BOOMER by Tim Engel (smallest ebook reader txt) 📕

to myself, ‘oh, that’s OK, I lift weights.’ Eating high fat meals, high carb meals, high sugar, low fiber meals followed up with scads of ice cream or cake or pie. Yes. That was the recipe for my 44 inch waist and 308 lbs peak weight.
As kids we used to get some good food. Mom and Dad had good jobs. Mom worked at the grocery store as a meat wrapper, so we never wanted for good food. Sometimes Mom was able to take advantage of good meats that had been marked down. So we always had steaks, roasts, and good ground meat. But the stuff I fell in love with was the chips, ice cream, cookies, fudge, cakes, and candy. I had a sweet tooth. I think Tom did too, but he was blessed with perfect teeth. My first visit to the Dentist with Grandma Warner resulted in 9 cavities in that little head. 9!? Sheesh. I guess all that candy did it’s damage. So all of my poor eating habits resulted in me adding extra weight and getting out of shape.
As a teenager, when I went out for football, I lost the weight. They worked it off us. I wish I had stuck with that plan, but fell back on my old ways, got lazy and ate wrong resulting in putting a lot of weight on my 6’4” frame. Weight Watchers, cardio, fat burn were helping me to get on track. I was pleased with my progress, but was beginning to stagnate. I had plateaued. What came next was a challenge at work. Well, at the Fitness Center – they had a weight loss challenge. I figured this was just what I needed to get me rolling again! Like Mr B said – with a little more push, youll really be rolling! So I signed up for the challenge.
Even though I had already lost a good chunk, I still had a ways to go. So this would be perfect timing. I decided that what I needed was to kick my butt harder – more cardio and more lifting. And tighten up a bit more on the diet. So I set out to do so. More cardio. I felt I was a bit stagnant with the bike, so I tried the stairmaster. Wow! Quite a challenge. The first time was tough! I was breathless. But I kept it up and got to where I could go an hour, sometimes 75 minutes on the stairs. In doing this, I was burning between 600 and 800 calories! Equivalent to a meal! That and sticking pretty closely to the weight watcher diet of 34 points I saw more weight melting off. At the end of the 12 or so weeks, we weighed in and had the results. I had lost another 30 lbs and came in 3rd overall for men in the contest. I was proud of this accomplishment. And I was close to my ultimate goal of reaching 230 lbs. A few weeks later I reached that goal and my total weight loss from the high point was 75 lbs!
Some people told me I had lost too much weight. I told them not to worry; I hadn’t lost that much. One lady at work gave me a new nick name ‘waist line’. I got a lot of compliments and appreciated them. I had an opportunity to talk about spin class, weight watchers, hard work, and perseverance. I saw many show up at the gym who had never been there before. I felt proud to set an example. To be like my family was to me. It had come later in life but still felt great. And I was glad that I had survived my heavy weight. Not to mention smoking!
McDonnell Douglas
I had hired into McDonnell Douglas in 1979. I didn’t think I would follow Dad into the aerspace business. He had worked there at Douglas for 28 years now. But my first wife Sidney and I had moved into some apartments in Bellflower right near Woodruff and Artesia. I worked at Amen’s market – Super A I believe it was called. I met a friend and his wife. His name was David. Dave worked in a systems department at Douglas Aircraft. He was helping to set up a new Manufacturing Execution System (PRIMS – Product Requirement Information Management System). He told me that they were hiring. I told him that my Dad worked there. He said well, hey – you might want to talk to him…so I called Dad. He talked to a friend down the hall who said hey, have the kid come in and apply. Since he has his AA degree, that’s a step up. Yeah, I did have an AA degree.
So I gave Dad my application and he took it in to Ralph Mitchell. ‘Mitch’ as he was affectionately known by his team. This group of people were Schedulers. They scheduled parts, tools, kits, and various other assemblies for airlines. For spares support. I came in and had an interview with Mitch. I think it went pretty well. I tried to be on my best behavior and was as professional as possible. Mitch seemed like a good guy. H e warned me that if I did get hired, that it was partly because of my Dad and his reputation and that it was important to work hard and build on that reputation. I told him that I understood and would do my best. I was hired.
Wow! A job at McDonnell Douglas! Working right down the hall from my Dad! I was super blessed! I remember how excited Sid was for me. She thought this would be a good change to move from the grocery business to aerospace. I had been in the grocery business because of the example and help from Mom and Pop, my Step-Dad. Pop was Tim Klasey. Another man from the great generation who also fought in WWII. While Dad was in the Pacific fighting the Japanese, Pop was in Europe involved in the battle of the bulge, fighting the Nazis.
My first days at McDD were eye opening! I got to see the assembly of DC-9s, DC-10s, and the throngs of people who worked here….thousands upon thousands. When I hired in in 1979, they were in the midst of a hiring drive and I believe the employment had peaked at around 30,000. We were part of schedules and were primarily working with spares schedules. Spare parts. Sometimes the airlines needed a part quickly and the order would come through us if we didn’t have the parts in stock. In that case we would figure a quick schedule. If the airplane was actually grounded for the part, we would figure a day or two to cut the metal and then fabricate the part.
When working a spares order we had a CMSR (commercial/military spares order). This form had triplicate carbon copies. At the top was a part number and a quantity. Also there was a job serial number for tracking and the customer information ( if it was an actual recent order from a customer). The first thing we would do is pull the FO (Fabrication Order) or AO (Assembly Order) that normally built the part. At this time, this paper work was not yet in a computer, but was a hard copy kept in the AO/FO files. We would go downstairs and write up a request on a card and give it to the ‘girls’ in the files to pull for us. We could either leave the form there or ask them to pull them right then if the job was ‘hot’ enough.
The AO/FO would have tooling and material information. This was key to our scheduling job as we had to be sure the material and tooling were available to build the parts / assemblies. We could also call the shop floor and check with the ‘control booths’ which housed the parts throughout the shop floor and see if they had parts in stock to fill the order request. Especially if it was a hot priority (AOG = aircraft on the ground), or 1A which was also hot or need to fill within 2 weeks.
AOs and FOs were created by the planning department. My Dad worked in Planning – but worked primarily Production Planning. That is he supported the folks who built the airplanes moving down the assembly line. For spares we worked with Spares Planning. They were located nearby and we would have normall back and forth traffice for questions about their ‘paper’. The FO would usually call out a material like aluminum sheet stock or steel tubing which would be cut to a certain size. Then the material would be moved to the next station to be stamped, formed, trimmed, heat treated, machined, or various other fabrication operation which would then go on to the various other operations until they were completed.
I was trained when I originally joined the department by “JB”. JB Spenz was very confident in his job. He was also transparent in his training. In that, I mean he revealed everything he knew to me so that I felt confident in the job I was doing. He had been in Spares working for Mitch for about 2 years at this time and had about 10 years in the company. JB was careful to teach me about material, parts, tools, wait, move, and queue times. He taught me about the various systems for checking for parts, tools, and materiel availability. I found it all fascinating and had a pretty good memory so it came to me pretty quickly. Within a short time I had been promoted to a salaried position and with it had more responsibility. I was given the job of quoting an scheduling kits. Kits were collections of fabricated parts and assemblies, fasteners, supplier parts, etc. to modify an aircraft. Usually these were fairly small mod kits for adding an antenna, or some palletized seats. But sometimes the kits were large and had hundreds of parts. One of these was the kit for modifying an entire DC-10 to 10 abreast seating. This kit was huge! And the mistake I made was twofold:
1 – I didn’t pay attention to the ‘need’ date.
2 – I didn’t schedule it in accordance with work order #xyz123.
Big oops. Embarrassing oops. I got a call 2 weeks later asking where the kit was. And I responded huh? It’s scheduled for next October. Well, turns out next October was about 6 months later than Product Support wanted it for our Customer. What ensued was meetings with my boss, his boss, Product Supports’ boss, etc. etc. Well, I think you get the picture. What I learned out of all of this is to pay attention to the details. Because sometimes that is very necessary information. And I also learned that it’s a strength to ask for help. When