Kenny Glasgow has never set foot in an executive suite but that didn’t stop him from flying to work. In the 1960s, Glasgow was fixing jet engines at GE’s Strother Field plant in Kansas, and saved up wages for a small Cessna 150 two-seater plane. “One fall the Arkansas River flooded and the road to Strother was closed for a several days,” Glasgow says. “I had about a quarter of a mile of alfalfa just east of the house. You could land down there when it wasn’t too tall. So I just flew to work.”
Glasgow gets things done. He spent almost four decades at GE, getting in on the ground level as a “heavy helper” in the maintenance department, and soaring to a leadership job on GE’s classified work for the B-2 stealth bomber. “The company raised my family,” he says. “It turned out to be heaven sent.”
Glasgow, now 75, grew up on a farm six miles from Strother that his grandfather settled in 1871. “Wrench turning was not all that unfamiliar,” he says. “On the farm, you kept most of your things running yourself.”
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Radioman: Kenny Glasgow sporting a flight jacket outside his barracks in Argentia, Newfoundland. Glasgow served in the U.S. Navy as a radioman on surveillance planes flying over the north Atlantic from 1954 until 1958. He joined GE in 1961.
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Kenny Glasgow with his daughter Kathryn. “My father swears that aviation is in our blood,” Kathryn says.
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He joined the NAVY from high school, and after active duty as a radioman on the Warning Star surveillance planes he found work on an oil rig. When the rig shut down, “my brother and I were looking in the paper for something to do to get groceries,” Glasgow says.
GE’s Strother engine repair and assembly plant was a decade old when the Glasgow brothers started, earning $1.78 ½ per hour. “That was a pretty good wage at the time,” Glasgow says.
He started by working nightshifts, drilling holes in concrete hangar floors to install machinery. But he soon advanced and started servicing and testing GE’s J73 and J85 jet engines. He learned on the job, from technical manuals and from other workers. “The foremen knew because most of them had done the job before,” Glasgow says. “They came through the ranks.”
He also learned from engineers at the plant. “It took me quite a while to be able to listen at the level they were talking, but once I caught on, they were like a walking book of knowledge,” Glasgow says.
In the late 1960s, Glasgow bought the Cessna and took his family on flying expeditions. One of his daughters, Kathryn, was smitten. “I remember spending weekends polishing that thing,” she says. “It was our family time. My father swears that aviation is in our blood.”
Kathryn got introduced to GE and Strother as a girl. “We’d bring dad dinner and get to spend a little more time with him,” she says. When it was her turn to graduate from high school, she went straight to the plant. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I always knew that I wanted to work here,” Kathryn says.
Like her father, Kathryn started at the bottom and now leads a team that repairs engines for Apache and Black Hawk helicopters. “There weren’t many women here when I was hired,” she says. “My dad was a protector, he was not afraid to say something to somebody.”
Glasgow taught her how to fix airplanes, shape tools, and find new solutions to problems. “He expected a lot, he wanted you to know a lot,” she says. When Kathryn decided to apply for an inspector job, she says, her father challenged her to read a measuring tool, the C – micrometer. “She could not do it, but by golly she learned quickly,” Glasgow laughs.
Glasgow retired from Strother in 1998, when the B-2 work was over. With more than 800 employees, the plant is one of the largest employers on Cowley County, Kansas. “This is a small community,” Glasgow says. “It’s like a family operation.”
Monday, June 18, 2012
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Community Health Pioneer Says GE Grant Will Help Cut Primary Care Doctor Shortage
Dr. H. Jack Geiger in a cotton field near Mound Bayou, Mississippi.
When Dr. H. Jack Geiger opened America’s first community health clinics in the cotton fields of segregated Mississippi and a poor Boston neighborhood, five decades ago, many of his patients had never seen a doctor. “There were enormous gaps in the health status of the African American, Native American and Hispanic populations, minority groups, and poor whites as well,” Geiger says. “There was a lot of need and community health centers were invented to deal with that need.”
More than a thousand of such centers across the country now serve 17 million minority and low-income patients. They stand as a testament to Geiger’s pioneering work, but need still remains. The United States is facing a looming deficit of primary care physicians. According to some estimates, the country will be short of 40,000 primary care doctors by 2020. This trend, combined a sharp rise in medical costs, “is not just a problem for vulnerable populations,” Geiger says. “It’s rapidly becoming a problem for the whole nation.”
Geiger says that U.S. medical care is “badly skewed to the extent that we are oversupplied with specialists,” and that “developed nations that have strong primary care networks are delivering not only the best primary care but also the most efficient.”
The GE Foundation has committed $50 million for more than 70 community health centers in 20 states to improve access to healhtcare. This week the foundation also made a $2.3 million grant to the National Medical Fellowship (NMF), where Geiger is a board member. The grant will help train future primary care physicians, nurses and doctor’s assistants at five community health centers in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Nashville, and Jackson, Mississippi. Students will learn clinical skills in neighborhoods with shortage of doctors and receive mentoring from local staff. The goal of the grant is to help launch a pipeline of primary care physicians to community centers around the country.
Geiger says that twice as many students applied as there were places for the first round. “There are few if any programs like this,” Geiger says. “It is this kind of team workforce that will be increasingly the way that medical care is delivered in the future.”
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