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.