The 1960s brought tremendous change – and progress – to Minnesota Power  Jerry Ostroski In his memoir below, retired Minnesota Power executive Gerald (Jerry) Ostroski fondly recalls the “trusty slide rule” -- a Duplex DeciTrig – he used as a young MP employee before the advent of computer engineering. However, Ostroski’s career-long interest in new technology and computers, and in how they could transform the electric utility industry, was legendary at Minnesota Power. Also legendary: astoundingly effective techniques in getting employees to buy roses from him to support an annual Rotary Club fund-raiser. He still sells them each year.
Ostroski began his Minnesota Power career in 1963 as an Assistant System Planning Engineer and steadily assumed positions of increasing responsibility, including Computer Applications Engineer, Transmission Planning Engineer, Manager-System Planning, Director-Planning, Director-Information and Planning, Vice President-Information and Planning, Vice President-Information and Environmental Services, Vice President-Minnesota Power and President-Synertec. It’s 6 a.m., and I’ve gotta find that alarm clock and shut the dumb thing off. Tuesday, Sept. 3, 1963 – my first day of waking up in a strange apartment and my first day of work at Minnesota Power & Light Company. My first real job as an engineer. I drove up from central Wisconsin yesterday -- Labor Day -- with everything I own in life sitting in the back seat of my 1956 Ford (I didn’t need to put a single item in the trunk), all eager to get on with a professional engineering career. A shower, shave, some Cheerios for breakfast, and I’m off to the office, wearing my only suit, my only white shirt and only neck tie. I have to drive around a bit to find a parking place downtown, but finally I spot one on south First Avenue East by a junk yard. It’s about a six-block walk to what will become my home away from home for almost 39 years.  Freimuth Dept. Store I walk west to Lake Avenue to cross the tracks on the Lake Avenue bridge, pass Joe Heuy’s café, and walk past the Freimuth Department store on Superior Street to get to MP&L’s door on First Avenue West. Through the door, down a few steps, pass the Credit Union office, turn right at the cafeteria, and wait for the elevator so Imogene can whisk me joltingly to the 3rd floor. She has never seen me before, so she has to ask which floor to stop for me. It’s the first and last time she’ll ask. I’m a bit early, so I take a seat on an old, well splintered, wooden chair just inside the General Engineering office. The door I just came through looks like it belongs to a 1920s dentist’s office – you know, wooden, with a frosted, mottled glass panel and GENERAL ENGINEERING in block letters painted in black across the back side of the glass.
The office space is a big “bull pen” carved out of an old building. I suspect that the suspended tile ceiling is covering punched-out metal ceiling panels that came from the ‘20s era also. The floors are square tiles covering old, narrow maple flooring strips that look like they belong in a gymnasium with basketball-playing high school kids running all over it. You can tell because some of the tiles are cracked and broken up; pieces coming off in places and a few tiles completely missing in non-critical spots. The desks are all wooden, all oak, all old, and all well used. Some have pieces of something that looks like a slit garden hose nailed to the corners to cover splinters, and some desk tops are covered with a green linoleum-like product (I don’t know if that’s to provide a better writing surface, or to keep the desk’s occupant from seeking too much medical help due to oak slivers getting imbedded in painful places). The desk chairs are all wooden also, and some even tilt and swivel. The seats and backs of some are covered with various types of cloths and cushions to provide a bit of creature comfort. I think one of these will soon become my home – and I soon learn which one. Of course, the new guy always gets the worst of the lot. A young lady enters and occupies the receptionist’s desk. She is Noreen, and I soon learn that I am indeed expected, as Noreen has a whole list of forms for me to sign and take care of before taking me around and introducing me to the “guys” in the office. All of the technical staff is male, and there are four females in the office. Noreen and Diane turn out to be the support staff for the engineers. Ellen is clerical and administrative support for the Operations folks; and Marguerite is secretary to the Chief Engineer (who, at the time, was Jack Rowe – later to become president and CEO). General Engineering consists of the lead engineers who all have offices with windows along the outside walls of the 3rd floor, either on the Michigan Street side – Substation Engineering and Special Construction -- or the 1st Avenue West side, where resides the Right of Way Engineer, System Planning Engineer, Distribution Engineer, Relay Engineer, Transmission Engineer, Engineering Projects Accountant -- and Beech, an about-to-retire lead engineer of some sort. The staff engineers supporting the lead roles all occupy the center bull pen, and their desks are lined up so two engineers can reach across an aisle and share a phone. Files, drawings, blue prints, and “drawing stuff” occupy all the available space. Every horizontal surface is covered with notes, drawings and plans of some sort. I’ll be working in the System Planning group. I’m the Assistant System Planning Engineer -- and, I find out later, I’m on a six-month probation to see if I can hack it in the real world. The other person making up the System Planning Department is my fearless leader, Bob Marchetti. Our job is to figure out what to build over the next few years to keep the lights on in central and northeastern Minnesota.  Mechanical Adding Machine For tools to help me in this new job, I find that I’ll have access to a mechanical adding machine in the “bull pen” area, and I can check out a mechanical calculator that can actually multiply numbers. And, of course, I have my secret weapon: a trusty slide rule -- a fancy K&E Duplex DeciTrig with hyperbolic sines and cosines to do the power line calculations. To the best of my knowledge, that fancy slide rule was the only one of its kind in the Company. Drafting tables are set up here and there so ideas can be put on paper in the code that only engineers can understand. For an engineer, it don’t get much better than that.
After a trip to Milt Prince’s office in the Personnel Department (I soon find out that Milt is the Personnel Department) to fill out medical plan information and paycheck deduction forms, I get introduced to the crew I’ll be working with – a few fairly new troops and some seasoned veterans. I meet all the lead Engineers (they, by the way, are all dressed in suits and ties) and all their staff (usually casually dressed, but those hoping to get promoted wearing suits and ties), and take a few side trips to other departments. There’s the drafting department, where there’s a room full of drafting tables, each with a draftsman bent over it putting ink or pencil onto paper or cloth, so Engineering’s ideas can be transferred to blueprints and sent to the various projects underway at the Company. Everything here is done by hand and computer-driven drafting is still a few decades away. At around 9:30 a.m., on a cue that I didn’t yet understand, the entire group gets up en masse and heads out the office door, taking me with them. We go down the steps and end up on the Michigan Street level in the “coffee shop” of the Company. Coffee (for a nickel), soft drinks, donuts, sweet rolls and other treats are available and everyone goes through the line, ordering from Margaret, who runs the place with an iron hand. Cigarette smoke is everywhere. A few of the tables have a game of cribbage underway, but mostly it’s small groups of folks, drinking coffee and talking. The various departments’ staff doesn’t mix much. Accountants drink coffee with the other accountants, the engineers have their spot, sales folks huddle together and so on. I later find out that the time to take your coffee break is strictly regulated by Jack Rowe’s secretary -- and woe to the poor guy who steps outside of the assigned break period – all in an attempt to regulate the flow of traffic in the coffee shop, I assume. The introductions and “papers signing” takes up most of the morning. For lunch I go to the Jolly Fisher restaurant on Superior Street. It’s the only eating spot I know of, and I thought I’d get in one last “real” meal before having to eat my own cooking – not a pleasant thought. Lunches from now on will be at Joe Huey’s, in the cafeteria, or at the Caribe Grill, where a burger and fries cost 59 cents. After lunch, I settle in to begin my first assignment. A box of metering charts and readings from the System Operations Center shows up and is dumped on my desk. With this, I’m supposed to determine what we should construct next to serve folks in the Little Falls Division, now that we are interconnected with neighboring utilities in two places and electricity generated by other folks begins to show up (and load up) ‘our’ lines. The technology to solve this type of problem does not exist within the Company, so we do the best we can with a DC board simulator. I learn that every once in while we hire the EBASCO consulting firm or take a trip to GE’s or Westinghouse’s engineering offices to use their computing facilities. The day ends with my desk looking like all the others, piled full of charts, papers, tabulations, and a note book of calculations. At 5 p.m., everyone leaves and so do I. The guys in the office told me about a local meat market, so I walk up First Avenue West and stop at Fichtner’s to pick up something for supper (rib eyes are advertised in their window for 59 cents a pound) and head back to my apartment to try to learn how to cook. I never did succeed at that.  Support Taconite Relief So ends my first day of real work, and begins a career that lasts almost 39 years. I will soon learn of something called “The Taconite Amendment” that will result in the decade of the ‘60s transforming Minnesota Power & Light Company from a small, backwater electric utility into a very fast growing, profitable, innovative leader of the industry. The passage of that legislation thrust MP&L into a growth and construction mode that would last for nearly two decades. Interconnections with other utilities went from two in 1963 to the 13 or so of today. Many coal-fired power plant sites were studied, as were a few nuclear plant sites on the North Shore, to supplant existing generating resources to meet the growing taconite processing loads. As you drive up Thomson Hill in Duluth, look at the transmission line towers that cross Interstate 35. They are built to 230-kV specifications to be able to carry the power generated by the then-proposed Hibbard Unit # 5, a 250-to-350 megawatt unit to be located on the Hibbard site. Hibbard #5 morphed into Boswell # 3. Jack Rowe determined to stick with what we knew how to do and decided to not go nuclear. Had he not made that decision, I don’t think the Company would exist today. Costs of nuclear generation would have driven the Company down the path of Lake Superior District Power Company and MP&L would have had to become an operating unit of Northern States Power, now known as Xcel Energy.
A few more significant events I remember occurring in the decade of the ‘60s:  Boswell Energy Center Construction
 Square Butte Of course, there were many other activities underway, but since I am not a historian, I’ll include in my discourse only those that still remain in my mind. As the decade ended (fall of 1969), I began the engineering effort necessary to figure out a way to move power from North Dakota to MP’s service territory. Minnkota Power Cooperative in Grand Forks, ND, had just completed the very successful and inexpensive Center Unit # 1, and the idea was to duplicate that unit on the Minnkota site and move the power to Minnesota using the 230-kV transmission system. In 1977, the Square Butte Project came online, looking nothing like the original idea: not a duplicate unit, not using the 230-kV transmission system, and not inexpensive. But it worked extremely well and continues to deliver power to MP to this day.
Round two of the taconite expansions was getting underway as the ‘60s ended, and so was the transformation of Minnesota Power & Light Company. The Company went from a small, slow-growing electric utility to an innovative, fast-growing utility that advanced the industry’s frontier in many areas: engineering, finance, research, environmental stewardship and others. It was a great time to be a young engineer. You got to think great thoughts, were allowed to develop some of them -- and a few even worked. |
|
