In those days, oil companies offered plum summer jobs to engineering students within a year of graduation. Landing one, Mary and I married on Saturday, [...]]]> A certain type of brisk, dry breeze upon my face invariably elicits one response: "This feels just like Texas!" I first felt the unforgettable hot breath of Texas in June 1967.

In those days, oil companies offered plum summer jobs to engineering students within a year of graduation. Landing one, Mary and I married on Saturday, drove to Humble Oil's Houston headquarters on Monday, and reported to their district office in Tyler on Tuesday.

Though our little apartment on North Broadway in the beautiful "City of Roses" stood just blocks from the office, most of my work that summer was in the field–literally. Several times a week, Doug Wilds, my boss, dispatched me 20 miles northward to Hawkins, location of one of the largest oil fields in Texas. A pleasant rural town of about 900 people, Hawkins quickly sprang to prominence after oil was discovered there in 1940.

And in those pleasant years B.C. (before cholesterol), my expeditions to that quaint town usually required a visit to Petty's Café to fortify myself for the hot breath of Texas with chocolate pie, naturally washed down with a glass of whole milk.

Charged with verifying that new equipment had been installed according to plan, crude maps and faded signs helped me navigate to obscure destinations among the five square miles of oil wells. But once located, matching confusing arrays of tanks, pipes, valves and flow meters to the crisscrossing squiggles on the construction drawings proved an even greater challenge.

Being unfamiliar with oil field hardware forced me to lean on others' expertise to fill significant voids in my knowledge. Consequently, I often threw myself on the mercy of "John," an older engineer who repaid to my unabashed confessions of utter ignorance with rich nuggets of advice. Though I don't recall John's real name, I've never forgotten a decision he made.

From comments made by others, I gathered that John had apparently chosen to decline promotions and transfers, preferring to rear his family in Tyler. This unwillingness to move, however, had seemingly "frozen" him in his current job.

How strange, I thought, that a man of such experience would permanently limit his career for a few years of stability. But just 13 years later, our son's birth, coupled with and our daughter's relentless physical decline, placed me at similar crossroads.

The summer job over, I returned to college and chose electronics over oil. And we've never been back to Tyler. Humble Oil and Refining Company became Exxon and later ExxonMobil. And the Tyler district office eventually closed as part of corporate streamlining.

John had no reason to remember me, just one of a steady flow of unremarkable summer employees. But like the hot breath of Texas, the feel of our encounter yet wafts across the decades.

To this forgotten man, perhaps still in Tyler, I'd like to say, "Thank you, John, for sticking with what you felt was right." True convictions are always costly, and others probably won't understand. But I do.

Copyright 2004 James McAlister

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In those days before the invention of handheld calculators, the slide rule reigned as the engineer's tool of choice. Manufacturers hawked their wares with the fervor of TV salesmen in [...]]]> When friend Keith Bolton politely inquired whether I had used Texas Instruments calculators during my employment at that company, he greatly underestimated my foothold in antiquity.

In those days before the invention of handheld calculators, the slide rule reigned as the engineer's tool of choice. Manufacturers hawked their wares with the fervor of TV salesmen in sharkskin suits, and engineers touted personal favorites like teenage boys one-upping each other with the horsepower of their hot rods.

But was Robert Rickett's Post Versalog really superior to David Bryan's K&E Log Log Decitrig or Billy Huebner's Jason 803?

Leaving Texas Instruments for Arkansas Power & Light Company instantly plunged me into computational dark ages. Our office cranked out daily gas flow calculations on Monroe "comptometers," clattering desktop beasts with 100-plus keys and a jillion whirring gears.

Since the Monroes couldn't do square roots, however, we resorted to tedious lookups and interpolations from mathematical tables–and then inefficiently punched the results into the Monroes.

"Speed up the process!" demanded Louis Grobmyer, the boss. For about $1,000, a new-fangled desktop calculator from Singer Corporation nicely filled the bill. Though possessing the one-touch magical square root key, it couldn't maintain running totals.

Undaunted, Singer bolted an automobile odometer look-alike to the calculator's side. Not a pretty sight, but it worked. The Monroes gradually migrated to the storeroom, doomed by progress. But the slide rule endured.

Unexpectedly, the roundhouse punch of technology knocked the slide rule to its knees in a single day, and death followed shortly thereafter. On February 1, 1972, Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP-35 (so named for its 35 keys), their first handheld scientific calculator.

We eagerly snatched up one of these $395 marvels to accelerate the tedious vector arithmetic required to balance rotating machinery with downtime costing up to $10,000 per hour. This glorious heritage all but forgotten, they bring but a thin dime at weekend garage sales.

Succeeding years found me punching out decks of computer cards for the FORTRAN programs controlling gas spectrometer analyses and cost of service studies. Infinitely beyond slide rule capabilities, these heavy-duty number crunchers silently hummed along on impersonal, unseen "big iron" mainframes located who knows where.

But despite the persistent onslaught of technology, some engineers clung to their slide rules, familiar friends they knew and understood. Executives John Harton and J.D. Phillips even tucked circular models into their shirt pockets. Manipulated with the thumbs, these curiosities never ceased to wring wonder from curious onlookers in meetings

Unfortunately, I've so hopelessly lost touch that I couldn't help my son figure out how to use his graphing calculator when he entered college. But I occasionally extract my own slide rule, an exquisite K&E Decilon, from its leather case, examine the finely machined scales… and wonder. "What's the use of a dead skill?"

Respecting neither calendar nor clock nor method, a job well done earns a reward that fades not. But like the slide rule, the experience of Youth sometimes loses its relevance before Age figures out what it all means.

Copyright 2004 James McAlister

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