Wednesday, October 29, 2014

A cobra (not that kind) inspired Ford’s diesel exhaust outlet

autoguide.com
Article thanks to hardworkingtrucks.com Links provided:
SEPTEMBER 3, 2014  Cobras are well known in and around Ford. Carroll Shelby practically made the high-horsepower machines a household name. 
But in developing the turbo exhaust outlet, or downpipe, of the 6.7-liter Power Stroke V8 diesel, Ford engineers found inspiration from a different kind of Cobra. 
Ford’s second-generation 6.7-liter Power Stroke V8 turbo diesel now boasts 440 horsepower, up from 400 horsepower, and 860 lb.-ft. of torque, up from 800 lb.-ft, across all Super Duty models from F-250 to F-450. And that is thanks in large part due to a downpipe that is shaped like a cobra head. 
Ford is the only heavy-duty pickup truck manufacturer that designs and builds its own diesel engine and transmission combination. This approach also enables Ford engineers to optimize the vehicle’s performance across the entire lineup.
hardworkingtrucks.com
A key Ford innovation on the original 6.7-liter Power Stroke V8 turbo diesel was its so-called reverse-flow layout. The design places the exhaust inside the engine’s V-shape while the air intake is positioned on the outside of the V. This segment-exclusive design naturally improves a variety of attributes:
  • Shorter airflow from the exhaust system to the turbocharger sitting between the engine’s cylinder banks improves turbo responsiveness – key to providing torque quickly to truck customers when they need it most
  • Positioning the turbo inside the engine’s valley helps the engine efficiently use the hot temperatures, improving performance and efficiency, while also reducing noise, vibration and harshness
The hot-V design of the 6.7-liter Power Stroke – with its turbocharger bolted directly onto the compacted graphite iron engine block within the V of the V8 – provides exceptional packaging, structural advantages, and improved noise, vibration and harshness characteristics.
Getting the hot exhaust gases from the turbocharger out of the engine V with minimal obstruction to exhaust flow, which aids in generating power, is the job of the cobra head.
Here’s how it works.
Any sharp turn or kink in an exhaust system can disrupt the flow and increase the pumping work an engine must do, reducing efficiency. The cobra head acts like a widened, banked turn, allowing exhaust gases to flow smoothly through the 90-degree turn from the engine to the aftertreatment system and reduce backpressure. By reducing pumping losses, the design improves efficiency and allows greater torque production.
By applying hundreds of hours of advanced fluid dynamics computer modeling simulations to the design, Ford engineers were able to optimize the shape of the pipe bend.
“Fluid dynamics allowed us to precisely tune the curvature and width of the pipe to optimize exhaust gas flow,” says Robert Wade, engine air path technical leader. “It turns out that a downpipe shaped like a cobra head is the ideal design for air flow and breathability, which we validated through thousands of miles of durability testing.”
http://www.hardworkingtrucks.com/a-cobra-not-that-kind-inspired-fords-diesel-exhaust-outlet/?utm_source=hwt&utm_medium=email&utm_content=09-03-2014&utm_campaign=HWT&ust_id=137f89555c


Saturday, October 25, 2014

Dick Trickle - Wisconsin's short track superstar makes it to Nascar

legendsofnascar.com
Good times, hard life, and a shocking death

Back in the mid 1960's my dad took me to my first short track race at the Hales Corners dirt track near Milwaukee. Fuzzy Fassbender was a popular older driver still competing and my dad told me of the days when he would watch him race many years earlier, after he married my mom and they moved to Milwaukee. Dad considered himself (he was) an excellent driver and when younger dreamed of driving race cars.

I quickly became a short track fan and over the next couple decades watched many races on Sunday nights at my favorite asphalt track, the Slinger Speedway. It was a high banked 1/4 mile oval and the races were very exciting, seeing Tony Strupp, Alan Kulwicki, Jim Sauter and other drivers compete. One of the big stars of the Wisconsin and mid-western tracks during those years was Dick Trickle and I remember watching him a few times when he would come to Slinger. He eventually made it to the "big time" in Nascar and was named Rookie of the Year in 1989! His overall Nascar career didn't turn out that great, but he was much older than most of the Nascar drivers by the time he came into it. He started racing in the late 1950's and his chain smoking and beer drinking ways probably were a detriment also. He ran his last Nascar race when he was 61 years old in 2002!

Another of Wisconsin's own, a younger Alan Kulwicki made it to the Nascar big time and was the 1992 Winston Cup Champion. Kulwicki, who made famous his "Polish victory lap" was unfortunately killed in a tragic plane accident just a year later in 1993.

I didn't know it at the time but Dick Trickle was quite an interesting character which I found in this really great story that was written about him after his death in 2013 by Jeremy Markovich at sbnation.com/longform. You can read the text below about this old school race car driver or click on the link to sbnation.com to view it with some really great pictures. It's a lengthy piece and I couldn't stop reading once I started, as I was trying to get off-line and get some other things done. Thanks to Jeremy for an truly excellent journalistic piece! It's a great read.
breitbart.com

The good times, hard life, and shocking death of Dick Trickle
(written July 30, 2013 by Jeremy Markovich)

Sometime after 10:30 on a Thursday morning in May, after he'd had his cup of coffee, Dick Trickle snuck out of the house. His wife didn't see him go. He eased his 20-year-old Ford pickup out on the road and headed toward Boger City, N.C., 10 minutes away. He drove down Highway 150, a two-lane road that cuts through farm fields and stands of trees and humble country homes that dot the Piedmont west of Charlotte, just outside the reach of its suburban sprawl. Trickle pulled into a graveyard across the street from a Citgo station. He drove around to the back. It was sunny. The wind blew gently from the west. Just after noon, he dialed 911. The dispatcher asked for his address.

"Uh, the Forest Lawn, uh, Cemetery on 150," he said, his voice calm. The dispatcher asked for his name. He didn't give it.

"On the backside of it, on the back by a ‘93 pickup, there's gonna be a dead body," he said.

"OK," the woman said, deadpan.

"Suicide," he said. "Suicide."

"Are you there?"

"I'm the one."

"OK, listen to me, sir, listen to me."

"Yes, it'll be 150, Forest Lawn Cemetery, in the back by a Ford pickup."

"OK, sir, sir, let me get some help to you."

Click.

The funeral was four days later. It was small. There weren't many people. Maybe 50, mostly family. A few were old crew members from Wisconsin and Kansas City. Kenny Wallace, a driver who made Dick Trickle his mentor, was there. So was Kenny's older brother Rusty, the former Winston Cup champ who used to call Dick every Monday. Mike Miller and Mark Martin, both drivers, came. Nobody else from NASCAR did. Dick wanted it that way.

There was no eulogy. The pastor only said a few words. But he didn't go on long. Soon, everybody had left the church and headed down the road to Dick and Darlene's place in Iron Station. Kenny hugged Dick's son Chad.

"I'm so sorry," Kenny said.

"Aw, come on, man," Chad told him. "Seventy-one years. That's pretty good." Kenny thought Chad sounded a lot like his father.

THE SUICIDE

That didn't seem like Dick at all. People who knew Dick had heard something was wrong. A lot of them weren't sure what it was. Kenny asked Darlene if she'd seen this coming. No. She had no idea anything was wrong until a Lincoln County sheriff's deputy pulled into her driveway on Thursday afternoon.

After Dick shot himself, Chad called Kenny. Darlene wants you at the funeral, he said. "You know," he said next, "we're all big Kenny Wallace fans." That sounded like a Dick Trickle call. There weren't many short phone conversations between Kenny and Dick. If the phone would ring and Dick's name was on the caller ID, Kenny would think twice about answering if he didn't have an hour to talk. But they still talked all the time. Dick was still giving him advice. Back in 2011, Kenny called to talk about his new Nationwide Series race team. He told Dick he'd lost some weight. He was ready. You've got a new car now, Dick told him. Do not change your driving. Let the car do the work for you. Kenny had 11 top 10s and finished seventh in points, his best showing in years.

The calls started to slow down. Kenny wasn't sure why. Dick really didn't talk about it. In 2011, Kenny's father, Russ, an old-school racer who won a lot around St. Louis, died at age 77. Your dad lived a great life, Dick said. He was in pain, but he's fine now. Dick could justify anything, but Kenny thought it was odd how quickly he'd made sense of his father's death.

After Dick's funeral, Kenny had an idea. "Darlene, maybe we should make some T-shirts," Kenny said. New ones. With Dick Trickle's name on the front. Just something so his fans could remember.

"Nope," she said. "We're done."

Darlene hadn't talked publicly about what happened to Dick. She still hasn't. And so Dick Trickle's closest friends were left with memories from a lifetime of friendship and a couple of clues and hindsight to make sense of his death. Darlene knew that the people who loved her husband needed to know what happened. So before Kenny and the rest of Dick's friends left the house after his funeral, she gathered up some manila envelopes and handed them out, one by one.

Here, she said. The answers to your questions are inside.

Most of the stories people tell about Dick Trickle aren't quite right. They aren't wrong, but they just aren't what they appear to be. He was bowlegged, and walked with a slight limp. That must be from a lifetime of crashes, right? Wrong. There was that commercial from 1997 where Dick Trickle talked about a contest for guessing the winner of the Napa 500. "A little tip," he smirked, "it's gonna be me." Instantly, text flashed on the screen: Dick is 0 for 243 in Cup races. "And remember, November 16th could be a real big day." That's 0 for 243, the screen said. If you saw that, and didn't know much about racing, you'd get the impression that Dick Trickle never won anything.

Same thing if you watched SportsCenter in the early '90s. You'd hear Dick Trickle's name alongside a litany of middle to back-of-the-pack finishes. Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann thought the name sounded like a joke, so they said it as often as they could after NASCAR highlights. "I thought, ‘Well, this guy's not any good,'" Patrick told SPIN magazine in 1996, which pointed out Trickle's last place finish in the Daytona 500 that year. "But he's a good old boy and he really represents what NASCAR used to be. He just loves to drive." Patrick and Olbermann weren't the only people who kept referring to Dick Trickle by his full name. Announcers did it. Fans did it. At the track, only his wife called him Richard. To everyone else, Dick Trickle had that three-syllable cadence that made you want to say the whole thing, like Kasey Kahne or Ricky Rudd. At first, it's funny, then familiar and finally it just feels easy, not formal. When you say Dick Trickle, you know a story is coming.

When Dick Trickle finally got to NASCAR, to the biggest stage he'd ever been on, he was fading. By that time, people had attached a lot of labels to him, some true, some half true and some not true at all. Hard drinking. Hard partying. Hard living. Veteran. Journeyman. Chain smoker. Respected by racers and loving fans who could appreciate who he was and what he'd done, he had become a caricature to many, misunderstood by a new group of people who only saw him as a coffee drinking, cigarette smoking, old-school racer. If you were one of them, you might think that Dick Trickle wasn't good enough to hack it in NASCAR. That he never got the chance to run in the Cup series as a young man. And that too, like so many of the labels, is not quite right either.

"He was definitely one of the most talented race drivers that we've ever had in America," says Humpy Wheeler, the former promoter and president of Charlotte Motor Speedway. "He's up there with A.J. Foyt, [Richard] Petty, [Mario] Andretti, Cale Yarborough, Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon." Wheeler once stuck his face in a tiger's mouth. He knows hyperbole. But he's being serious.

"Today, had he been 25 years old, his looks would have gotten him into a racecar," Wheeler says. But today, he would have had to deal with sponsors who squirm at habits like smoking cigarettes or personalities that aren't squeaky clean. Dick Trickle was the last NASCAR driver to keep a pack of smokes in his car. Imagine that now. These days sponsors create a whitewashed version of the drivers that fans fell in love with when racing was racin', and stock cars were actually stock cars. "Today, they would have tried to put him through the clothes wash, and he wouldn't have gotten in the clothes wash," says Wheeler. "If you start off and you don't have perfect size, perfect weight, perfect teeth, perfect hair and perfect speech, you're probably not going to get in a Cup car."

Dick Trickle could have. But he didn't. To understand why, you need to look at his life in reverse. That way the quirks become more commonplace, the near misses become wins, and the legend becomes real. The pain he endured at the end of his life washes away. He was a family guy from Rudolph, Wisc. - a working man, whose work just happened to be racing cars.

"He liked the simple life, he liked the simple people, he liked the working people," Wheeler says. "And that's where racing's always been, and despite all the people today that have entered this sport, particularly working for companies, that have led cloistered lives and don't understand working people, Dick Trickle sure did. And that's why they didn't understand Dick Trickle."

UP ALL NIGHT

It was 6:30 a.m. on a summer morning in 1996, and Dick Trickle threw the door open and walked into the conference room at the Chose Family Inn in Stoughton, Wisc. He had a somber look on his face. He stood on a cooler and looked around.

"You all are a bunch of drunks," he said.

The men in the room laughed. They weren't up early. They were up late. They were Rich Bickle's race team, which had beaten Trickle the night before at Madison International Speedway and clinched the championship in a series of races called the Miller Nationals. Once the race was over, they drank in the pits. It was always a contest between Bickle and Trickle to see who would leave last.

Once the track kicked them out, Bickle's team found a bowling alley and drank there. Then they found some bars that were still open. They drank there. When the bars closed, they ended up back at the motel in Stoughton. And that's where Trickle found them. At 6:30 a.m.

"Give me a beer," he said.

Dick always seemed to have a brewing company's logo on his car, and a can of beer in his hand. He joked about a sponsorship deal that gave him $100,000 and 350 cases of beer. But there are 365 days in the year, he said. What am I supposed to drink on the other 15 days?

The fans and friends who drank with him tended to miss something - Dick didn't actually drink all that much. Once he got down to the end of his PBR, he'd just stand there, holding a nearly empty can for as long as he could. Everybody else kept drinking. Dick kept holding. If someone threw him a beer, he'd take it. But people don't tend to do that when you've already got one in your hand.

His close friends had never seen him drunk, even though his close friends got drunk with him. Kenny Wallace finally figured out his trick. "You know how many times I've gotten drunk because of you?" he asked.

Dick would much rather talk. He'd stay up late to talk racing. Cars. Anything. If you'd ask him how on earth his parents named him Dick Trickle, he'd matter-of-factly tell you that his parents named him Richard. If you asked him how often he smoked in the car, through a special hole he'd drilled in his helmet, he'd ask: How many yellow flags have I had in my career? If you'd see him rolling up to the track in the morning and asked him how late he was up the night before, he'd probably say it would depend on the race. The rumor about him, spread by him, was that he needed one hour of sleep for every 100 miles he'd have to drive the next day. He once said he probably drank 40 cups of coffee a day. The man ran on caffeine and conversation.

You could tell when Trickle was going to say something important. "My boy," he'd start off, and then he'd tell you something simple that made a lot of sense. Don't say you finished sixth, he'd say. You won sixth place, because guys who finished seventh and eighth would love to have had the race you did. Don't race the other drivers. Just race the leader. Race the track. Don't crash. To finish first, he'd say, you must first finish. Guys like Mark Martin made that their mantra.

By that day in 1996, he'd been racing for nearly four decades. He had plenty of fans. But he was still more popular in the Midwest than he ever was outside of it. In 1995, he flew to Minnesota for an American Speed Association race at the State Fair, and his PR guy remarked that he seemed more popular than Richard Petty.

Dick Trickle had always been a big fish in a small pond. Before the 1990s that was about the best you could hope to be, a local hero. But during the 1990s, NASCAR shook off its reputation as a regional, Southern sport and turned into a national phenomenon. Petty retired and Jeff Gordon debuted in the same race in 1992, the Hooters 500. North Wilkesboro Motor Speedway shut down and Las Vegas Motor Speedway opened up in the same year. Neil Bonnett died on the track. Alan Kulwicki died in a plane crash; Davey Allison died in a helicopter crash. Before the '90s, a lot of races were still shown on tape delay. By 2000, a half dozen channels had broadcast live racing. The money started rolling in, and drivers who used to spend their time riding from track to track on the interstate began to buy their own private buses and airplanes. The King Air 200 became the most popular jet in racing.

Dick would fly with people, but he didn't buy a plane. He didn't even buy a big RV. He built a big garage behind his house in 1991, but that was it. "My boy," he told Kenny, "I don't need none of that stuff." The Wisconsin in him kept him incredibly frugal. Although he didn't like to talk money, he had a lot of it. In 1989, arguably his most successful year in Winston Cup, he made $343,000. He struggled in 1998, with only one top-10 finish. It was his final full season. He still won $1.2 million.

His biggest problem was his age. By the time he ran his last Cup race in 2002, he was 61. Too long in the tooth, as Humpy Wheeler would say. At that age, your eyes get to you. When you're down at Daytona or up in Charlotte, you're running at 300 feet a second. Sooner or later, your age is going to creep up on you. "Your eyes are what bring you down," Wheeler said.

Great race drivers don't hang around, Wheeler says, they fade away like old soldiers. When Trickle stopped racing in Winston Cup, he didn't come out and announce his retirement. There was nothing official. He was just done. That was it. He didn't become a team owner like Junior Johnson. He'd get invited back up to Wisconsin every once in a while to grand marshal a race, or he'd show up to sign autographs, but mostly he'd hang out in Iron Station with Darlene and his family. He went on a cruise for the first time in his life. He played with the grandkids, cut down trees on his property, picked up garbage along the road. He didn't need NASCAR. He never did. "Who knows," he told now-defunct bgnracing.com after his final Cup race, "maybe I'll be revived and get the support of the right sponsor and team and be out there every weekend. But if I don't, life isn't bad."

Trickle didn't need to win anymore. He didn't need the money. "I had a new challenge when I went to Cup," he told nascar.com in 2007. "I had a refreshing life, from 48 to 60. I was excited. I was pumped up. I enjoyed it. I got a second lease on life."

Back on that morning in 1996, at that little two-story motel in Stoughton, Wisc., the party was still going for Dick Trickle. Around 8 a.m., when it was time for either breakfast or bed, the long night started making memories foggy and Bickle's crew began to split up into two groups, those who fell asleep and those who passed out. One by one, they started heading off to bed.

Dick Trickle was one of the last to leave. He took a can of beer back to his room.

ROOKIE OF THE YEAR

It was 1989, and Dick Trickle was trying to buy a fake Rolex on the street in Manhattan. He was willing to pay $10. But he wanted a guarantee first. If it falls apart, the guy who was selling told him, you come and find me, and I'll give you another one.

This was a little bit of a stunt, done for the cameras. Motor Week Illustrated was putting together a story called "Trickle Takes Manhattan." A television crew followed Dick and Darlene around New York City. He bought a hot dog. He took the subway to Grand Central Terminal. "Man, look at all these trains!" he said. "You think you've got one that goes to Wisconsin Rapids?"

A few days later, on Dec. 1, Trickle stood on stage in a tuxedo at the Waldorf Astoria, listening to people talk about how old he was. "Luckily, this year's rules do not include any age restriction," an executive from Sears said, to mild laughter. He presented Dick with a painting of himself and his car. Dick got a check for $20,000. He'd just won NASCAR's Rookie of the Year award. At age 48.

"I'd like to thank Champion and Sears DieHard Batteries for giving us young racers a chance to come up through the ranks," he said. More laughs.

He thanked his kids for coming. He thanked Darlene for putting up with 31 years of racing. He thanked his sponsors. And he thanked Bill and Mickey Stavola, who owned the car. He had no contract. No guaranteed ride. He drove all year on a handshake.

"If you'd have told me last December that I would be on the stage at the Waldorf Astoria, I'd have said no way," Trickle said. "But one phone call last spring changed it all."

It started one year before, in 1988, actually, with the crash that ended Bobby Allison's career. Allison blew a tire at the Miller 500 at Pocono in June, and then Jocko Maggiacomo came along and T-boned him so hard that Bobby still doesn't remember the crash, nor winning the Daytona 500 the February before. Mike Alexander drove Allison's car for the rest of the season. Afterward, at the Snowball Derby in December, Alexander hit an embankment with the driver's side of his car. Something happened to him. But he didn't tell anyone for months.

A few days before the 1989 Daytona 500, Alexander did a media tour during the day but was too worn out to keep going through the evening. His PR guy, Tom Roberts, thought that was strange. On Sunday, after 188 laps, Alexander hit the wall in turn two and that was it.

The next race was the Goodwrench 500 at Rockingham in early March. Alexander and Roberts were having dinner and Alexander confessed he shouldn't be out on the track. He'd had blurry vision and severe headaches since the Snowball Derby. Roberts told him to fess up to his crew chief, Jimmy Fennig, and he did.

Now Stavola's car needed a new driver. A few years before, Fennig had been Mark Martin's crew chief when Martin was running American Speed Association races in Wisconsin. That's how Fennig knew Trickle. He convinced Stavola to bring him in for the race, and that Thursday night, Dick Trickle got The Call.

He started in the last row. During the race, he kept pitting on yellow flags, and one of his pit crewmembers kept leaning way in through the passenger window. The TV announcers thought there was a problem with the transmission. The transmission was fine. But the heat near the throttle was causing Trickle's right foot to swell, and the guy from the pit crew was trying to pull off his snakeskin cowboy boot. He kept trying until they finally swapped it out for a regular driving shoe.

Trickle finished 13th at Rockingham, ahead of Richard Petty. The next week, in Atlanta, Trickle finished third. He went on to nine top-10 finishes. Larry Pearson, son of NASCAR legend David Pearson, had been the favorite to win Rookie of the Year. That changed when Trickle came along.

Roberts knew Trickle could drive. But he also knew Trickle didn't have that much pressure on him. Opportunity just came to him. Trickle was just the fill-in guy and knew it.

Off the track, he hedged. For the first month, Trickle lived in a motel off of Interstate 85 in a rough area of Charlotte, just to be ready to go back home to Wisconsin Rapids with some cash in his pocket if NASCAR didn't pan out. But at the track, he was still the same guy he'd been up north, smoking and drinking coffee and talking to everybody. His family came to every race. He didn't want people to line up for his autographs - he wanted to buy fans beers and talk with them and work the crowd. Sometimes, after two-hour meet-and-greets, he'd ask if he could stay longer.

He didn't always qualify well, but he knew how to pass. He never tired out. He said he didn't need to work out. Got his workout in the race car, he said, and since he'd been driving so much in so many features on so many short tracks, he was in pretty good shape. At the gas pumps after the race, Roberts would see the other drivers worn out and sucking down oxygen. Trickle would just be standing there, cigarette in hand. I could go another hundred laps, he'd say.

He smoked outside of the car. He smoked in the car. When the yellow flag came out, so did the lighter. Trickle was a Marlboro man, but had the sense to put them into an empty pack of Winston's whenever he was at a Winston Cup race. He'd show up at races with a briefcase, just like the one Alan Kulwicki, another short track racer from Wisconsin who was named NASCAR Rookie of the Year, in 1986, made popular. Kulwicki would keep shock charts, setups and notes from the last race in his. Trickle's carried a schedule, a ball cap or two, cheap Miller High Life sunglasses and a carton of cigarettes.

By the time he was named Rookie of the Year, Trickle had already lined up a full-time ride for 1990, driving for Cale Yarborough's Phillips 66 team. Two months after his trip to New York, Dick and Darlene bought a modest 11-year-old Cape Cod house in Iron Station, N.C., along with the eight acres of land that came with it, leaving Wisconsin behind. Their new home was less than an hour away from Charlotte, near where most all the other drivers kept their race shops.

One of the stories that is not quite right is this: Dick Trickle never won while he was racing in NASCAR's Winston Cup. That is wrong. In May 1990, he qualified for The Winston Open, a 201-mile precursor to The Winston, NASCAR's All-Star race. But neither one was a points race, so it doesn't show up in most recaps. Still, the Open was big. Winning it gave you the 20th and final spot in The Winston, and the winner of that race got $200,000.

Ernie Irvan led a third of the race before Trickle took the lead with a dozen laps to go. Then Rob Moroso, the 1989 Busch Series champion, all of 21 years old, crept up behind Trickle. When the white flag flew, Moroso and Trickle traded spots, one and two, with Trickle taking the high side. When they hit the final straightaway and crossed the finish line, Trickle beat him by eight inches.

He got out of the car, grabbed a cup of water and thanked his sponsors. He thanked Cale Yarborough, who hadn't had a win as a car owner. The reporter asked him what he needed to do to be ready for The Winston, which started in 20 minutes. "I'll be ready," he said, sweaty, his hair mussed. "Just get the car ready." Then he hugged Darlene and answered another question about his car and Darlene buried her face in his shoulder. And then Dick Trickle went out and finished sixth in The Winston. Once again, he came from behind.

THE SHORT TRACK

Dick Trickle had a crown on his head. He'd just won the 1983 World Crown 300 in Georgia and the $50,000 that came with it. Dick looked over at the guy who'd just presided over his coronation in victory lane. "I'm not a king," he said. "I'm a race car driver."

This was, at the time, the largest prize Dick Trickle had ever raced for. He spent a month preparing the car. If anyone else did any work on it, he went back and did it over. "I never look at the purse," Trickle told Father Dale Grubba, a Catholic priest and chronicler of Wisconsin racing who'd known him since 1966. "My wife does. I come to race."

But for the World Crown 300, Trickle broke his rule. He did look at the purse. The race itself had been nearly rained out, and instead of thousands of fans at the Georgia International Speedway in late November, there were only a couple of hundred. It was a problem for Ron Neal, the engine maker who owned the speedway. He promised a huge purse for the short track race, one that now, because of the weather, he might not be able to pay for in cash. It's OK, Trickle said. I'll barter with you. So instead of getting the entire purse, Trickle also got new engines, and engine service, for his cars. He did things like that.

There are tons of stories about Dick Trickle from the short track days. He once told a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter about the time when he blew a water pump in a race, got on the P.A. and asked if anyone in the crowd had a Ford. A guy drove his car down to the pits. Trickle pulled the water pump off, put it on his car, won the race, and gave it back. Another time he blew an engine, pulled one out of a tow truck, dropped it in his car, and won that race also.

Trickle won a lot on the short tracks. Maybe more than any other driver. The number of wins that Trickle is supposed to have is 1,200, legitimized by a Sports Illustrated article in 1989. But unlike NASCAR, which has precise records, Wisconsin's short track racing record book isn't a book at all, but a patchwork of newspaper clippings and memories and word of mouth. One man, who has tried to piece together records of every race Trickle entered, says he's found evidence of 644 wins up thru 1979. He's not sure of the ‘80s. Trickle would have needed 556 more victories before heading off to Winston Cup in 1989 to hit 1,200.

Might have happened.

He was good at the little things. He knew how to power through the corners. He always kept his car in control, even in traffic. Pit stops were critically important, because when a race was long enough to require one, one was all you got. At the 200 lap races at Wisconsin International Speedway in Kaukauna, he would pit on around lap 70 or 80 when everybody else thought about heading in around 120. After his stop, he'd drive conservatively, waiting for a yellow flag. When everybody else went in to change tires, Trickle would stay out, take the lead, and a lot of times take the checkered flag. He won at least 34 races at Kaukauna. At least.

In central Wisconsin, the same drivers went to the same circuit of tracks, which all ran races on different nights of the week. Drivers didn't bump and grind because they couldn't afford to and you didn't have a week between races to fix your car. You only had a matter of hours. If Dick Trickle couldn't get around you cleanly to win, he'd settle for second. It wasn't worth the risk.

Almost all of the other drivers had day jobs. They had to go home after the races. Trickle could hang out at the track all night. He could hit the bar. He could hang out with fans. "Just because the races were over didn't mean pulling up the shades and going to bed," he told Father Grubba for his book "The Golden Age of Wisconsin Auto Racing." "You are still pumped up. What are you going to do, stop at a corner church?" When Trickle left the track, people would follow him. They knew he'd stop somewhere for a drink.

The things that made Dick Trickle old school later were quite ordinary then. He drank canned beer because that's what most bars served. He smoked because people smoked. He wore cowboy boots in his stock car because they were thick and durable, and that's what people wore to race.

He started to get a reputation. One time, at an ASA race, the fans booed him when he was introduced. Doesn't that bother you?, another driver asked. "When you get introduced there may be 500 or a thousand people that cheer," Trickle told him. "But when I get introduced, 100 percent of the crowd reacts, one way or the other."

He was always racing, stock cars, snowmobiles - anything. In the beer garden after a race at the Milwaukee Mile in 1969, Trickle got to talking with another short track racer, Dave Watson, and they decided they needed to race again. The two drivers and three crew members grabbed mats and walked to the top of a nearby giant blue carnival slide. They sat, counted down, and pushed off. Dick Trickle won.

In 1972, he entered 107 races, and won 68. He got his 49th on Aug. 4 in his 1970 Mustang, starting at the back of the field, taking the lead on lap nine, and taking the checkered flag on lap 30. By this time, he was starting to make the No. 99 car legendary. He was called the White Knight, named for the mascot of Super America, his sponsor. He won seven ARTGO short track championships in 11 years, from 1977 to 1987. He was the ASA champion in 1984 and 1985.

There was a point, in 1979, when Humpy Wheeler tried to bring Trickle down to NASCAR full time. Trickle had driven in 11 Winston Cup races up to that point, starting at Daytona in 1970. He ran four Cup races between 1973 and 1974 and won at least eighth place every time. The big question about a short track guy like Trickle was focus. The longer the race, the longer you're required to maintain that intense concentration. That was never a problem for Dick Trickle. Focus ran in his family. "They could focus so hard," said his brother Chuck, "and forget there was another world and get things done."

He made the calculations. There wasn't big money in NASCAR. Not yet. He could make more money in short track. So he told Wheeler, I can't afford to come down there. Promoters are paying me to show up at the tracks up here.

He had all the ingredients to be a great Cup driver. He just didn't need to be one. All he needed to do was win.

THE START

Rudolph, Wisc., where Dick Trickle was born in 1941, was race-crazy in the 1950s. At one time, Father Grubba says, there were 26 race cars in a town of just a few hundred people. Nearly every driveway had a race car in it.

When Dick Trickle was nine, a neighbor took him to a race at Crown Speedway in Wisconsin Rapids, and he thought that was the greatest thing he'd ever seen. For the next seven years, he focused on how to get behind the wheel of his race car. Problem was, the Trickles were on welfare. Dick's father Lee came down with an ear infection that led to medical problems and was hospitalized for years. There was no money for racing. Dick had to work for his money, on farms, and in his father's blacksmith shop. He swept the floors, but he also learned how to use the arc welder.

In 1958, at age 16, when he'd welded together enough parts and came up with enough money to buy a 1950 Ford, he dropped the engine from a 1949 Ford in it and started racing. It was slow, and during his first race, in Stratford, Wisc., he finished way back in the end.

When the nearest racetrack, Griffith Park in Wisconsin Rapids, found out he was too young to race, he was kicked out for a year. After that, Dick never took racing for granted. Whenever he raced, he raced hard, and smart, as if he might not have another chance.

But he still had a day job, working 66 hours a week at a service station in Rudolph while racing four nights a week. With his free time, he worked on his cars at night, using what he'd learned about fixing cars during the day.

He married Darlene in 1961, paid $8 for a motel room the night of the wedding, and then ran two races the next day at Wausau and Griffith Park. Dick started working for a telephone company, and hated it, being up high on the poles. So he started doing the math: Gas was cheap. Parts were cheap if he scoured through the junkyard and did the work himself. If he owned his own car, he wouldn't have to split up his winnings. Dick could bring in the money, and Darlene could stretch it as far as it would go, but the racing season in Wisconsin ran from only May to September, so he didn't have all year to make money, and the payouts for winning races were maybe $100 one week, maybe $300 another. He would have to be on the road constantly, going from track to track, from LaCrosse to Wausau, from Madison to Wisconsin Dells. He couldn't afford to lose. Wherever there was a race, Dick Trickle would have to go there and win.

I think I can make it, Dick told Darlene. And he did.

THE END

Chuck Trickle doesn't want to talk much more about the suicide. He's on the phone from a water park.

"It's not the right thing to do, and I'm upset the way he did it, but you know, I wasn't in his shoes," Chuck says.

"Now they're turning on the music," he says, changing the subject.

"That's my story, anyway." The music gets louder.

"The park is closing in 15 minutes," he says.

"Anyway, that's about it. Is there anything else you want to know here?"

Tom Roberts says he struggles with Dick Trickle's suicide. So does Father Grubba. John Close, who partied with Dick Trickle in Stoughton, is saddened by it. Humpy is too. Kenny Wallace put a Dick Trickle sticker in the cockpit of his dirt car in memory of Trickle. But he had to take it off. It bothered him too much. He had a hard time driving.

Kenny Wallace tries to justify it like the others. He doesn't agree with suicide, but he's not going to question it. Dick had been through a lot over the last couple of years, he said.

Kenny has been talking about Dick Trickle for about two hours when he stopped for a second. "You know, this has been like therapy for me," he says. His voice sounds tired. I want to make sure you understand that he was a good man, he says. I want to make sure you know the full story.

"Don't you fuck it up," he says.

So he tells me what was in the envelope.

There were medical records inside. Computerized forms. Test results. Findings from doctors. Charts. They detailed a day-by-day, doctor-by-doctor struggle with pain.

Dick Trickle chain-smoked for his entire life. But he didn't have cancer. Aside from some stents, his heart was healthy.

To understand the end, maybe you have to go understand the beginning, way before racing, back to 1949, when Dick was eight years old. He was playing tag with a cousin up in the rafters of the house his uncle was building in Rudolph when he fell and broke his hip. He dragged himself home, and his mother took him to the hospital. He spent six months there, and missed a year of school. Doctors weren't sure if he'd ever walk again.

Once he got home, he wore a cast on his leg for months before he and his brothers got tired of the thing and cut it off. He'd walk again, but always with a slight limp.

In 2007, 58 years after the fall, that hip needed to be replaced. The limp was becoming too painful. He also had stents put in, doctors put him on blood thinners, and told him he ought to stay off the track. In 2009, he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel he still felt good enough to race, but he admitted to feeling the wear and tear from years of bumping cars and hitting walls. "I'm paying for some of my good times," he said, "but at the same time, I'm getting better and better with old age."

But sometime after, only his family knows when, he began feeling a stabbing pain two inches under his left nipple. Dick Trickle didn't cuss all that often, but when the pain became too much he started to really let the words fly. His phone conversations got shorter because he just couldn't go on. He went to doctor after doctor, looking for help, for years. We can't help, they told him, because we can't find the pain.

The problem with pain is that most doctors need to know what's causing it before they can treat it. Prescribe the wrong drug, and you might mask the real problem. Prescribe the drug to the wrong person, and they might abuse it. One study found that chronic pain increases the risk of suicide by 32 percent. It can leave people desperate. It can change people.

After the pain started, Dick Trickle stopped smoking. But by that point, he was already dealing with another kind of pain, too.

In 2001, Vicky's daughter Nicole, Trickle's granddaughter, was on the way home from volleyball practice. She stopped for gas at a minimart and was pulling back on to the road when a pickup truck smashed into her side of the car. She died instantly. Dick never talked about it with Kenny all that much. That wasn't surprising. "You are never going to get a feeling out of Dick Trickle," he said. Still, Kenny knew he was grieving. Other friends said he never got over her death.

They buried Nicole at Forest Lawn. Her death came just three years after his nephew, Chuck's son Chris, died after being shot in Las Vegas. Police there have never solved the crime. Chris was an up-and-coming race car driver. He called Dick for advice all the time.

"You never know what a man is thinking," Kenny said. Maybe it was grief. Maybe it was pain. Maybe it was a combination of both.

Race car drivers don't like to talk about pain. It shows vulnerability. And besides, it might keep them off the track. Dick Trickle endured a lifetime of crashes and hard hits. He wasn't a complainer. But he'd been through a lot of pain. His chest. His hip. His granddaughter. His nephew. Dick Trickle was always a guy who looked ahead. He didn't dwell on the past. He always raced so he could race again. But there were no more races. Ahead, all Dick saw was suffering.

A week before his death, Dick called Chuck. I don't know how much longer I can take it, he said.

On May 15, Dick Trickle went to the Duke Heart Center in Durham. This was his best chance to get better. Doctors ran more tests. But it was the same answer. We can't find anything wrong with you.

On May 16, he was dead.

Kenny thinks everything was done deliberately. Dick Trickle didn't kill himself at home. He didn't do it on a piece of property that somebody else could buy sometime. He ended his life at the same cemetery where his granddaughter was buried, where he would be buried. He made sure Darlene and the family had enough money.

The Trickle family is still private. Chad Trickle politely declined to talk about his father. Vicky didn't return an email. Their racing days are done. But they still know there are a lot of people out there who loved Dick Trickle. Two weeks after the funeral, Kenny got a package in the mail from Darlene. It was an old Dick Trickle T-shirt.

Most of the grave markers at the Forest Lawn Cemetery are flush to the ground, so from a distance, one looks the same as the next. You almost have to know where you're going to find the spot where Dick Trickle is buried, on the gentle slope of a North Carolina hill. You can barely see a gas station across Highway 150. Beer, coffee and cigarettes aren't too far away.

His grave is right in front of Nicole's. There are a few trinkets on it. A little number 99 checkered flag. A toy John Deere tractor. A Titleist golf ball with the words "miss you dad." Some flowers. There's an oak tree nearby. It's sunny. The driveway through the cemetery is a small asphalt oval.

Fitting, really. Dick Trickle always liked a short track best.

Producer: Chris Mottram | Editor: Glenn Stout | Copy Editor: Kevin Fixler

http://www.sbnation.com/longform/2013/7/30/4567960/dick-trickle-suicide-nascar-profile

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Meeting a Walking Oshkosh Truck History Museum

1920's Oshkosh Truck Logo flickr.com
Article thanks to truckinginfo.com. Links provided:

Here's a guest post from Senior Editor Tom Berg about an interesting character he met on a recent assignment.

Thursday, August 14  We were in a small conference room at Oshkosh Corp.'s service center along U.S. 41 on the namesake Wisconsin city’s southwest side, talking about the company’s S-Series front-discharge mixer truck, which I was test-driving for the September issue of HDT.
I asked my hosts when Oshkosh first offered this type of vehicle. They were all relatively young, so the product has been in the lineup all the time they’ve been with the company.
“We’ll have to ask Clarence,” said Katie Hoxtell, a marketing and communications manager.
Who’s Clarence? I asked.
“Clarence Jungwirth,” she answered. “He started working at Oshkosh in 1945.”
What – 1945? That’s almost 70 years ago, I said.
“Yes. He’s in his 90s,” she said. “Would you want me to bring him in?”
By all means! And in a few minutes, in walked a slight but spry gentleman wearing a big smile. We shook hands and exchanged hellos, and he explained that he will be 95 this October. He signed on with Oshkosh after leaving the U.S. Army at the end of World War II, and still works a few hours a day helping customers with parts queries and other details, like answering my question about the S-Series’ origin.
“It was in 1986 or ’87, just about the time I retired, when we brought it out,” Jungwirth said, adding that his retirement didn’t last long.
Then he launched into the story of the front-discharge mixer’s invention by a concrete producer in Salt Lake City in the 1960s and its manufacture there, in Indiana, Texas, and back in Indiana, where many are still built today (though by competitors of Oshkosh). “When the patent ran out on it, we were able to get into it.”
That story comprises a chapter in “A History of the Oshkosh Truck Corp.,” a thick, photocopied, spiral-bound book Jungwirth wrote some time ago. It’s one of scores of books and articles he’s authored about Oshkosh -- the company and the city.
Another book is a lengthy account of his time in Wisconsin’s 32ndInfantry Division, an Army National Guard unit called up for service in the Pacific during the big war. He’s an amateur historian as well as an expert on the many types of civilian and military trucks and trailers that Oshkosh has built since its founding in 1917 and its extensive growth since.
Junwirth is a treasure, and it was a pleasure meeting him on the way to the cab of that S-Series mixer chassis.


Saturday, October 18, 2014

Hourly Pay for Drivers - Financial Suicide for Carriers?

thetruckersreport.com
Hourly pay for drivers is ‘financial suicide’ for TL carriers, exec says

Thanks to and written by: Kevin Jones  Links provided:

Oct. 23, 2013  Mileage-based pay cannot be abandoned, a panel of fleet executives agreed Tuesday, but the system must be adjusted to compensate truck drivers for the time they spend and the work they do when the wheels aren’t turning.
Ideas on driver pay, along with recruiting and retention issues, the impact of recent hours of service changes and driver health and wellness initiatives all were tossed around during a driver-focused session at the annual American Trucking Associations Management Conference and Exhibition in Orlando.
ATA Chief Economist Bob Costello laid the groundwork for the discussion by presenting the results of his recent survey on industry trends. Costello said fleets are adjusting to continued tightness in the driver market by increasing pay and hiring newer drivers.
“While the driver shortage is generally confined to only certain segments of the trucking industry, it is having real impacts on how fleets recruit and retain their drivers,” he said.
And the segment of the industry most affected by driver churn continues to be the long-haul truckload carriers, with turnover rates running at 99 percent in the first half of this year.
As a result, 91 percent of those fleets say they have increased or will increase driver pay this year. The survey also found that large TL carriers are mixed on whether they would employ across-the-board pay raises or incentive-based plans.
Citing government income figures, Costello calculates that driver pay, in terms of spending power, is down 10 percent since 1990. What makes trucking unique, even as a number of trades have seen wages erode over the same period, is that drivers are in high demand, he noted.
But it’s not that fleets have reduced pay rates. The modern supply chain features a greatly reduced average length-of-haul, along with reduced productivity. Prior to the recession, long-haul trucks averaged 10,000 miles per month. That’s down to about 8,100 miles today, Costello reported.
Moderator Dave Osiecki, ATA senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs, posed the question: Is it time for trucking to move to hourly pay rates for drivers?
Simply, that would be “financial suicide,” explained Steve Gordon, COO of Gordon Trucking Inc.
“Disconnecting driver pay from how we get paid by our customers is a very frightening thought for this industry,” Gordon said.
But he was quick to admit that mileage-based compensation was overdue for adjustment.
“Just look at how much more time drivers are spending loading and unloading – and I’m not talking about ugly grocery unloads; I’m talking about simple drop-and-hooking a trailer. That’s an hour out of his day.”
And while truck drivers have always faced delays, the slide in a truck’s average miles means drivers can no longer expect to have an especially high-mileage run to offset the time – and money – lost sitting at a dock, he added
“Drivers are gambling their paycheck every week on our ability to build a good, sustainable, fluid network. If we could line-out a schedule so a guy could know what he was going to do over the next five days, that would have an impact on turnover. But we’re at the mercy of the shipping community,” Gordon said. “The drivers are the ones taking the risk, not the shippers and not the carriers. That psychology is really tough.”
Derek Leathers, president and COO of Werner Enterprises, said his company had given hourly pay only “short consideration, to be blunt.”
Werner does employ “all kinds of pay,” and some drivers in its dedicated fleet are not paid based on miles.
But Leathers agreed that as long as customers are paying fleets by the mile, it would be impractical to disconnect driver pay from that basic aspect of the trucking business.
And, as he explained, the problem wouldn’t simply be one of mismatched scales: Drivers need to have the same focus on, and self-interest in, equipment utilization that their companies do.
“If we were to pay drivers by the hour, my fear would be that you would lose the biggest point of light that you have in your fleet, relative to inefficiencies,” he said.
Private fleets don’t face many of the uncertainties that challenge for-hire fleets, and their driver turnover rate benefits from a private fleet’s regular routes and schedules. Costello reported that turnover rate at about 10 percent.
But, as Osiecki pointed out, for-hire fleets must compete with private fleets for drivers.
Jeff Flackler, vice president of transportation for Wal-Mart Stores Inc., put his turnover rate even lower, at 5 to 6 percent. Still, the company is “working harder” to recruit and retain drivers in certain areas of the country.
“One of the challenges for us is we’re both a shipper and a carrier,” Flackler said, adding that transportation efficiency is a critical component in keeping Wal-Mart’s retail prices low. “We face different challenges than [for-hire carriers], but we have some of the same: How do you make a driver’s life better?”
Flackler got the attention of the panel – and the audience – when he reported the average pay for a first-year Wal-Mart driver to be about $76,000. About two-thirds of the pay package is mileage-based and one-third is based on activities, plus a substantial benefit package. Flackler also noted that Wal-Mart hires only experienced drivers, signing only 350 from a pool of 13,000 applications last year.
While Wal-Mart is generally considered to be a driver-pay leader (the average TL first-year hire makes about half of what Wal-Mart pays) Leathers conservatively puts the pay gap between for-hire and average private fleets at 25 percent.
He suggested that for-hire carriers must challenge those shippers with private fleets during rate negotiations: “If the higher driver pay that we’re advocating and pushing for is inappropriate or too much, then how do they justify within their own four walls that they pay those kinds of dollars?”
Leathers doesn’t expect the for-hire industry to immediately jump to Wal-Mart-level pay scales for OTR drivers, “but somewhere between here and there is what it’s going to take to move the needle.”
A couple of percent in mileage pay, however, won’t be enough. That’s why activity-based pay, assessorials and targeted incentives already are higher than ever, Leathers added.
Osiecki pointed out that FMCSA has reviewed a study from Australia that concludes hourly pay leads to improved safety and is following up with U.S. fleets have use an hourly-pay model.
But – and to much applause from the audience – the panel rejected any suggestion that the federal government should have a regulatory  ”dog in the fight.”
“It’s demeaning for them to always think they’re going to do it better than what we do, when it is our primary mission every day,” Leathers said.
Still, he made the case that issues like driver pay and retention can’t be settled until the entire industry adopts electronic logs, which will provide a fundamental, standardized metric to guide policy.
“The experimentation that we continue to have in tinkering with hours of service or pay methodology or any other thing doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s way too dark out there. Turn the lights on,” Leather said “Let’s prove that we are serious about compliance and that we are committed to obeying the laws – before they continue to write new ones. We can argue about this as long as we want, the more likely it is that other things will comes at us that we like even less.”
Kevin Jones is Senior Editor, Trucking Media, and writes from his home in Little Rock, Ark. His Fleet Street blog features whatever strikes his fancy and has at least a little connection to trucks, or drivers, or highways. Or David Allan Coe. (Google "the perfect country and western song" if you're not nearly as old as Kevin is.) You can also keep up with Kevin by following his Twitter feed (@KevinJonesCCJ) or just drop him a line:kevin.jones@randallreilly.com.
http://www.ccjdigital.com/hourly-pay-for-drivers-financial-suicide-for-tl-carriers-exec-says/?utm_medium=single_article&utm_campaign=site_click&utm_source=in_story_related


Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Why I am not hiring veterans… but I want to!



gettinghired.com
This is a guest post thanks to and written by  James O'BrienPresident & CEO at Artemis Global Logistics & Solutions. He makes some very interesting comments. You can follow James at the links provided:
Sept 22, 2014  I am not hiring veterans. Why is that?! After all, I am a veteran. I am a former enlisted Marine and I remember distinctly how difficult it was to get a job. So why am I not hiring veterans? The answer is simple: they are ill-prepared for the business world. I do not want that to be reality, but it is. Does that have to be a permanent condition? Absolutely not! But it can only change with political and social will.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let me state that I have a team almost entirely comprised of military reservists. Thus, to say I am not hiring veterans is a bit of a stretch; eighty-five percent of my staff and/or independent contractors are veterans or reservists. Still, I receive thousands of resumes a month. Many of those resumes are from veterans. Most of the resumes I receive do not qualify for the positions that they wish to fill. This is especially true of veterans. Unfortunately, no one is assisting these veterans to re-tool their resumes and their expectations upon leaving the military. That needs to change. Let me give you a few examples of what I have received to better understand the issue:
  • One resume I received was nine pages long… NINE!
  • One resume was for a position that typically requires decades of experience in my industry (supply chain management); the individual was a Specialist coming off of a four year enlistment in a military occupational specialty (MOS) that was unrelated to the position.
  • One resume explained that the technical expertise qualifying him for a position as an IT technician was that he “Plays Play Station 3.” (Sometimes I have to remind myself that I was once twenty-one years old and thought this was an important skillset as well.)
  • One resume was a single line: “I am a 25C” [NOTE: this applicant is in a communications.]
  • One applicant’s response to the question of salary requirements for a warehouse foreman position was “$70,000 a year.” This is a job that pays about $35,000 a year (give or take).
To be sure, the vast majority of military resumes are not that bad, but they are not good either. They are typically chock-a-block with catch phrases that are appropriate to all veterans: “organized,” “self-motivated,” “driven,” “attention to detail,” etc. Whereas every employer wants organized, self-driven and motivated employees, they also want employees with skills. Taglines cannot replace skills.
So, if you are a veteran, what are the skills you have learned? For officers, your college education and rank is not enough. Despite your clear leadership qualifications, you may have to go back to the “second lieutenant” equivalent in the civilian world. In time, you will prove your value. If you are an enlisted technician your skills will be translatable to the professional world within which you likely want to get a position. You will have an easier job finding employment, though you might have to get through the hundreds of other applicants. If you are in an enlisted position that is harder to convert into the civilian world, such as infantryman (which I was), than you may have to tone down your expectations. I bartended at night and worked in a butcher shop during the day while going to college. When I finally got my first “real” job post college it was a GS-4 position getting paid a whopping $22,000 a year – in 2002! But I knew I had to take a step back in order to learn the skill sets that ultimately made me marketable and allowed me to climb the ranks. Not all veterans can do that for a variety of reasons.
Like any Marine, I am not complaining for the sake of my own bloviating. I want to fix the problem. That cannot happen alone. Here are the solutions.
First, military recruiters are partially to blame. They will tell you to go into the military and you will come out with a great job waiting for you because you are better prepared to succeed. I call BULLPOOP! While it is true, you are better equipped to succeed, jobs will not be waiting for you. Get ready to compete with a lot of technically proficient unemployed. This needs to change. One way to do so is to better prepare the recruited in his or her initial phases of basic training: explain the education benefits better; encourage new recruits and candidates to expand their skill sets throughout their enlistment or commission; make it clear – being a soldier is not a qualifier for a job in its own right, you will have to do things on your own to prepare for your future.
Secondly, it is time to change the way the G.I. Bill and uniform specific education funds reimburse veteran’s education. Currently, colleges dominate those funds. But not every veteran is built for college. In fact, many joined because they could not sit still in a classroom. Therefore, education initiatives led by trade unions, trade associations, and technical schools should be given the same opportunities to train veterans as universities. The National Customs Brokers and Freight Forwarders Association (NCBFFA) has a GREAT idea, led by Pam Brown (of Future Forwarding of Atlanta, GA). They want to train veterans to become Certified Customs Specialists (CCS), a job that is growing in importance. Right now they are building support for funding and getting little traction. They are not alone. It is time to engage the carpenters, plumbers, and iron workers – among others – to build similar reimbursable institutes. After all, I can outsource a financial analyst’s position to India, but I cannot outsource a broken faucet.
Thirdly, businesses can become more engaged, but we need help. Tax breaks for training unskilled veterans would be a welcome benefit. More than money, rules restrict companies from hiring veterans. Regulations currently restrict how much we can assist. We are limited with regard to the amount of feedback we can give an applicant regarding his or her resume. We also need a greater amount of freedom to fire our new hires. Why? If that candidate for whom I wish to train turns out to be a turkey, I need to be able to release him or her in order to open new opportunities for a potentially better recruit. At present, the risk is entirely on the company and we can get hit with unemployment insurance for taking a chance. Thus, businesses seek those with records of success and skillsets. If you want to change that culture, the government should extend the probation period to give time to adequately train and assess veteran candidates. Unchain our potential!
Finally, elected officials need to care. At present, most do not. Veterans are treated like photo-opportunities by savvy political operators. When the cameras are gone, so is the support. The problem is only going to get worse. The World War II generation had a lot of comrades in Congress. The Vietnam Era, the last generation of drafted service members, still has a good number of elected officials as well – but they are dwindling. In the era of an all-volunteer military, only 2% of the nation will have served. Congress is beginning to reflect that demographic. Veterans need to organize for meaningful change in order to increase employment opportunities. Until that happens, they will continue to have higher than national average unemployment rates.
The wars are ending overseas. For many veterans they are beginning at home. They need your help. It will take some self-reflection and collective will to make that possible. They fought for us, let’s fight for them.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140922184440-12804420-why-i-am-not-hiring-veterans-but-i-want-to


Saturday, October 11, 2014

The Mafia's Ties to Wisconsin Cheese

thecheesemafiafamily
In March of 1980, after a two year investigation, the Pennsylvania Crime Commission released a Report of the Study of Organized Crime’s Infiltration of the Pizza and Cheese Industry. Wisconsin’s Grande Cheese Co of Fond du Lac was referenced several times.


Grande Cheese Co., mentioned in the body of the report in reference to Joseph Bonanno, Roma Foods and the Falcone Brothers, was born out of a Chicago gang war in 1939. During the first few years of its operation, at least five men, including the owner, were killed. Chicago crime boss Ross Prio eventually gained control of the company. Over the years Grande has been owned by or associated with numerous organized crime figures.


In the 1950's the ownership of Grande Cheese passed from Ross Prio to the DiBella family, John and his sister, Rose. John DiBella became corporate President in 1959. John had ties
to Milwaukee crime boss John Alioto who was Frank Balistrieri's father-in-law. John Alioto was the Milwaukee mob boss from 1952 until 1961 when he handed over control to his son-in-law, Frank Balistrieri. DiBella’s sister Rose took over her brother's stock after his death in 1964, and later sold her interest to the Candela and Gaglio families. The Gaglio family owned Ontario Importing, founded by the family patriarch, Vito Gaglio, in the mid-1960's.


The actual control of the cheese and pizza business began with no less a figure than Joseph Bonanno, Sr. Bonanno, living at that time in Tucson, Arizona, was regarded as one of the most powerful leaders of Organized Crime in America. Bonanno initiated a conspiracy to control the specialty cheese business in the United States in the early 1940's and even in 1980, he and his associates controlled the activities of some of the largest and most prosperous specialty cheese companies. Bonanno had direct ties to Grande Cheese of Wisconsin; through it to Grande's exclusive distributor in the Pennsylvania area, Roma Foods of South Plainfield, New Jersey; and through the distributor to hundreds of retail pizza shops which were financed and controlled by the organization in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.


The Falcone brothers of Brooklyn, New York--formerly associated with Bonanno-tied Grande Cheese and partners with a Grande officer in other Wisconsin cheese companies--built and operated for a decade a network of fraudulent "paper companies" designed to produce millions of dollars for the Falcones only to collapse financially when challenged by claims of their legitimate business victims.


The Pennsylvania Crime Commission investigation had determined that the Falcones and Thomas Gambino drove another company into bankruptcy in 1976. In December of 1975, the
Falcones and Gambino bought 70% of the stock of the previously family-owned Badger State' Cheese Company in Luxemburg, Wisconsin. Eight months later, Badger State Cheese collapsed in disarray with $1.3-million in debts. The Falcones and Gambino had taken over Badger and arranged that Capitol Cheese of Brooklyn, New York be the major customer and distributor for Badger. Capitol Cheese of Brooklyn was operated by Joseph and Thomas Gambino. Joseph Gambino was a leader in the Carlo Gambino crime organization.
Capitol Cheese directed delivery of Badger State cheese to Capitol's customers, collected payment from the customers, and then the cash disappeared. When Capitol Cheese owed Badger State Cheese $560,000, Badger State closed down and the Wisconsin State Department of Agriculture placed the company in trusteeship. Capitol Cheese, the Gambino business in Brooklyn, afterward, went out of business.


Also involved in the Crime Commission Investigation:
F & A CHEESE of Grand Rapids, Michigan, owned by Francesco and Angelo Terranova. The Company was started with a loan from the uncle of the Terranovas, John DiBella of Grande Cheese. F & A Cheese had another office in Upland, California. Raffael Quasarano, a member of the Joseph Zerilli criminal organization of Detroit, and Peter Vitale were indicted by a federal grand jury in Detroit in November, 1979 for allegedly extorting $270,000 from the Terranovas. They were also charged with mail fraud, tax fraud and racketeering. According to the indictment Quasarano and Vitale used "fear of economic loss" and threats of "force and violence" to gain control of an F & A subsidiary, Rogersville Cheese Factory, Inc. in Wisconsin.

According to a report printed in the Milwaukee Sentinel on Aug. 7, 1980, the owner of a Wisconsin cheese factory (Rodgersville Cheese Factory) allegedly taken over by organized crime bosses from Detroit was told by either Quasarano or Vitale in 1974, “The big fish is swallowing the little fish, and you're lucky your legs aren't broken, according to Federal Court testimony that day. Both eventually pled guilty and were sentenced to prison terms of four years each in 1981.


References:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1368&dat=19800807&id=lYBQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ChIEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2574,1039249