Oral-History:Marco Migliaro
About Marco Migliaro
IEEE Life Fellow, Marco Migliaro, received a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Pratt Institute in 1969 and he is a licensed Professional Engineer. He has more than fifty-five years of experience in the design, construction, installation, testing, and maintenance of electric generating stations and large industrial power systems. His technical fields also include stored energy emergency power systems, including stationary batteries.
Migliaro is the recipient of many awards and honors from IEEE and the greater technical communities in standards and electric power and energy. In 1988, he was elevated to IEEE Fellow “for contributions in the application and standardization of battery technology for industrial utility power systems.” The same year, he received the IEEE Standards Board Standards Medallion (1988) for "significant contributions to battery standards." In 1996, he received the IEEE Charles Proteus Steinmetz Award for "outstanding contribution to the development of standards in the field of power engineering and his innovative leadership in the IEEE Standards development process," and he was a recipient of an IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000. In addition to his volunteer work with IEEE-Standards Association, he is an active member of the IEEE Power & Energy Society and the IEEE Industry Applications Society.
Migliaro served as President and CEO of IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO) for almost twenty years (2003-2022), retiring as ISTO President in July 2022. He has been involved in the development of standards and standards activities for more than fifty years. The IEEE-ISTO was founded in January 1999, and he was one of four people appointed as a director on the IEEE-ISTO Board of Directors once the IEEE-ISTO was established. He was elected Chair of the Board of Directors in 2000 and became President in 2003. He also served terms as the President of the IEEE Standards Association and as the Vice President of Standards Activities of the IEEE.
Prior to working at IEEE-ISTO, Migliaro’s employment included Chief Electrical and I&C Engineer at FPL Nuclear Division (1990-2003); Technical Manager at ABB Impell (1988-1990); Senior Consulting Engineer at Ebasco Services, Inc., (1981-1988); Staff Engineer at Gibbs & Hill, Inc. (1978-1981); and Supervisor, Electrical Design Plant Section at American Electric Power (1969-1978). He also served as President of ESA Consulting Associates, Inc. (ESA) a consulting company that specialized in services related to emergency power systems for nearly twenty-five years from 1995 to 2018.
In addition, Migliaro has published more than forty technical papers and articles, contributed to four books including the Handbook of Power Calculations and the Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers, and served as editor of the first edition of the IEEE Stationary Battery Sourcebook. He also developed and taught seminars and workshops in the technical fields of stationary batteries and dc systems.
About the Interview
MARCO MIGLIARO: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, 17 and 28 November 2022
Interview #887 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
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Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Marco Migliaro, an oral history conducted on 17 and 28 November 2022 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Marco Migliaro
INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel
DATE: 17 and 28 November 2022
PLACE: Virtual via WebEx
Early life and Education
Hellrigel:
Today is November 17, 2022. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel. I am recording an oral history with Marco W. Migliaro. I am the Institutional Historian, Archivist, and Oral History Program Manager at the IEEE History Center. Mr. Migliaro is the recently retired President and CEO of the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization [IEEE-ISTO; https://ieee-isto.org/
]. He is a fifty-plus year expert on standards and an IEEE Life Fellow. He became an IEEE Fellow in 1988. Welcome, sir. I am recording this via WebEx from my house in New Jersey and Marco is at his house in Florida. Welcome, sir.
Migliaro:
Thanks very much, Mary Ann.
Hellrigel:
That is our header, and now we will get going. If you do not mind, sir, could you tell us the year you were born and where you were born?
Migliaro:
Sure. I was born in March of 1948 in Brooklyn, New York.
Hellrigel:
You grew up in Brooklyn?
Migliaro:
I was in Brooklyn for a little while. We lived close to Coney Island, but then my family moved out to Queens. We lived closer to JFK airport and the Nassau County line, in a town called Springfield Gardens.
Hellrigel:
Did you attend public school?
Migliaro:
Yes, I went to public school. I went to PS 137, which was one of the last wooden schools left in New York at that time. It was a six-room wooden school. At that time, Queens, in the Springfield Gardens area, was very rural. When we moved out there, we had three houses on our block, dirt roads, a lot of woods around us, and everything else. It was quite different than what you would see today. Then I went to Junior High School 59 and then I went to Brooklyn Technical High School as my high school.
Hellrigel:
When you moved out to Queens, this is in the early 1950s, and your parents bought a single-family home?
Migliaro:
Yes, a single-family home.
Hellrigel:
Today, people forget that the outer boroughs were far less developed than Manhattan and Brooklyn, even as late as the 1950s.
Migliaro:
That is correct. That is really correct.
Hellrigel:
If you would not mind, could you tell me your mother's name?
Migliaro:
Sure. My mother's name was Anna. Her maiden name was Dalton, and of course, she became Anna Migliaro.
Hellrigel:
What was her education?
Migliaro:
Her education, she had gone through high school, and she worked at New York Telephone for a number of years.
Hellrigel:
She worked at the New York telephone company as an operator or a clerk?
Migliaro:
That is correct. She was an operator for a while. She was directory assistance. She was customer service. So, she did a few different things in the telephone company.
Hellrigel:
She got this job out of high school?
Migliaro:
I believe so. She might have had some others, but that is the only one I recall.
Hellrigel:
Did she work while raising a family?
Migliaro:
No. She did not work while raising the family.
Hellrigel:
Your father's name, sir?
Migliaro:
My father was Marco Salvatore Migliaro.
Hellrigel:
His education and occupation?
Migliaro:
His education, he went through automotive high school in Brooklyn. When he came out, he wound up in World War II, and then he came back from World War II and continued to work for the US government. His background: he was an auto mechanic, a diesel mechanic. He was out in Fort Totten, New York, which is in Bayside, Queens, and that was sort of why we moved out to Queens. After the war, there were a lot of cutbacks in the government, but he still was employed with the government. However, his position changed, and he decided to open a gas station. He opened a gas station down in Coney Island. He had the gas station for a while in Coney Island, but unfortunately, around 1963 or so, he developed colon cancer and passed in 1964, May of 1964.
Hellrigel:
You were fairly young when that happened?
Migliaro:
Yes, I just turned sixteen years old.
Hellrigel:
At that point, did your mom go back to the telephone company?
Migliaro:
No, because I have a brother and a sister, she wanted to stay close to home. She worked in a facility right near home that was literally within walking distance. They manufactured supplies for bingo games.
Hellrigel:
Oh, wow. You mentioned you have a brother and a sister.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Are you the eldest?
Migliaro:
Yes, I am.
Hellrigel:
Your brother and sister, are they in technical fields?
Migliaro:
No, they are not. My brother's name is Dennis, and he is an auto mechanic, like my father. He graduated from Thomas Edison High School in Queens, and then he went to the Marine Corps. From the Marine Corps, he worked in the transit authority [Metropolitan Transit Authority, MTA] as a bus maintainer. After he retired from the transit authority [MTA], he moved to Florida. He moved to Florida ahead of me and then wound up as the fleet manager in Flagler County for the school system for the buses.
My sister's name is Annie. Annie finished high school and was in accounting and bookkeeping. She wound up always working locally because unfortunately, her husband passed away fairly early in his thirties from cancer, as well. She had two young children at the time. She worked for a company that sold boats, docked boats, showed boats, and stored boats. She kind of worked as their accounting person and I guess you would say gal Friday or office coordinator, if you will.
Hellrigel:
Office manager, clerical.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did she retire and move to Florida, too?
Migliaro:
No, she is still in New York. She is out in Lindenhurst, New York right now.
Hellrigel:
I like to ask people what they did for hobbies growing up. So, when you were growing up, did you have any hobbies?
Migliaro:
We went outside and played a lot. Like a lot of people, I played around with model trains, and I built model airplanes. I got involved with radio, trying to listen to shortwave radio and doing things. I got involved in building electronic kits. At that time, there were companies that would sell the kits, and you could build a radio or walkie talkie or lots of different things, so.
Hellrigel:
Heathkits or something?
Migliaro:
Yes, there were Heathkits and Allied. Yes, Heathkit was a big one.
Hellrigel:
Did you play sports or join any clubs in school?
Migliaro:
I was on the handball team for a little while in high school. As I said, our wooden school had only six rooms. It did not really have a playground. It had a kind of dirt lot in the back that we went out and did some things sometimes, but there was nothing. But then, at that time we always played out in the streets out there. All the kids on one block would get together and form a team and play the kids on another block.
Hellrigel:
Did you have any part time jobs or anything like that in high school?
Migliaro:
In high school, I delivered newspapers. I started delivering newspapers when I was about thirteen years old because I think that was the youngest you could be in delivering newspapers. But most of the time on the weekends, my dad would take us to the gas station. He and my brother would keep us busy down there. We would do things around the gas station, whether it be just cleaning up and washing parts, or doing oil changes, or some simple things that we could handle. Because of my inclination on some of the stuff, he used me a lot to rebuild generators and starters on cars. In those days, you could rebuild those things and put them back in rather than get a rebuilt one from the parts store. He would have me rebuild it for him and put it back in the car.
Hellrigel:
You and your brother went down there, so was your sister allowed to go down and monkey around at the station, too?
Migliaro:
My sister came down. Most times she would go to my grandma's house and stay there. Yes, she could come over there, too, but she did not get involved too much at the gas station itself.
Hellrigel:
In regard to the newspaper, were you delivering the Daily News or which paper?
Migliaro:
It was the Long Island Press, an afternoon newspaper, so I could go to school during the day and deliver papers at night. That was important because Brooklyn Tech was a two-hour commute by bus and subway from Springfield Gardens. I had to get up very early in the morning and catch a bus at 6 o'clock or so to get to school on time. Then I got home fairly late, but I could swing by and pick up my newspapers and deliver them.
Hellrigel:
Brooklyn Tech was one of the very competitive high schools to get into?
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
At what point did you decide you wanted to go to Brooklyn Tech and not one of the other high schools?
Migliaro:
I started to think about engineering, somewhere when I was about eleven or twelve years old.
Hellrigel:
How come?
Migliaro:
It was a particular guy who was an electronic technician. He did a lot with TV and things, and he was always at my dad's gas station. He always talked to me and basically encouraged me to take a look at engineering. Then I started to think about it. Then my uncle, John Alexander, who was married to my mother's sister, Lucille, my godmother. He encouraged me to think about Brooklyn Tech.
Hellrigel:
Was your uncle an engineer?
Migliaro:
No, he was working for Con Edison. He was a lineman.
Hellrigel:
At this point, what are your folks thinking about you? You are eleven or twelve years old, and you are thinking about becoming an engineer, so you had to go to college.
Migliaro:
No, I did not mind that. They were more concerned that I was going to travel two hours into Brooklyn to a neighborhood which was not the best neighborhood in the world at that time than they were about thinking about college or anything else at this point.
Hellrigel:
You get into Brooklyn Tech, and at this point, is it co-ed?
Migliaro:
No, no. Brooklyn Tech did not become co-ed until around 1979, I think, 1976 or 1979. I went in the 1960s, the early 1960s, because I graduated in 1964 from Brooklyn Tech.
Hellrigel:
It might be a dopey question, but what kind of subjects were you taking at Brooklyn Tech?
Migliaro:
Brooklyn Tech had a really good curriculum. It was a four-year high school and every year you basically took some sort or form of drafting. We had various drafting courses, including one semester on electrical circuits and drawing electrical circuits and sheet metal layouts and one semester on isometrics. Then they had various shops. You started with a pattern making shop and then you went to a foundry. They had a foundry at the school. Then you went on to machine shop. There was another course called industrial processes where they go through a lot of the processes to make products. Some of that was different types of woods and how they cure wood, how they dry them, how they prepare them, and how they got them. We studied various processes for making steel, aluminum, and copper. It was very, very comprehensive. Those are your first two years and in your third and fourth year you took a specialty. They had three different specialties in electrical engineering, including electric power, electronics, and broadcast. I took the electronics option, but in electrical, everybody took basic electricity. We always had shops that had labs that went along with them. In the electronics option, you specialized more in electronics, circuit design, and various things within electronics. In broadcast they had a radio station, WNYC broadcast from well, Brooklyn Tech. That was on the ninth floor. Brooklyn Tech had 6,000 boys in the school, so it was a huge school. In order to graduate from the broadcast option, you had to pass your second-class FCC license test.
Hellrigel:
WNYC is the public radio station.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Cool. What attracted you to electronics and not the other two?
Migliaro:
I cannot really give you an answer on that. It seemed to be maybe at that time, it was more popular. But by the time I graduated I had decided I really wanted to stick with power, so I never pursued electronics as a career. However, it certainly gave me some background in electronics. I really found that I probably had a leaning more towards power than to electronics, and that is what I focused on when I went to college.
Hellrigel:
What attracted you to power?
Migliaro:
Again, I cannot say 100 per cent for sure, but it just was the equipment, and you could see it. There were a lot of things that paid attention to and possibly some of the stuff. My uncle John had talked to me about things. I just felt that I was I was leaning more towards the power option.
Hellrigel:
The transistor was born in 1947, so you are coming of age in the age of the transistor. In power, post-World War II, there is expansion of electric service. There is thought of nuclear, so it was a growth period also for power. Broadcasting, I guess the attraction would be radio or television? I guess there were other options, you could have gone into mechanical engineering or chemical engineering at Brooklyn Tech?
Migliaro:
Oh, yes. They had a huge array of engineering options you could go into, including mechanical, chemical, architectural, aeronautical, civil, structural, and industrial.
Hellrigel:
What was your favorite subject at Brooklyn Tech?
Migliaro:
I guess if I have to look back, I do not know what it is and I do not want to call it a favorite, but it was certainly one of the most interesting. These industrial processes courses that I talked about before really got you down into how things were manufactured and how processes work. But there were lots of things they stressed with us at Brooklyn Tech. They were very careful about trying to tell us about problem solving and being very careful about following tracking your units and—
Hellrigel:
Cost effective measures.
Migliaro:
Yes, everything. It was and continues to be today a tremendous school.
Hellrigel:
What was your least favorite subject?
Migliaro:
Probably, my least favorite was one of the social science courses or maybe even English. I guess was not really fond of the English courses at that time, too, but the technical subjects were really interesting.
Hellrigel:
When I asked people that have gone to prep school, most of them say Latin or German were their least favorite subjects.
Migliaro:
Yes. The thing in Brooklyn Tech, is if you were in an engineering curriculum there was no requirement to take a language before you graduated. They had a college prep option for the person that wanted the tech education, but who was not quite sure of where they were going to go, or whether they really wanted engineering or not. That was college prep, and that option did require language. The only two languages they offered at that time were German and French because they were both technical languages.
Hellrigel:
You come from an Italian background, so do you speak Italian?
Migliaro:
Oh no. In my family, my great-grandparents were the immigrants from Italy, so my grandparents were actually born here in the United States. Actually, my grandparents were born in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Hellrigel:
They were part of the earlier wave of immigrants from Italy.
Migliaro:
Yes. In my father's family, there were ten children and the first five spoke Italian. My father was the sixth. The last five did not speak Italian at all.
Hellrigel:
That bridge was unnecessary for them and many immigrants.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
What did you do for fun? You played sports in the neighborhood.
Migliaro:
I played some sports in the neighborhood, but I listened to a lot of music, different kinds of music, and I actually read a lot. I just read books, mostly reading not technical books, but popular books at the time and historical books. I like history talks about the past and the present. I remember reading one on Abraham Lincoln and some other historical figures.
Hellrigel:
Did your family get out of town for the summer or weekends for vacation?
Migliaro:
Not usually. Sometimes we went to places on the weekend, but with my dad and his job and the gas station, it was pretty much on weekends. He usually worked on Saturday. Then on Sunday we would get up, go to early mass on the way into Brooklyn, get down to the gas station, and maybe come home about noon. He would leave there at noon and leave some people there, so we did not go away much. If we did, sometimes we would go to Coney Island, or we would go to Alley Pond out in Queens, places like that. It was rare that we left New York State.
Hellrigel:
I guess you were either a Brooklyn Giants or a Brooklyn Dodgers fan?
Migliaro:
Yes, the Dodgers and I followed them when they went to Los Angeles. But eventually, I became a Mets fan, when the Mets were a new team in New York.
Hellrigel:
What did you think of the move to Los Angeles?
Migliaro:
Well, of course, I did not like it at the time.
Hellrigel:
You were young.
Migliaro:
We felt like we were abandoned.
Hellrigel:
Then are you a Giants football fan?
Migliaro:
No, Jets.
Hellrigel:
These are almost obligatory questions for New York area people.
Migliaro:
No, that is okay.
Hellrigel:
I am trying to figure out your life story growing up. New York was a bustling place and complex metropolitan region. Did your mom let you ride the subway and explore New York?
Migliaro:
Oh, yes, yes, we did. After time, my parents were always nervous a little bit about letting us out and exploring on the subways and things. There were times for exploring, especially when I was in high school because Brooklyn Tech draws from all five boroughs. The people I became friends with and friends until today lived in the Bronx and some lived in Staten Island. Of course, at that time, there was no Verrazano Bridge, so I started taking the ferry over to Staten Island. We visited each other, so we had to ride the subway and the buses to get where we needed to go. And, of course, there were times when we just would ride the subways and buses to see how many stops, we could make and how many free transfers we could get to ride as many trains as you could.
Hellrigel:
Right. Many subway stops have free transfers, so you would run up and over to either catch another line or change directions. There are a few where you cannot go up and over and transfer for free.
Migliaro:
Yes. There are some that the transfer takes longer like the Times Square shuttle to the Flushing line and things like that. It is a fairly long walk. We did those kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
When you were in high school did you think a lot about going to college and your options? How do you end up at Pratt [Institute]?
Migliaro:
I really ended up at Pratt because I was graduating in 1964 in June, my dad passed in May of 1964, and my mom really did not want me going anywhere that was far away. I also needed to work to get through school, so I looked at schools that offered a co-op option. Pratt was one of those schools and Pratt had two cooperative options. They had a cooperative program where they worked with the US Navy down at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Both co-op programs were five-year programs as opposed to four-year programs. The Navy one was pretty attractive in the way that it was structured, but you had a six-year commitment to work for the U.S. government when you finished your education. The other one was an industry co-op program where you went out and interviewed with various corporations, and there was no commitment at the end. In addition, in the latter program, if you were also unhappy with a co-op employer, you could switch to a different employer, so, take an interview and switch to a different employer, so I chose that industry cooperative program.
Hellrigel:
The co-op program with the Navy seemed like ROTC.
Migliaro:
You were not in the military because it was a civilian job. There were some really good things about it in that the Navy paid for your books every semester. There was a bigger monetary commitment on the part of the Navy. I think your first and last year they paid your tuition completely; however, during the middle three years you had to pay the tuition, but every semester you got your books. In the private industry co-op program, there were no additional payments other than the salary you were paid while you worked at the company.
Hellrigel:
When you are doing this, do you remember which industry and which companies you co-oped with?
Migliaro:
Yes, I started with a company named Filtron. Back when it was still electronics oriented, they made filters and screen rooms. They were in Flushing, New York. It was pretty nice because in 1964, if you remember, the World's Fair was in New York. When you walked out the Filtron door you were on Fowler Avenue and there was a gate going into the World’s Fair almost directly across the street. On many of the nights I had to work, some of us went to the World's Fair, so it was a good location to work. I worked there for a while for I think two co-op sessions. Then because my interest was more in power, I wound up working for Best Foods, which was CPC International at the time. I worked in the Best Foods Division in Bayonne, New Jersey in the plant engineering department. I was closer to power, but most of the projects I worked on when I was at Best Foods were either mechanical engineering or some other type of engineering other than electrical.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that would be all the food processing lines.
Migliaro:
Yes, food processing and - -.
Hellrigel:
They were subsequently bought out by Unilever, years later.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You worked in the plant engineering department in Bayonne, New Jersey and you commuted from home. Did participating in the co-op program mean you worked full-time one semester and attended college classes full-time the next semester, alternating semester-to-semester?
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Then you stayed with Best Foods for the remainder of your undergraduate years?
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
At this point, the United States has the military draft, so were you eligible for that or as an engineer did you have a deferment?
Migliaro:
As an engineering student, I was able to get a deferment, a student deferment, at that time. Later, I went to work and when I had my first job, you also were able to get a deferment, but then the lottery came in. I remember watching that night to see where my birthday showed up and I was Number 362 in the lottery.
Hellrigel:
You had a high number.
Migliaro:
Yes, I was a real high number. They then announced later on that you could drop your deferment and go in the pool and that is what I did. I dropped my deferment and went in the pool. I do not remember how high they got that year, but they never got close to 362. I can tell you that.
Hellrigel:
Right, so you were not called up. At this point, did you get a job offer from Unilever?
Migliaro:
Well, from Best Foods, yes.
Hellrigel:
Excuse me. Sorry. Yes, it is Best Foods at this time.
Migliaro:
Yes, I did. I had a job offer and that was pretty comforting because you had a job offer really before you graduated.
Hellrigel:
When you are at the co-op, you are at Pratt. Were there any mentors or anybody you remember who was influential either at Pratt or the co-op posts?
Migliaro:
One person who was pretty influential and is also very active in IEEE is Dr. Eleanor Baum. I do not know whether you have ever met Dr. Baum.
Hellrigel:
I have not met her, but I know of her.
Migliaro:
She was my controls professor.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
She was very, very, very good. Another professor who was active in IEEE, but not as active as Dr. Baum, was Arthur Seidman, Professor Arthur Seidman.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I have heard of him, too.
Migliaro:
Then another influential person was Dr. Haroun Mahrous, the chairman of the department and active in IEEE. I do not know whether you have ever run across him.
Hellrigel:
No.
Migliaro:
He was a bit older than everybody at that point and he was very good and very, very helpful.
Hellrigel:
You became active in IEEE as a student?
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did Dr. Baum or the other professors encourage you to join IEEE?
Migliaro:
There was encouragement from them. I cannot tell you which one or all of them, but they all talked about IEEE and student membership. If I am not mistaken, I became a student member and got involved in 1967.
Hellrigel:
Why did you become a student member? Do you recall any of the student activities?
Migliaro:
We did not necessarily do very much, but we did get together and meet and talk. Some of the things available from IEEE might not have been as much as there are today, but it gave us time to come together and talk. There were some guest speakers, and they were always pretty interesting. I cannot tell you exactly what, but I do remember one of our professors, Dr. F. Assadourian gave a talk on antennas which I always remember. That was his specialty. It was antennas and he had come from industry.
Actually, the real key is Dr. F. Assadourian, who was good, and Professor Seidman. Both of them came out of industry and they had a lot of good industry experience. They really helped us understand a bit about what we were going to see when we went in the industry. And Professor Seidman was also especially good in labs. I had him for a couple of labs and he was always pretty good. He would tell stories, and we would breadboard circuits at that time, and he would say, oh, if you do not know what to do, add a capacitor, or something like that.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Figure it out.
Migliaro:
Yes. Let us try this 50k resistor and see what it looks like. He was very down to earth, and it really gave us a good feeling. At least he gave me a good feeling as to what you might run up against in industry as opposed to what you saw in a classroom. Of course, we had slide rules in those days. We did not have calculators, so we did not do it to nine decimal places. We would come out with something and say, well, it was 52.53 or something, and he would say, I know, just make it 58 or whatever it was. It was kind of interesting
Hellrigel:
This may have been appealing because it was a practical experience too with the exposure to industry as opposed to academic equations and modeling.
Migliaro:
Yes, it really was good. I guess it showed us that there were more than equations to the real world.
Hellrigel:
Often when I interview people, they will talk about the differentiation between theory people and hands-on people, but it seems in Pratt, you learned to do both.
Migliaro:
Yes, we had labs virtually every semester. There were always labs and the other thing about it is that the co-op program, the Navy co-op program, had been in force for many years, but the industry co-op program was actually brand new. My class was the first actual class that went into that industrial program. There was a professor who kind of guided us along the way. His name was Stanley Greenwald. He was a mechanical engineer. He got this concept of a co-op program and put it in place at Pratt. We were the first class, so all three years. Your first and last year, you are solid school, and your mid three years, you are really on trimester. It is work study.
The classes were very small. When I say very small, there were probably under twenty students in our classes or technical classes for the co-op class. That gave us a really good opportunity to interface very closely with our professors and to really get a lot of benefit from them, from what they knew and their knowledge. Again, you had some that were hands-on, and you had some that were pretty much theoretical. We had one who was very theoretical, and he was a great professor, too, but he was a very demanding professor. His name was Dr. Howard Boyet, and he was a physicist. He taught waves theory, and he really was very hard on us to make us learn and memorize things and proofs and all this stuff. But, if you got him into a lab, he basically could hardly turn on in an oscilloscope. He would always ask one of the students to help. He would say, “get this thing to work for me. Show me what is up here.”
Hellrigel:
I have recorded a lot of oral histories with the superconductivity people [IEEE Council on Superconductivity] who were physicists. They may have gone to physics programs as opposed to engineering because that is where they got the funding. Many of them ran labs for the professors because they could build stuff and fix things, like you mentioned.
At this point, are your classes co-ed?
Migliaro:
Yes. In the electrical curriculum at that time, there was only one female electrical engineering student. Mechanical had a few more, and of course, mathematics had some females, but primarily it was all male.
Hellrigel:
There are a few oral histories with Dr. Baum, and she is also an IEEE Life Fellow, I believe.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
You took her class?
Migliaro:
Yes, controls engineering.
Hellrigel:
How was that course?
Migliaro:
It was great. She had a good way of teaching, she just had a good style, and she got her point across.
Hellrigel:
Was she one of the few women professors?
Migliaro:
Oh, yes, yes. In electrical engineering, she was the only woman professor. I think they were good friends, but in mechanical engineering, there was, I think, only one female professor as well and that was Dr. C. Fazzolari, and I had her also. I either had her for statics or dynamics, I cannot remember which, but I believe she and Dr. Baum were pretty good friends.
Hellrigel:
At this point, you are going through industry, and you are doing the co-op. Did this give you enough money for tuition, books and pocket change?
Migliaro:
Well, almost enough. I worked weekends in a gas station pumping gas. I did that and I did take a couple of student loans at that time. The student loan program was very different than it is today because they only would cover tuition. You had to bring your tuition bill.
At that time, because I was in engineering, I was eligible for what were national defense loans, so any loans I took out were national defense loans.
Hellrigel:
You lived at home?
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
How long was that commute?
Migliaro:
About two hours. Brooklyn Tech is within walking distance of Pratt Institute. If you walk up DeKalb Avenue, you hit the other one.
Hellrigel:
As you are going through this, did you ever consider going on in graduate school?
Migliaro:
Yes, I did. Actually, I started graduate school at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. At that time, it was called Newark College of Engineering.
I can tell you now or I can tell you later what happened. At that time, the company I was working for put me into a two-year power systems course, and I had to spend all my time in that power systems course because that was right up my alley as to what I was working on and the field I was in. I did the two years in the power systems course that my employer sent me to and then I really never got back to graduate studies. When I was doing graduate work, I was in electrical engineering with the power option, and I minored in mathematics. I also minored in mathematics in Pratt as well. What I was going to say is being in the co-op program had a certain advantage in that when I was on my work semester, I used to take my social sciences course because most of them involved a lot of reading.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Migliaro:
I used to take them at night at Pratt Institute. I would drive from Bayonne back to Pratt and take my social science courses at night while I was off, which wound up causing me to have lots of open time in my junior and senior years, and I spent that time taking mathematics courses. I took a couple of industrial engineering courses as well.
Hellrigel:
I taught at Stevens [Institute of Technology] for a number of years, and the co-op students normally took their social sciences and humanities course at nighttime during their co-op semester.
Migliaro:
Yes.
American Electric Power
Hellrigel:
I would have them from 6 p.m. until 9 p.m. one night per week. I also taught at New Jersey Institute of Technology for one year and I also had co-op students at nighttime.
At this point, I believe, your first job is with the American Electric Power Company. While you are working with them, they are doing a two-year training with all these power engineering things, and you are taking some courses at Newark College of Engineering?
Migliaro:
No. I had started with American Electric Power, and I was taking my courses at Newark College of Engineering
I do not remember whether I was either two or three years at American Electric Power, and there were two courses that were being offered in the power field.
Since electronics was the big thing, many schools had dropped their power options, so even at Pratt, I only had one power course, one true power course in my five years there.
So, AEP selected engineers and sent them to one of two courses. One was with General Electric. General Electric had a course up in Schenectady that was a one-year course, and it was essentially two days a week, I think, Thursdays and Fridays. The people that took that course would drive up to Schenectady on Wednesday, be there Thursday and Friday, and then drive home.
The nice thing about that was that in Schenectady, Union College also offered an option for them to get their master's within the year by then taking courses at Union College. Most of the people from AEP and the local utilities, if we call them local, the New York area or drivable, used to drive up and back. But people coming in from California, from maybe Pacific Gas Electric or people coming from Europe, would reside at GE all week. They really were there all the time and most of them would take advantage of going to Union College and getting their master's degree.
At the time, the people who ran that school at General Electric left General Electric and formed the new company called Power Technologies Incorporated. Lionel Barthold, who is the president of PES [IEEE Power Engineering Society which is now IEEE Power & Energy Society] at one time, was the president of Power Technologies Incorporated. They offered a competitive course to General Electric’s, but they came to New York City and the class was held at the Con Edison Building. We would go to school every Monday, but it was a two-year course instead of a one-year course because you are only going to school one day a week. You had lots of homework, and we had exams, so it took a lot of time to do that. I had basically stopped working on my master's at that time. By the time I finished, I had such a great education in power systems and that is really my field. I did not feel there was any need to continue with a master’s back at Newark.
Hellrigel:
Did you ever think of going out for a Ph.D. to go into teaching and research?
Migliaro:
I can tell you what I have thought about it, but no, I just figured that I had what I needed to do and what I wanted to do at this point. I actually did do a lot of teaching later on.
Hellrigel:
Right. You are working for American Electric Power, so how did you get that job?
Migliaro:
Well, obviously through an interview.
Hellrigel:
Right. Right. Did you apply to a bunch of power companies?
Migliaro:
No. What happened is that in 1969, the job market for engineers was actually pretty good, and many of these companies came to campus and they sent teams down to interview you. If they liked you, they would invite you in for a further interview in the office. AEP came in and interviewed us, and I was invited in for an interview, which was essentially a full day interview. I saw twelve different people probably, and then I was made a job offer by them. I probably had about ten or twelve job offers at that time when I came out of school.
Hellrigel:
All in power?
Migliaro:
All in power. There was one interview I went on which was kind of interesting with Shell Oil. When I walked to the interview, the interviewer told me right away, he says, I know you are an electrical engineering student, but you are never going to be an electrical engineer if you come to Shell. We are interviewing for geologists, and we are going to send you to school. If you interview and you select this job, we are going to send you back to school to become a geologist. And the reason we do that is we find electrical engineers make the best geologists because they can model everything as electrical circuits.
Hellrigel:
You could visualize it and figure it out?
Migliaro:
Right. I thanked him and I left the interview because I was coming up on finishing five years of college and the thought of becoming a geologist just was not in my plans.
Hellrigel:
And at this point, what did your mom think about your accomplishments? That is quite a few interviews and offers.
Migliaro:
Yes, she was happy, and she thought it was great. But we never made much of a big deal about it. I am not—as a person, I do not tend to say much about anything.
Hellrigel:
But she must have been pretty excited; a college graduate and solid employment.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes, they were.
Hellrigel:
How did she celebrate your college graduation?
Migliaro:
Oh, well, we had a party. We had a party and my aunts and uncles had come, but it was only—I graduated a short time after my father had passed, so.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that is a sad time, and not really a time to celebrate.
Migliaro:
It was not maybe as big a celebration as it might have been.
Hellrigel:
Also, your dad was sickly as you were going through high school.
Migliaro:
Yes. [My father passed away one month before I graduated high school.]
Hellrigel:
Your mother was probably pretty proud and pretty excited.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes.
Hellrigel:
Then you have a job with American Electric Power. Where was this company based? Was it in New York City?
Migliaro:
It was in the City (New York City). It was at 2 Broadway in Manhattan.
Hellrigel:
Then you could continue to live at home?
Migliaro:
Yes, I continued to stay at home.
Hellrigel:
That must have made your mom happy. First born in an Italian family, a college graduate, you get to stay at home, and you are well-employed. The family stays together. It is not like you said the day after graduation, goodbye, I am going to San Francisco.
Migliaro:
Yes. Yes.
Joining the IEEE Power & Energy Society
Hellrigel:
And you are at this company, and you survived their training, and they have made you an up-and-coming power engineer. At this point, you are still involved with IEEE?
Migliaro:
Yes. American Electric Power was extremely supportive of IEEE.
Hellrigel:
In what ways?
Migliaro:
They wanted you to be active at meetings, local section meetings. They wanted you to be active in the Society. [The IEEE Power Engineering Society is now the IEEE Power & Energy Society.] They wanted to make sure you were a member. At that time, a lot of firms and consulting firms in the power field concentrated on making sure you had your professional engineers license and work towards that. AEP really did not care much about that, but they did care about professional memberships and that is regardless of your discipline. The mechanical engineers were very proactive in ASME, the civil engineers were very active in ASCE, and a number of the AEP employees became at some point, the presidents of [IEEE] Power Engineering Society and others, so that they had a lot of participation.
I had come out of school in June of 1969. I actually graduated on Friday and went to work for them on Monday around the time for the Winter Power Meeting [IEEE Power Engineering Society Winter Meeting], which was in January of 1970. My boss at that time, who I am sure was Mel Olken who was essentially my first boss at American Electric Power [AEP]. Do you know Mel?
Hellrigel:
No.
Migliaro:
Oh, okay. Mel was the executive director of the IEEE Power Engineering Society for a while. My first boss was actually a fellow named Bill Morgan. When I got to AEP, I was also very interested in getting out to the plants. When you first come into AEP, you go on a rotation for the summer, and you hit about two or three or four different departments. I spent a few weeks in each one of them to just kind of learn what they do.
One of my assignments was in generation, and I really enjoyed that. I enjoyed the thought of the power plants and design of power plants and I wanted to get out and see the plants because our plants were in the Midwest. American Electric Power was a holding company that owned seven electric utilities in the Midwest of the United States. I wanted to get out and see the plants. At that time, Bill Morgan, who was the section head, came in from the field. He embraced that and he actually got me an assignment for a couple months out at a plant in West Virginia that was just being started up. I became part of the startup crew, the electrical startup crew out there. During that time period, Bill Morgan left the company, and Mel Olken became the new section head, so by the time I got back, Mel was my supervisor.
Mel Olken came to me, and he gave me a paper that was going to be presented at a Winter Power Meeting and said, I would like you to review this, and I would like you to develop a set of comments that you can go to the meeting, and you can actually present your comments at the meeting. To me, this was great. I was only out of school for a few months. I did what he said to do, and I sent those comments in. It happened to be a Working Group report. The paper was published, it was on a Working Group report. The chairman of the Working Group called and said, I would like you to be on a Working Group if you are interested. I went back to Mel and said, hey, they want me to join their Working Group. He says, yes, go ahead, so I wound up on my [first] Standards Working Group in 1969. I [submitted my discussion] near the end of the year like December, and then in January I went to the Winter Power Meeting, and I presented my comments at the meeting. After the paper was presented, they responded to the comments, and I have been involved in standards ever since.
Hellrigel:
Wow. That was a quick run up the hill.
Migliaro:
Yes. It was incredible.
Hellrigel:
At this point, you join PES. It was known as the IEEE Power Engineering Society at that time. Now it is the IEEE Power & Energy Society.
Migliaro:
Yes. Well, I already had in my memberships, I had Power Engineering Society and Industry Applications [IEEE Industry Applications Society – IEEE IAS], because those were the two areas that were closest to what I was involved in, and those are still Societies I still belong to today.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Migliaro:
I toyed with the [IEEE] Computer Society for a while. I picked up a membership, but then dropped it after a while because it really was not what I was doing. Yes, I became part of the Power Engineering Society at that time.
Hellrigel:
Did AEP pay your membership and pay for you to go to conferences?
Migliaro:
No, they never paid for membership. However, they paid for you to go to conferences. Usually, they would give you dinner money or whatever, if you went to the Section meetings. They encouraged their engineers to be participants in their professional society, whatever their discipline was. That is the one thing I have got to tell you.
Hellrigel:
How accepting was Power Engineering Society to you, a young engineer? How did you find your welcome?
Migliaro:
I found a great welcome. I mean I was sitting with a roomful of people, and I probably was the youngest person there. I do not know for sure, but I probably was the youngest engineer there. I was accepted, without any real issues. A lot of times, it was kind of funny, this was on a committee, and I was trying to make some suggestions. A lot of times, the comments I used to get back in the meeting were, well, anyone who is familiar with that, knows that we always do that anyway. So, they did not want to put it in the standard. I was trying to add some extra words and say, hey, you really should put that down because, you tell me, everybody knows it, but I did not know it.
Hellrigel:
Yes, more wordsmithing was necessary.
Migliaro:
So, we were talking. They kept saying that, no, people know that, so we do not need to put it in. But I never had any problems, and we got a lot of things done and got a lot of comments. I made my comments, and some got in there, and some did not. That is the name of the game.
Then as I was involved in the WG, the chairman of the Working Group recommended me to the subcommittee, the Station Design Subcommittee, for membership. I do not know, but that was after maybe a year or two. I could look up dates if I had to. I joined the Station Design Subcommittee. I went back to Mel [who] at that time, was still my supervisor and I said, hey, I have got an opportunity to join the Station Design Subcommittee. He said, sure, no problem, and I participated at the subcommittee level and then eventually became a member of the Power Generation Committee of Power Engineering Society and ultimately became the Chair of the Power Generation Committee at some point later.
Hellrigel:
Wow. [IEEE] President [K.J. Ray] Liu likes people to think of IEEE as their professional home, and that seemed to work for you from the beginning.
Migliaro:
It did. As you said earlier, a lot of people were around the table. Some of these people were vice presidents, people that represented manufacturers, they were vice presidents of their organization. Some of the members of the committee that came out of the utility industry were the chief engineers at their corporations. Yes, you got me sitting there, just a new engineer coming out, and it was incredible. IEEE has been part of my whole career. I mean, from the first job at American Electric Power and every job I had after that somehow was tied to somebody I knew from IEEE.
Hellrigel:
At this point, are you going to Section’s meetings back in the New York City?
Migliaro:
When I could. In New York City that was the New York-New Jersey Section. When I could, I would go to them because, again I had a two-hour commute back, and it all depended on what we were doing. But I did try to go to a number of the Section meetings.
Hellrigel:
Did you use mass transit or were you driving your zippy sports car?
Migliaro:
No. Of course, working in Manhattan, most of the times, you use mass transit.
Hellrigel:
Now that you are starting your career, do you have any hobbies, such as building cars or radios?
Migliaro:
No, I think I was really trying to come up to speed in the power industry. At that time, I spent a lot of time with technical literature learning things, trying to learn things. And AEP also sent us to other courses that were outside courses summit, some of the General Electric courses in Schenectady, some locally, but they were very, very big on educating their engineers.
Hellrigel:
At this point you are working, and you have gone to PES, the big winter and spring conferences, are you getting attracted into any other IEEE conferences?
Migliaro:
Oh, yes, actually the main reason why I was always at the Winter Power Meeting, because at that time, the PES never rotated that meeting, it was always at New York. It was at the Hilton Hotel across from Madison Square Garden. So, every year, it was there. And that was just a subway ride up to the Statler Hilton Hotel and we were in the office, we would have a schedule, we would have the program there. We would have a schedule, and each of us marked the sessions we wanted to attend. Then they would coordinate the list and they would say too many people are going into this, but somebody's got to stay back in the office and whatever they did. So, we were always up there at that meeting. The Summer Meeting was in different places, and a lot of times, I did not go to Summer Meeting unless it happened to coincide with a Power Generation Committee meeting. The Power Generation Committee typically did not meet at the Summer Meeting, so there was no reason for me to be out there.
Hellrigel:
At this point, I guess you are getting some time to go on vacations?
Migliaro:
Yes, I took some vacations. Yes, and went to different places. But a lot of times if I could, if I went somewhere interesting, I would stay a couple extra days or something and spend a little time at another location. But yes.
Hellrigel:
I know at some point, you get your PE license, professional engineering license, so when do you work on that?
Migliaro:
Actually, I worked on it, and it took a while. I was pretty active in IEEE, and of course, in the [IEEE] Power Engineering [Society and the IEEE] Industry Applications [Society]. Also, you mentioned other conferences. I got involved in the [IEEE] Joint Power Generation Conference and PES was involved in that. Three societies were involved; ASME, ASCE, and IEEE ran that conference. I wound up on that committee that they call the Special Technical Conferences Committee of PES, and I became the Chair. I think my meeting was in 1988, in Philadelphia. So, I chaired the Joint Power Generation Conference back in 1988, in Philadelphia and you had a whole team for the meeting itself. Usually, one of the local utilities, at that time it was Philadelphia Electric, provided a lot of support to us for personnel for registrations and everything else. The Joint Power Generation Conference kind of folded maybe in the mid-1990s, or something. They just could not get enough interest in it anymore.
On my PE license. When I finally got that too, it was when I had left the utility industry and went to the consulting industry because the consulting industry stressed the license more. I had to kind of buckle down and start studying again, and then I got my PE license.
Hellrigel:
You are a PE in Florida?
Migliaro:
My exam was actually in New Jersey because I was living in New Jersey at that time. I had gotten married by that time, and I was living in New Jersey. I have my license in New Jersey—well, they are all inactive now, more retired status because I am retired. I had New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Florida, so five states.
Hellrigel:
Wow, that is a lot of exams. Are they cross honored?
Migliaro:
Yes, they crossed. The only one that was a little bit more difficult, and it was not that difficult, was in Massachusetts. In the state of Massachusetts, you had to actually provide samples of your work. So, I had to dig up calculations I had made and specifications I had written. They had a requirement that it could be no more than I think one inch thick, and it had to be on 8.5x11 sheets. It actually went to a board member who reviewed your work and decided whether you had the right stuff to be admitted in Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, my license was in electrical engineering. All the other states, the licenses are a professional engineer. Basically, the wording is you are free to practice any discipline as long as you feel you have competence in that discipline, so that in theory I could have designed a pumping system if I felt that I could do that.
Hellrigel:
Do it. That is broad parameters.
Migliaro:
Yes, well it is. When I worked for Best Foods, one of my major accomplishments there, they had a plant that made mayonnaise and we made margarine, among other things. One of the engineers, who was a mechanical engineer and a really sharp individual, designed a new metering system to make margarine. Then he asked me in my co-op session to design that same system for mayonnaise, so I spent time doing piping friction calculations for mayonnaise flowing through pipes and things, so.
Hellrigel:
Oh, boy.
Migliaro:
I did some, and it worked out really good. I had him to guide me, but it was certainly a bit far from electrical engineering.
Hellrigel:
Right. And that is the world-famous Hellman's mayonnaise.
Migliaro:
Hellman's mayonnaise, you had nothing better.
Hellrigel:
You could go anywhere in the world and tell them that you worked on that product, and they will know who you are.
Excuse me. Now, you are working, and you mentioned you got married at this point. How do you deal with the work life balance?
Migliaro:
That is kind of tough because again where I was living, I was living in New Jersey, it was again, about another two-hour commute into the City (New York City) every day to go to work. So, you leave early in the morning, and you come home late at night, but you make time on the weekends, and most important you try and get some vacation time whether you take it as a couple of days here or there a week. I was never much into taking two weeks off at any one time. That is not me. So, most times, I would take a few days here and make long weekends or maybe a week. We always had lots of family come. I come from big families on both my mother and my father's side, so there were always things going on. We tried to do it that way.
Hellrigel:
I do not want to pry into your personal life, but do you have children?
Migliaro:
Yes, I have four children.
Hellrigel:
Any electrical engineers or power engineers amongst your children?
Migliaro:
No, the closest we get is an architect. My son is an architect.
Hellrigel:
Did they spend time heading off to IEEE conferences with you? Sometimes people take family to a conference.
Migliaro:
No. When we went somewhere with the kids, it usually was not an IEEE conference.
Hellrigel:
I heard some jokes about people are very happy, depending on where they are in their family stage, when the conferences are near a Disney theme park.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes, Disney. Of course, Disney was just opening up, but we went to Disney separately, a lot of the groups. It was kind of funny, but the major Working Group that I was on, I spent a lot of time doing standards work. The chairman of that group was from Cleveland Electric Illuminating. Most of our meetings were always held in Cleveland, so it is tough to get to Disney when you are in Cleveland, but yes. So, we did not go places. We typically did not go places that were that exciting with that Group.
Hellrigel:
Oh, I like Cleveland. I went to graduate school in Cleveland at Case Western Reserve University.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes, it is a nice city. I mean, I do not dislike it.
Hellrigel:
If it is summertime, you could go to a couple of amusement parks out on the islands down by Toledo and maybe an Indians baseball game. But otherwise, unless you were into sailing?
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
It does not have anywhere near the attractions of Disney.
Migliaro:
But with that Group, we spent time in Cleveland, we spent time in Knoxville, and Knoxville is a beautiful city, too. We spent time in Raleigh—not Raleigh, Charlotte, because Duke Power was a big participant in the Group as well.
Hellrigel:
What is the name of this Group you worked with?
Migliaro:
It was the IEEE Battery Working Group. That was the primary Group I was involved with later. Actually, today it is a full committee of the [IEEE] Power & Energy Society [IEEE PES Energy Storage and Stationary Battery Committee, ESSB].
Gibbs & Hill, Inc
Hellrigel:
I am jumping around a bit on you, but I am just going to talk a little bit about your different jobs and then we will pop back to IEEE.
Migliaro:
Sure.
Hellrigel:
You are an IEEE Fellow. I will ask later about being an IEEE Life Fellow, what it meant to become an IEEE Fellow, and things of that nature. But I know you are at AEP, and you are there about nine years and five months, so about ten years, so that is a substantial portion of your career. Then you are going to make a jump to Gibbs & Hill, Inc.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Where you will spend two-and-a-half years [at Gibbs & Hill, Inc.]. Why jump to this program? Oh, and I did notice on your LinkedIn page that at AEP you are implementing electrical design standards, standard materials standard, and standard standards.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
At this point, you are heading down the tunnel the standards. Did you think you would spend your career with standards? I mean, standards are important, but what attracts you to get to the standards work?
Then we will talk about this other company.
Migliaro:
Well, the standards work, once I got into industry standards it really interested me. When I came to AEP, AEP was a really, really good company, and I have said that. They have a lot of people that had extensive backgrounds and AEP had many things that they did standard. Okay. As far as when they did wiring, the wires were color coded. On a circuit breaker we had exactly—we knew the codes, and we knew the wiring numbers, and we knew everything. But none of this was written down. Nowhere. It was all in people's heads because it was a very close group. People came from the field; they came from the plants. They knew what our standards were, they came to New York to do design. They had a very unique way of working with power plant design, in that when they announced the plant, they would announce the staff at some point, the plant manager, the system manager, the electrical supervisor, the I&C [Instrumentation and Controls] supervisor, whatever. Those people would all be transferred to New York. And they would work with us in New York, the design team to design their plant. And those people coming in from the field had incredible knowledge as to what it took to run a plant and maintain it and operate it. So, they would give us all that input. Oh no, you cannot do it this way because we will never be able to get it out to maintain it, or we will never be able to do this or that. And they work side by side with us and we come up with a plant design. At some point as the plant was being built, they would go back to the plant, and they would start interfacing with construction to get this plant built. They would start taking over that operation. Then when you get ready to start up the plant, the engineers who design the systems would go to the plant and start up their systems. If you had not done it right, you would find that out pretty quick, when you were out there, and then have to make a fix whatever it was. So, it was a really good way of doing things, at least in my opinion.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Migliaro:
I thought was terrific. Around the 1970s or so, we had this gigantic boom in the power industry where plants would be put in at incredible speeds. There was a big demand for power. And people started to hire different companies and we hired other consultants to help us do all the work because it was a huge workload. When people started to ask, well, how do we do this, or how do we do that? They say, oh, I will do it the same as this or do it that way. What I found is that people would come from companies like Bechtel, or they would come from other companies, and they would say, hey, here is a thing we use Bechtel for. Consequently, the design was kind of—I do not want to say out of control, but it was being convoluted.
So, I approached Mel, and actually at this point, I told him, I would really like to develop a bunch of engineering standards and talk to some of the senior staff and put these down and documents that can be written and could be put in a book, and we can all follow. The one thing about AEP, if you had an idea, they never really stopped you. It did not make any difference. If you were an assistant engineer, and you wanted to do senior engineers' work, have at it. They were very supportive of anything you wanted to do. I always found him that way, and he gave me the go ahead. He said, go ahead. So, I wrote some of these up and we started this book.
Then I got involved in the design side with a fella named Tom Argenta. We did the same thing for the construction sites. We actually developed standards on how to hang a cable tray, how to support a cable tray, how to do this, how to take care of manholes and whatever it turned out to be. We put these down in books and we gave them to our contractor and said, these are our standards, this is what you have got to follow. It made things much simpler. So, that is why I got involved in it, and it just stayed with me. It was very important to see that we were consistent, and we could do that.
Hellrigel:
At this point, you are building nuclear plants, coal power plants, natural gas; what is going on?
Migliaro:
Primarily coal plants, although we were building our first nuclear [plant], and that is the plant I was working on. I was working on D.C. Cook. [The Donald C. Cook Nuclear Power Plant in Lake Charter Township, Michigan.] When I first came there, I worked on a plant which was Mitchell [Power] Plant in [Moundsville], West Virginia. Each of the engineers had responsibilities for the new design. At that time, we also had about fifty-five generating stations on the system, and in the group, each of us also had responsibility for engineering projects at the plants that were already running. I had a number of plants assigned to me, so I would have to take care of betterment engineering, e.g., if they needed a new air compressor, or they needed a new design on an alarm panel or something, we would do that as well. That is pretty much how everything functioned, but my primary responsibility was D.C. Cook nuclear in Bridgman, Michigan.
Hellrigel:
This is a time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when concern about the environment and technology developed. Founded in 1982, the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology’s roots is a committee founded in 1971. Did that ever interest you?
Migliaro:
Yes, it did, but I cannot say I spent a lot of time there. I was pretty busy with what I was doing, but I always felt that nuclear power was safe. I knew the extremes we went to make sure that the systems were basically safe, and the automated systems would shut down in the event of a problem.
Hellrigel:
It was a heady time in terms of the environmental movement and the nuclear power movement. Let us see, in 1979 the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant had a problem.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
I do not know, but how did Three Mile Island impact how you worked? You had made the jump to Gibbs & Hill by that point.
Migliaro:
Yes, at that point, Gibbs & Hill is kind of an interesting story. When I was in this Working Group, the first Working Group I was on, I told you, some of the members there were chief engineers in our organization, and the chief engineer at Gibbs & Hill was on that Working Group. After a while, he got to know me, and he got to see how I work within the Working Group. He was always asking me to come to work there, saying why don’t you send me a resume [because] I could use somebody like you. I never gave it much thought because I was very happy at AEP.
When I went with AEP, even at the time of the job interview, so going back to the job interview and when I took that job interview, they told me that we want to tell you we are at 2 Broadway right now, but we have been in the process of trying to acquire Columbus and Southern Ohio Electric. If we do acquire Columbus and Southern Ohio Electric, our chairman [and] the board made a statement that the New York headquarters will be moved to Columbus, Ohio. If that acquisition comes through, at that time, it did not mean a lot to me. But back at that time, I was ready to leave. Suddenly, the acquisition actually came through and it was going to take a while. It was going to take a couple of years. By that time, things had changed. I was married, I had kids, my mother was getting old, and I was not as interested in going to Columbus, Ohio as I was ten years before that, so I started to think about other options.
Actually, I went to a Working Group meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the chief engineer from Gibbs & Hill was there. He said, hey, I got a job for you if you are interested, and you want to send me your resume. I told him, yes. I said I would because I thought about it and said, at that time, companies were not so accommodating in vacation time. At AEP I had three weeks’ vacation, but when you went to another company, they were not going to give you three weeks' vacation. They would start you again. So, I said, if I hang around another two years, I know I am not going to go to Columbus. If I hang around another two years, I am going to be starting. If I leave now, by the time two years comes out, I will be building up to three weeks' vacation, so I sent him my resume, and I moved to Gibbs & Hill. When I did move to Gibbs & Hill, I went into the industrial arena, and I wound up as a lead engineer on a petrochemical project in Saudi Arabia.
Hellrigel:
Cool.
Migliaro:
It was a $33 billion project for Yanbu Industrial City. I did the power plants, the gas turbine power plants, and it was a combined power generation desalination plant for the industrial complex. So, when Three Mile Island hit, I would kind of out of nuclear, but I did, of course, follow it. We tried to get as much information as we could on what was going on at Three Mile Island, what had happened, and everything else. I assume that answers your question.
Hellrigel:
Yes, yes. I was in high school at the time, living in northern New Jersey, and between Indian Point and Three Mile Island, there was a lot of talk about meltdowns and risk.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
It was still the Cold War, too, so we occasionally would still have the duck and cover drills. So, it just was an interesting time to be of that age, when you are old enough to recognize what was going on. I am just curious. Now, you are working at G&H (Gibbs & Hill). Did you have to move to Saudi Arabia?
Migliaro:
No, we stayed mostly in New York. I did go to Saudi Arabia for visits. Most of my work was in New York, or believe it or not, Pasadena, California, because the key firm in the management for that project was Saudi Parsons Limited. They were headquartered in Pasadena, so we would go to Pasadena for meetings. I spent a lot of time in Pasadena, and I spent some time in Saudi Arabia. The only real thing I needed to go there for were bid evaluations most of the time, but a bid evaluation might take a month, so you would be there for a month, and then come back.
Hellrigel:
You are still working here on standards and such. You had mentioned earlier, then you are going to get into teaching, and is this when you got into teaching?
Migliaro:
No, I am sure not so much here. And what happened is standards, again at that time the director of engineering was another electrical engineer, who also at that time happened to be a member of the IEEE Standards Board. His name was Edward Chelloti. I had approached him, and I knew him through my contacts as well in the Power Engineering Society. While I was working on Yanbu Industrial City, I also approached them and said, hey, did they have a set of standards that they had published. I said I would like to take on that responsibility, too, to kind of update them and bring them up to date. So, that is how I got involved in standards there. But again, through another IEEE contact.
Hellrigel:
Then this branch here with the Standards Board, is a new adventure for you.
Migliaro:
Right. I was up there, and Ed Chelloti was a member of the Standards Board. The Standards Board at that time used to meet at the United Engineering Center, which was IEEE's old building. There were no committees of the Standards Board. You probably heard terms like NesCom and RevCom. They [the New Standards Committee and the Revised Standards Committee] did not exist. The [IEEE SA] Standards Board did it. They did everything. The meeting was usually just half-a-day. Then when they started to develop NesCom and RevCom, Ed Chelloti had recommended me to be on NesCom, so that is how I got involved at the Standards Board level. Then later, of course, I became chair of the Standards Board and Director of Standards for the IEEE. But that was all pretty much during my time that I started at Gibbs & Hill is when I got on NesCom, then I moved to Ebasco Services after that.
Hellrigel:
Right. Why leave Gibbs & Hill?
Migliaro:
Ah, actually, when I was looking to leave AEP, my first choice to go to a place was actually Ebasco Services. I wanted to go to Ebasco [Electric Bond and Share Company], and again, it was actually a school contact that I had who had introduced me to their assistant chief engineer at the time. He was really interested in getting me to come to Ebasco, but they had a chief engineer at that time, who I just did not feel like my personality would work with his personality. I think I am an easy person to get along with, but I just did not think my personality would work with his, so I opted to go to Gibbs & Hill. At the time I left Gibbs & Hill, that particular person, he decided to leave Ebasco. When he left Ebasco, the assistant chief that I was close to up there called me and said he is gone and I am the new chief, and what will it take for me to get you here? So, we talked a little bit, and I wound up going over to Ebasco.
Hellrigel:
It must have felt nice to be recruited.
Migliaro:
Yes, it did. Honestly, it did. But the job he wanted me to take even before I went to Gibbs & Hill, I would have had that job. It was something that I really liked. It was in what they call their development group, which did all their standards and a kind of high-level consulting within Ebasco. Really, Ebasco had at that time five offices. The primary office was in New York, there was an office in Atlanta, there was another office in Houston, there was an office in Newport Beach, California, and there was an office in Bellevue, Washington.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
One of the things that the development group had to do was ensure a consistent product from all five offices. In other words, when Ebasco did a design, whether it be an industrial project or power plant design, it should look the same as if it came out of Ebasco, so it is not that Bellevue did it one way and Houston did it another way. The development group had kind of a charge that to ensure consistent designs. When I finally went there, I used to have to visit those offices at least once or twice a year and the chief engineer would visit a couple of times a year. One of the things we would do is review work-product to make sure that it followed our standard practices as far as how to make calculations and how to do things. And that was of interest to me, again, because of the standards background and the things that I liked to do.
Hellrigel:
While you are doing this, I see you are a senior consulting engineer. Did you have to start to manage more people like your staff?
Migliaro:
I did. Actually, even at AEP I had a staff of five or six people. It might not be obvious from the titles there, but at Ebasco, I had a group of about twenty people, but everybody was a specialist in that group. In the development group, we all had specialties, and we all were very focused. It was not a difficult group to manage. You have always got personalities, but the level or the professional level of the people was very high because they were a world class switchgear expert or a world class transformer expert, or a motor expert or whatever it turned out to be. We would consult to the other projects, and we would consult to our clients when they had a particularly difficult problem. Usually, we would also do independent design interviews of the work coming out of projects to make sure that the calculations were done correctly, followed our standard practices, and everything else. So, it was a good group to be with.
Hellrigel:
How diverse is this group? Essentially, are you recruiting people from around the globe, men, women? I am just curious.
Migliaro:
Predominantly, they were men, but we had a couple of women. We had people from diverse backgrounds. We had Asians and we had Blacks. It did not really matter. At that time, we did not think about a lot of emphasis on that, but basically, at that time we pretty much interviewed and tried to select the right person for that particular job based on their experience.
Hellrigel:
These mostly tended to be industry people and non-academics?
Migliaro:
Yes, they were mostly industry people. Most of them had had long careers. They were not new people. We did not really have any junior people in the group and most of them had spent time with probably two or three different employers, and some of them had been with manufacturers. For example, our transformer specialist worked for one of the big manufacturers for years, so he was an expert in transformers. Other people had their expertise built up either through courses they had taken or conferences they participated in, and papers they wrote. That was kind of an expectation. Most of the people in the group would have as a goal to at least get one paper published during the year and make a presentation somewhere.
Hellrigel:
At this point, you are now a manager, so are you promoting people or encouraging them to be involved with IEEE PES?
Migliaro:
Yes. Again, Ebasco was very supportive. My boss, who was the Chief Electrical Engineer, was a member of the Nuclear Power Engineering Committee, I was on the Power Generation Committee, and we pretty much had people on all major committees. Our switchgear expert was on a switchgear committee, our transformer expert was on a transformer committee, so that was a big part of what they needed to do. They had to be active within IEEE and they had to be an industry recognized expert because in the consulting business, the people are paying for this person to come down and they have got to have some credentials. The credential of writing IEEE papers and presenting papers and being on the transformer committee or being on power generation committee, those are very strong credentials that when you put a résumé in front of the client and say, this is the person that is going to come down and see your facility.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Two days ago, I was reading through the IEEE Executive Committee minutes from 1901 to 1904 and there was a bit of a dust-up because somebody had stationery printed, [noting that he was an AIEE Member]. On the stationery, he printed AIEE Member, but technically he was an associate member, and he had not been elevated to member yet, so they made this guy change his stationary. It had cachet. In 1903-1904, he wanted his stationery to state that he was an AIEE member because he was a consultant engineer, so he could write down on his paperwork that this is my membership.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
At this point, you are spending a lot more time traveling.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes. I am spending more time traveling at this point, yes.
Hellrigel:
And all your offices are domestic inside the United States.
Migliaro:
Correct.
Hellrigel:
For IEEE, are you starting to travel globally?
Migliaro:
Well, by this time, yes. I actually ended up being Chair of the Standards Board which meant I was Director of Standards which meant I was on the IEEE Board of Directors as well. And of course, with the Board of Directors, we were traveling internationally.
At Gibbs & Hill, I had traveled internationally because of the projects in Saudi Arabia and that was primarily to Saudi Arabia and to Japan because most of the gas turbines for the power plant were coming from Japan, so I spent a lot of time traveling to Japan at that time, and some time, not as much time, traveling to Saudi Arabia. Then when I came to Ebasco, pretty much everything was domestic. Most of what I did, and again, it was most of the nuclear plants that I was involved with in the role I played in the development group because that is where the demand was at that time. It is really a focus on the nuclear plants. I did a little work on some coal plants down in Texas, but not that much.
Hellrigel:
You are working primarily at nuclear plants, and I think at this point, phrases included “too cheap to meter” and “the future is nuclear power. Right? Buzz phrases. I guess you are building nuclear plants, and is most of the industry building nuclear power plants at this point?
Migliaro:
At that point, when I first went to Ebasco, yes, but then that started to back off. In fact, part of what we had to do in the time I was there was kind of change our business model. I do not know whether you know the history of Ebasco because back then it was a holding company of General Electric, years ago. Ebasco stood for Electric Bond and Share Company.
Hellrigel:
Exactly.
Migliaro:
Ebasco was involved in mining, and in lots of industries, [including] the oil industry and the petrochemical industry, around the world at that time. Then they focused on generation, and they further focused on nuclear. When nuclear started to slow down, we had to try to go back into some of our old businesses, and we had to approach people and talk to them about doing work for them. Of course, it was interesting because a lot of them had looked to us as having abandoned them for what they thought was a lucrative nuclear market, maybe.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Migliaro:
It was really tough to break back into it, but some of what I did at that time was actually get us back into some industrial projects. So, I started to do that even though we still had salespeople, the salespeople were out selling the power plants and the big multi-million-dollar projects, but we started to sell small projects, studies and reports and that is actually when I got into doing a bit more teaching. I started to teach some courses. Internally within Ebasco, we had a program for our engineers. I did not design the program, it was designed before I got there, but it was a program that every new engineer and when I say new, meaning inexperienced engineers, new out-of-school— not new to the company had to take.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Migliaro:
In the course of taking that series of lectures, they would actually design a 400-megawatt fossil fuel plant and they had to go through - -. They had to do the short circuit studies and the switchgears selection and motor selection and everything else. It was a number of modules, thirteen or sixteen modules, I do not remember which, and we gave lectures. They would have to stay after work on their own time, and they would have to have a lecture and they would have homework to do, and they would have turn in the homework and they would be graded and eventually get through the design. So, we brought that course actually to Con Edison and I taught that course in Con Edison a couple of times. And we did it one day a week for thirteen or sixteen weeks, whatever it was. I also had developed at that time because of my interest in batteries and participating on a battery committee, I had put together a pretty strong course in batteries. Again, the course was based on the IEEE Standards for maintaining and testing battery systems. I started to teach that course and I started to offer that course, so that is really when I started to get more teaching. I also developed a course on motors that I taught.
Hellrigel:
How did you like teaching?
Migliaro:
I enjoyed teaching, and to me it was just another way of giving back the input and the knowledge that I had to other people. Hopefully, they will learn something from it, or they can apply it somehow to what they do.
ABB Impell
Hellrigel:
You are going to work at Ebasco for over seven years, which is another good portion of your career. Then you jump to another company again. And is this for similar opportunities or—
Migliaro:
It is a company called ABB Impell or called the Impell at the time. They were owned by Combusting Engineering. They were later bought ABB because ABB bought Combusting Engineering. But the opportunity as one of the assistant chief engineers at Ebasco who was originally from Cuba we had a lot of Cuba engineers at Ebasco because Ebasco had a tie to Havana Electric from the old days.
Hellrigel:
That is right.
Migliaro:
When Castro had basically taken over Cuba, a lot of Cuban engineers left Cuba and when they got to the United States, they were employed with Ebasco because they had been essentially Ebasco employees down in Cuba. One of these engineers had gone to Impell and he came up with this concept of what they call the Senior Consulting Group. It was supposed to be limited to just maybe half a dozen people, and each person had specific specialties, and they were well-recognized industry experts. Their job, kind of the way he explained it to me, was you would be running your own company within a company. So, I did my own marketing, I wrote my own proposals, and I closed the sale of jobs. Hopefully, you would close a job, but you would get enough work that you could employ some of the other people and the staff. It was not just to keep you busy, and ultimately you collect the bills. From when I started in the industry, I have always wanted to have my own company and do consulting, so I saw this as a real good opportunity to learn that part of the business. At Ebasco, I learned some of it. We went through because of this switch from the nuclear market going back in the industry and again, trying to sell projects and everything else. They put us through a training program that taught us a little bit about law and contracts and things like that. But then, Impell would have given me an opportunity to go through the whole process and really, this whole concept of running your own company within a company was very attractive to me so I decided to give it a try and I went with ABB Impell.
Hellrigel:
They were based in New York?
Migliaro:
They were based in New York. They were actually in Melville. I spent a lot of time traveling with them, even more traveling. For a period of time, I ended up probably for at least a year, I was pretty much in Syracuse in New York because at that time, the nuclear power plants. Impell had a big focus on nuclear, but one of the things that they hoped that the Senior Consultancy Group could do for them was to get them into other industries. I had contacts in the banking industry and in the petrochemical industry which we brought work in from. At that time, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission used to issue what they call SALP Ratings. [The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) used the acronym SALP for systematic assessment of licensee performance.] It was their assessment of a nuclear power plant. You could be SALP 1 which meant you were the best of the best or you could be a SALP 5 which puts you on what they call the watch list.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Migliaro:
So, that puts you into a situation where you had a lot of regulators looking at you all the time and things like that. Nine Mile Point 1, which was owned by Niagara Mohawk at that point actually was shut down by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because of an event they had with the water hammer in the piping system that caused some supports to snap. I do not remember exactly, but it was a water hammer event and I think the structural supports failed and they were shut down. Then they looked at this whole thing to restart and Impell got the contract to do all their piping system restraints and everything. It was another big problem with their battery systems at the plant, and that is when Impell had offered me as a person to go up and lead that effort, so that is why I ended up going to Syracuse. We stayed with that, and I had a small design team up there. We eventually modified the systems and got everything up and running and they were allowed to come back online. So, that is pretty much what I was doing at Impell.
Hellrigel:
At this point, is there anything about running your own company you do not like?
Migliaro:
No.
Hellrigel:
Just curious. You are going to stay with this company a relatively short period of time. We will come back to your Standards work. It seems that you are going to do more work on batteries and Standards. As your career is excelling and you are also finding more activity in IEEE, and you are moving to hold office and other posts.
Migliaro:
Yes. When I was on the Board of Directors, I was on a number of committees and ad hoc committees. I became a member of the Employee Benefits Committee and then I chaired the Employee Benefits Committee, so I had lots of different assignments within IEEE. Mostly, if I guess they still do it, the Board of Directors review some of the other committees or departments and I was on a few of those committees. I have a list if you are interested.
Florida Power & Light, consulting
Hellrigel:
We can add that to your history. I know I am taking up considerable time. You are spending your career now doing consulting, you are working on batteries, you are working on generating plants, and you are going to move to another company. This is the Florida Power & Light (FP&L) and this is going to bring you right into the Nuclear Division. This is I guess an important time of your career because I think the title is Chief Electrical. What is I&C engineer?
Migliaro:
Instrumentation and Controls. It is still electrical.
Hellrigel:
Still electrical. And you are developing more cooperate policies. How does your job change when you jumped to FP&L?
Migliaro:
Yes. It does. FP&L, it is interesting in that when I was working at Impell and I was trying to develop more business, Impell had an opportunity to do work for Florida Power & Light and that was something that they really wanted to do. That was in their Atlanta office, and of course I was in the Melville office. The Atlanta office got an opportunity to work with Florida Power & Light and the Chief Electrical Engineer of Florida Power & Light at that time was a longtime friend of mine. In fact, I knew him, I knew his wife and his whole family because we had worked together at AEP many, many years ago.
Hellrigel:
And who is this?
Migliaro:
The fella's name was David Smith. They called me at Impell and said we have this opportunity, and we would really like to get it. We are going to propose, if it is okay with you, that you are going to be the independent technical reviewer for this project for them because we know you know these guys very well. I said sure, that is not a problem. They submitted that, the proposal went in, and then they got a call back. They said, well, if Marco is going to be involved, we would want him to live in Florida for the length of the project. So, they came back to me and said that they wanted me to live in Florida, and I said yes. It was about a ten-month project, so I said, yes, I will move down to Florida, but just for ten months. It turned out they lost the project for another reason which had nothing to do with it. Something happened and Florida Power & Light decided to do something else, and as a result, it just kind of faded away. Then, I got a call and they basically said they thought I was a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker at that time pretty much because I did love New York. They said we never thought you would leave New York to come to Florida. We have got a job for you if you would like to come down, so I came, interviewed, and then came down here. At the time I came down, I actually worked for Dave Smith, he was my boss, and I was a staff engineer, but shortly after that, he retired, and I assumed his position as chief electrical engineer.
Hellrigel:
Well, how was the move?
Migliaro:
It was good because at that time, companies moved people a lot better than they move them today. So, the moving package was a really, really nice moving package. It was fine. I would have bet a lot of money you would have never found me in Florida early in my life because I am not a person who likes the heat, but I really do like it down here in Florida now.
Hellrigel:
Did you take up fishing?
Migliaro:
Well, I always liked to fish. Even in New York, I did a good bit of fishing. Actually, here we did that, but then life just got too busy with Florida Power & Light. And I mean we had four nuclear units, and they demand a lot of my time, and a lot of other people knew me in Florida Power & Light and when I came down here, because of my experience in batteries I got involved with the Substations Group quite a bit. I got involved in the fossil fuel side of the house. And I got involved with their communications people assisting with battery issues, throughout the company. So that was it, but I was doing a lot of things at that time.
Hellrigel:
No second thoughts about leaving New York?
Migliaro:
No. No, actually, surprisingly not. I mean, and part of it, in all honesty was that a lot of my IEEE activities brought me back up to New York periodically. So, I felt like I felt like I really did not leave in some sense.
Hellrigel:
And at this point, your brother had already moved to Florida?
Migliaro:
Yes, my brother was in Florida before me.
Hellrigel:
Has your mom passed?
Migliaro:
My mom passed away. She actually was down in Florida for a while, too, and then she passed away.
Hellrigel:
Migliaro:
Your sister remained, so your ties to New York are getting a little bit elastic.
Yes. I mean, I still got a ton of cousins and everything up there, but I have got a ton of cousins down here, too.
Hellrigel:
Yes. There are always a lot of jokes about a lot of New Yorkers that visited and stayed or later relocated for retirement.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
You were at FP&L then for almost thirteen years, and while you are doing that, you also set up your own consulting firm?
Migliaro:
Yes. When I came to FP&L Dave Smith who was going to be my boss, his boss interviewed me, and his boss's boss interviewed me when I came down. And Dave's boss said, “I do not know that we are going to be able to challenge you enough down here. I do not think we can keep you busy enough.” So, I said, well, I think so. At that time, they had a little consulting arm in another company, and I cannot remember what the name of the other company. They said we will let you do consulting through that consulting arm. Remember I was not the chief engineer at that time, I was just a staff engineer. They said, you can work through them and do seminars or do investigations or whatever, and they would get the revenue. Then when I worked for the Nuclear Division, it would get the revenue. Between the time I was hired and the time I actually started they actually sold that company. They went in a mode where FP&L went back to basics - -[electric generation, delivery and] construction. Did you see the advertisements on TV for Colonial Penn Life Insurance Company? Well, FP&L owned them at that time, and they owned an Orange Orchard and Orange Nursery. They were in all these different businesses and said it is time to go back to basics. We are going back to what we do best. We are a utility, and we do that best. So, they got rid of a lot of these companies.
Hellrigel:
That is around the time GE (General Electric) had a credit card company.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Part of GE’s diversification. Then companies had another strategy, forming holding companies and buying businesses outside their main industry. It was kind of a crazy time in U.S. business, during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Migliaro:
Yes. They were not there. Then I came there, and I said look, I would like to use some of my vacation time and do a little consulting. They said, yes, if you want to do that, that is fine. So, they were fully aware that I had started this consulting company, and I used my vacation time. Florida Power & Light had a benefit which was you could buy two weeks of vacation a year. They would take those two weeks out of your paycheck over the whole year and then you would just use it as vacation time. The only hitch was that vacation had to be used last. So, you had to exhaust your regular vacation, then you will use that and if you do not use it, you will lose it technically. But since I was using it to teach courses and things, I always used my vacation.
Hellrigel:
And like you said, a lot of it could be done on weekends too if you are teaching courses?
Migliaro:
Most of the time, at plants, you are going to be teaching during the night.
Hellrigel:
All right, night. Yes.
Migliaro:
Yes. If I got to study or do something, I could go out and visit the site and then do the report at nights and weekends.
Hellrigel:
At this point, are you the lone wolf for the company or did you hire people? Of your consulting company.
Migliaro:
I had people; some people part-time depending on what my needs were because we did a couple of different things. I would pick up people as necessary, but I did not really have any full-time people other than myself.
Hellrigel:
Then like always, I am going back to the question about the balance between work and family life. You got a lot going on.
Migliaro:
Well, by the time I got down here to Florida, my kids were pretty well grown, and they really did not want to go to Florida. In fact, my oldest daughter was already married, and she was living in North Carolina because her husband was going to school there, so she had gone to North Carolina. Then the other kids just stayed, my son and one other daughter stayed in New Jersey. Actually, two daughters, but then my youngest daughter moved to North Carolina with my oldest daughter.
Hellrigel:
Do you still have some roots back in New Jersey and New York?
Migliaro:
Yes. Well, actually, now, my son is actually in Florida so—he is up in St. Augustine and is an architect. I only have one daughter still up in New Jersey.
Hellrigel:
You are working for—we will hop to IEEE in just one minute because while this is going on, you are doing a lot of consulting, and you are doing work with FP&L. You continued to work in I guess Standards and Batteries, would those be your two labels?
Migliaro:
Yes. That is about what I have been doing.
IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization
Hellrigel:
And I am going to make the jump then. You keep your consulting firm going and you are at FP&L and then—how do they get you to come over to—you are then an employee of IEEE-ISTO (IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization, ISTO) as of April 2003, and you become President and CEO of that entity, so I guess this is your last time full time job that you recently retired?
Migliaro:
Right. Right. I basically I had been approached on ISTO at the end of 2002. Actually, I could retire April 1st of 2003 from FP&L on an early retirement. And what happened, that was very important at the time and, may not mean much in this conversation, but at the time, that guaranteed me lifetime medical benefits through FP&L. Although I would have to pay a premium, it is still FP&L Insurance, which was always very good. The medical plan was always very good, so I told them in ISTO that I would be agreeable to take the job, but I could not take it before April 1st, 2003. There was an interim president at that time. They called him, [and he agreed to stay] until I was available to start on April 1st. So, I ended my work at FP&L and started my work at ISTO.
Hellrigel:
Did this at any point mean that you would have to move back to New Jersey?
Migliaro:
No. That is because the president of IEEE-ISTO was a part-time job. The contract that had been drawn out said it was twenty hours a week.
Hellrigel:
Then you kept your consulting firm?
Migliaro:
I kept my consulting firm.
Hellrigel:
This makes a little bit more sense to me being an outsider just trying to figure out how you juggled everything.
Migliaro:
Right. Yes.
Hellrigel:
So then, at this point [in regard to] your consulting firm, you have time to grow that?
Migliaro:
Right. Right. I never really wanted to grow it. I did not want to grow much again. I just wanted to keep it so that between ISTO and my consulting firm it kept me busy.
Hellrigel:
More than busy. Did ISTO ever evolve into a forty-hour a week?
Migliaro:
Well, there were times when I came up to New Jersey I would spend forty hours or more in a week, or whatever, but it is just like any other job. You do spend the time that you need to get the job done and I managed it so that I could do what I needed to do. There were times when ISTO might be a little slack that I could pick up a little bit more time for myself in my consulting work and then not have to devote much time to ISTO. But it still basically all worked out in the end. I just have to manage my time properly.
Hellrigel:
Right. And since you have the medical benefits from FP&L, you did not have to worry about that part.
Migliaro:
Right. In fact, my contract with IEEE basically said that there were no benefits. A twenty-hour a week person does not get benefits anyway. [You are a] part-time person.
Hellrigel:
Right. Right. Yes. So, you did not have to worry about trying to negotiate that as an add on.
Migliaro:
Right. Right.
Hellrigel:
When you are at IEEE-ISTO, are you an actual IEEE employee?
Migliaro:
Yes, part-time employee.
Hellrigel:
Yes, because that is also the confusing thing to figure out, so you are going to do that. We are going to make that jump in one second because the big question is how FP&L thinks about your early retirement because you had been such a central person there.
Migliaro:
Yes. It is just like anything else. They had told me that they would actually like me to continue. They recognized that I wanted to do something else, and they said, well, we can work with you to cut your hours down and you can phase out if you wanted, take a year to phase out or half a year to phase out or whatever you like to do, or just kind of work part time with us. That would mean I would not have my consulting company if I was doing ISTO, but I opted not to do that. I just said, I really needed to make the break, only because when you are working in the power plant business and you have got an outage in one of the major nuclear plants and things, you just cannot stop things.
Hellrigel:
No, you got to go.
Migliaro:
If you are on the critical path to the outage, everybody is on you. They are all eyes on you to get the work done and get it done as quickly as possible whatever time it turns out to be. Usually, when I worked outages at FP&L, we worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. You only do it for thirty days, thirty days or forty-five days, so it still is a burden to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week because after a while you do not remember what day it is. You have kind of lost track of things, but in the end, productivity does suffer when you are working that much at some point. You have got to be very careful because everything ties back to nuclear safety.
Hellrigel:
Right. At this point hurricanes and storms are increasingly common, so you never know when that is going to come at you.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Maybe, August through October, but yes, which coincides with some of the big Board Series and other challenges.
Migliaro:
Yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
So, you take your early retirement around your mid-fifties, and you are going to jump to ISTO. It is going to be a big career shift in that you are not going to be building and managing power plants anymore.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
How is that working for your identity that you had thirty-five years' worth of mostly working in industry.
Migliaro:
Yes. I still had my consulting company to do some things, but at this point, I looked at it and when I was first approached on taking over ISTO, my reaction was ah, no, I do not think I am the right person for that. They said, no, we think you are the right person for this. When I got in there and we were just starting up, I looked at things, there were lot of things that I felt I could work with, and I could help them improve the corporation. And again, going back to Standards and the Standard process is not designing power plants or anything, but there are certain things that tie in. We have got customer satisfaction, we have got to make sure we have a product that looks the same no matter which project manager is working on it, that we are delivering a consistent product if they are looking for support in a specific area, that we support them the same. That it is not program manager specific that everybody that gets Program Manager A gets treated like kings and everybody that is Program Manager B gets treated like dirt. So, there were lots of things that we could do.
Also, as far as planning and goal setting, I thought I had some strength in those areas that might be helpful to the organization because initially, they were just trying to put too much on their plate. They were still getting a lot of things done, but they were not getting everything they wanted done because they were putting too much on their plate. Then at the end of the year, when you do not get a lot of things done that you say you are going to get done, you do not feel good about it. It is better to know what you are going to do and get those things accomplished and feel good about yourself when the year comes to an end. I initially had the employees go on a retreat and we talked about some things, we talked about developing a mission and vision for the organization, and we had the debt. IEEE was our banker because we could not get a line of credit on our own, so we had a line of credit through IEEE. So, we had a lot of debt in getting this organization running. We had to pay off the debt. We had to put a plan together to get that debt paid off, which we did. So, there were a lot of areas that I felt I could really do something positive for the organization.
Hellrigel:
I will come back to this, and I know that Bill Rubin and others are going to ask you more about ISTO work. Briefly, what is the purpose of ISTO? I mean, I know, it is an important entity, but you are going to devote twenty years of your life now to this organization and you have been working with them in Standards beforehand, but what is the purpose of ISTO?
Migliaro:
The real thing is that Standards have been part of my career since day one. And on the IEEE side, whether it be the IEEE, the ASME, or the ASCE, we operate on a voluntary consensus Standard basis so that everybody who worked on the Standard were volunteers. They essentially represent themselves, not their company. Although in many cases, they are going to have their company's interest at heart when they do this work. Those Standards can take ten years to get developed. At the same time, we were in a very, very different world. Things were changing, and particularly in the IT sector, where things were moving so fast that if it took you ten years to develop a Standard, you missed the boat. So, organizations got a little tired of the traditional Standards methodologies and started to develop consortia and alliances that would then—Basically, companies would be represented, and they were basically meeting until they got a Standard out. If it meant they would meet every day for a month and get a Standard out, that was it. These people would be paid salaries and were not really volunteers that were working for the companies that was sometimes their full-time job. But IEEE as an organization, because of its [US IRS Tax Code} 501(c)3 tax] status could not host or support those organizations. The other thing is IEEE would always like to own the copyright to these things and sell the Standards as a business, and many of these organizations gave away their Standards. They spend this time, and they develop these things and then give them to everybody freely so that they could get out there and use it, right?
This is not me. Andy Salem, who was my predecessor as president of the IEEE-ISTO and who was before that, the managing director of the Standards Association, Standards Department in IEEE, envisioned this operation where we would support consortia and that operation. We worked together as a small team and eventually we came up with this concept of the ISTO. They [ISTO] would fill a void that IEEE could not participate in.
Hellrigel:
Yes, IEEE cannot be involved in certain activities.
Migliaro:
This kind of brings our menu of offerings and Standards to a completely new level. [It would] basically make IEEE in some way, through an affiliation with ISTO, an organization that could support any type of Standards operation, whether it be consortia or individual Standards. That concept was sold and approved by the Board of Directors and then the IEEE founded IEEE-ISTO, and basically, we began functioning. I was originally one of the four directors appointed to the ISTO, and Andy was the president. He also did business development with Peter Lefkin, and they basically used contacts, strong IEEE contacts. AT&T has always been a big supporter of IEEE. Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and IBM; they were all big supporters of IEEE. They were the ones that gave us, if you will, our initial programs. They were consortia forming, and they formed it within IEEE-ISTO and got us all started. We have just taken the organization since then and continued to expand on that. Now, in the twenty somewhat years since we have been formed, the areas that we are focusing on have expanded. We originally talked about Standards, but then we had groups that did not do Standards. Initially, we were in mobile space and now we do things in auto, we do things in medicine, and we do street lighting and LED lighting. Areas that we have never maybe envisioned we would be involved in.
Hellrigel:
Since you are developing standards, but do not charge, are you in some way competing with IEEE Standards if they developed a standard that they want to sell?
Migliaro:
Right. Well, honestly, we do not. The group still owns these standards. Within ISTO, the intellectual property is owned by the alliance or the program itself and they do not usually charge. But because of our affiliation with the IEEE, and this is one of our selling points, and that has been an issue for us, too. Bill Rubin could certainly talk to that and how we make people aware of the benefits of the affiliation that we have with IEEE. For some organizations that know IEEE well, they can easily understand that. There are some organizations that we talk and they could care less about IEEE as far as an alliance, but there were benefits to them, too. One of the things that we can do through an affiliation is we can take a group, and if they have an alliance and they develop a Standard which they develop free, we can take that standard and we can follow through the SA and we can make it an IEEE Standard. Then it is available as an IEEE Standard. Okay? I am not quite sure how the monetary end of that works. They may still offer it free, and IEEE has the right to sell it. I cannot tell you, but one of our groups which is MIPI [MIPI Alliance] has taken advantage of that, and they actually put one of their Standards through the SA process. They now have an IEEE Standard for one of their Standards. But that affiliation with IEEE allows them also to publish articles in [IEEE] magazines or newsletters, and we have done that too for them. In fact, the LaSAR Alliance which is a recent alliance they had an article in, I believe it was [IEEE] Spectrum that turned out to be one of the most popular articles for the month in that issue. They had a tremendous amount of hits, and we can get the details of that. It is beneficial to some of these organizations to have an affiliation with IEEE and they can move their organization forward with that affiliation.
Hellrigel:
Right. Through the publication and especially with Spectrum, they have reached all the IEEE members.
Migliaro:
Right.
IEEE Life Fellow, awards, recognitions
Hellrigel:
Then anybody else that picks up the magazine reads it online, so that exposes you, but it also gives you access to conferences and meetings and a whole host of others.
I just want to take one step back. While you are working, just before you go to FP&L, you are going to be elected an IEEE Fellow. Well, I like to ask people, where were you when you found out you were an IEEE Fellow, which is a big elevation?
Migliaro:
I do not remember exactly where I was. It was a funny thing because that year I had helped submit a number of Fellow nominations for other people. That year I had also submitted a Fellow nomination for an individual. Of course, when you are submitted as a Fellow, you generally do not necessarily know that you are being submitted. One time, it was a totally secret process and then because of people changing jobs a little bit more often, there is a limit they can tell you they are submitting or ask you for some information, whatever the process is. I was submitted for Fellow that particular year, too. I do remember now, I was actually working for Ebasco, and I was in our Bellevue office in the State of Washington. I was with another person who was very active in IEEE and also a Fellow. I do not remember whether he was a fellow at that time or not, or he got elected later, but his name was John Savia, Dr. John Savia. I got a call, and it was Mel Olken and basically, I knew they had a meeting so that the new Fellows would be available as to who made Fellow or not. So, when I heard Mel, I said, well, how do you do? I had submitted his application, and I remember he said to me we both made it. I think I was five feet in the air about then because that meant really so much to me to be elected a Fellow. At that time, I was thirty-nine years old. Today, there are probably a lot of younger Fellows, but at the time in 1987, because it was at a December meeting, right? So, it was 1987, I was thirty-nine years old at that point. It was very rare to see somebody that young to be elected a Fellow, and especially on the first [submission]. It was my first submission. A lot of times for some of these people, I had to make two or three submissions before I finally got success in getting them elected a Fellow.
Hellrigel:
Members can nominate a Fellow, or does only a Fellow nominate a Fellow?
Migliaro:
I think you have to be at least a Senior Member.
Hellrigel:
Senior Member.
Migliaro:
Then you need a number of Fellow references. For some of the areas that did not have a lot of Fellows, you could get some Senior Members instead of Fellows. But you had to be a Senior Member to nominate a Fellow.
Hellrigel:
Do you need someone else to nominate you for a Senior Member?
Migliaro:
No. You can self-nominate for senior membership.
Hellrigel:
Self-nominate. So, you are working up the proverbial food chain and now you are a Life Fellow.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
You jumped to that, and you are a Life Fellow. Do you have anything to do with the Life Members Committee?
Migliaro:
I read their stuff that comes out, but I have not been too involved, and that is because with IEEE-ISTO, I felt I had enough on my plate. I backed out of a lot of other things.
We talked a lot about [IEEE] Power Engineering Society, but in the [IEEE] Industry Applications Society, I was an active member of the Industrial Power Systems Committee, and I participated on a number of the color books. You probably heard those names, the color book series. I was Chapter Chair of the Orange Book, I did something on the Emerald Book and some of the other books, and for the Brown Book, I was a Chapter Chair in some of that. So, I participated there as well. I backed out of a lot of that when I started with ISTO just because I really could not spend that much time on it. The other thing I was also involved with UL. I sat on about four UL committees and that I continued to do even after I was ISTO president.
Hellrigel:
What does UL mean?
Migliaro:
Underwriters' Laboratories.
Hellrigel:
That makes sense for a start for Standards.
Migliaro:
Right. Yes.
Hellrigel:
And that is not IEEE, that is outside IEEE.
Migliaro:
Right, that is outside IEEE. That is the mark that you see on many household appliances, the UL label.
Hellrigel:
Yes, right by the UL and insignia.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
With that little tag on it.
Migliaro:
Not surprisingly, I was involved in batteries and battery charges and uninterruptible power supply systems because the other thing when I started my own company and I was working more in batteries, I also end up getting very heavily involved in the data center work because they use a tremendous amount of batteries in data centers as well.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I have seen a data center at 445, the IEEE Operations Center. It is, yes, backup on backup server.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
They have a special cooling unit and all that fun tech.
One other topic, did you have any involvement in IEEE-USA?
Migliaro:
No, not much.
Hellrigel:
Yes, we did not talk about too much about the IEEE Industry Applications Society, but we can get to that in a moment.
I just want to also get on the record that in addition to being a Life Fellow now, you have also received a number of awards from IEEE, including the [1988] IEEE Standards Board Standards Medallion [in 1988] for your “significant contributions to batteries standards.”
Migliaro:
Correct.
Hellrigel:
Then you have the 1992 PES Distinguished Individual Service Award, the 1996 Charles Proteus Steinmetz Award for your work on batteries, and the IEEE Third Millennial Medal in 2000. I am sure you received lots of other awards. Have you ever served on awards committee for PES or Industry Applications?
IEEE volunteer service, Board of Directors
Migliaro:
No. I was on the awards committee for Standards [IEEE SA Awards & Recognition Committee] for I think just a year, maybe two. Within Standards, I have been on most of the committees at one time or another. But in the other groups, I focused mainly on the Standards Coordinating Committees within those organizations. In PES, I was on the Standards Coordinating Committee and then chaired the Standards Coordinating Committee. But most of what I have done in these Societies has been always Standards related and in PES technical conferences, too. I have been involved with technical conferences, but other than that not so much others. Of course, when you get to the board levels, many times like when I was Chair of the Power Generation Committee, I was also on the PES now the name escapes me, but it was their technical activities committee or something which all the Chairs of the various committees of PES belong to.
Hellrigel:
How would you describe your experience serving on the IEEE Board of Directors?
Migliaro:
I enjoyed the Board of Directors. When I first got on the Board of Directors, they had this concept of some of the boards were what they considered major boards and others were not major boards.
Hellrigel:
Minor boards.
Migliaro:
And minor boards. Standards was considered a minor board, but in the first year that I was on there, I tried to educate a lot of people as to what Standards was, what we did, and how we interfaced. I think I demonstrated to the Board of Directors that within IEEE, Standards probably has the most direct involvement with industry of all the organizations. One thing that was big on the Board of Directors’ mind was how do we get more involvement with industry, and Standards does that because just about everybody on the Standards Group is a member of an organization working in industry. By the end of my second year, they decided to actually make Standards a major board and then create the position of Vice President of Standards on the Board of Directors. The Vice President of Standards would also then be a member of the Executive Committee as well. Typically, most people on the Board serve two years and then are moved to a different position. When they created this Vice President of Standards, they asked me if I would like to be the first Vice President of Standards since I had been instrumental in kind of getting Standards recognized as a major board. I told them, well, I have served my two years, but I would not mind if you are okay with this. Actually, they told me they were, and I ran unopposed because the Directorate, the Vice President of Standards is elected by the Assembly. At that time, it was not elected by the members. It was elected by the Assembly. So, I ran unopposed and now they told me that that was a big deal that you would be unopposed in the Assembly, but I was actually named the first Vice President of Standards of the Institute [IEEE].
Hellrigel:
This would have been about 2000?
Migliaro:
No. In 1992.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
Yes, 2000 was when the Standards Association was formed. Back in the 1990s, I was a Director, so it was I think 1990, 1991, and then in 1992, I was the Vice President of Standards.
Hellrigel:
Thinking about that time, you are still young, comparatively speaking, you are early in your career, and now, you are on the Board of Directors of IEEE. What were you thinking?
Migliaro:
I was amazed. I mean, I still am because I always try to think of the things I do and I do not think I do anything special sometimes, but obviously people recognized something. I just kind of do what I think I need to do. Maybe it is a simple way of putting it, but I need to just do the job I was put there to do.
Hellrigel:
When I was reading through some of your biographical information, I noticed that in 2000 you were elected chair of the Board of Directors of the IEEE-ISTO [IEEE Industry and Standards Technology Organization]. Who elects you to that post?
Migliaro:
In at that time, because ISTO was just forming, it was the IEEE Board of Directors because they when ISTO was first formed, the Board of Directors actually elected the first set of Directors of the ISTO.
Hellrigel:
Migliaro:
So, you are involved in the ISTO before you become employed by them?
Yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Then when you are like employed by them and you are the president and the CEO, does that put you on the Board of Directors of IEEE?
Migliaro:
No, no, because we are a separate corporation.
Hellrigel:
And are you still eligible to be on the Board of Directors but you would have to get elected some other way?
Migliaro:
No. I am eligible to be on the Board of Directors and I was at one point in time. In 2001, I was on the Board of Directors and the IEEE Board of Directors because I was elected president of the Standards Association [SA] in 2001. In 2001, I was elected as a director on the IEEE Board because I was the President of the IEEE-ISTO and I was also Vice President of Standards at that time, they still had Vice President of Standards. In 2001, I was elected president of the SA which made me a member of the IEEE Board of Directors and a member of the Executive Committee as the Vice President of Standards of IEEE. I was also a Director and actually at that time, I was the Chair of the ISTO's Board of Directors, so I was the Chairman of the Board of Directors in ISTO and the Vice President of Standards in IEEE.
Hellrigel:
That is a lengthy business card.
Migliaro:
Yes. Well, two separate business cards because you have got the IEEE and the ISTO. But at that time, I did not really feel there was a conflict of interest because of what we were both doing. Subsequent to me, F. Don Wright the Chair of the ISTO had chosen, when he was elected President of the SA to no longer be Chair. He remained on the ISTO Board, but he did not Chair it any longer just to avoid a potential conflict of interest. I guess we were more involved in things and from his perspective he did not think he could do that and keep it separated enough
Hellrigel:
And yes, there is that when I am trying to read though everything as an outsider not knowing how this really works, it looks intertwined and in the beginning it could not be otherwise.
Migliaro:
Yes. It actually was not as intertwined as you think, and that is the thing. When we had spoken earlier, Bill had a good word in that the organizations are complementary to each other.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Migliaro:
And that is the way I see it.
Hellrigel:
Yes. And that is why even working on the history, even within the Standards Association, they have a couple of different groups in their marketing people and there are other people. You have two different history projects going on and I was they are both working in the 501 Hoes Lane building, two groups and sometimes they seem like factions. I am trying to bring them together because of the overlap and there are people that have been working there such a long time like Mary Lynne Nielsen of the Standards Association and Michelle Hunt at ISTO, and Bill Rubin is my bridge between the two that helps me try to be less confused.
Migliaro:
Right. Michelle Hunt started with the Standards Department when she started with IEEE. She was the marketing manager of IEEE Standards, and she did marketing, and she ran the seminar program. Standards used to have a seminar program, and Michelle ran and coordinated the seminar program.
Hellrigel:
As an outsider trying to figure out [the IEEE Standards Association and IEEE ISTO] I did go down to the 501 building. I walked down there during the summer and Mary Lynne gave me a tour of the different groups. I am still trying to get heads and tails of that and that is why I am working with Bill [Rubin], Michelle [Hunt], and Mary Lynne [Nielsen] so that they can do more detailed oral history with you on those two separate entities. I know they are going to dig deeper, but what do you think is your biggest accomplishment with the ISTO? If it is not a stupid question.
Migliaro:
No, it is not a stupid question.
Hellrigel:
Go ahead, you can tell me some of them.
Migliaro:
There are a lot of things that I think are accomplishments. Certainly, one of the biggest things we did, we were able to bring our line of credit down to zero. When I took over the organization in 2003, we had $850,000 in debt.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
Yes. We brought that down to zero I would like to say by around 2009 or 2010. So, that was a tremendous accomplishment to be able to grow the business and pay down that line of credit. And we had—
Hellrigel:
How did they get into that kind of debt?
Migliaro:
Because it was a brand-new organization, and we need to pay salary to people.
Hellrigel:
Oh, salary and [office] space.
Migliaro:
Yes, salaries, and of course, being a separate corporation, we actually pay IEEE rent, we pay rent for the computers, we pay rate for the phones, we pay rent for the rooms, and all that stuff. But I think the other thing that is really, I am searching for the right words, but the thing is to really get the staff. We have a wonderful staff in ISTO, and you have met some of them. It is really to get them all working together and supporting the programs. I think we have accomplished that. In trying to do that, that means making sure they realize that they are appreciated. I always tell them, none of the things that I have done I could have done by myself, it is the staff. I always tell them, and they are probably tired of hearing me say it, but I tell them, we do not make widgets in our garage that we can sell and make a ton of money on profits. What we sell is our knowledge and our way of doing things and that is you, that is all the staff. And without the staff, we are not in business, we do not have our product, we do not have anything we can make a profit from. This is to let them know that they are the organization that makes this thing work when they work with the programs and the relations they have with the programs. The other thing is, most of our work and most of the alliances we have, come from referrals because people are very happy with what we do for them and how quickly we do it for them. When they are in a hurry, we can turn things around on a dime, and that is a credit to the staff. They all have the skills to make sure we know how to do that and get things done.
Hellrigel:
Right. How big is the staff?
Migliaro:
We have got about twenty full-time staff and thirty-two when you count some of the part-time staff. Then we have a number of contracts which may bring us up to about forty, so we have got three distinct classifications. For instance, we have some IT support, that is part time, and there are some other people in Standards that support us part time.
Hellrigel:
That is a big enough OU (Operating Unit). I guess you are a separate OU?
Migliaro:
No, we are not. We are a separate corporation.
Hellrigel:
You are a separate corporation. Well, then that is why in many ways, 501 [the IEEE offices at the rented building, 501 Hoes Lane], it is separate. IEEE grew and needed more space. Recently, there has been some more talk about moving people back or moving over for cost effectiveness [to the IEEE Operations Center at 445 Hoes Lane].
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
I do not know the culture of ISTO, but how would they feel about moving to the Operations Center at 445?
Migliaro:
Yes. Right now, as far as I know, I have only been retired a couple of months, but you lose touch quickly on some of the things, but right now I believe they are talking about moving ISTO support staff down to two floors at 501. The other thing I do not know, and this is I have no clue right now, but our new Executive Director at IEEE, Sophia [A. Muirhead], I do not know what she is doing or what she has been doing. Officially, she takes over in January, but I do not know her thoughts. I have never met her personally. We have talked and I provided her information on ISTO in the past, but I really think that she can change direction of things on how we do things because within the bylaws of ISTO, the Executive Director of IEEE has some responsibilities. For instance, the officers, any officer of ISTO, the bylaw say is appointed by the IEEE Executive Director. So, when I was made president, the executive director made that appointment. The recent executive directors have passed that responsibility on to other people. They have kind of not been as active as some of the early executive directors were when ISTO was being formed.
Retirement
Hellrigel:
Why retire?
Migliaro:
I got to retire sometime, and I thought this was a good time. I think COVID may have played a part in it. With COVID I kind of went up feeling a bit disconnected because the offices shut down and things like that. If I had stayed on, I would not have stayed on much longer than next year because I will be seventy-five actually next year.
Talking about things I got involved in, I am trying to put a family tree together on Ancestry, so I spend a lot of time going back through historical records and family records and trying to reconstruct the tree. So, I have met many cousins that I never knew I had growing up and some of them, we have become fairly close. So, I have something else to fill the time because although my wife may not agree 100 percent that I fill the time, the thing is that I did find something else I can fill my time with.
Hellrigel:
What about your ancestry in Italy?
Migliaro:
Well, most of our family seems to have come from the area down around Naples and Salerno. Eboli is where one of my great-grandfathers came from. The other one, I have not pinned down yet, but I think San Valentino Torio is where he came from in Campania also. And of course, my mother's family came from Ireland.
Hellrigel:
Oh. Okay, West Coast?
Migliaro:
I do not know. I do not have as good a handle on theirs. Her maiden name as I said was Dalton and that is a very common name, so when you go on the search Dalton, you get about 35,000 hits or something.
Hellrigel:
Your folks met in New York City?
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Your wife's a New Yorker?
Migliaro:
No. Actually, I have a second wife. My first wife and I got divorced a number of years ago, and my current wife is from South America, from Guyana, which, when she was growing up there was British Guiana.
Hellrigel:
You have another whole [family] branch to start researching.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
After Ireland.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Do you miss anything about not being at ISTO?
Migliaro:
Well, I think it is a little bit early yet, but I do miss some of the interaction, even with COVID and kind of a tuned down interaction although with COVID we had more WebEx conferences and things like that. But I do miss the contact with the staff because as I said, I really, really think we had a great staff, and they do a great job in what they are doing. They would not come to me for any little thing, but when they had something, they needed from me, they would always come to me, and I miss that a little bit.
Hellrigel:
Are you continuing involvement with PES [IEEE Power & Energy Society]?
Migliaro:
I still am a member of PES. I have had some things that I have looked at and seeing whether I want to get back involved in some of the activities, but I have not made a decision yet. Even when I was considering retiring, some of the people I know in HR, because I was very close with a lot of people in HR having been on the Employee Benefits Committee, asked me if I was interested in coming back to the Employee Benefits Committee. I do want to continue something with IEEE, but I do not know what it is yet right now. I am just going to take a breath for a little bit, I think.
Hellrigel:
I guess the same is going on with Industrial Applications [IEEE Industrial Applications Society], maybe you will revisit that?
Migliaro:
Yes, I may. I have lost contact with them more than I have PES. I am still a member, but I have not been in contact with those people as much as I have for the people from PES.
Hellrigel:
I guess I could throw a suggestion out. The Rising Stars Conference and Young Professionals, activities with the younger IEEE members may be appealing?
Migliaro:
Oh yes. I have always had an interest in educating the new people coming up and I have served on two college technical advisory committees in the past, the New York Institute of Technology and the College of Staten Island. And when I was in Ebasco, I ran a program with their Student Chapter and the professor that headed the Student Chapter at NJIT and he eventually wrote an IEEE paper on it, but we had him create software for us to perform calculations and we made it like a project for them. We actually had a project team, project leader and we tried to simulate a real-life experience for them, and it did work out very well. And as I said, he had written a paper on it. But we found that it was a good experience because initially, one of the first projects we did, we had them write a computer program that would calculate the acceleration time of a motor, whether it is started up or fan or a pump, because when motor starts the current rises significantly in what we call an inrush current, an AC motor, and then the current comes down so you have got to protect against that, you need a circuit breaker that does not trip when you see the inrush current, but then, if the inrush current stays on for too long, it has to trip. And once the acceleration times are known you can basically put all that kind of stuff together. And the fellow was a project manager. He found that he could not get the students to do what they needed to do, they did not pay any attention to him, and it was a bit of frustration for him. Then he was trying to do some of the work himself and then he realized he cannot do everything himself, so it was a good learning experience for everybody. But when we brought them in, we would have a meeting with them, we would lay out the plan, and they would have to deliver a plan to us and a schedule; milestone schedule and everything to tell us when they will be finished with the project, which worked out within their semester. We would usually take them to the executive dining room for lunch, and they had a nice view. At that time, Ebasco was in the World Trade Center, we were in Tower Number Two.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
The executive dining room was up on the 93rd floor, so they got a nice view of New York City. And then when they came back after they finished the program, they made a presentation to us of the program and that included a user's manual and everything else they had put together. Then we took them to the executive dining room again for lunch. So, it was a nice experience, and I enjoyed that.
I have thought of not IEEE-related but just tutoring or doing something else that I might help people with.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Yes. You could probably get them interested in robotic electric vehicles and things. I have been to some STEM education conferences and the robotics activities are very popular.
Migliaro:
Oh yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
I was actually at a meeting in Florida, in Orlando in March where they had some of the local college students come in and help the winners from these different state high school competitions and then some really young kids. It was interesting. They spent all day there with the kids. Teachers brought in kids, and they assembled like forty kids for them to work with, and that was pretty cool. I have a sneaking suspicion Bill Rubin and others are going to rope you into the history of ISTO and Standards Association projects.
Migliaro:
That is okay. There is no problem with that.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I have kept you quite a long time. Is there any topic we did not cover you would like to cover? We can have Round Two if you want.
Migliaro:
I am open to Round Two if you think of something, but I think we have covered a lot. There is probably a ton of stuff we have not, but.
Hellrigel:
I am going to have Bill [Rubin] review things to see the transcript. I can do more of the setup before they come in and ask you additional questions. I know we did not talk much about your publications. A lot of them were Standards related and what would be useful if you have a résumé, even an older one with the different years for things because I want to put together a biographical entry in our engineering technology history wikidethw.org and then I could list your different committees and all that and then link it to your oral history. And then, this also I found some links to the different awards you have won, and we can pull it together and then going from here, I have kept you. We have now had a recording that is three hours and fifteen minutes. And so, I will take a look at that, and I will look through and see the holes that we have, and we could follow up with another round.
Migliaro:
Sure.
Hellrigel:
I really appreciate you taking your time and demystifying some of this of what you do. The work with batteries and the power plants going forward might be another talk. And your work more directly with PES and Industrial Applications that I did not have time to home in on because I know that Bill [Rubin] will be interested in more of the Standards Association, ISTO, so maybe round two could be more PES related and Board of Director related.
Migliaro:
That is fine. I do have an old résumé. I used to keep it up-to-date pretty much, but it comes a point when I went to ISTO, I will be pretty sure of between ISTO and my own company that that is about the end of the line for me as far as work so I was not necessarily good in updating it, but I can send that along to you with the picture and the release. Okay?
Reflections
Hellrigel:
Yes, that'd be cool. Yes. Then we could work from there and there might be some things to clarify. I usually conclude by asking if we did not cover something and advice to youngsters. Yes, advice to youngsters, but we can come back to that. I think from my perspective, closing today, the question is also, what has IEEE meant to you?
Migliaro:
IEEE has meant a lot to me. I guess when I first got involved in IEEE, I did not realize how big a role it would play in my career, but as I got more involved in IEEE and met people, made contacts, it really was a big part of my life. It gave me the chance to network with people I probably would never have networked with had I not been a member of IEEE. I became close friends with some of these people. But certainly, it meant a lot to my career and even my jobs. As we went through this, really, just about every job I have had after my first one there has been some tie to IEEE that got me that job fairly easily without having to do all tough work, okay, because of my reputation. I understand that there has got to be something that I do that makes me worth it, too. It is not just that I am an IEEE member, but the thing is that it did give me the exposure and the opportunity to meet people that I probably otherwise would never have met in my life. I just feel very strongly about it. I feel very strongly about young people and the fact that not many of them are going into science and technology fields these days. It is a mistake. There is no easy answer to anything, but you have got to put in the time and put in the work and it will pay off. At least for me, it has been a very satisfying career, and if I had to do it all over again, I will be an electrical engineer again.
Hellrigel:
Migliaro:
Oh, yes. You will not become an art historian or?
No, if I was interested in money or something like that, and of course money is important, but there are lot of other careers that I could have embarked on that would have been much better looking back now, knowing what I know now. But I would never change it. I would not change it because the satisfaction that I got from the job and doing the things that I have done, and basically, developing things and creating products or creating standard ways of methodologies of doing things that literally hundreds, if not thousands of persons have followed. It is just something that is I just, I think is terrific.
Hellrigel:
You seem content.
Migliaro:
Oh yes. Yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
And I guess too with IEEE, you have gotten to travel around the globe which someone growing up [working class] in Queens might not have anticipated.
Migliaro:
Right. Well, the other thing, okay, we did not say, but nobody in my family flies. Other than my father in World War II having to get on a plane, my mother and father never got on an airplane. My brother will not get on an airplane although he did in The US Marine Corps. And my sister hates it on planes, so I always say I did the traveling for the whole family.
Hellrigel:
What was your favorite IEEE trip then?
Migliaro:
My favorite IEEE trip was Australia when I went there again because I was not officially in the Distinguished Lecturer Program, but I had a number of Sections that called me to come and give seminars particularly on batteries. The New South Wales Section had me over there three times to present seminars. Those were probably my favorite trips because they were always very appreciative. They were not charging anything, they took over my expenses to get over there, and they treated me very well. They always had some sort of tour, industrial tour, that they had set up for me. We always had a nice dinner. They took my wife out shopping or whatever. I made a lot of friends in Australia.
The other one that comes a close second is the Puerto Rican Section because I also went there, I think two or three times as well, to give seminars to the Puerto Rican Section. There was another thing which is tied more into standards, probably, but, or directly into standards. When I was on the Board of Directors as part of this whole education process to try and educate the directors as to the value of standards and the importance of standards, at that time the Regional Activities vice president which is not called Regional Activities anymore, but Regional Activities vice president came from Puerto Rico. And as a standards organization, we had never held a meeting outside the borders of the United States.
I actually arranged the first meeting in Puerto Rico, which is still essentially the U.S., if you will. depending on how you look at it. We went to Puerto Rico for the first time. We never met, so it was the first time we ever met there. There was an interesting story behind it because it was 1992, and we set this meeting up about a year in advance, or six or nine months in advance, whatever it turned out to be. We had the hotel, we got the hotel booked, and we had everything set. As we were getting closer to that, also was the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus discovering America. The regional vice president was from Puerto Rico, was Luchi Gandi and a little before the meeting Luchi called me and says, hey, I am coming to your hotel for the meeting. I am going to stay in your room. He said that weekend all the ships are going to be in San Juan Harbor to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus. There is going to be a parade of ships past the hotel, there are going to be parties, there is going to be everything. We already had this booked, so we went there. At that time, there was a young lady named Addy Zenni who was on the staff. I do not know if you ever heard that name.
Hellrigel:
No.
Migliaro:
She was on the staff of IEEE. She was a meeting planner and coordinator. We all went to her room the night before because we could see the fireworks display from her balcony. We were all out on her balcony. The next day, my room faced the ocean, so they all came, and they were on my balcony watching all the ships go by. We had the greatest time out there, although we had the meeting. I had arranged to have the Steinmetz medal that year presented at this meeting in Puerto Rico. The Steinmetz medal is a field award of IEEE. At that time, I do not know whether it still holds true today, but it had to be presented by one of the three Ps. [The three Ps are the future IEEE president, the current IEEE president, and the past IEEE president.] They do not let a Director make the presentation, so I could not present the award. I believe it was the President at that time, who presented that award at the meeting. It was really a very nice event.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that sounds like a lot of fun.
Migliaro:
Yes, it was. We just happened to pick these dates out of nowhere and they coincided with the event. We just happened to pick the exact dates that ultimately put this whole agenda together on the 500th anniversary of Columbus and when all the ships were in old San Juan. We went down, we looked at the ships, and it was just incredible. The meeting was good, too. We had a good meeting.
Hellrigel:
Financially, it was good that you planned so far ahead, before they would get the notion to increase your rates because it coincided with the anniversary event.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes. We would have never even got in.
Hellrigel:
I am losing sunlight. I work in a room where I use natural light, so that is why it is looking darker and darker.
Migliaro:
Oh, okay.
Hellrigel:
I have an electric lamp nearby, so I can turn it on.
Migliaro:
We still have sunlight here in Florida, so.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I paid my utility bill. Let us see, there it is, so I have a little bit of electric light.
The other topic we could follow up is that the batteries are such an important part of the solar move, so I think you might be called back on the lecture tour. You might be able to figure out where you want to travel for the next year.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
With storms and that, the other question is backup systems.
Migliaro:
Yes, I did some work on battery energy storage in Puerto Rico, too, actually. They had a battery energy storage facility there, and I worked with them for a number of years on their battery systems, getting them replaced. Then I did some others and one of the more interesting ones was a wind turbine farm that had an energy storage plant associated with it. It was in Maui. The wind turbines ran up the side of an inactive volcano. So, it was a nice trip.
Hellrigel:
Does your battery work have anything to do with electric vehicles or bicycles?
Migliaro:
No. I have not done much. Although, there were a couple of things when I was at FP&L that I got involved with because they were members of EPRI [Electric Power Research Institute] that looked at some alternatives on batteries in cars. But I never got very heavily involved in car batteries.
Hellrigel:
Yes, because the big battery issue around here now, are the lithium batteries in the bicycles, and their propensity to catch on fire.
Migliaro:
Right. Well, lithiums have a tendency to do that if you do not engineer them right.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I know that it was also a problem with the cell phones. You couldn’t put the batteries in your checked bag. You had to have them in a carry-on, and then they were banned from carry-on luggage.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
I do not know. But I digress. I have had an excellent afternoon, sir, talking to you. I really appreciate your time, and I will keep you posted on the status of this, and I will talk to Bill Rubin, and we will see about round two, if you are up for it.
Migliaro:
Sure.
Hellrigel:
Have a good day, sir. Thank you, on behalf of the IEEE History Center.
Migliaro:
Thanks, Mary Ann. It was a pleasure. I hope it turned out well for you. I enjoyed this. I did not know what to expect, but I enjoyed this thoroughly. So.
Hellrigel:
Well, I am glad. I had fun. I always have fun. My next one I have part two with a gentleman in Moscow on Monday.
Migliaro:
Oh, okay.
Hellrigel:
But take care, sir.
Migliaro:
All right, thanks very much. Take care of yourself.
End Part 1 of interview; Begin Part 2.
Hellrigel:
Today is Monday, November 28th, 2022. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel of the IEEE History Center, and I am here with Marco Migliaro, and we are recording part two of his Life Fellow IEEE staff oral history. Welcome, sir.
Migliaro:
Thanks very much, Mary Ann.
IEEE Power & Energy Society
Hellrigel:
Today, I would like to pick up with your Society work and I understand you were very active in the [IEEE] Power & Energy Society [previously, the IEEE Power Engineering Society] and you have actually received some awards. You have received some awards from them for your work, and I understand that in 1992, you were a PES [IEEE Power& Energy Society] distinguished individual service award recipient and I will turn it over to you. When did you become involved with, I guess at one point it was the IEEE Power Engineering Society, and now it is the IEEE Power & Energy Society. When and why did you become involved with PES?
Migliaro:
Actually, I was involved in PES at the end of 1969 and at the beginning of 1970 I started my first involvement. The reason I got involved was the Power Engineering Society at that time, their Winter Meeting was always in New York City, and I worked in New York City, down in American Electric Power [AEP] on Broadway downtown.
My supervisor at that time was Mel Olken. He had given me a paper that was going to be presented at the Winter Power Meeting and asked me to review it and come up with a set of comments on it, talking points that I could have a discussion of the paper after the paper was presented. So, that began my work well, not directly my work with PES, but that became the first involvement I had with PES.
I went through that paper at that time, and it was actually a paper written by a Standards Working Group that was discussing their work in progress on a standard related to battery maintenance at power plants. So, I went through that, and I prepared a discussion. I sent the discussion in, and at that time the chairman of the Working Group had gotten back in touch with me and said, if you are interested, we could use members on a Working Group. So, I went back to my supervisor and said, they are also interested in members on the Working Group, and he said, yes, that will be fine. So, that began my involvement in Standards at the same time and in a Working Group.
I went to that Winter Power Meeting, which was in January of 1970. I presented my discussion after they presented their paper, and there were a number of other people that presented discussions. Then I became part of that Working Group. And at that time being a novice to IEEE, I was a Student Member, but when you came out of school, and you started to see what IEEE was all about. IEEE was a huge organization to me at that time. Of course, at that time, they were called Regional Activities and Technical Activities and Standards Activities, and there were Committees and Subcommittees and Working Groups. It kind of boggled the mind. So, I actually was a member of the Working Group.
Hellrigel:
You had just graduated in the spring of 1969, so you are pretty young to get launched in the center of such a big organization.
Migliaro:
Absolutely. And actually, it was amazing because when I went to my Working Group meeting, and I think I had mentioned this in part one, many of the people sitting there, they were all very senior engineers, principal engineers, chief engineers, and vice presidents of manufacturing companies. And I am sitting in a room with them, essentially, someone who's not been out of school very long. At that time, and one of the reasons Mel had asked me to get involved in this was we had an event at a plant that involved the batteries, and it was directly related to maintenance. They gave me an assignment to be put in charge to make sure an event like that never happened at any of our generating stations again. So, this kind of fell in with what I was doing at work at the same time.
Hellrigel:
Could I ask what that event may have been?
Migliaro:
Yes, it was an event where, and I cannot say that they failed to maintain the batteries, but they certainly were not doing enough maintenance and we lost the unit, tripped offline and the batteries failed to operate properly. As a result, the turbine generator came down without lubricating oil on the bearings and it was a very expensive loss. I did not know at that time that, I did not know that it might have been a multimillion-dollar loss, but it was a big loss, and we did not want that to happen again. So, we went back in, and I researched it, looking at the alarm systems, the maintenance procedures, the maintenance policies, and the corporation. This was a nice fit with what the IEEE was doing at that time although the focus of the Working Group was really to put something in place for the nuclear facilities that were being designed at the time.
At that time, my primary design function at AEP was working on some 800-megawatt coal-fired plants in West Virginia. But shortly thereafter, probably within the next year or two, I actually moved to their nuclear plant, so then it was even more important. It tied more directly in with my job at the time since I was working on a design of a nuclear facility as well.
Hellrigel:
One quick question. So, when these batteries failed, the battery was supposed to go into action if the power grid service went down. And so, the power grid service goes down, the battery did not kick in, and then no oil to the turbine.
Migliaro:
Right. Actually, when you talk about the power grid, because the generating station is itself a power grid, we call it the auxiliary system or the generating system. So, it is a system powered off the generators that basically provides the AC power to the generating station. When you trip, normally you go on reserve power and the reserve power can come in and pick up things, but there were a lot of things that did not function at that time. They needed to rely on the DC oil pump, but the DC oil pump could not start because the battery was in a degraded condition and the oil pump could not start. As a result, no oil went to the bearings on the turbine generator, and it was severe damage to the generator itself. Also, when the generator cools down too, you can get some bowing in the shaft on the turbine generator because when the generator comes down, and it comes to a stop, you have got a period of time and then you put it on what we call turning gear so that you turn that turbine slowly until it totally cools down so that you do not get any bowing in the shaft or any other damage on the machine. So, it was a major event for the system. I continued to work on the Working Group, and I was on the Working Group for a few years. Then the chairman of the Working Group actually nominated me to join the Station Design Subcommittee because that particular Working Group was associated with station design. Then I became a member of the Station Design Subcommittee, and then again, it was a couple more years and I became a member of the Power Generation Committee of the Power Engineering Society. I also joined some other Working Groups at that time. There was a Working Group on Uninterruptible Power Supply Systems. There was a Working Group on DC System Design, and they were all related to standards at that time being developed within the IEEE. And in—go ahead.
Hellrigel:
Now by Working Group, remember I am an outsider, you would meet annually or present papers or you had problems you were trying to solve?
Migliaro:
Well, we were trying to write a standard. We were trying to write an IEEE standard. The Battery Working Group had responsibility for a number of standards, and these are things that we might talk about on the standard side. But the real key standard was IEEE450, the one that was talking about the maintenance of the batteries at the generating stations, and it also included substations. It was not only generating stations, but substations as well. Then the DC system design also was part of Station Design Subcommittee, and it related to generating station DC system design. I had gone through that and, in the progression of things, I at one point became the chair of the Station Design Subcommittee and then later on I became chair of the Power Generation Committee.
I also at some point became a member of what was called the Power Engineering Society's Standards Coordinating Committee. The Standards Coordinating Committee was a committee made up of a representative from each of the committees within the Power Engineering Society: Switchgear Committee, Transformer Committee, Relay Committee, Rotating Machinery Committee, Station Design, and Power Generation Committee. Each one sent a representative there and we coordinated amongst ourselves about the standards because as I had just mentioned, the battery standard, although it was being done in station design under the Power Generation Committee, had implications for the Substations Committee because the recommendations that we were putting together, also impacted substation batteries. So, we would discuss things like that at that meeting to make sure that when we had documents that kind of cross lines between different committees, that we either had set up liaisons. At one point, we had a liaison from the Substations Committee sit on the Battery Working Group. Then we would also talk about it in the Standards Coordinating Committee to make sure we did not have a conflict. The last thing we needed to do was get a standard to go all the way to the Standards Board and have one of our own committees within the Power Engineering Society object to approving a standard that was developed in the Power Engineering Society by another committee. So, I became a member of the Standards Coordinating Committee, and later I became chair of that.
I also wound up getting involved in conferences. I wound up getting involved in some of the conferences, but there was one conference in particular which the Power Generation Committee participated in. It was called at that time, the Joint Power Generation Conference. There were three societies that sponsored that. ASME sponsored it, ASCE, which is civil engineers, and IEEE. So, I was a member of what they call the Special Conferences Committee, and that is where in Power Engineering special conferences like that fell. Then I also became a member of the Joint Committee (ASME, ASCE, IEEE), Committee of the Joint Power Generation Conference. Ultimately, I became the chair of that committee. You go through a progression as treasurer, then secretary, then vice chair, and then chair. In those four years, you have been assigned a meeting, and my meeting was the 1988 meeting in Philadelphia. As you are moving through these positions on the committee, you are starting to build your local committee because there is usually a local committee that helps set up the conference with you. By the time you become chair of that joint society committee of ASME, IEEE and ASCE, your meeting is that year. I ran that meeting in Philadelphia and then continued to stay on that committee for a number of years, but at some point, the interest in the Joint Power Conference kind of faded and it sort of disbanded. It does not occur anymore.
Hellrigel:
Are there any key people you worked with at this point that you would care to mention?
Migliaro:
There are lots of key people. I am trying to remember them because there were so many. I will tell you as they come to me. I will come back, but there were a number of people.
Hellrigel:
It seemed at this point that you are almost in a raft going down the river in the rapids. At some point, did you ever think about, oh boy, this might take too much time from my work, employment?
Migliaro:
I had to do my work and it. I do not want to say it never interfered with the work, but I made sure I covered my work as well. I did a lot of work at night and a lot of work on the weekends because I also wrote a whole bunch of papers for IEEE that were published in the Transactions of the Power Engineering Society and presented at conferences.
Then also, about this time too, as I was getting along, I became more involved in the [IEEE] Industry Applications Society, and there it was more the Power Systems Engineering Committee. That committee was responsible for the Color Book series within the standards operation, and I am sure you have heard of the Color book series.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Migliaro:
I worked on the Orange Book and the Brown Book, and I worked a little bit on the Emerald Book later in my career, but primarily the Orange Book and the Brown Book. In the Orange Book, I was a member of one of the committees for one of the chapters, actually on Stored Energy Emergency Power Systems. Then on the Brown Book, I was the chapter chair on the modeling chapter for that particular revision because you understand these standards go under revision every five or ten years. So, a lot of times, you do not keep the same chairs. You rotate the chairs of the committee of the chapter chairs. I was involved in both of those. I also wrote a number of papers for the Industry Applications Meetings, primarily the Power System Engineering Committee, and I presented those at their conferences as well. And go ahead.
Hellrigel:
About how many publications did you have?
Migliaro:
I have about forty publications. Probably half of them were IEEE and the other half were other types of publications. I also had gotten involved in doing chapters in some books. Actually, a couple of my professors from Pratt approached me. They were editing a power systems book. It was a power system calculation book. They asked me to write a chapter, and I wrote one chapter on DC systems in that book and then I jointly wrote another chapter on synchronous machines with another professor, a good friend of mine, Dr. Omar Mazzoni. We also have done that book. That book has been, I think, in its third or fourth edition and as many editions as it is had, we have continued to rewrite that chapter or those two chapters in that book. But then, at some point when I was working on that book, the two professors I had mentioned their name in the last interview in part one. It was Professor Arthur Sideman and Dr. Haroun Mahrous. Dr. Mahrous was very active in IEEE as well, and they recommended me to another editor who edits the Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers, and he asked me to take over a chapter in there. It is actually on standards and the standards industry, so I picked up writing that chapter and continued that for a number of editions of that handbook. The last edition of that handbook, I basically, kind of passed that chapter on to somebody else. Then the Handbook of Power Calculations, I am not quite sure if that is going to be revised anymore, but if it is, I will probably do it jointly with somebody and then pass it on again to somebody else who will pick it up going forward.
Hellrigel:
With these two—well, the major textbook, what does it feel like to have your textbook being used by students in training?
Migliaro:
Well, I have had people come to me, not many, but some that saw I wrote a chapter in here and said something. I think it is pretty good if you are giving them some information that is going to help them in their career and help them learn something.
Hellrigel:
How has preparing these books changed over time? We are now in the digital age, and you have been working on the book for, I guess, a couple of decades.
Migliaro:
Yes, probably so. Probably so. It does not seem that long, but when you think about it, yes. It goes back that far. Of course, at that time, we were typing manuscripts and editing by hand, a lot of mail going back and forth, packages going back and forth to look at the proofs and all these things, to a point where these days, we get a PDF that we can comment directly on and make our changes, edits, deletions, additions, and whatever we want to do. As far as figures [are concerned], they are typically done by another group, but you just need a rough sketch and that has not changed very much except that you can do it on your computer now if you are so inclined. But the text, and the time it takes to review this and the back and forth has dropped dramatically.
Hellrigel:
How did you find that shift to going from working on paper to working digitally? You and I are both of that generation that was used to working on paper and now it is digital. Are you comfortable with that?
Migliaro:
Initially, I was not as comfortable. I am fairly comfortable with it today, but initially, I would print it out most of the time and I would work on a printed copy, and then I would take the printed edits and put them into the electronic file. I did not feel very comfortable editing the electronic file directly at that time. But over time, I have gotten used to it.
Hellrigel:
Do you read eBooks?
Migliaro:
Occasionally. I do a lot of reading on the computer, on my phone, but I still have a collection of books that I look at. But I do, I do look at eBooks once in a while.
Hellrigel:
So, you have got papers, you have got the textbooks, and have you been an editor of a journal or the proceedings of the conferences also?
Migliaro:
No, no. I never did that, but within the Power Engineering Society, within the Power Generation Committee, we had a group that was conference-related in the conference. When I was doing conferences, that group—and I cannot remember its exact name, but we basically used to coordinate the peer reviews of the Transaction Standards or Transaction papers. So, we would get all the papers, we would get reviewers, we would send it out to reviewers, get the reviews back, and come back in. And of course, any paper that you were sending out, you would review yourself anyway, right on top of that. I did a lot of paper reviews, and I wound up, I was again a member of that group and then later became the chair of that group. I think it was called a Technical Conference Subcommittee. But we did the paper reviews for the conferences.
Hellrigel:
Are you still involved with these committees in PES?
Migliaro:
Not so much anymore. I continued to be involved when I joined ISTO. I continued to be involved in some of them as a corresponding member because that is something you can do very easily today, which we could not do in the early days. It is just adding your name to the e-mails that go out. So, I continued to do reviews and reviews of standards primarily, as a corresponding member, but I have not been doing much of that in the last couple years.
Hellrigel:
Since you were with ISTO, did you have to take a step back from some of these Working Groups? I do not know if it is a conflict of interest.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes, I did take a step back, mainly because it was additional work that I had to take care of. I always was concerned about conflict of interest because there were certain things. People had contacted me about maybe doing a Fellow nomination or doing a Fellow reference, and I would always get it cleared before I did that as far as I could I do that. We will talk about the [IEEE] Board of Directors later, but when I was on the Board of Directors, the one thing that we could not do, we could not do any references for Fellows. So, I wanted to make sure that we are on the up and up. I did not take the time to put a reference together for somebody that would only be thrown out and they were really counting on it as one of the references or something.
Hellrigel:
If you are on the Board of Directors, then you might have to vote on something, and that could get a little murky.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Wow. You are working with PES, and what do you like about doing that kind of work?
Migliaro:
Well, I like meeting people and getting to know people and having some discussions. We would always talk about lots of things and particularly things that might be of interest. Currently, if there was a hot topic in the industry or you had a particular question that you wanted another opinion on, having that network of people out there in IEEE that I could just literally pick up the phone and give them a call was kind of amazing. We had that, too, and again, this ties in a couple of ways. There was one fellow who was with General Electric, a number[were], but this one was Paul Cummings. He was a rotating machinery expert. Then Charles Concordia, who had written a book on synchronous machines, was of course, part of the Rotating Machinery Committee and things. If a question came up, I had no problem calling either one of them and asking a question. But these were people—Charles Concordia was somebody that I was just amazed that I could meet somebody like that. I first met him in a course at General Electric a number of years back. He was one of the instructors out there. Then I got to know him more within PES and working with him in some activities and interfacing with him.
I got some reactions a lot of times. One time we had something, there was a problem with a generator, and I had told the people I worked with, I said, well, just call Charlie Concordia. He will give you [the solution]. At that time, he was living down in Florida, too. He retired. They were just amazed that I could give him his number and they could call him. They did, and he helped them. I had a similar event when I went to a company, at that time it was Commonwealth Edison's, and now it is part of Exelon. I was very good friends with the person who was the CEO and that was a fellow named Wally Behnke.
Hellrigel:
That is a very familiar name.
Migliaro:
Yes. He was president of PES at one point. [W.B. Behnke was the 1988-1989 President of the IEEE Power Engineering Society]. I got to know him very well and we had a very good relationship, and I had to go out there. One time, I was actually teaching a course at Commonwealth Edison, and I got there and the guy that I was meeting to set up the course. At some point I said, I got to talk to somebody here. I said, I got to see somebody here. I have something that I want to talk to them about. He said, okay, when we get some time. He says, who is it? And I say, it is Wally Behnke. He just kind of stopped in his tracks and he goes, Wally Behnke? I said, yes, yes, we are pretty good friends. So, you got those kind of reactions sometimes. But these were just people that in the course of what we did in the IEEE, we all kind of worked together and did things together and shared information and talked. I found that to be really something that was amazing. I even amazed myself times, the people I met, the people that I really looked up to in the industry and got to be able to meet them on a very personal basis.
Hellrigel:
Yes. A lot of people talk about the networking, but also the friendships. I think that is what people have been missing in the last few years with the virtual conferences. They cannot see their buddies and grab a coffee or a beer and catch up on the human end of it, so that is missing a bit.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
It is actually kind of fun to watch some of the interactions at the receptions. I have gone to some pretty big conferences, and it happens at the history conferences too, where you have not seen someone for a while and then you meet up with them. So, that is kind of cool because people think it is just an engineering society, but it is really a friends’ network, too.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
And Commonwealth Edison, that is based out of Chicago.
Migliaro:
Yes, that is correct.
Hellrigel:
I have got a good book for you to read. I will send you the citation.
Migliaro:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
Commonwealth Edison, if you are interested in. Yes, it is kind of fun. Now, do you have a link then? You have a link with some of your work then with Industry Applications. I do not know if there is anything else you want to add about PES?
Migliaro:
No. If I think of anything, we can add it, but I think we pretty well covered PES. There were certainly other things that I got involved in there, but that is the bulk of what I did. Pretty much, my home committee was Power Generation, and of course, the Standards Coordinating Committee and then again, the technical conferences. So that is pretty much it.
Hellrigel:
Did you have any favorite conference or destination that you liked?
Migliaro:
No. The destinations, most of the time, are all nice. I do not know that I have got one favorite, one that stands out. At any one time, anyone could be a favorite, but certainly, you like parts of California and you like parts of Texas and Phoenix. There are a number of places that are pretty nice when you go around.
Hellrigel:
PES had their annual, their January meeting in New York City. Do they meet elsewhere now?
Migliaro:
Oh yes. They changed that a number of years back, but the Winter Meeting was always at what was called the [New York] Statler Hilton Hotel at the time. Then it became the New York Penta.
Hellrigel:
The Winter Meeting.
Migliaro:
It was there every January and sometimes maybe it rolled into the first week of February. The Summer Meeting was always on the West Coast, so it might be in Portland or Seattle or Los Angeles or San Francisco or San Diego, or somewhere out there.
Hellrigel:
Do they still hold the Summer Meeting on the west coast and the Winter Meeting somewhere else?
Migliaro:
Yes, it is changed, but they are not very strict about it, but they try and make sure that the meetings rotate around the country, so that—
Hellrigel:
And they still have the two major meetings.
Migliaro:
They have those two major meetings, but then they also have the T&D Conference [IEEE PES T&D Conference and Exposition], which is a big conference, and then there are other conferences, ESMO [IEEE International Conference on the Transmission and Distribution Construction, Operation, and Live-Line Maintenance] and others that are parts of other committees. But they still have a lot of meetings around.
Hellrigel:
So, if I were to do a big oral history project, I should go to either the Winter or the Summer Meeting? That is where you catch most people.
Migliaro:
I would say that that would be a good one, yes. It used to be, and I cannot say because I do not see the attendance numbers now, but the Winter Meeting always had many more people than the Summer Meeting.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I heard that they could have 8,000 or more people. There would be so many people that you do not know where to put them.
Migliaro:
Yes. The [IEEE PES] T&D Conference, which takes place every whether it is every year-and-a-half or every three years. I do not remember because I was not involved in T&D that much, but it was a big conference and that one had huge membership that was up in those very high numbers as well.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and that might restrict where you can hold it because you need that many hotels.
Migliaro:
Yes. The T&D meeting also had exhibits. The big power equipment would be brought in, so you would need a place where you could see transformers or circuit breakers or whatever else they would set up. You basically needed somewhere that had a convention center.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and those exhibits are always fun, at least for me.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
To see the new tech and to meet people who can explain it. So that is fun.
Do you go to these PES meetings anymore?
Migliaro:
I have not been to one in a while. No, I have not been there.
IEEE Industry Applications Society
Hellrigel:
Now, I guess we can jump to the [IEEE] Industry Applications Society. When did you become a member of that Society?
Migliaro:
At the same time as PES. That is on my membership application, but I became active, probably about three or four years after I got involved in PES. So, saying the 1970, 1973, 1974 timeframe, probably. I started to get more active in the Industry Applications Committee. Some of that was also associated with the fact that I had not necessarily moved jobs completely at this point, but I started to get involved in other things, even at American Electric Power (AEP). Although my primary function was to design generating stations, at one point, we bought a towboat company because AEP had coal mines, and they had railroad cars. They bought a lot of railroad cars, they bought this towboat company, and we had to put a headquarters together, so I was the electrical engineer assigned to put the headquarters together for the towboat company. I had to get involved as we are trying to figure out what they need in a towboat repair and maintenance facility, so we got involved in dry docks.
Actually AEP, and I had mentioned this in the first part of my interview, was a very good company from that perspective because they kind of gave you a free reign on what you needed to do, but they would also make sure you knew what to do at that time. They took the team that was going to design this maintenance facility for the towboat company, and we spent time with the people that were in the towboat company that we bought, trying to learn exactly what they do, exactly what they needed. Then they sent us to a number of facilities that did towboat repair and maintenance; one down in Louisville, Kentucky, [and] one in the Pittsburgh area. We actually got to go through their shops, see how their shops were put together, see what their dry docks looked like, [and see] how their operations went. I got involved in that.
Then also down at our plant, which was in West Virginia, they decided to build a motor repair shop, motor repair and rewind. I was also the electrical engineer on that. That put me more into the industry side rather than the generation side, so I started to get involved more in industry applications at that point, too. We did similar things. We went to motor repair shops and went through there and looked at what they did, how they worked, the types of machines they had, [and] how they set up the power supply for all the equipment in the facilities.
Later when I started to move to consulting companies between Gibbs & Hill, I was assigned to a petrochemical project. It was power generation as well, but it was Yanbu Industrial City in Saudi Arabia. Again, I started to get more involved in industry applications, and then also when I left there and went to Ebasco, I got more into the industrial side as well. So, that then helped me with my activities in the IEEE Industry Applications Society.
Hellrigel:
Did you see this as a natural progression that you are going from the generating side to more aspects of what you needed to have on the generating side?
Migliaro:
I do not know. What I saw as a natural progression because I am still doing generating units. I was still doing generation station design, too, but it certainly gave me a different perspective on things. I could see other things besides just generating stations and I got to see how the facilities worked and operated and what their needs were and how they were different from what we are doing in generating stations.
Hellrigel:
Before your employer bought this towboat company, they would just outsource and hire towboats to move your coal and other things. Why make this jump to own a towboat company?
Migliaro:
I cannot tell you a hundred percent except that AEP was always very innovative and they liked to always advertise another AEP first or whatever it was. They always liked to be the biggest and the best, and they got to the point where they actually had so many generating stations along the Ohio River that it probably made sense to have their own towboat company. They also had mines. They had mines in Ohio, but they also had mines out in the west, in, if I am not mistaken, Utah, and maybe a couple other states. I think Utah was one of them. They would bring this coal in, and they also built a big coal transfer station where these hundred-car trains would come in and they would basically offload their coal. They built it in Metropolis, Illinois. I was not involved in that particular facility at all, but that was a big coal transfer station. Then the towboats would come down, pick up the coal, and bring it up the Ohio River to the generating stations.
Hellrigel:
In business history, they labeled this vertical integration, owning various stages of the business from raw materials through production and sometimes even into marketing and sales.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Historians and economics refer to it as backward and forward linkages or vertical integration in the era known as “the rise of big business.” Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and other industrialists expanded their investments to control from raw material, to manufacturing, to distribution and sales, etc. So, you might own the oil well to the gas station, or from the coal mine to the power plant. I guess that the complete gambit would be if they also sold the domestic appliances.
Migliaro:
Right. Go ahead.
Hellrigel:
And that is where the holding company came developed.
Migliaro:
Yes, because actually, when I first came to AEP, and as we are talking, it is kind of coming back to it. Most of our plants along the Ohio River were what were called mine mouth plants. The mine was really across the road from the plant, and you would see this big conveyor come out of the mountain and the conveyor would just convey the coal right over to the power plant. When they had to bring the coal in from the west, they did not have the ability, so that might have been the reason to spur the purchase of a towboat company because so much coal was coming from the west, and they felt that it was better to have our own towboats than to rely on everybody else. But most of the plants, or I should not say most, but a lot of the plants along the Ohio really were mine mouth plants where the coal mine was literally across the highway from the plant.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Just an aside, when [Thomas] Edison was going to jump into the power plant building business, he focused on Pennsylvania, in part, because it was the center of coal mining.
You are saying if we are going to make this work financially, and it is an experiment, we need to reduce the source and the linkages, so build the power plants near the coal supply.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Wow. These power plants that you are working on, are they going to start making the shift to natural gas or is that a whole other issue?
Migliaro:
Well, that was sometime after I left AEP and I do not know what kind of switch they made, but at the time I was with AEP, we had all coal-fired plants. Every one of our plants was coal-fired, and the nuclear plant was under design and then eventually got built. But if you remember, we had the big oil crisis back then and there were a lot of things put out and AEP put out a lot of things at that time and they really touted the fact that all their plants were coal burning and they did not need to rely on Middle Eastern oil. They had little trinkets. They had matchbooks where they would have some kind of funny sayings on it: We have coal, let us burn it,” or whatever it turned out to be.
Hellrigel:
Right. For example, buy American has been a popular slogan.
Migliaro:
Right. Then, at some point, we converted one of the very old units [from coal to oil]. It was a unit called Twin Branch in Indiana, and they converted that from coal to oil. When I left AEP, they had one oil burner; they had one nuclear, a two-unit nuclear; and other than that, they were all coal. They did have a couple of small hydro units, and a pumped storage unit. They did have a couple other things, but the bulk of their generation was coal-fired.
Hellrigel:
I guess this is just my personal interest. When you are shifting from coal to oil, does that mean you have to change all the machinery, and it is a major investment.
Migliaro:
Yes, it is a major investment. You have got to go back through and do boiler renovations, so that you are actually firing on oil rather than putting coal in air. Because we had a couple of different coal plants, and I am not an expert in boilers, but we had a couple units on the system that were actually, what they call cyclone boilers and most of the others burn pulverized coal. So, you would pulverize the coal into a powder and then kind of spray it into the boiler. In the cyclone boilers, you would actually swirl that coal in, and it would burn. It would be in chunks, not very big chunks, but it would be in chunks. I do not know whether you can convert the cyclones as easy as the pulverized coal, but again, I am not sure. I do not know what they finally did on a lot of that.
Hellrigel:
Right. This is bringing you more into the industry applications. What did you find challenging about this transition in your career? Did it present any challenges like retooling or something?
Migliaro:
Many of the calculations are all the same, but there is a different philosophy, a design philosophy, and you have to understand what the design criteria is. In many cases, in some of the industrial facilities and power plants we were always looking at something that was going to have a forty-year life and for the nuclear facilities now, you see many of it be extended to sixty-year lives. So, we are looking at very long-term design. So, when you design something, you are designing it to last forty years. Where in a petrochemical facility. You may design something to last for five years. It may not have the same type of equipment. Although it is still reliable, you are always looking for reliability and making sure that the systems do not fail. But some of the things that you design, you have got a different way you look at it and because your goal is different. A facility is going to run for five years and maybe shut down, as opposed to something that you expect without a doubt to last forty years as a minimum. And the coal-fired plants, I mean, we had many plants that went beyond forty years. It is just as long as they kept working and as long as they were making money and were efficient for us, they kept running.
Hellrigel:
Now, during your career—this might be off topic, but during your career, we had the rise of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and those type of criteria that you had to consider. How did the environmental movement and new expectations impact the work you did?
Migliaro:
In many ways, it had significant impacts because when we moved to put precipitators on. The flue gases that came out of the coal-fired plants, those were huge electrical loads, because you had this facility basically that precipitated themselves that were trying to take particulate out of what was going up the stack, so it added a lot more to our design. It caused us to maybe increase the size of the auxiliary system a bit because there was bigger power demand within the plant itself. Those were the type of things that we did. But other than that, we just went through, and we had to learn what we had to do or know what we had to do and go back and design it.
In a lot of cases, I can tell you even when we did the nuclear plant too, because AEPs first nuclear unit, there are only a couple of them that were ever put in, but it was a Westinghouse design. It had what was called an ice condenser containment. Within the containment building, there is like 300 degrees around the containment building full of ice so that in the event of a steam line break, the steam is directed up through these ice baskets, it melts all the ice, and this keeps the pressure down within the containment. As a consequence, the containment was much smaller than a normal containment that did not have an ice condenser. D.C. Cook was a nice condenser containment and I believe Sequoia and Watts Bar are also ice containments, and those are TVA units. There might have been another one that was scheduled, but I do not know that it ever got built, I am not sure. Sequoia and Watts Bar, I am pretty sure they were ice condenser containment. At least Watts Bar I am pretty sure was ice condenser.
We had an interface with people that were doing this industry, not the power industry, and their product was just not that reliable to give us the forty-year life we were looking at. So, we spent a lot of time with those people, re-engineering their products to make them rugged enough to withstand the forty years of the conditions that they were going to see in the power plants, and that took a lot of time, but it all worked well.
Also, I think when we got into nuclear instrumentation, I was not as much on the instrument side, but I got involved in it. I got into nuclear instrumentation. Some of the manufacturers, there was a slowdown in the defense industry at that time, so they took people from their defense industry and moved them into power plant instrumentation. That was also an educational process because number one, we were not necessarily familiar with the things that they were proposing because they were not the type of things that we were used to seeing in power plants. By the same token, they were not used to dealing with power plants. They were using what they were familiar with which was maybe not as attractive to us, but we eventually worked things out and came to a good compromise. I can say that they have worked really well over the years because I have not heard much of a complaint, years after I left AEP. I was still working in New York, and I used to travel a train with people that I worked with, and they would keep me informed about what was happening, particularly at the nuclear plant, since I was so involved in that and I was a startup engineer out there, too, for unit one. They would let me know that this was going on, that was going on, and if we had problems with this or that, but I never heard many complaints about anything. I guess everybody in total did a good job on kind of adapting themselves to a new set of rules and a new set of design criteria and maybe compromise to work things out for something that gave us a good solution in the end.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I can just envision someone that spent their career maybe designing nuclear subs. Now, they are designing a generation system, but it is a huge power plant.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Yes, because that would be one of the likely transitions for industry. I know GE (General Electric) and others did defense work for that and then, you have to shift your market to get new customers when they disappear.
Migliaro:
Yes, because in the nuclear power industry, not surprisingly, many of the people that worked at the plants came out of the Navy and it was nuclear submarines or nuclear ships that they had been involved in.
Hellrigel:
Ships and submarines, yes.
Migliaro:
Some of these people had been in the Navy for twenty years or whatever it was. I would kid around with one of them and just say, hey, these are not two land-based submarines here, they are two power plants, okay.
Hellrigel:
Yes. And they are not protected by a fleet.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Just the reflection of the shift, the historical shift, and having to move from wartime production or contracts to civilian contracts. I imagine the people felt fortunate they were made employed because there was the big dip in the computer and engineering employment in the early to mid-1970s. My father had come out of computer school and then there were no jobs like they were when he went in the year before. So, they had that challenge.
When you are working as a volunteer for the IEEE Industry Applications Society in terms of conferences and things like that, and the PES annual conference, what conferences did you attend?
Migliaro:
Primarily, at Industry Applications, they had an annual conference that they held, but also, the Power Systems Engineering Committee used to have its own conferences. So, I primarily went to those two conferences. There were some other conferences that I did go to, but I cannot recall which one of the Groups sponsored it. Whether it was a Protective Relay Group or another maintenance group that was being done. But as a result of participating in Industry Applications, I did get an invitation to speak at some other conferences, particularly when they were developing the Blue Book. When the Blue Book came out, they were looking for things and they held a conference to kind of get people talking about different aspects of maintenance and safety, and I spoke at a couple of those. So, that was my involvement primarily in Industry Applications. But I still maintain some activity in the Power Engineering Society and my predominant activity was still the Power Engineering Society, although Industry Applications was more active in some of those years.
Hellrigel:
What was the Blue Book’s topic?
Migliaro:
The Blue Book was maintenance safety.
Hellrigel:
This might be a stupid question, but who comes up with these colors?
Migliaro:
I do not know who comes up with the colors. The committee would, I guess. I do not know whether somebody would suggest a color. There was talk of a Rainbow Book. These books, the Gray Book, the Red Book, have a lot of commonality in them in that the calculations you do for commercial buildings are the same calculations you do for industrial facilities, using the same equations and everything. It is just that your system looks a little bit different, and they were thinking of taking all these common parts and relaying is another one. If you have protective relaying in an industrial facility, you have got protective relaying commercial facility, [and] protective relaying in a hospital, which was the White Book, the hospital book.
Hellrigel:
That makes sense.
Migliaro:
All these chapters repeated themselves in a sense. So, they talked about this Rainbow Book, in that they would take all these common sections and put them in one book called the Rainbow Book, which had applicability across the whole spectrum. But I think, by the time they got around, and again, I do not think the Rainbow Book ever came to fruition because with the digital world and the fact that you could from the Standard Association of IEEE buy a CD-ROM with all the books on it. It did not make a lot of sense to come out with this other book at that time when you could just throw this in your computer and go wherever you really wanted to.
Hellrigel:
And piece it together, yes. It sounds like maybe even a carryover from the military because they had manuals for everything. I would have to ask someone where do you come up with these colors, but yes, white makes sense for a hospital. These books then, well, they set the industry standard, but they also make some money on it if you are selling a copy of it?
Migliaro:
The IEEE, when you look at the Standard Association, and this may be something they will talk about in theirs, but the Standard Association and the Standards Department, which was its predecessor, never received any money from the general fund of IEEE, unlike some of the other organizations that got set aside some money for activities. Standards had to operate on its own and the sale of standards is a source of revenue, but just like anything else, they do not want to come out and make a huge surplus. They want to keep their operation going and make it reasonable for the members. But yes, you have got to build a surplus for your new projects that you have got to fund and things like that and you have got to pay your staff that is doing all this.
Those are things when I was, we will talk about the Board of Directors, but when I was on a Board of Directors, those are the things I used to get from the Society presidents. They used to think that Standards made a ton of money off these standards activities, which were all volunteer activities, and the volunteers were members of their Society, so basically, they felt they should get a cut of these monies that were coming in because it was people from their societies. We always went round and round on that point, and I think it still goes on today probably.
Hellrigel:
Oh yes. Yes, one person's annual fee is another person's funding for something. You need a revenue stream because you need to keep people working on projects and it is not that you are keeping quote, "people employed." It is just without those employees; you cannot do the work. It gets to be a vicious cycle when people start to try to figure out where to cut corners on finances. But yes, it is, yes. The politics of setting a price is also complex. When do they decide, we need another book? I mean, that would be a new standard?
Migliaro:
Yes. That usually came out of the committee. If there was a particular need, like maintenance. Safety and maintenance in particular became a hot button. As the interest grows, then basically, people would bring that proposal forward at the committee level or subcommittee level, and then it'd go to the main committee. Then they would basically say, yes, this is a good idea. Then there is a form you have to fill out for the Standards Association, which is called a PAR [Project Authorization Request]. It is basically a request to develop a standard and you have got to put information on there. Over the years, the PAR has changed, but they would ask things like, how many copies do you think you are going to sell or what is the need for this book or the standard? Who has an interest in it? Where are you going to get your members from as far as the Working Group is concerned? Today, the form looks quite a bit different because now we have got are there any patents involved, any licenses, or any IP that we have got to deal with? The form is still called PAR and it still gets submitted and gets approved, but the committees are where they decide they would like to do this because there have been standards.
When that standard was published, everybody that worked on it got a free copy of the standard. They would send you a free copy via participation in the group. Pretty much like the books, when you write a chapter in a book, you get a free copy when the book is published. There were some Groups that pretty much when you sent the copies out to the committee, those were the only people who were going to buy it. There was not a big market for it, but some of them were still necessary. It was a very necessary document even though the audience was very limited. Others would be a bestseller, and we would have lots and lots of copies go out.
Hellrigel:
I guess over the years, you have developed your own personal archive?
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Maybe we can talk about the dispensation of that said archive? I do not know if you knew Don Heirman, the late Don Heirman.
Migliaro:
Yes, I know Don.
Hellrigel:
He donated some of his material and it is now part of the official IEEE Archive.
Migliaro:
Oh, okay. Yes. I had that early Electrical Engineer’s Handbook, that 1921 edition.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I have that. Mary Lynne Nielsen gave it to me.
Migliaro:
I donated that.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I have that.
Migliaro:
Yes, we can certainly talk about some of that.
Hellrigel:
Yes, maybe you have things that are one of a kind that have not been digitized and posted in IEEE Xplore and we would hate to see it to go to a dumpster. In this transition from the paper to the digital age at the IEEE Archive, we will still get, even some conference proceedings that slipped through the cracks and did not get digitized. I work with Nathan Brewer, the digital archivist, and we have been trying to make sure that we keep every piece of history that we can. We can talk afterwards when we are editing your transcript.
Migliaro:
Yes, I have every paper I have written, and I have scanned them. So, I do not have very many paper records anymore. I pretty much have scanned almost everything I have had over time. I have scanned it piece by piece into a computer, and they reside on a portable hard drive. Actually, two portable hard drives, the primary one and the backup one; not leaving anything to chance.
Hellrigel:
Right. Yes. Keep them in two different parts of the house.
Migliaro:
I do. One's inside a fireproof safe, and the other one is somewhere where I can get at it easier.
Hellrigel:
I understand that, and it always makes me nervous. Things are digitized and people say we could throw out the paper, but, no, we cannot. The IEEE Archive has some one hundred-plus-year-old copies of certain [membership] applications, and no, we just do not throw out the paper.
Migliaro:
Right. Here in Florida, that held true back in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew hit, and all our plants were knocked out. If it was not for the fact that we had paper copies of all the drawings and everything else, we would have been in a real mess. Everything we had digitally, we had on paper and we had— to go back through and walk down the whole plant, see what was damaged and what was not damaged. When you are up north, you do not think about these things, but here in Florida, our weather is so good that the turbines are outdoors. There is no turbine building around them.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Migliaro:
They are just open to the air and the cranes, and everything is out there. Now the nuclear plants, the containment is still there, but the turbine facilities and everything else are out in the open. The fossil plants, the boilers are all open and there is no building around the boiler either. When the hurricane came through a lot of things got damaged. We basically had a walk down. We went in teams, and we had people with video recorders. As we compared the paper drawings to what was out there and saw what things were missing or blown away, it was a quick way of trying to assess the damage.
Hellrigel:
Did you have the floods actually carry boilers and that away?
Migliaro:
No. No, no. But we had, at one of our plants that I had been at, the whole intake was full of lumber and pieces of houses. Everything that was at the intake of the plant had to be cleaned out.
Hellrigel:
Well, I have not even thought of that because my research has focused on the brick-and-mortar power plants pre-1930 and those with turbines had them inside the power plant. I know there are issues with birds. How do you protect the birds from the big turbines?
Migliaro:
Well, those are the wind turbines.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes, the wind turbines.
Migliaro:
But these are steam turbines. They all are encased in metal, and they have got no building around. When I first got involved, all our plants at AEP were in fairly cool climate, so we had turbine rooms, and everything was enclosed. And we had a heating boiler for the winter because the power plant needs to be heated and things like that. Then I started to see some of these plants in the south and where's the turbine building? There is no turbine building. It is just the turbines are out there on a big turbine deck and they are just open. So it is, but the wind turbines, that was another job I did in Hawaii. I did something in Hawaii with wind turbines and that is a major problem at that particular facility because there is an endangered bat that lives there. Then you got the birds and eventually or ultimately some of them wind up getting hit by the turbine blades and killed. Particularly at night, the bats because everything insects are out at night and everything, and they are coming around, so they have to be very careful about that and they have a staff that goes around and basically inspects and they find if any, bird or bat has been killed, they actually have to identify it.
Hellrigel:
Document it.
Migliaro:
Yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
What do they do? Can they make noise or put lights around or what do they do to try to mitigate it?
Migliaro:
Well, the lights can sometimes attract more insects which will attract others.
Hellrigel:
That is true.
Migliaro:
So, I do not know what they try and do, but I know they try and minimize that.
Hellrigel:
Large hooting owls, AI hooting owls. Well, that is another industrial application that has unintended consequences of all of this. I guess, what were some of your challenges working with the [IEEE] Industrial Applications Society?
Migliaro:
I never really felt too much of a challenge with anything. There were people there and like we said, we talked about the Power Engineering Society, but in the Industrial Applications Society, I had met a couple of people. I do not know whether the name Rene Castenschiold means much to you, but he was very active in IEEE. He was a member of PES and IAS, but he spent most of his time in IAS. And another fellow, Daniel Love, Danny Love who worked for Betchel. They were good friends within that Society and were very helpful when I needed help.
Hellrigel:
Did you ever consider, or did you ever get asked to be presidents of these Societies?
Migliaro:
No. No, I was never considering that because I had a full-time job, and I really had to work. I had to be very careful about how much time, because I have got the work life balance in addition to all the other stuff that is going on, so I never did that. There were a couple of people that would kind of cheer me on to become president of the IEEE at one point when I was on a Board of Directors, but again, I could never afford that kind of commitment to do something like that.
Hellrigel:
In the end, it is really a three-year commitment because the IEEE presidency has the three Ps structure; [IEEE President-Elect, IEEE President, and IEEE Past President].
Migliaro:
Right. Right. It is the three-year commitment, yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and it would certainly get you in trouble at work.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes. Yes. There was one president that I remember, who worked for IBM and basically, they gave him a sabbatical for the three years just about.
Hellrigel:
And that is a luxury.
Migliaro:
Right. Yes, you do not find companies that do that. I know there was one person in the SA [The IEEE Standards Association] too that was elected president of the SA and the SA is the same. It is, you are SA president-elect, then your two years as president, and then a year as past president. After a while, that person's company got a little tired of the sabbatical type thing.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Yes. It could be career-ending and even for academics depending on what your post is, you cannot just be traveling so much.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
If you did get offered a sabbatical, would you have had an interest in being IEEE President?
Migliaro:
Probably. I cannot say no, but probably.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Yes. You certainly would have got a lot more frequent flyer miles to last you for years and years to come.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes. Yes. There would have been a lot of frequent flyer miles.
IEEE Board of Directors
Hellrigel:
I guess that brings us down to the Board of Directors.
Migliaro:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
When did you become a member of the Board of Directors?
Migliaro:
Around 1990. At that time, I was very active within PES, very active within Standards, and I think I mentioned in the first part of this, I was working at Gibbs & Hill. Ed Chelloti was our engineering manager there, and he was also a member of the Standards Board at that time. When the Standards Board decided to form these committees, NesCom and RevCom which are the New Standards Committee and the Revised Standards Committee that approve the new projects and approve the revised standards or the new standards. At some point, he recommended me for a position on NesCom and then I was asked to join the NesCom Group, so I did that. Then I was on a number of the committees. At some point, I was made the chair of the Standards Board, and when you are Chair of the Standards Board, you are also the Director of Standards. So, the Director of Standards was a position on the IEEE Board of Directors. Okay. And that was my first involvement at the Board of Directors level.
Hellrigel:
What did it feel like to realize, now I am on the BOD, [IEEE] Board of Directors?
Migliaro:
It felt really good because now I met a whole new contingent of people because I was pretty well focused in the industry and even with Industry Applications, it is still power. I met a whole bunch of new people, a lot of people from academia and a lot of people from other areas of industry. It was just kind of amazing to feel that I had gotten to the point where I was a Director of IEEE.
Hellrigel:
What did some of your buddies think, you have now elevated to the adult table, so to speak?
Migliaro:
I guess they thought about it, but actually, not a lot of people said that. I mean, other than congratulations, the normal congratulations, and hey, that is really great, and things like that. There was not a big fuss made over it, anyway. My supervisor at the time thought it was great because again, by this time, I am with consulting companies. Consulting companies pride themselves on the fact that they can tout their employees do this and that. And here you have got an employee who's the Director of Standards for IEEE, the Chair of the Standards Board, has written forty papers, and is active in committees and all this other stuff. So, they liked it. They liked it a whole lot.
Hellrigel:
When you were on the Board of Directors, did they have quarterly face-to-face meetings? I forget.
Migliaro:
Yes, they were about quarterly at that time. I do not remember exactly either, but they were quarterly meetings. and of course, I had to travel to the meetings. But that is okay. I got approval to be able to take the time necessary to go and attend these meetings and that did not present a problem from a work point of view. Part of it was that my supervisors knew I was going to do my work anyway whatever I was going to do.
Hellrigel:
And were these meetings enjoyable or is that a silly question?
Migliaro:
No. They were, in a lot of cases. I mean, just like any other meeting, there are times when things go on, but for me, a lot of what I enjoyed is really seeing how the chair operated. This is true of almost any group as I basically was working through. Of course, you have got some chairs that really know how to run a meeting and how to keep it on track, and of course, we follow a kind of Robert's Rules with some IEEE exceptions. It is really good when you have a good chair. It is really good to see how the meeting progresses. Okay. But if you have a chair that just lets everybody talk on and on and somebody says something and then somebody else jumps in and there is no structure to it, it can get pretty boring and pretty quick in some cases, or you have always got or you can sometimes have somebody that likes to talk, so they always want to get the floor and the chairman lets them do it many times. If they want to talk ten times, they can talk ten times and where other chairs would say, hey, you have had two times or three times, I think that might be enough and let somebody else speak and if not, we will just move forward, so whatever it turns out to be. I always enjoyed the meetings because there was always something that was important that we would do, and I always thought I learned something somewhere. I learned something as I went to these meetings.
Hellrigel:
The meetings too, put a demand on your life. You are on the Board of Directors and then you are on the Standards Board. How much traveling are you doing for IEEE at this point in your life? Are you at a conference like every other weekend, or?
Migliaro:
No, not that frequently, but frequent. But the thing is that when I got to the Board of Directors, then I had a back off. You realize that the Standards Board met four or five times a year. I was still pretty much active on at least one Standards Working Group, and that meant about four times a year. Sometimes the meetings were concurrent. In other words, the meetings might be at the same place. The Board of Directors, and sometimes the Standards Board, would do something like that. But initially, when I got involved and became the Director of Standards, the Standards Board had never met outside New York City. We used to meet at the United Engineering Center, and that was the only place the Standards Board met. Absolutely, absolutely they met nowhere else. We always had to go to the United Engineering Center, which was easily accessible to me because I worked in the City at that time, so it was just a train ride and a walk up to United Engineering Center. I could go to the Standards Board meeting and then go back. But the Board of Directors meetings were a little bit different in that, and you are probably aware of this, sometimes they lasted until 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes. Then you do it again the next day.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
They have the annual retreat or something, which is in January. I do not know if it is officially a Board of Directors meeting because I think it is called the Retreat or the President’s Retreat. I hear the phraseology retreat, but it could be classified differently.
Migliaro:
Yes. They did not have that when I was there. We had a January meeting, but we did not have any retreat, yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I do not know. It is just a corporate spin on it because it seems like they hang out and work for the same number of days as a standard meeting, and it is where they develop their agenda for the year. How long were you on the Board of Directors?
Migliaro:
Well, I was actually on the Board of Directors four years. The first time I was on for three years and the second time I was on for one year. What happened was that I was Chairman of the Standards Board, and the typical policy was that when you chaired the Standards Board, you could be reelected once because the typical rules of IEEE were that no person holds a position more than two years, and then you rotate that person out. But each year there was a separate election, and the Director of Standards actually is elected by the Assembly of the IEEE. So, the Assembly is part of the Board of Directors. It is a subsection or subcommittee, if you will, of the Board of Directors. It is all the Directors that are elected by the Members form the Assembly. And I think you are aware of that, so the Assembly then elects the Director of Standards. I was elected and that made me Director of Standards and Chair of the Standards Board. One of the things at that time was that the Standards Board and I think I mentioned some of this in part one, is that at that time they had this concept of major boards and minor boards.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Migliaro:
A major board had a vice president, so you were not a Director, but you were a Vice President of IEEE. Regional Activities was a Vice President, Educational Activities was a Vice President, Technical Activities was a Vice President, but Standards was not a major board, so the Standards Director was not a vice president. Then at that time, they had a couple other positions that were vice presidents, and then the secretary, treasurer or whatever. Predecessors of mine in Standards had always tried to push the Board of Directors to make Standards a separate board, while a major board recognized Standards as a major board. When I came on the Board of Directors, my one goal, if I can say, I had one particular goal. My one goal was to really try and educate the Directors on how much Standards does do, how much Standards interfaces with industry, and the role it really plays at IEEE. The fact that it gets no money from the general fund, it has to survive on its own, and as a consequence, I tried to meet separately at these meetings. I met with the presidents of the Societies. I met with the Regional Activities Directors. I met with the Technical Activities Directors. I tried to give them an education on Standards, [the IEEE Standards Association], and how much we did, what our activity was, and how many volunteers we had. We had 10,000 volunteers or 20,000 volunteers. I cannot remember the numbers from industry. Almost everybody was from industry. Very, very few from academia, and mostly all from industry and manufacturing. They were the people that wrote these standards. It started to gather some traction. Then I got reelected to the second year and Eric Sumner was the IEEE President that year [1991]. There was the Board of Directors, and then there was the Executive Committee. The Executive Committee was made of the vice presidents, the secretary, the treasurer, and the three Ps. The Director of Standards was not part of the Executive Committee, so when the Executive Committee met, I had to be there, but I could not go into the Executive Committee meeting because I was not a member of the Executive Committee. And one of the reasons I had to be there is there was no separate finance committee at that time.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Migliaro:
Okay. The Finance Committee, I believe it was in the bylaws, was made up of the Executive Committee plus the Director of Standards. So, if they decided to meet as a finance committee, then I joined the meeting.
Hellrigel:
So, you had to sit outside the door?
Migliaro:
I had to sit outside the door in anticipation of maybe having the finance committee called to order so I could go in.
Hellrigel:
Did you find yourself going in and then being put out again?
Migliaro:
Yes. The first year, I was Director [of Standards], Carl Bayless was the president of IEEE. So, Carl Bayless said one time, he did, he gave me a hard time, but just kiddingly because he was a very, very good person. But I think we had been on the Finance Committee, and they went back to the Executive Committee and for some reason I had not moved. And all of a sudden, he looks at me. He says, "What are you still doing in here?"
Hellrigel:
I had a similar experience. I was at an IEEE Foundation meeting. They wanted me at the meeting to represent the IEEE History Center because there was something about history on the agenda. Then I am told that they are going into executive session, so I go outside, and then, oh no, go back inside.
Migliaro:
Yes. He was really good natured about it, and he was half joking. I left the meeting. The next year when Eric Sumner was IEEE President, about partway through the year, Eric Sumner always used to just call me Migliaro. Hey Migliaro. He said, "Migliaro, how come Standards is not a major board?" I said, “I really do not know. I think we deserve it.” He says, "Well, why don’t we think about making it a major board?" So, that was our first opportunity. I really felt that all the work I did trying to educate these people—because I do not know how my predecessors approached it, but most of the time, I think they just approach it like, hey, we should be a major board and that was all. But they did not get anywhere... I do not know that they took the time to really educate the Board on just exactly what Standards was doing, what they were up to, and how valuable they work to the organization.
Hellrigel:
And especially if these were not people out of industry or manufacturing, then they would not come across standards much in their career.
Migliaro:
Right, right. And most of them were academia.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Yes.
Migliaro:
So, they did not understand it, but I tried. As a director, I tried to make all these meetings. We went to Europe, and I met with the Regional Committee there, and I talked about Standards at a Regional Committee. Anytime I had, I talked about Standards, and I talked about the fact that we interfaced with industry so much that we had all these people. Then at that time, the Board of Directors and industry had a luncheon. Whenever we had a meeting, they would invite members and it was kind of amazing. But the people that came from industry would always bring up standards and how important the standards part of IEEE was to their business, and I tried to reinforce that when I had the opportunity. I was there at the luncheon, and I would talk about standards, so I guess it sunk in after a while maybe. But Eric Sumner said why are you not a major board, so we moved to make Standards a major board. We put the bylaw revisions in and they basically came to me and they said, we are going to get this approved and they did. They got Standards approved as a Major Board with a vice president who would be a member of the Executive Committee. Then they said to me, would you like to be the first vice president of Standards of the Institute (IEEE)? I said, well, that is not my intention. My intention was to have you recognize the importance of Standards and make it a Major Board. But I have served my two years, and someone said, well, this is a new position. It really is a new position, and we will probably elect you for two terms, but we would at least give you one term since you were instrumental in making this happen. So, I said, okay and I put my name in a hat to be the first Vice President of Standards. I did not realize how it was at that time, but I actually ran unopposed. Nobody ran against me in that.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
They said that is incredible at the Assembly level to not have anybody run against you or not have a nomination come from the floor in the meeting of the Assembly to get somebody who wants to run against you.
Hellrigel:
Or a petition candidate. I do not know at that point if they had petition candidates.
Migliaro:
They do not need petitions in the Assembly. They just can nominate people.
Hellrigel:
Oh, okay.
Migliaro:
All they have got to do know that the person had agreed and that they were willing to serve if elected. So, I was elected the first Vice President of Standards, and I served a third year on the Board of Directors. Then I came off the Board of Directors and the SA [Standards Association] was formed. The actual SA was formed, and you have got twenty-five years now.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Migliaro:
Initially when it was formed, it had a president, but they did not really have a president who was elected by the members. The president was still appointed by the Assembly, but in 2000, we had it changed so that the president of the SA was elected by the members of the Standard Association. Don Loughry was the first president of the SA. They asked me if I wanted to run, and I said no. I think I served whatever time I needed to serve, but then in 2001, they basically came back to me. So, I became the President of the SA in 2001and then I was again on the Board of Directors as Vice President of Standards. Then a little further on, the SA decided they wanted a president, but they wanted a president who was elected for two years. They got that through, but I believe that caused them to not have the vice president slot anymore because at the IEEE level, I do not think you can elect a vice president for two years. So basically, the SA president is a Director and not a vice president any longer. That is my history on the Board four years. Three years at one point and one year later on.
Hellrigel:
Is there anything you did not like about that kind of work on the Board?
Migliaro:
No. I mean, not everything was super enjoyable, but nothing else.
Hellrigel:
Maybe mismanaged meetings?
Migliaro:
Yes. I mean it was a big responsibility, and I took the responsibility seriously and tried the work as best I could for the Institute (IEEE) at that point. The thing that I had to keep in mind is that when I was sitting on the Board of Directors, I should have the best interest of the Institute at heart and when I am sitting at the Standards Association, then I have the best interest of the Standards Association at heart. Sometimes that was maybe in odds in what we were looking to do because obviously the Board of Directors does not necessarily agree with everything you would like to do if you want to put a proposal for it, but it is just like anything else. You have just got to work anything and try and get it done, because at the Board of Directors level between the regional directors and the technical. I will still call them regional, although they have changed their name. But essentially the Regions have directors, and the technical societies have directors. There was twenty of them at that time; ten regional, and ten technical, and they tended to stick together and vote together.
Hellrigel:
As blocks?
Migliaro:
As blocks. And, if you were the Standards Department trying to get something through, you really had to move that block to get what you wanted done, and that was just, again, relationships and talking to them and educating them. The only thing I found is that nobody was trying to pull the wool over anybody's eye. Just explain to them what it was and explain to them how it benefited the organization, whether it be IEEE or Standards. Sometimes you won, sometimes you did not, but it is okay.
Hellrigel:
Is there anything memorable that happened in those four years? I am trying to think. Martha Sloan is IEEE President around this time.
Migliaro:
I think Martha Sloan was my last year when I was VP of Standards in 1992. I think that was Martha Sloan's year, or maybe it was the next year. But she was definitely at that point, yes.
Hellrigel:
[Martha Sloan was IEEE President in 1993.] Do you recall any reaction? This is the first woman who held that post.
Migliaro:
Certainly, not on my part, and I did not see anything anywhere that I know. She was a petition candidate, too, if I remember right.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Migliaro:
Yes. And there would probably little words than about petition candidate, than said anything else.
Hellrigel:
I am a little rusty on my elections, but I think she lost the first election. There is a time where there are people lost as a petition candidate and then they became a candidate appointed by the Board of Directors. Also, it is a time where I believe she was active in opening the door in China at that point. So, for IEEE, there was a lot of change going on. I did not know if anything from that period stuck in your mind, like any big work that the Board of Directors did.
Migliaro:
Well, the Board of Directors did a lot of things. One of them is, in my first tour on a Board of Directors, that is when IEEE was a 501(c)6 tax exempt.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes.
Migliaro:
It was a 501(c)6, and Eric Herz had come to us with a proposal that said, our attorneys really believe we can become a 501(c)3. The big incentive for the (c)3 was the tremendous savings on mailing costs, because to mail all the magazines that we distribute and all the literature we were sending out, that was a huge cost difference between a (c)6 and a (c)3.
Hellrigel:
Oh, oh. You would get cheaper mail rates.
Migliaro:
You would get cheaper rates.
Migliaro:
That was one of the biggest incentives to move to a (c)3. Today, that would have no incentive at all because of the electronic world we live in.
Hellrigel:
What is the difference between the (c)6 and (c)3? I forget.
Migliaro:
The (c)6, that is what ISTO is. It is essentially a trade association, so the work you do is for a specific need or specific group, and in a (c)3 the work you do is for the public in general.
Hellrigel:
So, for the benefit of humanity as a more open spin [or a broader goal].
Migliaro:
Right. It is a more open spin.
Hellrigel:
And because you work for the public, then you get different tax breaks or fees and other things.
Migliaro:
Right. So, actually, that was probably the biggest thing that we did going through that with Eric Herz. By the way Eric Herz was a character, but I think he did a lot for IEEE, and he had the interest of IEEE at heart. He was always looking out for IEEE. When he came with that proposal, there was a lot of things to be done and we eventually filed the paperwork through the attorneys and everything and got the (c)3 exemption. So, that was probably one of the most memorable things that we did while I was on the Board.
Hellrigel:
I do not know if I am supposed to ask, but what do you mean by Eric Herz was a character?
Migliaro:
Oh, basically, sometimes he would just fire out something. If he had it on his mind, he would just say it, and it did not come across very well sometimes, but he never said anything that was nasty. He would just say something and that is the way he felt, or he would send a note. I can remember he sent something to me or something, and some people would say, did you see what Eric Herz sent you now? I had not seen it at that point, but I saw it was okay. It was not anything terrible.
Hellrigel:
He held that job as Executive Director for many years.
Migliaro:
He held it for like thirteen years, which is tremendous for an executive director. For an organization like IEEE, the average longevity is five to seven years. Okay.
Hellrigel:
Right. In regard to Herz being known as a character, there are a number of bronze head sculptures at the IEEE offices, and I was told he used to have one on his desk. I forget the particular head, but I was told that he put his hat on it. That is where he kept his hat in his office.
Migliaro:
Yes, that does not surprise me, but I know when I talked to Eric—I talked to Eric one time and I cannot remember what particular conversation, but he told me when he got out of school and he looked at IEEE and member application at that time, and even when I got out of school, you could actually buy a lifetime membership in IEEE. I do not know since I do not get involved in membership. I do not know whether you can do that today.
Hellrigel:
I do not think so, but it is possible. .
Migliaro:
But like for $600, you could buy a lifetime membership in IEEE. I do not remember a price from the history perspective. You may be able to go back, but it was something like that. It was what you would think was not a bad price, $600, and Eric said that. He told me, when I came out of school and I was a member of IEEE, I looked at this and I said, hey, this a great deal. He was only out of school maybe a couple years and he took a lifetime membership.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
And at that time, I think he even became a Life Member at that point since he had a lifetime membership because the old rules on lifetime members you just needed age and I—yes, he—I do not know whether that worked in his case, but it did at some point. I am sure. But it was age and years involvement in IEEE had to equal a hundred.
Hellrigel:
Now the magic number is one hundred provided you are at least sixty-five years old.
Migliaro:
Yes, later they added the caveat that you also had to be at least sixty-five years old because I made the hundred before I was sixty-five. I actually got a note from the Life Members Committee welcoming me to the Life Members Committee, but then I never heard anymore from him until I was sixty-five. Eric bought a lifetime membership in IEEE, and I always think about that. He looked at that and said, this is a good deal. I am going to do it.
Hellrigel:
If he was always looking at the financial implications of his actions, then it made sense that he looked into the cost of mailing.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
In regard to buying the life membership, he figured too that he was not going to change careers, so he made that commitment. Maybe he thought, I am not going to go off to be a lawyer or a painter or something.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Yes. That is a funny story, that in his early twenties, he was thinking long term.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Oh, cool. I guess the Board of Directors dealt with new issues around the time with the whole dust up about appointed candidates and petition candidates and expanding into China, and so there was some growth and change going on.
Migliaro:
Yes.
IEEE-ISTO
Hellrigel:
Were there any challenges for the Board in your four years on it that could not be resolved?
Migliaro:
No, I do not recall any. I mean, you talk about the petition candidates. There was a time I think it was around 1988 or something, somewhere in there, just before that. I think there was a general feeling in membership that the Board of Directors was not really acting in the best interest of the members, and that is when you saw these petition candidates. Then pretty much in the time there, if a person was nominated as president for IEEE by the Board, that would be a negative, so in the elections, people looked for the petition candidates. Eric Sumner was also a petition candidate. Martha Sloan was a petition candidate. There is a whole bunch. There were a number of petition candidates at that time that got through those elections.
When we had business put before the Board we always managed to get our business taken care of there. I am sure there were challenges. There were times when we were looking to do things with our bylaws in the ISTO. Later when I was on the Board and one of the biggest issues, and it was not a terribly big issue, but one of the issues we always had is because ISTO was a separate corporation our bylaws require approval of not only the ISTO Board, but the IEEE Board since we are founded by the IEEE and that is what our bylaws say. When we had a bylaw change, we had no way of officially submitting it because we are not part of the IEEE. So, we had to submit it through the Director of Standards, and they were not always aware of what we were really trying to do on change in our bylaws. Then what we would wind up with is the Directors because they do not know much about IEEE ISTO, they would start questioning the bylaws for the whole thing. Like even down to the fact, well, why did we form this organization? Do we really need this organization? It got to be very convoluted to get things done. We had big challenges to get our bylaw change through the Board of Directors initially, and then we were able to.
Hellrigel:
What are these bylaw changes, the ISTO bylaw changes, that you are talking about.
Migliaro:
Well, some of them, the first changes that had to be done, were actually because we applied for a (c)6 exemption as a trade association because we operate with consortia so that the groups that we deal with are interested in only one segment of the industry; maybe the mobile segment, maybe street lighting, or something. They do not care about anything else. That is what they care about. So, they are going to do what is in the best interest of the mobile industry, not what is in the best interest of the general public. Hopefully, there is a tie there somewhere that they recognized. The IRS turned us down and they said, this is really not a trade association, it is just an extension of IEEE because IEEE was the sole member.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
IEEE got to appoint the Directors, and we had to go back through and revise the bylaws so that IEEE was named the founding member. The various alliances that we support would then be members of the organization as well. Then our members would elect the Directors. So, when we put that through, there were people that basically said, no, that does not work. Then they did not like the way the President was set up, in that, the President really could not be removed by the IEEE Board of Directors. The President of ISTO is appointed by the Executive Director of the IEEE. The President can retire, quit, or be removed by the [ISTO] Board of Directors, but not by IEEE, and they did not like that. So, there were a number of things. It just got into trying to explain to them how everything was, and you would have to go back into the history to bring everybody up to speed.
Hellrigel:
I think this is where Michelle Hunt and Bill Rubin might drill deeper [into that history].
Migliaro:
Right. Yes, they probably will.
Hellrigel:
In some ways, just hearing these stories, it is like you are trying to develop as a (c)6. When IEEE created ISTO, things made sense, but then in other ways, they [IEEE] are still like, your overlords, officially. It makes operations too complicated for that. Especially, oh, I do not know, IEEE is always looking for revenue streams, so are they getting any revenue at ISTO? Did anyone ever ask you that, like where's our money or something?
Migliaro:
Well, that was another big issue because ISTO is an organization that supports consortia and each one of these consortia have their own funds which they collect from their members as dues and that goes to the work of the consortium. But IEEE-ISTO is their banker. So, as we were starting up and I think I had mentioned in the first part of this, when I took over as President, ISTO was in debt, $850,000 to the IEEE because we had used our line of credit to get the organization started and we were in the process of paying down that line of credit. I do not remember when it was some of these bylaw changes [because] we also used to share our financials with them, with their Finance Committee, so that they were aware of what we are doing financially. But at that time, we had a bank account where we had $13 million in it, and that $13 million was mostly the funds of the alliances we supported. They were not ISTO funds, but we were managing their funds for them. You had this group at the [IEEE] Board at the time that saw this $13 million and they say they [ISTO] owes us $850,000, they got $13 million in the bank, so we should demand that they pay us back immediately. But we [ISTO] could not do that because that would be invading the funds of the alliances that way. We had to explain this whole thing to them, and they just did not understand how we worked.
Hellrigel:
Yes. It would be like telling a law office that managed the accounts for an estate the funds did not belong to them, they belonged to the client.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Your overall bank account has this money, so just give me some [was the attitude of some people on the IEEE Board of Directors].
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
We had that and that resulted in a lot of friction between the organizations. It was just the fact that they just did not understand. We did, but more importantly, at some point, some of the people did not want to even hear what the answer was. They just wanted the money paid back.
Hellrigel:
You would have to say, well, you lent it to us, and the funds are not ISTO money. You cannot get blood out of a stone. Also, what were the agreements by which you were lent the money? All of those ramifications. At this point, too, I do not know how financially sound IEEE itself was. IEEE has gone through some rollercoaster economic times. Currently [2022], IEEE is in really in good shape, and I have only been here seven years and they were in good shape throughout. In the past, there was some concern about finances, and cost-cutting measures have been made. For example, no first-class flights without approval from the IEEE President. Did you get the feeling that IEEE was in debt at this point?
Migliaro:
No, actually not. They just did not understand it, and we were fortunate at that time to have Dick Schwartz, who was the CFO of IEEE. Dick was a very big supporter of ISTO, as was Dan Senese, who was the Executive Director at the time we were formed. Dick took on the challenge to explain it to everybody, and I think we finally got it resolved. But it just put us through a lot of things. We were trying to start a company at that point, and we were being, if you will, distracted by IEEE. It was making demands on us, and it was not allowing us to do the work that we needed to do to build our membership. We get income from that membership, and we develop a surplus, which is used to pay the line of credit. We are trying to do this, and they are looking to get the line of credit back. They are stopping us from doing what we need to do to pay that line of credit because we had to focus our attention to their demands, as opposed to going out and doing some business development and hiring some people to get some people working to get some revenue in that would ultimately pay down the line of credit.
Hellrigel:
By starting a company, you are talking about actually staffing and building out the ISTO?
Migliaro:
Right. Right. I mean, ISTO was started with essentially two employees, and they were both IEEE employees on loan to ISTO.
Hellrigel:
And that is you and who else?
Migliaro:
Then we had three. I was a director at that time. It was Andy Salem, who was the President of ISTO. He had been the Managing Director of Standards, and he basically moved to the President of ISTO. Judy Gorman became the Managing Director of Standards. I was on the Board with three other individuals. Peter Lefkin was the other person. Then we added some additional staff. We had three people, and five people, and continued to build the staff.
Hellrigel:
Did IEEE ever threaten you with lawyers, like, pay up or we are going to take action?
Migliaro:
No. I do not think we got that bad. In our documents we have a clause because we basically say, ISTO is a separate corporation, which it is, but it is affiliated with IEEE through a service agreement and a trademark and license agreement. I am trying to remember. I am pretty sure it is the service agreement. One of those two documents actually has a clause that basically says, on-demand IEEE can ask us to dissolve. I think it is in the trademark and license [agreement] because we use their name.
Hellrigel:
They could ask you, but it does not mean they can make you?
Migliaro:
Yes, they actually do. We have to dissolve. We can certainly reform as ISTO, but not IEEE-ISTO.
Hellrigel:
So right now, are you legally IEEE-ISTO?
Migliaro:
Yes, the legal name is IEEE-ISTO, and we use that in accordance with this trademark and license agreement we have between the two organizations.
Hellrigel:
It is complex.
Migliaro:
It is.
Hellrigel:
IEEE-ISTO, you only do work in the United States?
Migliaro:
No. No.
Hellrigel:
You are global.
Migliaro:
We are global, but we only work with alliances and consortium.
Migliaro:
Not individuals.
Hellrigel:
IEEE is incorporated in New York City, New York State.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Then IEEE-ISTO is incorporated in New York State?
Migliaro:
No. Delaware. We are incorporated in Delaware.
Hellrigel:
Oh, okay. Many companies are incorporated in Delaware due to their incorporation laws being different, lower tax rates, etc.
Migliaro:
Right. Favorable.
Hellrigel:
You are courted, and you become an employee of IEEE-ISTO part-time.
Migliaro:
Right. Actually, I was an employee of IEEE. I had a contract and my contract said that my employment was to basically be on loan to ISTO to serve as their president because ISTO, in reality, has no employees. Initially, when it was set up, all the staff of ISTO were IEEE employees on loan to ISTO. Then in 2012, all the employees went to the SA [IEEE Standards Association], and there is a MOU [memorandum of understanding] between the SA and ISTO as to how those employees are used to support ISTO. But the president of ISTO is still an IEEE employee on loan to ISTO.
Hellrigel:
Oh, that is another complexity.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that is a big complexity. Why would they make the president of ISTO still an employee of IEEE, but not everyone else? What is the benefit; to make you accountable directly to IEEE? I do not know.
Migliaro:
I do not know, that is the way it was. It is just an independence, I guess. They set it up that way in the contract so that essentially, if ISTO was to disappear, my contract would disappear, too, because my sole purpose being at IEEE was to be the president of ISTO.
Hellrigel:
Right. Since you had a contract, that makes you a special employee because we do not have contracts with IEEE. We are at will employees.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Maybe you are at will anyway, but your situation is even another layer of contract. So now, today, ISTO people are employees of the IEEE Standards Association.
Migliaro:
Right. There is an MOU between IEEE and ISTO as to how those employees are used to support IEEE-ISTO.
Hellrigel:
Now, IEEE Standards Association, it has its own employees or are they then employees of IEEE?
Migliaro:
Well, they are all IEEE employees. Yes, they are all IEEE employees, but they are assigned to the Standards Department.
Hellrigel:
Then technically, this is even more convoluted. So, in the end then, if you work for the ISTO, then you are technically an IEEE employee via the Standards Association's agreement, or is that even more murky?
Migliaro:
Yes, yes.
Hellrigel:
I guess, these days it matters even less because there is no IEEE pension program anymore. It is all like the 401k, so that is more easily dispensed with.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
But I could see back in the day, you had to start labeling things differently if you wanted to. You are in the pension, out of the pension. And I do not know if that was a difference, but yes, that is complex.
Migliaro:
Yes, ISTO was modeled after an organization called PRI which was affiliated with the Society of Automotive Engineers. It took me a minute to think about it. But SAE created this organization called PRI, and that is how we tried to model ISTO. However, they did a much better job than we did. The lawyers all worked this out. When we went to see SAE and PRI we were looking at all this. Within SAE and PRI, if you are an SAE employee and you decide to take a position in PRI, you move and you become a PRI employee. However, all your seniority, vacation, everything that you had in SAE, moves with you. If you leave PRI and go back to SAE, then it all moves back.
For whatever reason, IEEE said they could not make that happen. In other words, that was a whole thing for the IEEE employees on loan, because if they were not on loan to IEEE-ISTO, they would lose all their benefits. They could not get their benefits or anything else and that is why they had to stay as IEEE employees on loan. That is the way it was worked out. I know within PRI and SAE, people could move back and forth between the two organizations without hurting their vacation entitlement, their benefits, their seniority, whatever it was.
Hellrigel:
Now, you are working for ISTO, and I know that Bill Rubin and Michelle [Hunt] will get more into that. How did that grow? You had mentioned that you got rid of the debt?
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
How did you get rid of that debt?
Migliaro:
Well, by getting more programs and bringing more revenue into the organization. We also had to take a good look at the staff at that point, too, and we had to cut back on some staff at that time. Fortunately, most of the staff we cut back on, I think pretty much 100 percent that we cut back, there were other positions in IEEE that were open that they were able to go into. So, I do not believe we had anybody that was laid off at that time. It made us very cautious about staff and adding staff in the future. We also put a plan together and that was something that I was involved in within ISTO, sitting down and putting a plan together for how we are going to pay this line of credit down. Then we just put the plan in place, we stuck with it, and we wound up paying our line of credit off. Actually, we wound up paying it off earlier than we expected. I do not remember how much earlier, not tremendously. Maybe we paid it off in March and we should have paid it off in December or something like that, but we did pay it off early. And it was due to a fairly large program that we had taken on board that had plans to have some of their own staff, but they could not get them hired right away so that we actually took on the role of—what that staff was. Then we were charging for that, so we were making some money. And we made a little bit of margin, and we took that money and put it towards the payoff at line of credit, so.
Hellrigel:
What was this program?
Migliaro:
At that time, it was called LiMO. The acronym was an L, capital L, small I, and then capital M-O. Yes. It was in the mobile operated in the mobile space. They eventually hired staff that were headquartered in England. They had an executive director, a head of operations, and some other people on staff. I do not remember all their different titles.
Hellrigel:
You must have been pretty happy when the line of credit was paid off?
Migliaro:
Oh, we were very happy when the line of credit was paid off. We still have a line of credit from IEEE. Although now, our line of credit is $250,000 and at that time Tom Siegert was the CFO. We initially went back and said we just want to keep the $850,000 line of credit. He said, well, why do you need that much? Why don’t we just make it 250? We agreed to make it 250, but we have actually never used one single dollar of our line of credit since we paid it off. I think that is a tremendous accomplishment.
Hellrigel:
So that is an emergency?
Migliaro:
Yes, that is an emergency, if we need money. We do have a reserve, but by our documents, the reserve is limited right now. We have a formula on how we calculate reserves. Actually, this probably makes things even more complicated for you, even though your head's swirling already on this. Everything over that goes back to the SA. So, all our funds go back to the SA, except for what it takes to operate the company and our reserve.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
So that is where the IEEE benefits because when we are making money, the SA is making money because that money is going back to them, less essentially the operating costs of the IEEE-ISTO. We keep our reserves at a level because we sometimes need to go out and get credit cards for our programs and things, and if you do not have reserves, no bank will give you credit cards.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Migliaro:
So, we have a set reserve, and that allows us to deal with the banks for the programs that we support. But we cannot build our reserves up to multi-millions of dollars because that all goes back to the SA.
Hellrigel:
So, the ISTO, if it is a good year, it is a revenue maker?
Migliaro:
It is a revenue maker. We have had a surplus almost every year. But the thing is that that surplus, essentially, anything over what it takes to operate the organization goes back to the SA.
Hellrigel:
And then, are there any rules about what the SA can do with your money?
Migliaro:
No.
Hellrigel:
Okay. Just curious.
Migliaro:
It is their money, yes.
Hellrigel:
If they had to keep it, they can spin it back and grow the ISTO?
Migliaro:
Well, well, they do that. If you want the MOU, I could send you the MOU or somebody there could send it to you. Michelle [Hunt] could send you the MOU.
Migliaro:
Your head will really be spinning by the time you finish it. But what happens is in this MOU, the SA agrees to do all our marketing for us, so the business development and marketing expense of ISTO is paid for by IEEE-SA. Okay?
Hellrigel:
Okay. I have met some of those marketing people. Wow. Yes, it is pretty convoluted. But I guess, given your operations it all makes sense, but to an outsider it looks really, really complex.
Migliaro:
Right. Even some of our board members, when they come on and we kind of give them the governing documents, if they take time to read it, their head is spinning by the time they finish it.
Hellrigel:
That is why in a meeting with Mary Lynne, Bill, and Michelle it was decided that due to the complexity and the specialization of ISTO, as well as Standards, that they would then take up the next oral history with you because then you would not have to explain such back story to me, and they would have more informed questions for you. It is so much different than my work with Societies and that kind of [IEEE] business.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
And you would not have to spend all this time educating me and it just makes more sense for that end.
I guess you are pretty content then, with the work that you have done with ISTO? You have got it on its foundation.
Migliaro:
Yes. I am really happy with the work and the ISTO because we have made it an organization that is debt-free now. We have a whole series of templates that we can use to support our programs. We have been very careful about benchmarking ourselves periodically. We do annual customer satisfaction surveys. All those things have been put into place since I became president. And we just look for those types of things to continue because they will change over time. But the real thing is, you always got to check yourself and see how you are doing? Then, see how do I know how I am doing and what is telling me what I am doing? Those feedbacks that [come from] customer satisfaction surveys are good, but at the same time, you do not want to overload the programs with surveys to the point where they do not want to bother with them anymore. So, you have got to run a balance, but you have got to make sure where you are at because you do not want any surprises.
We do not want surprises of programs coming back and telling us, well, we are leaving you because we are unhappy about this or that. But programs will leave. That is the nature of consortia. They do their work, and they shut down. When we first put IEEE-ISTO together, we projected that we were going to see turnover every three to five years. We were going to see an alliance form and fold. That did not turn out to be the case. A Working Group has been with us for the entire history of ISTO, so [that is] twenty-four years. Voice XML just shut down, recently. It was with us the whole time. Then there have been others that have come and gone. There have been programs that come in and decide they want to merge with another alliance, and that is supported.
Hellrigel:
Have you ever had to throw anyone out?
Migliaro:
No. No. Not at this point. We probably have come close on one, but they reformed, and they left. But no, we have not had to throw anybody out.
Hellrigel:
Yes, because sometimes you would wonder and due to the international nature, and, yes, business and whatever, State Department (United States Department of State) rules and all that.
We are almost done, but I guess, how is the work of ISTO changed over that twenty-five-year period?
Migliaro:
The work over the twenty-five-year period. Back when we first formed, consortia were really just getting started, and many times, we would have groups come to us and they really did not know how to form a consortia. They did not know what it took, they did not know how to set it up, and we would kind of guide them through all that. Today, consortia have been around, and the people involved in them have been on other consortia, so they know how they work. They know how they are set up. They know how they are operated. So, they do not need some of that stuff and the hand-holding that we used to do. In many cases, originally, we used to sit on their board or a member of would sit on their board. Generally, in the secretary slot. We do not see that as much anymore. We do not have a direct role in the governance of the organization, but we still have to maintain some kind of view of it so that we make sure that antitrust policies are not being violated because when you get into consortia, that are in specific industry and you have got competitors coming together to work on these things, you want to be careful that they do not share information.
So, we have an official antitrust policy, and that policy talks about things and says, hey, even casual conversations are not allowed. You just cannot do this. When you are at a meeting, you cannot discuss these kinds of topics. So, we have got to have some insight. They cannot be totally closed and say, hey, we do not need you, we do not want to see you, or we are not going to share our minutes. They have got to share their minutes. They have got to let us in some of the meeting to kind of as an observer. We have got to make sure that we are not violating antitrust because they operate, for the most part some of them are separately incorporated, but for the most part, they operate under ISTO's legal umbrella. So, we provide them with the legal umbrella for their association, alliance, or whatever they call themselves. And in the end, if they get sued, it is us that is going to get sued. IEEE-ISTO gets sued if there was an antitrust thing, so we have got to be very careful about those kinds of things.
Overall, I think we have been very, very good in maintaining our staff. We have not had a terrible turnover, and most of the people that are with us have been with us for a long time. We have a really quality staff. They know their job. They know how to work with these alliances and organizations. If they have any questions, they have other people on staff that can help them. We have people that have various specialties that can pitch in on any one of the groups. One of the women on our staff is absolutely great with event management and , we have other people that do well in marketing and promotions and things like that. Although we do not do a lot of marketing for our programs, we will help them sometimes. If they need it, they know they can come to us. Everything we do, we get paid for.
Hellrigel:
What is the size of the ISTO staff, about?
Migliaro:
It is we have got full timers. We have got about twenty, eighteen or twenty full-time. We have got about another twelve or thirteen part-time. These are people that are IEEE employees, but part of their time is spent working on ISTO. Then, we probably have about eight or ten contractors that work directly for the program so that all the contractor's time is spent on a particular program. So, essentially, you have got about forty people, probably.
Hellrigel:
That is quite a large group. How has that changed over time? Like you said, initially you had to lay people off.
Migliaro:
Initially, we had to, but then it held pretty steady. Over the last four or five years, I would say, that has been a pretty steady number. Some of the people that are on our part-time list do not necessarily spend a lot of time on ISTO. Like, we have about three IT support people. Most of the time—I do not want to say they do nothing, because that is not true. But they will generally enter any tickets, if we have a ticket, we need generated for some problem we are having. And if we have a particular problem, like, right now, just before I left, we were trying to move our accounting program to a cloud-based system. That was one of the issues early on, and I will get back to that in a minute. But that IT person spent a lot of time working with us to make sure the cloud-based system was reliable and worked and operated properly. When we first started ISTO, these were some of the struggles we had. We had to use Oracle, the IEEE Oracle system for accounting.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes.
Migliaro:
IEEE Oracle was never designed to handle alliances, but we were kind of forced into it. They said, no, you can use our accounting system and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, but it did not work. As a consequence, we had to hire a couple of people to do nothing but take the data we had and build a whole bunch of Excel spreadsheets that met the needs of the programs because Oracle could not. We tried to convince IEEE accounting that Oracle was not working, and it took a while. Then Dick Schwartz had gotten involved at that time, too, and he actually loaned us one of his senior people at that time. Basically, they came to the conclusion that, yes, you need some other system.
At first, we went to a QuickBooks Solution, and that worked for a while. Then, ultimately, we moved onto an accounting system that was really designed, number one, primarily for not-for-profits, but also for groups that dealt with alliances. So, we are in pretty good shape on that system right now, and we have had that system operating for years now and it is done very well.
We had a new membership program module which was being rolled out. We went to a different membership software. There are still some bugs between that and the accounting program, but hopefully Adam [Newman] will get that worked out under his watch now.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that is frustrating when one size does not fit all. IEEE added a new program for some work. The new product is Next Gen, and it has issues, too.
Migliaro:
Oh, have they?
Hellrigel:
Yes. Yes. And then also the issue of travel now and accounting issues. We have to go through their travel company, [the IEEE designated company]. It is a little frustrating because in the History Center we do not have a very big budget., and my question would be, why, if I go to the United website, can I get a ticket cheaper than if I go through your travel company? So, there are some of those challenges.
Migliaro:
Yes. Early on, we found the same things. We found when we used IEEE travel, we did not always get the best deals. And because we are working for programs, and they are paying the bills, we basically just went and did what made sense for the programs and tried to give them the best we could at the least expensive cost. I know they changed the policy, but I do not know what the staff is doing now since they travel. They are traveling for the program, but they are traveling as IEEE-SA. So, I think they go back through travel.
Hellrigel:
They have to. We have to.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
It is just a challenge.
Migliaro:
Yes, I ran into some things in ISTO because again, we have our own bank account and we have our own money, so we are not tied. Certain things, as IEEE employees they need to be supported by IEEE, for their employee needs. I have had people come to me that they could not get the USBC to whatever cable or something. They needed it, and IEEE said, well, it is not our policy to supply those or whatever.
Hellrigel:
It is troublesome. Right, yes. Another thing, sometimes I could get things less expensively than going through certain things, but I understand the accountability, security, and all that.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
But that is a challenge. At IEEE-ISTO you had to do your accounting and the other system did not work, but hopefully, everything's better now.
Migliaro:
Yes, everything's better now. Sometimes I would authorize the expense through ISTO, and we would just be done with it because I cannot have the delay. We have a customer and that customer's program. They need something done right now. We cannot go back and argue about this for three days, so I will just say, look, just buy it. I can give it to them because if the program's going to get unhappy, then they are going to get mad at us. We may lose the program. We may lose the revenue over this stupid thing. We cannot afford to do it.
Hellrigel:
You talked about three part-timers and some of them being IT. This is understandable now and explains why when I go to 501 [the IEEE office building at 501 Hoes Lane] there is an IT person in that one room sometimes.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes.
Hellrigel:
You can call the Help Desk and IT will help over the phone, but I have found it is always quicker to just walk downstairs with my computer and then they help me. It is really quick, and they are great.
Migliaro:
Right.
Reflections, closing remarks
Hellrigel:
The next group is going to get more in depth with ISTO as well as the Standards Association. I have kept you quite a bit today. I do not know if there is any topic we need to cover, did not cover?
Migliaro:
No, I do not know. I cannot think of any certainly, but it is a lot of years.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Migliaro:
I have been trying to—we are trying to cover in a few hours actually. It is actually not a few hours. It is a good amount of time, but it is still, fifty-three years that I have been involved in this in one way, shape or form.
Hellrigel:
Right, more than fifty years, and that you have seen the changes and your professional career has changed quite a bit. You have worn so many hats: IEEE Member, Fellow, Life Fellow, Board of Director. Then, this whole IEEE-ISTO development. Looking at your career, that is probably the most unexpected change because when you started you did a lot of standards work, but you have seen even the Standards Association created and ISTO created. These are two new major vectors of IEEE history which have not been well documented, so I know that we will have to follow up with you on that.
In summation, or is there any part of your career that was unanticipated? I mean, you graduate Pratt in 1969, what did you think your future held?
Migliaro:
I really was not sure. The one thing I knew is I wanted to ultimately wind up in consulting somehow. That was my thought. And I always had a vision of my own company, which I eventually was able to do. I had my own company for a while. There were so many things that occurred in my career that I never thought that would happen. And I do not know that I—I told this story in the first part. But when I was a co-op student, I was—I told you I was working first for one company. I worked for Best Foods. And then I worked for Best Foods, at the end of your co-op work period, your supervisor would give you a review. And you would get a review and that would determine your grade and your co-op assignment.
But the person that did my review—the very first time at Best Foods or Corn Products, he was the plant engineer. He was essentially the chief engineer of plant engineering, but they called him the plant engineer. His name was Homer Yennakis. He was a very nice guy. And he basically gave me my review and he told me all the good things I had done on my assignment, which was good to hear. Then he says, they also want me to discuss any negatives. And he says, I only have one negative that I would like to discuss with you. He said right now, when I tell you this, you are never going to believe me that this is a negative. But he says, as you go through your career, you will see that if you do not work on it, this is going to be a negative for you. I said, okay, and he said, you never say no. I said, yes, I never say no. He said, that is going to be a negative because you’ve got to learn when to say no sometimes. It took me a lot of years to get to that point. But there are times when you need to say no, because you just cannot try and do everything. But when things came up, I always volunteered. Whatever it was, I wanted to do something new and challenging. I wanted to try another area, I wanted to do this, I wanted to do that. But you just cannot do it all.
Hellrigel:
About how old were you? At what point of your career did you feel, okay, I can say no?
Migliaro:
It is probably in my forties, late forties, early fifties maybe. I do not know.
Hellrigel:
I was a little later.
Migliaro:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
Mine occurred a few months ago.
Migliaro:
(Laughter) Okay.
Hellrigel:
So, my annual review coming up my joke is that it took me sixty-one years to realize I have the power and the right to say no. And when the gentleman said to you, okay, you have to learn to say no. What did you think at that point? Oh, okay, he needs—
Migliaro:
His exact words to me were, you are not going to believe me when I tell you this. That is exactly my thought. I do not believe you.
Hellrigel:
Did you think: Yes, this guy is just setting me up.
Migliaro:
No, I did not think he was setting me up. I just said, I do not believe this. But I have always remembered it and I always kept it in my mind. I have worked on it. But even in—there was another time, I was probably about forty-five or something, and I was working with a company, and they set us up on something. There was this puzzle you had to solve. Basically, if somebody solved it, they could go help somebody else. Okay. Those were the rules. If you finish yours, go help somebody else solve theirs. I had all these people come to help me because I had not solved mine yet. I kept turning them away. I was getting rid of them. Leave me alone, I will take care of it. That was a big turning point to me because it was pointed out to me that the facilitator or so was telling me. She said, Marco, everybody was coming over there to try to help you solve your problem. You were chasing them away. You want to do it yourself. You cannot do it yourself. So, that was a moment that always stuck in my mind too.
Hellrigel:
So, in your mid-forties, you learned it was okay to accept help.
Migliaro:
Yes, I do not know that I did a real good job of accepting it after that. But it was not that long after, so I guess late forties to early fifties, I was probably more with the program. But I still like to be involved in things. When something new comes up, I still always like to be involved in it, if I could be.
Hellrigel:
I guess you are pretty content with the direction your career took?
Migliaro:
Yes. Yes, I am very content. I have had a chance to—especially in some of the things I did in my own job, I got to as a related thing, I went to many places that are exciting places to go. Although it had nothing to do with what I was there for, people would take me on tours of these places. I was at Cape Kennedy when they were getting parts of the Space Station set up to go into space. I had a particular thing; I was giving a lecture there, actually, a training seminar I gave there for two days. These fellows later took me over to where the Space Station was. I got to see that up close. I got to see the part of the Space Station that was next in the launch on the shuttle, and they were showing me around. I was at the White Sands missile site. I was at a hydroelectric plant in the state of Washington that was built inside a mountain. The whole hydroelectric plant was built inside this mountain after World War I.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
The places I have been to as part of my job have got me to places that I was able to tour some of the things there and see some things. I was at another hydroelectric plant up in Washington State where the only access to it is by boat. They had to build the whole plant. Yes, everything had to be shipped in by boat. Everything. Even to get to the plant, I had to get on a boat.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Migliaro:
Take the boat to the plant. Take the boat back to my hotel at night. Of course, there was a lot of beautiful scenery out there in the State of Washington, too. I am amazed at things I have seen and things I have been able to do. Just never expected it. In my wildest dreams, when I graduated school, I do not think I could have predicted some of this stuff.
Hellrigel:
Now that you are sort of retired, what is in your game plan?
Migliaro:
Well, I still stay involved in some of the ISTO work because I am still a Secretary of the Board. As we talked last time, I thought of getting back involved in some of the IEEE activities that I have kind of not been involved in since I have been with ISTO. And the other thing is that when I did start stepping back, I started to put a family tree together and do some research, so that is what keeps me busy these days.
Migliaro:
I probably watch a little more TV than I used to watch. I am not a big, or I was not a big, TV watcher, other than catching the news or something like that. I am not a big movie goer. I just will not recognize the name of actors. If there are people in the news that you see, [I recognize them], but I do not know most actors or anything else. It is just not my thing.
Hellrigel:
I guess the kids would ask what are you binge watching on TV these days? Do you watch and entire series?
Migliaro:
Occasionally, but sometimes I just pick things, or actually, I go back and look at some of the shows that were on when I was younger on some of these networks that have some of the old shows.
Migliaro:
But I usually watch it with my wife, so we will have something that we will agree on but there are somethings that we watch some Indian movies. We watch some Korean movies. We watch a series, and those are pretty interesting. I actually like things that make us laugh, so we watch a lot of comedies. Try to watch comedies and spend the time.
Hellrigel:
I could make a recommendation if you grew up Catholic. There is the series, Derry Girls. It is about these Catholic school girls in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. And it is pretty funny. I think there were three series.
Migliaro:
It is good?
Hellrigel:
Yes. It is not a crime drama. Nobody is getting killed. Yes, it is good. So, it is Londonderry or Derry, depending on your religion.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
It is called Derry Girls.
Migliaro:
Yes, I will write it down. I will take a look at it because it may be something of interest, especially if it has got some comedy because we like that. I do not care for a lot of gory movies or things like that. It is just not my thing. I would rather be entertained or laugh or whatever. But I am always amazed at some of the old shows. I may not know that I saw that specific episode or whatever because I am not good at remembering those kinds of things. There are things I can remember forever, but those do not hold. They are not of interest to me to the point that I would remember, but they are really funny. There are a lot of lines in there that I looked at it and said, man, how come I never saw that when I watched this thing? This thing's got a lot of inuendo and a lot of things.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes. Pre-code Hollywood movies had a lot of inuendo. Then in 1934, the Motion Picture Production Code created censorship guidelines for what you could say/not say and show/not show, so the older movies, pre-code were a bit racier. And yes, and some of them did not weather well. But yes, it is amazing. Well we both grew up with channel 2 [CBS], channel 4 [NBC], channel 5 [WNEW], channel 7 [ABC], channel 9 [WOR], channel 11 [WPIX], channel 13 [PBS- WNET] out of New York City.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
That was that, and the TV stations actually went off the air at night.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
It would come on in the morning and it would start with agricultural news at maybe 5 o'clock.
Migliaro:
Right after the Star-Spangled Banner.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Yes. Growing up in the New York area, you could watch those old movies, including the Bowery Boys, also known as the East Side Kids and the Dead End Kids. Often, their movies were broadcast when the Yankees got rained out.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes, but I digress. This has been a lot of fun for me. Again, I do not know if we have any other topics to discover, at this point, but I know that I am going to work with Bill Rubin and develop the next direction for the ISTO and IEEE Standards Association. They probably will not pester you until 2023.
Migliaro:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
I will meet with Bill and discuss the work they need to do for that project. [Founded in 1998, the IEEE Standards Association celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2023. The IEEE ISTO, founded in 1999, marks its twenty-fifth anniversary is 2024.] In addition, you and I can work on posting some of your material on the ETHW [Engineering and Technology History Wiki] as part of your biographical entry. For example, we can post papers that might not be in IEEE Xplore (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp).
Migliaro:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
One last question. Did you have any patents?
Migliaro:
No. No patents. I have tons of copyrights because I had developed a whole series of training programs that I used to teach industry to electricians and technicians and engineers as part of a continuing education program. Most of those are in the area of stored energy systems, batteries, and UPS systems [uninterruptable power supplies].
Hellrigel:
Yes, we did not talk too much about your teaching. We did briefly touch on that with your consulting work. If you want, we can follow up on teaching in your biographical entry.
Migliaro:
Sure. Whatever you want to do is fine with me. I would do in-house courses at different corporations or different organizations. That, again, that is another one that I got I went places that I never expected to go. I had one seminar that I gave in Astoria, Oregon on a scientific ship that does sea exploration. They had the submersible, the Alvin, on that ship. They had two submersibles. I got a chance to get on the ship and gave the seminar on the ship. Then I was able to go through and look at the Alvin and look at some of the maintenance they were performing now that they were back at shore and go through that. There were a lot of things I have done that just as you talk about them, they come back to mind. Then I also did public courses where I would just advertise. I had a fairly big mailing list, and I would send [announcements]. I would do maybe half a dozen public courses over the year where I would arrange a hotel and people would send tuition in and we would do a course. Then I taught for a couple of different companies at various times.
Hellrigel:
About how many different courses did you teach? You had a repertoire?
Migliaro:
Yes, yes, I had about ten or twelve courses, but there were only a couple of them that were in big demand. And that was the maintenance course—the battery maintenance course, which was a two-day course. I also offered a one-day version sometimes. Budget-wise they could not swing two days, or they could not get their staff off for two days, so we had a shortened version. I had a DC system and design course, I took. And then I also had a UPS [uninterruptable power supplies] course I taught. I actually taught for the State Department. I trained people that were at the embassies, the maintenance managers at the American Embassies around the world, but the training center was in Arlington, Virginia. So, they would come to Arlington, and I would give them the training. I taught UPS systems and then I also taught battery maintenance to them. And that was good too because I got to talk to them and learned a lot about the embassies and what they did at the embassies as far as maintenance and things like that. But also, just the operations; embassies, I guess, are like little kingdoms with the ambassador being the king.
Hellrigel:
For security purposes then, the embassies would have their own central station or power plant supply that ran on batteries?
Migliaro:
It was an emergency back-up, yes, in case they lost power. They had their own generators as well, but I did not teach the generator portion. I taught the UPS, the uninterruptable power supplies, which backed up their data processing. The batteries then provided the power in the event of loss of the embassy power sources up until their diesels got running and then they got them back on AC. I did that and that was pretty good. But there were a lot of stories about the embassies. It is not anything bad, but, I mean, like the design considerations. In a lot of facilities and power plants and things, there are certain power supplies that you do not lose no matter what. Like, in hospitals. you do not lose power [because] you have UPS backup on some emergency outlets to control life support systems and things like that. But at the embassy, you—one that you do not lose power is the ambassador's coffee pot.
Hellrigel:
That is great.
Migliaro:
There is a different design philosophy.
Hellrigel:
Oh, I would be more worried. I would want the septic system to work.
Migliaro:
Yes. The whole septic system is good. It was a good experience.
Hellrigel:
Did you need security clearance to do that?
Migliaro:
No because I was not at the embassies. It was all done in a training center in Arlington, Virginia]. There are UPS systems, so they gave me the manuals of the particular UPS systems they had, which was, it was an old system adopted, it was not necessarily—when I say old, it was not that old. But it was a system adopted from—that the Navy used on ships. Then they just repeated that. They replicated that at the embassies. So, they gave me the manuals and I was able to develop the course from that and then teach them troubleshooting and maintenance on those systems.
Hellrigel:
Wow. That must have been fun. It seems like maybe you could do that today. Get back to the swing of that.
Migliaro:
Yes. I could do that today. In fact, I was teaching for one company that I could still teach for, but I gave it to somebody else to do because again you just realize that things cannot go on forever. That facility in Arlington is another thing, again, you—the facility in Arlington that they use for the State Department Training Center used to be an old facility that belonged to military intelligence. And it had a complete array of tunnels beneath all these buildings because it was like a collage campus. There were buildings, maybe six or eight buildings on the campus. It is a big area.
Hellrigel:
Really?
Migliaro:
It is very close to George Mason University, down in Virginia. There are about eight buildings there, and they are all connected by these tunnels underneath. The guy I was with was an ex-military guy and he took me down through all these tunnels. We walked around and went into different buildings. There was no security there. I mean they were training everybody. People were learning languages to go to the embassies because when you go to an embassy you have to know the local language. He said that at the time it was built, it was during the Cold War and the Russians would monitor the movements of people via satellite cameras and satellites because it was a military intelligence facility. They built all these tunnels underneath so the people could move around, and the Russians would never see them moving. So, they were able to see them coming into work in the morning and going home from work in the afternoon. But almost all the movement during the day was done underground.
Hellrigel:
Well, if you could park underground, they would not know if the car came in with one person or five people.
Migliaro:
Right. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Also, they could not get the mugshots of the people, or it would be more difficult to figure who they would want to infiltrate.
Migliaro:
Yes. Those are the kind of things I did. And those things I would never have expected when I graduated, that I would be doing something like that.
Hellrigel:
And right now, you are doing the genealogy. Maybe once the cooties [COVID-19 pandemic] end you could do some traveling, or not.
Migliaro:
Yes. Yes. We have done quite a bit of traveling, and IEEE helped with some of that. [In conjunction with] some of the meetings, I was able to tack on vacation and take my wife. But we still travel. About four times a year we take a trip just for us. Then, once or twice [a year] we go up to New York to see relatives and whatever we have to do. We will see how that continues. As long as we have our health and everything, we will be able to do those kinds of things.
Hellrigel:
The rage during the COVID-19 pandemic has been to buy an RV [recreational vehicle].
Migliaro:
Oh, no. I do not think I would do an RV.
Hellrigel:
No? I do not know if you have been following the MOVE truck [mobile outreach vehicle]. Now I think they are two or more trucks.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Has something like that piqued your interest? Maybe go out and roam with them?
Migliaro:
Yes. It is actually, it is a pretty nice concept. I actually did something like that. It was not exactly that. Early in my career, at American Electric Power. After the major blackout back when we had the big blackout in the 1960s, AEP had bought some gas turbines. They bought three gas turbines. They were on tractor-trailers, and they could move them around. The idea is they could plug into the distribution system. For a while. that was part of my responsibility for maintenance-type engineering. Those three gas turbines were my responsibility. They were so-called portable, but they got to a point where they were no longer transporting them around anywhere because, number one, they were big. They were oversized loads, so they needed special permission to go on some highways because of their weight. They finally just got them to the point where they kind of installed them permanently at power plant in Indiana. I was involved with those gas turbines for a while.
Hellrigel:
Did you have to drive them?
Migliaro:
No. I never drove them. No.
Hellrigel:
I have seen a lot of that big equipment on Interstate 80 (I-80). I know they take those highways because of the height of the bridges and all. Interstate 80, for the most part is a nice straight highway as opposed to Interstate 76 (I-76) down through Pennsylvania. I would not want to be on that with the turns, or Interstate 79 (I-79) going into Pittsburgh, no. But that is cool. And, yes, the MOVE truck, I have seen that on display. And of course, I contact Mary Ellen Randall now and then to find out what they have been up to
Migliaro:
Right. Oh, okay.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that is cool. Are you fully content with your career? You are retired, but you are really keeping more than busy.
Migliaro:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
The genealogy will keep you very busy once you start digging in.
Migliaro:
Oh, yes, it has. I have not been doing much lately because there have been some other things going on. My wife gives up on some of that because if I get interested, sometimes I will stay up until 2, 3 o'clock in the morning trying to track something down, and she just gets tired and heads into bed.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Yes. She has had enough.
Migliaro:
But it is interesting.
Hellrigel:
I guess you might get back involved with PES [IEEE Power & Energy Society] or the IEEE Industrial Applications Society?
Migliaro:
Yes, I hope to. I think I told you last time, I want to just relax a little bit, take a breath, and then see what I want to do.
Hellrigel:
Right. We are going to be poking at you a bit in 2023 for some history work as I work with Bill Rubin and others.
Migliaro:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Right. Then I will ask your advice about who we should move ahead with and approach to record an oral history for those projects and PES, also.
Migliaro:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
It is going to take some time to edit the transcript and get back to you due to scheduling another other oral history projects also underway. After I review and edit your transcript, I will forward it to you for your review. Then if you do not mind, while we are editing it, I am going to share it will Bill Rubin so that he can prepare for his questions with you and the portion of your oral history focusing on the IEEE Standards Association and IEEE-ISTO.
Migliaro:
Sure. Sure.
Hellrigel:
Cool. If we do not have anything else to cover today, I will let you go. Once again, thank you very much, sir.
Migliaro:
Oh, thank you very much. I did not know what to expect, but I am very, very happy with the outcome.
Hellrigel:
Well, thank you. We can also add additional material as a first-hand history and post written documents with your biographical entry on the website Engineering and Technology History Wiki where we will also post your oral history transcript. We can pull everything together for you and then you could even give us advice about how to approach collecting your history of IEEE standards and ISTO. You can advise me as well as Michelle [Hunt], Mary Lynne [Nielsen], and Bill [Rubin] on how we should package it all to properly reflect all your contributions.
Migliaro:
All right.
Hellrigel:
Thank you, sir, and have a good evening.
Migliaro:
Mary Ann, thanks very much. Take care of yourself. Have a good holiday and a good New Year.
Hellrigel:
You, too. Thank you.
