Date with a Hero

Last Wednesday was one of the most memorable days in my career as I got to spend a good portion of it with "Sully" -- Captain Chesley Sullenberger -- the U.S. Air pilot who, together with his crew, safety landed flight 1549 in the Hudson River on January 15th.

Sully was the keynote speaker at the fifith annual International Auto Glass Safety Conference, sponsored by the Auto Glass Replacement Safety Standards Council (the AGRSS Council) for which I serve as a volunteer leader this year. After a private breakfast with AGRSS-registered companies, Sully kept a crowd of about 4,000 glued to their seats and riveted by his recollection of his flight that day.

There's a lot parallels between the auto glass industry and the aviation industry, including the quest to reduce costs and the resulting ways this affects safety. (You can see one such example in the Daily Show http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-october-13-2009/chesley-sullenberger. I was struck by them as I read Sully's book. (You can read my opening at the Conference here.)

All industries, especially the glass industry, are under pressure to reduce costs. AGRSS-registered companies pledge safety as their paramount concern. And they not only pledge to do the job right, they allow independent, third party validators to come into their shops and audit that committment.

The Captain understood this. "The AGRSS Council must have felt like a tea bag in an ocean when it started," he said. "I applaud your efforts."

He also understood the importance of safety. "I will be known in my life for this one event but, in reality, that event was one I had trained for and had to anticipate for many years."

Sully is the living definition of hero. But he is also a regular guy--a reluctant celebrity who has had fame foisted upon him by one extraordinary action. It was an honor to meet him.

GlassBuild Days Two and Three

Day two was noticibly stronger than the first day. It seemed that many people came in the for the show on Wednesday and spent the better part of Thursday there. Reaction among exhibitors was more mixed than usual. I took an informal straw poll while walking the aisles and here are the results. When asked how the show was going for them:

About 40 percent said it was a good show, and that they were very pleased;


About 40 percent said that it had exceeded their expectations. Most were quick to add, however, that their expectations had been nil given the economy;


About ten percent said it was not good at all for them;


and the other ten percent said that it was really too soon to tell. With trade shows, the proof is in orders that come in from it.



As for traffic, it's difficult for our booth staff to adequately assess as, try as we might, our booth somehow always end up in the hinterlands of the show (three rows from the end this year), but our editorial staff reported brisk traffic most of Thursday in certain areas of the show. So I don't think we'd be the best judge of traffic because we didn't have much ourselves.



What Thursday gave our industry was .... hope. There was still some business to be done out there. And there was more than one occasion when customer and exhibitor embraced in a joyous "we are both still here" hug that let you know that was just what both of them were thinking.



Reviews of the seminars were mixed with high marks given to the Energy Session and the Solar Panel with a great video into by Russ Ebeid. Judging by that video he'll be joining the 60 Mintues team any day now. Our ediorial staff will be covering the important ones in more in depth in future issues.

Day three was painfully quiet with very little activity, leading some of the familiar comments I've heard over the years to resurface ... GBA should be a two day show ... GBA should be every other year. Ending shows on Friday is always tough because everyone wants to get out of town and it did seem a much lighter traffic day than the last day of the show in 2008, which was on a Thursday.

It's Show Time

The first thing I noticed about Atlanta today was that the weather was beautiful. I was expecting to see canoes in the streets and water half way up the streetlights. But that, according to the cab driver, was last week not this week. He showed me some pretty high-high water marks in downtown while mentioning that the rain was 150 year rain. The city did a good job of clean up because you can't even tell there was flooding. At behind all that bad weather came the beautiful day we had today.
Tomorrow starts the glass show. Some people think of New Year's day as the beginning of the year; for others, it's September when school starts. For me, for the last 28 years at least, this show has always represented a new beginning .... more tomorrow.

Our Condolences

Well, it wasn’t the flu, but I got hit with a pretty nasty cold earlier this week. So I found myself calling in sick for three days, something I have not done before. Problem was, it was such a wicked cold that it was hard to function even from home.

This is how I have come to find myself in the office on the most beautiful of Saturdays, catching up on what I should have been doing all week … so please forgive me for being a day or two late in talking about John De Gorter, who died on Wednesday in North Carolina at the age of 81.

John De Gorter’s roots were in the glass industry. His father, Daniel was one of the largest importers of glass and glass products in the United States. After his death, John expertly predicted that increased need for fabrication equipment in this country as a result of improved and float production in this country. John felt that glass fabricating equipment would be in greater demand in the future. So in 1969, De Gorter Inc. began devoting its efforts to the sale and service of glass processing equipment.

Long before it was commonplace for foreign machinery companies to have representation in the United States, John De Gorter saw the need and filled it. The list of machinery his company has sold into the United States is too long to include and he was known worldwide.

On my first trip to glasstec in 1984, I was excited to try and meet with as many equipment and machinery manufacturers as I could. In every single meeting, when it became apparent I was from the United States, the very next question, every time was either “Do you know De Gorter?” or “Can you introduce me to De Gorter?”

Condolences to his wife of 58 years, Denise, and their children Dan, Deborah and Peter.

More info is available here.

Taking Up the Pen Again

When I was an eight-year-old second-grader at Queen of the Most Holy Rosary elementary school on Long Island, N.Y., I decided our school needed what I called a newspaper, but what was really a monthly magazine. I thought we needed it because we didn’t have it. Oh sure, we got tons of great-smelling blue mimeographed sheets to read and bring home at night, but we didn’t have anyplace where we students could express ourselves. I had this vision that kids from each grade would submit stories and artwork and we’d give the “newspaper” out once a month to all the students in every class once a month.

So I went to my teacher, Sister Rosario, who patiently listened to my request and then sent it to the principal, Sister Sheila. A few days later they said, “Okay, you put it together and we will copy and distribute it.” They even told every teacher to allow me to come to their class and talk about the newspaper and how kids could send materials and pictures in. I thought the students should name it too, so I came up with this contest idea for the name. Anyone who wanted to could submit a name for our newspaper and the students would vote on it. They’d see the winning name when the first issue came out.

The response surprised me—the first issue was about 40 pages long (there’s still a copy somewhere up in my parent’s attic) and it was filled with stories, poems and pictures from every grade. The winning name, The Monthly Blab, was my least favorite of the choices but it had won fair and square. I felt a real sense of accomplishment when I gave the final pages to Sister Sheila with a big drawing of the school penned by a fourth-grade artist, and right below it in big block letters the winning title, The Monthly Blab.

It seemed like it took forever to get the newspaper printed because, at that age, I was unfamiliar in some of the ways Catholic schools work. I did not realize that the ever-resourceful sisters had talked a local printer into printing the Blab at no charge—but the agreement was that he would “fit it in whenever he had time.” Finally, after March had turned into April, one day, I heard the shrill sound of the intercom intrude into our classroom and a booming voice called me to the office. Now, at my school, being called to the office usually meant either you were in big trouble or someone in your family had died, so I actually found myself hoping I was in trouble.

Sister Sheila was waiting for me with Pete, the janitor, who had a pretty good-sized dolly upon which were piled three big cardboard boxes. “Here’s your newspaper,” she said with a slight smile. “You can hand it out in all the classrooms tomorrow. Make sure you give Sister Rosario one, too,” was all she added.

I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. As soon as we got in the hall, I asked Pete to open the box and hand me one. And there it was, all 40 pages, printed in front of me with the great illustration of the school and below it the words The Monthly … no, wait, where were the words? The spot where the words The Monthly Blab had sat was now blank. Instead, on top, in the finest cursive penmanship you could imagine (that I recognized as Sr. Rosario’s) it said Our School Newspaper. Our School Newspaper? Our School Newspaper? A very cool name had been replaced without my knowledge—and with a very lame one at that.I thought there was a mistake, so when I got back to my classroom, I told Sister Rosario. Now here you should know that most of us in the class figured that, conservatively, Sister Rosario was about 117 years old. She was also about 3-foot 11, but she had the aim of Tom Seaver with an eraser, so I mean it when I say we were looking eye-to-eye and I was trying not to be intimidated.

“Sister, there’s a mistake,” I said holding it up and pointing at the blank space. “It was supposed to say The Monthly Blab right here and it doesn’t.”

“Oh, that’s not a mistake,” she shot back pleasantly. “I changed it. That wasn’t a good name for a newspaper.”

“But Sister, all the kids voted …” I protested.

“Oh well, too late now,” she said with a unique combination of authority and finality.

I was eight years old and I’d learned an important lesson. I’d just been edited.

I should probably be too embarrassed to tell you what I did, but I will anyway. Working out of Pete’s broom closet, I was able to spend the whole next day delivering the newspapers to all the classes. But before I would visit each class, I would make a stop in the girl’s bathroom and, in my best penmanship, write the words The Monthly Blab in magic marker on each one. I did this for all copies—all 841 copies—except, I’d somehow forget to do it on the copies I gave to the teachers. An ingenious plan, I was sure.

The first Blab got a number of great compliments and I started to plan the next edition. It wasn’t too long after that that the good sisters told me there was not enough time or money to do another issue of the Blab, so I shouldn’t even bother to work on it. This was how I came to understand the phrase “winning the battle but losing the war” at a young age.

To my knowledge, there never was another school newspaper at QMHR, which, sadly, is no longer a school but a community center.

So why am I telling you this? Because I tried an experiment this summer. It’s been 40 years since I first started writing for The Monthly Blab. I decided this year to take the summer off from writing. That’s why I haven’t in ink since May. Oh, I was still editing, researching, etc., but I just took a break from writing. I had this crazy idea to stop for a summer and see how it felt. Instead of feeling a sense of freedom, I felt loss. I missed writing terribly, and I’m back. I will keep a tender hope that you are glad; I know I am.

Icy Tears

The closing of the Pittsburgh Glass Works plant in Hawkesbury, Ontario, brought to mind a special memory. See the links below for more information.

Father-Daughter Dance
Any Dream Will Do

Spring Ahead

“The harshest winter finds in us an invincible Spring.” -Albert Camus

When I began to write this article on Monday, the outer suburbs of the Washington, D.C., area had just been hit with its first major snow in more than three years. We got ten inches at our offices here in Stafford, Va. Now, as I put the finishing touches on it on Saturday morning, I am being enticed outside by the promise of a 72-degree temperature, bright sun and absolutely no snow left on the ground—it’s all melted. In its place are tons of industrious birds, including at least two robins with bright red chests thumping, all digging into the waterlogged earth in search of breakfast. Might it really be Spring?

Spring was on my mind early last October when I read part one of Brigid O’Leary’s excellent article about the glass in the new sports stadiums opening this year. “Why don’t we save it for Spring?” suggested editor Megan Headley. “We can use it in March and it will come out right before the start of the baseball season. It would be a great cover story.”Now there’s a saying among editors (sort of akin to the “sometimes-you’re-the-windshield-sometimes-you’re-the-bug” one) that says “great pictures or great photos, you never get both.” In this case, we had a great article, but we had no photos. So any story, let alone a cover story, was going to be a challenge.

With that in mind, Megan went to work on the both the Yankees and the Mets to let us get some great glass photos of their new digs. Now let me say that getting permission to photograph an as-yet unopened major league baseball stadium turned out to be the most difficult photo shoot we’ve ever attempted. Despite repeated tries, the Yankees just said flat out “no.” Thanks to the good graces and great shots by the glass teams working there, we were able to bring you the interiors any way. You'll see some exterior shots next month.

After many months of negotiations, the New York Mets came through and, once Megan got the word that we could do so, we knew just who we wanted to take the pictures.The photos of the new Citi Field in this issue were taken by award-winning New York photographer Fred Kopf. “I had an escort with me at all times but there were certain areas I was not allowed to visit like the players’ locker rooms,” he said, “but I got a good cross section of all the major glass work. They told me that the Mets were allowing only two photographers in to shoot prior to opening day—a Sports Illustrated photographer was permitted to take one picture and USGlass magazine, which did a full shoot.”

I knew Fred would come through for us. In addition to being a professional shutterbug, he is also my younger and only brother and is used to the danger that difficult situations bring. Most days, he serves as a lieutenant in the New York City Fire Department. He is FDNY through and through. “It was a great kick to do the shoot and the Mets organization was first-class,” he said. The article also served as a point of discussion in my family. Growing up in New York, the boys (my father and Fred) were always more partial to the Yankees. But my mother grew up in Queens watching Shea Stadium being built and passed her admiration of the Mets on to her daughters, so the shoot also served to prove the ladies right: Mets rule.

I am headed home this week to New York, which is also the home Glass Expo Northeast '09. We will be out at the Hyatt Regency Long Island Wind Watch Hotel &; Golf Club. The event runs Wednesday and Thursday and I hope to see you there.
Here’s wishing you an invincible Spring. —Deb

P.S.: Take a look at this New Yorker article for another take on baseball's new abobe in the big apple.

Photos and text (c) 2009 Key Communications Inc.