More on My Dad - Donald P Golden, Sr

My dad was an interesting guy. After WWII and just after I was born he took a job as a machinist with the Magnolia Refinery in Beaumont. The refinery was a subsidiary of SOCONY thru the 40’s and 50’s and became a Mobil refinery in the late 50s.

As an hourly tradesman my dad faced the ‘no degree’ stigma common to oil companies.

That limited his promotion potential. Using the GI bill he entered Lamar Tech’s night school to work on a degree in engineering. (At some point Lamar was upgraded to a University.)

I recall dad’s studying in the laundry room. I think he did ok on the subjects that he realized applied directly to engineering, the math and science courses, but the soft subjects frustrated him. History, literature, English all took a lot of time and seemed to him not to be advancing him toward his job goals.

Eventually, he quit. I think full time work, raising a family and maintaining the house and car just left too little time for college. This was probably a poor decision but who am I to criticize?

My dad, at this point in his life, was loyal to Mobil to a fault. He would drive miles out of his way to put Mobil branded gasoline in the family car.

In 1960 he was loaned to Amoco to work on a startup team for a refinery on the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines. This was a six month assignment, there were some significant complications, but we all survived.

When he returned from this assignment, Mobil offered him a salaried, non-degree professional position with a new startup, Mobil Chemical, adjacent to the refinery in Beaumont.

The chemical plant had two main facilities, an Olefins cracker and a Benzine unit. My dad was assigned to the Olefins plant and in particular to the care and maintenance of the charge gas compressor. This is an enormous compressor that drives the feed at very high pressure into the cracking furnaces.

This compressor turned out to have a design fault. I do not have the details, but every six months or so conditions would occur that caused it to fail in a very self destructive way.

I recall returning to Beaumont from Crystal Beach on the Bolivar Peninsula one Sunday afternoon. Dad was a ‘heavy foot’ driver and treated highway speed limits as suggestions. He was not reckless, he speeded relatively safely, but nonetheless as we were inbound to Beaumont on I-10 we crested an overpass and the Mobil Chemical flare was in fine form.

Dad went from heavy foot to intense heavy foot. We skidded to a stop in our driveway (the car was panting from being ‘rode hard’), dad changed clothes in a flash and was off to the chemical plant to care for ‘his’ compressor.

Once the unit was back on line - this may have taken a few months - he began a study of the compressor problem like a maniac. He read engineering text books about compressor design and failure modes. He had drawings and measurements. He understood how the bearings worked and how they were lubricated. He was a self made expert on this compressor.

He figured out the design flaw!

He wrote up his conclusions and submitted them across the Non-Degree/Degree divide. He was so pumped. He was going to save Mobil Chemical millions of dollars in repair costs and downtime losses.

The degreed engineers up the chain treated this paper from a guy who did not finish college with disdain and did nothing! This broke my dad’s heart.

So for a few years every so often he compressor lunched itself, the flare flared and Mobil went into panic mode, and Dad faithfully helped get it going again.

A new degreed engineer was hired into the compressor team. He was smart enough to listen to Dad. Maybe he had been a lieutenant in the army and learned that the sergeants typically had lots of wisdom if the lieutenant would just listen.

What Dad told him made sense to him. He wrote it up and submitted it. Management reacted. York Compressors (the manufacturer) was called in and lectured. They agreed to the source of the problem. York and Mobil engaged in a joint effort to reengineer the compressor.

Dad made several trips to York during this process. The young engineer was set up for rapid advancement (Early Identified Staff in Shell Oil Speak). No one recognized that Dad had pointed out this problem and its solution several years earlier.

The result of this kerfuffle changed my dad’s attitude toward Mobil. He was less enthusiastic. He cut back from going the extra two miles to just one mile. He began buying Gulf and Shell and Conoco products.

I saw this non-degree/degree barrier at work in other oil companies. It seems to be considerably less of a problem in many high tech companies. The fact is that good ideas are not the exclusive domain of college educated people.