When I started work here in Aiken in 1989 there was one other draftsman already here. I say draftsman, but he was much more than that. Lynn was also designing all the valve assembly test fixtures. After he designed them, he built them. In between all that he had to teach me how to use AutoCAD. When I was in Florham Park I used something called CADAM that ran on a mainframe computer. Everything in Aiken was running on PCs (8088 and some 286s) and they had AutoCAD version 9.
Lynn used to do all the drawings by hand, but a couple years earlier and engineer had won an Apricot computer with AutoCAD version 2 installed on it at a trade show. Lynn learned to draw on the “new” computer and even started redrawing the plant layouts. The kicker of this is the Apricot didn’t have a mouse, he navigated around drawing walls and lighting and such in our150, 000 sq ft plant using the arrow keys to move the cursor.
As we started growing on the production side, all that work defaulted to me and Lynn kept up with the assembly side. We shared a 20′ x 20′ room that had the back 1/3 separated via cubical walls where Lynn built the test benches and fixtures. I nicknamed him the Mad Scientist because it was almost comical the noises that emanated from behind those walls. About eight years ago they really separated us when he got his own room on the other side of the plant.
Two years ago he retired from ASCO. The Assembly Engineering Department had grown from just Lynn to an Engineering Supervisor, 3 Engineers and him. He didn’t stay retired very long. Seeing as he had pretty much designed and built every piece of test fixturing out there, he had to come back in and consult to help them fix them up. Soon he was coming in every day, they found a spare cubical and dusted off his old PC, and he was back doing pretty much what he was doing before he “retired.”
Two weeks ago, after he got done burning some leaves in a pit behind his house, he hung up the rake in his garage. There must have been a piece of something still burning on the rake he didn’t notice. The ember fell off onto a gas can and before you knew it the garage was on fire. Lynn tried to put out the fire with a nearby hose, but couldn’t do it. Before some construction workers from next door could pull him away from the fire he was badly burned. Lynn is lying in an induced coma in the burn ward of an Augusta hospital with 3rd degree burns over nearly 25% of his body. His lungs were burned badly from the heat and he is breathing with the help of a ventilator. It was touch and go for a while, but he appears to be getting a little better each day.
His daughter has a blog where she is posting updates for all of his family and extended work family to read: Lisa’s Family Page
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 116