My life at work was, with the exception of my experience in the Army, which is described elsewhere, almost exclusively with the Shell Companies. My prior work experience had, for the most part, done nothing to prepare me for work in the industrial world, but provided other benefits to be sure.
During high school, I worked summers in a variety of jobs, none of which lasted an entire summer. One summer, for example, I cleaned residual fruit from the trees in a grapefruit orchard. Later that summer I walked behind a moving trailer and attempted to throw bales of hay up on to the stack as a moving target. I was undersized for this job and it only lasted a few days before I gave up. That same summer I made some additional money picking carrots, a backbreaking, hot job but not otherwise as physically demanding as the bales of hay.
The next summer I worked an engineering assistant for about a month for my future father-in-law's engineering firm. The assignment was to take field notes dictated by an older engineer who was surveying the physical plant for the local power company. He was arthritic and could not write himself, so I was the scribe whose notes were to be typed up each evening by his wife. The problem was that she could not read my handwriting any better than his, so I lost the job. I spent the rest of that summer stacking cases of canned citrus juice at the cannery in Tempe. During the spring semester of my senior year in high school I worked as a janitor at the College Bookstore at ASC. The following summer, my brother Charles got me a job as a bus boy at Bright Angel Lodge at the Grand Canyon. That was exciting, but I got homesick after several months and returned to Tempe. I was lucky enough to be hired again the bookstore, this time as the Assistant Manager - Supplies, and held that job for three years. The book store job was a blessing as marriage soon created the need for a steady income, even if only for thirty hours a week, and I enjoyed the company of a fine group of full time employees and student workers.
During the fall semester of my senior year in college, I saw the bills mounting from the birth of and care for our first child, and recognized that with a second child on the way I had better do something more to contribute to their support. So I took a job working as a technician in the pneumatic controls laboratory of AiResearch. Working graveyard shifts five and six days each week gave me a great boost in income, and I managed to make it through that year with grades that were slightly better than the previous year, so it all worked out for the best.
When the Shell recruiter, Don Limerick, came to the ASC. Placement Office, campus my appointment was at 1:00 PM and the room was tiny and poorly ventilated. As Don was explaining the Torrance Plant operations in his methodical monotone, I fell asleep somewhere in the Butadiene plant and woke up in Rubber, having missed Styrene completely. How I got hired as a result of that interview is beyond me, but I was grateful for the opportunity that was afforded me, and within a few weeks after my graduation from ASC., I reported to work at the Shell Chemical Torrance Plant as a chemist.
I could probably write a book about my career with Shell. It spanned a fascinating period in the history of that corporation, a period in which the company passed through many phases of organization and organizational philosophy, change was nearly always the order of the day. It was a very rewarding career, though as I look back on it now there is not much left in Shell to represent major periods in my career in a business sense. For example, I spent ten years learning to make synthetic rubber, but then had the unfortunate experience of leading the effort to close down Shell's synthetic rubber business and sell off the Torrance Plant where I had spent ten years of my career. My only other plant experience was as a Plant Manager for Shell's polypropylene plant at Woodbury, New Jersey, but some years after I left Woodbury, the plant was sold, and since then other Shell's polypropylene facilities at Norco, Louisiana and a joint venture with Union Carbide have all been sold and Shell is no longer in that business either! So the essence of my career that remains in some way is in the Head Office assignments that accounted for two thirds of my career.
Since my career with Shell was in various assignments, many of which were not very lengthy or of much interest to the most readers, I will simply list them with starting dates, and provide links to lengthy essays on some of the more interesting assignments:
June, 1956 - Chemist, Plant Analytical Laboratory, Torrance Plant
August, 1957 - Military Leave of Absence
August, 1959 - Chemist, Polymers Experimental Laboratory, Torrance Plant
October, 1962 - Group Leader, Polymers Experimental Laboratory, Torrance Plant
August, 1963 - Senior Technologist, Technological Department, Torrance Plant
January, 1964 - Group Leader, Polymers Experimental Laboratory, Torrance Plant
June, 1964 - Assistant Manger, Polymerization, Polymers Operations, Torrance Plant
August, 1965 - Manager, Polymers Department, Torrance Plant
December, 1966 - Staff Assistant, Chemical Staff Administration, HO, New York
December, 1968 - Planning Manager, Industrial Chemicals Manufacturing, New York
April, 1969 - Economics and Logistics Manager, Lubricants Department, Shell Oil Marketing, New York and Houston, Texas
August, 1971 - Special Assignment, Polymers Division, Shell Chemical, Houston, Texas
February, 1972 - Plant Manager, Woodbury Plant, Shell Chemical, New Jersey
August, 1975 - Manager, Plans and Analysis, Refining, Shell Oil Company, Houston
February, 1979 - Manager, Products Environmental Conservation, Shell Oil Company
June, 1992 - Manager, Products Health, Safety and Environmental, Shell Oil Company
December, 1992 - Retired
After my retirement, I was honored by the American Petroleum Institute (API) Refining
Department with a Certificate of Appreciation for my efforts as a member and chairman of
the Committee on Refinery Environmental Controls (CREC). I was particularly pleased with
this recognition, for since the Refining Department started this practice in 1949, there
had been only 112 other recipients of this certificate out of the many thousands of
participants in Refining Department committees over those years. Of the prior recipients,
I recognize only a few from Shell, but the list is a distinguished one, including as it
does, former Refinery Manager and R&D GM Spence Lehman, former Vice President John
Sheehan, Process Engineering Manger Curt Williams, Engineering Services Manger Russ
Nordstrom and my last boss, Vice President Ray Lopez who was honored at the same meeting
at which I was recognized. Only two former chairmen of CREC had received this recognition.
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Comments or suggestions are welcome: Tom Williams, trw@rice.edu