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My wife Paulette and I returned to her hometown of Milwaukee when I finished my four year Navy
enlistment. We found an apartment within the first few days and I began to work at Centralab, a Division
of Globe-Union Inc. I was hired as a technician to work in the special capacitor lab where
I helped assemble capacitors designed for
industry. Most of the items were made with the help of Ray, who was also a lab technician. There were several ovens in the lab that we used to heat capacitors so they could be soldered or assembled, then slowly brought back to room temperature again to be tested and stamped for values. Disk1 Disk2 Group Doorknob a Doorknob b CRL Ceramic Mount One of the areas I worked was in a special radio frequency screen room where capacitors were connected to a kilowatt transmitter and marked with a black mark where we would aim a radiometer feeding the output into a XY plotter. As the transmitter current was increased, the temperature would also increase, and once stabilized, I would turn on a small fan from across the room which would rapidly drop the temp which really amazed me. During those tests I learned that just a small amount of air flow really cooled overheated components. As I was thinking about leaving Centralab, they were just beginning to use clean rooms for their new ceramic based miniature circuit boards. Paulette and I decided to move back to Ohio when we found the taxes of owning a home in Wisconsin were six or seven times more than my parents were paying in Columbus. During my time in Milwaukee, I completed my CIE electronics course I had started while serving in the Navy. After a few weeks of additional study using study guides from Cooks Institute of Electronics, I then took get a day off and traveled to Chicago by train with my slide rule in my pocket (the only type of calculator available at the time), and sat for my first class FCC license exam. In the first few days after arriving back in Columbus, I was hired at WBNS-TV as a broadcast engineer. I recently received an email from Pierre LaVignette who writes "I was surfing the web under the word "Centralab" and found your web site. I went to work for Centralab in 1984 in their New Berlin facility. I do not think that facility existed when you were there? You probably remember the Villard Plant and the Keefe Ave Plant from your days? Sadly, I participated in the closing and selling of the Villard plant in 1986. As you are probably aware, the switch Division was eventually sold off to ElectroSwitch who was acquired by C&K who was acquired by ITT. The Capacitor group went a number of different directions...the Military Caps became Sierra Aerospace which is now defunct. The discs spun off into Ceramite which was eventually acquired by Vishay. The resistors were kept by Philips and then sold to Vishay. It is interesting, to this day, people still recognize the Centralab name for its quality even though the company known as Centralab hasnt existed since the late eighties. One final ironic note, the trade name "Centralab" is now owned by a Singapore trading company". |
