Recreation with Co-Workers

One of the advantages of working for a large organization like Shell at one of its larger installations was the scope of capabilities of the people on site with whom one eventually became aware. The service engineering department was an attractive place for skilled laborers — very little if any shift work, stable employment at a competitive wage etc. So, for example, when I was constructing the extension to 411 Bonnie Drive and came to the point when the electrical wiring was to be done, an obvious possibility (since I didn’t feel I wanted to tackle the entire task myself) was to talk to the electrical foreman in service engineering. He offered his services and I’m sure I had the work done at less cost than had I fired an electrical contractor. This way I could also help him with work, under his direction, and thus facilitate the job and reduce the cost.

Another instance of “using” Shell was in regard to the photographic and duplicating department. In connection with the considerable number of movies and still photographs taken of the tray action in the tray test column I had become well acquainted with the principal photographer — that is, not the individual who ran the department who was also a very competent man, but instead the man who actually took the pictures requested of the department. So when my mother wrote her account of her mother’s life and wanted to include some pictures I suggested that I could probably arrange to get the appropriate negatives made from the old photographs she had that she wanted to include. I simply took them to Ed Nyberg, the Shell photographer, and asked if he could make negatives of them, which he offered to do, sub rosa, on Shell’s time. Strictly this was an unethical use of Shell’s time, but I’m sure it went on at all levels and personnel and so long as the opportunity wasn’t abused was winked at by management.

Another feature of the Emeryville establishment that I appreciated was the cafeteria. The food was good and the character I liked, cheap, and of course convenient. While I was a bachelor I would typically have my main meal of the day at lunch time. I have always liked, even preferred, cafeterias as a place to eat out, from days at the Quadrangle and its cafeteria, through Shell days at Emeryville, in Houston where I recall the meals to Luby’s and Morrison’s (the latter served me well during the time I was consulting at Shell in 1975, they had a cafeteria off of one of the downtown tunnels in the business district) and presently in Ashland at such places as North’s.

One of my favorites from Shell cafeteria days was sour cream raisin pie. When Emeryville shut down I lost this for an internal [sic] but re-established contact at a small restaurant called Just Desserts over in Medford, Some friends of ours here, Colver and Avis Anderson, had apprised us of this restaurant and we tried it out, and eventually became aware that included in the pies they made was a sour cream raisin pie. The restaurant no longer exists — it expanded to a second location in downtown Medford (a poor choice as downtown Medford is in the doldrums retail wise), later gave up their first location, and eventually folded. If they had stayed where they were originally (still used as a restaurant) they would probably still be in business. Just another example of an unwise business expansion that led to failure.

I inquired at the restaurant if the cook would give out the recipe but with no success. Jean eventually tracked down a recipe that, as near as I can taste, equals the old Shell cafeteria and the Just Desserts recipe. The lead came from the local extension service office over in Medford. Jean will occasionally made a modification of the recipe (only the filling, not the pie shell) substituting non-cholesterol bearing ingredients (yogurt for sour cream for example), which I duly appreciate. There appear to be several recipes for sour cream raisin pie and I have tried it in various restaurants over the years, since Emeryville days. Most have been disappointments; the closest match, other than Just Desserts, is at Marie Callenders, but even there the taste isn’t quite the same or quite as good.

Another feature of working in a fairly good-sized and coherent unit was the recreational opportunities that occurred. At Emeryville there was a group called the Shell Development Recreational Association, which received some funding from the company. One activity sponsored by the association was the softball league, which I recall fielded several teams from various departments at Emeryville. I remember participating in some games in which I was on the engineering department team; characteristically I was a recruit of necessity or desperation and I’m sure that I was at best a “space-filler” and any effect I would have had on the outcome would have been detrimental to the engineering team.

The engineering team was quite successful, principally because they had an excellent pitcher in one Merle Gould; they also had a good catcher in the person of my friend Hugh Guthrie. Indeed it was probably the latter that got me involved in playing in the games at all. Usually they were held on Saturday mornings on a school playground in south Berkeley. I actually had a fielder’s glove which I had purchased with some prize money from the informal Shell bowling leagure in the San Francisco office group.

My participating in this off-hours sport began of course while I was working in San Francisco and I suppose continued for 2 or 3 years. We would leave the Shell building on Bush Street right after work, and several of us would ride the street car out to the Broadway Bowl — there was a little “greasy-spoon” near it where we would perhaps have a hamburger. the “prize” money was as I recall really a refund of a portion of the fee we paid — at least in my case it was as I never was good enough to win anything for my standing. One time I bought some bowling shoes, which I kept long after I stopped bowling until Jean disposed of them. The softball glove went at some time before the move to Houston to one of the Piehl boys. My average in bowling was somewhere in the 130 range; once I lad a game over 200 but that only occurred once. Later on when I was working at Emeryville I would occasionally join the SDRA league at the Albany Bowl, but I was never a regular there.

Another activity that the SDRA sponsored was an occasional bridge tournament and I recall participating with Jean as partner in the cafeteria (in the evening) after it was moved to the M building. These were tournaments in which various Shell locations played the same hands so that the different locations competed with each other. Jean and I would as a rule perform less than the average although I recall once when we played against Stan Newman and Marilyn Johnson as opponents and beat them rather badly. This was indeed strange though since Marilyn was a life master — her big hobby was playing bridge and Stan was no slouch either.

Now that I think of it Marilyn was also interested in horses, and the riding thereof. She worked in either the library or tech files, made the move to Houston and was still unmarried, at the age of 40 or so, when I last encountered her or heard of her. Stan spent his career in process engineering and was one of those individuals who always seemed impeccably dressed regardless of the situation. I could never understand how anyone could not seem a bit rumpled at some time or other.

I also played in some bridge tournaments with Dwight Johnston as partner. In one of them we actually garnered a few master points. Jean and I haven’t played bridge in some time; we used to have a weekly evening with Nan and Louis Hershberger — people we knew from church and who have lived within walking distance of us here — but this was discontinued when Jean developed her going-to-sleep problem. Such activity would stimulate her so that she’d have trouble going to sleep.

In a way I miss playing bridge occasionally; it is a game that has attracted me ever since the early days of kibitizing the noontime games at Shell in San Francisco, and later in Emeryville. Recalling these days of watching the noontime game brings back vivid memories of the participants: Russ Shiras, who was a participant in the early development of distillation calculation technique for Shell in the 1930s and who was one of the seediest, most disheveled persons of a professional level that I’ve ever encountered — his long lank hair was always drooping into his face, to be ineffectually brushed back, his suit always seemed wrinkled and a size or two too small, he was always dripping cigarette ash everywhere including himself. He was a man with a very mobile face, bushy eyebrows, rather pale blue eyes. For all his unkempt appearance (and his bridge-playing tended to be as disorganized and erratic as his dress) he was basically a very kind and considerate person. He read a lot — that was his hobby; his wife, a strong Catholic, was a write, I think of detective fiction though I’m not sure. She had got Shiras to adopt Catholicism; I was always surprised that he had agreed to this.

Then there was Charlie Hurd, also with a finger in development of engineering calculations for distillation for Shell. A thin, dark, somewhat saturnine man, he was the basic data honcho at San Francisco when I arrived from the south and it was he that the new trainee engineers met first in their training program and assignments. A better bridge player than Shiras. In later days after the move to Emeryville he wrote the first comprehensive distillation calculation program in Shell; this was in the early days of electronic computers and he wrote the program in machine language (not something like Fortran which later became the programming medium — I don’t know now what is used).

Another participant in the noonday bridge was Dick Kunstman I think by Emeryville days he may have been transferred to the instrumentation department — he and Shiras would occasionally get into past bridge game discussions lasting for some time with both men almost livid. I wondered on occasion what department management thought of the time wasted in these discussions — the noon “hour” had a nominal, scheduled, length of 40 minutes but the bridge plus discussion time often 1-1/2 hours. But to my knowledge nothing was ever said about the time consumed.

A minor member of the fractionation calculation groups was Cornell Jarman. He was an accountant by training, had been with the group since Wilmington days and was a person used for menial calculation chores. A congenial person, a Mormon and an active one though he and his wife had limited their family size.

A more colorful figure was Dante Sarno, who to my way of thinking was the real brains of the fractionation group. A rather short, dark, bald-on-top person of Italian background, with his customary black cigarette holder and cigarettes. He played an important part in the plant startups of Shell’s extractive distillation licensing activities.