the name of the guy that was staying with Joe Flannery in the trailer? The one with the gray hair?”
He reminded me that his name was Chet Turner. Steven told me that Chet had died a while back (on January 12, 2013, less than two weeks after I started writing about Power Plant Men) and that he was a good friend. So much so, that Steven found it hard to think about him being gone without bringing tears to his eyes. This got me thinking…. I knew Chet for a brief time. I wondered what was his story. I knew from my own experience that most True Power Plant Men are Heroes of some kind, so I looked him up.
Now you know what I found. What I have told you is only a small portion of the wonderful life of a great man. I encourage everyone to go and read about Chet Turner. The Story of Chester A. Turner
Notice the humble beginning of this man who’s father was a carpenter. Who’s mother worked in the same effort that her son did during the war to fight against tyranny. How he became an electrician at a young age, not to rule the world, but to serve mankind.
Looking at cars has taken on an entirely new meaning to me. I am honored today to have Chet forever in my memory.
Comment from Original Post:
Hey Roomy, been on vacation for a while. Just got around to the story. All I can say is thanks. My eyes are a little blurry at the moment. I will write you later when I can see better.
Comment from Previous post:
-
I enjoy reading your blog very much and am so happy you take the time to share these memories. Chet was a wonderful man and I am very blessed to have been raised in the presence of these true heroes.
Looking forward to reading more!
Toby O’Brien and Doing the Impossible
Originally posted May 23, 2014:
There were three times when I was an electrician at a coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma when, according to others, I had done something that they labelled “impossible”. One of those times began when a Plant Engineer Toby O’Brien came to me and asked me if I could find a way to connect to the Prime Computer down at Corporate Headquarters so that he could edit some Engineering drawings he had worked on when he was working at Oklahoma City. That in itself wasn’t what was impossible. That came later, but it pertained to a similar subject.
Somewhere in Corporate Headquarters stashed away in a room somewhere was a Prime Computer just waiting for Toby.
Prime Computer
Toby knew that I had an account on the Honeywell Mainframe computer downtown, since I was always getting myself in trouble playing around on it. Since I could connect to that, he wondered if it would be possible to connect to the Prime Computer where his Medusa CAD drawings were kept. He gave me some information about how he used to log into it when he was working downtown…. before he was banished to the Power Plant Palace 70 miles north out in the middle of the country.
Toby had a CAD tablet and a disk to install the driver on a computer. This would allow him to work on his CAD drawings. For those of you who don’t remember, or have never seen such a thing. It is like a very fancy mouse…. or should I say, Mouse Pad. Since you used a stylus to draw and point and click on a large pad called a tablet. Not anything like the little tablets we have today.
CAD Drawing Tablet
At the time, the only connection we had to the Honeywell Mainframe from the power plant was through a router called a Memotec. The bandwidth was a whopping 28,000 baud. A Baud is like bytes per second, only it is measured over an audio line as an audio signal. Like the sound that a Fax machine makes when it first connects. Toby had talked to some guys down at IT and they had a copy of the same Honeywell emulator called “GLink” we were using at the plant, only it would connect at a super whopping 56,000 baud. Twice as fast! They wanted someone to “Beta Test” it. They knew I liked doing that sort of stuff, so they were willing to give us a copy to try out.
This is GLink today. Back then it was for Windows 3.1
Toby and I decided that the best place to try out our “Beta Testing” was in the Chemistry Lab. The main reason was that it had one of the newer 386 desktop computers and it was in a room right next to the data closet where the Memotec was talking to the mainframe downtown. So, if I had to run in there real quick and spit in the back and “whomp it a good ‘un”, I wouldn’t have too go far. That was a trick I learned from watching “No Time for Sergeants” with Andy Griffith. Here is the lesson:
If you have trouble viewing the video from the picture above, this this link: “No Time For Sergeants Radio Operator“.
To make the rest of this part of the story a little shorter, I’ll just summarize it to say that by logging into the Honeywell Mainframe using my account, I was then able to connect to the Prime Computer using Toby’s account and he was able to edit his CAD drawings from the Chemistry Lab at the Power Plant 70 miles away from Corporate Headquarters. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but in those days, this was “new technology” for us Power Plant guys anyway.
Before I continue with the “impossible” task, I need to explain a little about how electricians kept the Electrical Blueprints up-to-date at a Power Plant. This was a task that I was given when Tom Gibson was the Electrical Supervisor. I was supposed to take all the blueprints that had been revised because of some change that had happened at the plant, and make sure they were properly updated. Then I had to go through a process to make sure they were permanently updated, not only on the three copies that we had at our plant, but also with the “System of Record” set of blueprints at Corporate Headquarters.
So, let me tell you the process, and I’m sure you will be able to relate this task to something you encounter in your job today. Even if it is preparing the Salads at a Sirloin Stockade before opening time.
The first step happens when someone in the electric shop has to rewire some piece of equipment or something because the equipment was moved, removed, upgraded to something else, or someone thought it would work better if we did it a different way. Then whoever made the change to the electric wiring would go to the prints that were kept in the electric shop and update them so that the new wiring job was reflected in the Blueprints.
This is important because if someone a week later had to go work on this equipment, they would need to be able to see how the equipment is now wired. If they were working off of an old print, then they might blow something up, or injure or even kill someone…. most likely themselves, if it ever came down to it.
The other two copies of prints also needed to be updated. One was in the Instrument and Controls shop, and the most important copy was in the “Print Room” right next to Tom Gibson’s office.
The second step was to send off a request to Corporate Headquarters in Oklahoma City for a copy of all the blueprints that were changed so that the change could be made on the copy and sent back to Oklahoma City.
The third step is when a fresh copy of the blueprints arrived at the plant from Oklahoma City a few weeks later. These were updated with the changes and sent back to Oklahoma City.
The fourth step is when the blueprints are reviewed by an engineer downtown and the changes are made permanently by a drafter downtown.
Step five: Then three copies of the permanently changed prints were sent back to plant where they replaced the three marked up copies.
This process generally took two to three months given that the drafter downtown had to take the Original drawing, scan it in the computer, make changes to it, and then save it, and send it to the printer to be printed.
Toby and I had “petitioned” our plant management to buy us a copy of AutoCAD so that we could make our own revisions right at the plant, and send the changes directly to Oklahoma City, all complete and ready to go. The only problem with this was that AutoCAD software did not come cheap. It was several thousand dollars for just one copy.
Even though this was before the World Wide Web, I knew where I could get a pirated copy of AutoCAD, but since neither Toby or I considered ourselves criminals, we never really considered that a viable alternative. Tom Gibson was pitching for us to have a copy, but it was figured that if we had a copy, the company would have to buy a copy for all six main power plants, and they weren’t willing to dish out that much money.
Somewhere along the line, after Tom Gibson had kept pushing for the importance of having up-to-date Plant Electric Blueprints in a timely fashion, a task force was formed to address a faster way to make print revisions. Because Toby and I (and Terry Blevins) had been pushing this at our plant, Tom asked Toby and I (actually, that should be “Toby and me”, but “Toby and I” makes me sound smarter than I am) to be on the Task Force with him.
So, one morning after arriving at the plant, we climbed into a company car and made the drive to Oklahoma City to the Corporate Headquarters. When we arrived, we sat in a big conference room with members from the different power plants, and a number of engineers from downtown. I was pretty excited that something was finally going to be done.
I don’t remember the name of the engineer that was the leader of the task force, I only remember that I had worked with him once or twice through the years on some small projects. When the meeting began, I expected that we would have some kind of brainstorming activity. I was all ready for it, since I had all sorts of ideas about how we could just edit the prints directly from the plant on the Prime Computer where the prints were stored, just like Toby had done.
When the meeting began there was no brainstorming session. There wasn’t even a “What do you guys think about how this can be done?” No. The engineer instead went on to explain his solution to the problem. I was a little disappointed. Mainly because I was all fired up about being asked to be on a task force in Oklahoma City to work on…. well…. anything…. to tell you the truth. And here we were listening to a conclusion. — Sound familiar? I knew it would.
This engineer had it all figured out. Here was his solution:
Step 1: A request was sent by company mail to downtown (same at the old second step) for some blueprints that need to be updated.
Step 2: The prints are downloaded onto a floppy disk (3.5 inch High Density – which meant, 1.44 Megabyte disks).
Step 3: The disks were mailed through company mail back to the Power Plant.
Step 4: The Power Plant receives the disks and loads them onto their computer at the plant and they edit the blueprint using a pared down CAD program called “RedLine”.
Step 5: The print revision is saved to the disk and the disk is mailed back to Corporate Headquarters using the Company Mail.
Step 6: The print is reviewed by the engineers for accuracy and is loaded into the computer as the system of record.
Ok…. this sounded just like the previous method only we were using a “RedLine” program to edit the changes instead of using Red, Green and Gray pencils.
It was evident that the engineer in charge of the meeting was expecting us to all accept this solution and that the task force no longer had to meet anymore, and we could all go home and not ever return to consider this problem again. — Well, this was when I said the “Impossible”.
I raised my hand as if I was in a classroom. The guy knowing me to be a regular troublemaker asked me what I wanted. I said, “Why mail the files? Why not just put them in a folder and have the person at the plant go there and pick them up?” — In today’s world the idea of a drop-box is about as easy to understand as “Google it”. Back then… I guess not. Especially for some engineers who had already decided on a solution.
So, the engineer responded, “Because that can’t be done.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “It’s impossible. Someone in a power plant can’t just go into a computer at Corporate Headquarters and access a file.”
Well, that did it….. I told him that we were able to edit CAD drawings on the Prime computer from the power plant. He said, “No you didn’t. That’s impossible!” I looked over at Toby who was sitting next to me with a big grin on his face. So I said, “Who is the IT guy in the room? He can tell you that you can get a file from the mainframe from the power plant.”
The engineer replied that he didn’t invite any IT people, because there wasn’t any reason. Everyone knows that you can’t copy files on a Corporate computer from a power plant. So, I said, “Invite someone from the IT department to the next meeting. I’m sure he will agree with me that this can be done. — Shortly after that, the meeting was adjourned (but at least I had managed to convince the team we needed a second meeting).
You should have heard me rant and rave all the way back to the power plant that afternoon. How could he possibly be so naive to make definite statements about something and basically call me a liar when I said that we had already done it. I’m sure Tom Gibson was glad when we arrived back at the plant and he was able to get out of the company car and into the silence of his own car for his drive back to Stillwater. Toby on the other hand carpooled with me, so he had to hear me rant and rave to Scott Hubbard all the way back to Stillwater that day.
Needless to say, we had another Print Revision Task Force meeting a few weeks later. Tom, Toby and I drove back to Oklahoma City. I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen.
The meeting began with the engineer in charge of the task force saying, “The first thing we are going to address is Kevin Breazile’s statement about sending files to the power plant. We have invited someone from IT to answer this question.” Then he turned to a guy sitting at the table. I don’t remember his name either, only that I had worked with him also through the years (oh yes I do. It was Mike Russell).
The engineer turned to the IT guy and said (using a tone that indicated that I belonged in a mental institution or maybe kindergarten), “Kevin seems to think that he can somehow get on his computer at the power plant and access a folder on a server here at Corporate Headquarters and download a file.” He stopped and with a big smirk on his face looked at the IT guy. Mike just sat there for a moment looking at him.
The engineer just stood there with an evil grin on his face waiting… Mike said, “So? What do you want to know?” The engineer said, “Well. Is that even possible?” Mike replied, “Of course! It’s actually easier for him to do that than it is for someone on the 3rd floor of this building to access the mainframe on the fourth floor.”
The engineer’s jaw dropped and he eked out a meager little “what?” Mike asked if that was all. When he was assured that this was the only question, he stood up and walked out the door. As he was leaving he turned a side glance toward me and winked at me. I was grinning ear-to-ear. I could tell, I wasn’t the only one that had a beef with this particular engineer.
So, you would have thought that it would have been a quieter ride back to the plant that day, but leave it to me…. I kept on going on about how that guy was so sure of himself that he didn’t even bother to ask the IT guy before the meeting began just to check his own erroneous facts. Geez! That was the most surprising part of the day. If he had only asked him before the meeting, he wouldn’t have made a fool out of himself with his snide comments just before he was put in his place.
So, Toby and I proved that doing the impossible isn’t all that impossible when what someone thinks is impossible really isn’t so. This stemmed from a lesson my dad taught me growing up when he told me, “Don’t ever say “can’t”. There is always a way.”
Comments from the original post:
-
Ah, the good old days when the best computer was the new 386. Things weren’t impossible but you had to think about it and plan quite a bit. Great stories!
-
Always enjoy reading and thinking about a world I wouldn’t even know about if it weren’t for your unique blog!
Ruth in Pittsburgh
-
Great story! I heard a pastor once say “What you “know” can keep you from learning the truth.” I saw this principle in operation many times in my career.
I had been at the WFEC Hugo Power Plant for a short time when the Plant Manager directed me (Maint. Supt.) to have the Mechanics “block the condenser” for a “hydro”. (Prior to a condenser hydro, several mechanics would work for about 4 hours dragging heavy timbers into the 3 foot tall space between the bottom of the hotwell and the concrete floor. They would space these timbers evenly across the entire condenser floor and use wedges to remove all clearance at each support beam. All this work was “required” to support the additional water weight (several feet higher than normal operating level)). I knew this “blocking” was never done at any OG&E plant but I didn’t want to make the Plant Manager look like an idiot. So I did what he asked. We “blocked” the condenser for a hydro. Then I got with just the Plant Engineer and asked him to get the Mechanical Prints for the condenser. I asked him if it was necessary to block the condenser for hydro. He said they had always done it because of the extra weight of the water. When we looked at the condenser drawings there was a note indicating it was designed to support a full hydro water level. He showed the print to the Plant Manager (one on one). Nobody was made to look foolish and for the next condenser hydro we didn’t “block” it – and the Mechanics were really happy!
-
We used to have a saying that I picked up from Bob Kennedy. “We’ve been doing it this way for 35 years. “
-
-
Well over the years there were a lot of engineers that way. Not all. We have had outstanding ones as well and the stinkers too. Just hate the politics of people so evil and cruel. Man is beyond ugly so often.
Elvin Power Plant Tool Room Adventures With Bud
Originally posted September 27, 2014, added a picture of Bud
When I say that Bud Schoonover is known as “Elvin”, I don’t mean to imply that he was Elvin in nature. What I mean to say is that he did not necessarily possess the qualities of an elf. Well, except for his smile, which is somewhat Elvish-like. Bud’s smile was usually more like a look of warning for those who didn’t know him well. I have always said that he reminded me of a six foot, 5 inch tall, white Aunt Esther from Sanford and Son, and about 75 to 100 pounds heavier.
Aunt Esther from Sanford and Son smiling like Bud Schoonover
What I mean by saying that Bud is known as “Elvin” is that is what his Mother called him when he was born. Though somewhere along the line he became known as Bud; Not from his middle name… because I think that was Floyd. Bud was my good friend and carpooling buddy (See the post “Carpooling with Bud Schoonover“). Maybe that was why people called him Bud. Because he was everyone’s “buddy”.
I don’t mean to make it sound like Bud has passed away, because as far as I know, he is still an active Republican voter living on South Palm Street in Ponca City. I also don’t want you to think that I was only friends with Bud Schoonover because he was a good carpooling buddy. No. Bud had all sorts of talents. He gave great weather reports each morning when we would gather to take our trek to the Power Plant some 20 miles away, as I mentioned in the other post about Bud (since first writing this post, Bud has passed away. See the post: Dynamic Power Plant Trio – And Then There was One).
I don’t think that there was anyone at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma that didn’t like Bud. There was just something naturally likable about him. Bud worked in the tool room and the warehouse ever since the day I first arrived at the plant in 1979. — Well, the warehouse wasn’t much of a warehouse back then. It just had stuffed piled up against the walls. No shelves, No storage racks. No drawers and bins full of parts.
Bud is four years and 26 days younger than my own father, and four years and 18 days younger than Elvis Presley.
The King
He will be 76 years old this January. Needless to say, Bud retired from the Power Plant in 1994 after having just turned 55. At his going away party, some guys at the plant fixed up a Wal-Mart shopping cart with a bunch of accessories attached to it so that he would be properly equipped when he went to work at Wal-Mart as a Greeter. — For those of you who don’t know…. Wal-Mart used to hire elderly people to greet people when you walked into the store. They might pull a cart out of the stack of carts and give it to you if you looked like you were in need of a cart.
Wal-Mart Shopping Cart
Bud was extra careful when working in the warehouse. He wanted to make sure that he was getting everything right, so he would check, and double check, and then check again…. just to make sure everything matched. One good example of this was when he was tasked with ordering a half set of coal burner nozzles and tips for the boiler.
There were 24 of these Coal burner nozzle and tips in the boiler. The nozzles costing about $13,000 and the tips ran somewhere around $4,000 each.
Coal Burner Nozzle
There was another assembly that attached to the end with the hole on the side that allowed the nozzle to change the pitch it was called the Tip.
So, Bud wanted to make sure he created the order correctly. So, when Bud placed the order with the supplier, he not only included the Supplier’s part number, but he also included the manufacturer’s part number. Just to make sure they knew they were sending the correct part, he even sent them the old manufacturing part number that they used a few years before they changed their part numbering system. — So, when he sent the order, it had all three part number for the 12 nozzles. He did the same thing with the smaller piece for the end of the nozzle.
To Bud’s surprise, one bright sunny morning in December, 1989 (well, it may not have been that sunny that day), guess what showed up at the loading dock? 12 nozzles with the suppliers part number, 12 nozzles with the manufacturer’s part number, and 12 more nozzles with the manufacturer’s old part number! Yeah…. Didn’t count on that one.
I think I know how Bud must have felt when that happened. Probably the same way I felt the morning I was summoned to the front office to pick up my mail, only to find a stack of a couple hundred envelopes from all over the company after printing something out on all the printers in the company (See “Power Plant Customer Service Team Gone Wild“). I think Bud took these things in more in stride than most people might. His reaction to finding out that the order he had created for $156,000 had suddenly turned into $468,000 was probably something like…. “Oh Geez. I sure don’t want to do that again!”
During the “We’ve Got the Power” program (see the post “Power Plant We’ve Got the Power“), the HR and Warehouse director, Linda Dallas asked us if we would put in a proposal to scrap the extra nozzles since these nozzles were very big. She didn’t think it would look good if her own team created the proposal since she was already responsible for the warehouse. We had two people from the warehouse on our We’ve Got the Power team, Dick Dale and Darlene Mitchell, so she thought we could do something out the conundrum. Two nozzles fit on a pallet, taking up space all over the warehouse.
The nozzles with the Tips attached
We could save money just by scrapping it because we wouldn’t have to pay taxes on the parts. It cost too much to return them to the supplier because the restocking fee was too high. — And E-Bay didn’t exist back then.
Instead of accepting our proposal, it was decided that instead of just changing out half of the nozzles during the next outage, they would just replace all of the nozzles. This reduced the number of nozzles left in the warehouse to a more manageable number. So, Bud’s Faux Pas, may have just helped increase the efficiency of the boiler significantly with the replacement of the nozzles which may have translated into savings of unknown millions of dollars, of which Bud received no credit… But that’s okay. Bud wasn’t one to seek credit for his ingenious accidental idea of triple ordering boiler Nozzles.
One of the favorite stories I would tell my children as they were growing up when they would ask me to tell them a Bud Schoonover story was the story about the last tool in the tool room. — This is Bud’s own special way of handling the restocking of the tool room. It goes like this…. For instance….
If you went to the tool room to ask for a yellow flashlight and it happened to be the last yellow flashlight in the tool room, and it was Bud Schoonover’s week to man the tool room, then you would hear something like this:
Yellow Flashlight similar to the one I carried
“I can’t give you a yellow flashlight, because I only have one left.” — You may want to respond with something like, “But Bud, if there’s one left, then why can’t I have it?” Bud’s reply would be, “Because if I give you the last one, then I’d have to order more.”
At this point, you may want to start over asking if you can have a yellow flashlight, with the hope that Bud may have forgotten that he was down to his last yellow flashlight…. You might even phrase it a little differently… You might say something like, “Well… Can I just borrow a yellow flashlight for a few hours? At least for as long as I have to do some work in the dark?” — I have seen this approach almost work. He would stop and think about it like Andy Griffith in “No Time For Sergeants” trying to answer questions being asked by the Psychiatrist:
Andy Griffith talking to the Psychiatrist in No Time for Sergeants
Then the next question you may ask (I know, since I asked it more than once) is: “So, Bud, how about ordering some more yellow flashlights.” Bud would reply with something like, “No. I don’t really want to order anything this week.”, as he nods in the direction of the computer monitor sitting on the desk just to his left… — Oh…. computer shy…. that’s why. Not comfortable ordering stuff on the computer (especially after ordering all those coal burner nozzles).
I can understand that. He is the same age as my own father, and my dad at that time would literally call me at least one time every single day to ask me a computer question. Like…. “How do I move a paragraph from one part of a document to another part?” — “Um… Yeah Dad, (for the hundredth time), you do it like this….”
There’s something about every one of my friends and family that were born between December 30, 1934 and January 27th 1939. They all had the same problem with computers. Must be that particular generation born within that four year period. I’m sure Elvis, who was born right in the middle of that time frame (on January 8, 1935), would have had the same trouble with the PC if he had lived long enough. — I know… I know… I just saw him the other day myself.
Only he had gained some weight
Anyway, there was one sure fire way to get that tool that I needed from the tool room while Bud Schoonover was manning the front gate, and that was to volunteer to go to the warehouse and pick up a box of the parts yourself and carry them back and hand them to Bud, while taking one out for yourself. — And the time I needed a flashlight, I did just that.
One time I went to the tool room in the middle of the winter when we had water pipes that were frozen and I needed a propane torch to heat the pipe to melt the ice. Bud told me that he couldn’t give me a propane torch because he only had one left. I looked up two racks over from the gate and could see at least two boxes of propane bottles on the top shelf.
I told Bud that I wouldn’t be taking his last bottle of propane, because there was at least two bottles right up there on that shelf. Bud insisted that he only had one bottle of propane left and he couldn’t give it to me. So, while smiling at Bud and explaining that I could see the two bottles right up there on the top of the shelf,… with one hand on his shoulder (which was about a whole foot taller than my head), and the other hand unlocking the gate, I told him I would show him.
So, I stepped into the tool room, and said, “It’s ok Bud, I won’t take your last bottle of Propane, but I do have to take this bottle here, because we have a water pipe that is frozen solid, and I need to use the propane torch to warm it up. Here… I”ll just take this one, and you can keep this other one here….”
Power Plant Propane Torch
As I walked back out the tool room smiling all the time at Bud, who was just staring at me with a worried look finally lowered his shoulders which had been creeping up closer to his ears as I had sidestepped him to get to the propane bottle.
The funny thing was that by the end of the week, there would be a whole list of parts and tools that only had one left in the tool room. Bud would consider it a successful week if he could make it through the week without having to get on the computer and order some more parts. He knew that next Monday, when Dick Dale
My Dear Friend Richard Dale
or Darlene Mitchell
Darlene Mitchell another dear friend
arrived, they would restock the shelves, and he would be in the warehouse filling the orders and bringing them over on a two wheeler to the tool room. And the world would be right once again.
As I mentioned above, since originally posting this post, Bud Schoonover had joined Dick Dale in the warehouse of Paradise. Here is the latest picture of Bud:
Bud Schoonover
Comments from the Original post:
-
Great story on Bud. He was a might tight. Thanks for the photos of Dick and Darlene. Great memories.
-
That a funny story. Bud must have been fun to work with.
When we have an bad experience, we often learn the wrong lesson. Lots lots people learn to distrust computers, but they are just machines. Like any machine, we have to learn to use a computer properly.
Apparently, Bud just filled out a form incorrectly. Did it really make any difference whether the form was on a computer? Would he have filled in a paper form correctly?
What I find weird is that someone could place $468,000 order, and no one on the other end would look at the order carefully enough to wonder why Bud had used three different numbers to order the same part. Was it advantageous to the folks receiving the order to overlook the obvious? Why didn’t they call and confirm the order?
Something Is In The Water at the Muskogee Power Plant
Originally posted: April 15, 2013:
“Something is in the water in Muskogee.” That is what I used to say. Something that makes people feel invulnerable. That was what I attributed to David Stewart’s belief that he could jump up in a falling elevator just before it crashed into the ground and he would be saved (see After Effects of Power Plant Drop Tests).
There was another story at the Muskogee Coal-fired Power Plant where this one mechanic believed that he could stick his finger in a running lawnmower and pull it out so fast that it wouldn’t cut his finger off. Of course, True Power Plant Men tried to reason with him to convince him that it was impossible…. Then there were others who said… “Ok. Prove it.”
Think about it. A lawnmower spins at the same rate that a Turbine Generator spins when it makes electricity. 3,600 time a minute. Or 60 times each second. Since the blade in a lawnmower extends in both directions, a blade would fly by your finger 120 times each second. Twice as fast as the electric current in your house cycles positive and negative.
Typical Power Plant Lawnmower
This means that the person will have to stick their finger in the path of the lawnmower blade and pull it out within 8/1000th of a second…. IF they were able to time it so that they put their finger in the path at the precise moment that the blade passed by. Meaning that on average, the person only has 4/1000th of a second (or 0.004 seconds) to perform this feat (on average… could be a little more, could be less).
Unfortunately for this person, he was not convinced by the logicians that it was impossible, and therefore proceeded to prove his case. If you walked over and met this person in the maintenance shop at Muskogee, you would find that he was missing not only one finger, but two. Why? Because after failing the first time and having his finger chopped off, he was still so stubborn to think that he could have been wrong, so later he tried it again. Hence the reason why two of his fingers were missing.
Upon hearing this story, I came to the conclusion that there must be something in the water at Muskogee. I drank soft drinks as much as possible while I was there on overhaul during the fall of 1984.
As I mentioned in the post Power Plant Rags to Riches, in 1984 I was on overhaul at Muskogee with Ben Davis. An overhaul is when a unit is taken offline for a number of weeks so that maintenance can be performed on equipment that is only possible when the unit is offline. During this particular overhaul, Unit 6 at Muskogee was offline.
Ben and I were working out of the Unit 6 Electric shop. Ben was staying with his friend Don Burnett, a machinist that used to work at our plant when I was a summer help. Before Don worked for the electric company, he worked in a Zinc Smelting plant by Tonkawa, Oklahoma. Not only was Don an expert machinist, he was also one of the kindest people you would run across. Especially at Muskogee.
I was staying in a “trailer down by the river” by the old plant. Units one, two and three. They were older gas-fired units. I think at the time, only Unit 3 was still operational. The first 2 weeks of the overhaul, I stayed in a rectory with the Catholic priests in town. Then David Stewart offered to let me stay in his trailer down by the river for only $50 a week.
After the first couple of weeks it was decided that the 4 week overhaul had turned into a 9 week overhaul because of some complications that they found when inspecting something on the turbine. So, I ended up staying another month.
When they found out that they were going to be down for an extra 5 weeks, they called in for reinforcements, and that is when I met my new “roomie”, Steven Trammell from the plant in Midwest City. He shared the trailer for the last 4 weeks of the overhaul. From that time on, Steven and I were good friends. To this day (and I know Steven reads this blog) we refer to each other as “roomie”, even though it has been 28 years since we bunked together in a trailer…..down by the river.
I have one main story that I would like to tell with this post that I am saving until the end. It was what happened to me the day I think I accidentally drank some of the water…. (sounds like Mexico doesn’t it?). Before I tell that story, I want to introduce you to a couple of other True Power Plant Men that lived next door to “roomie” and me in another trailer down by the river (this was the Arkansas River by the way…. Yeah… The Arkansas river that flowed from Kansas into Oklahoma… — go figure. The same river that we used at our plant to fill our lake. See the post Power Plant Men taking the Temperature Down By The River).
Joe Flannery was from Seminole Plant and I believe that Chet Turner was from Horseshoe Plant, though I could be mistaken about Chet. I know he was living in south Oklahoma City at the time, so he could have been working at Seminole as well. These were two electricians that were very great guys. Joe Flannery had a nickname. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I think it was “Bam Bam”.
Yeah. This Bam Bam. From the Flintstones
Joe was very strong, like Bam Bam. He also reminded me of Goober on the Andy Griffith Show, though Gary Lyons at our plant even resembled Goober more:
Goober from the Andy Griffith Show (played by George Lindsey)
Chet was older than Joe by quite a lot, but I could tell that my Roomie and Joe held him in high esteem… So much so, that I might just wait on the story I was going to tell you about the time that I drank the water in Muskogee to focus more on Chet Turner… otherwise known as Chester A Turner.
I first met Chet when my roomie asked me if I wanted to go out and eat with him and our two trailer neighbors. On the way to dinner, we had to stop by a used car lot to look at what was available because Chet loved looking at cars. He had gray hair and was 60 years old at the time.
During the next 5 weeks, we went out to eat almost every night during the week with Chet and Joe. We explored Muskogee as best we could. That means that we visited about every car lot in the town. We also ate at a really good BBQ place where you sat at a picnic table and ate the BBQ on a piece of wax paper.
One night we were invited by another electrician (I think his name was Kevin Davis) to meet him at a Wal-Mart (or some other similar store) parking lot where his son was trying to win a car by being the last person to keep his hand on the car. He had already been doing it for about 4 days, and was exhausted. It would have reminded me of the times I had spent adjusting the precipitator controls after a fouled start-up, only, I hadn’t done that yet.
I was usually hungry when we were on our way to dinner, and I was slightly annoyed by the many visits to car lots when my stomach was set on “growl” mode. I never said anything about it, because I could tell that Chet was having a lot of fun looking at cars.
If only I had known Chet’s story when I met him, I would have treated him with the respect that he deserved. If I had known his history, I would have paid for his meals. It was only much later that I learned the true nature of Chet, a humble small gray-haired man that seemed happy all the time, and just went with the flow.
You know… It is sometimes amazing to me that I can work next to someone for a long time only to find out that they are one of the nation’s greatest heroes. I never actually worked with Chet, but I did sit next to him while we ate our supper only to return to the trailers down by the river exhausted from the long work days.
Let me start by saying that Chet’s father was a carpenter. Like another friend of mine, and Jesus Christ himself, Chester had a father that made furniture by hand. During World War II, Chester’s mother helped assemble aircraft for the United States Air Force.
While Chet’s mother was working building planes for the Air Force, Chet had joined the Navy and learned to be an electrician. He went to work on a ship in the Pacific called the USS Salt Lake City. It was in need of repairs, so he was assigned to work on the repairs.
While working on the ship, it was called to service, and Chet went to war. After a couple of battles where the ship was damaged from Japanese shelling it went to Hawaii to be repaired. After that, it was sent to the battle at Iwo Jima. That’s right. The Iwo Jima that we all know about. Chet was actually there to see the flag being raised by the Marines on Mount Suribachi:
The Iwo Jima Monument
Chet fought valiantly in the battle at Iwo Jima and was able to recall stories of specific attacks against targets that would make your hair stand on end to listen to. After it was all said and done, Chet was awarded the Victory Medal,
The Victory Medal
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal,
and the Philippine Liberation Campaign Ribbon.
Philippine Liberation Ribbon
As well as others….
At the time that I knew Chet, I didn’t know any of this about him. Isn’t that the case so many times in our lives. Think twice about that Wal-Mart Greeter when you go to the store. When you see an elderly old man or woman struggling with her cart to put her groceries in her car…. You may be looking at a hero.
I was looking at Chet thinking, “boy. This guy sure enjoys looking at cars…. I’m hungry.” This past week I was thinking about writing tonight about an event that took place while Ben and I were on overhaul at Muskogee. I thought it would be a funny story that you would enjoy. So, I asked my roomie, “What was the name of the guy that was staying with Joe Flannery in the trailer? The one with the gray hair?”
He reminded me that his name was Chet Turner. Steven told me that Chet had died a while back (on January 12, 2013, less than two weeks after I started writing about Power Plant Men) and that he was a good friend. So much so, that Steven found it hard to think about him being gone without bringing tears to his eyes. This got me thinking…. I knew Chet for a brief time. I wondered what was his story. I knew from my own experience that most True Power Plant Men are Heroes of some kind, so I looked him up.
Now you know what I found. What I have told you is only a small portion of the wonderful life of a great man. I encourage everyone to go and read about Chet Turner. The Story of Chester A. Turner
Notice the humble beginning of this man who’s father was a carpenter. Who’s mother worked in the same effort that her son did during the war to fight against tyranny. How he became an electrician at a young age, not to rule the world, but to serve mankind.
Looking at cars has taken on an entirely new meaning to me. I am honored today to have Chet forever in my memory.
Comment from Original Post:
Hey Roomy, been on vacation for a while. Just got around to the story. All I can say is thanks. My eyes are a little blurry at the moment. I will write you later when I can see better.
Comment from Previous post:
-
I enjoy reading your blog very much and am so happy you take the time to share these memories. Chet was a wonderful man and I am very blessed to have been raised in the presence of these true heroes.
Looking forward to reading more!
Toby O’Brien and Doing the Impossible
Originally posted May 23, 2014:
There were three times when I was an electrician at a coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma when, according to others, I had done something that they labelled “impossible”. One of those times began when a Plant Engineer Toby O’Brien came to me and asked me if I could find a way to connect to the Prime Computer down at Corporate Headquarters so that he could edit some Engineering drawings he had worked on when he was working at Oklahoma City. That in itself wasn’t what was impossible. That came later, but it pertained to a similar subject.
Somewhere in Corporate Headquarters stashed away in a room somewhere was a Prime Computer just waiting for Toby.
Prime Computer
Toby knew that I had an account on the Honeywell Mainframe computer downtown, since I was always getting myself in trouble playing around on it. Since I could connect to that, he wondered if it would be possible to connect to the Prime Computer where his Medusa CAD drawings were kept. He gave me some information about how he used to log into it when he was working downtown…. before he was banished to the Power Plant Palace 70 miles north out in the middle of the country.
Toby had a CAD tablet and a disk to install the driver on a computer. This would allow him to work on his CAD drawings. For those of you who don’t remember, or have never seen such a thing. It is like a very fancy mouse…. or should I say, Mouse Pad. Since you used a stylus to draw and point and click on a large pad called a tablet. Not anything like the little tablets we have today.
CAD Drawing Tablet
At the time, the only connection we had to the Honeywell Mainframe from the power plant was through a router called a Memotec. The bandwidth was a whopping 28,000 baud. A Baud is like bytes per second, only it is measured over an audio line as an audio signal. Like the sound that a Fax machine makes when it first connects. Toby had talked to some guys down at IT and they had a copy of the same Honeywell emulator called “GLink” we were using at the plant, only it would connect at a super whopping 56,000 baud. Twice as fast! They wanted someone to “Beta Test” it. They knew I liked doing that sort of stuff, so they were willing to give us a copy to try out.
This is GLink today. Back then it was for Windows 3.1
Toby and I decided that the best place to try out our “Beta Testing” was in the Chemistry Lab. The main reason was that it had one of the newer 386 desktop computers and it was in a room right next to the data closet where the Memotec was talking to the mainframe downtown. So, if I had to run in there real quick and spit in the back and “whomp it a good ‘un”, I wouldn’t have too go far. That was a trick I learned from watching “No Time for Sergeants” with Andy Griffith. Here is the lesson:
If you have trouble viewing the video from the picture above, this this link: “No Time For Sergeants Radio Operator“.
To make the rest of this part of the story a little shorter, I’ll just summarize it to say that by logging into the Honeywell Mainframe using my account, I was then able to connect to the Prime Computer using Toby’s account and he was able to edit his CAD drawings from the Chemistry Lab at the Power Plant 70 miles away from Corporate Headquarters. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but in those days, this was “new technology” for us Power Plant guys anyway.
Before I continue with the “impossible” task, I need to explain a little about how electricians kept the Electrical Blueprints up-to-date at a Power Plant. This was a task that I was given when Tom Gibson was the Electrical Supervisor. I was supposed to take all the blueprints that had been revised because of some change that had happened at the plant, and make sure they were properly updated. Then I had to go through a process to make sure they were permanently updated, not only on the three copies that we had at our plant, but also with the “System of Record” set of blueprints at Corporate Headquarters.
So, let me tell you the process, and I’m sure you will be able to relate this task to something you encounter in your job today. Even if it is preparing the Salads at a Sirloin Stockade before opening time.
The first step happens when someone in the electric shop has to rewire some piece of equipment or something because the equipment was moved, removed, upgraded to something else, or someone thought it would work better if we did it a different way. Then whoever made the change to the electric wiring would go to the prints that were kept in the electric shop and update them so that the new wiring job was reflected in the Blueprints.
This is important because if someone a week later had to go work on this equipment, they would need to be able to see how the equipment is now wired. If they were working off of an old print, then they might blow something up, or injure or even kill someone…. most likely themselves, if it ever came down to it.
The other two copies of prints also needed to be updated. One was in the Instrument and Controls shop, and the most important copy was in the “Print Room” right next to Tom Gibson’s office.
The second step was to send off a request to Corporate Headquarters in Oklahoma City for a copy of all the blueprints that were changed so that the change could be made on the copy and sent back to Oklahoma City.
The third step is when a fresh copy of the blueprints arrived at the plant from Oklahoma City a few weeks later. These were updated with the changes and sent back to Oklahoma City.
The fourth step is when the blueprints are reviewed by an engineer downtown and the changes are made permanently by a drafter downtown.
Step five: Then three copies of the permanently changed prints were sent back to plant where they replaced the three marked up copies.
This process generally took two to three months given that the drafter downtown had to take the Original drawing, scan it in the computer, make changes to it, and then save it, and send it to the printer to be printed.
Toby and I had “petitioned” our plant management to buy us a copy of AutoCAD so that we could make our own revisions right at the plant, and send the changes directly to Oklahoma City, all complete and ready to go. The only problem with this was that AutoCAD software did not come cheap. It was several thousand dollars for just one copy.
Even though this was before the World Wide Web, I knew where I could get a pirated copy of AutoCAD, but since neither Toby or I considered ourselves criminals, we never really considered that a viable alternative. Tom Gibson was pitching for us to have a copy, but it was figured that if we had a copy, the company would have to buy a copy for all six main power plants, and they weren’t willing to dish out that much money.
Somewhere along the line, after Tom Gibson had kept pushing for the importance of having up-to-date Plant Electric Blueprints in a timely fashion, a task force was formed to address a faster way to make print revisions. Because Toby and I (and Terry Blevins) had been pushing this at our plant, Tom asked Toby and I (actually, that should be “Toby and me”, but “Toby and I” makes me sound smarter than I am) to be on the Task Force with him.
So, one morning after arriving at the plant, we climbed into a company car and made the drive to Oklahoma City to the Corporate Headquarters. When we arrived, we sat in a big conference room with members from the different power plants, and a number of engineers from downtown. I was pretty excited that something was finally going to be done.
I don’t remember the name of the engineer that was the leader of the task force, I only remember that I had worked with him once or twice through the years on some small projects. When the meeting began, I expected that we would have some kind of brainstorming activity. I was all ready for it, since I had all sorts of ideas about how we could just edit the prints directly from the plant on the Prime Computer where the prints were stored, just like Toby had done.
When the meeting began there was no brainstorming session. There wasn’t even a “What do you guys think about how this can be done?” No. The engineer instead went on to explain his solution to the problem. I was a little disappointed. Mainly because I was all fired up about being asked to be on a task force in Oklahoma City to work on…. well…. anything…. to tell you the truth. And here we were listening to a conclusion. — Sound familiar? I knew it would.
This engineer had it all figured out. Here was his solution:
Step 1: A request was sent by company mail to downtown (same at the old second step) for some blueprints that need to be updated.
Step 2: The prints are downloaded onto a floppy disk (3.5 inch High Density – which meant, 1.44 Megabyte disks).
Step 3: The disks were mailed through company mail back to the Power Plant.
Step 4: The Power Plant receives the disks and loads them onto their computer at the plant and they edit the blueprint using a pared down CAD program called “RedLine”.
Step 5: The print revision is saved to the disk and the disk is mailed back to Corporate Headquarters using the Company Mail.
Step 6: The print is reviewed by the engineers for accuracy and is loaded into the computer as the system of record.
Ok…. this sounded just like the previous method only we were using a “RedLine” program to edit the changes instead of using Red, Green and Gray pencils.
It was evident that the engineer in charge of the meeting was expecting us to all accept this solution and that the task force no longer had to meet anymore, and we could all go home and not ever return to consider this problem again. — Well, this was when I said the “Impossible”.
I raised my hand as if I was in a classroom. The guy knowing me to be a regular troublemaker asked me what I wanted. I said, “Why mail the files? Why not just put them in a folder and have the person at the plant go there and pick them up?” — In today’s world the idea of a drop-box is about as easy to understand as “Google it”. Back then… I guess not. Especially for some engineers who had already decided on a solution.
So, the engineer responded, “Because that can’t be done.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “It’s impossible. Someone in a power plant can’t just go into a computer at Corporate Headquarters and access a file.”
Well, that did it….. I told him that we were able to edit CAD drawings on the Prime computer from the power plant. He said, “No you didn’t. That’s impossible!” I looked over at Toby who was sitting next to me with a big grin on his face. So I said, “Who is the IT guy in the room? He can tell you that you can get a file from the mainframe from the power plant.”
The engineer replied that he didn’t invite any IT people, because there wasn’t any reason. Everyone knows that you can’t copy files on a Corporate computer from a power plant. So, I said, “Invite someone from the IT department to the next meeting. I’m sure he will agree with me that this can be done. — Shortly after that, the meeting was adjourned (but at least I had managed to convince the team we needed a second meeting).
You should have heard me rant and rave all the way back to the power plant that afternoon. How could he possibly be so naive to make definite statements about something and basically call me a liar when I said that we had already done it. I’m sure Tom Gibson was glad when we arrived back at the plant and he was able to get out of the company car and into the silence of his own car for his drive back to Stillwater. Toby on the other hand carpooled with me, so he had to hear me rant and rave to Scott Hubbard all the way back to Stillwater that day.
Needless to say, we had another Print Revision Task Force meeting a few weeks later. Tom, Toby and I drove back to Oklahoma City. I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen.
The meeting began with the engineer in charge of the task force saying, “The first thing we are going to address is Kevin Breazile’s statement about sending files to the power plant. We have invited someone from IT to answer this question.” Then he turned to a guy sitting at the table. I don’t remember his name either, only that I had worked with him also through the years (oh yes I do. It was Mike Russell).
The engineer turned to the IT guy and said (using a tone that indicated that I belonged in a mental institution or maybe kindergarten), “Kevin seems to think that he can somehow get on his computer at the power plant and access a folder on a server here at Corporate Headquarters and download a file.” He stopped and with a big smirk on his face looked at the IT guy. Mike just sat there for a moment looking at him.
The engineer just stood there with an evil grin on his face waiting… Mike said, “So? What do you want to know?” The engineer said, “Well. Is that even possible?” Mike replied, “Of course! It’s actually easier for him to do that than it is for someone on the 3rd floor of this building to access the mainframe on the fourth floor.”
The engineer’s jaw dropped and he eked out a meager little “what?” Mike asked if that was all. When he was assured that this was the only question, he stood up and walked out the door. As he was leaving he turned a side glance toward me and winked at me. I was grinning ear-to-ear. I could tell, I wasn’t the only one that had a beef with this particular engineer.
So, you would have thought that it would have been a quieter ride back to the plant that day, but leave it to me…. I kept on going on about how that guy was so sure of himself that he didn’t even bother to ask the IT guy before the meeting began just to check his own erroneous facts. Geez! That was the most surprising part of the day. If he had only asked him before the meeting, he wouldn’t have made a fool out of himself with his snide comments just before he was put in his place.
So, Toby and I proved that doing the impossible isn’t all that impossible when what someone thinks is impossible really isn’t so. This stemmed from a lesson my dad taught me growing up when he told me, “Don’t ever say “can’t”. There is always a way.”
Comments from the original post:
-
Ah, the good old days when the best computer was the new 386. Things weren’t impossible but you had to think about it and plan quite a bit. Great stories!
-
Always enjoy reading and thinking about a world I wouldn’t even know about if it weren’t for your unique blog!
Ruth in Pittsburgh
-
Great story! I heard a pastor once say “What you “know” can keep you from learning the truth.” I saw this principle in operation many times in my career.
I had been at the WFEC Hugo Power Plant for a short time when the Plant Manager directed me (Maint. Supt.) to have the Mechanics “block the condenser” for a “hydro”. (Prior to a condenser hydro, several mechanics would work for about 4 hours dragging heavy timbers into the 3 foot tall space between the bottom of the hotwell and the concrete floor. They would space these timbers evenly across the entire condenser floor and use wedges to remove all clearance at each support beam. All this work was “required” to support the additional water weight (several feet higher than normal operating level)). I knew this “blocking” was never done at any OG&E plant but I didn’t want to make the Plant Manager look like an idiot. So I did what he asked. We “blocked” the condenser for a hydro. Then I got with just the Plant Engineer and asked him to get the Mechanical Prints for the condenser. I asked him if it was necessary to block the condenser for hydro. He said they had always done it because of the extra weight of the water. When we looked at the condenser drawings there was a note indicating it was designed to support a full hydro water level. He showed the print to the Plant Manager (one on one). Nobody was made to look foolish and for the next condenser hydro we didn’t “block” it – and the Mechanics were really happy!
-
We used to have a saying that I picked up from Bob Kennedy. “We’ve been doing it this way for 35 years. “
-
-
Well over the years there were a lot of engineers that way. Not all. We have had outstanding ones as well and the stinkers too. Just hate the politics of people so evil and cruel. Man is beyond ugly so often.
Elvin Power Plant Tool Room Adventures With Bud
Originally posted September 27, 2014, added a picture of Bud
When I say that Bud Schoonover is known as “Elvin”, I don’t mean to imply that he was Elvin in nature. What I mean to say is that he did not necessarily possess the qualities of an elf. Well, except for his smile, which is somewhat Elvish-like. Bud’s smile was usually more like a look of warning for those who didn’t know him well. I have always said that he reminded me of a six foot, 5 inch tall, white Aunt Esther from Sanford and Son, and about 75 to 100 pounds heavier.
Aunt Esther from Sanford and Son smiling like Bud Schoonover
What I mean by saying that Bud is known as “Elvin” is that is what his Mother called him when he was born. Though somewhere along the line he became known as Bud; Not from his middle name… because I think that was Floyd. Bud was my good friend and carpooling buddy (See the post “Carpooling with Bud Schoonover“). Maybe that was why people called him Bud. Because he was everyone’s “buddy”.
I don’t mean to make it sound like Bud has passed away, because as far as I know, he is still an active Republican voter living on South Palm Street in Ponca City. I also don’t want you to think that I was only friends with Bud Schoonover because he was a good carpooling buddy. No. Bud had all sorts of talents. He gave great weather reports each morning when we would gather to take our trek to the Power Plant some 20 miles away, as I mentioned in the other post about Bud.
I don’t think that there was anyone at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma that didn’t like Bud. There was just something naturally likable about him. Bud worked in the tool room and the warehouse ever since the day I first arrived at the plant in 1979. — Well, the warehouse wasn’t much of a warehouse back then. It just had stuffed piled up against the walls. No shelves, No storage racks. No drawers and bins full of parts.
Bud is four years and 26 days younger than my own father, and four years and 18 days younger than Elvis Presley.
The King
He will be 76 years old this January. Needless to say, Bud retired from the Power Plant in 1994 after having just turned 55. At his going away party, some guys at the plant fixed up a Wal-Mart shopping cart with a bunch of accessories attached to it so that he would be properly equipped when he went to work at Wal-Mart as a Greeter. — For those of you who don’t know…. Wal-Mart used to hire elderly people to greet people when you walked into the store. They might pull a cart out of the stack of carts and give it to you if you looked like you were in need of a cart.
Wal-Mart Shopping Cart
Bud was extra careful when working in the warehouse. He wanted to make sure that he was getting everything right, so he would check, and double check, and then check again…. just to make sure everything matched. One good example of this was when he was tasked with ordering a half set of coal burner nozzles and tips for the boiler.
There were 24 of these Coal burner nozzle and tips in the boiler. the nozzles costing about $13,000 and the tips ran somewhere around $4,000 each.
Coal Burner Nozzle
There was another assembly that attached to the end with the hole on the side that allowed the nozzle to change the pitch it was called the Tip.
So, Bud wanted to make sure the created the order correctly. So, when Bud placed the order with the supplier, he not only included the Supplier’s part number, but he also included the manufacturer’s part number. Just to make sure they knew they were sending the correct part, he even sent them the old manufacturing part number that they used a few years before they changed their part numbering system. — So, when he sent the order, it had all three part number for the 12 nozzles. He did the same thing with the smaller piece for the end of the nozzle.
To Bud’s surprise, one bright sunny morning in December, 1989 (well, it may not have been that sunny that day), guess what showed up at the loading dock? 12 nozzles with the suppliers part number, 12 nozzles with the manufacturer’s part number, and 12 more nozzles with the manufacturer’s old part number! Yeah…. Didn’t count on that one.
I think I know how Bud must have felt when that happened. Probably the same way I felt the morning I was summoned to the front office to pick up my mail, only to find a stack of a couple hundred envelopes from all over the company after printing something out on all the printers in the company (See “Power Plant Customer Service Team Gone Wild“). I think Bud took these things in more in stride than most people might. His reaction to finding out that the order he had created for $156,000 had suddenly turned into $468,000 was probably something like…. “Oh Geez. I sure don’t want to do that again!”
During the “We’ve Got the Power” program (see the post “Power Plant We’ve Got the Power“), the HR and Warehouse director, Linda Dallas asked us if we would put in a proposal to scrap the extra nozzles since these nozzles were very big. She didn’t think it would look good if her own team created the proposal since she was already responsible for the warehouse. We had two people from the warehouse on our We’ve Got the Power team, Dick Dale and Darlene Mitchell, so she thought we could do something out the conundrum. Two nozzles fit on a pallet, taking up space all over the warehouse.
The nozzles with the Tips attached
We could save money just by scrapping it because we wouldn’t have to pay taxes on the parts. It cost too much to return them to the supplier because the restocking fee was too high. — And E-Bay didn’t exist back then.
Instead of accepting our proposal, it was decided that instead of just changing out half of the nozzles during the next outage, they would just replace all of the nozzles. This reduced the number of nozzles left in the warehouse to a more manageable number. So, Bud’s Faux Pas, may have just helped increase the efficiency of the boiler significantly with the replacement of the nozzles which may have translated into savings of unknown millions of dollars, of which Bud received no credit… But that’s okay. Bud wasn’t one to seek credit for his ingenious accidental idea of triple ordering boiler Nozzles.
One of the favorite stories I would tell my children as they were growing up when they would ask me to tell them a Bud Schoonover story was the story about the last tool in the tool room. — This is Bud’s own special way of handling the restocking of the tool room. It goes like this…. For instance….
If you went to the tool room to ask for a yellow flashlight and it happened to be the last yellow flashlight in the tool room, and it was Bud Schoonover’s week to man the tool room, then you would hear something like this:
Yellow Flashlight similar to the one I carried
“I can’t give you a yellow flashlight, because I only have one left.” — You may want to respond with something like, “But Bud, if there’s one left, then why can’t I have it?” Bud’s reply would be, “Because if I give you the last one, then I’d have to order more.”
At this point, you may want to start over asking if you can have a yellow flashlight, with the hope that Bud may have forgotten that he was down to his last yellow flashlight…. You might even phrase it a little differently… You might say something like, “Well… Can I just borrow a yellow flashlight for a few hours? At least for as long as I have to do some work in the dark?” — I have seen this approach almost work. He would stop and think about it like Andy Griffith in “No Time For Sergeants” trying to answer questions being asked by the Psychiatrist:
Andy Griffith talking to the Psychiatrist in No Time for Sergeants
Then the next question you may ask (I know, since I asked it more than once) is: “So, Bud, how about ordering some more yellow flashlights.” Bud would reply with something like, “No. I don’t really want to order anything this week.”, as he nods in the direction of the computer monitor sitting on the desk just to his left… — Oh…. computer shy…. that’s why. Not comfortable ordering stuff on the computer (especially after ordering all those coal burner nozzles).
I can understand that. He is the same age as my own father, and my dad at that time would literally call me at least one time every single day to ask me a computer question. Like…. “How do I move a paragraph from one part of a document to another part?” — “Um… Yeah Dad, (for the hundredth time), you do it like this….”
There’s something about every one of my friends and family that were born between December 30, 1934 and January 27th 1939. They all had the same problem with computers. Must be that particular generation born within thatfour year period. I’m sure Elvis, who was born right in the middle of that time frame (on January 8, 1935), would have had the same trouble with the PC if he had lived long enough. — I know… I know… I just saw him the other day myself.
Only he had gained some weight
Anyway, there was one sure fire way to get that tool that I needed from the tool room while Bud Schoonover was manning the front gate, and that was to volunteer to go to the warehouse and pick up a box of the parts yourself and carry them back and hand them to Bud, while taking one out for yourself. — And the time I needed a flashlight, I did just that.
One time I went to the tool room in the middle of the winter when we had water pipes that were frozen and I needed a propane torch to heat the pipe to melt the ice. Bud told me that he couldn’t give me a propane torch because he only had one left. I looked up two racks over from the gate and could see at least two boxes of propane bottles on the top shelf.
I told Bud that I wouldn’t be taking his last bottle of propane, because there was at least two bottles right up there on that shelf. Bud insisted that he only had one bottle of propane left and he couldn’t give it to me. So, while smiling at Bud and explaining that I could see the two bottles right up there on the top of the shelf,… with one hand on his shoulder (which was about a whole foot taller than my head), and the other hand unlocking the gate, I told him I would show him.
So, I stepped into the tool room, and said, “It’s ok Bud, I won’t take your last bottle of Propane, but I do have to take this bottle here, because we have a water pipe that is frozen solid, and I need to use the propane torch to warm it up. Here… I”ll just take this one, and you can keep this other one here….”
Power Plant Propane Torch
As I walked back out the tool room smiling all the time at Bud, who was just staring at me with a worried look finally lowered his shoulders which had been creeping up closer to his ears as I had sidestepped him to get to the propane bottle.
The funny thing was that by the end of the week, there would be a whole list of parts and tools that only had one left in the tool room. Bud would consider it a successful week if he could make it through the week without having to get on the computer and order some more parts. He knew that next Monday, when Dick Dale
My Dear Friend Richard Dale
or Darlene Mitchell
Darlene Mitchell another dear friend
arrived, they would restock the shelves, and he would be in the warehouse filling the orders and bringing them over on a two wheeler to the tool room. And the world would be right once again.
Since originally posting this post, Bud Schoonover had joined Dick Dale in the warehouse of Paradise. See the post: “Dynamic Power Plant Trio – And Then There Was One“. Here is the latest picture of Bud:
Bud Schoonover
Comments from the Original post:
-
Great story on Bud. He was a might tight. Thanks for the photos of Dick and Darlene. Great memories.
-
That a funny story. Bud must have been fun to work with.
When we have an bad experience, we often learn the wrong lesson. Lots lots people learn to distrust computers, but they are just machines. Like any machine, we have to learn to use a computer properly.
Apparently, Bud just filled out a form incorrectly. Did it really make any difference whether the form was on a computer? Would he have filled in a paper form correctly?
What I find weird is that someone could place $468,000 order, and no one on the other end would look at the order carefully enough to wonder why Bud had used three different numbers to order the same part. Was it advantageous to the folks receiving the order to overlook the obvious? Why didn’t they call and confirm the order?
Elvin Power Plant Tool Room Adventures With Bud
Originally posted September 27, 2014, added a picture of Bud
When I say that Bud Schoonover is known as “Elvin”, I don’t mean to imply that he was Elvin in nature. What I mean to say is that he did not necessarily possess the qualities of an elf. Well, except for his smile, which is somewhat Elvish-like. Bud’s smile was usually more like a look of warning for those who didn’t know him well. I have always said that he reminded me of a six foot, 5 inch tall, white Aunt Esther from Sanford and Son, and about 75 to 100 pounds heavier.
Aunt Esther from Sanford and Son smiling like Bud Schoonover
What I mean by saying that Bud is known as “Elvin” is that is what his Mother called him when he was born. Though somewhere along the line he became known as Bud; Not from his middle name… because I think that was Floyd. Bud was my good friend and carpooling buddy (See the post “Carpooling with Bud Schoonover“). Maybe that was why people called him Bud. Because he was everyone’s “buddy”.
I don’t mean to make it sound like Bud has passed away, because as far as I know, he is still an active Republican voter living on South Palm Street in Ponca City. I also don’t want you to think that I was only friends with Bud Schoonover because he was a good carpooling buddy. No. Bud had all sorts of talents. He gave great weather reports each morning when we would gather to take our trek to the Power Plant some 20 miles away, as I mentioned in the other post about Bud.
I don’t think that there was anyone at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma that didn’t like Bud. There was just something naturally likable about him. Bud worked in the tool room and the warehouse ever since the day I first arrived at the plant in 1979. — Well, the warehouse wasn’t much of a warehouse back then. It just had stuffed piled up against the walls. No shelves, No storage racks. No drawers and bins full of parts.
Bud is four years and 26 days younger than my own father, and four years and 18 days younger than Elvis Presley.
The King
He will be 76 years old this January. Needless to say, Bud retired from the Power Plant in 1994 after having just turned 55. At his going away party, some guys at the plant fixed up a Wal-Mart shopping cart with a bunch of accessories attached to it so that he would be properly equipped when he went to work at Wal-Mart as a Greeter. — For those of you who don’t know…. Wal-Mart used to hire elderly people to greet people when you walked into the store. They might pull a cart out of the stack of carts and give it to you if you looked like you were in need of a cart.
Wal-Mart Shopping Cart
Bud was extra careful when working in the warehouse. He wanted to make sure that he was getting everything right, so he would check, and double check, and then check again…. just to make sure everything matched. One good example of this was when he was tasked with ordering a half set of coal burner nozzles and tips for the boiler.
There were 24 of these Coal burner nozzle and tips in the boiler. the nozzles costing about $13,000 and the tips ran somewhere around $4,000 each.
Coal Burner Nozzle
There was another assembly that attached to the end with the hole on the side that allowed the nozzle to change the pitch it was called the Tip.
So, Bud wanted to make sure the created the order correctly. So, when Bud placed the order with the supplier, he not only included the Supplier’s part number, but he also included the manufacturer’s part number. Just to make sure they knew they were sending the correct part, he even sent them the old manufacturing part number that they used a few years before they changed their part numbering system. — So, when he sent the order, it had all three part number for the 12 nozzles. He did the same thing with the smaller piece for the end of the nozzle.
To Bud’s surprise, one bright sunny morning in December, 1989 (well, it may not have been that sunny that day), guess what showed up at the loading dock? 12 nozzles with the suppliers part number, 12 nozzles with the manufacturer’s part number, and 12 more nozzles with the manufacturer’s old part number! Yeah…. Didn’t count on that one.
I think I know how Bud must have felt when that happened. Probably the same way I felt the morning I was summoned to the front office to pick up my mail, only to find a stack of a couple hundred envelopes from all over the company after printing something out on all the printers in the company (See “Power Plant Customer Service Team Gone Wild“). I think Bud took these things in more in stride than most people might. His reaction to finding out that the order he had created for $156,000 had suddenly turned into $468,000 was probably something like…. “Oh Geez. I sure don’t want to do that again!”
During the “We’ve Got the Power” program (see the post “Power Plant We’ve Got the Power“), the HR and Warehouse director, Linda Dallas asked us if we would put in a proposal to scrap the extra nozzles since these nozzles were very big. She didn’t think it would look good if her own team created the proposal since she was already responsible for the warehouse. We had two people from the warehouse on our We’ve Got the Power team, Dick Dale and Darlene Mitchell, so she thought we could do something out the conundrum. Two nozzles fit on a pallet, taking up space all over the warehouse.
The nozzles with the Tips attached
We could save money just by scrapping it because we wouldn’t have to pay taxes on the parts. It cost too much to return them to the supplier because the restocking fee was too high. — And E-Bay didn’t exist back then.
Instead of accepting our proposal, it was decided that instead of just changing out half of the nozzles during the next outage, they would just replace all of the nozzles. This reduced the number of nozzles left in the warehouse to a more manageable number. So, Bud’s Faux Pas, may have just helped increase the efficiency of the boiler significantly with the replacement of the nozzles which may have translated into savings of unknown millions of dollars, of which Bud received no credit… But that’s okay. Bud wasn’t one to seek credit for his ingenious accidental idea of triple ordering boiler Nozzles.
One of the favorite stories I would tell my children as they were growing up when they would ask me to tell them a Bud Schoonover story was the story about the last tool in the tool room. — This is Bud’s own special way of handling the restocking of the tool room. It goes like this…. For instance….
If you went to the tool room to ask for a yellow flashlight and it happened to be the last yellow flashlight in the tool room, and it was Bud Schoonover’s week to man the tool room, then you would hear something like this:
Yellow Flashlight similar to the one I carried
“I can’t give you a yellow flashlight, because I only have one left.” — You may want to respond with something like, “But Bud, if there’s one left, then why can’t I have it?” Bud’s reply would be, “Because if I give you the last one, then I’d have to order more.”
At this point, you may want to start over asking if you can have a yellow flashlight, with the hope that Bud may have forgotten that he was down to his last yellow flashlight…. You might even phrase it a little differently… You might say something like, “Well… Can I just borrow a yellow flashlight for a few hours? At least for as long as I have to do some work in the dark?” — I have seen this approach almost work. He would stop and think about it like Andy Griffith in “No Time For Sergeants” trying to answer questions being asked by the Psychiatrist:
Andy Griffith talking to the Psychiatrist in No Time for Sergeants
Then the next question you may ask (I know, since I asked it more than once) is: “So, Bud, how about ordering some more yellow flashlights.” Bud would reply with something like, “No. I don’t really want to order anything this week.”, as he nods in the direction of the computer monitor sitting on the desk just to his left… — Oh…. computer shy…. that’s why. Not comfortable ordering stuff on the computer (especially after ordering all those coal burner nozzles).
I can understand that. He is the same age as my own father, and my dad at that time would literally call me at least one time every single day to ask me a computer question. Like…. “How do I move a paragraph from one part of a document to another part?” — “Um… Yeah Dad, (for the hundredth time), you do it like this….”
There’s something about every one of my friends and family that were born between December 30, 1934 and January 27th 1939. They all had the same problem with computers. Must be that particular generation born within thatfour year period. I’m sure Elvis, who was born right in the middle of that time frame (on January 8, 1935), would have had the same trouble with the PC if he had lived long enough. — I know… I know… I just saw him the other day myself.
Only he had gained some weight
Anyway, there was one sure fire way to get that tool that I needed from the tool room while Bud Schoonover was manning the front gate, and that was to volunteer to go to the warehouse and pick up a box of the parts yourself and carry them back and hand them to Bud, while taking one out for yourself. — And the time I needed a flashlight, I did just that.
One time I went to the tool room in the middle of the winter when we had water pipes that were frozen and I needed a propane torch to heat the pipe to melt the ice. Bud told me that he couldn’t give me a propane torch because he only had one left. I looked up two racks over from the gate and could see at least two boxes of propane bottles on the top shelf.
I told Bud that I wouldn’t be taking his last bottle of propane, because there was at least two bottles right up there on that shelf. Bud insisted that he only had one bottle of propane left and he couldn’t give it to me. So, while smiling at Bud and explaining that I could see the two bottles right up there on the top of the shelf,… with one hand on his shoulder (which was about a whole foot taller than my head), and the other hand unlocking the gate, I told him I would show him.
So, I stepped into the tool room, and said, “It’s ok Bud, I won’t take your last bottle of Propane, but I do have to take this bottle here, because we have a water pipe that is frozen solid, and I need to use the propane torch to warm it up. Here… I”ll just take this one, and you can keep this other one here….”
Power Plant Propane Torch
As I walked back out the tool room smiling all the time at Bud, who was just staring at me with a worried look finally lowered his shoulders which had been creeping up closer to his ears as I had sidestepped him to get to the propane bottle.
The funny thing was that by the end of the week, there would be a whole list of parts and tools that only had one left in the tool room. Bud would consider it a successful week if he could make it through the week without having to get on the computer and order some more parts. He knew that next Monday, when Dick Dale
My Dear Friend Richard Dale
or Darlene Mitchell
Darlene Mitchell another dear friend
arrived, they would restock the shelves, and he would be in the warehouse filling the orders and bringing them over on a two wheeler to the tool room. And the world would be right once again.
Since originally posting this post, Bud Schoonover had joined Dick Dale in the warehouse of Paradise. See the post: “Dynamic Power Plant Trio – And Then There Was One“. Here is the latest picture of Bud:
Bud Schoonover
Comments from the Original post:
-
Great story on Bud. He was a might tight. Thanks for the photos of Dick and Darlene. Great memories.
-
That a funny story. Bud must have been fun to work with.
When we have an bad experience, we often learn the wrong lesson. Lots lots people learn to distrust computers, but they are just machines. Like any machine, we have to learn to use a computer properly.
Apparently, Bud just filled out a form incorrectly. Did it really make any difference whether the form was on a computer? Would he have filled in a paper form correctly?
What I find weird is that someone could place $468,000 order, and no one on the other end would look at the order carefully enough to wonder why Bud had used three different numbers to order the same part. Was it advantageous to the folks receiving the order to overlook the obvious? Why didn’t they call and confirm the order?
Toby O’Brien and Doing the Impossible
Originally posted May 23, 2014:
There were three times when I was an electrician at a coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma when, according to others, I had done something that they labelled “impossible”. One of those times began when a Plant Engineer Toby O’Brien came to me and asked me if I could find a way to connect to the Prime Computer down at Corporate Headquarters so that he could edit some Engineering drawings he had worked on when he was working at Oklahoma City. That in itself wasn’t what was impossible. That came later, but it pertained to a similar subject.
Somewhere in Corporate Headquarters stashed away in a room somewhere was a Prime Computer just waiting for Toby.
Prime Computer
Toby knew that I had an account on the Honeywell Mainframe computer downtown, since I was always getting myself in trouble playing around on it. Since I could connect to that, he wondered if it would be possible to connect to the Prime Computer where his Medusa CAD drawings were kept. He gave me some information about how he used to log into it when he was working downtown…. before he was banished to the Power Plant Palace 70 miles north out in the middle of the country.
Toby had a CAD tablet and a disk to install the driver on a computer. This would allow him to work on his CAD drawings. For those of you who don’t remember, or have never seen such a thing. It is like a very fancy mouse…. or should I say, Mouse Pad. Since you used a stylus to draw and point and click on a large pad called a tablet. Not anything like the little tablets we have today.
CAD Drawing Tablet
At the time, the only connection we had to the Honeywell Mainframe from the power plant was through a router called a Memotec. The bandwidth was a whopping 28,000 baud. A Baud is like bytes per second, only it is measured over an audio line as an audio signal. Like the sound that a Fax machine makes when it first connects. Toby had talked to some guys down at IT and they had a copy of the same Honeywell emulator called “GLink” we were using at the plant, only it would connect at a super whopping 56,000 baud. Twice as fast! They wanted someone to “Beta Test” it. They knew I liked doing that sort of stuff, so they were willing to give us a copy to try out.
This is GLink today. Back then it was for Windows 3.1
Toby and I decided that the best place to try out our “Beta Testing” was in the Chemistry Lab. The main reason was that it had one of the newer 386 desktop computers and it was in a room right next to the data closet where the Memotec was talking to the mainframe downtown. So, if I had to run in there real quick and spit in the back and “whomp it a good ‘un”, I wouldn’t have to go far. That was a trick I learned from watching “No Time for Sergeants” with Andy Griffith. He is the lesson:
If you have trouble viewing the video from the picture above, this this link: “No Time For Sergeants Radio Operator“.
To make the rest of this part of the story a little shorter, I’ll just summarize it to say that by logging into the Honeywell Mainframe using my account, I was then able to connect to the Prime Computer using Toby’s account and he was able to edit his CAD drawings from the Chemistry Lab at the Power Plant 70 miles away from Corporate Headquarters. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but in those days, this was “new technology” for us Power Plant guys anyway.
Before I continue with the “impossible” task, I need to explain a little about how electricians kept the Electrical Blueprints up-to-date at a Power Plant. This was a task that I was given when Tom Gibson was the Electrical Supervisor. I was supposed to take all the blueprints that had been revised because of some change that had happened at the plant, and make sure they were properly updated. Then I had to go through a process to make sure they were permanently updated, not only on the three copies that we had at our plant, but also with the “System of Record” set of blueprints at Corporate Headquarters.
So, let me tell you the process, and I’m sure you will be able to relate this task to something you encounter in your job today. Even if it is preparing the Salads at a Sirloin Stockade before opening time.
The first step happens when someone in the electric shop has to rewire some piece of equipment or something because the equipment was moved, removed, upgraded to something else, or someone thought it would work better if we did it a different way. Then whoever made the change to the electric wiring would go to the prints that were kept in the electric shop and update them so that the new wiring job was reflected in the Blueprints.
This is important because if someone a week later had to go work on this equipment, they would need to be able to see how the equipment is now wired. If they were working off of an old print, then they might blow something up, or injure or even kill someone…. most likely themselves, if it ever came down to it.
The other two copies of prints also needed to be updated. One was in the Instrument and Controls shop, and the most important copy was in the “Print Room” right next to Tom Gibson’s office.
The second step was to send off a request to Corporate Headquarters in Oklahoma City for a copy of all the blueprints that were changed so that the change could be made on the copy and sent back to Oklahoma City.
The third step is when the copy of the blueprints arrived at the plant a few weeks later, they were updated with the changes and sent back to Oklahoma City.
The fourth step is when the blueprints are reviewed by an engineer downtown and the changes are made permanently by a drafter downtown.
Step five: Then three copies of the permanently changed prints were sent back to plant where they replaced the three marked up copies.
This process generally took two to three months given that the drafter downtown had to take the Original drawing, scan it in the computer, make changes to it, and then save it, and send it to the printer to be printed.
Toby and I had “petitioned” our plant management to buy us a copy of AutoCAD so that we could make our own revisions right at the plant, and send the changes directly to Oklahoma City, all complete and ready to go. The only problem with this was that AutoCAD software did not come cheap. It was several thousand dollars for just one copy.
Even though this was before the World Wide Web, I knew where I could get a pirated copy of AutoCAD, but since neither Toby or I considered ourselves criminals, we never really considered that a viable alternative. Tom Gibson was pitching for us to have a copy, but it was figured that if we had a copy, the company would have to buy a copy for all six main power plants, and they weren’t willing to dish out that much money.
Somewhere along the line, after Tom Gibson had kept pushing for the importance of having up-to-date Plant Electric Blueprints in a timely fashion, a task force was formed to address a faster way to make print revisions. Because Toby and I (and Terry Blevins) had been pushing this at our plant, Tom asked Toby and I to be on the Task Force with him.
So, one morning after arriving at the plant, we climbed into a company car and made the drive to Oklahoma City to the Corporate Headquarters. When we arrived, we sat in a big conference room with members from the different power plants, and a number of engineers from downtown. I was pretty excited that something was finally going to be done.
I forget the name of the engineer that was the leader of the task force, I only remember that I had worked with him once or twice through the years on some small projects. When the meeting began, I expected that we would have some kind of brainstorming activity. I was all ready for it, since I had all sorts of ideas about how we could just edit the prints directly from the plant on the Prime Computer where the prints were stored, just like Toby had done.
When the meeting began there was no brainstorming session. There wasn’t even a “What do you guys think about how this can be done?” No. The engineer instead went on to explain his solution to the problem. I was a little disappointed. Mainly because I was all fired up about being asked to be on a task force in Oklahoma City to work on…. well…. anything…. to tell you the truth. And here we were listening to a conclusion. — Sound familiar? I knew it would.
This engineer had it all figured out. Here was his solution:
Step 1: A request was sent by company mail to downtown (same at the old second step) for some blueprints that need to be updated.
Step 2: The prints are downloaded onto a floppy disk (3.5 inch High Density – which meant, 1.44 Megabyte disks).
Step 3: The disks were mailed through company mail back to the Power Plant.
Step 4: The Power Plant receives the disks and loads them onto their computer at the plant and they edit the blueprint using a pared down CAD program called “RedLine”.
Step 5: The print revision is saved to the disk and the disk is mailed back to Corporate Headquarters using the Company Mail.
Step 6: The print is reviewed by the engineers for accuracy and is loaded into the computer as the system of record.
Ok…. this sounded just like the previous method only we were using a “RedLine” program to edit the changes instead of using Red, Green and Gray pencils.
It was evident that the engineer in charge of the meeting was expecting us to all accept this solution and that the task force no longer had to meet anymore, and we could all go home and not ever return to consider this problem again. — Well, this was when I said the “Impossible”.
I raised my hand as if I was in a classroom. The guy knowing me to be a regular troublemaker asked me what I wanted. I said, “Why mail the files? Why not just put them in a folder and have the person at the plant go there and pick them up?” — In today’s world the idea of a drop-box is about as easy to understand as “Google it”. Back then… I guess not. Especially for some engineers who had already decided on a solution.
So, the engineer responded, “Because that can’t be done.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “It’s impossible. Someone in a power plant can’t just go into a computer at Corporate Headquarters and access a file.”
Well, that did it….. I told him that we were able to edit CAD drawings on the Prime computer from the power plant. He said, “No you didn’t. That’s impossible!” I looked over at Toby who was sitting next to me with a big grin on his face. So I said, “Who is the IT guy in the room? He can tell you that you can get a file from the mainframe from the power plant.”
The engineer replied that he didn’t invite any IT people, because there wasn’t any reason. Everyone knows that you can’t copy files on a Corporate computer from a power plant. So, I said, “Invite someone from the IT department to the next meeting. I’m sure he will agree with me that this can be done. — Shortly after that, the meeting was adjourned.
You should have heard me rant and rave all the way back to the power plant that afternoon. How could he possibly be so naive to make definite statements about something and basically call me a liar when I said that we had already done it. I’m sure Tom Gibson was glad when we arrived back at the plant and he was able to get out of the company car and into the silence of his own car for his drive back to Stillwater. Toby on the other hand carpooled with me, so he had to hear me rant and rave to Scott Hubbard all the way back to Stillwater that day.
Needless to say, we had another Print Revision Task Force meeting a few weeks later. Tom, Toby and I drove back to Oklahoma City. I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen.
The meeting began with the engineer in charge of the task force saying, “The first thing we are going to address is Kevin Breazile’s statement about sending files to the power plant. We have invited someone from IT to answer this question.” Then he turned to a guy sitting at the table. I don’t remember his name either, only that I had worked with him also through the years.
The engineer turned to the IT guy and said, “Kevin seems to think that he can somehow get on his computer at the power plant and access a folder on a server here at Corporate Headquarters and download a file.” He stopped and looked at the IT guy (Ed, I think is his name). Ed just sat there for a moment looking at him.
The engineer just stood there with an evil grin on his face waiting… Ed said, “So? What do you want to know?” The engineer said, “Well. Is that even possible?” Ed replied, “Of course! It’s actually easier for him to do that than it is for someone on the 3rd floor of this building to access the mainframe on the fourth floor.”
The engineer’s jaw dropped and he eked out a meager little “what?” Ed asked if that was all. When he was assured that this was the only question, he stood up and walked out the door. As he was leaving he turned a side glance toward me and winked at me. I was grinning ear-to-ear. I could tell, I wasn’t the only one that had a beef with this particular engineer.
So, you would have thought that it would have been a quieter ride back to the plant that day, but leave it to me…. I kept on going on about how that guy was so sure of himself that he didn’t even bother to ask the IT guy before the meeting began just to check his own erroneous facts. Geez! That was the most surprising part of the day. If he had only asked him before the meeting, he wouldn’t have made a fool out of himself with his snide comments just before he was put in his place.
So, Toby and I proved that doing the impossible isn’t all that impossible when what someone thinks is impossible really isn’t so. This stemmed from a lesson my dad taught me growing up when he told me, “Don’t every say “can’t”. There is always a way.”
Comments from the original post:
-
Ah, the good old days when the best computer was the new 386. Things weren’t impossible but you had to think about it and plan quite a bit. Great stories!
-
ALways enjoy reading and thinking about a world I wouldn’t even know about if it weren’t for your unique blog!
Ruth in Pittsburgh
-
Great story! I heard a pastor once say “What you “know” can keep you from learning the truth.” I saw this principle in operation many times in my career.
I had been at the WFEC Hugo Power Plant for a short time when the Plant Manager directed me (Maint. Supt.) to have the Mechanics “block the condenser” for a “hydro”. (Prior to a condenser hydro, several mechanics would work for about 4 hours dragging heavy timbers into the 3 foot tall space between the bottom of the hotwell and the concrete floor. They would space these timbers evenly across the entire condenser floor and use wedges to remove all clearance at each support beam. All this work was “required” to support the additional water weight (several feet higher than normal operating level)). I knew this “blocking” was never done at any OG&E plant but I didn’t want to make the Plant Manager look like an idiot. So I did what he asked. We “blocked” the condenser for a hydro. Then I got with just the Plant Engineer and asked him to get the Mechanical Prints for the condenser. I asked him if it was necessary to block the condenser for hydro. He said they had always done it because of the extra weight of the water. When we looked at the condenser drawings there was a note indicating it was designed to support a full hydro water level. He showed the print to the Plant Manager (one on one). Nobody was made to look foolish and for the next condenser hydro we didn’t “block” it – and the Mechanics were really happy!
-
We used to have a saying that I picked up from Bob Kennedy. “We’ve been doing it this way for 35 years. “
-
-
Well over the years there were a lot of engineers that way. Not all. We have had outstanding ones as well and the stinkers too. Just hate the politics of people so evil and cruel. Man is beyond ugly so often.
Something Is In The Water at the Muskogee Power Plant
Originally posted: April 15, 2013:
“Something is in the water in Muskogee.” That is what I used to say. Something that makes people feel invulnerable. That was what I attributed to David Stewart’s belief that he could jump up in a falling elevator just before it crashed into the ground and he would be saved (see After Effects of Power Plant Drop Tests).
There was another story at the Muskogee Coal-fired Power Plant where this one mechanic believed that he could stick his finger in a running lawnmower and pull it out so fast that it wouldn’t cut his finger off. Of course, True Power Plant Men tried to reason with him to convince him that it was impossible…. Then there were others who said… “Ok. Prove it.”
Think about it. A lawnmower spins at the same rate that a Turbine Generator spins when it makes electricity. 3,600 time a minute. Or 60 times each second. Since the blade in a lawnmower extends in both directions, a blade would fly by your finger 120 times each second. Twice as fast as the electric current in your house cycles positive and negative.
Typical Power Plant Lawnmower
This means that the person will have to stick their finger in the path of the lawnmower blade and pull it out within 8/1000th of a second…. IF they were able to time it so that they put their finger in the path at the precise moment that the blade passed by. Meaning that on average, the person only has 4/1000th of a second (or 0.004 seconds) to perform this feat (on average… could be a little more, could be less).
Unfortunately for this person, he was not convinced by the logicians that it was impossible, and therefore proceeded to prove his case. If you walked over and met this person in the maintenance shop at Muskogee, you would find that he was missing not only one finger, but two. Why? Because after failing the first time and having his finger chopped off, he was still so stubborn to think that he could have been wrong, so later he tried it again. Hence the reason why two of his fingers were missing.
Upon hearing this story, I came to the conclusion that there must be something in the water at Muskogee. I drank soft drinks as much as possible while I was there on overhaul during the fall of 1984.
As I mentioned in the post Power Plant Rags to Riches, in 1984 I was on overhaul at Muskogee with Ben Davis. An overhaul is when a unit is taken offline for a number of weeks so that maintenance can be performed on equipment that is only possible when the unit is offline. During this particular overhaul, Unit 6 at Muskogee was offline.
Ben and I were working out of the Unit 6 Electric shop. Ben was staying with his friend Don Burnett, a machinist that used to work at our plant when I was a summer help. Before Don worked there, he worked in a Zinc Smelting plant by Tonkawa, Oklahoma. Not only was Don an expert machinist, he was also one of the kindest people you would run across. Especially at Muskogee.
I was staying in a “trailer down by the river” by the old plant. Units one, two and three. They were older gas-fired units. I think at the time, only Unit 3 was still operational. The first 2 weeks of the overhaul, I stayed in a rectory with the Catholic priests in town. Then David Stewart offered to let me stay in his trailer down by the river for only $50 a week.
After the first couple of weeks it was decided that the 4 week overhaul had turned into a 9 week overhaul because of some complications that they found when inspecting something on the turbine. So, I ended up staying another month.
When they found out that they were going to be down for an extra 5 weeks, they called in for reinforcements, and that is when I met my new “roomie”, Steven Trammell from the plant in Midwest City. He shared the trailer for the last 4 weeks of the overhaul. From that time on, Steven and I were good friends. To this day (and I know Steven reads this blog) we refer to each other as “roomie”, even though it has been 28 years since we bunked together in a trailer…..down by the river.
I have one main story that I would like to tell with this post that I am saving until the end. It was what happened to me the day I think I accidentally drank some of the water…. (sounds like Mexico doesn’t it?). Before I tell that story, I want to introduce you to a couple of other True Power Plant Men that lived next door to “roomie” and I in another trailer down by the river (this was the Arkansas River by the way…. Yeah… The Arkansas river that flowed from Kansas into Oklahoma… — go figure. The same river that we used at our plant to fill our lake. See the post Power Plant Men taking the Temperature Down By The River).
Joe Flannery was from Seminole Plant and I believe that Chet Turner was from Horseshoe Plant, though I could be mistaken about Chet. I know he was living in south Oklahoma City at the time, so he could have been working at Seminole as well. These were two electricians that were very great guys. Joe Flannery had a nickname. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I think it was “Bam Bam”.
Yeah. This Bam Bam. From the Flintstones
Joe was very strong, like Bam Bam. He also reminded me of Goober on the Andy Griffith Show, though Gary Lyons at our plant even resembled Goober more:
Goober from the Andy Griffith Show (played by George Lindsey)
Chet was older than Joe by quite a lot, but I could tell that my Roomie and Joe held him in high esteem… So much so, that I might just wait on the story I was going to tell you about the time that I drank the water in Muskogee to focus more on Chet Turner… otherwise known as Chester A Turner.
I first met Chet when my roomie asked me if I wanted to go out and eat with him and our two trailer neighbors. On the way to dinner, we had to stop by a used car lot to look at what was available because Chet loved looking at cars. He had gray hair and was 60 years old at the time.
During the next 5 weeks, we went out to eat almost every night during the week with Chet and Joe. We explored Muskogee as best we could. That means that we visited about every car lot in the town. We also ate at a really good BBQ place where you sat at a picnic table and ate the BBQ on a piece of wax paper.
One night we were invited by another electrician (I think his name was Kevin Davis) to meet him at a Wal-Mart (or some other similar store) parking lot where his son was trying to win a car by being the last person to keep his hand on the car. He had already been doing it for about 4 days, and was exhausted. It would have reminded me of the times I had spent adjusting the precipitator controls after a fouled start-up, only, I hadn’t done that yet.
I was usually hungry when we were on our way to dinner, and I was slightly annoyed by the many visits to car lots when my stomach was set on “growl” mode. I never said anything about it, because I could tell that Chet was having a lot of fun looking at cars.
If only I had known Chet’s story when I met him, I would have treated him with the respect that he deserved. If I had known his history, I would have paid for his meals. It was only much later that I learned the true nature of Chet, a humble small gray-haired man that seemed happy all the time, and just went with the flow.
You know… It is sometimes amazing to me that I can work next to someone for a long time only to find out that they are one of the nation’s greatest heroes. I never actually worked with Chet, but I did sit next to him while we ate our supper only to return to the trailers down by the river exhausted from the long work days.
Let me start by saying that Chet’s father was a carpenter. Like another friend of mine, and Jesus Christ himself, Chester had a father that made furniture by hand. During World War II, Chester’s mother helped assemble aircraft for the United States Air Force.
While Chet’s mother was working building planes for the Air Force, Chet had joined the Navy and learned to be an electrician. He went to work on a ship in the Pacific called the USS Salt Lake City. It was in need of repairs, so he was assigned to work on the repairs.
While working on the ship, it was called to service, and Chet went to war. After a couple of battles where the ship was damaged from Japanese shelling it went to Hawaii to be repaired. After that, it was sent to the battle at Iwo Jima. That’s right. The Iwo Jima that we all know about. Chet was actually there to see the flag being raised by the Marines on Mount Suribachi:
The Iwo Jima Monument
Chet fought valiantly in the battle at Iwo Jima and was able to recall stories of specific attacks against targets that would make your hair stand on end to listen to. After it was all said and done, Chet was awarded the Victory Medal,
The Victory Medal
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal,
and the Philippine Liberation Campaign Ribbon.
Philippine Liberation Ribbon
As well as others….
At the time that I knew Chet, I didn’t know any of this about him. Isn’t that the case so many times in our lives. Think twice about that Wal-Mart Greeter when you go to the store. When you see an elderly old man or woman struggling with her cart to put her groceries in her car…. You may be looking at a hero.
I was looking at Chet thinking, “boy. This guy sure enjoys looking at cars…. I’m hungry.” This past week I was thinking about writing tonight about an event that took place while Ben and I were on overhaul at Muskogee. I thought it would be a funny story that you would enjoy. So, I asked my roomie, “What was the name of the guy that was staying with Joe Flannery in the trailer? The one with the gray hair?”
He reminded me that his name was Chet Turner. Steven told me that Chet had died a while back (on January 12, 2013, less than two weeks after I started writing about Power Plant Men) and that he was a good friend. So much so, that Steven found it hard to think about him being gone without bringing tears to his eyes. This got me thinking…. I knew Chet for a brief time. I wondered what was his story. I knew from my own experience that most True Power Plant Men are Heroes of some kind, so I looked him up.
Now you know what I found. What I have told you is only a small portion of the wonderful life of a great man. I encourage everyone to go and read about Chet Turner. The Story of Chester A. Turner
Notice the humble beginning of this man who’s father was a carpenter. Who’s mother worked in the same effort that her son did during the war to fight against tyranny. How he became an electrician at a young age, not to rule the world, but to serve mankind.
Looking at cars has taken on an entirely new meaning to me. I am honored today to have Chet forever in my memory.
Comment from Original Post:
Hey Roomy, been on vacation for a while. Just got around to the story. All I can say is thanks. My eyes are a little blurry at the moment. I will write you later when I can see better.
Comment from Previous post:
-
I enjoy reading your blog very much and am so happy you take the time to share these memories. Chet was a wonderful man and I am very blessed to have been raised in the presence of these true heroes.
Looking forward to reading more!
Power Plant Men 
Ah, the good old days when the best computer was the new 386. Things weren’t impossible but you had to think about it and plan quite a bit. Great stories!
Always enjoy reading and thinking about a world I wouldn’t even know about if it weren’t for your unique blog!
Ruth in Pittsburgh
Great story! I heard a pastor once say “What you “know” can keep you from learning the truth.” I saw this principle in operation many times in my career.
I had been at the WFEC Hugo Power Plant for a short time when the Plant Manager directed me (Maint. Supt.) to have the Mechanics “block the condenser” for a “hydro”. (Prior to a condenser hydro, several mechanics would work for about 4 hours dragging heavy timbers into the 3 foot tall space between the bottom of the hotwell and the concrete floor. They would space these timbers evenly across the entire condenser floor and use wedges to remove all clearance at each support beam. All this work was “required” to support the additional water weight (several feet higher than normal operating level)). I knew this “blocking” was never done at any OG&E plant but I didn’t want to make the Plant Manager look like an idiot. So I did what he asked. We “blocked” the condenser for a hydro. Then I got with just the Plant Engineer and asked him to get the Mechanical Prints for the condenser. I asked him if it was necessary to block the condenser for hydro. He said they had always done it because of the extra weight of the water. When we looked at the condenser drawings there was a note indicating it was designed to support a full hydro water level. He showed the print to the Plant Manager (one on one). Nobody was made to look foolish and for the next condenser hydro we didn’t “block” it – and the Mechanics were really happy!
We used to have a saying that I picked up from Bob Kennedy. “We’ve been doing it this way for 35 years. “
Well over the years there were a lot of engineers that way. Not all. We have had outstanding ones as well and the stinkers too. Just hate the politics of people so evil and cruel. Man is beyond ugly so often.