Memoir of Lucky Joe

Book excerpt: America is still a land of opportunities, when you have good friends and schoolmates, appreciative bosses who value your potential to contribute to their enterprise,regardless of your race,national origin or speaking English with foreign accent. But it is not inevitable that you can have a great journey in America. God luck will make it happen. This is a true story of Joe's lucky journey in America. Joe came to Seattle with a foreign student visa from Taipei in 1960. His first job in Seattle was a night shift janitor at Doctors Hospital so he might go to school during the day. Two years later his physics laboratory partner got him a job as a part time technician at Being Airplane Company. the Boeing experience got him a teaching assistantship in electrical engineering department of Johns Hopkins university in 1963. He finished his Ph.D. dissertation in 1968. He taught Communication Systems at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1968 -1969. Not by planning he luckily entered into American military industrial complex world beginning 1970. First Joe received his security clearance from US Department of Defense in 1970 at Page Communications Engineering company in Washington, D.C. and then the clearances from the US Navy, US Army and US Department of Energy. He was naturalized to be American citizen in July of 1970. Between 1970 and 1987 he worked hard as a system analyst, operational analyst and project director for the US Navy and the US Army, reaching the top rank of GS-18 in Senior Executive Service of the US Government. He received one Outstanding civilian Service Medal from the Department of the Army and a Distinguished Public Service Award (medal) from the Secretary of the Navy. During this period he travelled all over the world for his job, by air, by land, on water and under water of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In 1987 he was hired as manager of strategic planning at Westinghouse Defense Group in Baltimore and chairman of Westinghouse annual R and D symposium(1988-1995). He was also appointed President of Westinghouse Electronic Systems International Marketing Company (1988-1992). He marketed electronics system of F-16s for more than twenty F-16 user countries. Grumman purchased Westinghouse Defense Group in 1995 and made him Director of special projects pursuing business opportunities in the post Soviet market in Moscow of New Russia and Cape Town of the new Republic of South African. Joe's interest in global technology issues took him to Planetary Defense workshop in 1995 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. the workshop was co-chaired by Dr. Edward Teller ( father of hydrogen bomb } and Dr. Eugene Shoemaker (discoverer of short comet). His interest in the future of defense industries attracted him to attend in 1996, the NATO Conference on defense industry conversion strategies at Perthshire of Scotland, UK in 1996. Joe retired from Grumman on march 1, 1998. It had taken him more than fifteen years to acknowledge in this book that how lucky he had been .