Environmental Progress - Fall 1998

Another Day, Another Dollar... And Another Generation

If buildings could talk, many present day staffers would hear old familiar voices

When the Illinois EPA moved into its new digs at Ninth St. and North Grand Ave. last spring, at least a dozen of the relocated occupants were now coming to work where their parents, grandparents, and assorted relatives had worked before them. Many of them had grown up hearing stories about the "good old days" when saying you worked for Illinois Watch Co. or Sangamo Electric was a subtle way of boasting about your career luck.

"It was the best place I ever worked," she said.

"You had to work very hard, but they paid you well for your hard work," Becky Lockhart's grandmother Chris Roth recalls. She worked at Sangamo from 1936 to 1963 and more than 30 years later, still keeps in touch with some of her co-workers. "It was," she told Becky "the best place I ever worked."

Long time employment and warm recollections seem to be part of the job description at the venerable firms where young men and women often started working in their teens, or got their first "real" jobs after finishing school, and just stayed on. And on.

Some left to work elsewhere but came back to rejoin the "family." Others left at Uncle Sam's bidding, responding to draft notices. One of those was William Sinkus, who had worked at Sangamo about a year when he was drafted in 1951. When he returned to Springfield in 1953, he also returned to Sangamo.

His daughter Jane, now working here for Illinois EPA, may hold the record for family ties with her work place. In addition to her father, her grandmother Mary worked for Sangamo for 12 years, her mother was employed there, and at various times a great uncle and a great aunt also reported to work at the Ninth and North Grand complex.

Ralph Foster's grandmother was only 16 or 17 when she went to work for Illinois Watch Co., and his great uncle was a supervisor at Sangamo Electric. Because both companies occupied the square block site together for a while, he says his great-grandmother worked at the site as a Sangamo employee while her daughter worked for the watch factory.

Jim Kallmeyer was one of those who got his first real world job at Sangamo as a young engineer fresh out of college. He worked as a product design engineer in the electronics lab located on the second floor of the south side building facing North Grand Ave. Where banks of windows now look out over the parking lot, there were only solid walls and no windows when he worked here, he says. In those labs, he helped develop some products that went on to successful use, and some others that didn't make it. One, he recalls, was a method of interpreting data from meters from a source mounted in a moving vehicle. "We tested it and it worked," he says. "It was a good device, but for some reason, it just never flew."

Engineers came from Europe and Japan to learn state-of-the-art processes.

While Kallmeyer worked in his windowless lab, another Sangamo employee named Ron Miller was teaching customer engineers how to use a key-to-magnetic-tape device that replaced punch cards. Considered state of the art by data processing firms at the time, the equipment was used in offices throughout the country, and Miller taught students from Japan and the Netherlands as well as U.S. users.

When his division was moved to Denver, Miller stayed on at Sangamo as a technical writer in a division that designed and built state of the art modems. Later that division was moved to Maryland and Miller became a state employee. Though they both worked here at the same time in the '60s, he and Kallmeyer didn't meet until they were Bureau of Air employees at Illinois EPA.

Not all Sangamo employees found a permanent home here. Some, like two of Steve Colantino's uncles, polished their skills working for Illinois Watch Co. then opened their own jewelry stores. During his 15 years at the watch company, one uncle worked on the production line making Bunn Specials, one of the firm's top lines. The expertise in "hairspring" work that he gained there eventually enabled him to open his own jewelry/watch store in downtown Springfield. During his 15 years with the watch firm, he played trombone with the company band.

At a time when women were likely to leave the work force when they married, Vickie Thompson's maternal grandmother was for a couple of years one of the women who made up a big part of the Illinois Watch Co. payroll, until she married in 1920.

Larry Eastep's mother was one of the youngsters who took a summer job at the watch factory when she was only 16. Since the family lived on Eighth St., she was able to walk to and from work and go home for lunch from her job installing stems in the watches.

Keith Pierce remembers that his uncle, Raymond Pierce, was 19 when he became an apprentice watch maker at Illinois Watch, and later became a tool and die maker for Sangamo Electric. Pierce's mother and his aunt moved from a farm near Athens to work at Sangamo during the war years. Though his mother moved to California as a war bride in 1944, and his aunt left Springfield after the war ended, he says his mother and aunt both enjoyed their jobs and later recalled the excitement of "living in the big city" of Springfield.

Another North Sider who walked to work from a home only a block away was Michelle Tebrugge's great aunt, who worked for Sangamo Electric for 35 years. She was part of a good sized work force of Italian-heritage workers who enjoyed sharing stories about "the old country."

Dick Jennings, now the Bureau of Air manager for the 14-county Peoria/ Quad Cities Region, once designed components for Sangamo Electric Co. in the building at the corner of 11th St. and North Grand Ave. where Director Mary A. Gade and other senior management officials have their offices.

Following his discharge from the U.S. Navy in 1967, Jennings landed a job at Sangamo Electric as a mechanical design engineer, and was assigned to a group that developed time switches and interrupters.

"Sangamo built the 'Cadillac' of everything..."

Sangamo's time switches had innumerable applications, but a familiar one was a switch that turned lights on at sundown and off at sunrise. Unlike today's dusk-to-dawn devices, Sangamo's switches were purely mechanical; they had no photocell for detecting darkness but relied instead on an ingenious series of rotating cams adjusted for the latitude where the switch would be installed. Latitude was the key, Jennings said, because local sunrise and sunset is determined by latitude.

Sangamo at that time also built interrupters, the mechanical switches that produce either a busy signal or a ring after a phone number is dialed; today microchips control these events.

Jennings also has fond memories of Sangamo, especially for the quality of its products. "Sangamo built the 'Cadillac' of everything," he said.

"...They made watches so well, they never needed replacement..."

Quality was also a watch word at Illinois Watch Co. Andrew Jankowski says his father has an Illinois watch that originally belonged to Andrew's grandfather. Jankowski remembers that his father once told him one reason the company went out of business was "they made the watches so well, they never needed replacement. They essentially may have put themselves out of business by producing such a fine timepiece." Whatever the reason for the firm's demise, Jankowski's watch still runs.

And it comes up ticking.....

So does an Illinois watch owned by Bill Child. It was given to his grandfather when he left the C&IM railroad and took up farming shortly before the Great Depression in the late '20s and early '30s. Now 60 to 70 years old, the watch loses time, Child says, because the essential jewels in the movement have become too worn to serve their purpose.

Still others....

Karen Smith worked in the Sangamo purchasing department in the late '60s. Marilyn Clardy's father-in-law was a Sangamo employee the last three years the firm operated. Rick Mollahan's father-in-law worked for Sangamo Electric for 34 years, and was married to a woman whose father was a foreman in the main factory. Rick Mollahan's wife worked at clerical jobs in what is now the executive tower each summer while she was in school.

Mike Bower's mother Helen, a great-aunt and great-uncle were all Sangamo employees. His great-aunt Lily still lives about a block away and, he adds, knows many other Sangamo "alums" who have followed with interest the many striking changes in their old work place.

Ann Alexander's brother Nicholas was a long time Illinois Watch Co. employee. Ann still prizes a leather billfold watch factory workers were given, embossed on one side with a drawing of the plant from an aerial perspective, and on its face bearing images of Illinois watches.

Sangamo sonar sank Soviet subs

One of the Sangamo's greatest technical achievements was the design of supersensitive recording equipment for the Navy that captured sonic signatures of Soviet submarines to let American sonarmen identify different classes of subs by the noises that only they emitted.

"Clearly, you had to design and build superior equipment to have the fidelity needed to train sailors to classify a sub by sound alone," Jennings notes.

So important was that work that not even some Sangamo workers knew what the plant was producing during the war, and Sangamo workers took their loyalty seriously.

"Even in the '50s, when the war was over," Child remembers, "if I asked my Aunt Joanna what they did at Sangamo, she'd just say 'we can't talk about that'."

Workers on break stood at tall tables... there were no chairs.

World War II was even further in the past when Mary M. Anderson worked for Sangamo in 1969, preparing navy brochures and books. By then, things were changing. She had a parking spot in a lot north of Converse St., where the Agency's fenced lot is now located. Each car, she recalls, had to display a tag on the license plate screw to show it was authorized to be there, or the vehicles could be towed.

Employees all had to wear badges with identity photos which were scanned by cameras at every entrance. To enter the building, she says, each employee would have to push a buzzer, and stand in view of the camera before the guard would "buzz" each one in separately. And "there was no holding the door" for the next person in line.

If an employee changed hair color or style, she remembers, the guard might not recognize them and the worker would then have to walk completely around the building in order to sign in. Visitors of all ages had to wear a visitors' badge and sign in at special entrances. Break rooms had no chairs, and workers on break simply stood at tall tables. When they returned to work, they went to desks where no personal items like photos, plants or decorations were allowed. Operations had come a long way from the "club room," the band and the company picnics.

Set 'em up in the other lane

Clearly, most Sangamo employees enjoyed themselves both at work and after hours. Child's Aunt Joanna was one of many who took part in the company's multiple bowling leagues, and Kathy Walker says "I still remember those great picnics" she attended when her husband was a Sangamo employee. "The food, the entertainment...it was like the Fair," she says.

Ron Miller may have summed it up best.

"I'm proud of my time with the Sangamo Electric Company," he said. "At one time this was a respected, innovative company known throughout the world for its products."