Settling in at 411 Bonnie Drive

I had furnished 931 Seaview with various pieces of secondhand furniture and appliances and enough kitchenware and dishes so that I could accommodate my parents when they visited me in early 1953. I had my desk and chair, plus I think I’d acquired a bookcase somewhere along the line. I bought an old sofa and chair, the sofa being convertible into a bed. I also bought a spring and mattress which I used until my parents’ visit. I made a support for the spring to keep it up off the floor. As my parents used it during the visit I also had a small cot that I used. I had also bought a used refrigerator, a table and some chairs.

When Jean and I were married we moved all our separate furniture belongings into 411 Bonnie Drive and the combined sets of furniture, dishes, etc. were sufficient to set us up in housekeeping. Gradually the items I had were replaced over the first few years with better quality furnishings. I think the first household items we bought were a vacuum cleaners and a washing machine. Actually I think the vacuum cleaner came first, for a few months at least Jean took our wash down to her parents’ and used her mother’s Maytag.

There was a stove at 411 Bonnie Drive which the Wilsons left for us but we replaced that with one more to our needs. The refrigerator we used for a uear or so until we got a new one — I remember selling it for $50 to the father of the lady next door. He was the head of the Addiego clan in El Cerrito and had several apartment houses, where I think the refrigerator ended up.

We still had the sofa and chair at the time Muriel was born. I can remember Jean spending time in the chair one night when her labor pains were starting. The chair we kept I think after the sofa was discarded and I seem to remember thatMuriel had it downstairs in the bedroom she occupied (after the extension was finished). She didn’t like it when we finally disposed of it — I at least wasn’t aware of her attachment to it, another example of a parent not knowing what’s going on in the mind and feelings of an offspring.

Early Retired Life

After we were settled in Ashland, I did make a few rather desultory probings about getting some employment, not necessarily along the line of engineering but looking into that also. Nothing came of these efforts however locally and they gradually dwindled. I have mentioned the idea I had of getting a BS in business from the college here, but this too wasn’t implemented because of a lack of pressing reasons.

During this time I wrote to my last supervisor at Shell for a possible recommendation in my attempts at securing some engineering work. It happened that the engineering department was scheduled to develop a large, rather complicated design for one of Shell’s processes or s potential licensee and he needed to assemble the staff for the project. Anyway he offered me the opportunity of working on the project as a “consultant” and I decided to take him up on it.

So from March 1975 through October or November I spent most of the year in Houston, plus a brief period in early 1976. Initially I simply stayed at a motel near downtown Houston, later I was able to set up a series of house-sitting periods when various Shell personnel were on vacation etc., so I didn’t use the motel facilities from then on. This afforded Jean a good opportunity to join me which she did for a considerable part of the time. During the summer of 1975, Palma also joined us in Houston; first she worked I seem to recall as a “temp” but later she was continuously employed at Pennzoil I believe it was.

The work was quite profitable money-wise and in addition it provided sort of a tapering off of my engineering career, which in retrospect softened the transition process into retirement.

Since I came back after the brief stint in 1976 I have done no engineering work at all, and as of the present time (late 1991) I would be quite out of touch with current methods, status of computer programs etc. As the years have passed my interest in engineering in a specific way has gradually disappeared, although I suppose you could say I still have a general interest.

For awhile I continued subscriptions to a few technical magazines. The last of these was the general organ of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, entitled Chemical Engineering Progress, which I have decided to discontinue in 1992. I will still receive a monthly newsletter, with its news of obituaries etc. but here too the names of persons described or listed seldom contain any names that I have known so it is of swindling interest.

I have also dispensed with the periodical information on technical meetings. I doubt I’ll ever attend another, the technical sessions would mean nothing to me, the chance of encountering old-time acquaintances small, and the plenary sessions of at most marginal interest. I shall probably continue my membership contributions in the society the rest of my life; actually because of the years I belonged I am listed as an emeritus member and do not have to pay any further dues.

Here in Oregon there are two local sections of the AIChE, one in the Portland area and the other taking in the rest of the state, from Salem south through the Willamette Valley and including a few stray individuals like me farther south. I belong to this southern group and have attended occasional meetings when it could be included with some other trips. The section is rather small so it doesn’t have a very active program but it is interesting to experience occasionally again the flavor of a local meeting of the institute.

A Career at Shell

The work I did at Shell from the time I transferred to San Francisco until the mid 1960s was certainly enjoyable and I suppose it some respects it was what a chemical engineering graduate would sort of dream about doing as a career goal. One was always on the forefront of what was going on in the development of equipment; indeed a fair amount of time was always devoted to keeping up with the current literature. This involved scanning the summary of contents of periodicals circulated by the library, perusing the half dozen or so periodicals that were regularly sent to me and doing the same with company reports that Technical Files sent around.

The work was not entirely research however as there were always operating or design problems that were referred to the department that required handling. Shell used the chemical engineering department as sort of a lure for engineering graduated they wanted to hire. As I indicated the work was sort of a novice graduate’s dream and they played on prospective employees’ desired in the regard to get them to accept employment.

Gradually this presents a problem as it required moving people out of chemical engineering into other parts of the organization. After new engineers would work for a couple of years and then sending that there were better opportunities for career advancement elsewhere would take transfers to other parts of Shell. This partly solved the problem but there came to be the feeling on the part of management that it would be helpful if members of the department who had been in research for a considerable legth of time would also transfer out.

So I was approached in this regard and a year’s assignment to Licensing and Design engineering was arranged. This department handled the evaluations and actual designs of the process that Shell licensed to outside companies, as well as some of the designs for applications within the Shell organization itself. This occurred in the mid 1960s, essentially after nearly two decades in research.

I found the work, essentially process engineering, to be stimulating and interesting and at the conclusion of the year decided to transfer permanently into this new phase of chemical engineering. It was in this kind of work that I spent the remainder of my career at Shell, including the work I did for the company after I retired (mostly in 1975, but also briefly in 1976).

In retrospect I think that it would have been more favorable to my career at Shell had I made the change earlier. In a way I feel that my career potential at Shell was not achieved — I attribute this in part by the lack of background and sophistication in my childhood and adolescence (i.e., when I went to work at Shell I really had no feel for how a large industrial organization operates) and secondly by the absence of some experienced person who would have offered advice to me at some crucial points in my career.

Had these factors been in effect it still might not have affected the course of my career significantly. I have a certain diffidence, lack of aggressiveness and unwillingness to have the single-minded commitment to career goals that would have kept my career to about what it was.

Shortly after transferring to process engineering, my department head approached me about the possibility of becoming a supervisor, with responsibility in the area of separations (distillation etc.). However he said to achieve this I would need some plant start-up experience and this would have involved a fairly lengthy absence away from family and the familiar scene. After considering the matter I decided I wasn’t interested in the effort and disruption involved, at least at that point in my career.

When Shell decided to move its research establishment, along with the associated engineering functions, to Houston I first decided not to go, but later changed my mind and the family made the move. It it still a question in my mind if we made the right move, economically or for the effect of the move on our daughters.

Economically I suspect there would have been little difference in the family fortunes. The appreciation in the value of 411 Bonnie Drive would have well offset the income from two years of employment, the increase in the Provident Fund savings and what I received “consulting” in 1975–76.

After we moved to Ashland I considered getting a degree in accounting and doing income tax work but there wasn’t any incentive income-wise to do so and other diversions such as gardening and drawing and water-coloring intervened. It is also, at this point, a question in my mind once we went in Houston to have stuck it out for longer than the two years we were there.

I suspect that had I been working downtown in Houston, instead of out at the International Trade Center there would have been a good deal less impetus to leave Houston on my part. Had I been working downtown I could have commuted easily on the bus that ran along Memorial Drive to downtown. Such a commute would have been much more to my liking that the drive in an un-air-conditioned [car] to ITC.

As it turned out Shell moved its engineering functions from ITS to a downtown location within less than a year after we departed Houston. We left in June 1974 and by March 1975 when I started the work I did for Shell that year they have moved downtown to the Milam building. I think that had we stayed in Houston it would have been much easier on Laurel. She was just getting established I think with a group of friends in Houston and she never did really “click” in Ashland.

For Jean and me the early retirement to Ashland turned out very well. We have been happy and occupied here and life here has been satisfying and rewarding. Income-wise there was no problem at all, and we were easily capable of meeting the 2-1/2 college educations that we still had to provide for. Muriel was halfway through her first four years, but Palma was just starting college when we arrived in Ashland. Laurel of course still had three years of high school still before her college career would begin.

Fractionation and Distillation

From the time I was transferred north from the LA area, except for the initial training period in San Francisco, I was engaged in chemical engineering research. This was true as long as I was nominally attached to the SF office, even though I was spending time either at the experimental tray test column at Emeryville or at the laboratory in south Berkeley.

At SF there wasn’t a chemical engineering department as such — it wasn’t until the transfer to Emeryville was made that this was formalized. However both at SF and Emeryville this research was under the direction of Matt Saunders, who was one of the more notable individuals I knew at Shell, or for that matter in the field of chemical engineering. He was a paraplegic, having been injured by a shotgun blast to his lower spinal area as a young person, probably in his early teens.

Despite this handicap of spending the rest of his days in a wheelchair, he entered the engineering field and his doctoral work was the pioneering work in the development of a truly scientific basis for assessing the capacity of distillation equipment. He had first worked for Shell at Wilmington where I started but he had transferred to SF by the time I arrived on the scene.

He was a man of rather slight statute, I’d guess he never weighed more than 100 pounds. Personality-wise he was a very considerate, even kindly person, and I was fortunate in having him over me in management. Between him (as department head in chemical engineering) and me there was Robert Olney as supervisor. Olney was actually also a graduate of Iowa and he was in the master’s degree program there during my senior year.

A preponderant part of the chemical engineering research I was associated with related to the design of distillation equipment (from the standpoint of capacity or throughput, associated characteristics such as pressure drop, and tray efficiency — thus it was different from “paper” research on computer programs for theoretical tray calculations) but it also included the design of extraction equipment and liquid/solid contacting.

The work, particularly that in the field of distillation equipment, led, perhaps inevitably, to my becoming an expert in the field. As a result I formulated, in conjunction with others, the design manuals for various types of distillation equipment and for extraction equipment that were used in Shell USA. During this period Shell also belonged to an inter-industry research group called Fractionation Research Inc. which was on the premises of the C.F. Braun company (one of the premier chemical construction firms at the time — thought it lost its position in subsequent years). This group had meetings several times a year to discuss its program and results and over the years I attended a good fraction of them — they were held in various places in the Midwest and wester USA such as LA, Dallas, Tulsa, Houston, etc.).

The research at Emeryville was coordinated with work at Shell Oil’s Houston refinery and this results in trips to Houston and New York in relation the work at the different locations. The trip to Holland thatI made in 1954 was also in the area of relating the experimental work which was being done at Emeryville with the work being done at the Delft laboratory (near the Hague) by the Dutch part of Royal Dutch/Shell. 

This trip which lasted about 2-1/2 months came at a less-than-propitious time for Jean and me. Jean was pregnant with Muriel, indeed in the last trimester, and Shell felt that it would be unwise for her to accompany me on the trip. Had it not been for this she would likely have come along, and I daresay the time in Holland would have been extended. Actually in retrospect I think that she could well have made the trip even though she was pregnant and Muriel might have been born in Holland rather than at Alta Bates in Berkeley.

The RIde Group

During all this period of marrying Jean, having a family and doing the things associated with that, I was of course working at Shell. Living where we did I had an easy commute to work — the distance was not more than six to seven miles and there were several alternative routes, so that if the freeway was slow because of the traffic problems, there were several city-street paths to reach Emeryville.

When we were first married I simply was a paying member of the group that rode in Elmer Anderson’s old green Chevrolet. The Andersons lived up the hill back of us somewhere so he just picjked me up on the way. Later it became a ride share group which, after a period in which there was a frequent turnover of membership, settled down to four people, myself in chemical, later process engineering, John Illman a couple of blocks away from 411 Bonnie Drive, and John Pezzaglia, farther away down by the El Cerrito high school, who were both chemists in product of Process development, and Hank Gillette, who was a technician in instrumentation.

This four-member group was in existence for a long time; all the members had been “typed” I think as to their potentiality in the Shell organization and weren’t likely to be transferred away from Emeryville — I think there was a tacit recognition of this by the four individuals. Because it was a four-member group one of use would have to drive twice eery fourth week, but riht now I can’t recall what day of the week this extra day fell on. I do remember that Pezzaglia always wanted to drive on payday — he always went to the bank with his paycheck. So sometimes there was some switching of driving days.

The Pezzaglias were sort of nominal members at Epworth; Jean and I sort of joked that Phil might show up a couple of times a year like at Easter and Christmas. When Shell moved to Houston, I lost touch for the most part with the ride group; the three other members did not go to Houston. I guess they were all old enough to qualify for retirement and Shell didn’t regard them as worth the transfer expense.

I’ve completely lost touch with John Illman — he had been in detergent research and went with Shaklee. Pezzaglia was close to 60 years of age and stayed on at Emeryville, helping to attend to the last details of closing out the place. He probably continued working for Shell a year or so after the move to Houston. We’ve seen them infrequently over the years at such events as the Shell Christmas party.

Similarly with Hank Gillette. Hank never married; during much of the time I knew him his mother lived with him in a small house down on Everett Street. He had ridden with me to work when I lived at 931 Seaview, so I knew him for a long time. A rather quiet personality, a quite capable worker in his way. He walked with sort of halting step — not really a limp — as he had injured a foot sometime and I think the gait he adopted to accommodate the hurt persisted after it had healed. He would usually come to the Shell Christmas party so I would see him there when we changed to attend; we also saw him once when we house-sat the Art Sanford house on one occasion when they were off on a trip.

Art was the janitor at Epworth and we knew him and his wife from Epworth. How we happened to set up the house-sitting I don’t recall. Their home was in the same vicinity as Hank’s house and we saw him when we were out for a walk.

The Sanfords had a dog that we were supposed to take for a walk, and that is the reason we were out walking. Taking the dog for a walk at the Sanfords was quite an experience. During most of the time the dog was confined either to the house or then fenced-in backyard. He liked to be out for a walk and when he detected the least movement toward someone taking down his leash he would come bounding. How he would detect this when he was asleep on the rug several rooms away is beyond my understanding.

Church Affiliation

I sort of became sidetracked in writing about Jean’s and my life together — but of course the association we had with her parents was an important part of that. I believe I have indicated earlier that Jean and I sort of compromised on a church affiliation to provide a religious background for the rearing of our daughters. Jean had been a quite committed member of the Christian Science church,and she continued this after our marriage, and indeed Muriel attended Sunday School at the church in Berkeley for a short while.

When she felt that some sort of common agreement between us was needed we decided (after inspecting various area churches and denominations) to affiliate with Epworth Methodist church in north Berkeley. The attraction there was the pastor, one Don Getty, who actually moved on, à la Methodist practice, after a couple of years when a building program was finished. By that time our association had sort of become established and we have continued attending Methodist churches, both in Houston and here in Ashland.

Jean dropped her membership as a Christian Scientist, but had never formally joined the Methodist church. I transferred my membership from the Lutheran church, and have maintained it. Actually I think Jean retains some elements of her faith from her childhood and early adult years — I’ve lost virtually all of whatever commitments in thinking I ever had. Occasionally when we lived in El Cerrito, Jean would attend some Christian Science function such as a lecture and here in Ashland similarly.

Currently with our custom of attending the Methodist church on my once-a-month ushering day, Jean will sometimes attend the local Christian Science church. Over the years I have accompanied Jean a couple of times to a Christian Science Sunday service. I felt singularly unmoved by the experiences as I now react to almost any religious function I attend.

Our attendance at Epworth, aside from it providing social contact of an agreeable nature, had some additional facets that were interesting and useful. Among these were the adult classes on Sunday mornings which often had instructors from the Pacific School of Religion as teachers. Indeed several of the faculty from the school were members at Epworth. These provided discussion on a more intellectual and thought-provoking level than the usual Sunday morning discourse or service.

During the years we attended Epworth there was one other pastor whom I really liked, one Max Brown. I don’t know just what the attraction was since I do not recall his sermons for any particular level of interest or intellectual insight, but his kindly personality was certainly appealing.

We had all of our children baptized at Epworth, I guess this was, for me at least, sort of tradition retained from my early life and church association. Whether I would provide an impetus for this now is hard to say, certainly any real significance to the rite has long since departed from my thinking. Each time the child wore the baptismal dress that Jean had which had been made I recall by her mother sometime in her youth. Jean was not baptized in it — she remembers when she and her sisters were baptized well beyond their infant years. This was at the instigation of her mother whose family had a Methodist background in San Francisco.

Jean’s dad never had any religious affiliation, though further back in his family on both sides there were strong elements of religious belief. As Jean remarked, the Masonic Lodge was his religion. I think the primary years in the Sunday School at Epworth were instructive and worthwhile years for our daughters — I can’t really say beyond that. There was one primary teacher, of long standing and experience, at Epworth whom I thought to be an effective and worthwhile part of our daughters’ upbringing.

Looking back, I get the impression I used the church for what it could give me, without returning any real personal commitment, except for monetary contribution.

Some Ribley History

As I mentioned Jean’s dad had a character that was almost schizophrenic — being utterly charming at times and curt and impolite at others. My personal opinion is that this is in part at least the instability of his childhood. I’m not sure I know just where he was born but it may have been in Tennessee where the family was for awhile living in some sort of commune. Then later the family spent time in San Marcial, New Mexico.

Checking with Jean, I find that her dad was actually born in San Marcial and the experience with the commune occurred after the move back east from San Marcial.

His sister Alta, older than he, was born in Tennessee before the residence at San Marcial. One time Jean’s dad related a strange, somewhat disjointed account of some sort of incident between him and his sister at San Marcial. There appeared to have been some sort of physical squabble between the two, and from the account, Jean’s dad seemed to indicate that he had had the impression that this spat or quarrel, whatever it was, had some sort of connection with his sister’s death, which occurred at San Marcial.

I felt vaguely uncomfortable during his telling of it and didn’t pursue the subject by some questions, to try to clarify the indefiniteness of the story. Jean had never heard the story at all, and her understanding was that Alta had died form “brain” fever, whatever that was.

The family experience at the commune turned out unsatisfactorily. I don’t know if the idea of joining the commune came from Jean’s grandfather or grandmother — I would suspect the latter. Apparently the investment the family made in joining was lost either in whole or in part. The family then moved to Denver.

Jean’s dad at times related incidents of his childhood there, such as his days as a newsboy. Presumably his dad worked on the Moffatt tunnel, although I think when we tried to investigate this it turned out there were two projects by this name. I think he was injured when working on the tunnel, also he was somewhere employed as a strike breaker and had some difficulty subsequently in finding employment.

The family eventually ended up in Richmond [California] for a few years prior to the San Francisco earthquake, with Jean’s grandfather working (I believe) for Santa Fe railroad. Here it was that he was drenched when a water tank broke at the time of the quake, he went to work anyway, contracted pneumonia and died.

Whereas Jean always knew a fair amount about her grandmother’s past history (perhaps because she lived on for quite some time after her husband’s death) she, and her father for that matter, knew surprisingly little about her grandfather’s life. It wasn’t until after Jean’s dad died that Jean’s research into genealogy developed what she now [h]as ascertained about his early life in Baltimore and later in Ohio.

There were a few garbled pieces of information that Jean’s dad had about this period but contact with the rather numerous Ribley relatives in Ohio had been completely lost. Despite Jean’s success in turning up information about her grandfather’s youth and history up until the age of 20 or so, there is a gap from then until he married her grandmother, when he was about 40. Jean hasn’t been able to pin down anything in this period.

There was a family rumor that her grandfather had a sawmill in the Truckee area which burned down, also that he had a considerable sum saved either before or after the event. In 1990 Jean and I spent a couple of days around the Truckee area trying to investigate these rumors but we developed absolutely no information or leads.

I think that prior to Jean’s grandfather’s death he had arranged for her dad to start the apprentice program at Santa Fe railroad. He was probably in his early to mid-teens when this occurred, thus he had rather limited formal schooling. During the year or so he went to school at Richmond, the principal of the school was a man by the name of Walter Helms who was a longtime acquaintance and mentor of Jean’s dad. Helms sponsored Jean’s dad when he joined the Masons, which he was active in during most of his life. Jean’s dad did well in his apprenticeship and later in his work at Santa Fe, where he fairly early reached the status of night shift foreman — a position he held when he was married.

Because of personality conflicts with a superior he quit Santa Fe and during the 1920s and early to mid 1930s, he suffered from under-employment or lack thereof. I have come to the opinion that Jean’s dad needed more than anything else a competent and trusted advisor or experienced person that he could turn to for advice and consultation. He should never have left Santa Fe, and if he had not, the family experience would have been entirely different and much better.