Rick Bush called me to discuss an article I had sent in for publication in T&D World. Our conversation drifted, and I found myself telling Rick about my early experiences at Consolidated Edison and Long Island Lighting Co. (LILCO). Rick's response went from polite interest (maybe feigned) to downright enthusiasm, “Anthony, you have a story to tell!”

I am now 94 years old and know God has kept me here for a reason, so I continue to try to make a difference. Today I am sharing a firsthand story you are unlikely to hear from any person living today.

I joined United Electric Light and Power Co. as a clerk in 1926. Our company supplied alternating current to an area of Manhattan north of 137^th Street. At this time, our assistant chief engineer, Hudson Roy Searing, was developing low-voltage secondary networks including the network protector. We had three small substations in our service territory, which was an enclave in New York Edison's direct current territory.

As a clerk, I was routinely subjected to good-natured abuse. For example, I laughingly refused to go to the Elizabeth Street Substation for a bucket of watts. My duties, besides running errands and buying cigarettes for the three big bosses, were to update records of transformers and keep records of work orders issued by engineers. My boss, Jeb Stuart (the grandson of the famous Confederate cavalry officer), must have liked my work because at the end of the year I received the largest percentage raise I ever received, with my salary going from $10 to $16 weekly.

Working and going to school at night, I moved into engineering with an electrical engineering degree from Cooper Union.

The years 1927 to 1930 saw a skyscraper boom on Lower and Midtown Manhattan, culminating with the Empire State Building. The New York Edison direct current system, already a veritable copper mine in the streets, was simply unable to supply the power required, so we ran 13.8-kV transmission lines to feed them. Later, Queens and Brooklyn tied into our networks to provide greater reliability.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Through consolidation, I found myself a part of Con Ed. The same Mr. Searing, who was now our president, informed us that although we had 22,000 employees on the payroll, 10,000 people should be ample to run the enterprise. Searing announced there would be no layoffs, and instead instituted severe salary cuts. There was a scramble among the engineers for the relatively small amount of work. Like dogs after a bone!

Economic growth was coming to Long Island, and I decided to be a part of it. Now an employee of LILCO, I helped upgrade the existing 4-kV overhead system to 13.8 kV. I had the opportunity to work with Andy Anderson with A.B. Chance to develop hot line tools, which were mounted at the end of wooden sticks that could withstand these very high voltages.

WORLD WAR II

As the war came about, iron and steel wire replaced copper. Women flooded into operations at power plants, substations, dispatch and meter reading — and at the same rate of pay as the men they replaced. There was definitely a pecking order in the company, as the engineers and superiors worked on the second floor with all others working on the first floor.

My career had its ups and downs (politics weighed heavily in the early years, too). We saw an influx of non-technical executives who had no understanding of the realities of the business. In a peak of anger, I took my list of accomplishments to the CEO. If I were not given a vice presidency, I threatened to take early retirement and leave.

This diatribe had its effect, and I shortly found myself retired and living in Texas near my wife's folks. I did keep my LILCO stock to fund my retirement, but the well-chronicled demise of LILCO cost us some $30,000, which would have been the core of our retirement.

NOW FOR MY SOAP BOX

Probably the biggest single issue we face today is the incompetence of executives running so many of our utility companies. We need to restore integrity and competence to the CEO position, and that responsibility must be undertaken by members of the board. We need to create a pool of qualified applicants for executive and board positions instead of following the insane search procedures we follow today.

An individual is not always given the opportunity to view the impact of one's career from several thousand miles and a generation or two. These notes may shed a bit of light on our early history and stir some long forgotten memories.

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Anthony Pansini has published a series of books including Pansini's “Guide to Electrical Power Distribution Systems,” which is available from the Fairmont Press.