Copeland’s Summer Job - Dave’s Midwestern Ohio Memories

A Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s.

Copeland’s Summer Job

College kids are heading back to school and leaving their summer jobs, which brought to mind my first non-farm summer job at Copeland’s in Sidney, now part of Emerson Electric. They make compressors for home and commercial air conditioning units. It was the summer of 1966, just after graduating from high school, and my job was sweeper in the valve plate line. The part is pictured below, which had many holes that had to be drilled and chamfered, creating plenty of metal chips for me to sweep. 

Soon I got to know all the operators on the line and by asking questions and observing them, learned all the jobs in the department, which was consistently running behind the rest of the factory causing a valve plate shortage. So the foreman called together the 15 or so workers in the department and asked for ideas to increase production. One of the operators felt the scrap rates were too high contributing to the losses while another operator suggested tag relief, which meant that instead of shutting the line down for a break twice a shift, the operators would get relieved by someone for their breaks, thus keeping the line running. Since I was the only person in the department not tied to a specific machine, I volunteered to analyze the scrap and do the relieving, but would need a extra half hour of overtime before and after the shift to catch up on my sweeping duties. The foreman agreed to give the suggestions a try. Soon it became obvious that one of the positions on the line was the bottleneck and not coincidentally also the source of most of the scrap. The work was re-balanced, the scrap rates came down and valve plate production caught up, plus I earned a few extra buck from the OT. More importantly, I learned a valuable lesson from that foreman to create a team environment and to solicit ideas from employees, an approach that I replicated many times during my 33 years in the auto industry.

But it did backfire once during a coop rotation in Human Resources, where as a student at General Motors Institute, I would go to school for a quarter, then work the next quarter at a GM plant in Dayton. My job was testing potential new employees for hourly line jobs. One of the test takers was a star running back for the UD Flyers who had just “graduated”. Well, he flunked the test, but I passed him anyway (probably the same way he got through UD) and he was hired. After returning from school the next quarter, I was assigned as production foreman, and you guessed it, the star running back was in my department. So I was the unfortunate recipient of my earlier misjudgment to wrongly allow the running back to be hired, as he was the most unmanageable employee in the department. No amount of employee involvement worked with this dude.

Fortunately, there was a two week summer shutdown about that time, so I was reassigned to the area of the plant that dealt with warranty returns as a huge backlog of returned parts had accumulated. Surprisingly, there was no structured way of sharing the tear-down analysis results with the Engineering and Quality departments so they could change the design or process to prevent future defects from getting into customers vehicles. Fortunately, an older coop student I knew, who worked in Engineering, was interested in getting the warranty return tear-down analysis results, so thanks to his ingenuity, my hard work and our teamwork, the backlog was cleared, the data was provided to the right people and the problems were being prevented. This experience yielded another valuable lesson applied many times during my career to assure cross communication and timely feedback took place to identify and resolve problems quickly and effectively.

That work experience eventually lead to coop jobs in Engineering and Manufacturing, fields in which I subsequently spent most of my career at General Motors for 6 years and then Ford for 27 years. My final position before retiring was Director of Ford's Global Quality, which took every bit of my skill and experience to muster. The concepts learned during my first jobs described above, coupled with my experiences on the family farm posted in earlier blogs, thankfully provided a solid foundation to meet the challenges presented during my subsequent career progression.