Saturday, May 10, 2014

My Clark story in early 1980 part 3 The staff

Max van Dam who was trained in Europe passed away by the time I came to Clark.  So as far as I could determine all the R&D staff received on the job training on the intricacy of silver halide photography in Clark, except for Gene and John da Silva.      John was another eccentric but capable chemist who could come up with a good experimental results without being able to explain his thought process or the reason behind his decision.           John Pilot was the most reliable and steady organic chemist.      And as I jokingly said that an excellent photographic chemist often comes from an organic chemist, he indeed became a top notch photographic chemist.            At much later time when Clark was closed down after the Kodak Polychrome joint venture, he was the one I sought out to stay in our lab.         Steve Gallo became a key person to connect R&D and the plant.       He worked not only on product development but also on scale up and trouble shooting.       Through his close relationship with plant he earned huge respect and trust by the production personnel... a great asset for R&D to work harmoniously with plant.
Penny Mullen stands out among many excellent technicians we had.      She was working for John da Silva on cubic crystal based new rapid access film emulsion.          I remember we were under heavy pressure to produce results and I was very impressed to learn that she was the one who took initiative in an experiment and completed the test late into nights.    
We also had numbers of DIC chemists who came to work with us side by side.      Couple of them liked to work in the US and decided to stay but most went back to become key technical personnel with in DIC later on.