admiralkit

"Peanut butter. Just keep eating peanut butter. There's good health in eating peanut butter."

He's also a big fan of eating extremely slowly. As he has said before, "Time spent eating doesn't count against time spent living, so the slower you eat the longer you live."

"My first one was a Liberty Magazine route. I'd usually make about $2 per week if I sold 150 magazines. Had some special customers, like Homer at the Stude[baker] garage. There was a house that I walked by with some girls on the porch, and they asked what I was selling. I told 'em it was magazines. They said come up on the porch and wait a bit - they were right by the train tracks. The train would come in and have to wait 20 minutes for another train to pass, so at least 4 guys would jump off the train and the girls would make them buy a magazine before they went into the house. The cat house was near the top of my delivery list for the day every day after that!

I worked at Celeryville after that in Jr. High. There were the Krugers and the people that came from Holland, and they loved that black peat ground where they could plant celery. They would pay you ten cents to plant a row, or a big bunch of celery. If I did two or three rows (an hour and a half per row), I would usually take the celery and sell it to relatives or friends (and once to Bishop Brown!) - you could get 35 cents for a bunch of celery if you marketed it right.

In high school, I got a job at Shockler Meyer's clothing store. I worked four hours a day after school every day and 12 hours a day in high school. Then I got a job at the [local paper] to write up the school news - I got $4/week and filled a whole bunch of space talking about every kid at school. Old editor Gosshorn thought it was great because he sold more papers. Then I worked at the old North Electric factory inspecting relays - $0.25/hour yielding about $10/week.

When I got back from the war, I started a sign company with some of my bonus money from the war. Illumilite Displays were something I developed using 3M reflectorized paints - I worked with the National Lead Company in partnership with Dutch Boy Paints and would put up signs that would reflect headlights all over the state of Ohio. The sales were easy, but the problem was finding spaces that were close enough to the highways [ed.: pre-Interstate days] that would catch the headlights and reflect back at the drivers.

While I was still doing Illumilite, I had two brothers and my oldest brother Paul was a machinist who knew how to run the automatic lathes. He and a couple friends bought, I think, 6 rather old Brown & Sharp single spindle lathes. They seemed to be doing good, at one point, I think after the Korean War finished, they had some bills and needed to borrow $2500. I said I don't have it to loan to you, but I'll cosign a loan at the bank. They were supposed to pay $50/month for two years or something like that, and after about 3 or 4 months I get a call from the bank and they say, "Hey, we ain't getting no payments!" I go to see what's wrong, and my one brother was in debt and he was going to have to go bankrupt. It turned out that Paul would work on Monday, but by Tuesday he would take the brass chips from the lathes down to the junk yard for scrap money, and that was enough for beer for two days so he wouldn't come back to work until Thursday, so the bills weren't getting paid.

As the Illumilite displays were getting displaced as the Interstate took hold, I studied up on machining and quite a few people in town needed to buy parts. There was a spark plug company that needed to buy a shell to make the spark plug out of and a brass nut to go on top, and I got orders from Trojan Spark Plug, the Galion Iron Works for the ball joints they needed to weld to their Graters, and the dump body company Hercules all needed different parts for their hydraulic parts, and it occurred to me that whatever we could make they would buy, as long as we were competitive. So we started making parts for all of those companies, and we found out that if we had automatic spinning lathes, then we could start bidding on military parts as well. We took an order around 1956 that was for parts usually for Picatinny Development Grounds in New Jersey, called the Picatinny Arsenal. There were 7 different parts that went into the front-end of a 20mm fuse [a type of bullet].

I used to shoot something similar, but those were single-barrel machine guns that could fire about 1,000 minutes. These bullets were for a new invention by General Electric called the 6-barrel gatling gun. We ended up making the first experimental 400,000 round run at 50,000 rounds per month. They soon decided to put this gun on all of the airplanes and the helicopters and even the ships from the Navy. We were nimble enough to selectively gamble on buying new machinery with the latest threading and machining at the same time so that by 1966/67/68 from 40 cents per set for the fuse parts to down to 16 cents a round, and then began furnishing them with empty projectiles for their loading plants.

We had two plants, one in north central Ohio and one in southern California, and were their best low-cost producer of parts for their 20mm cannon rounds. Fuses, cases, links. We had value engineering changes to reduce their costs and eventually merged with companies in St. Louis and Florida. We were then known as Valentec International, where Valentec stood for Value Engineering Technologies. We started doing business with companies in Europe with NATO. In 1984 we were attractive to the conglomerate company out of Connecticut, Insilco (International Silver Company) and they made an offer to buy the company that couldn't be refused. I worked with them for a couple more years before I hit 65, and by their rules I had to retire at which point I left the company.

Since then, I continue to be active in several family companies. In 1985, the government was selling off a large warehouse that they weren't using anymore that I partnered with another family to purchase. [He remembers a lot of the details, but for privacy reasons I'm filtering them out here]. We've rented the building for some 30 years to a tire company. We also purchased and have run a farm in 1967, and invested in other family businesses."

He continues on with details about the family history that I'm not going to detail here.

Edit: added some paragraph breaks to make it easier to read.

"Well, they're gradually moving to drone warfare. Makes it a little simpler than having all of them people up in the air. Airpower is what won World War II, but it isn't the same now. It's a changing world. And with the instant replay, it's all on CNN and HLN, it's probably a less dangerous world but we learn whatever's going on so quickly we can probably reduce conflicts among big powers, but could possibly increase the number of overall conflicts."

On another war the scale of WWII - "Not on this planet."

On the Great Depression: "It probably was a healthy thing. I was fortunate to be in a family that had a small farm, a blind horse, and Uncle Milty who knew what needed to be done first. 'Get the corn in before the 10th of May!' For a young kid growing up to be able to help, Uncle Mitly couldn't see well and the horse was blind so it was my job to make sure the horse was planting the corn rows straight.

You learned how to take care of the blind horse, and then you went to town to help Uncle Milty make it home. He'd get his old age pension check, go to the penny store and buy new long underwear that he'd wear year-round, and some new farm shirts and overalls. Then he would get a haircut and a shave. Then after '33, Prohibition was over. I'd wait with the blind horse and he'd go into the saloon, and after a while I'd have to go in after him.

The blind horse knew the way home. It was brick highway #19 that went to Bucyrus, but she knew just when to get off the highway to get home. She could bring him home herself, but if he was in there too long someone else would have to get into the stall to get the harness off. Every kid should have a blind horse and an Uncle Milty to learn from."

Sorry, he's kind of in story telling mode at the moment. I've not heard some of this stuff myself, so I'm not interrupting him too much.