Early Days at Shell

The work that the new engineering recruits did at Wilmington was not really chemical engineering, though it did provide an exposure to the refinery environment. A good part of it could have been done by persons of less training and skills — I guess this was the real reason why I decided Shell was “stockpiling” engineering personnel for availability at a later time.

After a week’s orientation a new engineer first spent a year or so as an analyst doing various analyses related to the process being investigation on a pilot plant scale. This was following by a period as a pilot plant operator, and then a gradual transition to report writing, data workup etc.

The work as an analyst and pilot plant operator involved shift work which was a new experience for me. I was through the analyst period and in the pilot plant operator period when I was offered the post of coordinating the analytical work. I accepted but this was a mistake for me I realize now as I wasn’t by temperament, or perhaps more importantly by experience and breadth of outlook suitable at the time for the assignment.

At this time in my career I did not have the background of contact with the world beyond the home, farm, church and school environment that I had grown up on to enable me to estimate my future better. This was in part the result of the community environment and the restricted traveling that our family had done, but it was also influenced un a more subtle way by the lack of a broader experiential background on the part of my parents and the tendency of my mother in particular to shield her children from influences strange or alien to home, church and family. In retrospect I’;m sure that this lack of sociological background influenced my future at Shell — not that I would want to have it any different.

The difficulty for me in supervising the analytical work that the analysts did was that they were of the mind that the character of the work was beneath them. They were graduate engineers and it was not the kind of work they thought they should be doing. In other wordsI did not have the personality and experience to tell them to shape up.

In the work I had done for my uncle Carl I had exerted no independent judgment. I had just done what he told me to do. I certainly had not been in a position where I was responsible for the work of others. Had this not been the case things might have turned out differently and I might have drifted into a management position along the way. Not that I would have wanted in the end for things to have turned out differently, but they could have been quite different.

As a result of my dissatisfaction with the position I was in I decided that I would leave the Shell company and take whatever developed with the draft board. I left a note to that effect on the manager’s desk when I left after finishing my day’s work, but the manager talked me out of quitting. I was given other work to do which was in the area of individual research projects. It was during this phase that I began to use some of the chemical engineering knowledge I had gained in school. I recall purchasing the first copy I had of McGraw-Hill’s Chemical Engineering Handbook. I later disposed of it but it was followed by several subsequent editions of the manual. I believe that I still have the last edition I bought.