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I, Andreas, was born during the Second World War in 1943 in a town called Schaffhausen, in Switzerland, close to the German border. My father was a patternmaker at a large foundry in town when he was not doing compulsory military service with Unit #7 of the small Swiss air force. We lived in a company apartment in a working class neighborhood.

I am the oldest of three brothers. Peter died at home at the age of 2½ of meningitis before penicillin became widely available. I remember playing with him. Urs died as an infant.

My dad always wanted to travel to other countries, but the depression of the thirties made that unaffordable. During the war, neutral Switzerland was completely surrounded by Nazi Germany; Austria (which had joined Germany in the Anschluss); Vichy France and Mussolini’s Italy. Battered and occupied postwar Europe was not a holiday destination, either.

A sense of being locked up in a miniature country is something that has lived with me to this day.

Ever since I was in elementary school I was not your average neighborhood kid. I read all the books on my father’s bookcase, mostly more than once. I read juvenile books about North American explorers; about teenagers growing up in indigenous Canadian James Bay families; teenagers growing up in California, in Argentina. I read the story of the shipwrecked “Swiss Family Robinson,” some Swiss Classics and books on twentieth century European history. From a collection of fairy tales from around the world, I discovered that not all fairy tale stories followed the pattern of those collected by the Brothers Grimm, which always started with “Es war einmal,” or “Once upon a time ...” and normally ended with “Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, so leben sie heute noch,” or “a princess and her rescuer living happily ever.” I really liked the postscript: “Und wenn Du die Geschichte nicht glauben willst, so zahle einen Taler,” or “If you do not wish to believe the tale, you must pay a silver coin.”

From my bedroom window I could see a part of Germany, the Büsingen enclave, an oddity which had survived from the Middle Ages. Early on, I was interested in international events and in meeting people from other countries and cultures, listening to foreign correspondents on Swiss AM radio, which broadcast from a location called Beromünster.

I often listened to foreign radio stations. Depending on atmospheric conditions, and time of the day or night, I could capture signals on the AM band; long-wave and short-wave from RIAS Berlin (Rundfunk Im Amerikanischen Sector); Radio Monte Carlo; Radio Luxemburg; Radio Vatican; Radio Moscow as well as neighbouring German and Austrian stations. The Swiss public network of FM stations (called UKW, for Ultra Short Waves) was still in its infancy and did not serve our border area well.

Together with reading daily and weekly newspapers from Switzerland, Germany, France, the UK and the International Edition of the New York Herald Tribune, these were my “Windows on the World.” I spent most of my pocket money buying newspapers at the newsstand at the train station or buying pocketbooks at the two main bookstores downtown. I also borrowed books from the main reference library in Schaffhausen, used their reading room for more of the latest newspapers and magazines and borrowed history books from the company library where my father worked.

So it will not surprise you that I was sometimes teased as “Ein Stubenhocker fährt nach Asien,” or “A Bookworm Travels to Asia,” the title of a book written by a Swiss priest, Josef Maria Camenzind, who had traveled overland through Russia and Siberia to China to explore the country in 1936, because he wanted to become a foreign missionary. Unfortunately, his religious order would not let him stay there. In their opinion, his weak health did not qualify him to be posted to China.

So, you see, it was only natural that I would pursue a career that would take me to the far corners of the world.

While I was still in high school I came to the conclusion that I wanted to emigrate. I was very aware of the social pressures and unwritten expectations of Swiss society. I did not like all the behavioral constraints. In a small country of five million at the time, where almost everybody knows everybody, I felt boxed in. Because of the country’s tightly knit social structure of family connections, schools, fraternities, religious, military and political party affiliations and business networks, there existed many opportunities for career and personal growth. These were the upsides for young people in Switzerland then. However, I saw mostly the unwritten constraints on personal freedoms by the entrenched establishment. Novel ideas were not welcome, as they might threaten the “holy cows” and the legends of medieval Swiss “military heroes.” Economic power, police and military were used to quash attempts at change. Many independent journalists, writers, artists and upstart businesses suffered from the repression for years.

This desire to escape affected my views on getting tangled up with young Swiss girls and women. I was of the opinion that most females had a strong attachment to their extended families and hometowns, and therefore would not be happy for long with a Swiss who had decided to emigrate. That only left those Swiss who had lived abroad in emigrant families or somebody living already in a country I could see myself emigrating to. The situation reinforced my natural shyness towards girls, since without any sisters I had nobody to get hints from.

Rather than fight against such impossible odds, I decided while still in high school to emigrate before turning 30, while I was still young enough to grow roots in a different country. So it was important to get a worldwide marketable university degree with an eye to becoming a manager for an international corporation.

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First, I had to pass an entrance exam for high school, survive a three-month probationary period and pass written and oral final “Matura” exams in modern languages and math at the end of 5½ years. It was not a problem for me, as I was one of four top students in my class. We rotated the position of class speaker among us for many years. Two girls and two boys. I am still in touch with the other three at occasional class reunions in Switzerland.

My high grades on the end-of-high school exams gave me the right to study at any university in Switzerland for a degree in humanities, business, science or engineering, but not in medicine, law or theology, where Latin was a prerequisite.

Rather than studying chemistry or engineering, I decided to study business at the University of St. Gallen, the Swiss equivalent of Harvard Business School. It offered a 4 year program to a “lic. oec. HSG,” later considered an M.A. in Business within the European Economic Union.

To obtain the degree, students had to have worked for at least six months in the fields of business, banking, insurance, etc. I did even more than that. First, I worked six months as a “computer programmer/trainee” with UNIVAC in Zurich, at the time the “Number 2” after IBM; and then 12 weeks at a copper rolling mill, Hussey Metals, a Copper Range company in Leetsdale, Pennsylvania, just north of Pittsburgh – my first experience of America, memories I’ll never forget.

This is how that happened…

During my second semester at the business school in Switzerland I told my AIESEC chapter that I was interested in a summer job abroad, preferably in America.

AIESEC is the French name for a worldwide student-run exchange program for business and economics students. Students would find work places for foreign students to be traded for desirable placements in the other country. The first offer was for an eight week job on the Atlantic coast of France with a beach chair manufacturer. That was not exactly what I was looking for. So I did not accept it, and asked them to keep looking. Even though summer break was approaching fast, I was willing to gamble, hopeful that something better would emerge.

A few nail-biting weeks later I was offered a twelve week job at the copper rolling mill in Leetsdale, starting at the beginning of July and paying $250 every four weeks.

I immediately took it.

I applied for a student visa at the U.S. Consulate General in Zurich and got the multicolored visa stamped into my passport. I had never seen such a multicolored stamp -- red on one end, blue on the other. Probably to make it difficult to forge.

Then I booked a low-cost flight from Zurich to New York City on a turbo-prop DC6-B chartered by the Swiss Student Travel Agency (SSR). By the time that I could inform the U.S. employer that I was coming, there was no more time for them to reply with details. All I could do was buy a “99 Day Ticket at 99 Dollars” from Greyhound Bus Lines, valid anywhere in the continental US. This would get me initially from New York City to Pittsburgh.

I vividly remember the day of my arrival in New York, taking the Airport Bus to the Manhattan Terminal. It was July 3_, 1966. Everybody was saying that it was one of the hottest days ever in New York -- 107 degrees Fahrenheit, something I had never experienced in Switzerland before. And there I was wearing a business suit and tie, on a blazing hot and humid midday, dropping off my suitcase in a locker until evening, when the overnight Greyhound bus was leaving for Pittsburgh.

Culture shock started quickly. The neon lights at Times Square; Orange Julius booths; alternating green (Walk) and red (Don’t Walk) signs at pedestrian crossings; yellow taxi cabs, etc. As I was getting hungry, I started reading menus on the outside of air-conditioned diners and restaurants, looking for familiar items at affordable prices. I thought I had found something familiar when I saw the term “Cottage Cheese.” Since I liked anything with cheese in it, I went inside the drugstore diner and ordered it, waiting, sitting at the unfamiliar long counter. To my dismay, Cottage Cheese was nothing like hard Swiss cheese. Instead, it was soft crumbly white fresh cheese with pineapple pieces and it came with little cellophane two-packs of salty crackers. I had never seen cottage cheese before, nor such crackers.

But lucky me, I would be travelling by bus. The record heat had buckled some of the railway rails, cancelling a number of evening trains. Overheated cars were stuck in one of the tunnels under the Hudson River. Our bus probably used a bridge to leave Manhattan, avoiding the traffic jams.

The next culture shock came in the middle of the night somewhere along the Pennsylvania Turnpike at a rest stop. Everybody got off the bus to have a drink or snack. I was thirsty and picked up a little cardboard container of milk out of the cooler. I looked at it, turned it around multiple times, read the instructions on how to open it. Somewhere it said “Pull [or push] to Open,” but I did not know where or how. Thankfully, another passenger noticed my problem, showed me how to separate the two “wings,” spread them apart and then push/pull to make a spout. Finally, I could quench my thirst.

It was probably around five o’clock in the morning when the bus finally arrived at the deserted terminal in Pittsburgh. I should not have been surprised. It was early Monday morning on the Fourth of July, U.S. Independence Day, a public holiday. Not expecting anybody to meet me to tell me what to do next, I asked the only waiting taxi driver to take me to the Hussey Metals plant in Leetsdale. The driver was black, one of the first black people I ever met. (There were hardly any black people living in Switzerland at the time.)

I got scared as the driver got lost in a warren of alleys with scrap yards in what is now known in Pittsburgh as its Golden Triangle, coming up to an unfinished bridge across the river, turning around and finding the real bridge to the Ohio River Boulevard leading to Leetsdale. It seemed that we had been driving quite a while and still were not in Leetsdale. The driver admitted that we were outside the area he was familiar with. And the taxi meter kept ticking.

After we finally made it to Leetsdale, he drove up to a motel where we could see guests outside. It was the “Sewickley Motor Inn,” a fancy place with an outside swimming pool. The taxi driver asked about the rates at the motel, $35 per night, which was way unaffordable for me on $250 pay for four weeks. We found out that there were no other “affordable” accommodations in Leetsdale at all, that it was strictly an industrial town. We were told we would have to continue north on the Ohio River Boulevard to a company town called Ambridge, named after the famous company called “American Bridge Company.” There we would have to turn west at the only traffic light in town and go one block to a small inn, called a “rooming house.” What a relief. They did have a vacancy for me, at affordable weekly rates.

I checked in and immediately had a shower, as the day again was sunny, hot and humid, and I had not changed out of my business suit since leaving Switzerland. I also had not shaved in three days and felt uncomfortable. Therefore, next, I had to find some electric pre-shave. I found it at a drugstore on the main street, which was open, even on Independence Day. Outside, I noticed numerous American flags on six foot wooden poles set into matching metal rings along the concrete sidewalk. It was quite an impressive wall of flags on both sides of the main street.

Back at the inn, I asked how I could get to the factory in Leetsdale the next morning to report for work.

“No problem,” was the answer. “Our son works there. He will give you a ride when he leaves in the morning.”

The next morning the inn keeper’s son got me past the gate house and into the office building of Hussey Metals to report for work.



The acceptance letter had mentioned that I would be working in the Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable departments. However, those were the departments the company president’s daughter, Alice, had been assigned to. It was going to be her summer job before going to Stanford University on a scholarship. So, instead, I got assigned to the Industrial Engineering Department for the first eight weeks, followed by four weeks with the Plant Scheduler. That was fine with me. Even though I was a business student, I did not like accounting in the narrow sense, or being labelled a “bean counter.” Financial and inventory analysis, performance improvement and planning was what I was interested in.

The industrial engineers showed me what information they had about order volume and inventory levels. I worked on their numbers, hoping to find statistically relevant patterns to calculate optimal re-order quantities.

Everything reminded me of World War II. Army-green steel furniture was the standard look, likely the original war issue style left-over from when the factory manufactured landing barges. The barges were pushed from the back of the plant to the river bank, floated down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River, and ultimately served on the European and Pacific landing beaches.

The four or five industrial engineers in the department welcomed me and made me feel at ease. Every day at noon they invited me to join them for lunch at restaurants on Main Street in Ambridge, the closest town for sit-down meals. Our small group drove in two of their monstrous 1960’s “cruisers,” the size of which I had not seen in Switzerland before.

Then I learned the standard way little restaurants and drug store diners operated. At the entrance, there was always a neon sign advertising one of the local beers. Upon sitting down, there followed the daily soup together with those cellophane two-packs of salty crackers and a glass of ice water. Normally, everybody ordered the home-cooked daily special. Everything was new to me.

The Industrial Engineering Department was located separately from the main World War II military style administrative building and gatehouse, but not inside the plant itself. It was attached to the west side of the tall rolling mill building facing the Ohio River. Fortunately, the attached office had air conditioning, unlike the main factory building with its annealing ovens and hot rolling mills.

After a few weeks of number crunching in search of a formula to fit the numbers to statistical equations based on graphed information, I realized that there was too much variability in the demand for any one production item and too many one-off product orders.

Then I was re-assigned to work with the Plant Scheduler to track and locate slabs to be rolled and rolled coils to be grouped for shipping. The Plant Scheduler’s office was inside the large factory, among the rolling presses, annealing ovens and work-in-progress areas. His office was located up in a “box” on stilts to give him a panorama view of the plant. From there he could give instructions by loud speaker to the various departments.

In the plant it was even hotter than the 100 degree Fahrenheit summer temperatures outside. To compensate for the loss of electrolytes from sweating, there were self-serve dispensers with brown “salt” pills attached to a few of the steel pillars of the factory structure. I gladly used the pills when I was working for extended periods in the mill part.

My role was that of a “roaming scout” on the plant floor to find and locate “missing” slabs and “lost” coils. Whenever I found a slab or coil with thick layers of dust, I would wipe off the dust until I could read the order number which had been marked by chalk weeks earlier. Then I reported it to the Plant Scheduler who could then “re-unite” it with the majority of that particular order, and have it shipped and invoiced to the customer.

During my final days on the plant floor I met an “acceptance engineer” from a major client whose role was to verify that their slabs had been rolled to specification. Then he could approve them for shipping. It turned out that he was one of three co-inventors of patent #3.137,937 for an “Explosion Bonding” process granted by the United States Patent Office on June 23, 1964 and assigned to E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. The process was used by the U.S. Mint to produce new quarters. A little earlier, the price of silver had increased dramatically. People began melting old, pure silver quarters into silver ingots to sell on world metal markets, causing a shortage of quarters for daily business transactions. It was therefore necessary to reduce the silver content of the coins by layering it between two layers of nickel while maintaining size, shape and magnetic qualities for coin-operated vending machines. The “Explosion Bonding” process was used to anneal the layers. No welding or gluing would do the job that explosion bonding would do. At Hussey Metals we rolled large slabs of nickel/copper/nickel into coils which, once certified by the visiting acceptance engineer, would be shipped to the U.S. Mint to be processed into quarter coins without delaminating. Carefully look at current quarters from their side, you will be able to see the three layers. You will notice that five cent and ten cent coins are solid nickel.

At the rolling mill plant and staying with an American family helped my English (nobody that I ever met in Leetsdale spoke German or French).

My first glimpse of America had been an eye-opening event. From New York’s heat and neon lights to the factory on the Ohio River where barges for the war had come from, I gained memories that have remained with me all my life.

But the time finally came to start making my way back to Switzerland to finish my education and make ready for my next big adventure.