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Born 1932 in NYC, started MIT in course XV in 1950, took out 1951/52 at West Point, in 1954/56 the army, graduated in 1957. Was with Procter and Gamble Manufacturing in the US and Europe for entire career, retired in '89. Married (Lois), currently living in Cincinnati; four children (one an MIT alum), three grandchildren.
In the first week after graduation Lois and I got married, took our honeymoon (in Canada), moved to New jersey, bought a car (TR-3), and I started my first job, in production supervision, at Procter and Gamble's NYC plant; after that, the pace picked up ´; -]. Four and a half years and two children later, P&G posted us to Europe.
My degree was a BS in course XV and my entire career was in manufacturing management, all of it with Procter and Gamble. I started work in P&G's Staten Island factory in June 1957 as foreman in the detergent-making department (round the clock, shifts changing every week = chronic jet lag!), at last making it to department manager (day work!), in which capacity I was, in November 1961, transferred to P&G's plant in Belgium (in Malines, just North of Brussels), where the atmosphere was as sweet as the NY plant's had been tough. A year and a half later, I was posted to Germany in that same capacity for the start-up of P&G operations in that country. The factory was on a green-field site in Worms, a rural town famed for Luther and Liebfraumilch, and far, far from corporate headquarters. The freedom was heavenly, and when the startup proved successful, I was given responsibility for the plant's production and warehousing operations. The business grew, demanding more bureaucracy, and in 1967 I was moved out of the warm camaraderie of plant operations to the alas more formal company headquarters near Frankfurt, there to be Manufacturing's liaison with surrounding company functions (Marketing, R&D, Buying, Finance, manufacturing in other P&G subsidiaries), coordinating German production scheduling and administering manufacturing capacity and capital planning. In 1970 I was transferred to P&G's European headquarters in Brussels to perform these same functions for the European division.
In January 1978 I was transferred to corporate headquarters in Cincinnati, again to do manufacturing liaison and coordination, this time for paper products (primarily disposable diapers: Pampers and Luvs) for the company's international businesses. The logistics of moving massive amounts of such light, bulky goods around the globe proved formidable - at one time we were the biggest single shipper of sea-vans on both oceans - and the company moved rapidly to build on-the-ground capacity in each individual market, eventually obviating the need for international manufacturing liaison. And for me.
In 1983 I was gathered up with half a dozen similar white elephants, people whose current functions had evaporated but who were too senior to fire and too mavericky to be inserted atop an innocently bystanding part of the business, and told to go off and, er, ah.... yes! - "invent the factory of the future!". We pondered and mulled and finally worked out that first we needed to know the business strategies of the individual categories of products to be manufactured. We discovered that not only did we not know what they were; neither did anyone else in the company. Forget factory design; we took off on what proved to be the most intense learning period of my life, and the most exciting segment of my career, as our group set out to find out just what a "strategy" was, then work out how to help business teams construct one, and finally, learn how to help work groups understand the systems in which they were immersed, and, finally, master them. It was a sort of organizational psychiatry and profoundly satisfying, but I must admit that it was coincident with my retirement in 1989 that P&G stock took off.
I married Lois Gardner, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, in Lenox, Massachusetts, in June 1957. Our offspring consist of a daughter, Susan, born in 1958, and three sons, Arthur, Richard and Peter, born 1960, '63 and '64.
After graduating from the University of Cincinnati, Sue made her circuitous way finally into the Human Resources department of GE's plastics plant in the Netherlands where she met, and in 1995 married, Jan Willem van der Werff, who runs the Lexan operation there. They have two boys.
Arthur graduated from MIT as a real (unlike his daddy) engineer (mechanical) and also went with P&G. He's based in Cincinnati but operates in other parts of the world most of the time (he's currently commuting between an equipment fabricator in Switzerland and a P&G factory in China).
Sue and Arthur were both born in the US; but Richard joined us in Brussels, and Peter in Heidelberg. After graduating from Tufts, Richard too went with P&G, eventually becoming marketing manager of the company's subsidiary in Egypt, where in 1994 he met and married Ishraq (think Nefretiti), who was with Saatchi & Saatchi in Cairo. Richard subsequently left P&G and is now General Manager of Benckiser's (a German consumer-goods company) Israeli subsidiary in Tel Aviv. They have a son, who will soon have a sister.
Peter became enamored of computers in his mid-teens, and still is. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon in Applied Math, he continued for some years to work in the university's computer department, but is now with a private software (networking) company in Pittsburgh. He recently became again enamored, this time of something softer and more complicated than computers, and is to marry Lisa this summer.
While Lois and I are both from New York (that was) and much admire some other parts of the world, we've settled in Cincinnati (Mark Twain said he wanted to be in Cincinnati when the world ends, as everything here happens ten years later). We sometimes yearn for the liveliness of favorite places such as crisp New England, charming Brussels, sumptuous southern France, but we'd built a pleasant life here during my final working years, and chose to remain after my retirement. At first I did a bit of consulting, but then as I wound down from the compulsions of a career-oriented life, it dawned on me that I didn't have to put up with this aggravation. We now spend our time travelling (it helps to have far-flung children!), gently socializing, doing inconsequential but enjoyable domestic projects (eg gardening), playing tennis, and indulging an interest in genealogy.
LIFE HIGHLIGHTS
There were two experiences of my adult life that I'd regard as formative above all others. One was having worked and lived for sixteen years in Europe. We discovered it is a very good deal indeed to possess the cultural ease that comes of being an American, while at the same time enjoying the many elegances of Europe, elegances which are achieved by folks there having been brought up constrained to do things only the Right Way. Importantly, moving about in Europe allowed our children to make the liberating discovery early in their lives that there can indeed be more then one Right Way of doing things.
The other experience was the intense learning I went through during the final years of my career, about how the world - and not just its machines - works; about human behavior and relationships, and in the process, about myself.