Adventures at Klipsch 1976 to 1983

[HDBRbuilder]

My Adventures at Klipsch

Klipsch Employee Observations

1976-1983

HOW TO GET A JOB WITHOUT REALLY TRYING:

I got out of the

Army in June 1976, after serving four years as an infantry paratrooper. Once I got out, I applied for Unemployment

Insurance and half-heartedly began a job hunt in order to meet the requirements

for continuing to draw the weekly unemployment checks. I had never drawn the benefits before, so I

just went by the advice of some friends who had told me that if I didn’t really

want to go to work yet, I should just

apply at companies that were not hiring.

And, one of those friends suggested that I apply at Klipsch.

So, bright and

early one morning I put on my old paint-covered bib overalls I had worn when

painting my father’s house and a t-shirt and headed over to Hope, AR from

Prescott, where I lived. I stopped by my

father’s workplace in Hope and got a cup of coffee, told him I was applying at

Klipsch and he told me what he knew about the place. Then I went out to the factory and went in

the front office, got an application and filled it all out and returned it to

the lady there, and was on my way out the front door.

As I was leaving,

a tall thin guy with long wavy hair and a Fu Manchu moustache was coming in, and asked me what I was

doing. I told him that I had just

applied for a job. He asked to see my

application, looked it over, and said, “an infantry paratrooper, huh? I was in the 101^st Airborne

myself! There is nothing I like more

than to see a paratrooper come in here in his work clothes looking for a

job! You’re hired!” That is how I met Bob Moers, the President of

Klipsch at the time.

He took me through

a maze of corridors to a small office at the rear of the “red brick” building

and told me to wait there. He went out

on the rear deck, and I could overhear him talking to a man with a strong deep

voice. I was looking around the office

and saw some HO scale train engines, a slide rule on the desk with a bunch of

technical papers, a big sign over the bookcase with Thoreau’s quote “Beware All Enterprises Which

Require New Clothes”, and a number of other interesting things all around the

room.

They both came

back inside and into the small office, and the tall man with the grey hair and

moustache reached to shake my hand and said “Welcome aboard Mr. Barr, I am Paul

Klipsch. I hear you are a new employee with

us and that you have some carpentry experience.

We will put that to good use immediately. Please follow Bob up front and he will get

you on the payroll and insurance plan and tell you where you will be starting

at. Are you ready to go to work right

now?" I replied “Yes, Sir!”

So, Bob turned me

over to the office folks up front, and they got me signed up for insurance and

such and data for the payroll, and gave me a Yellow T-Shirt that had "Bullshit"

written on the back and Mr. Klipsch on the front, and a “stolen from Paul W.

Klipsch” coffee mug and some yellow bullshit buttons and a hat…and I was thinking…"this is pretty cool, the first place that I apply for a job, I get one and all of this cool stuff!”...then I thought..."That

so-called friend of mine set me up for this, because she knew Klipsch was

hiring! There goes my post-military paid-vacation! The next time I see Gwin (Cox) I’ll have a

few choice words for her!”

So, right before I

left the office, I was told that lunch break starts in 15 minutes, just clock

in over at the plant at 12:30 and ask for Harry, the foreman of the cabinet

shop. And who do you think I saw running

by the front of the building as I walked out?

Gwin! She was laughing and

pointing at me and having a big time doing it!

So I ran after her, not knowing that she was on a one-mile run at the

time! I chased her down to the chicken

plant gate a half mile away, then chased her back to the Klipsch factory…and we

chatted during the lunch break and I let her know what I thought of the whole

thing. Then the warning buzzer went off and I took my time card and clocked in…and

went looking for Harry!

HAVING FUN WITH BOIS D’ARC AND VOLATILE CHEMICALS:

I found Harry, the foreman of the cabinet shop, and he told

me to go over to the new building and get with Bois d’Arc and he would show me

what to do. So I went out onto the

loading dock and walked over to the new building hunting for Bois d’Arc. That was his CB handle back then, when people

did with their CB radios what people do with cell phones today. His real name was Robert Wyatt. He was a country boy and was building up a

nice cattle ranch with his earnings there, or that was his plan (which he

achieved). He had started working there

a few days before I was hired. If you

want to know what he looked like back then, there is a poster of him squatting

on a Heresy Speaker writing on a wall “A little Heresy is good for the soul”

Robert was the first black hired at Klipsch, and on and off,

he was the only one working there for at least five years. He used to laugh and call himself the “token.” Don’t get me wrong, the company hired women

and minorities regularly, but most people they hired never stayed long. It was HOT in the summer, COLD in the winter,

with lots of dust in the air all the time.

Some people just don’t want to work in that environment. The advantage then of working there was Not in

the environment or hourly wages, it was in the benefits, the employee

discounts, and the employee bonus program, all of which made it worthwhile at

the time I was hired.

So, Bois d’Arc handed me a heavy duty garden hoe which had

its blade straightened out with no bend and we proceeded to scrape up the

spatters of concrete that had dropped onto the slabs in the new building. The

concrete trucks had dripped them as they drove to the next form while the slabs

were being poured. Bois d’Arc explained

that the larger speaker cabinets were slid around the plant on metal gliders

attached to their bottoms. We had to

clean up all the rough spots on the slabs, clean the slabs, then put concrete

sealer down so that the slabs will be smooth and the speaker cabinets will

slide easily and not tip over…so we scraped…for over a week…then we scrubbed

the floors and got the cleansers off so that only smooth concrete with no

chemicals remained, and the floors were ready for the sealer to be applied, about

two weeks following my being hired.

The “new building” was the same size as the plant at the

time. So the plant was basically

doubling in size of floor space. The new

building was attached to the old building at the rear where the sanding and

painting areas were. The new building

was already completed, with doors and windows and such, but the floor was not

ready for the expansion yet, and we had the task of taking hand-held garden

sprayers and spraying concrete sealer down on the entire floor. Three coats were applied over three

days. This was in the hottest part of

the summer and the fumes were volatiles and made you high as a kite, like glue

sniffers get…with a headache immediately following that night.

So, each morning, Bois d’Arc and I would spray this stuff

down, lose our minds, laugh and giggle and be silly with everybody at lunch, go

back and spray more down, laugh and giggle all afternoon, drive like morons

back home…wake up at midnight with headaches, and go to work the next morning

to do it again. We had lots of fun, but

don’t remember much of it or why it was so damned funny at the time! But the

floor was sealed and the stuff was moved around and the building we worked on

became the paint room and final assembly and shipping area in the new expanded

factory.

Stay tuned for the next Adventures at Klipsch story!

Robert "Bois d'Arc" Wyatt on this poster:

[tigerwoodKhorns]

As I was leaving, a tall thin guy with long wavy hair and a Fu Manchu moustache was coming in, and asked me what I was doing. I told him that I had just applied for a job. He asked to see my application, looked it over, and said, “an infantry paratrooper, huh? I was in the 101^st Airborne myself! There is nothing I like more than to see a paratrooper come in here in his work clothes looking for a job! You’re hired!” That is how I met Bob Moers, the President of Klipsch at the time.

Good story Andy. The paragraph above made me laugh. You were already dressed for the job.

[JerolW]

Nice read. Next installment, please.

jerol

[indyhawg]

Great story. Looking forward to the next one.