Here's an excerpt from the interview I'm doing with Tom Watson. This is when I first started at Fender in May of 1978. I was a neck buffer...

I kept working my ass off in neck buffing. I had hit “standard� (the quantity and quality mandated by management) within two weeks. My co-workers were pretty pissed, but we started getting along anyway. I ended up meeting more and more people who really did care about the product, unfortunately most of them were in no position to make a difference. The chasm between management and the factory workers was huge. I applied for every job posting that came up the first two months I was there. Finally one came up that I knew I was made for… Model Maker for Research and Development. I applied for it and I got it!

I worked for a guy named Pete Bell who was head of the Model Shop and another Model Maker named Dave Moehler. I had such a cool gig, I built the prototypes off of the drawings from the designers and engineers. I got to work with some really historical people like Freddie Tavares, Harold Rhodes, Ed Jahns, the list goes on and on. And I didn't just build guitars. I built amplifier chassis and boxes, piano parts, mixing consoles, drum parts… I even had to turn custom drum sticks… so it was very challenging and extremely interesting. I guess about a year or so after I started in the Model Shop, Dave quit. About the same time, Pete took over new responsibilities and I was made Supervisor of the shop. I hired long-time Service Center employee Steve Boulanger as the other Model Maker. He and I made a great team. Years later, when CBS laid off most of the employees, he would go on to Jackson and Valley Arts Guitars. I hired him into the Custom Shop in the late eighties, he is a great tooling guy.

Another year or so later, Greg Wilson, the Guitar designer with Freddie Tavares, took a sales job in the field. He and Freddie recommended me to fill his spot. What a freakin' honor, twenty three years old and I was made a Guitar Designer at Fender, working side by side with Freddie Tavares… wow. Freddie became like a father to me. He even called me his third son (no disrespect to his real sons, Terry and Freddie Jr.) He taught me the ins and out of guitar design, told lots of historical stories, made me take vitamins and told lots of lots of really bad, old jokes. He would even do one-armed pushups when artists would stop by, just to show them how “spry� he was. I loved him. What a great man.