In 1989 I was invited to join the Hitormis Gun Club; this institution was originally started by a few Fellows engineers back in 1930 as a way to promote company morale. It also became an important sales tool; customers, and perspective customers would be wined and dined to enhance future relationships. In the early days there was a tennis court (still there, but in poor shape). Old dusty hunting trophies are mounted inside the building. In the beginning only Fellows employees (following an embarrassing induction ritual) were eligible to join this club. Because of the decline of the local industries, membership is now open to anyone who is interested (with no induction ritual).

I thoroughly enjoyed working at Fellows, and knew quite a few people there. I would occasionally take a walk out thru the manufacturing and assembly area to see what was going on. At one point there was a 100″ gear shaper being built for a company in India. When they were running that machine off, they cut a gear that had an 8″ or wider face, and because they used cutting oil for coolant (not water), there was quite a fog in the building from the hot chips coming off the workpiece. Pretty impressive.

The J&L comparator product line had been moved back to town, and was being built in this building in North Springfield. Richard Smith was the assembly foreman, someone I had known for years. His brother, Nelson, had attended VTC with me, and we were hired on at the same time in 1965; Nelson had gone to work in Comparator Engineering in Plant #2, I had been placed in Plant #1. After Textron moved the comparator product to South Carolina in 1980, Nelson left the company. He eventually bought into a machine tool supply company, Stewart-Hunt, specializing in fluid power.

As the gear shaper orders for Caterpillar wound down, our work load decreased dramatically. I started to feel somewhat exposed, being the “Last One Hired”. It was kind of the same feeling I had before J&L closed, so I decided to look around for something else. It took a while, but I finally found an ad from a company in Lebanon, New Hampshire, called New Jersey Machine. They were looking for engineering help, so I went up for an interview. At this time I had been cultivating a beard, and did not know how it would affect the talk. The personnel director who conducted the interview was getting ready to retire, so maybe he did not mind the beard; but after my hire, several of the employees told me that the guy did not like beards…………