Springfield assembler is Cascade’s first 50-year worker

Company has several workers with 40-plus years and has brought one back from retirement to train others.


“I don’t know what we’re going to to without Jim if he ever does retire.”

— Jim Hamilton’s supervisor Bill Mahr

In an age of robotics, CNC technology and software design packages, terms like skilled crafts and industrial arts can sound like relics of the Iron Age.

But as Cascade Corp. gets ready to honor Springfielder Jim Hamilton as its worldwide organization’s 50-year full-time employee, a different scenario is developing in the shop at 2510 Sheridan Ave.

With manufacturing under increasingly tight deadlines, Cascade leaders say the skills and knowledge Hamilton and a dozen other Cascade employees with 40 years of experience have are an increasingly rare and valuable commodity.

It’s a story made for the Labor Day weekend.

“What (Hamilton) does and how he does it, it’s going to be extremely difficult for us to replace him,” said Rodney Hickman, manager of Cascade’s Springfield plant.

As Hamilton sub-assembles by hand all the seals that go into hydraulic cylinders for the fork lift operating systems Cascade sells, “he can feel when when it’s not right,” Hickman said.

Bill Mahr, the company’s staff manager for cylinders, said Hamilton’s ability to do so caught a problem that none of the company’s other quality control systems was able to.

Mahr explained that whatever’s moving on the fork end of a fork lift, “there’s a cylinder moving it.”

The cylinders, which resemble hand bicycle pumps, hold hydraulic fluid under high pressure and use that pressure to provide the lifting power.

So when seals that help contain the hydraulic fluid fail, things go wrong.

“We were having problems in the field with the way (one five-piece seal) performed, so engineering redesigned it,” Mahr said.

The fix had made it through all the company’s processes, and thousands of seals had been made by the time a set made it to Hamilton’s workbench on the shop floor.

“Jim came up to my office, and he put them on my desk, and said they were not correct. And I couldn’t see what was wrong,” Mahr said. “I had to pull the prints.”

A follow up revealed that the supplier had mistakenly matched up two different generations of the proposed fix, which created a “very minor radius change” that Mahr said Hamilton detected.

Hamilton “never put them on a part,” Mahr added. “They never left the building.”

In a sometimes repetitive job, “I don’t see how he stays focused” to be able to catch the imperfections that can lead to problems, Mahr said.

“I don’t know what we’re going to to without Jim if he ever does retire.”

What they might do is bring him back as a temp, as they’ve done with Dick Harvey, who retired after 47 years and is now helping Chad Kelly, a younger skilled tradesman, learn to design fixtures and tools on the fly.

In today’s manufacturing, “lead times that you get from customers are very minimal,” said plant manger Hickman. “We need to expedite everything involved in getting from a concept to a finished product.”

As a result, there’s often not time to go through the lengthy process that calls for a team to redesign a tool or fixture, get quotes from outside companies, review them, choose one, and have the job worked into the supplier’s production schedule.

Jeff Henning, staff manager of technical services at Cascade, said that while he uses “a lot of software packages” to design things, Harvey can do it in his head.

Harvey refers to the software between his ears as his “gray squish” and claims he looks younger than 71 because “I’ve been here in the shade” rather than out in the sun.

Like Hamilton, though, Harvey has done most of the jobs in the plant, knows the materials, machines and processes that drive production, and brings a problem-solver’s mind to the work.

“It’s the way you do woodworking as well,” Harvey said. It’s also the way he thinks when he repairs machinery for farmers around Greenfield, from which he drives each day to come to work, showing up on some days when Springfield workers have called in because of the snow.

“Very few people can think that way,” said Henning, which is why Harvey is so valuable.

His problem solving contributes to two important things: machinery that helps make the ultimate product, and tools and fixtures that improve the efficiency of a host of smaller processes also going on in the plant.

That work is “vital to a company like ours,” Hickman said. And because older workers “have seen and overcome a lot of obstacles over the years and know how to troubleshoot, we have to have them mentor the younger generation.”

That generation was yet to be born on Sept. 13, 1963, when, with John F. Kennedy in the White House, Hamilton worked his first day at Cascade.

Like his sister, Shirley, who works at the Union Club, Hamilton quit school in 11th grade to help support the family.

“”My Dad was always sick. He had heart problems,” he said.

After earning $25 a week at a Phillips 76 car wash, then $10 more a week at a filling station, he started grinding burrs off metal at Cascade for $1.61 an hour.

Taking home a shade less than $80 a week before taxes, “I thought I was on top of the world,” he said.

It was on-the-job training.

“When I started, it was just one little section of a building and and office. And it’s been added on three or four times.”

“We make all the parts” for the front ends of fork lifts. .

“I’ve worked in every part of assembly over there.”

Although Hamilton still appears to be bull strong from daily martial arts workouts that grew out of lessons he began taking when he got his first Cascade paycheck, he said he’s glad no longer to be paired up with someone else wrestling 1,000 pound cylinders through the production process.

“When I started building sub-assemblies, I thought I was in heaven,” he said.

Still, the seals and O-rings on cap valves and in cylinders don’t slide on themselves.

“You have to have extremely strong hands to do it,” said Tom White, who worked for years with Hamilton and retired as the plant’s staff manager after 46½ years. “And he does thousands.”

“He can also tell when the finish is not correct” on the steel of a cylinder, White said.

White added that he came to appreciate Harvey’s skill by trying to keep up with him one day.

“He’s such a good machinist that no movement is wasted,” White said.

Hamilton, who calls Cascade “a good place to work, maybe the best place to work,” also describes the atmosphere in which his contributions and Harvey’s are valued.

“We’ve got a heckuva a good shop, a good team. You don’t have the boss over you all the time. They trust you. They treat you with respect.”

Hamilton said managers and younger employees have reason to trust in older workers, most of whom are willing to “stay there and do the job and make sure it’s done.”

With Cascade’s purchase last fall by parts maker Toyota Industries, “hopefully we’re going to build a lot of Toyota stuff, too,” Hamilton said.

“It just seems like it’s getting better. And I think this Rodney Hickman — he’s a local guy, graduated from Shawnee (and) and an Ohio State man — he’s going to put us in there where we’re really good.”

Although he feels odd about serving as Hamilton’s supervisor, given that when he was born when Hamilton was in his 16th year on the job, Mahr is confident in hazarding a prediction about the man about to be honored as Cascade’s first 50-year employee.

Says Mahr: “He’ll probably be our first 60-year (employee), too.”

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