I quit high school at eleventh grade and then went to work forking can in this Nestlé’s milk plant.

They had a fork about that long and you’d pile it full of – the cans were in a railroad car. You’d just stick this fork in there and you’d have maybe 100 or 150 cans and you put them on a conveyor. It went up and round and through and in and through the machines and it filled up with milk.

Then after it was filled with milk they had another machine there that put a drop of solder on it and it sealed the hole and they grabbed those cans and they rolled them. They had a machine there that rolled them, it wrapped around. But that’s about as hard a work as I done! (Laughs)

After that I came to Findlay and started hauling stone for the National Lime and Stone, which is still in business. The only stone quarry here in Findlay now, and from then I worked there till…till 1950 I went in the service. Got out on a medical.

I went to work at Garwood after I got out of the service. I worked over there for 19 years. So I went in there in the fall of ’50 and I worked till the spring of ’70.

There was this guy named Oroville Armacost. When we started in and they said, “Don’t trust that guy,” okay?

He worked at Garwood at that time, and I went in there as a storekeeper. I worked, let’s see, I worked there about 14 years and I was over the salvage department.

And my boss, he had quit and had left it all up to me. So I took care of the storage yard for different parts that could be stored outside.

This was all over there to that Garwood building and the guy would come out and take inventory and I had my desk sitting out there. I kept parts records at the cabinet there with drawers in it and he’d sit out there and go through my records.

He used to say, “It’s no use me going down there in the hot sun and checking the parts when I can sit here in this cool building,” so he sat there with the doors open and the wind blew through and he’d sit there and go through my records and take inventory! (Laughs)

So I did that work. See, I worked there 19 and a half years. Then the last five years I worked there, five or six, they transferred me up into the office. Well, before that though I was a dispatcher for the parts department. I would go round to get parts for the repair orders. And I did that. I worked that for, I don’t know, three or four years?

Then they shut me up in the office. So I worked up in the office as a claims adjuster for five years and all my bosses all died and I guess there’s only – well, I worked out the engineering department really. There’s two…two engineers left here in Findlay and one in Texas. The rest of them are all dead.

I retired in ‘93.

From the State, went there in ’83 and retired in ’93. So when Garwood; they merged with an outfit out of California they closed this place up over here.

Then in 1970 they had a big sale and a lawyer that was here in town, he bought the building – they call it Saucer Steel Company now. They have steel; they sell steel over there and they have offices and a nut and bolt shop up in front of it, but the old building is still open. They are still doing business there.

But not as tractor and ditcher. They used to build ditching machines and stone spreaders and they used to build cranes for government; rubber tire cranes, but that’s all out.