Experience in the Mylar Operation - I worked in the Mylar R&D laboratory four years (1960-1964), and was involved as a research supervisor in several successful programs resulting in new varieties of film as well as some new process technology subsequently commercialized in the Mylar plants. Scientists I worked closely with included Mike Karickhoff, Howard Davies, and Carl Heffelfinger. Mike and Howie worked under me on new product development programs. Carl was an experienced scientist, a few years older than me, who'd spent his career in the Mylar business and provided me with a great deal of valuable technical background. We all became good friends. Mike left Du Pont some years later and had a career with Standard Oil of Indiana, while Howie and Carl spent their entire careers in Du Pont. Howie eventually became technical superintendent of the Florence, S.C., Mylar plant, while Carl stayed in Circleville, where he became known as "Mr. Mylar" and was recognized for his expertise in polyester films by being named Research Fellow. I've always felt that the products which came out of these early programs more than justified my lifetime earnings.

Next I spent a year as process supervisor in the Circleville plant, which gave me a more intimate knowledge of manufacturing processes and procedures. It also provided a better understanding of the psychology of Du Pont production supervision and management, who were always much more concerned with "quantity" (i.e., getting product shipped to customers) than "quality" (i.e., making sure product worked well when customers used it). I'm sure this was because they were evaluated individually much more on monthly costs and production volumes than on product quality, despite the fact that, in the long term, quality would undoubtedly have a greater effect on sales growth and earnings. In all the Du Pont businesses I was involved with, the balance in Manufacturing always seemed heavily weighted in favor of "getting the product shipped" even if it might have a few quality problems. Over the years, I feel this made us unnecessarily vulnerable to competition, though it may have helped near term earnings. This is an good example of the short term thinking which seemed to pervade Du Pont (and probably most other U.S. corporations) at the time, driven by the need for managers to achieve good track records (i.e., "to look good") early in new assignments in order to receive high ratings and be promoted - the holy grail of ambitious people.

While still in the R&D group, I was involved for about a year in a unique cooperative program with IBM at Poughkeepsie, NY, when we attempted to provide suitable film base for a high information density metal plated magnetic tape they were trying to produce at Poughkeepsie. (Their tape semiworks was in a building which the IBM people referred to as the "pickle works." IBM had actually purchased an abandoned pickle factory and converted it to a research laboratory during their expansion after World War II. I have recently read that this same building once housed IBM's first semiconductor laboratory.) I was the primary coordinator for Du Pont. This program required several visits to Poughkeepsie, and provided interesting insights into magnetic recording technology and base film requirements, partly because IBM gave us almost unlimited access to their operation, which was in serious trouble (and subsequently failed). I worked closely with Chuck Holcomb of Circleville, a very capable process engineer, during this program. Chuck later worked with me in the magnetic tape program, and finally became a senior engineer in the Brevard, N.C., laboratory. We also became involved in a cooperative program with RCA at Camden, NJ. They had special tape needs associated with in-flight recorders for the Mercury space program. Film Department's general manager, Donald Carpenter, who was feeling the heat from corporate management because of falling cellophane earnings and the high development costs of several new programs, decided to take a direct hand, and initiated both these programs with his opposite numbers at IBM and RCA as a way of cementing relations with important customers and stimulating Mylar sales. Unfortunately, we were also unable to resolve RCA's problems, which were caused by frictional heating during spacecraft re-entry, although we helped them evaluate several experimental film bases. These programs helped us recognize that high tech applications were pushing the characteristics of every component of magnetic recording well beyond the state of the art, particularly with respect to the stability, physical uniformity and surface properties of the film base we supplied for recording tape. These requirements went far beyond the relatively straightforward mechanical properties needed in food packaging films, where the Film Department had gotten its start. These 1961-2 programs were a precursor of Du Pont's later work to develop significantly improved films for magnetic recording, particularly for home video, now the largest market for Mylar.

Transfer to the Magnetic Tape Venture - In early 1965, I learned of a rejuvenated Du Pont magnetic tape program at the Experimental Station, and by making contacts behind the scenes (a risky business at best!) was able to solicit a transfer to that program. I had recently been asked to transfer to customer service work in Wilmington in the Film Department, which I had declined - at some likely risk to my future promotional opportunities - and soon afterward was told of a new offer from Textile Fibers Department at their plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Fibers was embarking on a significant expansion, and needed additional technical supervisors. That might eventually have proven a fine opportunity for me, though I didn't see it that way at the time. Rather than interview for the Fibers job, I decided to be proactive and try to get into a program I knew I would enjoy technically. In retrospect, this probably limited my ultimate career advancement, since I went down a blind alley for several critical years for my career, while still in my early forties. The fact that the tape venture was ultimately unsuccessful meant that people like myself who had committed ourselves to it, especially those in management, effectively lost those key years, career-wise. Our "sponsors" were gone after the venture collapsed and we had to re-establish our reputations more or less from scratch in our next jobs, often in a new department. And of course at that point, everyone was several years older and came with an aura of "failure" attached. None of these "facts of corporate life" were ever spelled out to me. Like most important things in my career, I had to learn them the hard way.

The fact that the technical content of the work was still so important to me in 1965 shows that even ten years after graduate school I had actually not completed the transition from "scientist" to "manager;" also that I badly wanted the tape program to succeed, since I've never been a good loser! In my heart of hearts, I still thought of myself as a scientist, and felt I could make my greatest contributions in a technical capacity. Also, I found magnetic recording technology particularly challenging. In fact, I recognized while a new supervisor at Circleville that I was most effective when I worked closely with the technical people assigned to me. Often I was able to analyze their data and make suggestions which proved quite important in their work. The programs which made the greatest progress were usually the ones I spent the most time on. Doing this in a way which doesn't antagonize people is a fine art, but by establishing cooperative working relationships, most people welcomed my help over my career, since they realized that it made them look good when their programs succeeded.

We moved back to the Wilmington area in early 1965, where I took a technical supervisory role at the Experimental Station in what was called the "Crolyn" magnetic tape venture. We bought a nice home in Chadds Ford, PA, just over the line from Delaware, in beautiful rolling country only about three or four miles from the home of the famous painter Andrew Wyeth. Our two oldest children, Todd and Anne, were in second grade and kindergarten, and our youngest, Jill, was only a few months old when we moved in early 1965. We greatly enjoyed our new home and then seven years in then-rural Chadds Ford, whose schools were considerably better than the ones in Circleville. It was a great environment for children, and we still have a strong emotional attachment to that area. (It's interesting that our older daughter Anne, now an attorney in suburban Philadelphia, sometimes visits the Chadds Ford School in connection with her legal practice, which involves school board support.)

It was when we lived in Chadd's Ford, in about 1967 that I first took up recreational running, or jogging as it was then called. I think I first heard of this from my brother's family, who had gotten into the jogging craze in Oregon a year or two before. Since I recognized that my leg endurance (or lack of same) was limiting my golf game, I decided to try running two or three times a week to increase my strength. It's remarkable to recall that for the first several years I ran, it was on Chadd's Ford's many hills, and I was running then in the same steel toed safety shoes I wore to work, which were available to employees at a discount. Later, I converted to regular running shoes, which worked considerably better. When I began, my goal was just to be able to complete one 1.5 mile circuit, without stopping to catch my breath, around the hilly development where we lived in Chadd's Ford (which involved several serious "ups and downs") before leaving for work. Later, in Princeton Junction, NJ, and Pittsford/Rochester, NY, when I was running on flatter ground (usually after work during the week), I worked up to longer distances, first about two miles around the development we lived in in New Jersey two or three times a week, and later to five miles or more in Pittsford, with my longer runs on weekends. It was after moving to Pittsford in 1977 that we started going to YMCA exercise classes regularly after work, and over the next few years, Carole, Todd, Anne, Jill and I all participated in a number of 5 kilometer (3.1 mile) fun runs and a few 10 K runs, usually with some of our Y friends. (Jill even went out for the high school crosscountry team, which proved to be character building for her because she was slow like me, though she never lacked in determination. Todd had a real talent for running, and enjoyed beating the pants off of most of his colleagues during required Air Force runs to demonstrate physical fitness.) Most of that time I was running a total of at least 20 miles a week - not much for serious athletes, but not bad for a 50+ year old "non athlete." The pinnacles of my so-called "running career" were two-fold. In the early 1980s I ran a total of 1000 miles one year (after having run 500 and 750 miles the two previous years), which earned me a special "thousand mile T shirt" from the Y. And in 1981 I entered, and successfully completed, one 15 K (9.2 mile) run in nearby Palmyra, New York. My times were never great by "serious" standards, but since my goals were primarily to keep going and finish, that didn't bother me much. I know that I did achieve my primary goal of finishing in less than 90 minutes in that 15K race, despite the last quarter mile or so being all up hill. Except for a chronic soreness (planar fascitis) in one foot which I was able to overcome by custom orthodics, I never suffered any joint problems or serious muscle pulls due to running.

I also rode my bicycle fairly regularly in those years, usually distances of 5 to 10 miles on weekends. I'm sure these activities must have helped keep up my general fitness and health, not to mention help to retain my sanity in the face of job pressures. Unfortunately, as time went on I eventually got to a point where I just couldn't face going out to start running in the evenings, and decided my body was "sending me a message" to try something less strenuous. So the last year I ran in a 10K race was 1984 (that was on July 4, and I can still remember how terribly hot it was). By the next year I had stopped running altogether. And I gradually stopped riding my bicycle in the 1980s for similar reasons. Since then I've tried to walk and/or ride my stationary bicycle on a regular basis, though I admit I lack the discipline I once had with the running and bike riding. I've found that riding my exercise bike at a brisk pace helps keep my blood pressure under control, which is an incentive to keep going on that. (In just the past few months - since January, 2004 - after some back and leg problems I've taken up daily strength and stretching exercises at home to improve and maintain general fitness, and I'm encouraged by the progress I've made. Though I'll be 75 in a couple of months as this is written, I'm finding that it's still not too late to improve my physical condition!)

Life in a Venture - The magnetic tape program was one of several new product development programs which were being organized then within Du Pont as embryonic businesses. These were designated as "ventures," and were all supposed to be capable of growing into at least $100 million dollar a year businesses. This approach was fostered at the highest levels of management, and was intended to "jump start" the innovation process. Some ventures, like "Corian" (synthetic marble, part of the venture first known as "Building Products"), "Tyvek" (plastic sheeting, part of a venture on non-woven fabrics), and "Cromalin" (color proofing film), resulted in products which are still doing very well, though many other ventures were commercial disappointments. The idea was to set up separate enterprises with entreprenuerial management to carry promising new products to market quickly like small startup companies, being free to make decisions rapidly while having the financial and technical resources of a large corporation. Venture managers reportedly stood to make a handsome profit if they were successful. Some ventures, like magnetic tape, were carried by a central staff department for their first few years while others originated and grew within existing businesses (usually called "operating departments" in the company).

The Du Pont Magnetic Tape Venture began in Du Pont's Development Department, a staff group, but was picked up by Photo Products Department after about three years. Since the people running the ventures were expected to be aggressive, we invariably found ourselves committed to timing goals which were grossly unrealistic. (We used to try to remind management that although it takes nine months for one woman to produce a baby, nine women can't do it any faster!) Some irreverent souls like myself felt it might be significant that magnetic tape came into Photo Products on April Fools Day, 1967, since it was quite apparent by then to most of us working people that the program had been "over-sold and over-promised." But we had no choice but to try to make things happen as forecast. This kept things interesting, but ultimately became very stressful and frustrating, especially to those in supervision. Unfortunately, the qualities of self-confidence and optimism which enabled a person to make great presentations and be chosen venture manager were often not coupled with adminstrative ability and sound judgement. In retrospect, that may have been the greatest weakness of the venture concept - the scarcity of capable leaders who could grasp both the technology and business factors, hence make the right decisions. Our original venture manager, Maury Ward, a great front man who never enjoyed being restricted by hard reality, was replaced in 1969. The program soon lost its entreprenurial character and became run like any other business, i.e., it was expected to meet its financial commitments. "Crolyn" magnetic tape, as it was named, never became the major commercial success which was hoped for, though Du Pont did produce magnetic tapes for several years (both video and audio), and supplied magnetic powder to a few licensed tape manufacturers at home and overseas at least into the 1980's. We also participated in a joint tape venture with the Philips Company of the Netherlands. While our tape program eventually turned a modest profit, I doubt if we ever recovered our up-front R&D expenses, since we had had a very large program for several years. Chromium dioxide produced elsewhere is used today in video recording tapes from at least one manufacturer, though modified, high coercivity iron oxide is used in most VHS and high quality audio tapes while newer, superior magnetic materials are used in many recent applications.

The venture included people from several Du Pont departments, in an attempt to capitalize on the breadth of technology the company had. It was a good concept, though we were nevertheless always at a disadvantage technically to companies like 3M and Memorex, who had years and years of practical experience making tapes. Several of the people I worked with in the tape venture became my good friends, including John Dickens, Jim Barton, and Tom Lynch. I played golf with these men regularly in those years. John, who was from England and had trained at Oxford, had actually been my last lab partner at the Experimental Station. He was not only a brilliant scientist but an accomplished golfer. I always felt that was unfair somehow, since I had to work so hard, especially on my golf. Though he had apparently been stereotyped earlier as "just a good scientist," I managed to get John promoted to supervisor in the venture, and he subsequently enjoyed a fine career in management, finally working closely with me on graphic arts business teams after I moved to Rochester and he to Parlin. Jim Barton had spent his entire career in Film Department marketing before moving to the magnetic tape venture, and specialized in finding new markets for our tape, which he was very good at. Tom Lynch was a very capable chemical engineer with experience in several departments before I managed to snag him for our tape coating program. He and Barton later worked together in the Netherlands during the Du Pont/Philips joint venture of the early 1980's.

Attempting to find markets for our new tape products, we sought close working relationships with equipment manufacturers around the world. This was necessary because our tapes worked best in equipment which was optimized for chromium dioxide rather than iron oxide. We eventually had cooperative technical programs with several companies, starting with Sony. They agreed to develop home video recorders for our tape in exchange for an exclusive license to produce and sell chromium dioxide tapes in Japan, and a royalty on all tapes sold. I'm sure our management didn't realize then how significant the exclusive rights in Japan were, being closely focused on the U.S. market, which represented a huge potential opportunity. I travelled to Japan in late 1967 with two high level Du Pont managers. We spent a week in Tokyo and Sendai, discussing technical and business issues with Sony people by day and learning to appreciate Japanese culture on the weekend and at night. I had a chance to meet one of Sony's founders, Mr. Akio Morita, as well as his younger brother, Masaki Morita, who managed the plant at Sendai where Sony made its magnetic tape. (The Morita family was one of Japan's leading brewers of saki (rice wine) before World War II, and A. Morita was still involved in that family business on the side when we visited Japan.) Our primary host that week was a remarkable man named George Hatayama, who came from a highly educated Japanese family which was quite "western" in its orientation. One of George's grandfathers (or perhaps it was his great grandfather) had actually attended Oxford University in the 1820s, long before Japan was opened to westerners by Commodore Perry. George spoke fluent English, as well as several other western languages, and appeared to have a fine technical mind. He had served in the Japanese navy during World War II and was one of Sony's first employees after the war, when they set up a radio factory in a bombed out Tokyo warehouse. His wife was the daughter of one of Japan's leading liberal prewar politicians, and they lived in her family home, one of the few in Tokyo which survived the great American fire raids of early 1945. (It was built of stone, which no doubt helped save it.) We exchanged Christmas cards for a number of years after my visit. Although I found it impossible to sleep well after long evenings of eating and drinking, this was a fascinating trip. I came back from Japan convinced that a nation of eighty million intelligent, hard working people, all sincerely trying to be the very best at whatever they did, would soon become a formidable force in the world's economy.

Our program with Sony ultimately led to their so-called "Beta" system, which relied on video cassettes containing half inch wide chromium dioxide tape. One unintended consequence of this program, however, was that the other Japanese equipment manufacturers combined to introduce an alternate system which worked nearly as well with tapes made with a chemically modified, high coercivity iron oxide which they could sell at home as well as overseas. Although this system gave slightly poorer picture quality than Beta, the VHS system was designed to have the advantage of somewhat longer playing time, enough to be able to record a two hour movie on a single tape at standard recording speed. At home, the Japanese manufacturers began a whispering campaign against chromium dioxide, claiming (with little or no justification) that it presented unacceptable health hazards. Because of genuine health problems which had previously been caused in Japan by cadmium, mercury, and other heavy metal industrial wastes, this approach was quite successful in curbing acceptance of the Beta system by Japanese consumers. Ultimately, the VHS system, originated by JVC (Japan Victor Company), was adopted by nearly all other Japanese companies and gradually pushed the Beta system out of the home video marketplace around the world, despite its technical inferiority. This is an excellent illustration of how marketing factors can sometimes restrict applications of superior technology. Sony actually stopped producing Beta recorders for home recording in about 1990, long after the VHS system had become the de facto world standard. I've recently learned that Beta recorders using one inch tape are still widely used in professional recording, though current tapes are based on high coercivity iron oxide.

I stayed with the Du Pont tape venture until mid-1969, when the program was reorganized and cut back substantially. The Crolyn technical group had always been a close-knit community with great team spirit, and it was sad to contemplate our being disbanded and sent off to other assignments. (In those days, no one at Du Pont was ever laid off for lack of work.) Characteristically, some of us "refugees" organized a great going away party for ourselves, at which we presented the new venture manager, Jack Hustler, with a model of the Titanic seemingly going down, but told him not to despair, the ship might actually be COMING UP out of the water! In retrospect, this prediction was not much more fantastic than the original business forecasts which had been made by Crolyn management - who of course were expected to be optimistic, almost as a condition of employement! Hustler called them "pipedreams." If those plans had been fulfilled, by 1969 chromium dioxide tape would have been well on its way to becoming the leading magnetic recording medium worldwide. Instead, Du Pont was a minor "wannabee" on the sidelines, and destined to remain so.

Reassignment to Silver Halide Research - I was put in charge of a group assigned to resolving quality problems in Photo Products' silver halide photographic businesses after the Crolyn reorganization. There was plenty to do on quality, since Du Pont had never been fully competitive with Eastman Kodak and other leading manufacturers, especially in day to day product uniformity. This work involved weekly trips to Parlin, New Jersey, where our principal photographic plant was located, several miles east of New Brunswick. The Parlin plant had been founded to make motion picture film in the early 1920's, partly as an outlet for nitrocellulose from Du Pont's wartime explosives plants, also useful in photographic film base. As a prime supplier of explosives to the Allies, Du Pont emerged from the First World War with hundreds of millions of dollars to invest, and with the rapid growth of movies, photographic film represented one such investment opportunity. General Motors, then a struggling competitor for the American mass car market against the virtual monopoly of Henry Ford, was another such opportunity. The GM investment, made in the early 1920's, was probably the most profitable Du Pont ever made, and was held until the government forced divestiture in the early 1960's after antitrust litigation, when GM stock was passed along to Du Pont stockholders. Du Pont still has an auto finishes laboratory in Flint, MI, near the center of GM production and where all Chevrolets were originally built.

As a footnote, while it works well enough when fresh, nitrocellulose film base ages badly, tending to embrittle and become even more combustible with age, causing many projection room fires. During the 1920's, cellulose acetate film (so-called "safety base") was developed as a stable replacement for nitrocellulose film, which was then gradually phased out. However, many early motion picture classics which were never copied onto the new base have been lost forever, and the George Eastman House photographic museum in Rochester still has an archival protection program which is copying early movies onto stable acetate base. They store their remaining nitrate based films at low temperature and humidity to preserve them. In about 1980, there was a major fire in their film vault caused by spontaneous combustion of nitrate films.

My supervisor in our quality program was a hard-nosed veteran of Photo Products named Harry Knop, who clearly took a dim view of the ventures, and regarded supervisors from them as unproven greenhorns. Harry had once played football, and was known then as "a pulling guard," someone who blocked for running backs (specializing in knocking people down to get them out of the way). I'm sure his management philosophy was based in some measure on that experience. He was still, in his fifties, serving as a referee for high school games, and must have been in wonderful physical condition. I had the formidable task of convincing Harry that I knew a little about supervising technical people and that I could eventually learn something about photographic technology. The facts that he (a) had been returned to R&D from Marketing in some disgrace after supervising a field sales group and (b) was reporting to a Laboratory Director who didn't share his stern management philosophy only added to Harry's discontent. Another "endearing quality" he had for me personally was his poor opinion of women scientists, three of whom, Marian Berg, Joanne Gerlach, and Christina Lazaridis, were assigned to my group. (All were actually quite competent researchers, though Harry didn't seem to want to admit it.  Joanne, who was young and rather attractive - and also quite independent - seemed to bother him the most, perhaps because he correctly surmised that she took a rather dim view of him.)  Overall, Harry seemed determined to remake the world in his image, starting with the people reporting to him. The two years I reported to Harry were the longest of my career, though I was sustained by the knowledge that my colleagues all shared my dim opinion of the man. I'm afraid I'll always remember one criticism he made in an annual appraisal - that I never had any good new ideas. That was after he had rejected out of hand every single thing I'd suggested over the past year! In addition to generally toughening my character, Harry did one worthwhile thing for me, though. He suggested I consider taking Vitamin C to reduce the number of colds I got. That has worked very well for me over the years. And of course Harry also served as a great "negative role model" - someone I would try NOT to emulate in the future, again validating the old adage that you can learn something worthwhile from almost anyone.

Transfer to Parlin, New Jersey - In the course of my group's quality program I became well acquainted with people in the Graphic Arts Laboratory in Parlin, headed by an experienced manager named Walter Foy. At the end of 1971, I was offered a transfer there to supervise work on some new graphic arts color reproduction films, which I quickly accepted, though with some misgivings based on what I had heard about what an uncooperative atmosphere Parlin had. Walter apparently had liked what he had seen of me, and requested me for his group. I began work at Parlin in January, 1972, and we moved into a nearly new house in Princeton Junction, NJ the next month. We lived only a half mile from the railroad station serving the town of Princeton, which was connected to the mainline by a three mile trolley line commonly called "The Dinky." We actually lived in West Windsor township, though the built up area near our house was called "Princeton Junction," after the main line railroad station. I had a 24 mile drive, one way, to work. But since traffic was generally relatively light most of the way in the direction I went, it took only about 40 minutes to get there, not too bad by today's standards. Usually I had finished dinner and was out working in the yard when my neighbors who commuted to New York City walked by on the way home from their trains.

Although the move to New Jersey began a significant turnaround in my professional fortunes, things at home were a bit difficult at first for Carole and our two older children, Anne and Todd, who were in 7th and 9th grades and had suddenly lost all their friends - a classic problem for families of relocated Du Pont managers. But we all soon became well acquainted within the friendly new development where we lived, and look back now on our Princeton Junction years as good ones. In 1975, Todd graduated from Princeton High School, which had always served students from smaller nearby communities and was a good school academically. Anne was in the first group of students who went all the way through our new local high school, West Windsor-Plainsboro, completed shortly after we arrived. She graduated there in 1977. Jill started midyear in the second grade in Princeton Junction, and enjoyed five good years in local elementary schools. Carole took a part time job in the book department of the Princeton University Store, which didn't pay much more than minimum wage, but offered great discounts to employees on a variety of merchandise, including records, TV's, and sports clothes, all of which we took advantage of. I was quite active in my photographic darkroom then, also ran a few miles a week around our development and rode my bicycle many miles on weekends around the flat nearby farmland. I also played golf at Cranbury Golf Club, just a few miles from home, usually with Carole and sometimes with Anne or Todd.

To continue the story of my Du Pont years, please transfer to Bob Hendricks' Memories - Du Pont Years (1972-1977), by clicking here.

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(Last rev. 4/16/04)