May 9, 1944

May 9, 1944

949 W 12th St

San Pedro, Calif.

Dear Mother, Father and the rest of the folks at home,

I have had my pre-induction physical examination today and I feel sort of dispirited tonite. However I have taken a good warm bath and feel a little better. I could have told them beforehand what my physical condition was — namely o.k. in every respect. The only thing marked in red on my sheet was that I had an appendectomy scar. The navy quota was filled so I was assigned to the army. Personally it does not make a lot of difference because one would be as distasteful as the other.

If I listen to my reason I cannot see how I can avoid being deferred again, but military service seems to be a very real possibility after you have gone thru a physical examination of this type in which all those in charge tacitly assumed you were already in it for all practical purposes. I will have to pinch myself if I am again deferred to make sure I am not dreaming as I did when I received the first one in Iowa City. Well, I should know in a couple of weeks what will happen.

If I am permitted to stay on here, I will be taking my vacation in August instead of June-July as I had previously planned. The reason for this change is that otherwise I would be having my vacation including a day which would be a holiday anyway and which would mean that I would be using up 1/12 of my vacation on a day which was vacation anyway — a very foolish procedure.

I hope that after Vivian comes home that she will feel better and be able to throw off the cold that has been plaguing her this spring. I have bought a book recently which I am now reading which I think she should enjoy. It is about a California ranch, on which all the animals have names like they do at home and where the cows are breaking out now and then and other troublesome and sundry discomforts. When I am finished I will try to remember to send it along. It has made me think more of home than anything else I have come across recently.

If I am taken in the army and survive the war, altho it would solve a lot of problems not to come out of it, I don’t think I shall return to Calif or to commercial employment. If I do not stay on the farm I shall go back to school and try to get a teaching job when I finish. Calif is o.k. and the people here are nice and all that but I feel like a prodigal son eating husks in a far off land. I seem to be leading a purposeless existence. This is, I suppose, mostly a reaction to today. I am certain tho that I shall be an inefficient worker till I find out what is to happen.

Good night

C.P.

September 11, 1942

Sept 11, 1942

425 S. Cabrillo Ave

San Pedro, Calif

Dear father, mother, and anyone else who may read this,

In my last letter I told you a little bit about the laboratory. This tim I guess I will try to reconstruct a sort of plan of the Shell Development Co’s buildings here. They are not very large, any of them, and the laboratory is about a representative size.

On the south side of the road is a big ditch and on the other side of the ditch is the manifold thru which all of the pumping here is done. All the pumps are in one place sp that they can be used continuously and therefore more economically. Farther south are the stabilizers where unstabilized gasoline from the other Shell refinery near here (at Dominguez) is stabilized (that is, compounds too volatile for gasoline are driven off; that is compounds of the properties similar to those used in natural gas).

A is a building housing a couple of desks, gas analysis equipment & AB Cox’s office. B is a mechanic’s shack where Shorty Coe has been building another lab sized model of Plant I, similar to plant IV lately. B also houses the centrifuge that is used in sulfanations. E and W are indiscriminate areas of which I know little. The outside gate of the refinery is about ¼ mile north of the Shell development plant. A road runs north from the east side of Plant I, passing some fractionating columns and the solvent extraction plant for lubricating oils, then stops and turns east & west near the furnaces. By following the east branch for awhile you come to a rather large vacant space across which you walk, past the loading racks, the Shell Oil Lab, the office building and finally out thru the main gate, opening on Sepulveda Blvd. (see map I sent you at one time).

I do not know a great deal about the refinery here except incidentally, because we have little to do with it. A toluene production plant is being built at the Dominguez refinery which is a couple miles north of the Wilmington refinery. A similar plant is being built at the Wood Rive Refinery near Chicago.

The Shell Development plant started here about 7 years ago as I have already said and has grown considerably since then. However, its growth has resulted in a considerable degree of disorganization I think. The laboratory records, while complete, are kept somewhat unsystematically and the laboratory, due more or less to the fact that nobody has the time or the inclination is never thoroly cleaned up. Probably the worst phase in this respect, in my opinion, is the sample situation. I think that is an many samples are to be kept as now are, more and better storage space than the inadequate cupboards, should be provided. Moreover many of the samples are kept for a considerable length of time since it is never known when they might become important.

Nevertheless, I think that if I am to continue working for the Shell Dev Co, I’d as lief work here as in Emeryville. The climate here, tho rather foggy as I have already implied, is not as bad as near San Francisco. Moreover I believe that the establishment here will continue to grow altho that is problematical. At any rate, it is a much smaller organization and I think easier to work in than at Emeryville. Also, at Emeryville, there was been considerable labor trouble, I gather which does not sound so good.

All this may be rather looking into the future too far. I can’t see that I am going to enjoy the work here very much, probably for a considerable length of time. I believe that when I have enough saved to start farming I will leave because I just cannot see myself doing work like this all my days. Ig I were really keen about my work, as Raiford was always saying, I suppose I wouldn’t mind keeping on with it, but the more I think about it and come in contact with it, the less I really like it. Perhaps if the war continues I will land up in the army. At any rate, I am managing to stay out of it for awhile which is something.

I scarcely, if ever, read any newspapers and I don’t have a radio so I am sort of out of contact with the war. I picked up a newspaper left on the P.E. the other morning, but the most interesting news I could find was that the Cards were 2½ games out of first place and the Browns seem to have annexed 3^d place rather conclusively. If it weren’t for the newspapers grabbing hold of every happening in the war and playing it up in big headlines, the was would begin to be a dead issue I think.

As usual, I am disgusted with what I am doing, with life, and with the world in general. Maybe that’s why I would like to be a farmer — where there is a minimum of contact with people etc if you want to make it that way. I have no desire to make a lot of money or influence people or do remarkable things or make contributions to science. The extent of my ambition is to have enough to eat, something to wear (preferably covert pants & shirt and Rockford sox), books to read, paper & pencils to fool around with and enough to keep me busy so that the leisure I get will be appreciated, all with as little contact with others as possible.

The farm seems to be almost ideal in this respect, except for the books. However, the books worth reading are relatively scarce and they probably could be obtained without too great hardship. Moreover, living on a farm by yourself would probably involve the least responsibility and the least danger of economic want neither of which I am particularly anxious to encounter. The only disadvantage I can possibly think of is that there probably will be another war 25 or 30 years hence and I might not be old enough to stay out of it. However, that is rather far in the future and it’s easier not to consider it altho it seems to be a relatively real possibility. If there were any uninhabited part of the globe not ruled by some asinine form of gov’t that is run by a bunch of loco-minded nit wits and which did not blithely assume that its citizens exist for its benefit, I would be tempted to hie myself thither provided it wasn’t 100% desert (like Calif).

Well, I guess that’s enough of that. I’ll probably be able to exist another week without thinking too much about it.

You asked me mother about how to get in the coast guard. I really don’t know but I think that inquiry at a large enough post office, at the dean of Men’s office at I.S.C. or at the individual in charge of the ROTC there might be able to supply the information. I do not believe that more than a high school education & reasonable physical health is required altho I am not certain.

If I were you Vincent, I would not immediately buy a slide rule. If you do, don’t be in a hurry but look at the bulletin boards etc & you might be able to pick one up second hand for a reasonable sum. The first year you probably will use a rule for multiplication & division only and after that for about 95% of the time. A Mannheim rule for $2 or $3 serves this purpose. In buying a rule make sure that the sliding part (that is the long part that has the numbered scales on it) works easily. It should not fall out when the rule is held vertical (that is, from the rule proper) but it should move easily.

The 25¢ rule I left at home moves entirely too hard and when I say entirely I mean entirely. The sliding part (reader) should be more difficult to move than the long sliding part having the scales on it. This part (the sliding part) is the glass part with the single line in it that can also be moved along the rule. However, here again reason should be observed. Besides this it is sufficient to see to it that the rule is not warped, as would be apparent by discrepancies between the long sliding part & the rule proper. Most rules nowadays are made of mahogany covered with celluloid or some similar substances. Distrust any that are not unless possibly in the $2 class of Mannheim rules.

If you want to get a better rule for permanent use, it should have, besides the usual multiplying & dividing scales (called a & b usually) the following (1) the c scale (or inverted b scale) on the long sliding part (2) log-log scales (3) trigonometric scales. Beyond these there is nothing to be gained I think and most any rule above $10 has them. You probably can ask an engineering teacher, or you might encounter it in one of your freshman courses, if you want to know anymore about. However, don’t be in a hurry — You probably won’t need it for a good while.

I have deposited my money on a checking acct in a bank here and will send home periodically any excess that occurs. There is one now so I will enclose a check for it in this letter.

Tomorrow I might decide to go up to Los Angeles and look around or maybe out to Pasadena to see some of the things of interest. As for looking up Earl Strand I will leave that to people who are more capable of enduring his peculiar and eccentric character than I am.

As I write this I am sitting in a sort of easy chair with my feet on the bed and I am noticing that I have a lot of hair on the top of them that I really was never conscious of before. Something of an accomplishment no doubt. The toes also have hair on them. I shall have to grow a mustaches to even things up, otherwise I will have too much hair on my feet and not enough on my head.

With love and in boredom

C.P.

July 22, 1942

July 22, 1942

Iowa City, Iowa

Dear Mother & Father

This is just to let you know that I have been classified II-B for an indefinite period, probably six months since all deferments must be reviewed at such periods A II-B classification means that you are essential (?) to the war effort in a civilian capacity.

With love,

C.P.

June 13, 1942

June 13, 1942

Iowa City, Iowa

Dear father, mother, the instructoress at the Gowrie Lutheran vacation Bible school, and brothers,

This past week has been much cooler than the week which preceded it. This morning it is positively chilly. The wind is from the north. I deduce that it is a cold front moving in. During the week there has been a considerable amount of precipitation here and I suppose elsewhere, because the river has risen considerably. Last night I noticed that it had gone up about 3 feet from the previous night. As a result the water has been getting progressively softer and the water softener has not been giving the correct treatment to the water. By tonight tho I think that it should have just about reached the correct dosage.

At the power plant they have only two boilers on now but I wonder with this cold spell if they won’t put on another. Incidentally the university has bought about 5000 tons of washed Kentucky coal about 2" x 2"x 1" or so in size and is storing it. I guess they are afraid that they might run out if an acute railroad car shortage develops. This coal is really beautiful stuff. As I said it has been washed so that it is a glossy black with no dust along with it. Besides that it is a good quality coal so that there is not very much ash in it so that it is relatively free from seams etc. When you come down to see me graduate I can show it to you. It will be really quite a big pile of coal when the 5000 tons are all put together in one place.

Being as I did not know if either the Physical Chemistry or the Differential Equations class was scheduled to meet on Saturday, I went to find out before continuing my letter. Neither of them were. I notice also that the east smokestack at the power plant was producing smoke so that my surmise was correct. Both of the boilers that were on discharge their smoke into the west stack.

So far we have done two experiments in Physical Chemistry. Both of them were fairly easy. However in the Victor Meyer determination of vapor density I thought that I would never be able to get the apparatus leak-proof. I have one of them partly written up so I should be able to get both of them finished today. In class we have just sort of been going along not taking up very much in particular I think. A great deal of the material we have had so far I have already picked up in one place or another. The differential equations course is easier than I expected, at least so far. I am certain that I know almost as much as if I went to class.

I am very much undecided about what I should do about applying for the meteorological training. last week I was just about all ready to jump in but now I am very uncertain. The cause for the uncertainty is this. In the process of going around asked for letters of recommendation etc. etc. I was mostly advised that what I was doing was perhaps the best under the circumstances. However, when I asked Arnold for a letter of recommendation, he said that he would give me one of course but that he hoped it wouldn’t do any good, that is, that I wouldn’t get the appointment. He thinks that I should take my changes on the job with the petroleum company, even tho there is the danger of not being deferred.

As I respect his opinion more than the opinions of all of the rest of the teachers combined, I do not know what to do. I believe that as matters now stand I will let matters slide at least till I come home around the 4th of July. However, I will get everything together so that I can mail in my application whenever I want to. If I were really certain that I should try to get in the navy I should make the application immediately, but I am mot definitely not certain. Moreover I was talking to Prof. C. Woody Thompson, the university adviser on military affairs and he said that even if I were not deferred I probably would qualify for a number of different posts in the army that would not involve actual combat duty. It is very hard to decide what I should do, but where last week, things seemed to point toward the navy training they are now veering away from it. Maybe the purpose of it was for me to take differential equations this summer which I would not have had this question not come up.

We have a new German teacher now, being as the other one is gone on a vacation or something. His name is Schulz-Braden and he was born in Germany. He is a rather small fellow and looks rather odd, but I believe that he is really a very interesting individual to know. Unfortunately we have only 1 class a week now so we will not have very much contact with him which is really too bad.

I am running out of news so that I believe I will close.

With love

C.P.

P.S. I am enclosing a couple of clippings out of the same paper that give some evidence of the muddy thinking of our leaders in Washington.

P.S. Three more weeks till I come home for the 4th of July and 7 more weeks till I graduate. Can I wait? Yes, but hardly.

P.S. I will close with a very unpleasant thought. If I did decide to try to take my job in Calif., it would probably involve the little matter of leaving for Calif directly when school was over and not having any vacation at home. This is really too bad, but it seems the only safe procedure in case I do not decide on the navy training

P.S. The laundry bag came just now. Thank you for the cookies mama. I suppose the letter will come this afternoon.

P.S. As usual, my sincerest regards to everyone who will condescend to write to me.

May 28, 1942

May 28, 1942

Iowa City, Iowa

Dear father, mother, Snooty-Poot, brothers and anyone else who may read this letter,

I cannot figure out exactly what went wrong with my last letter but I suppose (after long cogitation) that something went wrong with it. I got to thinking after I found out that it had not reached you and began to wonder if I had put a stamp on it. But I am certain that I did for I went downtown to mail it because I didn’t have any stamps in my room. I may have forgotten to buy a stamp to put on it after I got downtown but I think that that is a rather poor explanation. I mailed in in a sort of sub-post office in a drugstore, which always looks as if the mail were regarded purely in a secondary light and it may have got lost there. At any rate, it wasn’t a very good letter anyway since I did not feel like writing a letter then so maybe it is just as good that you did not get it. I’ll try to remember everything of important which I put into it and include it in this letter, so that if the other one does not turn up, you will still know about everything of vital importance which has been going on in Iowa City.

Today is a very gooey, sticky day. I can just imagine days like this all summer and I am not exactly looking forward to it. No doubt it will seem nicer when I am looking back at it. Two of my courses finish this week, strategic minerals & elementary meteorology. I am just about certain that I will get an A in strategic minerals because my average in the daily tests which really determine your grade is definitely above the bottom limit specified for an A. I don’t know about elementary meteorology. I did all right in the first test, A, but I do not know how I came out in the second. However, I cannot think of anything which I did wrong. Saturday morning we are going to have a 2-hour test in this subject for which I must do a little studying.

By the way, I have been looking around for loopholes that I can get thru if the draft board doesn’t think a chemical engineer is necessary to national defense. Of course I suppose there are some requirement to be met which I do not know of yet but I believe I am qualified. The situation is this. If you are a graduate of an engineering college, over 20, plus some additional minor qualifications that I can meet, you can enlist in the navy, receive a commission as an ensign, go to school for 9 months at government expense at any one of about 5 schools in the U.S. to become a meteorologist. During this time you will be on a result salary of about $180 a month. At the end of the time you will act either as a meteorologist in some connection with the navy or otherwise teach naval cadets what meteorology they need to know.

Frankly this sounds very good to me. If the war continues for some length of time, it would indeed be the safest thing to do. Moreover I should be able to save enough so that at the end of the war I could start farming. Or, since the science of meteorology has recently undergone radical changes in practice & unusual advances in theory, well trained individuals in this field are somewhat scarce. The only thin that is wrong about it is that to be worthwhile, the war would have to last a reasonable length of time so that either of the two above-mentioned objectives could be attained. I am sort of up a stump. If I do it, I will be safe from the army but I probably will never be a chemical engineer and moreover if the war stops soon, I will be only worse off for my decision. If I don’t, I might conceivably get in the army which would be sort of messy but if I didn’t, my future should just about be settle.

Meteorology is interesting stuff — just as good as chemistry could ever be. I suppose it is sort of wrong to look at the whole situation in such a selfish way but I just cannot help it. I have written to the proper authorities to find out some more about this. Maybe something will turn up to turn me either to it or against it as has always seemed to do in the past. I hope I get the same guidance this time as previously. By the way, I would of course like to have your opinions on the subject.

Last Tuesday night I went to see “As You Like It” — a play production of the University theater here. According to the regulations, you paid to see it in your tuition so of course I thought that I might as well take advantage of it. It is, as you know, written by William Shakespeare. For the first 3 or 4 minutes it was sort of hard to understand what was going on but after a while you could understand everything that was said very well. I think that when I have time I am going to have to read all of Shakespeare’s plays, especially if they are as interesting when read as when they are presented. For it was very interesting I thought. I never noticed it before when I read Hamlet or Macbeth or anything but Shakespeare always gathers up all his characters in the end and gives them a very definite fate or future either for better or worse. When the play is over there are not any loose ends that didn’t come out right. I rather think that he should have made a very excellent detective-story writer if he had lived in this day and age. I won’t attempt to tell about the story but I will say that it was very funny in parts and I enjoyed seeing it very much.

Because I went to the play I got only 6 hours of sleep Tuesday night (the play wasn’t over till 11:00 and I didn’t get to bed before 11:30) and last night I got only 6½ for some reason or other. I guess I just didn’t get finished with what I needed to do till late, so today I have been sort of droopy all day. After German class is over tonite I think I will go right to bed and see if I can’t catch up a little bit. The German class is held in the evenings because that is the only time when some people could come to class. Next week of course, things should be easy so that maybe I can get my water analyses in Industrial Chem finished and the fuel or gas analyses started. That is sort of a messy course I think. The book isn’t any too good and some of the tests don’t have too good a theoretical basis I don’t think.

In case it was in my last letter and not before, Wilmington Calif. is a suburb of Los Angeles. Of course that is another argument in favor of the Chem Eng’ng since there is a university there and I can continue my studies.

I am going to maybe buy some books which I don;t have to have but which I would like to have — maybe a meteorology book and some others so that I might write some checks soon. I suppose I could use my money that I have or my check which is coming next Sat but it is easier to use that to pay the rent with and eat on.

I have found out that I got an A in economy after all so I got B only in speech & organic chemistry.

With love

C.P.

Thank you, mother, father and Vivian for the letters I received from you in the past two weeks.

[marginalia] I mailed my laundry home on Wednesday so you should get it by Friday at least.

I think mama, that you have been forgetting to put my towels in my laundry. I do not know where all of them have gone otherwise.

Career Guidance

The school staff included no counselor to guide students in choosing a career, but I recall Mr. Millard in one of his classes talking a bit about various careers. As I recall he handed out a little pamphlet that listed potential incomes in various professions and engineering was indicated as having a top potential of about $50,000/year. I never achieved that in all the years I was at Shell. About the closest was the $35,000 I earned in 1975 when I worked part-time for Shell as a “consultant.” Perhaps that was the first “push” toward engineering as a career for me.

Although Gowrie high school did not include chemistry in the curriculum, somehow or other I had developed an interest in the subject. Perhaps I mentioned it to the superintendent (A.C. Anderson, who succeeded Leistra) and he gave me a couple of demo textbooks that he, as superintendent, had received from textbook vendors. One was in physics and the other chemistry. I think I read portions of the chemistry text so I had an idea of what it was about when I enrolled in junior college.

There was one incident that may have steered me in the direction of engineering. One evening, when we were still in the little brown house, I was at one of the summer band concerts. Somehow or other I became aware of, or possibly was introduced to, a cousin of Robert Blomgren (a year ahead of me in school but with whom I played on occasion — he lived in a house not far from us — actually when we children carried milk to Aunt Hulda and gradfather Strand we walked through their yard). I was impressed by this cousin (by name Jack Sederholm) who was described as being an engineer. Robert followed his cousin’s example and ended up as an engineer.

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.

A Fork in the Road

During the late winter or early spring of my second year at the university, the Shell company came to the university on a recruiting trip. At that time my plan was still to take another complete year at Iowa to complete the requirements for my degree (picking up various introductory freshman and sophomore courses that I had missed), so I did not expect to be looking for work for a year or more.

Perhaps it was Dr. Arnold who suggested that I schedule an appointment and interview with the Shell representative. At any rate I did sign up for an interview and it went very well indeed. This was partly happenstance as the course in chemical engineering principles I was taking at the time happened to had fractionation as an upcoming subject. For some reason I had read ahead so I was, as it were, primed on a unit operation of major importance to any oil company.

The interview did drift to distillation and mostly I was prepared for the questions that were posed. There were two questions that I was relatively unprepared for — one was as to the technique for measuring equilibrium data and my spur of the moment reasoning was satisfactory; the other question was on tray efficiency and when I was asked what tray efficiency I would suggest, I demurred saying that a selection depended too much on the particular service (certainly true). When pressed for a number I said 50% which at that time was an often used value.

In retrospect I think this was a key point in the interview and I suspect at that point the interviewer (a Dr. Millar) had made up his mind to offer me a job. He sort of leaned back as if to say I’m satisfied as to this student. There were two men on the interview team and at this point the second man (a Dr. Vaughan) took over and from that point on the interview was mostly a sales pitch, describing the research establishment at Emeryville.

I received a job offer several days later via a telegram (which I still have somewhere) and (I think) after a discussion with Dr. Arnold decided to accept, noting that it might be over a year before I would appear in California. Actually since the exigency of the draft situation grew steadily more pressing, I decided to go to school the following summer so as to graduate a half year (or more) early. This decision involved getting the university to accept various junior college credits (such as European history which I took the second year I was there) in place of some freshman and sophomore engineering courses (like surveying). The university seemed to accept this quite readily — I suppose it had been urged to speed up their instructional schedule.

I don’t recall if it was prior to the Shell interview, I guess it must have been, that I had been accepted for summer employment with General Electric in Rochester, New York. My memory on this is rather uncertain, I think that was the case but I’m not absolutely sure. GE had quite regularly hired some of the undergraduate Iowa engineers for such employment. Or whether I just intended to apply. This never developed when I decided to go to summer school so I could finish my schooling sooner.

Later on I also explored the possibility of enlisting in the U.S. navy in a meteorological program they were offering. I would have gone in as the lowest officer rank (ensign). I would have gone through a training program. I had the paperwork done but I never submitted it. Had I gone ahead and been accepted for this I don’t know for sure what I would have done. I mentioned the possibility to Dr. Arnold and I can still see him in his office in the chemistry building, stout as he was and projecting sort of an aggressive stance and hear him saying “What would you want to do that for?”

It like the chance interview with Shell, was one of the key moments in my life, since I’m quite sure that Arnold’s comment steered me toward going with Shell. My life would certainly have been different had I gone in the navy. I would have probably ended up in the Pacific theater of operations and been involved in some of the naval encounters there. Maybe I would not have survived. Had I come through the war, would I have used the G.I. bill to get an advanced degree in engineering, or would I have retreated to farming in Iowa? Who knows?