Sixty Years Ago

Sixty Years Ago

Sixty Years ago today on July 11, 1960, I walked into the offices of “California Texas Oil Corporation”, at 380 Madison Avenue, between 46^th and 47^th Streets, in New York City, to begin my first salaried, professional, engineering job.  The Process Engineering Department was in Room 1215, and being a newbie, I did not even rate a Dilbert-style cubicle.  My desk was in the “bullpen”, with those whom we then called “secretaries”.

I had a young family, had just completed my active military duty as an Army Signal Corps officer, and had just moved to Metuchen, New Jersey, in the New York City area.

When I first saw the name of the company, I thought “California wouldn’t be so bad, but I’m not so sure about Texas” (sic).  I soon learned that Caltex were an integrated international oil company who were a joint venture of Standard Oil of California and Texaco, and they had oil production, refining and marketing all over the world. I had just interviewed with the SOCAL Refinery in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, who had almost exactly the same Engineering structure as Caltex in NYC, but the international nature of Caltex attracted me.

It turns out that I spent more time in my nearly 30 years with Caltex at their Corporate headquarters in New York and Dallas, than overseas, but that’s just the way things went.  I did live in The Netherlands, Lebanon, Kenya. England, at various times.  I also travelled extensively throughout Europe, Pakistan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore.

By 1960, I was not new to working for a living.  I had been doing that, first with menial labor-intensive jobs in my early teens, to full time shifts in the Berkshire cotton mills while I was in high school, (before Warren Buffet bought them and took the name), to both technical-type and street-wise jobs while going to college in Boston. I can still emulate the accent and relate that I “pahked cahs at Bahston Gahden”.

I did just about every crappy job in the world in my teens, including back-breaking and dirty farm work, digging ditches, drilling and blasting ledges on construction, and several other forms of low wage, physical labor.  I was also relatively smart in my little high school class of 100+ kids, so I decided to get out of that little corner of the Berkshires, and do something more substantial.

We were not a wealthy family, by any means, so my first thought was the military and the GI bill, but my mother and Mr. Grosz, the principle of my high school convinced me, with appropriate scholarships, to go to college at Northeastern University in Boston.  Northeastern had a co-op program where I could defray part of the cost of going to college while gaining experience in my chosen field.

Even back then, and at a young age, I did a cost/benefit analysis of going to college and getting a degree versus working and earning for those 4 or 5 years.  I estimated that it would take me to nearly 30 years of age to break even, just on the basis of lost earnings.  I hesitate to do this sort of calculation in the present day, with colleges and the government gouging students and their families with almost “unrepayable” student loans, while expanding campus infrastructures to Olympian proportions.

I chose Chemical Engineering as a field of study because, at that time, the field paid the most.  Electrical Engineering was comparable, but I preferred Chemistry and Physics compared to even more advanced derivative math than Chemical Engineering required.

I didn’t intend to write quite as much, but I’ll include the above in the autobiography that I’m sporadically working on.

Ray Gruszecki

July 11, 2020