Interviewee: Carl Shellhorn

Interviewers: Noah Michela, Renzo Gansa

Interview Date: May 16, 2024

Noah Michela: This is Noah Michela and Renzo Gansa. I am pleased to welcome Carl Shellhorn who I am interviewing on behalf of the St. Helena Historical Society’s Oral History program. We are conducting this interview at four o'clock on the 16th of May at the St. Helena High School library. Welcome, Carl, can you begin with telling us where you were born and when you first came to the St. Helena area.

Carl Shellhorn: Yeah, Carl Shellhorn. And as in today's date, I'm seventy-three [corrected from seventy-two] years old and I came to the Napa Valley in 1964. But prior to 1964, I was born in Anchorage, Alaska in 1951. And I went to, you know, elementary and junior high school in Alaska and my father worked for the Alaska Railroad, which it’s funny, at the time you never realized what your parents do and how significant their role is in what you become and what you do. My father worked for the railroad and in my childhood time he was a superintendent for the railroad and was in charge of communications and those things, telephones and literally telegraph and train dispatch. And the railroad had its own telephone system, so they were in charge of phones all up and down the rail belt from Fairbanks all the way to Seward, Alaska, and back to Anchorage. And so his people took care of all that stuff.

CS: As the son of a superintendent, there were some privileges that I was allowed with the railroad. And one of them was I could go see my dad's secretary, one of the few guys that actually had a secretary on the small railroad, and get a pass to go on the train. [Then,] go down below and see one of my schoolmates' fathers, who was a ticket agent, and get the ticket validated. And then, depending on whether I was going fishing, or whether I was going hunting, or we're doing both or whatever. You'd go down to the platform with your knapsack and your shotgun in it and your fishing gear and whatever and tell them you're gonna go to mile 163 and get off. And we were on the northbound train. And at the end of the day, the southbound train coming from Fairbanks would come by. And the dispatch would tell them they had a pickup. And they'd pick us up after we were hunting and fishing and doing what we had to do. And so it was quite fortunate.

CS: So that gave me a background in some electrical stuff because that was the department, the communications department. The old man was instrumental in bringing the first microwave stations to Alaska. And so it was kind of a milestone. I got to see some of that stuff way before it was common as a young man. Anyway, my dad got his 30-plus years with the railroad and decided to retire. And he didn't let it be known to any of us that he had some health issues and he wanted to move someplace with a more temperate climate. And so he was either going to move to the Sonoma Valley or move to the Napa Valley. And as it turned out, in 1964, we came here to the Napa Valley. And my dad was a… Mason and an Elk and all those other fraternity groups that some adults belonged to, especially back then. And we, through their connections, we ended up with a house and a place to live.

CS: Then I went back to school. I finished my last year, eighth grade, in the Napa school, Ridgeview [Junior] High School. And then the following year I went to Napa High. And we had the largest, the three years that I was at Napa High, we had the largest classes that the school ever had. And so I ended up graduating high school in 1969. And in my years going to school in Napa, I belonged to a Boy Scout troop when I lived in Anchorage. And when I moved down here, I joined a Boy Scout troop. And then shortly thereafter, I joined a program that I'm still with today, some sixty years later now, and that's the Sea Scouting program. And as a Sea Scout, I went through that as a youth, and that set me up for the beginnings of a career. And not, funny thing is, it wasn't in the maritime industry, which was the direction that a lot of scouts went. Mine was in the industrial industry.

CS: And so I took welding classes in school and machine shop classes. And when I was in Anchorage, I took the carpenter and wood shop classes. And then when I came here to California, I took the electronics class, the welding class, and the machine shop class. So I took those three shop classes my first year in high school. And then the second year in high school I dropped the electronics class and took the welding class and the machine shop class. And I had English and history and bonehead math class and those kinds of [things], you know.

And so I graduated from high school. There was a change in my junior year. And that was what I took in the junior year– I took junior college classes in welding. And then during my senior year, I took junior college classes in welding and ultimately machine shop. In my junior year, I'd take all my high school classes in the morning and in the middle of the afternoon, I'd go literally across the quad to where the junior college stuff was then and take junior college classes. And then the following year, the schedule was all screwed up and I could start at seven o'clock in the morning. So I took a bookkeeping and accounting class in the morning, which I always wanted to work for myself and do that kind of thing.

So, well, you know, I might learn how some of this works.

And that served me reasonably well through my life. And so I take the accounting class in the morning and then at nine o'clock I would start a welding class that went until noon and at quarter to noon I would bail and jump in my 1956 Volkswagen I owned and race across town to walk in at quarter after twelve into my American government class in high school. So I took American government and English at high school, and finished my high school requirements. And I had the high school machine shop class, which was a phenomenal program at the time. So I did that through my senior year. The next year, I'm 100% junior college, and finished my welding technology program and took the machine technology program.

CS: Then when I turned nineteen, my high school girlfriend became my wife and I got married and went to work and have been working ever since. So that's kind of the high school part of it. And I was very fortunate after high school and I started to work and so forth, there was about a four year period there before I had any kids. And in that four-year period, I got associated with a church, the Presbyterian Church in Napa, and got on one of their boards. But...not so much the church but the people. The people that were there were great mentors and supporters of a young man with a new family who's got ideas but no real direction. I mean, I was working, I had a full-time job, I was working from time to time. And the guy that was the chairman of the trustees of the church, I knew him casually. So they put me on the trustees because they said, you're a good working kid, you need to be here.

CS: So I found out that he was the general manager of the Kaiser Steel Fabrication Plant in Napa. So he said, “how would you like to have a job?” And I said, “well, I already have a job.” And he said, “I think we need to talk because I think there's a place where you could do well here.” And so it was kind of funny. I had a welding background, I had a machine shop background, and I had a medium to heavy equipment background. So I had three different places and I worked on some other miscellaneous equipment in my time in a short period of time.

And so I got the inside scoop on what every one of those shops do

And so he's the general manager of the company. He's the head number one dude in Napa. And he says, come down to my office and meet me at, I don't know, eleven o'clock or something like that. So I show up and I walk in. There's the superintendent of the garage, the superintendent of the machine shop, the superintendent of the welding shop, and the superintendent of the pipefitter shop and he had talked to all of them about me, and they all wanted me to go to work for them. And so the superintendent of the whole facility, the guy that all the shops worked with and related to, took me on a tour of the place. An individual one-on-one, you and me kind of tour. And so I got the inside scoop on what every one of those shops do and a chance to talk to the superintendents of those shops about advancement and work they had and the type of work they do and so forth. And the most unlikely of the bunch was the plumbing and pipefitter shop. Well, they were really short on numbers. They were really short on people at that point in time. But it was a small shop and there was basically nowhere to go but up. And I could do a lot of the basic stuff that the pipefitter shop wanted me to do. So I ended up going to work in a pipefitter shop.

CS: So I became what was a plumber and steamfitter for Kaiser Steel Corporation. And I worked on piping that was this big [pinches fingers together ~¼ inch] for doing instrument work and so forth. And I worked on piping big enough I could walk through it. So we did everything in between. So the rule was if something went through it, plumbers and pipefitters did it. If the same piece of pipe was structural, then the boilermakers did it. So if it held something up, the boilermakers were in charge of putting it together. If it was fit up in such a fashion that it was used as an air ventilation duct or as a vent for a bilge pump or if it was something like that, then we get it. And it was funny because I got to do a lot of stuff. And then they put me in a lot of places. I worked some maintenance for, have you ever ridden BART? Have you ever ridden the BART from Oakland to Concord? Through the mountain?

NM: Yes, I have, yeah.

CS: Yeah, okay. All right, when you get in there, you'll see these segmented pieces that go all the way around the tunnel. And they're all, they're three feet long, and they all bolt together. Okay. Well, we made those. It takes eight three-foot long sections to make a circle, and each circle is three feet of tunnel. So you bolt 1500 of them together, you got a mile of tunnel. Okay? And so we had a mill on the Kaiser place in Napa that we made these segments. It was a manufacturing mill. Flat, raw material came in this end, painted and banded material came out the other end, and it was formed and shaped and we had specialized equipment to weld it, specialized equipment to machine it and drill it and do all that stuff. Well, I didn't actually make the segment.

My job was to keep the machinery running that the guys ran that did make the segments

So I did maintenance. So I got to work all over the mill. I got to learn how all that equipment operated, and I did that for...whatever the length of that contract was, it was fairly short. And then they shipped me off to go do something else. So I had another job. And then I went down to Vallejo and worked in the Vallejo construction yard where we actually built offshore drilling rigs. We'd made the hull sections in Napa. I helped to build those. They shipped them out of the dry docks and floated them down the Napa River, got them to Vallejo and we...put them together and stacked them all up and put all the pieces. And we made a rig that was roughly 500 feet long and 240 feet wide. And from the water line to the deck was 135 feet. And then I had a big tower 200 feet more above that when it was completed. For exploratory well drilling for petroleum. And I was a foreman on that job. All the plumbers and pipefitters worked for me. And the pipefitter welders worked for me. And I was the youngest guy they ever had. I had that job.

NM: Really? How old were you at the time?

When you talk about baptism by fire . . .

CS: I was twenty five years old. So, when you talk about baptism by fire, I had men working for me that had more years in the trade than I was years old. Okay? So you have to learn real fast that even though I'm your boss, and you're old enough to be my dad, okay? I'm still the boss. But you have knowledge a nd experience and so forth because you've done all this time in the trade that I don't have. So if I just blatantly go, okay, well, we're gonna do it this way and don't ask anybody. It's a formula for disaster. But if I sit down with you and go, hey, in your experience, have you built anything similar to what we're making today? We gotta put this together and it's got pieces that are this way and we have to pick it up with a great big crane and put it inside the drilling rig and work on it inside, vertical, and do all this and hook it all up. How would you go about routing this? Thank God I had good people. We'd sit down, have our little meeting and figure out how to put this together and then we'd go hang it and build it and do it. And so I learned a lot. Learned a lot in how to work with people, learned a lot about the business by itself.

CS: [A] drilling rig is a floating city

Its main thing in that city is not to make bricks like Pittsburgh over here or to grow wine grapes like we do here. It's to drill holes in the ground and find oil. And that's what that floating city is supposed to do. And so it has everything a city has. It has offices, it has a system of government, it also has navigation and location equipment so it can be moved. And it has places for guys to sleep, eat, and do laundry. The part that always baffled me, but they had it, [it] wasn't my thing. In the rec room we had a pool table. We had a pool table and a piece of gear that floated on the water! How the hell does that work? But they loved it. They all played pool. And when you worked on the rig offshore…The galley's open twenty four hours a day. You can eat any time, anything. If you want to sit down and eat nothing but t-bone steaks that are that thick [gestures with hand], you can do it. But you still have a job to do. You still got to work.

You work. Work was hard and there was lots of it.

There's no, you know, one thing about being out there is you had to stay after it. You work. Work was hard and there was lots of it. So your shift would be over, you go down, crawl into your bunk room and change clothes and take a shower, let the water run over you until you can't stand it, and then get dressed into something comfortable and go to the rec room. And in our rigs, there's no alcohol, no beer, no wine, no nothing, no alcohol. So you go up there and have a nice tea or something like that, and then go to the galley and have dinner and [have] all the ice cream you could put on a plate.

And then they'd either take you off the rig with a helicopter, fly you back to where I was in Santa Barbara, fly us back to Santa Barbara airport, or we had crew boats that went back and forth and you'd get on the crew boats. They were about average sixty, sixty-five feet long crew boats. They go fairly fast, not smooth, just beat the daylights out of you driving back and forth. All the guys inside because the wind’s blowing and the sprays coming in the boat. They close all the doors and windows and then they'd all smoke. Oh my God, it killed me. Just, smoke would make me so seasick, I couldn't stand it. But it was a good job. I had a great job. And then when those were done, I worked in Vallejo to build other drilling rig parts and pieces.

CS: Then … the company had built a great big barge for hauling offshore drilling rigs. It was built in Korea and came over here with a drilling rig on top of it that was also built in Korea. And came into the Santa Barbara Channel. So we had built pieces for the barge in Napa. And those pieces were, what they call jacking equipment, was what they used to pull this 20,000 ton piece of equipment onto the barge. And the barge we had made at the time was the largest barge of its kind in the world. It was 900 and something feet long by 158 feet wide. It was fifty feet wider than the Panama Canal. It had to go all the way around. It was towed by two great big huge tugboats so when we were taking the rig off the barge and putting it in the water and doing that kind of stuff, we lived on the tugboats.

And these were the largest class of tugboats in the world

They were owned by a company called Smit Tak, which is a Dutch company. And we stayed on board. We had our own area on the tugboat. And so we take the small boat from the barge over to the tug, get on the tug and shower and change clothes and have dinner. And on the tug, you could have a drink. And if you got screwed up and got drunk, you were fired and you got sent home. There was no ifs, ands, no maybes, no second chance, nothing. But you could sit in the corner of the dining room, they had kind of a little bar area over here. And you could have a cold beer before dinner or after dinner, whatever you wanted to do. And that was fine. Nobody had any issues. And we ate Dutch food, a lot of ham, cheese, and butter. Everything they had was covered with butter. I mean, if you had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, there was butter on it first. It was just different customs, different things. For a young man, it was a great experience. I mean, I got to do all the fun stuff and didn't have any real responsibility. So in 1984, due to some political and business and whatever, Kaiser Steel went out of business. They folded up.

CS: Since 1972, I had been doing my own [business] on the side

I had a welding truck and generator and so forth. And that's when I started coming up here into St. Helena and doing work up in the valley. And so I've worked for… Well now there's over 300 wineries. So to say I've worked for all of them, no. But I can guarantee you I've worked for probably at least half of them. The ones that were here in the early ‘80s and 2000s, I worked for a whole bunch of them. You've been in the winery, seen the stainless steel pipe that all the wine goes through and all that. Well, we used to put that in, that's called process piping and connect up the big stainless steel tanks and so forth.

But I had a small company. I mean, on average, there were only three of us:

Myself, another journeyman, and a helper. That was what we had. So for me to go into a big winery and do all of the process piping and that kind of stuff, I didn't have the manpower for that. So what I did a lot of is the big company would come in and do all the stuff and then they'd say, oh, well, we need this pipe moved. It's got to be cut and turned and hooked to this piece of equipment. Well, I could do that, because it didn't take weeks to do the job. We could do it in a day or two days or something. So I did the process piping, all the stainless steel, the food grade and all that. And then I did a lot of agricultural work. And one of the things I was building were pump stations. You guys in your lifetime they've gotten rid of just about all the sprinkler systems. Now they use fans and all that kind of stuff. But in the ‘70s and early ‘80s we had sprinklers in big reservoirs all around the Valley, especially down here in the flat. And they had big pump stations, pumped thousands of gallons of water a minute to spray the vineyard and did that in March and April, [when] they're in the frost season. Do you know how that works?

Renzo Gansa: I don't, no.

CS: It's very interesting. It's physics, it's a thermal kind of biology problem. So you've got a grape plant and the buds coming up. And you've all seen them. You've got this little round, kind of half green, that looks like bark starting to stick up out of the corner of the grape, the limb of the grape plant or on the cane that's been left. Well, if that freezes, it does what's known as it burns. Okay? And that bud takes a long time to replace itself and heal. And so it makes your grape harvest late. But the water from the sprinkler in the cold weather, at two o'clock in the morning when it's dropping down to about freezing, the water goes tink, tink, tink… with the rain bird and waters the vineyard. Well, the water falls down over top of the bud and freezes, but it doesn't freeze the bud.

The bud has its own thermal energy because it is a living, growing thing and has heat

That heat uses the ice as an insulated envelope and even though the temperature out here is below freezing, the temperature around the bud is not. It's cold, but it's not below freezing. It doesn't burn the bud. So that's how it works. So all those sprinklers spray water over and all the little buds get covered with ice and in the morning sun comes up, thaws, everything melts, everybody's happy. Without it, the bud gets frost on it. And you've seen the frost, frost is crumbly, okay? And it absorbs water. So it dehydrates the bud and the bud freezes and dies. So that's how the sprinkler systems work.

CS: And we used to put them all over. They were everywhere. And today, we've gone through several droughts over the last thirty years, you know? And so storing great big huge quantities ofwater or finding a way to get quantities of water has been difficult. So they've gone to wind machines and so forth. But before the sprinklers…we used smudge pots. Smudge pots were used in the orchard industry for years. But here...you want to generate a thermocline in the air, a temperature difference between what's here and what's here. The weather on top is cold, it's trying to come down. You put all the smudge pots in and they're burning and so forth. They create a heat layer [that] tries to come up, so that layer of heat is trapped.

Well, in order to keep it trapped, you have to have something that's dense that won't filter up through the cloud. And so they make them smoke. And in the old days, they put anything that would burn into a smudge pot. They used lubricating oil, old diesel fuel, you name it. And then they'd set the pots so they'd burn but [mainly] smoke. And I can remember coming up from Napa to Yountville and you'd see this wall of black. Just like you were gonna drive through a wall. Went all the way across the valley, and it was all smudge from the smudge pots. Unbelievable.

The air pollution control people would all be kicking and crawling in the street

CS: And so that's why they don't do it today. But as a young man, you'd follow the tanker behind the tractor and fill them all full of diesel fuel and oil, whatever you could get to fill them up. And then at two o'clock in the morning, they'd come back, the farmers would come back behind you and they'd light them all up and get them roaring. And then they outlawed them and took them out and so forth. So, things that have changed in the valley in my working career, the smudge pot thing was one of them. But it was interesting how it worked. We even had places where some of them were out of the way. They'd take automobile tires, fill them full of diesel, and light them on fire. Well, it worked just like a smudge pot as far as making smudge.

The thickest and gooiest and nastiest black smoke you ever saw in your life, because they're burning all these tires all over this acreage. And the smoke would come up and the cold air would come down, it would trap it. Same way it traps smog today. Only this, you gotta take a knife and cut a square in order to have a place to breathe. Oh, it was terrible. But it was what we did. I mean, back in the ‘70s and so forth, there were a lot of smudge pots here in the valley. And when they got rid of them, you could see them lying in the fields, man. There were smudge pots everywhere. It took several years, and there was a crossover period that they could do this and couldn't do that. And the sprinklers were so much cleaner and actually worked better. The sprinklers will work down to about…twenty-nine degrees somewhere in that neighborhood. So three degrees below freezing. A wind machine blowing the wind around to stir the frost up can barely, barely make it to thirty-one, thirty degrees. So not as efficient as all as far as protecting the crop.

CS: On my own, before I got my business going full blast, I built agricultural pump stations. And the funny part is that, because now there are fewer and fewer sprinkler systems in the valley, probably 70% or 80% of the pump stations I built were forty years ago. They're gone. All been taken up and changed [to] the wind machines and different things. So it's interesting to see that evolution. And then in 1984, I started my shop in Napa full time. You know, it was one of those where it seemed like it was eight days a week. They're all the time, you know, start early, work late. Well, I can't say that. I never really started early. I'm not an early guy. But I'd work late. I could work late with anybody. Got to get dynamite blowing me out of bed in the morning. But, and at seventy-two years old, it's still that way. This is 2024, right? Yeah, so I'm seventy-three years old. As of April.

NM: Oh yeah, happy birthday.

I continued to do some agriculture work, but I kind of fell into a job doing shop work.

CS: Yeah, yeah, April 2nd. The shop jobs that I did for the wineries here, all over the upper part of the valley, was wine caves became the thing to do. Okay, they're from a property tax standpoint. If you have a 40,000 square foot building, it taxes at this rate. If you have a 40,000 foot cave, there's no tax on it.

NM: Really, wow.

They cost more to build, the tax rate is way different.

CS: So that's why they're digging caves in the ground. The county doesn't tax them the same. And I don't know what the ramifications are. They're building more caves. But one of the things that the caves have to have, the division of alcohol, firearms, and tobacco (ATF), they require that if you're going to put wine in a cave, then it has to be secure because you pay taxes on it. They don't want people fraudulently removing and moving and doing stuff to make it [so] when the taxman comes in and counts all your wine, today you have fourteen cases and when he leaves all of a sudden you've got 140 cases. And so you have to have a way to lock up your winery. Well to do that you have to have a door. Well, I built wine cave doors. And I've made them out of wood. Well, they're all, because I'm a steel shop, they were all made with steel frames of some kind. So we'd roll channels or we'd fabricate pieces and they'd go into the cave. And when the cave guys are digging the cave, they would gunite the steel frames in. And then we would duplicate the frame in my shop and build the door.

Some of them were just the skeleton of a door. And then the cabinet makers and the wood guys would come in and clad them with wood, and they would have that archtop castle entrance looking door, you know, like you'd have on a medieval castle. That is so popular with the wine cave people, okay? They want that archtop. And then later on, I started to build all steel doors. So we'd make the doors all out of steel too, being fabricated, and then they'd get treated so they wouldn't rust. And the frames that went into the concrete, we'd galvanize them, we'd zinc plate them, and I'd send those out and have that done. But I built a trailer that would hold the doors so I could bring them up and down the valley without, wider than my trailer and I couldn't haul them. So I had to stand them up on an angle like this [gestures with hands]. So here's the bottom of the trailer and put a leg up and hold them.

NM: How big were they?

CS: I could do doors that were thirteen feet tall. By laying them over on an angle, I could haul them on my trailer. So the bigger doors, I actually built some doors that you could back a fully loaded semi-trailer into. So those had to be close to fifteen feet tall. And then I built a door for a winery up here in the hills above St. Helena. The room of the winery was round. Okay. And they wanted a door in one side. But when I talked to them, I said, do you really want this beautiful round room that you built to have a flat cord where the doors go? I said, why don't we make the doors round? So we figured out how to make [a] curved door. But it almost backfired on us because the top of the door opening was an arch. So now you've got a curved door that goes into an arch. So the top is a compound curve. It goes this way and it goes this way [shows shape of door with hands]. So how do you make that? And so what we did is I made the arch of the top of the door as a flat arch, rolled a piece of steel to make the top, put a cord in it to stiffen it, and put some other stiffeners. So we made a flat door to fit in this curved opening. Then I took that piece and sent it to the pre-former people in Petaluma, and they put it into a roll, and they rolled that piece this way. So now it was arched and curved, and back down as an arch. And we cut it apart and welded it and put it all in. And when we got all done, I had two doors that came together like this as an arch with a curved top. So we did some interesting doors over the years and did them for little wineries, and did them for big wineries. I mean, I made stuff here in the valley for …

We built all the doors that are at Staglin Winery

We built a lot of, not all of the doors, but I built the majority of the doors in the beginning for Winery 7 & 8 and Highway 29 and… there's so many of them I can't remember the names of. But one of the things that happened with the doors, is some of them I never knew where they went. The cave company that was making the caves would call me in and say, “hey Carl, you know, here's a sketch, we need a door that looks like this.” And so I'd bid it and we'd build it and I'd put it on my trailer. And one of their guys would come on his way home from work, pick up the trailer, take it to the job site the next day, unload the doors and they'd install them and put them in and my trailer would come back empty and I'd get paid. I never knew where the doors went.

NM: Wow, is there a reason they did that?

CS: No, it was just the way it was. I didn't have to go to the winery and you know I have several hundred cave doors in the valley here. And you know it's … You know, it's funny, I can drive down through the valley and go, okay, we made doors for those people and we made doors for those [people]. You know, I did work for Beringer's and all the name brands.

NM: Some big names, yeah.

CS: Big names, well and the little guys. Did a lot of work for some small wineries. And up there in Angwin, I did a bunch of doors. Matter of fact, I made a miniature cave door for … right at [the] big curve going up to Angwin.

NM: Near Newsom’s winery?

CS: No, anyway…Viader

NM: It was near the Burgess winery, right?

CS: Yeah. She had a house built and underneath the house there was a space, but you could go through and step down into the space, but there was only room for a real short door. And I made this miniature [door], curved just like a wine door. They put it in and it's still there. When the fires burned that whole part of the hill, it burned right around it and didn’t burn any of it. So where are we at? Quarter to five we're going run out here pretty quick so what do we need to do here guys?

NM: I mean you're covering a lot of like good information I mean you've got all this stuff we're looking for, I mean you're definitely an entrepreneurial person would you say that?

CS: Well, supposedly, yeah okay you know one of the things that I can tell you is that in my particular welding business I had some specialties that I did because early in my career I got to work with some of the very best people in the industry. I was young enough but old enough at the time to work with the last bunch of World War II welders, machinists, fabricators that worked in the shipyards in different places during World War II. To work with them gave you an attitude that nothing was impossible. No, “can't, I don't know, “ – none of that was not part of their vocabulary. So you learn to [say],“Okay, we have a problem. The three of us gotta sit down, rack our heads together, and we'll solve it. And if we don't, we'll go find somebody else to help us solve it.” And so, when I worked for Kaiser Steel, that attitude prevailed.

I got to work in planning and estimating, and a little bit in the engineering office.

CS: And I was lucky, I got to work in part of the administrative office.They're big engineers, the guys that had the projects, the ones that were hard and unique and so forth. Almost no exception. Every one of those men were virtually self-taught. Now they eventually went to the university, you know, they became graduate engineers and were top in their field in their own right. But a lot of them started by sweeping the floors in the machine shop. That's where they started. And later on, guys were graduates of different schools and trade schools and universities and they would go to work for the company, but they'd work in the blueprint room, making blueprints. That's where they started. That was the sweeping floors of that industry.

CS: One of my dearest friends was a machinist at Mare Island. During World War II, he was drafted and was in the Army in the Philippines. But when World War II was over, he became a machinist at Mare Island. And he taught me more stuff than I could do. I could never recount. And every time I do machine work in my shop now, I go, “Okay, Warren, how would you do this?” Stop and think and try to remember what that old man had taught me. Besides being a great mentor for me, he was like a second father. It's good, you know, there were good times with people that were good, squared away, wholesome individuals that were extremely knowledgeable, not only in their trade but in other things as well.

My buddy Warren, journeyman machinist, as a machinist he could take this thing and machine it and make whatever you want out of it, hands down, period. But he was also an amateur geologist, and he had a four-wheel-drive Jeep and a motorhome, and he'd drive off into the hinterlands and collect rocks. And he'd come back, and in his shop in his garage, he had a big saw to cut the rocks into slabs, and up in his attic in his house, he had all the lapidary equipment to clean and polish and do all the stuff to do that. [He] even had a machine that would make facets like a diamond. So he could take a piece of quartz, put it on the dopper (referring to a dop stick), place it on the table, and then move it, index it, move it, index it... When he was all done, he had a piece that looked like a faceted diamond. Just unbelievable. And this was a hobby, you know?

CS: So in my scouting career as a young man, as a teenager in scouts, we overhauled some diesel engines. Pretty good sized diesel engines. And that work that I learned there from the people, the adults that helped us do that. It wasn't a case of that we helped the adults do the work, they helped us do the work. As I got older and so forth, and even today, I worked on a diesel engine for a boat a month ago, helped get it running and so forth. And it's a new Sea Scout boat down in San Mateo, and [long pause while searching for picture]... okay, so there's the people, that's where I was Saturday. There's me on the end. And these are the crew and some adults. And this is their...twenty six foot boat [image 1].

NM: This is for the Sea Scouts?

I got into the welding business because as a Sea Scout

CS: Yep, yep. This is the brand new chartered Sea Scout ship called the Nautilus. And it's in San Mateo. So, you know, a good day. I was responsible for fixing the engine and the mechanicals and the steering and all that kind of stuff for these guys so they have a working program. Extremely grateful for what I was able to do, but the only reason I could do that job, because in the beginning I was a Sea Scout. I got into the welding business because as a Sea Scout, in our ship that we had at the time, we had a fire pump. And the bracket that held the fire pump on the back of the engine broke, didn't work. So, I got together with one of the adults and we didn't have any welding equipment, we didn't have any torch cutting equipment, none of that. So the angle iron and flat bar we used to make this thing, we hand cut with a hacksaw and we had no way to tack it together so we drilled all the pieces and put number six screws into all the holes, everywhere you would tack it if you were going to weld it. And then we took it to a guy to weld it. He didn't pay any attention. He just welded it up, turned it, didn't keep it flat, didn't tie it down, and when we got it back, it was like this, it was twisted.

NM: Warped and twisted.

CS: Couldn't use it. I was pissed. So I signed up and took a welding class in high school for the sole purpose of being able to make another fire pump mount. And by Christmas, I'd learned enough on how to weld and what to do that I built my fire pump mount, we put it back in the ship, hooked the clutch and the piping and everything back up, had a working fire pump in the ship. And the welding teacher at the time was also the Explorer Scout leader. And he learned who I was. And I was the only Sea Scout in his welding class. All the rest of the guys belonged with [the] Explorer Scouts. I was the odd man out. But we all got along pretty well. And then he recommended that I hook up with the Junior College teacher, which at that time was on the same campus. Junior College was at this end, High School was at the other end. And so my welding career … started as a Sea Scout. That's why I went to learn how to weld and to do all that. And it was not fraught without its humbling experiences. One day in the beginning of the welding class, the teacher's name was Don Farmer. And I had this plate and I welded it together and he looks at it and he stops a minute and he calls the entire class over. Everybody's going around and he says, “Yep, Carl's got this piece welded together” and he threw it up in the air and it came back down and hit the steel plate on the floor and broke in two. All over the place.

All of you want to be careful about penetration. You have got to make sure it's all welded together

And he goes, all of you want to be careful about penetration. You have got to make sure it's all welded together. So, I mean, I'm embarrassed as embarrassed could be, you know. And so he takes me over and he goes, he goes, I see what you did, what you need to do. So he very carefully took my hand and put the stinger in it, and we welded this piece, and he showed me how to correct that. So what became a very humbling moment turned out to be a good thing when it was done. But that was how I got into the welding business.

NM: Wow, that's quite the start.

CS: At school, you know? And I studied. It was more than just making arcs and sparks in class. You know, welding, it's primarily an electric process. And I'd already taken electricity in school the year before at Napa High. You know, for a kid that was sixteen years old, I had a pretty good electrical background at the time. And so, I went into, you know, how this particular kind of welding machine takes power from the wall and turns it into the welding current you can weld with. And we had solid state machines, we had motor generator machines, we had big rectifier machines, we had all these different machines in our welding shop similar to what you guys got over here.

NM: We’ve got a really nice shop.

CS: Yeah, real nice shop. I got to take a peek.

CS: And so it was one of those things that at that point when I'd bring my workbook in because I made a list of every machine in the shop and then, for every machine, I did a dialogue. If I knew where it came from, you know, it was Navy surplus that came out of a shipyard or one of the machines had the name of a ship on the side of it where when they scrapped the ship out, we ended up, the schools ended up with a welding machine. And so I had this book that [documented], “this motor generator made by GE made in 1948. This is when we did blah, blah, blah. This machine was this big. This was a new machine made by Linde or this was a new machine by Lincoln in those days.” So I made a book, told how they worked and I did a brief how to set the machine. “If you're gonna do this, you put this here, set here, turn this, turn that on. Do one, two, three, four, you got it.”

CS: And my high school teacher looked at it and goes, “you need to be in the college class”. I'm like, “okay.” So they put me in the college class and I was six foot tall. I was built like you, I was kind of skinny, but not a rail. But in those days I was six foot tall and weighed 138 lbs, I could run. All I did in gym class was run. They all wanted me to play basketball and I hate basketball. I don't know why. Just the way it turned out. And so that prejudice has been with me for the last sixty years. Anyway, school was good, it was interesting, and I got from that beginning, and going into the junior college program put me in a position.

All the guys in the junior college class were at least two years older than I was. When they graduated at the end of the year, they were all eighteen plus years old, I was sixteen years old. But I'd test all the same welding tests. So all these guys would all go down in masses to Kaiser Steel and try to get a job. Well, they'd take a list of everybody's names and they'd send everybody up to the weld lab in Kaiser Steel and you'd get a plate and the welding machine and you'd have to sit there and weld it up and then they'd cut it and break it and check it. And if it passed, they'd tell you, “Okay, you got to report on Monday to work swing shift, blah, blah, blah.” You know, “see Billy over there in the foreman shop.” Well, I'm in there, cooling my heels, waiting for my turn. And the phone in the weld lab rings and the guy answers the phone. And he goes, ”is there a guy here named Shellhorn?” They go, “they want to see you over in the office.” So I grabbed all my gear and I hot footed over to the office. The HR guy over there, his name was Brundy, asked me, “How old are you?”

CS: And I said, “I'm sixteen years old.” And he goes, “pack up your gear and go home, kid. Come back when you're eighteen.” And I go, “Shit, all my buddies are going to work. Everybody's going to make money.” So I went back to the high school, to the college program, and saw my teacher, Jack Duncan. I told him, “They won't hire me. I'm not old enough.”

CS: And he goes, “We're making parts in our welding class to go into the new junior college welding facility that's going to be on Streblow Drive out on the outside of town in Napa. I need somebody to help me put this together." And he says, “You're not gonna make the $4.70 an hour, or whatever it was we were making at Kaiser at that time. He said, I can pay you $1.65, period. That's it, that's what the school can pay.” He says, “You know, I'll work you like a slave.” And I said fine. The very best summer I ever spent in my entire life. I had my own private journeyman teacher all summer long. I learned how to do more stuff in the welding business and then, coincidentally, they were also building a machine shop at the college at the same time. Well, the machine shop teacher needed a helper so they drafted me also. So I got to work with the machine shop teacher. So I got to learn how mill machines operate and big lathes run and big drill presses because we were fixing all that stuff that they got surplus to go into the college machine shop class. So that summer of 1968, I worked for the junior college district as a flunky, and the best apprenticeship program a man could ever have. I can literally say I've used what I learned, in that environment over that three-month period, virtually every day I walk into the shop and go to work. And both those gentlemen that worked with me on that thing, they've both passed away. It happens, but I was fortunate enough to be one of their apprentices. It was really cool.

NM: Quite the story.

CS: We're out.

RG: Yeah, we're out of time.