28 CTI-Morgan
Leesona, CTI-Morgan
I applied at the Leesona company in 1970 and was hired as a machine operator in the Bore-matic department to work in a group numbering about six. Situated near TF Green airport in Warwick RI on Strawberry Field Road, with an immense parking lot, they made textile-weaving machines with their high-speed shuttles, the company’s specialty. Leesona was a union shop, so all the hourly people, of which I was one, were obliged to become members of the AFL-CIO and had dues deducted from our weekly paychecks. We were on a “group incentive” plan, meaning that regardless of an individual’s performance, the employees were all paid according to the combined average output of their group; though this plan had the plus of rewarding those less well or able or proficient, if an operator was well, learned or skilled, he was de-incentivized to excel, so I disliked it, as a few lazy employees used their time in the bathroom or reading the newspaper, and the group was compelled to carry them. Each employee was paid a different rate according to whether he was getting tools, setting up his machine (we had two kinds, each with one boring head or two), or trucking parts, or cleaning up the shop; it was very complicated, and a roomful of union stewards (clerks) kept track of it all; also each employee was paid according to his seniority. We usually worked on cast iron or aluminum parts or housings.
After training briefly on the 7:30-3:00 day shift, because of my newer seniority I was changed to the (more highly paid) night shifts – 2nd shift was 3:15-11:00 or 3rd 10:45-7:15 – the overlap supposedly allowed information transfer for continuity, and time for washing up. We had a half hour for lunch, which most people took in lunchboxes. While on days I car-pooled with another employee who had also had a shop at his home and sold used things there; Ginny and I bought a stove and some furniture from him. A few years later he died in the hospital from colon cancer.
In my spare time I roamed the large building; once I made from scrap a holder for my small hex key tools. On one of these forays I (re)met a man I knew from WBCA. I stayed at Leesona through the birth of our first son, Joseph, when I was hired at CTI.
I began what became a long career at Carbon Technology, Incorporated (CTI) through the encouragement and sponsorship of a friend who had just started working there as plant manager of this fairly new family-owned manufacturing company, which made and sold seal rings, bearings, vanes, and other small mechanical parts from carbon, which they made themselves using a sophisticated proprietary process and expensive specialty machines. Our two leaders were previously with premier US carbon companies. My original friend later left, but I found several other friends in the company.
We sold not our own designed products, but produced customer-designed parts, made in our own proprietary manufactured materials (there were a few basic recipes, but several processing options, and hence many final “sales grades”); our customers were companies who made equipment for a variety of industries; we made and sold these parts to order, either in a “job shop” or in a “blanket” fashion, so that we typically had in process at any given time thousands of different parts for hundreds of customers. Our manufacturing and shipping lead-time was from a few days to several weeks, depending on availability, complexity, and customer need; we kept a supply of our basic manufactured carbon materials to make these from, and used “blank” shapes where quantity and other factors permitted.
I lived by the philosophy that quality is the province of the individual producer, and one cannot be responsible for the work of another, but each person must be responsible for his own work. I changed our company from its practice of having a quality “police force” group of “inspectors” who alone had the responsibility of quality, to the revolutionary practice that each person inspects his own product. Thus I eliminated our plethora of roving general-purpose inspectors and adopted a system of written within-manufacturing “first piece” checks to authorize production. One or two quality department “final inspectors” who supposedly verified quality (but really documented it), typically by “lay-out” blueprints or sampling inspection written on inspection sheets, for those customers who required it, typically aircraft, government or automotive customers. In some cases we used personnel in the manufacturing department to fully document their own products, providing cradle-to-grave ownership, but in most cases we simply eliminated inspectors in the quality department, taking it “on faith” that quality would be there.
I had another philosophy I developed over time and implemented at CTI: every step in any process is the “customer” of the preceding step and the “supplier” of the next; this relationship I summed up in the saying “everybody’s someone’s inspector sometime”, to paraphrase a popular song.
I implemented these philosophies at CTI, and they worked: customer feedback of our quality performance soared, and was generally outstanding, with less than 0.1% non-conformance; the more advanced customers had us in a “ship to stock” status.
Hired as “Quality Assurance Engineer”, I was the only person in a salaried position who was never promoted (though my job titles and job responsibilities changed many times as the company expanded and evolved). Originally in Rumford RI (a factory village in East Providence) and just moved to its new plant in rural Exeter, CTI had about 30 employees and $12M sales when I joined, and grew to about 150 employees and $40M sales at its peak. We expanded the company twice, doubling our floor space each time.
Though CTI was a “job shop”, several of our processes ran around the clock, including preparation of our “flour” (moldable carbon powder), pressing, furnacing, and resin impregnation. Day shift started 7:30; lunch time was 11:25-12:00 (included 5 minutes for wash-up), with two 15-minute breaks 9:45-10:00 and 2:00-2:15; day ended 4:25 (again, 5 minutes wash time). All this was for hourly workers; salaried were expected to stay as long as it took (working for free, of course).
In its early days CTI had an extraordinarily high population of Christians, or at least people sympathetic to the church. The company’s founder, though involved with the Methodist church in his town of East Greenwich, was by no means evangelical or responsible for recruiting Christians. CTI had the blessing, while our founder lived, of a significant number of Christian workers, including the man who invited me, and another he called, a former Marine with two tours in Viet Nam. This latter man and I were friends, and he was a fitness nut, so as he and his family lived near us, he and I used to ride our bicycles to and from work; this was a distance of 8 ½ or 10 miles each way, depending on our route. We also often walked or ran (jogged) out the Yawgoo Valley Road during our half-hour lunch time, starting at 11:25, which practice I and a few others continued after this friend moved to NH a few years later, a total distance of 2-4 miles, depending on our time and condition. Most days several employees, led by this man (fitness nut, remember?) played an impromptu game of touch football at lunch and afternoon break, first on the front lawn, where were our flagpole and two septic tanks; later in the side yard, beside the fire pond. This man was supervisor of our material processing area; in this capacity he published for a couple of years the weekly “CTI Rooster” (roster) listing the employees scheduled to work next week-end; in those early days, even salaried employees were expected to be in the plant on Saturday (working for free, of course) – I took a few such turns. A naturally charismatic evangelist from QBC, he led a few employees to follow the Lord, and briefly ran a prayer time during lunch.
We periodically replaced the “muffle” (liner pipe) in our furnaces (ultimately five); these were ¼” thick Stainless Steel, long and very heavy, welded in place, and to replace one was a big deal. First the long furnace was dismantled, then the full-length muffle was lifted by chain hoists, laid beside its furnace, then a contracted welder came with his electric welding truck, cut off the burnt-through old section, and welded on a new section, made before in his CT shop and sent ahead. One time a hoisting chain slipped, and the muffle fell, pinching off the end of my friend’s thumb. He was rushed in immediate, intense pain to the hospital, where his shortened thumb was sewed up, and he missed several weeks of work (at full pay, through the fear-driven generosity of our boss). After a few years at CTI, he rejoined the Marines and moved to NH.
Another Christian friend was the Production Control manager, and he played in our football games, and went with me once to get a Volvo engine at a junk-yard. He and his wife owned a St Bernard at their rented home on School Street, where Ginny and I were their dinner guests once; he ultimately left CTI, after he bought a new house in rural Shannock RI.
Flocks of wild pigeons used to frequent the electric wires along South County Trail in front of our building (as well as seagulls, since our place was the site of a former shellfish company, and the birds never forgot). Once I caught a beautiful white dove that was unable to fly, and nursed it back to health at our home. At length it recovered and flew away.
The company had an asphalt-lined pond for fire-fighting, and a nearby outbuilding which housed a Diesel pump and piping for the system. Once (I hate the cold and snow of winter) I went ice skating alone on the pond at lunch time. At other times in summer I took my lunch box to the side field above and near the pond. There once near where I was I was mesmerized by a curious struggle between a garter snake and a large bullfrog: the snake, thinking to make an easy meal of the frog, began to swallow a hind leg, but was stumped when it reached the frog’s crotch and the other hind leg; after what seemed a long time, the snake gave up, and the frog escaped, though mangled, and hopped away.
Occasionally my boss, CTI’s founder and president, took me with him on trips to visit customers; once we went (he drove us in his comfortable Ford LTD) to Baltimore, where a leader dubbed CTI “the gods of the carbon world”. Often he would take me for lunch to a neighboring restaurant, which practice was continued by his successor. One time we (me, Ginny and our baby son Joseph) were invited, along with other CTI leaders, to his nice house in East Greenwich, where our president announced the promotion of his protégé (who later became president) to the title of General Manager.
During my years at CTI, I was instrumental in developing several unique materials and processes. We made a graphite grade with high temperature capability and strength properties (aircraft engine makers loved this); we alone in the world had a continuous mixing process to make mechanical carbon; we were best in molded to size technology through our powder control, tool design, press selection and operation, furnacing and impregnation (both resins and inorganic) – we worked hard and smart and simply couldn’t be beat! I became a member of Morgan’s “Global Technology Group”, set up by my boss, CTI’s president while he was still influential; we usually met in OH, at the luxurious offices of the former Union Carbide company.
After several years, this highly profitable (for a maker of primary carbon materials) company was sold (the original owners had died) to publicly held Morgan Crucible, and an era of lower profits began. This English holding company bought several carbon companies in the US, under the leadership of our former much lower margin rival, and proceeded to “rationalize” the proprietary product and processes of each, with financial guidance from Raleigh NC, where carbon brushes (a similar, related product) were made. CTI was deemed a “center of excellence” and became the supplier of carbon blank materials at or below cost to other Morgan companies world-wide. At the same time we were forced to sell molded-to-size parts (in which niche we were best in the world) at prices far below their worth.
Our dominating leader retired, and our former rival began to phase CTI out, and became the flagship of the group of US carbon companies under the Morgan aegis. Because I didn’t fit their mold, I was earmarked for oblivion in 2002, and often worked very late just to prove myself. Two years later, it was decreed that CTI would be closed for economic reasons (go figure), with a target closing date to cease production end April 2006 (happened) and to close the doors end June (went on for several months), but since my debilitating illness was apparent, though I had a letter saying that I would be kept through June, I was terminated with two weeks’ notice in April, by a phone call from my boss in PA; even then, I had to request a slightly better severance (health care and pay through June), in return for which I had to sign a release letter.
I heard later that the company’s plan to enlarge their Mexico operation to handle CTI’s large submersed electric motor business, which had gone very smoothly under CTI, was having complaints of quality and delivery (to say nothing of much higher shipping costs, and hand-holding travel), and they might lose the business; as well as mold-to-size parts – Oh well; as my mother said, If you can’t listen, you can feel”!