As was mentioned before, there were ten or twelve people who made up the drafting pool at J&L. Most were involved with creating mechanical drawings (details) of parts extracted from a layout created by an engineer in one of the product departments. There were also a few folks who were working on the electrical side of a project, mostly concerning electrical junction boxes, and the panel layout and detailing of electrical components. There were very few women who had an interest in this type of drafting work (although most of the hands-on electrical panel wiring was done by women).

I think it was toward the end of 1965 when I was placed in the drafting pool. One of my VTC classmates, who had an electrical degree, was also there. I had been staying at various rooms around town, none with cooking capabilities. He and I decided to rent an apartment on Wall Street, so we could cook for ourselves, and save some money. I was never very good at saving money (or cooking either). But between us, we learned to improve in those areas. In a typical bachelor fashion, the dishes would pile up in the sink, getting washed only when we ran out of clean ones. The cooking was never very good, but it was better than what we had been doing on our own.

Back in those days, most automobiles were rear wheel drive, front engine setups. There were very few four-wheel drive, or front wheel drive, cars. So getting around a town like Springfield was quite a challenge in the winter. Just a slight incline (like there is in front of the post office), could stop traffic flow if the conditions were right. And there was plenty of traffic when the shops got out. Getting thru town could take an hour (and the side streets were even steeper). Being on a tight budget, I usually bought winter retread tires, which cost considerably less than new. And they worked fine, as long as I didn’t drive on the interstate much. Higher speeds tend to create heat in a tire, and sometimes the retread would fail. A couple of cement blocks in the trunk helped in the traction department. It didn’t help the fuel mileage, but gas was less than 40 cents a gallon.

As with any group of people, we had our share of, shall I say, “interesting folks”. One young fellow always seemed to do things to create attention. He had been taking some sort of self-defense course, and he wanted to show us just how much he had learned. He brought in a heavy hand file from the shop (the technical term is “bastard” file). It was about 1/4″ thick,  and placed it on top of two stacks of books. He then proceeded to karate-chop it………..of course the books were not very firm, the hand went down, the file did not break, the hand was very swollen for several days………..