When I arrived in town, there was a car dealership directly across the  road from J&L Plant #1, that was called Yankee Ford. After I started work, I went into the dealership to inquire about the new Ford Mustang that had been recently introduced. I was interested in a fastback with the high-performance 289 engine. They gave me a price, and details of the financing / monthly payments. It was going to be a stretch, but I thought I could swing it. Until I found out what insurance would cost. So I ended up buying a one year old Plymouth Sport Fury (with the small V8).

The garage was not in business very much longer, and eventually J&L bought the building and converted it into the J&L Technical Center (it is now the town police department). The “Tech Center” as we called it was set up to train customers and employees on how to operate various J&L machinery, mainly the TNC line of lathes. They had a very talented group of instructors of various disiplines, machine mechanical repair, electronic repair, and programming. They had several lathes in the building, and also one of the new 1040 NC grinders. Upstairs were the offices and classrooms, the machinery being on the ground floor. There were a lot of classes given to us engineer types, to educate us on all the necessary facets of these machines. Of course, each one of us was involved design-wise with small portions of the product line, but these classes brought all of it together. We even learned how the programming was done (even though most of us never really applied it).

During the Holidays the Tech Center was a beehive of activity and good cheer. This was the late ’60’s, and partying was pretty much wide open, not frowned upon as it is now (for liability purposes). There was always a big party at the Tech Center, and inside the main plants there were “refreshments” available if you knew where to look. But nothing  really out of control. Usually the bottles became visible during the last hours of the last working day before Christmas. I remember one Christmas in particular, when one of our older engineers happened to be over at the Tech Center. This was the last working day, and everyone was in the proper Holiday Spirit (hic!). A few of the instructors talked him into wearing a wig (he was quite bald), and they took him around the main assembly floor of plant #1. Their plan was to walk him around and introduce him to various people as a “poor customer who couldn’t get home for Christmas”. Our engineer was quite familiar with folks on the assembly floor, but it was amazing how many people were fooled by the wig and the shop coat he wore. But as they introduced him, there were some who slowly realized this was a trick……….

As we moved forward into 1970, there was a big storm brewing between J&L and the union. Union disputes were not uncommon in the valley, there always seemed to be bad feelings between the local UE and the shops. As they say, there are always two sides to the story; I think there may be three sides: Their Side, Our Side, and somewhere in the middle, The Truth…………..