MY MEMORIES

Charles Glenn Petersen

1960 - College Years II

Job Hunting

During my Senior year, I signed up for job interviews with various companies and I made a few trips to the job locations for further interviews. Sometime during the year, I received a letter from American Can Company offering me a job with the same group I had worked for during the previous summer. It was an acceptable offer so I was under no pressure to find a job, but wanted to look around just in case something better came along.

There was one memorable trip out to Boston to interview with Raytheon Corporation. I drove to Des Moines and flew to Boston’s Logan airport. I remember the landing at Logan. We came in over water. As I looked out the window, the water got closer and closer to the point I could see the tops of the waves. It was an anxious moment but just before I thought we were going in, a runaway appeared a few feet below me. The next morning I talked with people in their personnel department, then I sat around waiting for someone to talk to about a job. Finally I was escorted to an engineer’s office. He told me he would show me around the plant while they organized a job interview. It went down hill from there. Finally, they admitted they had no openings and had no idea why I had been invited to come to Boston. What a waste! So I flew back to Des Moines, but we couldn’t land because there was blowing snow and the visibility was too low. So, we circled around for an hour then down we went through the clouds, but the visibility closed down again and up we went to circle for another hour. By this time, we were getting low on fuel so we flew to Omaha where we landed safely. They then put us on a bus and 3 hours later, I was in Des Moines. By now it was after midnight and I still had an hour’s drive back to State Center on snowy roads, which turned into two hours because of road conditions.