Bill Sides:  

Living on island in central Florida with wife Joy (52 yrs.). Living in Florida since 1968, owner and operator of Boat Corral, the largest and oldest marine dealer and firearms dealer in the areal. Retired in 2004. Bill Sides - LIFE SYNOPSIS 8.13.14 William H. (Captain Bill) Sides, was born in Johnstown Pa. June 11, 1933 at Mendenhall maternity on Osborne St., the second son of Walter Charles (dec. 1997) & Mary Lillian Stokes (dec. 1985) Sides. He lived in Ferndale through the fifth grade, then attended Elim, Stutzsman & Westmont Upper-Yoder High School. He started and ran a snow plowing, tennis court grading & miscellaneous grading business while in school. He worked as a Willys & Jeep mechanic during and after high school at Westmont (Grad. 1951), & attended the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown. He moved to Pittsburgh in 1953 and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1955 with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. He moved back to Johnstown to work as an industrial engineer for U.S. Steel and to teach Design Engineering, machine design and drafting at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown. At U.S. Steel he did time studies on machining, casting, & fabrication processes and wrote standard practice procedures & production standards for management bonus plans and labor union contracts. In 1957 he enlisted in the Navy Critical Skills Program, serving as a design engineer at the Naval Ordinance Laboratory, Silver Springs Md. He designed and supervised construction of a plating facility to electroplate tooling and military ordnance. He was a bugle player in the Navy Drum & Bugle Corp, playing at ceremonies, parades, and graduations of navy personnel around Baltimore and Washington D.C. While stationed in Silver Spring he worked two evenings a week for Washington Technological Industries as a draftsman, earning 4 times his military pay In 1959 he moved from Johnstown to Pittsburgh (Penn Hills). He served as the Assistant Mechanical Engineer for the P. & L. E. Railroad. There he met his wife, the former Joy L. Bouma whom he married in 1960. Responsibilities included design and maintenance of all mechanical services for the railroad. Bill & Joy bought their first house on Bradshaw Dr., Mt. Nebo. He engineered the shut down & abandonment of the Smithfield power plant. When the power plant was abandoned, he designed the heating, ventilation, & air conditioning systems as well as all the mechanical services for the now Historical Landmark P. &L.E. Terminal, now the Grand Concourse Restaurant in Station Square. He obtained a prestigious professional engineer license in 1961. In 1962 he was promoted to Industrial Engineer for the parent New York Central Railroad. He hired engineers and established an Industrial Engineering Department in Beech Grove, Indiana. His department began establishing standard practice standards when the shop was reopened. Six months later, for numerous reasons, Bill refused a promotion to General Manager to run the Syracuse shop of the NYC, which had 550 employees. Daughter Sheryl Lee was born 2/16/63. Bill & Joy, along with new daughter Sherry moved to Dearborn Michigan area in 1963 where he was a plant engineer for Ford Motor Co., Wayne Assembly Plant. In addition to designing facilities for mechanical services, designing electronic heating & air conditioning controls, preparing bid papers, & supervising contractors, he served as relief foreman, general foreman and superintendent for all the skilled trades, maintenance and cleanup departments when needed. He was promoted in 1965 to the Ford Automotive Assembly Division general office, working as a design engineer. He developed, published, & instituted their first computer program for solving complex empirical formulas for fluid flow in open & closed conduits, piping, & drainage. Each calculation, which formerly took days, could then be solved in minutes. He also developed and wrote the first standardized construction material & labor specifications for the Division, which saved thousands of hours for engineering on contract preparation for 23 Assembly plants. He did estimations (some as high as $23 million) for mechanical services changes and for annual model year changes. He designed, wrote specifications for construction contracts, and supervised contractors on mechanical changes and additions for 23 assembly plants. One major project he completed was for was the first use of foam for fire suppression at the Automotive assembly plants. He designed, negotiated approval with the National Fire Protection Underwriters, and supervised installation of the first foam system to suppress fires on the final assembly lines of the automotive plants. This eliminated the use of expensive CO2 systems. While at Ford he attended night school at the University of Michigan, earning an MBA degree in 1968. Bill had a job offer from the Ford Technical Services Division, headed by Lee Ia...Expand for more