 Alright, so we are here in Toronto interviewing Mr. Jerry Heffernan. The interviewer will be William McCrae, and we're just going to start with a few simple questions. So, could you please state your full name, please? My full name is Gerald Robert Heffernan. And could you please state the date you were born? I was born in July the 12th, 1919. And your age? My age is now approaching 96, so I'll be 96 in July 12th this year. And where were you born? I was born in Edmonton, Alberta. And as a child, what did your parents do? Well, my father was just back from the First World War when I was born, and at that time he was involved with the sawmill, which he and another good guy started. And when they ran into a downturn in the market, the other individual suggests they burn the place down and get to collect the insurance. My father was a very strict guy, and he was horrified by this idea. Strangely enough, he saw a little bird down, and my father played the other man for it. So that partnership broke up, and my father moved us into Caswell, in the Kootenays. That would be 1923, I guess, I was about four or five years old. And we lived in a little, not even a village, just, I think, three or four families, three miles from Caswell, which was a mining town at that time. There was a lot of activity going on in Kootenays and development, lead silver, zinc mines, feeding the chemical smelter. And he established a brokerage from there. And then in the 29 crash, both of these went bankrupt, and we moved from our house in near the lake, which is just, as I say, just a little tiny little hamlet of four families, I think. And then he managed to get a place with a big timber limit. And a lot of farmland and a big orchard, and so I had been, they started after I was there, they started a little one-room school, and I was about eight years old when I started school. Prior to that, my father taught me mathematics, and my mother taught me English. And my grandfather, who was quite an entrepreneur, gave me a drafting set when I was a little kid, and gave me a problem of designing a five-star, five-point star. And that took me a long time to figure out what I learned a lot about geometry with my little set, and I learned to range 60 degrees in the circle, and you divide by that five, and then you figure out how to build a five-point star. But that was a great period, actually, for me, because my mother took a great interest in teaching me English and getting me to read. She's a member of the Book of the Month Club, and the little kid I got reading all the books that she got. And that was my education until they built this little one-room school, and then I was in that with, I think, there were eight grades all together in this one-room school. The teacher used to write out by horseback from the castle, and as a whole, the education I had, I was pretty bored in grade one, got lots of trouble for dunking in a little girl who had big tails in front of me in the inflow. However, I weathered that, and it promoted pretty quickly, a grade three. And then when the crash came, the 29th crash, my father moved us up to the lake toward Nelson, we were about 13 miles from Nelson, and we had a big timber limit there, and a large truck farm, and a large orchard, and I worked with my father and my two brothers. I didn't go to school for two years, but I did correspondence course, and finally after I completed my correspondence course, I hadn't completed. I was in the middle of grade eight, and my aunt asked me to come and live with her in Nelson, where there was a junior high school, and I joined junior high in the february. I remember very well in grade eight, and it was a well-organized school. I didn't know any of the rules, so I was immediately, got lots of demerits, and got pushed to the back of the class, and got beaten up a few times by the school boys. That led me to, there was a little black guy who had a gym in Nelson, and he kept the kids in there and teach them how to box, and we didn't have to pay any fees, but we had to put in little boxing matches, and he charged 25 cents for people to come in and see us box, so that was a professional box. That's a good deal. But it was a great experience, and gradually I got more of the humps, and moved on to the high school, and at this point, when you moved with your aunt, was the recession towards the end? Is that why your dad could afford not? That was, let's see, I have to figure it out. That was about 1932, let's see. 32, so still in the middle there. So the depression was still in the way, but my father then had a job with the MECO, and the rest of the consultant made him mine, he was melting. And during the time that I was in, in mere late Caslow, my father was very much involved in the mining industry, and he had a friend, a prospector and promoter, who used to take me around to all the mines, he took a shine to me and I was a little kid. So I got to know all the mineralogy of the area, and got fascinated with it. I even won a five dollar prize at Caslow on the 24th of May against all the prospectors, because it was an ore judging contest, and I, you were all with stuff in the whole area, and they had you break down the names of different minerals, and I eased it, I guess, because I won the five dollar prize, which was the top prize. But that started me on a track of really major interest in mining and geology, and it was right in the heart of the Kimberley, the big Kimberley mine was underway, and SG Blalock in our most, in our latest move, after the, the big farm, was our next door neighbor. And we are, property bordered here is where he built a quarter of a million dollar house of that type, and he was the head of chemical at that time, and he is a metallurgist. So I was influenced, strongly influenced, towards mining and metallurgy. And he was the one that had solved the, the problems of the Kimberley mine, which is a very complex, zinc led silver mine. And, well, what was the problem? It was the basis of consolidated mining and smelting, and the town of Trimble, which had the big smelters, and the big smelters for that purpose. So I was brought up close to, close to the mining industry, and there's all the mines around there, as underground and a little kid, terrified at first to give all that rock and talk, and I even got used to it. Oh, and then, when my father died, he had mustard gas from the First World War, and I was 14 when he died, and 1933. And he got pneumonia with just part of what I left, and no, no penicillin in those days, so he, he didn't live through it. And then my mother moved our family. I worked for the B.C. Forestry one year when I was a teenager. I got a job at building a road into, building a trail, really, at that time, in the Kokonee Place here, part. And part of the road to drive, cars could drive up within about three miles of the park. And I got doing a lot of mining, mom climbing and stuff with a buddy of mine, and he gave it to me again, exploring my whole area, to see if we could find a mine, which we didn't. So then, my family, my mother moved this after my father died to Vancouver, where I went to the Junior Matrix in Vancouver. And then after that, one year there, after my father's friend Sandy Walker was town planning engineer, and he insisted that I go down to U of T, and so I came down to U of T and enrolled in metallurgy, and about my degree there. I had some great influences in Nelson, in high school. They had a great teacher of mathematics who used to get us to do a metal arithmetic for ten minutes or so before you started the class, really, at the beginning of the class. Warm you guys up. And yeah, they warm us up, and he gave us difficult problems. But we learned all the tricks of metal arithmetic, which stayed with me for a long time, and it was pretty useful when I got into engineering. But the other one was Pop Smiley in high school, who was a fascinating chemistry teacher. He used to do all kinds of stunts in the lab, and I loved that, and of course I learned all the early sort of chemistry at quite a young age. And when I got down to Toronto, for instance, I spent a year at St. Michael's College, and one little father there teaching was trying to teach chemistry, and I'd keep correcting him until finally he said, have her, and you seem to know a lot about chemistry, and I do, you can teach the class. So I was stuck. But that really, I had to bone up on things and teach seniorly trick chemistry. It was really a tremendous educational background all around for me, between the mining and the, and the two, the wonderful math faculty teacher I had in high school, and then this incredible chemistry teacher got me started out. I saw a head of metallurgy in 1940s, in 1939 at UT. And were there, did you like all classes, or were there classes that you just hated? Well, I hated drafting. It was a waste of time. We had 20 hours a week drafting. You can believe it in those days. I was much more interested in the metallurgical mining chemistry side of the business, side of the education. Yeah, I hated that. You still do, I can't even draw. And you said you started in 1939 at U of T? In 1939. How did the war affect you? Well, I graduated right into the Army. I'd been in the Kennedy Office of Training Corps, and I already had one pip up. But we had to go through the whole boot camp process. And first I went to Traveller in Quebec and for officer selection at the present course. Then I went out to Gordon Head in Vancouver Island, and then back to Padawama for advanced engineering training with the Army. And then back to Chilliwack. I had a great experience. I had a lot of different platoons on a train. I even had an officer platoon for young guys like I do with their flashes up under them. It was a tremendous experience because we had to do large projects toward the end of our training. For instance, one job I had was to build a mainly bridge over with my platoon or a river, a fairly small river, and have tanks rolling over the next morning. And that was a tremendous experience because I had to learn to organize my 64-man platoon. All we had to do to the dark was no sound as though there were enemy across the river. And we built a mailing bridge and we had tanks running over. But that was a great lesson in organization and logistics to get that done. And then later on, I had a job to take my platoon to Vancouver and build a... While it was more than a platoon, we had a company with a captain who was in charge and a bridge commander. And we had to build it over a minute main interception of Vancouver. And we had to ready the next morning to the running. There was an overpass, we had to be running the next morning. The bridge commander and the captain were the commander of the project. There was a hotel nearby and they got in there and they got looped. So I ended up with a charge of the whole damned-off creation. And pulling guys out of the alley to get this thing built in the morning. And it was... Those experiences were unbelievably worthwhile as I went along. And then during the summers, I worked first of all, I got a job at Link Belt at 32 cents an hour building equipment for the mines. And then I got from there up to the Listen Abbey area where we discovered there was an Abbey mine that year. And I was on the prospecting team and it was a tremendous experience again, five months. And I came back relatively wealthy because I saved all the money. I got paid, which wasn't much, but we used to gamble with the crew every night. Most of them were aboriginals and they loved to gamble. So we played poker every night, and I was pretty good at poker. Made some money? Made 300 bucks, I think, for over $300 just gambling, which was my tuition fee then. So I came back pretty well. And then I got a job at Miranda Smouter working work through there and the roasters. This was after you had graduated? No, I was still in the summers. I got five months up at Miranda. Okay. By Prof that time I was a wonderful professor of energy, joint guest, and he's something of a philosopher and he'd say, now when you go to the plant he got us jobs and various operations I got at Miranda. He said, just try to get to learn as much as you can yourself when you're great by going around and studying all the other operations and talking to guys there. So it was a tough experience because it was terrible, terrible films and you wore a mask all the time and it smuggled. And the work was pretty rugged, but I managed to I was getting $0.32 an hour, I think, working in the roasters and then I worked on the reverbs for a while and across the aisle I saw that the guys were punching tours and the converters over there and they paid $0.40 an hour. So I talked to the foreman and let him do that and just a little killed me because he had to wear a big leather apron and punch the tours and there's a guy working in the halfway point of course and then if you let them freeze over you had to take a hammer and work their way through and I lost about ten pounds a week there, but I finally got the hang of it. But it was again another tremendous learning experience. And then in my final year I got a job at Link Belt and it was a real metallurgical job. They needed somebody and they had a lot of stuff going on. They were converting from building bicycles to water things from the irony and dating and I really had a great summer there. They gave me, I'd never ridden a bike before and I didn't have one to the money to buy one but they gave me a test bike and at that time the origin of copper this is all going into ammunition and they had to convert their brass breaks into something else so I was given the job of a lab and test to work out a place where we could use steel instead of copper and I came up with a soft chrome plating effect and it was just about to kill me because I'd jam on my breaks I had a big hill outside the plan where I'd get my test bike out there and roar down it jam on the brakes and then go over the handlebars when I finally got it right. That was another tremendous experience. And I had been reading about austempering in some of the literature I had at school and one of the problems they had was the bombs the little pin they had in the northern bomb site which they were building and I saw the girls having trouble with them they had a shio glass they rolled these things down and determined which ones were straight and which ones were crooked and I looked at it and I realized the problem was they were distorting during heat treating so I had been reading about austempering I talked to the foreman into letting me have a little salt bath where I could take these pins and austemper them so they didn't distort and that was another great sonar because I solved that problem and I became a hero around the plant because now the girls could get 100% production from there there the little pins they were running I was just very fortunate with the background experience that I had both as an early kid I did my first when I was up in the big farm we were providing firewood for Nelson about 13 miles away and we had a great big orchard with all the apples going to waste so one time I was in Nelson and I went over to the jam factory and I said you know I've got all these apples and I don't have any way to get to the market and there's a place next door with a truck there which is $125 it's an old truck I was 13 I think at the time so I went and just talked to the manager and I said you know if you would give me a contract to move our apples into Nelson I could go over and get the the garage guide and sell me that that current truck on credit if you would back the credit up for what I've been at delivery entrepreneur what I'd be into because when I was a little kid we used to pick huckleberries and sell them for ten cents for a big coffee tin full of huckleberries and I had a seed root where I'd go around selling seeds to all the local farms and people were growing vegetables and farms and then selling magazine subscriptions and collecting beer bottles my brother and I would collect beer bottles all summer and then send twelve dozen of a barrel up to Nelson by Steven the little paddle speed was ahead and I can see you're getting bored no no no I'm just looking at the here just one moment it's because one battery is getting weak so I'm just going to switch them out I was keeping an eye on it so that it wouldn't die I'm not bored at all just to test real quick okay is it going alright alright so where were we well we were in Nelson I think and one thing I forgot to tell you is before we moved there when we were still on the big farm of Timberlind and I bought the truck we were able to deliver stuff to wood to Nelson everybody's wood burning stoves and furnaces at that time and we cut firewood and we grew lots of vegetables and we used to take vegetables into Nelson and sell them to the stores and individuals and then when we'd had a surplus we'd drop it off at the hospital which was needed a lot of help as they were having tough time at the depression and while I was there as a friend of my father's came along and made a deal with me that if I would look after his pack train that I could ride the they had a little buckkin mare which was part of the the little pack train that he had a mule with two horses so he said if you'd pass through those guys and look after them you can get to ride the mare so I said okay so I then that just before spring break-up he came along I wasn't in school at that time but he said I'd like you to run my pack train up to the mine which is about 20 or 30 miles from Caslow or from Nelson rather and up in the mountains so I had the job during the winter of running the pack train up there and then running the score out on on skins and they were kind of like a toboggan but they were cow skins which had turned upside down it loaded the ore on there and then I built up a pile of ore these are pretty heavy sacks I built up my upper body quite a lot doing that job and that was a great experience being a cam and I got from here at the mine I got to know the miners they cooked like me and they had to there's 20-odd feet of snow up there and so the camins were totally buried in snow and they had to ice steps down into the cookhouse and he'd make apple pies and feed me when I came up and I'd raw hide the ore down again and stack it up I didn't get paid for that it's just but another great experience in mining as a teenager I was a young teenager I was only 13 or 14 when I was running the back trade and I learned to carry a lot of responsibility and I learned a lot about mines and the site I didn't want to be an underground mine worker it was all ahead it was all dynamite too and it was almost summer work to load out the quarry they had tracks but they pulled the carts out by hand they didn't have and it was pretty brutal work so you liked you were interested in the mining subject but you didn't want to work I didn't want to become a miner I did the prospecting deal with with on the mine the mine up in in in Runabee the Runabee mine up near Mississippi and I prospected that year as a matter of fact another guy and I were so impressed with the Runabee mine that we decided we'd skip school skip our engineering school work in there then one morning we worked at a work weapon our tent was about 6 or 8 inches of snow on the ground we said well to hell with this and we hiked out to Mississippi and back to school we were late Registrar said well I can't take you we were late for starting we said come on we were stuck up on the bush a lot of snow we couldn't get out in time so we finally said we were late finally okay we'll let you catch up and it was all great all marvelous experience the mining and metallurgy side of this and so then when you went to U of T you graduated what was your first job after being a student well my first job after being a student after being in the army I mean yeah so you studied and then you did the army yeah I did the army yeah I did my metallurgy first graduated straight into the army got my officers training had a great experience there in training doing engineering work and then and after that I was sitting the floor was over and at that time they had a surface of engineer officers so our name was up to old go overseas and my name had just come up and I was packing actually getting all my gear ready for overseas when they declared VE Day so they cast a low troop movement you must have been relieved well it wasn't really a disappointment I had two brothers over there and I wasn't enjoying that and then I joined the Pacific force in Chilliwack and I got all trained up for the Pacific force one of my brothers came back from Europe and we got all trained up for the Pacific force Juggle Wharf there and then they dropped the atom bomb that was the end of the war and they cancelled all troop movements again we were just on route to southern US joined a group down there as specialists and fortunately we had to fight our way up through the Japanese islands which would have been a killer so that was all part of the experience but after one of those over I had 250 guys under my command at that point so I sent them out on a route march I think because there no point in training anymore we had to keep them under control and I was sitting with another officer the officer's mess ten o'clock in the morning playing cribbage and one of us said you know a lot of my guys are going back to university 15-15-4 oh yeah they're going to eat a lot of the stuff so we just dropped our cars in the middle of the game went over to the adjutant's office a tough adjutant Charlie Aiden and we don't see Charlie and we said, Charlie we're working really hard we need a long weekend in Vancouver and he finally relented and gave us a pass for the long weekend and then we went over to the border transport and we said we have a very important reconnaissance to carry out in Vancouver such as we can't tell anybody about it but we need a Jeep to get there so we go right up and we got there and I was met there by a guy named Dr. Frank Forward who was ahead of the metallurgy department he wrapped his arms around me and he said, oh god am I glad to see you he said, I've got a help and I've got all these service guys coming back and we took me over to the dean and they said, you're hired you can start right away and they said, well guys so we're in we have number one priority to get you out of the area so when we got a camp on Tuesday after the long weekend there was a message from the colonel's office to report over to the colonel and we said, oh we've come up with us and when we went in, Charlie said, what kind of weekend did you guys have at Vancouver? I was just quiet, Charlie he said, well what's this all about there's a telegram from NDHQ for Heffernan and Joe to report to MD 11 immediately for discharge in Vancouver with red tags on it for our documents so we whistled through we were out of the army in two hours and started the most wonderful year of my life with Dr. Frank Ford and he had a lot going on and he loaded me with work I had a young wife but I mean first of all he had I was demonstrators they called in the lab and had to build the lab and then Frank was working on the sheriff garden process at that time and he paid me 75 cents an hour to stay after hours and work on the project so I did that working on the sheriff garden process and then Frank they built a pilot plant in Ottawa and so Frank asked me if I'd take his lecture so I did a lecture in the metallurgy class and then I did some other stuff while I was there I was doing some advanced math and a lot of scientific stuff so were you doing a masters or were you I was working on my masters and also like a teacher assistant I was teaching at the same time and then I was in the business school and I got interested in what they were doing so I started auditing some of their classes and it was pretty interesting and then they had an individual come in Dr. Fleury had been a colonel in the army out of officer selection and he put us through a lot of he went to serve his tests and he went through my system for selection because he said most of you guys back from the services you don't know what you're good at or what you want to do and he said I'll run you through my tests so they had 8 hours of tests no computers in those days and so we went through our tests and then he gave us an interview after we had completed our tests and he'd collated the information and he said to me a while young fellow when I went and said what are you planning to do and I said well sir I've been offered two jobs and he said what are they and I said well one is to stay on the university and get paid as I do my doctorate and the other is the BC Research Council was just starting out and they'd offered me a job most of the guys didn't have a job offer of these two job offers and quick as a wink Fleury said don't take either of them I said why can't I do them he said oh yeah you can do them but he said I'll guarantee you that within five years you'll be climbing the wall in frustration I said oh what should I do he said get a job in industry he said get a job I don't care where they get in the sales or in operations but get a job in industry look at these lists he said you'll make a good form of a better superintendent look at this a good manager, a very good manager but look at this running a large company and we both had a chuckle over that but he said do it so I went out and I found a job in a foundry as a metallurgist in a foundry and it was a transition for wartime supply to you products and I got really involved in there in that foundry and one thing I found was that it was a black art run by a bunch of scots from the Clyde Bank and the meldier would pour a spoon full of metal and judge the temperature and he was all in place depending on the light in the place that went down to here a bright day and we had all kinds of what they called the shots in the foundry and then we had a lot of trouble with the over-temperature because then the sand would all stick to the castings and it'd be discarded so it wasn't consistent at all I said they had no no system of checking the temperature so it was all hard and a dark dark science really so I talked to my boss the president of the company so he said okay so I bought one and Jimmy the superintendent of the plant he said that'll may work that that was his favorite talk every time I came up with it it'll may work and he used to throw a little on-road with tobaccos for something if it was a little it was going to make it right so I finally got confidence from the meldier because I could predict the temperature pretty accurately with the optical pyrometer and then I did a lot of this stuff there which helped the foundry I spent transitions from I got into the mining industry a lot because we were trying to find products for the mines and I developed austenitic manganese steel it was a hard-wearing steel and a wear-resistant steel and then I found the the guy they were in a dock at the end of the foundry the guys were dumping all the gates and rises from the castings from the austenitic manganese casting in the ocean so I said what are you doing that for and they said well the the superintendent said it comes up in the mold you know that and I said oh I think I know the problem and I said Jimmy let me let me get rigged up to do some oxygen blowing in the because I think it's hard to he didn't know what it was all about finally we were led and let me I hooked up with with a can of liquid air I told them what I wanted to do so at a very early stage we blew oxygen into the furnace just with a pipe and loaned me an old no more scrap castings and then the reason I did that was that he said I said why are you doing that I think I may went over that why are you scrapping all that he says it comes up in the molds and then the oxygen great reluctancy part of casting small heat with with the stuff that I blown hydrogen out of and no more problems so then I went up a notch in Jimmy's estimation and then there are a lot of other things that he and I would fight about I got my first ulcer morning I'd go in and have a fight with Jimmy but then was he your boss he was a superintendent of them but my boss was really the president of the company and your position exactly at that time I was metallurgist I had a lot of tremendous experience there and when Frank Ford I forgot to tell you but when Frank Ford also had a consulting practice in Vancouver he got so busy teaching and on the Sheriff Garden process they asked me to take over his consulting practice at 75 cents an hour so I said sure and I go on these calls and there were easy little problems to solve of the various industries around Vancouver and but I got another great experience there because I I could come back to the lab and do whatever had to be done to test that find out their problem and then go back and give them an answer there's a great educational experience the only problem was that I had a little wife you were the wife and she'd be at home expecting you for dinner and as walking past his door Frank would say oh Jerry there's just something I'd like to discuss with you two hours later I'd be heading for walking but that background was just incredible Frank was really a metallurgist and working with him solving all these problems and the metallurgical field and then going to the foundry and solving problems there it was really a tremendous background then the foundry went bankrupt the president had a heart attack so he appointed me assistant general manager and he was running the whole foundry and we had hired a new account before I went out and the reason that we had a new account was the other account that I had been working on a cost accounting system that I've hooked on cost accounting through my courses at the business store and we'd worked out a need system with all these new products coming out we had to refine those and and we didn't know our costs so we got this our system up to a certain point with the with the president before he got sick at the end of the whole operation he had five little companies going and he was just creaming under award-prime prices at the patrol board he was creaming a little bit off each company and when we found for that we showed him the the outline we had for bringing our costs under control immediately and then I was left with this situation and then the new account came in and one day it came up to me and he said, Jerry, he he said, I've got tuberculosis and I have to go up to Cameroons for the cure I felt sorry for him he's a sickly looking guy anyway I said, oh, that's tough and he laughed and I said, well, I'd better get into his finances and I got in there and he'd set up five dummy companies and he had invoices coming all in from them that he'd paid into these phony accounts and as soon as I saw it I knew there was fraud involved so I called they sent a detective down and he came in with a big portfolio of pictures he said, just go through this see if there's anybody to recognize my accountant, biggest life and he is a taunt artist who can come in they caught him on Australia with a nurse he got over there with his money but he cleaned out all the money and credit of the company before he left so I had to call the creditors meeting which was another great experience and I called that and I said, I think go over a period of six months I can work this off and work and pay it all back but there was one scrap dealer there who agreed at the meeting then he came to me after the meeting he said, look give me 50% on the account now and I'll pay off and I said and then I'll forget the account and I said, I can't do that you know we've made an agreement to share all of his agreement by that and he said, in that case I'm going to issue a rent, which he did so we went into bankruptcy then I had to take the company through bankruptcy which is another tremendous experience but while we had been doing all that we'd been making small inquests for a little start-up rolling bill and they had bought a used electric arc furnace asked me if I'd come over and be superintendent of the new melt shops so I did and that worked could you talk a bit more about you using the electric arc furnace as you are known for that well there's a lot about the electric arc furnace because I'd got a lot of steel making experience in the foundry making grinder steels and then I started off with a crew that was a few of the guys from the foundry I got to come and work for me and it was starting from scratch and we were making the small ingots for the rolling mill which was a few miles away and I got that working pretty well a lot of experience there and then they were working so well that the rolling mill couldn't roll all our stuff that were turning out so one day the president of the company we called the managing director in those days called me up and said Sunday called me up and said I want you to see us home tonight so I went back to his house he said tonight at midnight I want you to take over the rolling mill he said I don't who you are who you fire I'd make that damn place work and I didn't know anything much about rolling but I went over there and they had a rolling quit they had a rolling quit and one guy got to know a bit on the rolling mill what do you do exactly in a rolling mill well in a rolling mill you take these billets which are cold or small ingots and they had a re-heat furnace there gas fired oil fired actually before the days of gas and heated them up to rolling temperature and then we had one called a roughing mill three high mill roughing mill and these guys would take these 250 pound billets on tongs out of red hot out of the furnace and they were run down by hand from the furnace to the mill and then through the mill we work it through the mill and then they had what we called a cross-country mill where again tongsmen would take it through the cross-country mill and Chris Mousty was the finisher and notice he was pretty good he always had his guys set properly and he was a good tongsman quite an athletic guy and so after the superintendent and the head rolling quit I said to Chris do you think you can take over the head rolling's job you know I'll give it a try he turned out to be great as a matter of fact he became the executive of one of our companies later he didn't have a big education about grade limit or something and but he was really smart he kept on reading and learning and and pretty raw experience around this plant he was out of control and the first night I was there I went out to see how things were going with the reheat furnace and here were a bunch of guys chasing another one at a jug of wine not a bowl with a jug of wine around the reheat furnace and I was furious pretty hot there when he came by I tripped him and I caught the jug and I smashed it on the ground and I said okay you guys no more drinking was true no okay so they went back to work and then I went down and still in the middle of the night and I was trying to catch up on the paperwork such as it was in the office and I heard the mill stop so I went up to see why it stopped we had a little change room we called it a dry where the guys would change into the street clothes and here they were all shooting crap around a pile of money again my temperature got better and I grabbed the money and threw it around the room okay you guys room number two no gambling in this place so they said okay I went back to work and then an hour or so later I was working on a big mean looking guy who's on the reheat furnace 250 pound guy and he's leading a little delegation he came down and he said Jerry you've been making a lot of new rules around here he said what happens if we don't abandon I said well George you see that road up to Marine Drive it's not very far is it he said no he's kind of a dumb guy I said well it's one hell of a long way back he said Jerry don't get mad we just wanted to go and then another time when I was in the mill I came in and as a night I was just checking things out and I found one of the the mechanics that we call the boilers in those days leaning over one of the pieces of equipment I wonder what's wrong with him he went out and he was drunk as a skunk so I said in all the rules get your stuff and head out of here pick up your pay tomorrow morning so he grumbled but he left and then a while later again I was catching up on some work and he came down he was obviously ready to have a fight with me but I was pretty good I'd been on the wrestling team at the university and I'd come back and you were boxing too and I was boxing so I wouldn't do it I'd fight a lot of big guys and so he came in and not far behind him came the president of the union and the secretary two tough guys from the Ruffin mill big strong guys and Frank Bobby who's a communist they came in they grabbed this guy and wheeled him out and I said what was that all about when they came back and they said Jerry did you know he had a knife and he was going to kill him but they were that was the president of the secretary of the union and I got along well with the union they liked somebody with a strong hand and eventually I had to cut it down from two chefs to two because we could produce all the steel that the melt shop could produce and two chefs and I said we've got a I called the union guys there and I said we've got kind of one total chef and he said I'm not going to do it by seniority and I said I'm going to pick the crew and if you guys don't like it you can we don't know how free this is as far as I'm concerned and they said Jerry just settle down we know it's a tough call but just let us screen the people that you have cut out I said ok and they were the one guy that they protected and he was an older fellow but he's pretty good and so they protected him and did you go off merit or productivity well he was no but for letting a certain crew go you said we couldn't we didn't need three crews anymore we could produce all all the melt shop could produce we could do it in two chefs yeah but you said the ones who you were letting go you weren't going to base off seniority so did you base off merit whether they were laggages what their tendency rate it was and so on if they were goofing off a lot stuff like that and I picked them up I just made one mistake and this was an older fellow who happened to be the father of a girl who Chris Felzley later on married and it was a good choice and anyway that was a tremendous experience and then as we got making money again in the plant and things were going well I the Leduc happened and I said you know there's an opportunity but this kind of mill up in Edmont so the chief executive said well it sounds like a good idea so I worked hard I worked a lot at night trying up a plan for the operation Edmonton and then this is to open a rolling mill? yeah for this is a melt shop a melt shop and rolling mill so he said oh by that time I'd been made general superintendent the whole organization and I was running pretty well and when I proposed this new proposition and I'd been there about four years I guess by then and four years after I got out of the Army and it was in 1954 so I'd been out of the Army in 45 I guess yeah it was line years later I had to join the university thing and then I'd been at the steel mill and the managing director liked the proposition and I kept him informed of what I was doing and did the business study on it and showed him the finances and then he had a board meeting of the board and some of the top management people and having his son the sales manager for the company and I laid out the plan to the board and they seemed to like it and his son was hated fine and he said what do you want me to do again he was totally opposed to the idea he said what do you want me to do again ulcers flagged back and forth to Edmonton and again my fiery temper came up I was really angry and I said Jerry we don't even need you up there you won't have to come around and that kind of got him all mad at me and there was a shouting match and finally the managing director said heard enough of that operation said it was causing too much to such another company I don't want to hear it again and I guess I was white with rage and I just got up and I said you won't and I walked out and I come to see an engineer Bartholomew had a company in Vancouver and he had been working closely with me on the development of the aircraft furnace and improving its output and helping me a lot on the rolling mill and electrical stuff so I came to see Alan Barth he had been like a second father to me and my picture had appeared on the western minor front page picture and Bartholomew told me Jerry when you're in business avoid publicity that complaint he said it makes your enemies vindictive and your friends jealous so he said oh that's a good idea so anyway when I went down to see Barth he was like a second father to me and he said I said I don't know what I'm going to do but I'm going to quit that company he said well what's this all about I told him a story he said well it sounds like a pretty good proposition he said why don't you do it yourself and I said I don't have money I might be able to scare up 10,000 bucks by that time we had no money and he said well I've got a little and I have some friends who have a lot they're Gibson brothers in Toronto logging company so quite later with this plan where we leave her the company very highly with $15,000 of equity $350,000 of preferred shares and and the remainder of the benches with an equity kicker the preferred shares with an equity kicker so Clark Gibson said well that's pretty good he said we'll put up the most of the $350,000 if you can find the rest of it and and then Barth said I'm going over to England he said I have some friends with over there who have a lot of money give me a one-pager on it and so the next thing I knew he went over to the there's a real tune of guys who became the real tune of guys so Mark Turner and the next thing I knew there's a guy calling me out of me from their company and he liked it so I quit my job and we financed the company got one difficult problem because the Brits had promised to put up a million dollars in the debatures the total money financing was $365,000 if you can imagine Bill Lee and Steelener for that and so this was pretty difficult and I went into Seattle and my memory's getting bad I'll get it anyway they had a Bank of Toronto at that time President Bank of Canada Bank of Toronto Bank of Toronto and we went into Seattle and I put the proposition he said well that sounds pretty good we'll take the debatures and the start up if you can imagine a young guy he liked it and so we got started with our financing the way we went and we built the project and really record tied I think it was about three or four months before we were making Steele and it was a success right from the word go and we were in the black and kind of paused it within three or four months and went on from there and then we kept expanding the plant and then we kind of got under the skin of Stelco because we didn't market for long products in the area all the products we made and only that we'd taken over another company at that time with Bankrupt it was making products for the oil industry and we took over some of their products and then they had one particular which was a great success the B7 Stud which is a very strong boat industry and we'd taken over that business and they went Bankrupt and we took it over and then I've developed a really neat way of making B7 Studs for a little cost and we were getting into Stelco's market with B7 Studs, such shipping up to Ontario and Stelco got intrigued with us about that time our British friends said we're interested we have some people that are interested in putting in an integrated steel plant in Alberta and I told them they better get you over here to talk to them and find out what it's all about and at that time I'd been developing this the steep river the the an iron deposit of up in the caribou country and and it was low grade but it was similar to the net hours in France and we'd done a lot of testing on that I made a product for the Japanese direct reduced material which we could shift a bunch over to Japan and they liked it and they could land it over there for $35 a ton and then the prices scrapped and the US dropped and the Japanese didn't need this stuff anymore so it was the end of that project but the Europeans were interested in it and Robert Benson and Lawsdale were the financial people at that time and hooked up with one of the big British companies and a French company and we had progressed the idea of an integrated steel plant based on iron ore supply of scrap was limited of course and and the Stoutco I think they made it, the Brits decided that they should be gentlemanly talk to Stoutco about it and I suspected that would be the kiss of death because we met with the president of Stoutco at that time and the guys from Europe and he let it be known in no uncertain terms that Stoutco would not appreciate an integrated mill so not far from that we got an offer from Stoutco to buy so at a very high price I think our original equity was, the plant was $15 million and they took on the debt and the print crafts and paid us 10 million for the equity after so reluctantly but probably wisely we accepted the offer and but then I developed the so-called mini mill process to a large start where our financial groups said well if you see another opportunity we'll back you and it happened then that I had a friend who called me up and said why don't you come down and build one of these plants in Toronto great market here but that would be close to Stoutco right Stoutco is on Hamilton so we built a steel mill out in Whitby and we well we're in Edmonton we developed continuous casting there and we built the first plant in the world that was designed entirely around continuous casting of the roll and everything and again we built the plant in eight or nine months and headed up and running and we were again we were catch positive very short order and really fighting into Stoutco's market for long products but we had a big advantage and Stoutco the directors asked me well what happens to Stoutco what was the price I said well the market across the borders wide open and if they bring the price down we could survive Stoutco gradually got out of long products business and left out left the field to us but that was a great success and then the Rogers Bob Rogers came up from Texas and he had heard about our operations and they'd like to build a plant in Texas so we had partners and we built a plant where we each had 50-50 at the deal and it's a long story but then we built three other bidding bills well before that we built one in Minneapolis St. Paul and that was a great success and then the opportunity came up in Texas and the Minneapolis St. Paul situation was with the big international company and they decided they'd like the whole thing but before that we had a when we did the deal I had insist on that we have the Russian Relent Clause in there if they decided if even party decided to buy the other side out but we would negotiate and they built another plant near us on their own and I said you guys are in conflict of interest and a few and I'm going to trigger a call so then I went to the bank and I got a line of credit for $75 million to buy the plant in Texas but they have the St. Paul and these other guys up the ante and I couldn't go far with that we had a long negotiation so finally they accepted their offer and we were pretty flush with cash so then the operation potential came up in Texas and we built a plant in middle Othien where Bobby and Clyde Bobby and Clyde had robbed their first bank and we were looking for a site went into the bank manager well first of all of the city hall we saw a sign out want money try work that's pretty good slogan and then we went in to see the bank manager and there was a I looked at his window and I said is that a bullet hole through here window he said yeah well he says one day I sat in the air and he says see these guys tough looking birds one of them gets out of the car and walks toward the bank and he gets out stands by the door of the car and he said and I realized they were going to rob me so he says I reached in my desk and pulled out my gun and the guy came in the door he had a gun on me so I just shot him and then he said the other guy ran I got him through the window well that's Texas that's pretty good both of them and that again was a tremendous success and we we branched out and built another plant in Virginia from the based on the Texas plant we expanded with 2 million tons a year how many many mills did you build and develop I built I think it was 6 or over we built the first one was Edmonton well I guess Edmonton was one Edmonton Toronto we built an expandable with 2 in the US 3 in the US 6 and 1 in England and then the the the plant was in Texas was pretty interesting because we got into much bigger products there from Simply Bar we developed a system there of what we call near net shape casting where we cast a product that was looked like an I-beam and then with a very simple roll we could turn that into a section sound-assailable then we built a big one of those in near Richmond of Virginia in middle of it was near Richmond and it was dedicated entirely to big white flange beads and it was a great success and that was then we had already built one in England before we built Texas and that was very successful to make a long story short I became known as the king of the many mills as the guys started the mini mill revolution started the mini mill revolution which had a significant impact on the steel industry the big guys weren't into continuous casting at that time and we ran them out of the only one that survived I think was because a lot of other mini mills developed in our technology we didn't have a patent of anything where I ran what I call an open house system anybody who wanted to visit our plant could visit it provided with reciprocal arrangements and I would say look you know the competitors are not big mills here they're the overseas mills and if we're going to survive as an industry we need to help one another develop the technology and out of that came very close contact with the Japanese they got a window of what we did in Toronto and they came over and said could they send people over I said yes maybe we have a reciprocal arrangement so we had a lot of good types of the Japanese they were very good and opened their doors to us they were advanced in some areas that we were we exchanged information that there was people trained over in our place and we sent people over there we kept on advancing the technology and the Japanese did and I was back and forth to Japan and I even learned a bit of the language and I was going to spend a lot of time there in Edmonton at the time when we made our first contact with the Japs so I knew we'd be over there a lot and so I called up the University of Edmonton and said we got a student that could teach me Japanese I said yes so this little girl and she's a tough little bird and she saw us studying the Japanese Kenji characters and all this stuff and she just took my books and wiped them and said you'll never learn Japanese I would teach them phonetically so she'd come over for dinner at night and we'd tape the recordings and she'd teach me Japanese and so I learned to speak well, language reasonably well and then my first meeting in Japan I went over with these managing directors Tsubatomo Shōji Kaisen and Mr and I went through all the pleasantries in Japanese and after a while Mr. Sheena-san said oh Mr. Heffernan you speak Japanese very well just like a high class Tokyo girl so I went around and I could speak the language I understand it fairly well but everywhere I went people put their fingers in the lap my strange pronunciation in the strange vocabulary I was known as the Tokyo girl and I had a wonderful experience with the Japanese another one of my great great connections and experience I'm not that's about the story and could you just explain in layman's terms what continuous casting is oh yeah well the way the way it transcended from the big companies were pouring 30 tonne ingots and then they did these huge rolling mills to roll them down into size for their blooming mills and billet mills and I looked at that stuff and I could never afford one of those plants but also it's very inefficient their yield was only about 64% and our yield was up in the 90s and that's yield from ink to to bar shape or whatever they're doing so we concentrated on that but that was the major difference they used these huge mills and then they used huge blooming mills to roll these huge 30 tonne ingots down and then they needed huge finishing mills and everything was monstrous and huge plants and huge cranes to carry this stuff so we could run a continuous billet through the castor which was the size we wanted to go directly into our bar mill and it just our yield went out way up 30 degrees so it's simply because of the size a lot smaller volume and more productive and the quality was really excellent because of these big mills and we get a lot of segregation to slow cooling and we could get pretty rapid cooling on these small ingots so there wasn't the segregation so our quality was very good and we gradually penetrated the high quality market with our bars and we took all that business away from Steeleville's and I guess the final killing shot for Bethlehem Steeleville they were big on large structures where we came up with this business of being able to produce big wide flange of beams 36 inch wide flange of beams that are rather simple enough but with our near shape we cast it looking like a big section of the bead and then we rolled it down and our costs were so much slower that we had one other thing that spoke in our favor that is the Japanese and the Koreans were getting pretty good at shipping long products into North America and I talked to our guys about they said you know we're paying $20 an hour they're paying $1 an hour over there their cost of shipping is about $1 a ton in North America the only way we can beat them is by getting our man hours per ton down to one and they integrated guys were about ten at that time in Canada so we really worked at that and the crews were very cooperative on it and we did get our man hours down to one ton per man hour and the big guys were still working at ten hours they're all down to much lower than that they all went to continuous casting but Bethlehem went broke and a couple of other integrated operations US Steel survived because they bought a they bought an oil company but when I got to know US Steel pretty well and through the conferences with Pittsburgh I saw this huge building tower business building full of people and a simple business like Steel what do you need all those people for then later on I was in New York and I saw that building another big huge office building and it was I found out they had 27 levels of vice presidents not 27 27 levels goodness why do you need all those people for a simple industry and of course they eventually got out of all that but they survived because they had but I think all the other integrators went broke and I sorry for all the people that were out of a job but it was a major change technologically and I became known as the father of the mini mills because we helped all the other guys get started and that gradually worked the big guys out of all their long products is that still how it works today? oh yeah I think they're all pretty well running certainly all my old clients one of them is not it was a wire mill and it it couldn't stand the high residuals and it was profitable for a while but then we sold it to all of my old companies were bought by the Brazilians and they closed that plant down and shipped high quality billets made from iron ore in Brazil cheaper than we could it was easy to draw so they closed that but I said how many mills did I say? seven I think in total yeah I think that's right seven or eight how did you get here with Clairvests? well I retired finally I was chairman of Texas Interest big cement and steel operation they made me chairman after their chairman died made me chairman over the whole outfit and I was chairman for quite a few years and then I got to be 85 and finally at a meeting in Texas it looks ridiculous to have a Canadian chairman of a large Texas public company and I'm going to retire and he said oh no you should retire you still got all your marbles out of there no I'm out of here so I retired and the guy who was chief executive took over as chairman and I came back to Toronto and then I was back to Toronto yeah why did you come back to Toronto? well it was where my home was my children my home was here and the children were all at university in Ontario and one at LIT my wife was here I used to commute back and forth to Texas and back and forth to England and back and forth everywhere I was tired of all that stuff but then I had a great friend who I met when I was building Lake Ontario Steel and he was a lawyer and he he was working for the other side it was a very tough negotiation a very tough group of Toronto and structural steel people were reinforcing by guys and they were tough to deal with one nut and pull factory guy and Lionel Shipper the lawyer had been so good on their side that after we got the deal settled and I asked him if he'd like to be become the lawyer for the company council for the company he said yeah I would he's a young guy so he was terrific and then after I came back from all the activities down there and involved in other things and had time he said well Joe Rotman was just starting this company up it was called Royal Securities at that time and he said would you like to beat him so I met Joe he was collecting some money to start this little operation up so I said yeah he became a director and we changed the bank the Royal Bank got upset by our name in the investment business so we changed our name to Claremest and we just took the name Claremest Claremest so it became Claremest and that was it we didn't get off to a really good start and some of the other guys wanted out that were in so I bought their shares at half price because I had confidence in Joe I ended up as the second largest shareholder Claremest and then we just went on from there Joe was a great chairman and we got a new we got joint chief executives with this son who was brilliant and and also another chap who was equally brilliant and they matched one another we had co-chief executives and it was it was a great experience and I'm getting the stage for one of these days I'll say look I'm getting too old for the director I was going to say you said you were tired but you didn't really retire came here and started Claremest I got into a lot of other things and then just to finish off what would you say is the what would you say are you proudest of professionally in your life it's tough it would have to be the development of many bills and it was it was a long long story and a long tale a lot of developments a lot of great science and engineering went into it it was really another thing that I'm really proud of is starting commercialization fellowships at the University of Toronto and we give these either graduates or the masters or science or engineering we give them two years to develop their technology and to come up with a viable company which we then help finance through the early stages and we've had some successes there some very good successes there so I would say those two things kind of go hand in hand development of the virtuous circle part of it and then and the support we gave Dr. Fraser Buster and the things that have come up the two programs we started with there were the early childhood development program and the artificial intelligence robotics and while we're on that program Canada didn't have much going on AI and robotics at that time and we got a call from Ottawa asking us under what condition we should participate to the tune of $800 million in the space station and Jim Ham was president of the University he was a classmate of mine at that time and Jim and I Fraser had Jim and me and we wrote a letter for him back to Ottawa that under one condition and that was the week at the end robotics for the space station and out of that came the Canada which you've seen and a lot of other things we talked about in our museum kickstart to artificial intelligence robotics in Canada Geoffrey Hilton who is the artificial intelligence guy has just been hired by Google and he's into deep neural networks and termed just potential and there are a lot of other good things that come out of that AI and robotics program so I guess you'd have to look that for the success of Seafar and the success of the commercialization fellowships which I hope will catch on across Canada and then the mini mills so that was excellent that's enough for you yeah and the last thing I could see you no, no last question and this is actually probably my favorite question that I like to ask is if you were speaking to someone younger like me or a student or someone like that and then you have to pick one what would be the one life lesson or piece of advice to give them to give them or me what life lesson do you have to give oh I would say early education and work start working from the time you were a little kid I hate to the what is it they call the minimum wage tax because it prevents little kids from working and you really need that experience at a very early age just doing little chores going out with a shovel and shoveling snow and now if you do it your employer's life will be charged they screwed my first job with mowing lawns so I would say yeah mowing lawns doing any damn job you get picking cherries I did picking aqua berries selling over 10 cents a bucket of those days and those were great experiences going around selling magazines subscriptions early education and basic I think to be able to develop companies company later on if that way you get to know people you get to understand people much better you learn what it is to actually get into marketing which I was never very good at with my seen route and all that stuff I had learned a lot and so I would say those two things that's for only one that's fine that's good early education that includes working as a young child you learn a lot well Mr. Reffen thank you very much thank you much appreciated hope it works out alright for you