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January 2023 #15282 Page #86
Memoriam In Memory of a Machinery Master
By Joe Kannapell
P
at Linton was a MiTek original, like none other, with his hands on and his arms around MiTek equipment for 44 years. He led by example, with the utmost humility, and was a key player in elevating MiTek machinery from mediocrity to magnificence. And his start, assembling two of the truss industry’s most prolific machines, couldn’t have been more auspicious. Here were Pat’s own recent recollections… “I was hired on at Hydro-Air Engineering as an assembler late spring of 1978 at the old machinery plant on South Vandeventer. I spent the first three months basically building the press heads that would be used in the Mark 8 and 10 systems or the (world record holder multi-head) Glide-A-Way and helping out with a Beaver (floor truss machine) order every now and then.”
Pat Linton
In mid-1978, Hydro-Air bought Art DePauw’s saw company in the Chicago suburbs and launched the most successful product line in industry history, but under incredible duress. Prior to the sale, Art had taken dozens of orders and down payments, without any means of fulfilling them, and precipitated a customer crisis that demanded drastic measures to resolve. “I don’t remember the exact month, but I will say in September (1978) they were looking for volunteers to go up to St. Charles, Illinois to help build saws. I was young and single, so I accepted, I had nothing to lose. Steve Sueme being my age and a welder accepted to go as well so we drove up there together. Greg Finn joined us a few weeks after our arrival. It was a very small shop with a lot going on. You could see tons of parts everywhere throughout the shop since they were so busy. I have the number of 45 saws in my memory as to how many saws they had on order trying to fill. That was another reason we St. Louis people went up there, they needed help. We were working 70 plus hours a week. Anyway, I could go on forever with more details like it being the coldest and snowiest winter that area had seen in years and how we warmed our toes up in our steel-toed boots with a torch and never walked outside, you always ran to where you were going. My time there lasted 6 months and by the time I left I could build a Quadri-Cut in my sleep and a Combi-Cut with a little help from a drawing.”
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