Did you get to do a fair amount of traveling?

Oh a reasonable amount, yeah maybe three, four trips a year. Something like that.

Where to?

Well some of the trips were to this ASTM organization. There were times when I would be invited to go to a consumer company and give lectures to their people. I can remember I was very impressed with the trip down to one of the cigarette manufacturers, who were of course, using lots of corrugated to ship their cigarettes. But that is just an example of the sort of consultation that I did. So this leads basically down to the next set of questions, well when did you leave the Lab and why? Well I went to an ASTM meeting Louisville in 1983 and it was springtime and well, virtually like it is today although it was earlier in the year---I came back to the Lab and everything was dull and quiet here, there was just nothing going on you know. I said to myself, what am I doing here? Because we had salaries, [but] there were threats of layoffs and cuts and so on even back then, but the fact was that there was enough money for salary but there was not money for equipment or projects work. So you could sit and write reports for whatever you could put in them and sit at the desk and twiddle your thumbs but you could not really do a lot because of the shortage of operational funds. I think that condition has continued same way, perhaps even worse, right down to today.

And that was in 1983?

1983, yeah.