Frank Carriglitto                          yohoho@insightbb.com   

Rockford, IL
 
Petting a koala at Steve Irwins' zoo near Beerwah, Australia

Been living in Rockford since moving here in 1951 from Minersville, PA.  Still married to the same woman after 45 yrs.  Don't know how she puts up with me, but she did give me 3 wonderful children.  The oldest son lives in Panama City Beach, FL, daughter lives near us here in Rockford, and the youngest son lives in Breckenridge, CO.  We have 2 beautiful granddaughters, both in college.  The youngest at NIU and the oldest at U of I.  She will be a senior this coming school term and has applied to several Law Schools (this, of course means that she will have to be removed from the will.  We can't be responsible for any more lawyers).

I first worked at Sundstrand (Sundstrand Machine Tool, Airplane Division) in the summer of 1954 in the 11th St plant, running blueprints and Job prints down to the shop.  They got the contracts for the F101, F102, F104, F105, and F106 all at once, and Sundstrand Aviation was born.

I went on to college as a Chemistry major, and worked some summers after that as a technician in the Materials Lab and as a testman in the labs off 9th St, did a stint in the Army in 1958-1960 where I got to know Elvis, then returned to get my Chemistry degree at Milton College.  After that, started full time in the Materials Lab, still on 11th St, but helped lay out a beautiful new labratory in the Harrison Ave plant and moved there, where I worked in the lab for a number of years until the first Earth Day, when I was given the job as Environmental Chemist.  I did that for two years, but got bored with that and was given the assignment to design more "plastics" into our systems.  That was a very interesting assignment and was met with some very interesting reactions from project managers ranging from "Great, it saves us money and is lighter" to "You ain't puttin' any of that *%#@!*^  stuff in my unit!"

 

Somebody got the bright idea that we could build a better generator than the stuff we were buying to hook up to our CSD's, and I ended up working on the team designing our new generator.  This resulted in my spending a lot of time traveling, to Fullerton, Aneheim, SanDiego, Brea, and CostaMesa until I got to know California as well as the natives.  That came to an end when Harry and Bob bought this little plant in Lima, Ohio and somebody threw in this little place in Santa Isabel, PR.  Spent a couple years back and forth to that plant, helping set up the impregnation processes there.  After that, I got to spend a couple easy years sitting still in Rockford and retired in 1996 after 34 yrs.

 

Here is a photo of an active volcano we saw while visiting Rabaul, Papua, New Guinea

 

I enjoyed those many years at Sundstrand and miss many of the friends I made there, but like the rest of you, I couldn't do it now.  There is just no time left for that stuff!