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HM: In fact, they were better -- the only other salary that was exceeded that Hewlett-Packard when I went down there. But that was because Yukio Tazuma, one of my friends from way back, Seattle guy, well, he was in the same class as this guy that was giving us the tour at Hewlett-Packard. And he was head of industrial design, and he knew Yukio very well. And he, when he found out I was Yukio's friend, when he picked me up, he says, "Oh, gosh, well, what the heck is Yukio doing?" So I says, "Well, he's working at Boeing." "You know, I've been trying to get that guy down here. He's a good guy. He shouldn't -- he should be working for a company like ours."

But I spent about three days at Hewlett-Packard at one, one time period. Then they asked me what kind of work I'd, I'd like. So I said, I've been doing different design things. I've been involved with, some of the IBM equipment in the wind tunnel. They had a kind of a pretty good shadow on what, what I was doing. But they had three different jobs that they had lined up for me. One was a digital voltmeter. And then the second one was -- at that time digital voltmeters were the rage. And then the second one was, they had a frequency oscillator system that was, would key into different frequency spectrum. And then they had another work item that, it was a universal oscilloscope multimeter. And the thing that really scared me away from Hewlett-Packard was this, this Chinese Ph.D. And he's sitting in with the design group, just like you're one of the group members, and he starts writing this differential equations on this blackboard, and he'd go like hell. And here he's, he's finished with the bottom line, and I'm still on about the third or fourth line...

TI: Trying to figure out what he's doing.

HM: ...trying to figure out what is this, that thing doing? Anyway, he was a very, very well-trained mathematician, as well as being an electrical engineer, Ph.D. And it scared the living daylights out of me. I couldn't possibly keep up with this guy. But I didn't want to tell this host guy that, after the, I think about the third day I was there, I, I spent almost one day each with each of these the different design groups. And I was afraid to tell him that I couldn't keep up with the guy. So I kind of shied away from the thing. I said, "You guys got some real powerful people here, and maybe I won't even make the grade with them." He said, "No don't think about that kind of stuff. It's easy to pick up." But that was a deciding point that I didn't go with them.

TI: And in the back of the mind you thought that you would probably work for Boeing? That you would get a job there?

HM: No. I had this, this, we had a temporary assignment right towards the end of our senior year. They were looking for different types of individuals. And --

TI: This was Boeing.

HM: Yeah, Boeing. So they had a so-called management, management trainee program. And I -- through my brother's insistence, I kind of got into that thing. And you were supposed to go through a whole series of assignments and, over, I think about twenty, twenty-month period. And then you could pick out the one that you wanted and you could be assigned to the area. And then you're supposed to become a first-level supervisor. But I started that program, and before we graduated they terminated the darn thing. And then they said, "We're going to discontinue it because the labor requirements are so heavy now that we can't afford to do this kind of thing." But then I interviewed people like IBM. And that was when they were making that Ramac 305. Are you familiar with that big, huge disk? Well, that was the group that I interviewed. And the thing that frosted me was you had to wear a tie, and you had to wear a white shirt and a dark suit. And that, they comply with that rule. You go to the design group, and here's these guys, they have the tie. The coat was on the rack, but any -- everything else, the tie was on.

TI: Well, thirty years later, just to let you know, I interviewed IBM. Same thing. Got the job offer, had to wear the same...

HM: Yeah.

TI: They still wore the white shirts and the ties and the suits.

HM: But I decided then and there this is, this is it. No, I don't want to be in this kind of job. But, and the reason why I picked Convair at that time was the fact that the weather was great, you could do -- they gave me a whole selection of jobs. Wind tunnel --

TI: This was called Convair?

HM: Yeah.

TI: And that's located -- where was that located?

HM: In San Diego. It used to be Consolidated Vultee. And then they changed their name to Convair. And that became a part of General Dynamics. So it, the, the San Diego division was for making commercial transports. At that time they were making the Metropolitan and that, that 240, 340, 440 series of airplanes, twin-engine prop airplanes. And they carried about forty passengers, something like that.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.