While I was working at the University of California, I also worked in the shipyards in Oakland. I also worked in Alameda for a while. There, I worked in the dry dock.

One day, a friend of mine asked me why I didn’t get out of there.

I said: “where would I go?”

He said: “why don’t you go up to the lab?”

I did, and about two weeks later they called me. That was a helluva job. They had a good pension, and it was a really good work because it was varied. It wasn’t all the same, as when I worked at Peterbilt. That was a lousy place to work, because I did the same thing day in and day out

Peterbilt was always trying to reduce the weight of their trucks, because different counties had different loading regulations. Peterbilt made an aluminum truck, and I welded the whole damned thing. That was on my resume. That was the first all aluminum truck on the Pacific coast. That achievement helped me quite a bit.

When I went to the university my boss asked me if I could do heliarc welding. I told him that I had done tons of it. I also got into burning. You see, you can’t cut stainless steel with an acetylene torch. We had to use plasma arc. I cut a lot of stainless

I’m really lucky. I got some breaks, and I took advantage of them.

When I got to the university for example I could see the need for blueprint reading. So I went to night school.