Tulare
Today I met an engineer for lunch at Champs BBQ in
Bakersfield. He was on a project at the
Shell Pipeline Station across from the airport.
I enjoy remembering and sharing good times and experiences with
people. You never know how we are all connected
in this business, even across generations.
I mentioned how I worked with so-and-so in 1995 at that pipeline station. I was providing Plasite and Briner coating to
coat the big storage tanks and high- temp silicone to paint the large crude oil
heaters. The heavy crude needs to be
warm enough for flow through the lines to L.A. and S.F. There are multiple stations with tanks and
heaters on the long routes. My client was in Bakersfield to inspect my
Fiberspar pipe and connectors that was purchased for some new pipelines in the
Carson/Long Beach area he has been working on.
My companion’s Champs burger looked really good as always,
but I don’t eat burgers much any longer.
It looks like a great bun and the large Angus patty is hand shaped. I ordered my usual meat salad. The Champs salad includes choice of meat on
romaine lettuce, blue cheese and a great chipotle, lime vinaigrette and a small
corn muffin. I like to add the sweet and
spicy BBQ sauce to the salad for additional flavor. It’s a
great salad, but the tri-tip, although cooked to my preferable medium/medium rare,
had a few pieces with grizzle hidden in it.
And as I was busy trying to eat while relaying stories of places and
people he knew, from a time when my guest was a toddler, I had to nonchalantly spit
hunks of chewed grizzle into a napkin. He
seemed interested in that I used to work on projects with the Shell engineer
that he only knows of as a sort of legend and is too busy to ever meet. I’ll scan and send a technical bulletin that
I found about this same plant and corrosion engineer that I wrote in 1995 when
he used my products.
In asking my client about his business trip and telling my
old-school stories that these young people probably hate, I learned of his
staying over last night in Tulare. I
commented, “That’s a weird town isn’t it?
I remember making sales calls in Tulare 25 years ago. I sold water filter skids and instrument air
dryers to the Haagen Dazs ice cream plant in Tulare. And in downtown, there is a huge Dairyman’s
Co-op. I would sell filters for the milk
bottling plant. That plant bottles milk,
cheese and yogurt for the entire West Coast.
The stainless steel milk trucks are lined up to get in and unload all
day and night.”
One day selling filters for the sterile water and air that
is used in the milk bottling operation, I got a chance to see the process and
consult on using the filters. In putting
on the white lab coat, hard hat and hair net, I was having a hard time getting
the hair net over my head. The guys
started laughing at me and I asked what was so funny. They said, “That’s the beard net. You need to put that over your mustache.” I can’t think of any food or beverage
processing plant that ever smells good.
Even wine and beer plants can smell bad from the fermentation. But a milk plant is the worst. And to get to the bottling room we walked
through the yogurt room where they made yogurt in 5’ by 20’ open tanks. Remember
how your baby’s spit-up smells?
My favorite story from Tulare is from when I was selling
ultra-high purity filters to a small business that made a very high value serum
for use as a growth medium in bio-tech labs.
I got a lead from Pall Corp. that this company in Tulare is making fetal
bovine serum. The most high purity and
valuable serum made. Bovine serum is
valuable and fetal bovine serum is a higher level of purity coming from the
fetus. It needs to be filtered with 3
stages of 0.1 micron filters. And the
most high tech process filtration company I was selling for is all excited
about this great high tech company in my territory. I was mostly an oilfield process guy and
spent 90% of my time with oil, gas & produced water processes. So I did not know what to expect and I took
our technical specialist familiar with bio-tech applications with me.
On my first appointment, the serum guy tells me, “The
building is just off the 99 Fwy behind the glass and mirror store on the right. You’ll see the dry ice sign. That is us”.
The only building was a concrete
block bunker with no windows and no address.
There’s the dry ice sign. That must be it. I open the door and this waft of smoke and
tiny white flies pours out of the door at us like it’s been bottled with
positive pressure. Greeting me was a
messy desk with fast food remnants on it and old stale coffee cups. The owners, Ross and Randy stood there
looking at us as I am waving my hand across my face to clear away what I
realized are not tiny white flies, but cigarette ashes and smoke filling the
room. Ross was a great tall slim man
that reminded me of the Rifle Man, (Chuck Connors) after 40 years of smoking. And Randy was a short sloppy man with a beer
belly and shabby cloths. I recall to
myself, Tulare is a fucking weird place.
In the room to my right, the size of a living room, there
were centrifuges the size of washing machines lining all the walls and a row
down the middle? And next to the door was
a large freezer filled with blocks of dry ice. I know because a customer came
in to by some dry ice while we were there. My colleague and I are looking at each other
like, “What the hell kind of place is this?”
It’s supposed to be an ultra-high purity fetal bovine serum
plant. And we’re trying to sell them the most premium filters that cost $400-$500
each? We got to see the filtration process and the
production operation. It was a little
room in the back with a little filter stand and stacks of 1 liter glass bottles
full of serum in a refrigerator. The
fetal bovine serum was probably worth thousands of dollars per liter. These old coots are rich. I think they were rich because they were
using cheap-ass filters instead of the high dollar ones were have to sell. This is going to be a tough sell, but they
could buy $5K per month in filters in this dump. And I have a sales goal to sell this high
purity line. So I persisted.
We gave our song and dance and I remember eventually
selling, or giving, them some filters to try.
I remember after getting to know Ross and Randy, I asked Randy one day, “How
did you ever get into the fetal bovine serum business?”
He said his PhD brother at USC mentioned that he needed fetal
bovine serum for the lab. There is a
short supply and it’s really expensive. And Randy had a friend that worked in a slaughter
house in Paso Robles. So he contacted
his friend to ask if he could help.
Randy explained that cow fetuses are really hard to come by. At the slaughter house, they do not want to
slaughter a pregnant cow. It’s a real
mess to deal with. But if you are in
need of fetal blood, that is the place to look.
Sometime a pregnant cow is unknowingly slaughtered. Randy’s friend would call him and he would head
to Paso Robles and bleed the fetus of its blood and take it back to
Tulare. The blood from the fetus is more
pure because it’s naturally filtered and protected from antibodies and all the
biology stuff that I forgot from high school.
“What’s with all the centrifuges and dry ice?” I ask.
The blood is centrifuged to separate the serum from the red blood. He explained, “We didn’t have much money back
then and we could not afford new centrifuges. We searched all over for used
centrifuges. (How did one find a
centrifuge without the internet 25 years ago?)
We would buy whatever we could and fix them up. Pretty soon we had lots of them and we would
sell the one’s we didn’t use. So we got
into the refurbished centrifuge business.
And when we got orders for serum, we had to ship it with dry ice. We were buying so much dry ice we eventually started
selling it and got into the dry ice business.
It’s great for Halloween parties”.
On a following visit to Tulare, I stopped by this thriving empire
to see my buddies. Ross was there alone
with an office clerk. I asked about Randy
and learned he had recently passed away.
I was sad but not surprised. And
I was not surprised that Ross was still chain smoking like a chimney.
Great steak topping:
crumble some blue cheese with chopped garlic, butter and olive
oil. And the money part, add some chopped
roasted pecans. It is great on top of
your favorite steak.
Great new wine discovery:
I got a hit on facebook (someone is monitoring us). It was an ad for Varozza Vineyards in
Napa. I checked out the web site and saw
that they are an ultra small winery and that they barrel age for 36 months and
bottle age for 18-24 months. I was going
to the geothermal geysers for a sales call and made an appointment on the way back. They sell most of the grapes they grow in the
heart of Napa but make 125 cases of cabernet sauvignon and petite sirah. Both were great but the petite sirah had the
edge. It’s massively full bodied and
wonderfully balanced after all the aging and dark like octopus ink. I can recommend it at $40/bottle.
