When I was working at System Industries in Santa Clara, California (1976) the owner of the company (Dr. Edwin Zschau) went to Japan to learn how to run a business.

They were doing very well in comparison to USA companies and there was a lot of interest in learning why. So we adopted many oriental concepts and implemented them in our business. One thing was that we had a company song. We had a birthday meeting every month and we would all sing the company song.

Lyrics:
"System, System Industries, Here we go, Hand in hand.
Solving Data Mysteries for the betterment of man."

Another thing we did was take a two hour lunch so we could exercise. I swam at the Santa Clara International Swim center with my wife. She was working the Graveyard shift at National Semi-conductor so we met twice a day. Lunch and evenings.
We had many people from foreign countries working there. When Dr. Zschau went to Japan he hired many Japanese people. Immigrants made our company better. That was a universal fact of life about Silicon Valley... The brightest engineers worldwide came here for work. I had a neighbor from Nicaragua who came to work at IBM. And another Engineer I knew came from Germany at the end of WW2 to work at Lockheed. Very Common.

~~~~~ (~);-} ~~~~~

Another time in Santa Clara we partticipated in a "Car Rally". Everyone would meet at a starting location then we were given a series of clues as to where to go next. One clue was "Go to a street named for a part time orchestra leader." We were supposed to figure out the puzzle and navagate to checkpoints. The answer to that clue was "Semi-conductor Blvd"... semi meaning part time and conductor is the leader of an orchestra. This was all part of the California Car Culture.

Read more of my Auto-Biography at: http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/03/growing-up-in-los-gatos-california-in.html

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