An occurrence which many said would never happen has happened: Ralph Cox has retired!
Here’s a snippet from his goodbye letter to his co-workers:
All, After 30 years with Industrial Handling Engineers in Houston and 15 with Tompkins, it’s clearly time for me to retire. If you don’t think so, keep in mind that when I started we took black and white still photographs of operations, did facility measurements with 100’ tapes, timed operations with analog watches, did spreadsheets with paper, pencils and erasers, multiplied and divided on slide rules, added and subtracted on ‘adding’ machines, drew layouts by hand on drafting tables with parallel bars and printed them as blueprints, used a Smoley’s handbook to look up needed triangular dimensions, communicated long-distance in writing with a letter or a telex machine, arranged conference calls with telephone operators, copied one original at a time for reports and collated the black and white report pages manually.
Tompkins Associates celebrated Ralph’s retirement with a very nice luncheon in San Antonio. In a company made up of traveling consultants, it is rare indeed for everyone to be together in the same room. Most of these folks hadn’t been together as a group in more than 5 years!
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Want to see more pictures or get a print? Here’s the galleries: http://davidcox.smugmug.com/Family
David, congratulate your Dad for me and ask him how things are after being retired for 3 months. 🙂 In reading his comments, I recall doing everything he mentioned during my career.