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Yes, Virginia, Picker used to have a division that did all these things and it was based in Northford, CT. Nowadays Picker is known solely for it's Computed Tomography units. But back in the late '70's, Picker was the leading company in Medical Ultrasound. Things had started off small...a small company in North Haven called Intertech (yes, right about the time an agent named Mannix in the TV series of the same name, worked for a secret organization called Intertech..;) made Medical Nuclear scanners. My father worked there as a draftsman at one time. Then Picker bought the company and eventually moved to a newly built facility in Northford. It was, and continued to be, a place of great people to work with...even until the end in 1985, when the division was shut down. This page is a small tribute to the great people and the slime bag managers that worked there.
It's a little known fact that alumni of Picker Nuclear, Ultrasound and Clinical Lab still meet once a year on the 2nd Friday (I think!) of December at the Mill Pond Tavern. Someday maybe even I will make it there......And if any of you Picker Alumni see this, Drop me a line: didymus7@hotmail.com. Then I'll tell ya who I really am...and I'll bet ya you'd never guess!
When I graduated from Northeastern University back in 1975, the economy was not that great. It wasn't until October 75 when I finally landed a job at Picker. Of course I had worked the co-op plan at Northeastern and spent two 3 month periods working first in the old plant in North Haven, then participating in the big move to a brand new facility in Northford.
As a co-op I first worked for the Nuclear scanner department. The big project was creating masks for the front of the Photomultiplier tubes so that the light was evened out to present a flat field without 'hot spots' around the tube locations. A fellow Tech was Luis Alvarez and our direct supervisor was Mike Yarsavich (?). The project leader was Dr. Ron Bernardi, who was great guy and I was happy to come through for him. Later on, we were joined by a engineer, Mike Gambini.
The next Co-op period, I knew more, so I sort of graduated to being a real Technician, even though it was grade C. Instead of dealing with masks, I got to do real circuitry. I worked for an engineer named Walt Oliwa, also for engineer Frank Ragonese, who, it was said, only understood relay logic. Frank must have been close to retirement then. Fellow technicians were John MacCausland and Steve Demanczek. Steve was not long in the US, coming from Poland. John, unfortunately had a knack of attracting trouble, especially financial. Eventually he started thinking wrong and committed suicide. That still makes me stop and wonder.
One of the smartest (and looniest) people there was Bill Trenary. You really could not have more hair and beard on your head than Bill. He knew his TTL (that's all we had back then) but had a weakness for Chevy Corvairs. It is said that he had 5 or 6 of them in his backyard but none of them were drive-able since none of them were complete.
About this time I heard of Ken Plesset, who working in Ultrasound. Since I was a chess player and he was a chess master (almost), I heard about him all the time. I wouldn't really meet him until I started working full time.
One of the slimiest characters there was Sam Goldman. He was a manager of some sort, but I'll never forget how he dealt with graffiti. You know how we can always count on someone disliking or even hating us. Sometimes it's a misunderstanding, other times it's a mental problem--theirs or ours! Well, one day someone, we never really found out who, wrote something about Sam on the bathroom wall. I don't remember the actual words, but it wasn't even very bad, maybe something like 'Sam Goldman sucks'. The next day, nobody could use the bathroom. It was blocked off and he had a photographer come in and take a picture of the graffiti. Over the next couple of weeks, lab notebooks would suddenly disappear for a day and then reappear. I don't know if anybody was ever confronted. But this was gestapo stuff.
My first department was development of the first real-time mechanical ultrasound scanner. The development name was the 80R...the R stood for Ramses. Why Ramses? Well, it was before my time there, but the origin was in the scanner itself. A transducer was mounted on a small bracket that was oscillated back and forth. So they needed some flexible covering to extend from the transducer to the solid body of the device. Apparently the first try was a 'modified' condom. Yep, you heard it here first.
The department was a small one and consisted of the manager, Peter Mueller: an engineer, Bill Carrano and a technician, Don Janus. Then I was installed as the 2nd engineer. My first assignment was memorable. All I had to do was add a connector between the front panel lamps/switches (hey, this was the early days of the LEDs and they were damned expensive, so we used LAMPS) and the card cage. The prototype was originally direct wired, which is not great on production units. It was my first encounter with molex connectors and I kinda got the pins wrong and wired the +27 volts from the lamps to a TTL chips. It turns out that is just the right voltage to make gobs of smoke.
I spent two co-op periods at Picker. The second period, some six months later, landed me in an over-crowded building with benches and partitions stuck in every possible space. Late in that 3 month period we would move to the new plant in North Branford.