My Boss Built It By Himself

In 1958 my future boss graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee with a degree in engineering. He was raised, after his father died, by his mother. They didn't live in squalor but his formative years were during WWII and with three other brothers younger than he pickings were slim. The government didn't pay for kids to go to college in those days. They worked their way through school. My boss, upon graduation, took a sales job with a subsidiary of Owens-Corning selling in ground fiberglass tanks. He was on straight commission. His earned salary in 1959 was over $125,000 and he got fired. Some company presidents get jealous when their salesmen make more than them. First year employees even more so.
My boss knew a lot about pumps, the kind that shove product from one area to another. He knew a lot about motors and gearboxes and centrifuges. The government didn't teach him these things. He read and he understood and he put into practice this learning. When my boss was 26 years old he started his own pump repair business from scratch. He took the earnings from his first year sales position and slowly but surely built the business to the point that he was making a very good living. His company became so successful that other pump companies asked him to sell their pumps. In addition, he realized that this would require him to hire more people to make the business grow.
Somewhere around the mid 1970's my boss was asked to solve a pump problem on the top floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago. It contained some Dresser Pumps and a pressure was building up causing windows to blow out onto Wacker Drive. This was not a good thing. Pumps have a shaft that comes out of their bearing housing. At this point, between the shaft and housing is a rubber lip seal that looks like a donut. The more common name is Chicago Rawhide lip seal. The problem with these things is they last about six months before they wear out and oil gets out of the bearings and contamination enters in destroying the life of the bearings and causing the equipment to break down. My boss took a pen knife and made a slight gouge in the rubber lip seal to relieve the pressure solving the immediate problem. On his drive home to Rock Island, Illinois a light bulb went on. Why not replace the rubber with a piece of bronze and a slight clearance with the shaft then use a press fit into the housing? And the first stage of an invention was completed. The federal government wasn't there, either. My boss did it on his own. I was hired to work for this man in 1988 but by then not only had the original piece been perfected but another rotating piece of bronze had been added to keep contamination from getting into the bearings. In other words, a two piece, non-contact, non-friction, non-wearing piece of equipment to keep rotating equipment running indefinitely. I was the fifth salesman hired. When I retired in 2008 we had 25 salesmen throughout the world. Our company, the first of it's kind had fourteen competitors and we still had 79% of the world market. Isn't that amazing? We were truly number 1 and my boss built it with an idea and from scratch. As I've said many times, my boss is to the industrial world what Steve Jobs was to computers and associated equipment.
In the original pump company he had hired three inside sales staff. When I left the company he still had his pump repair business and there were 150 more employees making this a capitalist company of gigantic proportions. My boss was so good that each inside sales lady was on salary but also received a commission based on what her outside salesman(MJ Hawkeye) did in the field. We were allowed to invest in the company and had all the benefits of the successful firms in America.
My boss is the epitome of hard work. I asked my boss a few weeks ago if he ever had any government interference to what he was trying to do. "Only once", he said. "Bureaucrats from the state government in Springfield came in, saw an electrical outlet that they said wasn't up to code and fined me five thousand".
It's an insult to free enterprise to say that my boss had help in starting his business and keeping it going. Here's what happens in his business. Every month the workers received a check for services rendered. If there was money left over then he paid himself. That's the way it works for a business.
Barack Obama knows absolutely nothing about business or how to start one. It's an insult to my boss to even suggest the government has provided any help in keep the company going. Barack Obama couldn't carry my boss's jock strap.