We who were still employed were hoping for a renewed effort to bring back the jobs that had  been lost. But this didn’t happen; without a Textron, and their deep pockets, there was no money to accomplish this. We stumbled on, selling machines that tried to take advantage of the parts we had in stock. We had purchased a lot of high-dollar items based on faulty sales forecasts, and now we tried to use them wherever possible. Research and Development was, for the most part, dead. Of course, when the word got out that the Great Jones and Lamson was on the ropes, our sales suffered. Our foreign competition had become firmly entrenched in this country, and their business approach of selling a “standard” lathe had gained many converts; customers who had been catered to by J&L over the years had quickly left the fold. Forgotten were the ties that we had build with them; it seemed that a lot more of customer business decisions were being driven by accountant-type people without any real engineering knowledge.

Our new president, Donald Hoodes, had brought in his “team”, the exact number I really didn’t know. There was some sort of marketing guy who, rumor had it, owned a horse farm. He wore cowboy boots and a western hat, and wandered up and down the outer hallway constantly. Mr. Hoodes reportedly put his wife and daughter on the payroll; the end of J&L as we knew it was near .

The summer of 1985 found us working on existing orders, and new ones that trickled in. At this time we were working with a reduced office workforce, mainly due to people leaving of their own accord. The shop floor was severely depleted by attrition and layoffs. The days of full parking lots was gone. But we soldiered on. These times are not very vivid in my memory, perhaps because they were not “good times”. Just a job. Income to raise a family. Our oldest child, Janine, graduated from Springfield High School in June of 1965, just a few weeks after the company was sold. We still had two more children in school.

The rest of the year is kind of a blur to me. I continued to be employed full time, but there were signs that things were not going to get any better. Our insurance benefits started to become somewhat of a hassle; claims were not paid in the normal timely manner; if we paid up-front, and expected to be reimbursed (as under Textron), there were delays. I remember that there were times when the insurance was on the brink of cancellation, being rescued at the last minute.

Some 1985 statistics: Average wage $22,100; a gallon of gasoline $1.09; U.S. postage stamp $0.22; Mikhail Gorbachev becomes Soviet leader; Nintendo game systems released; Windows 1.0 released (the first); CD music format is introduced to consumers.