Social Life

The people I worked with provided some social contact outside the work environment but not a great deal. The individual in charge of the group when I arrived, Bob Cole, one evening had a group of the young engineers to his home for an evening of playing poker. I had never played the game and I have no recollection on how I fared. I also don’t know how I got to his house as I had no car at that point.

There were a couple of evening parties at a home on the waterfront in Long Beach that a group of the young engineers had rented together as a residence. I can also remember a weekend foray to the Huntington library in Pasadena where the famous “Blue Boy” picture was on display. I seem, to remember there was also a companion portrait of a young girl in a pink dress.

This excursion was made either with Frank (Jim) Cosgrove as a companion or it might have been with one Henry Harold Bulkowski. Henry left Shell after the war and I never heard his name again until I saw it in CEP either in an obituary or as a 50-year member of AIChE. With Frank I had a longer and more significant continuing contact that included the time I worked in San Francisco and Emeryville. Frank was a chemist, not an engineer so he worked only as an analyst and never in the pilot plant. He was a graduate of Fresno State. Frank and I became well acquainted and I believe I’ve mentioned that it was he who introduced me to philosophy and Biblical criticism. Thus he was certainly one of the influential persons in my life.

For a long time I lost track of him — he gradually did not respond to Christmas cards and eventually one was returned as “wrong address.” One time when Jean and I were visiting Muriel in Sacramento I mentioned that I had lost track of Frank but that he was a member of the California bar and I wondered if he could be tracked down that way. Muriel immediately went to the telephone and soon established that he had died some time before. I felt saddened that I had not made the attempt sooner to try to locate him.

There were also some social contacts at work during the noon hour. There was inevitably a session of the game of Hearts which was played along with the eating of lunches. I participated in these games at least occasionally — this must have been after I was working alone on various projects. I seem to recall that I held the record in these noontime games for the lowest score — in Hearts the low score winds and once I had the jack of diamonds but no other tricks so I had the lowest score possible.

Once Zene Jasaitis asked me for an overnight stay in his home — Zene preceded me in charge of the analytical work. I’d almost forgotten about that.