Created 2/22/2026

Last week I wrote about the life of Ken Scott as I knew him. He was a noble fellow who I encountered my first day on the job in May 1979. His life was an open book as far as I knew. I found over the years that many of the Power Plant Men had previous lives before they came to work at the remote power plant in North Central Oklahoma that they didn’t readily reveal to their coworkers.

Jerry Mitchell, for instance, even though he seemed like a simple mechanic had worked on military jet engines to the point where he built the engine in the blue Corvette he drove to work each day. The one that would go from zero to 80 miles per hour and back to zero from the main gate to the highway. As he showed me one day when we were driving home after spending our Saturday doing coal cleanup. He had machined the parts in the engine himself (see the post:  A Power Plant Man Becomes an Unlikely Saint).

Anyway, I digress.  There were many Power Plant Men that I learned later in life had quite a history before they came to work at our power plant that was remarkable.  Sonny Kendrick didn’t seem to be that kind of person.  He seemed like an open book to me.  But come to think about it.  He didn’t talk much about his past.

That’s why I was so surprised that one day when I was first working with Sonny on the roof of the Precipitator when I had my head inside a precipitator control cabinet and I had just finished blaring out my rendition of the Brady Bunch Theme Song.  Suddenly Sonny stunned me with such a shock that made me think I had been electrocuted.  Sonny had suddenly burst out singing like the famous opera singer Luciano Pavarotti.  I explained all this in the post:  Singing Along with Sonny Kendrick.

Actually, Sonny looked like this:

Sonny Kendrick died on January 6, 2026 (two days before his 77th Birthday).  To me, it was fitting that Sonny’s Birthday was on January 8, given that it was also Elvis’s birthday.  When he died, I received several messages online from Power Plant Men notifying me about his death.  Bob Eno, who I worked with as an electrician at Horseshoe Power Plant, sent me a message through Facebook saying, “Sorry to the be the bearer of bad news.”  With an article about Sonny’s passing.  When I told Bob that I had heard the news, he asked me, “Didn’t he sing at your wedding?”  In fact:  He did!

After hearing Sonny Kendrick singing on the precipitator roof, I realized that I could no longer remain single.  I had to go out and find a wife so that I could be one of the few people in the world that could claim that Sonny Kendrick actually sang at my wedding!!!  Luckily, I already had someone in mind.

When I was waiting in the back of the church getting ready to walk down the aisle, one of the deacons in the church who happened to be the Assistant Plant Manager at the plant, Bill Moler and was going to process before me, when he heard Sonny in the balcony above us going through a litany of beautiful arias asked, “Who is that singing?”   I turned to him with a big smile on my young face and said, “That’s Sonny Kendrick.”  He looked stunned.  He was shocked and said, “Our Sonny Kendrick?”  I don’t know if before that day, anyone at the plant actually knew that Sonny could sing.

Even though Sonny Kendrick was already at the plant for a year before I arrived my first summer in 1979, I started working with Sonny Kendrick when I joined the electric shop, because there was an urgent need to teach someone else how to work on the Precipitator.  This was because a few years earlier, our Electrical Supervisor, Leroy Godfrey, had banished Sonny to the Precipitator after Sonny had pointed out to him that he was an Electrical Specialist, and he should be working on more than just the precipitator.  From that point on, Sonny was banished to the precipitator.  This was a dusty dirty job that no one wanted to do.  Sonny was becoming burned out and was growing more and more discontent.

Leroy later wanted to fire me after one time when I refused to take a piece of plexiglass back to the machinist to have additional holes drilled in it.  Leroy was trying to make a certain project be over budget, because he was playing a game with an engineer who had failed to come and ask Leroy for advice before planning out a job.  So, I knew about the wrath of Leroy.  I talked about his personality in the post “The Passing of an Old School Power Plant Man – Leroy Godfrey“.

When I was a janitor and had been assigned to clean the electric shop a year before I became an electrician, I would hear Bill Rivers, who was one of my carpool buddies, playing jokes on Sonny each day.  He would refer to Sonny as “Baby Huey”.  I didn’t really understand this reference, as Baby Huey was a cartoon character in a comic book:

Then just now, while I was writing this post and talking with an AI tool about Baby Huey, it pointed out that Baby Huey was a singer:

I think Bill Rivers probably had in mind the cartoon version of Baby Huey, but after hearing Sonny sing, I think that maybe Bill Rivers didn’t realize that a singing Baby Huey made a lot more sense.

I think some people were under the impression that Sonny Kendrick was a slow learner.  What they didn’t realize was that he had a very good memory, and when he was learning something new, he would try to completely understand it.  He would take a lot of notes and study them.

When I had taken over the operation and maintenance of the precipitators from Sonny, I started changing the controls drastically.  I adjusted the rapper heights and the timing, the voltages on the transformers, and the vibrator settings.  Sonny had been trained by Buell, the precipitator manufacturer how to operate it properly, and I was changing all of that.  We had a few heated arguments over something called “Re-entrainment”.  I had not been trained by anyone, except Sonny and Bill Rivers.

I thought some consultant had made up the term to sound smart, because it didn’t make sense to me, considering I was doing the exact opposite of what Sonny had told me needed to be done.  I said, “Unless you can convince me that what I’m doing causes something called re-entrainment, and it’s a bad thing, I don’t see why I should change what I’m doing.”  — See.  I really was hardheaded.  I had only been an electrician for 4 years at this point.

Sonny walked out of the office, and into the Electrical lab.  Then a few minutes, he came back with a manual from his precipitator class, and on page 234, he pointed to a paragraph and he said, “read this.”  It said, “Running the rappers at too fast of a rate, especially on the back end will cause re-entrainment.  The particles falling from the plates will be too small to fall into the hopper and will instead be re-introduced into the airflow.”  — Ok.  So, now I understood.  Re-entrainment wasn’t just some made up name to confuse the public.

This encounter taught me something about Sonny that I hadn’t realized before.  Sonny knew what re-entrainment was.  Sonny knew a lot more than he let on.  The thing about Sonny was that he was incredibly humble.  He didn’t want anyone to know that he was bordering on genius.  He was just fine being called “Baby Huey.”  He didn’t mind if each day, Bill Rivers would come into the shop and play jokes on him.  In fact, Sonny Kendrick loved that people thought enough of him to pick on him.  I usually felt that way about myself.

Maybe that is why being banished to the precipitator had eaten on him so much.  It was a lonely job.  Being the only Electrical Specialist at the plant set him apart.  He became much happier in 1988 when we had a reorganization, and the Electrical Specialist job was eliminated, and Sonny became a regular Electrician.  Then he was on a regular crew working with everyone else.  I had to wrestle the precipitator away from him knowing that he would be a lot happier not to ever have to work on it again.  It was good to see Sonny walking around the shop with a big grin on his face.  Here is his work photo:

Sonny attended the Church of Latter-Day Saints with his best friend from the plant was Jerry Dale, a machinist.  Jerry and Sonny drove me home one day from work.  Sonny and I had had a religious discussion one day on the precipitator roof, and Sonny had gone down to the machine shop and brought Jerry up to roof to hear what I had to say.  This was not like one of those contentious discussions where we disagreed about something.  It was just a new way of looking at something that Sonny seemed to like.  So, he went and asked Jerry, who was some kind of leader in their Church to come and hear it.  After that, Sonny asked if they could drive me home that day so they could talk more about it.

That was the day that as we were driving home, and shortly after we had passed Bill’s Corner, we came up to a car driving slowly.  Jerry made a statement that has stuck with me.  He asked me, “Should I put the car into overdrive and drive over the car?”  A mile or two earlier, since it was a windy day and the north wind was blowing rather hard, he said, “The wind is blowing so hard, instead of using gas, it’s filling up my tank.  I may have to take the gas cap off in case it overflows.”  I could see why Sonny liked hanging around with Jerry Dale.  Besides that, he was a very good machinist, and you never knew when you might need his assistance.

I mentioned this in the post, Relay Tests and Radio Quizzes with Ben Davis, that one of the jobs the Electrical Specialist would do was to test the relays during an outage (known as an overhaul).  Now that I had taken the precipitator away from Sonny, he would spend overhauls in the electric lab testing relays.  These are the relays that protect all of the electrical equipment when a fault of some kind occurs.  There are overcurrent relays, under and over voltage relays and relays that detect a grounded circuit.

After Sonny was no longer an Electrical Specialist in 1987, Ben Davis and I were assigned to do relay testing during one of our major overhauls, as you can read in the post above.  Sonny was not too happy about that because it was kind of fun testing protective relays in the electric lab during an overhaul.  So, years later in 1993, Ben Davis, Sonny Kendrick and I were assigned to go to Dallas to go to an Advanced Protective Relay Maintenance class.

Here is the manual we used:

I still read this at night sometimes when I’m having trouble going to sleep.

Anyway.  It was nice that Sonny was able to go to the training after years of testing relays without actually being formally trained.  Here is how Sonny took it:

One other incident that comes to mind when I think about Sonny.  One day he was sitting in the electric lab during break time, and he sneezed.  When he did that, he “threw out his back”.  He was suddenly struck with a terrible pain in his back.  I believe that he had a ruptured disk.  I mentioned this in the post:  “Back to Plain Ol’ Power Plant Back Pain“.  He was out of commission for many weeks after that one whopper of a sneeze.  You just never know when some tragedy like that may happen.  Sonny, being a naturally positive person took it in stride and didn’t let it get him down.  After his back had been repaired, he was back to his normal self again.

There’s a lesson to learn there.  When you are right with God, then when sudden events happen that change your life, those times are taken in stride as something that makes life more interesting.  Sonny seemed to see life that way, and it was encouraging to be around him because his attitude sort of rubbed off on you.

When you work in an isolated environment such as a Coal Fired Power Plant located in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma, you work with a group of people all focused on doing their jobs to make electricity for people across Oklahoma, so they can be safe and secure in their homes.  You know some of them are farmers.  Some of them perform in rodeos.  Some used to work on oil rigs, or on Highway construction.  Some worked in other factories, such as the Zinc Smelting plant in Tonkawa.  Or in the Oil Refineries in Tulsa.  One guy even spent most of his life in the three surrounding counties, never venturing out into the world.  Many lived on Indian Reservations nearby the plant.  Many came from other power plants, even as far away as California.

Sonny Kendrick, like the majority of power plant men was born in Oklahoma.  He was born in Oklahoma City actually.  When he told me about how he wanted to be a singer when I first found out he could sing.  He explained to me about how he instead went to Okmulgee to go to the OSU Technical School and obtained a degree in electronics.  He explained that he needed a job where he could support a family.  I had seen his wife at some of the holiday functions.

What was never mentioned in the 20 years that I worked with Sonny was that he met his future wife at the American University Baptist Church in Beirut Lebanon when he was a junior in High School.  — Wait.  What?

It turned out that when Sonny was growing up, he lived in Libya, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, and Lebanon!  How come I never knew this?  I never knew that Sonny had worked on a Seismograph Crew for Conoco Oil company in Mississippi!  The things you can learn by reading an obituary…  As I said, Sonny was a humble man.  He didn’t talk much about his own life.  He just looked at you and smiled just like that picture above.

There is a video on Sonny’s Obituary site:  Obituary for Sonny Kendrick The video has a song by Elvis Presley.  Sonny and Elvis shared a Birthday.  January 8.   I encourage everyone to go to this site, and down at the bottom is a 20 minute video showing the life of Sonny.  You will be amazed at the person that you thought you knew.

Here is Sonny and Ladean as a young couple:

When Bill Rivers used to call Sonny, Baby Huey, I suppose if he had known him when he was younger, he would have had more respect for this humble man.  Here is Baby Sonny:

Everyone at the plant knew him as Sonny Kendrick.  He was like a “Sonny”.  To me, he is also Franklin Floyd Kendrick, Opera Singer and Friend.

 

A New Power Plant Story:

I left my Power Plant family behind 25 years ago to pursue a life of adventure in Round Rock, Texas writing computer applications for Dell for 12 1/2 years and then General Motors for 10 years, after which I retired.  This past summer (2025) I was invited to a Power Plant family reunion that repeats every three months in Stillwater Oklahoma with my past family of the same Power Plant Men that I spent writing about for four years between January 2012 and December 2015.

When I arrived at the lunch being held at the Mexican Restaurant, I met up with 35 men I hadn’t seen for 24 years.  We went around the table introducing ourselves, just in case we couldn’t recognize each other behind the gray hair and wrinkles we were wearing that afternoon.  I sat across the table from an old man I didn’t know, and I introduced myself to him.

I said, ‘Hi, I’m Kevin Breazile.  I used to be an electrician at Sooner.”  He shook his head and said he didn’t remember me.  I knew his voice.  I also recognized the look he gave me.  It was the same sad and confused stare my dad would give me when he wondered who I was while he was struggling with dementia.

He said, “I’m Jasper Christensen.”  I immediately recognized him and realized that his voice was still very similar to the younger Jasper that I knew many years earlier.  He was an Engineering Supervisor and later our Maintenance Supervisor when I left the plant.

I smiled and said, “Jasper!  I’m Kevin!  I was always a troublemaker electrician.  I left in 2001.”  Jasper turned to look at the younger lady sitting next to him, who was obviously there to assist him as he had no memory of me.  I quickly picked up my phone and searched on WordPress for a Power Plant Post that I had re-posted just the weekend before called “Power Plant Quest for the Internet” and showed him the picture I had posted of him:

He was surprised and said, “Oh!  That was a long time ago.”  I said, “Well, you look the same to me.”  He definitely still had the same distinctive voice.

Jerry Potter was sitting next to me and said that he had read some of my Power Plant posts, but that he never read anything about himself.  I realized that if I had written about Jerry, it would have been in passing in a post about someone else (I mentioned him in the post about the Power Plant Birthday Phantom because his birthday was the second one in January), because even though I held Jerry in high regard, I never really worked directly with Jerry.  He worked on the heavy equipment in the coal yard, and the only time I interacted with him was when I was working on the coal dumper.  The first time I met Jerry Potter I immediately thought of him as Slim Pickens younger brother.  They looked so much alike.

Jerry just turned 65 last month (January 2026).  I first met him when he was 21 or 22 years old.  Just to give you an idea of the history that these men had with each other.  Maybe at future events, Jerry will share a story with me that I can write about.  The coal yard operators lived in a world of their own, working shift work up on the hill driving heavy equipment back and forth across the coal pile and running the dumper that dumped the coal from the coal trains that had travelled all the way from Wyoming to bring us black chunks of preprocessed electricity.

This is all just an introduction to the story I want to share about the engineer who flexed his muscle, as the title of this post suggests (or explicitly states).  You see, one person that was NOT at the luncheon was Ray Eberle.  Ray was one person I really wanted to see when I visited Stillwater.  He and I had spent the last three years I worked at the plant sitting side-by-side working on our computers making the company’s all-encompassing enterprise resource planning application SAP smarter.  You can read about our endeavor in this post:  Tales of Power Plant Prowess by Ray Eberle.   So, I had messaged Ray the night before the get-together to see if he was going to be going.  He told me he was busy building a house on the east side of Stillwater, and he was going to be there most of the day.  So, we arranged to meet around 9:00 in the morning.  The lunch didn’t start until 11:00.

Well.  I was late making it to the lunch by 15 minutes, because spending just two hours with Ray isn’t usually enough.  Ray is one of the most interesting people on the planet, and time flies when you are with him.  The three years when I worked with Ray flew by so fast, I think I developed wind burn on my face.

When I was talking with Ray, he told me the following story.  This is where the engineer comes into the picture.

After I left the plant to begin the next part of my life, Ray, either because he was too heartbroken because I was gone, or because he wanted a change of scenery, had moved into a room across the hall from where we had set up shop in the Master Print Room.  Nine years after I was gone in 2010, while Ray continued improving the SAP application by entering Bill of Materials on all of the parts used by the Power Plant, a new engineer suddenly entered his office.

Ray was sitting there behind his desk focusing on his work:

In walked the new young engineer. Steven Jones (I think that’s his name).  I do not have a picture of Steven, and it’s just as well.  I don’t think he would want me to post it here.  Keep in mind, Ray Eberle was a mechanic.  His regular job was to work in the maintenance shop when his expertise was needed.

When Steven Jones, came into Ray’s office, he asked Ray, “What is it you do here?”

Ray’s response was “I’m a mechanic”. — unexpressive stare — oh.  Like the picture above.

The engineer Steven turned around and left.  Something about this exchange obviously had ruffled the feathers of the newly hatched engineer, because after a few minutes, he returned, and asked Ray, “How is it that you have a desk when you are just a mechanic?”

If Ray even responded, he probably just said, “Because I do.”  This seemed to rile the young engineer even further, because evidently based on his question, this new engineer didn’t have a desk.  He was probably using a table or was in a cubicle in the engineer’s room down the hall.  He left in a huff once again.

A little while later.  Let’s say, fifteen minutes or so, this young man returned to Ray’s domicile and said, “Come with me.  I want to show you something.”  So, Ray, ceased his productive computer venture and set out to discover what sort of fancies young engineers wish to share with the common mechanic.

Ray followed Steven into another nearby room, where he pointed to an unused desk.  Steven said, “I would like for you to move this desk into my office over here.”  Ray said, “Okay”. Then the engineer turned around and left.

Ray then left the office area for a little while, and when he came back and was walking down the hallway, he saw John Belusko (an operator) walking by.

Ray asked John if he would help him move a desk for the new engineer, and John indicated that he would be glad to help Ray.  So, Ray picked up one end of the desk and John the other and they headed down the hallway.  When they passed the engineer’s office, John said, “Hey, don’t you want to go in there?”

Ray said, “Just follow me.  I’ll show you where we need to put it.”  So, Ray and John carried the desk down to the end of the hall and made their way out onto the Turbine Room floor.

Ray had already moved the overhead crane into position and had some slings ready to tie the desk to the overhead crane hook.  At the end of the Turbine Room floor there is a crane bay that goes all the way down to the bottom floor (6 stories down).

At the bottom of the crane bay, there was a large dumpster:

Ray and John lowered the desk into the dumpster as a large truck was hooking the dumpster up to be hauled away.  Then John returned to the Control Room while Ray went back to work making himself useful again.

A few minutes later, the young engineer Steven Jones entered Ray’s abode once again.  This time he said, “Ray!  I thought I asked you to move the desk into my room.  Where is it?”

Ray, wishing to asway the young man’s concern, said, “Follow me.”

Ray took Steven down the hall and out onto the Turbine Room floor.  He pointed down at the dumpster that was just leaving the crane bay on the trailer of the truck and pointing at the desk laying upside down in the dumpster said, “There’s your desk.”  Ray turned around and headed back to his room to work on his tasks and make himself a hand for the electric company once more leaving the engineer staring down at his power dwindling away.

When Steven Jones had asked Ray what he did here (at the plant) and he answered that he was a mechanic, what Ray failed to mention was that he was one of the world’s leading Turbine Generator Specialists specializing in General Electric Generators.  He was also a renown storyteller throughout the lower 48 states who holds several degrees in Bard-ology.  What the young engineer had yet to learn was that the men and women that maintained the equipment in the plant were all specialists in their own fields with decades of experience working with the leading mechanics from across the nation that came to work alongside them throughout the years.

Nobody, not even the plant manager would treat these men and women disrespectfully.  Because they would be doing it at their own peril.  (as some learned the hard way).

One more note:

The Power Plant post I wrote just before this post was written in 2021.  I reposted it last week.  It was about the first summer when I went to work at the plant in 1979 as a summer help.  In that post I wrote about the day I was assigned to assemble office desks.  You can read about this in the post “Power Plant Desk Job“.  It occurred to me after I wrote this post about Ray Eberle and the engineer that the desk that Ray lowered into the Dumpster could have been one of the desks that we assembled that summer in 1979, 31 years earlier.  So, in a small way, I may have played one little role in the education of the young engineer that day.

One final note:

John Belusko passed away on December 7, 2019.  I saw Facebook light up that day with posts remembering him when he died.  Since he was a devout Catholic and an even better Power Plant Man, I’m sure that while we are holding our Power Plant Reunion at the Mexican Restaurant in Stillwater Oklahoma every three months, John is up there in Heaven with all the other true Power Plant Men in heaven, gathered around a table looking down on us, waiting for the time when we will all be reunited.  Here is the picture on his Obituary for Strode’s Funeral Home:

Revised 1/24/2026

Many years after I had completed writing four years of Power Plant Posts, I realized that I hadn’t quite finished writing all of the stories I should have included.  Back on August 4, 2021, I added this post to the 208 original stories I had written:

Originally posted 8/4/2021

Back in November 2015 I wrote a post about how in November 2000 I realized that I was probably going to have to leave the Power Plant because I was not able to apply for an IT job in my own company.  You can read about it here:  Crack in Power Plant Armor leads to Gaping Hole in Logic.  A month later I wrote a post about how I was moving to Round Rock Texas to work for Dell:  The Heart of a Power Plant.  I thought it would be interesting to describe my experience interviewing with different companies.  The difference between companies was very noticeable.

I’m not including all of the companies I interviewed, because that was about 45 different companies.  Only those where I had an interesting adventure:

One of the first companies I interviewed with was ABF, a trucking company.  ABF stands for “Arkansas Best Freight”.  The headquarters was in Fort Smith, Arkansas.  After my first interview they asked me to drive to Arkansas for a second interview, which I did on my day off (as we were working 4 – 10s at the time, we had some weekdays off).  I took my wife Kelly and the kids with me and made a trip out of it.  They fed us a lunch and paid for my driving expenses and they drove us around town.  I think I was more interested in the nearby Nuclear Power Plant than I was ABF.

After it was all said and done, they decided not to hire me.  They were looking for someone younger who wasn’t such a troublemaker.  — I had explained how I wrote the program that wrote the script language for GLink so the foremen could take their work home and still do their mainframe work.  You can read about that here:  Power Plant Men Take the Corporate Mainframe Computer Home.

I think it was when I described the Birthday Phantom application to them, that they became a little wary.  After all, it did end up sending emails to the user from themselves announcing that it was someone’s birthday that day.  — 10 years before Facebook came around and now does the same thing.  You can read about that story here:  Power Plant Birthday Phantom.

When they sent me a polite rejection letter telling me they decided not to hire me, I wasn’t surprised.  Kelly was relieved, because she wasn’t looking forward to a possible move to Fort Smith Arkansas.  Even though I wasn’t surprised, Kelly was.  She figured anyone would want to snatch me up if they had the chance.  When she asked me, “What’s the deal?  Why wouldn’t they want someone with a 4.0 GPA?” I just replied, “I don’t know.  I think they want someone younger they wouldn’t have to pay so much.”  We just breathed a sigh of relief and moved on.

Another company I wasn’t too excited about was DST Systems in Kansas City.  They housed the Mutual Fund transactions for all but a couple of the Mutual fund companies in the US.  I had grown up in Missouri and I had a lot of Italian relatives living in Kansas City.  I had spent a lot of time there.  The company flew me up there and put me in a nice hotel for the night.

Then the next morning they gave us a tour of their data center that is inside a cave on the south side of Kansas City, 5 miles from my Aunt Ginny’s house, and about 3 miles from where my grandfather used to live. They were really proud of the fact that their data center contained 70 Terabytes of data!  That’s funny to think about today.  Just a couple of years later, Dell’s data warehouse had over a Petabyte of data, or 1000 Terabytes. (Years later in 2018, after working at General Motors, I learned that a self-driving car collects over a petabyte of data in one month).

After the tour of the data center in the cave, (where I was more impressed by their backup generators, since they looked like the those we used at our power plant) they drove us downtown and interviewed. me.  — When I say, “Us”, I mean the other college students applying for the jobs.

I had heard that they liked to ask you technical Java questions, so I was prepared for their question, which was, “If you needed to do this, this and this, how would you write the code in Java?”  When they asked me this question my response was, “Do I need to know Java on the day I start the job?”  They replied, “No, we will teach you the way we write Java”.  — I already knew that was the case before the interview.  That’s why I asked that.

Then I said, “I took Java a year and half ago in an accelerated summer course and made an A in it.  I haven’t used Java since, so I don’t remember the exact syntax, but this is how I would write the code….”  — They offered me the job, but the pay was too low.  This wasn’t a rejection, but I was glad to turn them down.  There was something depressing about the company, even though I couldn’t put my finger on it.

The one company all the IT students wanted to work for was Williams Communication in Tulsa.  They held a reception in one of the new buildings on campus in the evening, which I attended.  I talked to a couple of classmates from the last couple of years that had gone to work for them and were now helping to recruit new employees.

They told me that during the interview they were on the lookout for people who came to the interview well prepared.  They didn’t want to hire them! This was because they figured that their answers weren’t necessarily “honest”.  I found this rather confusing.  I was going to be well prepared for the interview, and now they are telling me that they want me to act as if I wasn’t.

So, the next day during the interview when they came to the point where they asked, “Do you have any questions?”  I responded by asking, “When someone attends a meeting at your company, do you expect them to be prepared to discuss the topic at hand when they show up, or do you prefer they just go to the meeting unprepared and make it up on the fly?”

When they replied that they expected the person to be prepared for the meeting (which I knew they would), I asked, “When I was preparing for this interview, I talked with some of the recruiters yesterday that I knew, because they were in my classes in the past.  They told me that during this interview you are looking for people that are prepared for this meeting.  If they are, then you don’t want to hire them.  How does that make sense if you expect them to show up for a meeting prepared but not an interview?”

The two young guys interviewing me looked a little embarrassed and just shrugged their shoulders.  Needless to say, they didn’t offer me a job.  The following week while I was in various classes, I heard others talking excitedly about being offered jobs with Williams Communication beginning when they graduate in May.  This was the company a lot of students wanted to go to work.  They evidently gave a lot of perks to their employees.  It was their dream job, and it was in Tulsa, not too far from Stillwater.

Many of the students going to work for Williams, had arranged to move to Tulsa at the end of school.  They had hired over 200 students.  A couple of people had already moved and were commuting to class.  Then the news hit the fan (so to speak).  Williams Communication was in financial trouble, and they were not only not hiring the students they said they were going to hire, but they were laying people off.  I considered myself lucky to not have been offered the job 6 months earlier.

I had a similar “scare” during the first week of May when Dell, (who had been laying off a lot of employees all spring — This was the Millennium Internet bust) called to tell me that they were moving my start date from the beginning of June until August 20 as I discussed in the post linked above, “The Heart of a Power Plant”, so I knew what some of the students were going through.  My problem was that I was in the middle of selling my house in Stillwater, Oklahoma and buying a house in Round Rock, Texas at the same time.

I had an interview with Wal-Mart and they offered me a job.  The pay wasn’t that good.  Before I even considered whether to accept it, I went to a “social” where they had a meeting to explain what working for Wal-Mart would be like as an IT employee.  While they were talking, one of the people giving the presentation recognized one of the students in the room and asked her if she would like to stand up and tell how it was last summer when she worked there as an intern.

The young girl stood up and walked to the front of the room.  She looked around at the Wal-Mart representatives and smiled.  Then she looked at the audience of eager students waiting to hear about all the great things about working for Wal-Mart.  Then she spoke.  She hesitantly said, “Well (pause).   I cried a lot.”  The room burst into laughter.

The Wal-Mart recruiters were as surprised as everyone else.  They asked her to explain.  So she told us that one day she went to run a job on the mainframe and when she did, she shutdown all of Argentina for about 30 minutes.  They informed her that they lost millions of dollars in that time.  She said that no one told her that you weren’t supposed to run jobs like that during working hours.

I knew exactly how she felt.  I had tried compiling a program on our mainframe at the Electric Company one day just for fun, and a little while later someone from the IT department called the Power Plant wanting to speak to Kevin Breazile.  — Yeah.  I had locked up the mainframe until the program finished compiling.

They asked me if they could kill the job.  I told them “Sure!”  This was after I had been scolded by Tom Gibson, our Electric Supervisor after the plant had been contacted by the President of the company because I had sent something to everyone’s printer and messed up all the billing, payroll and work order jobs.  See the post Power Plant Customer Service Team Gone Wild.

Then came Boeing.  I was interviewing for a job in Wichita.  When they found out that I was both an IT person and an Electrician they offered to hire me right on the spot.  They asked me to give my 2 week notice and they would move me to Wichita where I could start as soon as possible.  They said that I could work on fighter planes, both wiring them and programming them.  This was very tempting.

I told the recruiters that I would like to get my degree before I would leave the electric company.  After all, they were paying for my classes.  I only had 6 more hours after the current semester, and if they wanted to talk next semester, I would be willing to discuss it with them then.  They said that if I went to work for Boeing I would receive a $3,000 bonus when I receive my degree, if there was some way to make that work.  That was the last time I heard from them.  My wife wasn’t too keen about moving to Wichita anyway, so, I took that as a good thing.  Although….

I also interviewed with Koch Industry in Wichita and they did interview me on-site (twice).  When they offered me a job and I told them that the pay was not enough.  Then they called me back a few weeks later and I went up to interview again. This time with their pipeline switching team.  It turned out that they were using a system called “PI” that we used at our Power Plant.  I mentioned this in the post:  Power Plant Control Room Operator and the Life of Pi.  By that time, I had the offer from Dell and Koch said they couldn’t pay me what I was asking.

An interesting thing happened when I was on site for the interview.  That morning they had found one of the Koch Industry employees brutally murdered in his home (I think I watched a Forensics Files many years later about this murder).  This had unnerved the employees and they were sort of on “lock down”.  They didn’t really want to advertise that, but when the recruiter was having lunch with me in their cafeteria, she mentioned it to me.

JD Edwards was a competitor with SAP at the time.  I had an advantage when I interviewed with them, because I had been working on SAP for the past 3 years.  They flew me to Denver and I stayed in a nice hotel just across the parking lot from their office.  By this time, I was used to flying with a few other 4.0 students who had been offered jobs from the same companies I had.  Some who ended up working at Dell when we were all said and done.

While I was in the interview and they found out that I knew the SAP Maintenance Module and worked for the company that had worked with SAP to develop it, the person interviewing me became excited and left to go find another person to come into help with the interview.  JD Edwards wanted to develop their own Maintenance Module and since I knew both systems (as I had taken a computer course in school where we worked on JD Edwards’ One World application), They were eager to hire me.

They offered me more than any other company, but when I looked at the cost of living in the area around their office (which was not far from Columbine High School), I told them they would have to go higher.  They went back and forth with me, but couldn’t come up to where I would accept their offer.

As a follow-up to this story…. In the year 2005, I went to Denver for some training with Kronos, our timekeeping system at Dell.  I ended up staying in the same hotel where I stayed when I interviewed with JD Edwards.  Their building was just across the parking lot.  It was abandoned.

JD Edwards had been bought by Oracle a couple of years after I interviewed with them, and they just liquidated their IT department in Denver.  So.  I dodged a bullet with that one.

The same thing happened with Sprint.  This was another company a lot of students were interested in.  They had a nice campus in Overland Park Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City.  I began the interview by joking around with the recruiters who were older people like me.  I told them where they could find a nice place to eat dinner and other stuff like that.

They didn’t like my answer to the question, “Who is Sprint’s number one competitor?”  I told them, “Technology”. They asked me to explain, and I told them that in one day a new technology can come out and make their company obsolete.  They didn’t seem to like that answer.  I know they were looking for the answer, “AT&T and T-Mobile.”  Like I said, I wasn’t too eager to move to Kansas City (Overland Park is a suburb of KC).

Sprint didn’t offer me a job, but they did offer it to another older student who was a friend of mine, who was eager to move to Overland Park in May.  I suppose he eventually did.  Then in 2003 when I was in another training class in Overland Park for Kronos, I met up with my best friend of all time Jesse Cheng.

While we were driving around town, we passed the Sprint campus where my friend from class would have worked.  The campus was abandoned.  Jesse said they closed it about a year before.  — Whew. Glad they didn’t offer me a job there.

As a side note on 1/24/2026:  Jesse Cheng ended up working at General Motors as the resident doctor at the factory in Fairfax Kansas, and then at Arlington, TX while I was working at General Motors.  The last time I talked with Jesse was…. Yesterday.  We have been friends now for 50 years.

My favorite interview story is this:  I interviewed on campus with Fleming Foods.  A Supermarket chain in Oklahoma City.  Many of the people on the board of directors of our electric company were also on the board of directors for Fleming Foods.  After the first interview I received an email stating that my next interview was going to be in Oklahoma City on the Monday afternoon two weeks from then.  I immediately responded and said that I had a prior commitment during that time and would not be able to attend the interview (I had a test in one of my classes during that time), and I asked if they could reschedule the interview.

I didn’t hear back from the recruiter to reschedule the interview.  The next time I received an email was the Friday before the Monday when the interview was scheduled.  It reminded me to show up for the interview and gave instructions as to where to go, etc.  When I received the email, I immediately wrote and told them that as I had already indicated, I would not be able to attend the interview on Monday due to a prior commitment, and I had asked if the interview could be rescheduled.

The recruiter wrote back saying that it was very inconsiderate of me since a lot of trouble had been put into scheduling the people for the interviews and that valuable time would be wasted by important managers if I didn’t show up for the interview.  — I thought…. “Wow.  This is a great way to inspire students to come and work for Fleming Foods.”  So, I responded….

I said this:  “In my past experience I have found that the culture in the HR department generally reflects the overall culture of a company.  I thank you for showing me the culture found at Fleming Foods.  First of all, you totally ignored my response when I indicated two weeks ago that I would not be able to attend the interview by not responding and not attempting to reschedule it.  You have shown me that Fleming Foods is not a company that I would want to work for.  Please cancel the interview and do not try to reschedule it.  Thanks again for the heads up.”

I went to work for Dell in the end.  The Post “The Heart of the Power Plant” linked above tells the story about moving down to Round Rock to work for Dell.  As Paul Harvey used to say, “Now you know the Rest of the Story”.

Revised 1/11/2026

Originally posted December 19, 2015

August 16, 2001, was my final day at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma.  I had stepped onto the plant grounds May 7, 1979, 22 years earlier.  Now I was leaving to change careers and moving to Round Rock, Texas to work for Dell Computers as a programmer.  During my final day, a going away party was held in my honor by the Power Plant Men and Women that I had the privilege to work alongside during the past 22 years.

A few minutes before the party began, I slipped into the office bathroom/locker room and changed into a navy-blue suit and tie.  Combed my hair.  Put on black socks with my shiny black shoes.  Grabbed my briefcase and headed for the break room.  When I walked in the room, it was packed full of Power Plant Men and Women all waiting to say goodbye to one of their family.

Many wondered who it was that had joined their party of one of their own.  Who was this person in the suit and tie?  Ed Shiever told me later that he didn’t even recognize me.  It wasn’t until I reached out and shook his hand that he realized that he was Kevin Breazile.  The same person he had known since he was a temp employee working in the tool room.

When the Power Plant Men finally realized that I was the person they had been waiting for, they broke out in applause as I walked around shaking their hands.  I would have broke out in tears if I hadn’t been thinking about what a great person each of them had been over the many years we had known each other.

I made my way to the front of the room where I had set up a computer and hooked it to the big screen TV.  I had a special surprise waiting for them.  One that would temporarily change the plant policy on going away parties after I was gone.  I had prepared a special PowerPoint presentation for them (insert evil grin here).

I set my briefcase next to the computer on the end of the table acting as if the computer had nothing to do with the party.  Then I stood there as the “going away” part of the party began.

It was typical for people to stand up and tell a story or two about the person leaving, so Jim Arnold (the Supervisor of Maintenance and my part time nemesis) was first.  He explained how I had been working on SAP for the past three years creating tasks lists that are used to describe each possible job in the plant.

He turned to me and asked me how many task lists I had created in the last 3 years.   I replied, “About 17,800”.  Jim said that this boggled his mind.  It was three times more than the entire rest of the company put together.

Jim made a comment about how he wasn’t sure he would want a job where you have to dress up in a suit and tie.

Andy Tubbs stood up and presented me with my 20 year safety sticker and a leather backpack for working 20 years without an accident, which was completed on August 11, just 5 days before.  I had worked four summers as a summer help, which counted as one year of service, then I had completed 19 years as a full time employee that very same week.

I like being roasted, but that didn’t really happen.  A few other people told some stories about me, that I can’t recall because I was busy thinking about the PowerPoint presentation.  I had memorized my entire script, and the presentation was pretty much automatic and timed, and I had to keep to my script or pause the presentation.

Then Jim Arnold asked me (Bill Green, the Plant Manager was gone that day visiting the Muskogee Plant – was it on purpose?  Hmmm.) if I had anything I would like to say before I left…. That was the cue I had been waiting for.  I replied, “Actually, I have a PowerPoint presentation right here, and I hit a key, and the TV lit up….

I will present each of the 26 slides below with the comments I made during each one.  Since many of the slides are animated, I will try to describe how that worked as I made my presentation… so, hang on… this is going to be a lot of slides….  I broke it down into about 45 pictures.  The Script is what I said for each slide:

Script:

Remember when Mark Draper came here for a year and when he was getting ready to leave, he gave a presentation about where he thought we were doing well, and how we could improve ourselves? (See the post UK Kudos for Okie Power Plant)

I thought that since I have spent 20 years with you guys, I might be able to come up with a few comments.  Especially as opinionated as I am.

 

Script:

In 1979, I came to work here as a summer help.  The plant was still being built and I was really impressed with the special quality of people I met and looked up to.

Script continues as these three pictures slide in:

Like for instance there was Sonny Karcher and another was Jerry Mitchell.  It has been a while since I have seen these two guys, and I know that Jerry has passed on, but this is the way I remember them.

And of course Larry Riley was there.

Larry was the one I worked with back then that seemed to know what was going on.  I will always consider him a good friend.

When I was on Labor Crew I would call him “Dad”.  He would never own up to it.  He said I was never the same after I fell on my head when I was a kid.

I used to get really dirty when I worked in the coal yard right alongside Jerry Mitchell.  He would stay perfectly clean.  He told me that I knew I was good when I could keep myself clean.  —

Well.  I have found a better way to do that. (as I pretended to brush lint off of my jacket). (some laughter).  Once again, I would like to thank OG&E for paying for my education.

I encourage all the new guys to seriously consider taking advantage of the free education benefit.

Script:

Then of course there was our Plant Manager and Assistant Manager back then.

This is how I remember them.

 

Script:

After hiring on permanently as a janitor in ’82, and getting on Labor crew in the spring of ’83.  I was able to get into the electric shop in November 1983.

I vividly remember my first day as an electrician.  The first thing I worked on, I shorted it to ground.

Script continues as Charles Foster’s picture slides in:

With no prior experience as an electrician I was allowed to join the electric shop.  Charles Foster was instrumental in getting me into the shop, and I am grateful.  As everyone knows, Charles is a long time friend of mine.

For years and years Charles would tell the story about how he fought tooth and nail for me against the evil Plant Manager and His diabolic Assistant who wanted me to be banished to the Labor Crew for eternity.

Not too long ago I told Charles that if he hadn’t pushed so hard to get me into the electric shop, I probably would have left OG&E and went back to school years ago (like my mom wanted me to do) and made something of myself long before now.

Script:

These are the electricians that were there when I first joined the electric shop.  These are the only ones left.  I think we started out with 16. (That’s me in the lower right).

The electricians were always a tight knit group.  It amazed me to see electricians who couldn’t stand each other sit down and play dominos three times a day, every day, year after year.

Jimmie Moore joined the shop some time later.

And of course.  Bill Bennett was around back then.

When I arrived in the electric shop I was 23 years old and I replaced Diana Brien as the youngest electrician in the shop.  As I leave, I am almost 41 years old, and I am still the youngest electrician.  As I leave, I relinquish the title back to Diana Brien who once again will be the youngest electrician.

As a side note…. I don’t know why I forgot about Ben Davis.  He reminded me after the presentation… I don’t know how… Here is a picture of Ben:

Script:

I suppose you all remember what happened on February 15th, 1985.  The day we refer to as “Black Friday”.  The day that the “Drug and Theft” ring was busted up at Sooner Station.  That was the day that a very dear friend of mine, Pat Braden, whom everyone knew as a kind easy going person turned out to be some evil leader of a theft ring.

Note:  As I was saying the above statement, This mummy walked across the slide…

Note:  Then Barney slide across in the other direction…

Script continued:

Well.  I know better than that. I will always remember Pat Braden with a smile on his face.  Mickey Postman, I know you would agree with me about Pat and just about everyone else who knew him well.

It has been 16 years since this took place and the company has gone through a lot of changes, but don’t ever think something like this couldn’t happen again.

Note… The hammers come in and stomp the images off the slide….

Script:

Then there was the first Reorganization.  The old people retired on October 1st.  That was the end of the Moler and Waugh regime.

Script:

At first we thought we were all on vacation. Our new plant manager came in the first meeting with us and told a joke.

We all looked at each other and wondered, “Can plant managers even do that?”

I’m sure you guys remember Ron Kilman.  Bless his heart.

Script:

The second part of the first reorganization allowed people without jobs to find a position in the company over a 8 month period.

Note:  Pictures of Scott Hubbard fly in along with the words:  “Hubbard Here!”  then each one disappears leaving this:

Script:

That is when Scott Hubbard joined the electric shop.

Scott and I drove to work together for a long time and we became good friends.

I’ll miss Scott when I leave.  I’ll remember that while “Hubbard is Here”, while I’ll be down there – in Texas.

 

Script:

Do you remember the Quality Process?  They said it was a process and not a program because when a program is over it goes away, and a process is something that will always be here.  — Yeah right.

Note:  While I was saying this, the screen all of the sudden went dark as I kept talking… I could tell that people wondered if I realized that the presentation had suddenly disappeared….

Script:

This is all we have left of the Quality Process.

Note:

When I said the line “This is all we have left of the Quality Process”  pointing my thumb over my shoulder with a look of disappointment on my face, the room suddenly burst out into cheers and applause as they realized that the blank screen represented the current state of the Quality process at the plant.

Script:

The first reorganization was done in a somewhat orderly manner.

They retired the old guys out first and brought in the new management, then they informed those that didn’t have positions and gave them time to find a job before they let them go.

Note:  The sounds of gun shots were barely heard from the computer speaker, as splats occurred on the slide until it looked like this:

Script continued:

The second reorganization.  Well.  It was a massacre.

It was a very lousy way to do this, and very humiliating.

Note:

Jim Arnold at this point was about to jump out of his chair and stop the show (since he was instrumental in making the downsizing as brutal as possible), so I was quick to go to the next slide…

Script:

With the redesign came another Plant Manager.  One of the first things I remember about Bill Green was that one morning I was stopped at the front gate and given a 9 volt battery for my smoke detector.

I took the battery home and put it in my smoke detector, and – guess what? – The battery was dead.  And I thought, “Oh well.  These things happen.”

Well a couple of years later, there was Bill Green handing out smoke detector batteries again.

I checked it out and sure enough, it was dead also.

 

Note:  As I was talking during this slide, the marbles dropped in and bounced around then at the end the hat and moustache landed on Bill Green.

Script:

I am just wondering. I want to test out a theory I have.   How many of you was given a dead battery?

—  OK, I see.  Just the trouble makers.  I understand.  It all makes sense to me now.

Second Note:  Bill Green had a jar full of marbles and each color represented a type of injury someone has when they do something unsafe.  Most of the marbles were blue and meant that nothing happened, the other colors represented increasingly worse injuries.  Two marbles in the jar signified fatalities.

The numbers went like this:

Out of 575 incidents where someone does something unsafe, here are the consequences:

390 Blue Marbles:   Nothing happens

113 Green Marbles:  A First Aid injury

57 White Marbles:  A Recordable Accident

8 Pink Marbles:  Up to 30 days lost work day injury occurs

5 Red Marbles:  60 or  more lost workdays injury occurs

2 Yellow Marbles:  A Fatality occurs

Script:

The Maintenance workers are the best people I know.  Everyone one of them has treated me with respect, and I consider each of you a friend.

You are the people I will miss.  Not the coal dust, not the fly ash. —  Just the people.

Note:  Over the next set of slides, I showed the Power Plant Men I worked with… I will show you a couple of pictures of some slides to show you the animation that I had slide in and I’ll explain them.. I didn’t say much during the following slides.  They flashed by fairly quickly:

Note:  The circle with the slash over Bob Blubaugh represented him being recently fired… The story around this is on some of the last slides… and was a tragedy.  The military cap landed on Randy Daily (in the lower right) because he was an Army Medic and was always in charge when it came to safety.

The donut flew up to Danny Cain because if there was ever free food somewhere, Danny would find it… Especially if they were donuts.

 

The words “Huh, Huh?” flew to Jody Morse, because he had the habit of saying something and ending his sentence with “Huh, Huh?”

Note:  That was the end of the pictures of the Maintenance Power Plant Men….  I didn’t have pictures of the Operators, and they weren’t at the party…

Script:

Without these two, you wouldn’t get paid, and you wouldn’t get parts.

I agree with what Jerry Osborn said about Linda Shiever.  There isn’t anyone out here that can do the job Linda does every day.

Script:

The maintenance foremen have treated me with respect and I would like to thank all of you for that.

Note:  Then Jim Arnold flew in:

Script:

I realize that you have to do certain things some times because there is someone looking over your shoulders directing every move you make.

Note:  At this point, Jim leaned forward in his chair to get a better look… wondering if that was his face on this picture of God…

Script:

Yes, Jim Arnold does take care of us, and we know that he doesn’t want to retire and leave us to fend for ourselves.

Note:  There was a policy where you could retire once your age and years of service added up to 80 years.  Jim Arnold’s added up to 100, but wouldn’t retire.

Note:  Still talking about Jim Arnold:

Script:

Therefore he has devised a plan in case of an untimely death.

So don’t be smilin’ too big!!

Note: Still talking about Jim Arnold….

Script:

He will be able to direct the plant operations from his heavenly throne.

So don’t worry.  He is NOT going away.

Second Note:  At this point the PowerPoint presentation locked up on the computer… I had to shut down the presentation and restart it, and quickly go back to the next slide… I remembered the Alt-F4 closes the active application, so I was able to do this within about 15 seconds.

Script:

Do you remember when Bill Moler decided that you had to wear a hardhat to go fishin’ in the discharge?

He said it was because he wanted everyone to be safe.

As you can see, this made Johnny Keys rather upset.

Note:  As I was speaking, Hardhats dropped onto the people:

Script:

Some bird might fly overhead and  drop something on you.

Everyone knew the real reason.  He didn’t want anyone fishing out there, so he was making it more difficult to do that.

He used “Safety” as an excuse.  Because of this, he lost credibility when it came to safety issues.

Note:  The Hard hats disappeared and Cell phones and pagers dropped down as I said the following:

Script:

When you start making policies that use safety as an excuse, but it isn’t the real reason, you lose your credibility.

Second Note:  At this point, Jim Arnold was jumping up from his seat… You see, Jim Arnold had fired Bob Blubaugh a few months earlier because Bob carried a cell phone with him while he was working.  Jim told him he couldn’t use his cell phone during the day.  When Bob refused to stop carrying a cell phone Jim Arnold fired him for insubordination.

Today that seems crazy as everyone carries cell phones.  Jim’s excuse was that carrying a cell phone was not safe, though he couldn’t exactly explain why.

That’s why Jim jumped out of his chair… I thought it was over, and I had two more slides to go….  So, I quickly clicked to the next slide… and Jim sat back down…. whew….

Script:

I would like to say goodbye to Doug Black.  I have been blessed to have been able to spend time with you the past three years.

Note:

Then Doug slid off the slide leaving a picture of Toby:

Script:

I would like to say goodbye to Toby, you have been a good friend, and I’ll stay in touch.

Note:  Then Toby slid off and Ray Eberle’s picture was left:

Script:

Ray, I had to hide this picture from you, because you sat next to me as I created this presentation.  I just want to say that the last three years we have spent working on SAP have meant a lot to me and you will always be one of my best friends.  Thank you.

Script:

With that I will say “Goodbye” to all of you.  Thank you!

Note:  This is a picture of Jim Arnold and Louise Kalicki stepping off of Air Force One.  I super-imposed their faces over Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This is the end of the presentation….  With that I was ready to leave the plant and begin the next stage of my life.  I will explain more in the post next week.

After I had left, I heard that when the next person had a going away party, Bill Green announced that PowerPoint Presentations are no longer allowed during going away parties!