My brother decided on early retirement. He and his wife have traveled during the last few years to exotic places around the world. His latest E-mail contained pictures of a recent trip to Cuba where he somehow joined a horticultural group studying how Cubans raised crops without using chemical fertilizers. His previous trip was a boat cruise around the Mediterranean with a stopover and local tour of Turkey.
One of my sisters has been a transient traveler her whole adult life. She married a U.S. citizen who decided to move back to Ireland, the land of his forebearers. For many years my sister and her husband have spent part of each year in Ireland and the rest of the year in Morocco.
My travels may not seem to compare with the spots my brother and sister have visited but to me they are just as meaningful. As a teenager working after school in the family locksmith business I never thought about what was required in order to manufacture key blanks, door closers or the dozens of other security products which I handled each day.
After working as a locksmith for many years I joined Abloy Security locks and was immediately sent to Joensuu, Finland to visit the Abloy factory. The factory is located a distance from town in a forest area. A wide road through the woods provides a route for the hundreds of bicycles which workers ride to work each day. Two wheel scooters are used as the mode of transportation for personnel movement around the factory. Twice a day music is played and everyone stops to do calisthenics. Meetings with company officials included visits to the sauna.
Another visit was to the Kaba Ilco plant in Rocky Mt, NC. The highlight of that visit was to see a container the size of a semi trailer filled with molten brass. As the big container is tipped, a long tube of molten brass is sent down a conveyor belt. The brass tube material is cut into thick coin-shaped discs, the discs are reshaped into thin strips, the strips are fed through stamping machines to make key slugs and the punched out strips are sent back to the big container to be changed back again into molten brass.
One visit was to the LCN factory in Princeton, IL., where door closer parts were seen riding on an overhead conveyor system as they moved to different assembly sites in the plant. The finished products came off the end of the conveyor system in a steady stream.
My extensive list of factory visits includes Silca in Italy, Arrow Lock in Brooklyn, Chicago Lock in Wisconsin, Fort Lock in Chicago, Master Lock in Milwaukee, CompX in Illinois, Sargent Lock plus Corbin-Russwin in Connecticut, Medeco Lock in Virginia and many others. Each visit added to my understanding of how many dedicated engineers, designers and assemblers are required to products the security products we take for granted each day.
Maybe I haven't been to many known attractions but for my money I would not trade my factory trips for visits to the Taj Mahal, Casablanca or any other tourist trap you can name.
