Following retirement from Texaco and the many years of working there, I could see in about three weeks that I was not going to be happy doing nothing, so I took another job. I went to work for SGS out of Deerfield, Texas; my territory covered the south half of Kansas, border to border. SGS worked with the World Bank in the process of loaning money to people in third world countries. The bank required inspections on site on behalf of the people who ordered a product. As we got an order, SGS would inspect for quality, as well as quantity, on products being loaded in shipping containers.
I worked a great deal with Rubbermaid down in Winfield, inspecting water bottles they were sending to the Philippines. I assumed the products were going to a reseller there.
A Cessna airplane, going to the Gold Coast in Africa, had to be checked. I needed to take pictures, verify serial numbers on the radios and all the equipment.
One of the oddest products I was sent to verify were cattle hides from packing plants in Dodge City ordered by a company in the Philippines. The hides had to be rejected if they had too many holes or were too large.
In Hutchinson, I reviewed stainless steel restaurant or food service equipment. A company in Parsons made oil tanks in sections, to be bolted together on site. My job was to inspect the sections and make sure they had the right number of parts before it was shipped to South America. A company in Peru needed machinery to manufacture chicken feed, so I inspected that equipment. Oil products in El Dorado needed examination as well.
These inspections were not just a simple glance; a great deal of precision and security went into the job. For example, I had to break open cases of whatever I was checking to make sure it met the required criteria. When a shipping container was being loaded with products, I’d have to lock the doors on it while the workers had a break for lunch so that nothing could be taken in or out until we were ready to get started again. When the container was loaded, it was sealed, and a report was written and sent.
It was also my responsibility to inspect the jet fuel to be loaded onto Air Force One if and when the President of the United States flew into Wichita to fuel up. I would order testing on a sample of the fuel on the truck. The truck would then be locked until the test results came back, before the plane could be filled with fuel. Fortunately, that never happened on my watch.
In July of 1993, we bought our place on the Lake of the Ozarks and moved here in September. That ended my work with SDS because I was out of the region they were covering. About six weeks after we moved to Missouri, I got a call from the man who was previously the Manager for Operations at Texaco, asking if I was interested in a job in Dallas writing training manuals for a new refinery to be built in Thailand. Pat and I went to Dallas and I interviewed with Caltex, owned by Chevron and Texaco, conducting operations overseas. I worked there about a year. My boss there, John Edge, was from the UK, living in southern Wales, and he had worked for British Petroleum as a captain on ship tankers hauling crude oil.
John’s wife Margret and Pat got along well, too. There were people from all over the world working together on this new refinery, from South Africa, Australia, the U.S., Canada, and other countries. After we had been in Dallas for a year, we got another company to help with writing the manuals, training material, and operating procedures. There were 15 or so writers who needed oversight and clarification. John was in charge of a tank farm and the marine terminal. I had never worked around a ship, so I had things to learn also. He went on to Thailand and we went to Houston for six months until that work was completed.
Although the company was unsure about whether I would go overseas, John wanted me. There were four of us from the El Dorado refinery, though I was the first to go to work for them. When we flew from Houston, we laid over for a couple of days in Hong Kong. When we landed and went downstairs to the main entrance, there were thousands of people, some holding signs with the name of the person or persons they were there to pick up. I felt very out of place among all the Chinese people. I was conscious of how it would feel to people from other countries to come to a city like New York and be surrounded by people of a different nationality.
As Pat and I did some touring in Hong Kong, one area was right next to the boundary with China. We got our picture taken with an elderly Chinese lady on one of our tourist stops where they sell knick knacks; Pat bought a brocade tablecloth that she gave to Tori. When we left Hong Kong, a man we spoke with was very concerned that Hong Kong would be handed back over to China in just a couple of years after we were there. We could tell he was concerned and almost frightened about the prospect.
