Vermont Rebuild had a 401(k) plan; the company contributed an amount equal to 3% of our pay every week. We could put in 2% more, and the company would match it. So most of us were investing 7%. It wasn’t a bad plan at all, and you could pick and choose among several investment options. The only problem was, you couldn’t change these options very easily ( I think there was a three month wait period). We even had a profit sharing program that I remember receiving a few checks from.

Our health insurance was usually Blue Cross / Blue Shield, with the premium cost split, the company paying 50%, the employee paying 50%. Dental insurance was available for an additional cost. These plans would usually change every year, due to premium cost increases. Sometimes the insurance carrier would change; I remember Aetna was our insurer for a while. Craig would shop around every year to get the best plan for the least cost. Sometimes our deductible would go up so that the premiums could stay low. We had a small, older workforce, and some of us had serious health issues; this in itself meant higher premiums.

One of the nice features we had at Vermont Rebuild was a weekly newssheet that was handed out with our paychecks. This single sheet could have some news about work in progress, pending sales, or perhaps a story on one of the employees. Sometimes, someone would insert a fun item, maybe even a mix-and-match game people could get involved in. This sheet was eventually discontinued, as workloads increased and time was used for other more productive things. But I really missed it; I think it kind of brought us closer together.

Early in my career at Vermont Rebuild, we became involved with a company called U.S. Repeating Arms (better known as Winchester). They had a plant in New Haven, Connecticut, and they had several machines that needed to be rebuilt and upgraded. Two of these were “cold formers” that they used to forge their gun barrels. One of these machines was originally built by Cincinnatti, the other was a Fellows product built here in Springfield. It was very interesting how these two companies design philosophy differed. The Cincinnatti unit was a single spindle machine with a 200 ton forging capacity. The Fellows machine was a twin spindle with a total capacity of 500 tons. I was assigned to be the project engineer on the Fellows machine.

One of the good things about the Fellows machine was the fact that Winchester had purchased all the engineering data from Fellows years before, so we had all the microfilm drawings to work with. The bad news was that Fellows only made seven or eight of these machines, and every one was different. We had quite a job reviewing the machine as it was being disassembled, and identifying which drawings were pertinent.