Executive Moves

By Christel Hoverkamp

Executive Moves is a captivating account of the life of Mobil Corporation executive Peter Hoverkamp and his wife, Christel. During a career with Mobil that spanned over thirty years, Peter and his wife moved around the northeast and then from the U.S. to live in England, Indonesia, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Qatar and provided the opportunity to reconnect with her lifelong friends in Germany. During their travels, the family of two expanded with the birth of three children then the children's spouses and then grandchildren. Executive Moves provides remarkable insight into various world cultures and the involvement of corporations like Mobil to explore for hydrocarbons and produce some related products for the world energy markets. The account is filled with inspiring and amusing stories as well as some tragedies, as life is wont to provide. For expats and anyone interested in international travel, Executive Moves is a must read!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christel Hoverkamp
• Release date: Oct 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311889614

Christel Hoverkamp

Christel E. Hoverkamp was born in Berlin, Germany. After fleeing Germany, she moved to the United States. Her subsequent travels have led her to reside in England, Indonesia, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Ms. Hoverkamp deeply loves her family and friends. Her interests include writing, fishing, golf, tennis, gardening, practicing speaking German, Indonesian, Arabic and most recently, Chinese. She now resides in Florida with her husband, Peter.

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Executive Moves

Christel E. Hoverkamp

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 Christel E. Hoverkamp

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Cover art by Richard A. Abel

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First Printing: 2014

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue Staten Island, N.Y.1960-1968

Chapter 1 Staten Island to Framingham, Mass. 1968-1970

Chapter 2 Framingham to Yorktown, N.Y., 1970-1974

Chapter 3 Yorktown to Navesink, New Jersey, 1974-1976

Chapter 4 Navesink to Woking, Surrey, England, 1976-1978

Chapter 5 Woking to Jakarta, Indonesia, 1978-1980

Chapter 6 Jakarta to Stavanger, Norway, 1980-1983

Chapter 7 Stavanger, Norway to Hinsdale, Ill., 1983-1984

Chapter 8 Hinsdale to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 1984-1989

Chapter 9 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (continued)

Chapter 10 Jeddah Still more from Jeddah (continued)

Chapter 11 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (continued yet again!)

Chapter 12 Leaving Jeddah

Chapter 13 Jeddah, S.A. to Roslyn Va., 1989-1993

Chapter 14 Roslyn, Virginia to Doha, Qatar, 1993-1996

Chapter 15 Doha to Winter Haven, Florida 1996+

Epilogue

About the Author

Acknowledgments

This missive is about chronicling our family’s moves from place to place over a thirty-year time frame. In each place we lived there were numerous people I should recognize as having made our move interesting, exciting, safe and rewarding. The problem is there are so many that I risk offending someone I might overlook. Consequently, I prefer to say just a heartfelt thank you to all we have known, you know who you are, and if you happen to read the chronicle that follows, you may even remember some of the many events. There are many more I have not included and someday I might get around to including them. Again, thanks to all our friends and acquaintances in the U.S., Western Europe, the Mideast and South East Asia.

I must also recognize the source of a lot of my memories. Because of my husband Peter’s many meetings, dinners and other social functions involved with his jobs, I kept a daily schedule or journal of where I had to be, when and what the function was and who was involved; tennis, boating trips, vacations, visiting dignitaries, dinners, diplomatic and social receptions and so on. In the journal I saved the formal invitations, pictures in many cases, correspondence and other incidentals related to the functions. I kept these books for over the last twenty years of our travels before retirement and they served as a great prompt as I thought about this book.

The people I am most thankful for are our children, (children at the time as they are now grown adults with their own children), George, Christopher and Heidi. They never gave us cause to worry that they would do anything other than to support our nomadic lifestyle and to do the right thing at the right time as they faced life’s challenges as they grew and matured.

Peter’s brothers and sister need a special shout-out, Capt. Doug Hoverkamp, U.S.M.M.O. and Master of Steam or Motor Vessels of Any Gross Tons would recount stories of incidents that happened during forty-years of seagoing time. He was always there when we asked for help with our miniscule boating ventures. Peter’s late brother, Fred, the youngest of the four siblings was the founder and President of R.E.M.T.C. He and his wife Annie, another European from Ireland, were our constant companions, by phone and correspondence, during our away time, after retirement, and the hosts to our many family gatherings at his rural spacious home.

Peter’s sister Bette, the oldest of the four and her husband, Dr. Herb Wohl, were, like Doug and Fred, always ready to provide whatever support we needed. They were never too busy to lend a helping hand to whatever had to be done. Even though Betty, Peter, Doug, and Fred’s immediate families, i.e. children, spouses and their children, their grandchildren and now great grandchildren total sixty-eight souls. During Fred’s funeral Betty leaned over to Peter and said, Now there are only three of us. Knowing how close they are and the hardships of their early life I could understand her heartfelt lament.

Since I have no siblings or any other relatives, my closest friend and confidant, Marga Flemming, and her family in Fuessen, Germany must be mentioned. Our two families have visited each other constantly since 1976, mine to Germany and hers to wherever we were and is the source of many happy memories considering the way it all started in 1940 in Berlin.

To one and all, my sincere and heartfelt thanks.

Mar. 2014

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.

Amelia Earhart

Prologue Staten Island, N.Y.1960-1968

Our daughter Heidi, the youngest of our three children, once asked Peter when we were in Norway, how come we aren’t like other people? Peter asked what she meant and she said, you know, live in the same place, same house year after year you know, the kind of house with a white fence around it rather than moving all the time. She was our youngest child and of the twelve-years of her grammar and high school, ten-years were spent in schools overseas. On the other hand, our two boys used to ask us every few years when and where we would be going next. As Peter thought about it he wondered what would make her say this. Then he recalled another event around the same time.

We were on home leave when Heidi was about twelve or so. We were in a convenience store and Heidi was buying something. When the store clerk asked her for the money for her purchase, she took out her change and held it in the palm of her hand hesitating for a few seconds. The clerk then said, as he looked at the coins in her outstretched hand, that it would be two nickels and a dime. Heidi looked at Peter and said, Dad, what are a nickel and a dime? If he had asked for the money in English Pounds and Pence, Indonesian Rupiah, Norwegian Kroner, Swiss Francs, German Deutschmarks (before the E.U. common currency, the Euro) or even Saudi or Qatari Riyals she would have known how to respond.

Then there was the issue of schools and the option of living in one place for decades. By the time Heidi was approaching high school, that is, at the end of the eighth-grade, she had been to five schools in four countries and was having some difficulties with her studies. So, in retrospect, Peter realized that all these things reflected in her enquiry as to, why we weren’t like other people. We were like some other people, he told her. We were among a small cadre of corporate gypsies who travel the world on behalf of the companies who have significant international business interest that need a certain amount of American expertise at one point or another in the business development particularly in the oil and energy fields for axiomatic reasons.

Christel at Rhodes School, far-left

While embarking on this type of lifestyle may not be for everyone, it wasn’t a new concept to Peter and especially for me i.e. the frequent moves at an early age.

I was born in Berlin and in the immediate aftermath of the war there was only myself and my mother left. It was hard to find anything to eat or even go to school so, by the time I was my daughter Heidi’s age, I had been to more schools than she had, six, although under very different conditions. When we had to leave Berlin, my mother told me that we boarded the last train out in 1943 when the allies started bombing Berlin in earnest. I stayed on a farm in Vilsbiburg then to Fuessen then a convent school in Geimersheim near Ingolstadt, then to Nürnberg. I met my lifelong friends in Fuessen however and returned there at every opportunity as a young girl.

At this junction I was about twelve, the same age as Heidi when she asked Peter the probing question, why aren’t we like other people? So, moving around was sort of normal for me. I don’t ever remember asking my mother why we weren’t like other people as all the other people were mostly like us, displaced and one-step away from being homeless with nothing to eat.

However, through all of our moves over all these years, I have maintained a friendship covering four generations with some of the people I met in Fuessen. My mother and I immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950’s and I attended Classical High School in Worcester Mass., then to Rhodes Preparatory High School in New York, located at 11 West 54th Street. After high school graduation in 1959 I enrolled in Notre Dame College on Staten Island, NY. Also, in 1959, I met my future husband Peter on the Island and we were married in 1960. My thought on all these moves was, if you never make a move, one will never have lived. Our family certainly has lived a life of experiences.

Much of what follows is a narrative about my husband Peter and his activities that led to promotions and transfers to different business units of Mobil Corporation, (now ExxonMobil). Over a career of thirty-years we spent almost equal time between domestic assignments and international assignments. I’ve tried to convey what I was doing as he was making a future for us all through his work. So much happened in these thirty-years of Peter’s work and my being the soccer mom and stay at home wife, companion, and mother that it is hard to convey the most interesting events but I intend to try. To understand why all the moves were tolerable, to me at least, one needs to know a little about me and my husband, Peter, before our life journey begins. I mentioned above a very brief note about me, now a little on Peter.

My husband had a very different experience growing up. He was born on Staten Island, New York but by age three his family moved to Bay Shore way out on Long Island. A few years later they moved again to Coral Gables, Florida after his mother and father divorced. After about five years in Florida, his mother moved them back to Staten Island where he stayed for two-years.

Peter at Walker AFB, Ca. 1957

He then left home after the eighth grade to attend a junior novitiate for his high school years as he had considered a vocation to the religious life. This wasn’t to be after three-years in the novitiate so he returned to Staten Island as his agreement with the Order was that after a year of the outside world, if he still wanted the religious life he could reapply.

However, shortly after he had entered the novitiate his mother had returned to Coral Gables so there was no home for him on the Island. He stayed with a relative, got a part time job, went to school, met a girl and decided that the religious life was NOT for him! So he enlisted in the Air Force at eighteen in 1955 after graduation.

In August of ’59, after almost four years at a Strategic Air Command base in Rowell, New Mexico, (yes, the same place as the little green men from outer space were supposed to have landed a few years earlier), he was in the aviation Cadet/OCS Program at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas. His father died unexpectedly at age forty-four in California. His father was an alcoholic and had been since before they moved to Florida the first time and supposedly on the mend when this happened.

Peter returned east for the funeral on Staten Island. He had been in the service since 1955 and intended to make it a career but he knew he had to get a college education both for personal and economic reasons.

The path he was on wouldn’t accommodate that for many years, if at all, because of the frequency of TDY’s (Temporary duty away from your home base which was not uncommon for flight personnel in the AF) and the relocations an AF military life entails. He had been at Walker Air Force Base, a SAC base, in Roswell his entire time in the service before going to Lackland, TX.

Peter at Lackland AFB

August 1959

He saw what this type of living did to people so he decided then and there, at the funeral, that he would change direction and resign from the Air Force since his original enlistment time was up. He resigned and returned to Staten Island to enroll in college in September of 1959. I’m glad he did because that’s where we met that very same month and married a year later. That was fifty-three years ago as of 2013.

Our plane in 1963

Peter graduated from Wagner College on Staten Island in 1965 with a BS in economics. He had taken five-years to complete the normal four-year program as he worked full-time in lower Manhattan. He went to school at night, weekends and summers; no on-line computer courses in his day.

Peter had learned to fly while in the service so in the fall of 1959 he joined an Army flying club located on Miller Army Field on Staten Island. He and a friend purchased a Cessna 172 and leased it to the Army for the club’s use. It was a good deal for Peter as he and his partner only paid ten-cents a gallon for avgas when they flew and the Army was supposed to take care of the maintenance.

When he was not working or going to school, he was at Miller field flying. My friends called me the flying widow. By 1963, we had two children and it became expensive to pay rent, support the plane and put food on the table for the four of us, so something had to go; it was the plane!

Peter had also joined Prudential Steamship Company in September of 1959 just a few weeks after his Air Force discharge. By the end of 1965, he had become the westbound freight manager for Prudential’s trade Route 10 which was cargo loaded at ports in the Mediterranean; Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, etc. and offloaded mostly in New York but occasionally in Philadelphia and Baltimore. The company was owned by the Skouras family of 20th Century Fox fame.

Skouras was interested in expanding the company so Peter became a member of a small group of managers who were working on a proposal for a construction differential subsidy to be submitted to the U.S. Government for LASH ships. LASH means lighter aboard ship, the precursor of container ships. He had also been asked by the company to be its representative on the shake-down cruise on one of the company’s new ships. This was in the fall of ‘65 and he spent three days at sea on this new ship doing what he has always loved to do other than flying, being on the water.

Prior to joining Mobil, as I said before, we had two children and moved our household twice, first from a one bedroom garden apartment to a two bedroom apartment on Grymes Hill right next to Wagner College. Peter went to school, worked and flew! I had children!

Raising two toddlers was a full time job so my time was spent at home most of the time. Our neighbor couple who lived in the apartment above us was about our age and had one daughter. We shared experiences as we raised our children. One year we decided to go skiing with them. He had skied in college and said he would show us how. We hired baby-sitters and off we went.

Christel, George and Chris 1963

It was a long weekend and we went to the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. He indeed did show us how to ski. That started a long love affair with skiing for Peter and I and eventually our children, and then their spouses. This passion remained for years.

When Peter joined Mobil a few years later we rented a small house on three-acres on the Island and in those days, before the Verrazano Bridge was built connecting the Island to New York City via Brooklyn, the Island had plenty of open space. The only way to get to the Island from New York was by ferry to Manhattan, a five-mile trip, or to Brooklyn also by ferry. So the people who lived on the Island had a relatively tranquil life compared to the rest of New York City. A small creek ran through our yard, among fruit trees, chickens, ducks, a pony and a corn field right behind our property.

Staten Island is an anomaly in that it is the highest piece of land between Maine and Florida rising from the seashore to about five-hundred feet. A series of hills and valleys run almost down the center. The Island was sparsely populated compared to New York City’s four other boroughs in the early ‘60’s, at least before the bridge was built. They also built a four-lane highway down the middle of the island to connect the new Verrazano Bridge to the Outerbridge, which took people to New Jersey in half the time that it took previously. Once when we had a picnic for Peter’s Mobil colleagues they couldn’t believe this was part of New York City. It was often referred to as the forgotten borough.

So why did Peter leave Prudential? While he enjoyed the job he saw limitations on where he might end up for a lot of reasons. So he answered an ad placed by Mobil Oil Company for a marketing operations trainee position in the New York State Marketing Division. To make a long story short, he was hired and started on April 25, 1966, on my birthday! He continued to go to school for his MBA as he saw the effort as a part-time job. He received tuition reimbursement from both Mobil and the G.I. Bill at the same time, as well as getting more knowledge.

Marketing operations was that part of a marketing division responsible for building and maintaining service stations along with the receipt, storage and distribution of all finished petroleum products to retail, distributors and commercial customers. This last activity involved the building, maintenance, repair and operations of bulk storage terminals and loading facilities and warehousing and distribution centers throughout the Division.

New York State Division covered all of New York State. Trainees were expected to rotate through a number of staff and line supervisory jobs for about twenty-four months, before being assigned to a regular slot in one of the many facilities. His first training assignment was as a foreman at the North Henry Street Terminal and warehousing facility in Brooklyn, N.Y. This was the largest loading and distribution center in the State and employed hundreds of employees to operate and maintain the tank trucks and tractor-trailers used to deliver gas and oil, tire, batteries and other products to customers in the New York City area.

A couple of years before Peter’s assignments to North Henry Street, the company had installed an automated bulk loading system that was supposed to load trucks remotely and generate a dispatch sequence and invoices all from a central control room. While it was installed, it never worked. So his training assignment was changed to include making the system work along with his job as a foreman and he had one year to do it. So he made it work!

His next assignment in the fall of 1967 was to train at Port Mobil on Staten Island. This was Mobil’s largest tank farm facility supplying finished products to all the terminals in New York State Division and other locations in the Northeast. The tank farm received products from large tankers (ships) and the Colonial Pipeline.

His most memorable experiences aside from trying to remember where all the pipes and pumps went and what they did, where the firefighting equipment was and what a hot work permit was, was climbing to the top of the huge storage tanks to gauge them, (measuring how much product was contained in the tanks). He said that it was the hardest for him climbing down from the tank tops, rather than going up the tanks. The other employees thought he was crazy. Another interesting aspect at Port Mobil was that the terminal manager used to work for Peter’s grandfather when the manager was a youth in the construction business on Staten Island.

By this time his brother Douglas was a captain on coastal tankers. He was the youngest captain at that time in the New York area according to the Staten Island Advance, the local newspaper that actually ran a center fold feature article on him. He and Peter would get together when Douglas docked his ship at Port Mobil.

After a few months at Port Mobil, Peter returned to the Division headquarters and was assigned as part of a team to do Plant Asset Evaluations. This entailed traveling all over the state, from Buffalo in the west to Plattsburgh in the north to Port Mobil in the south and all the way to the east end of Long Island, all terminals and bulk plants in between. There must have been fifty or more and he and his colleague probably did a third of them. Peter and his colleague were convinced that no one read these reports as they would do their analysis and make recommendations to improve, consolidate, or close these facilities, because they received absolutely no feedback, no comments, or even questions from the management.

One day they were doing an evaluation of a small facility in upstate New York that was on a large piece of land, probably about thirty-acres or so, but the terminal occupied a very small plot of this land. There were two or three small storage tanks and loading racks for two or three drivers and trucks. Peter knew nothing about farming or farm subsidies, other than they existed, so he did a little research, very little, and recommended in their report that they should apply for a federal farm subsidy to NOT grow potatoes on the thirty-acres and could receive ‘X’ amount of dollars for not growing the crop. A few weeks went by and they heard nothing from the management about their recommendation. They were convinced no one was even reading these things.

He was about eighteen-months into the two-year training program and he told his supervisor that he thought the training program didn’t seem very structured or comprehensive for what it was intended to do. This supervisor said, Okay, your next assignment is to develop a training program that you think is more appropriate. Over the next few months, that’s exactly what he did. This required him to coordinate his recommendations with E.R., the Employee Relations department.

Since he wasn’t in E.R. he couldn’t sit in their offices because of all the confidential materials and information they had, so he sat outside their office area. When he needed to talk to someone he would bang on the wall and someone would come out see what he wanted. Sometimes it would work the other way. They would tap on the wall and say, come on in.

During this time he also developed a labor expense planning model for use in the terminals. When he was at N. Henry St., they had to do an annual budget and it seemed it didn’t really capture all the labor expenses that were being incurred. He was also soon to graduate school at Wagner College. One of his college courses was labor expense planning and with a few modifications, he used the information that he had learned and put it to good use at work.

Chapter 1 1968-1970 Move #3 Staten Island to Framingham, Mass.

Peter’s two-years of training were up in 1968 and he also finished his MBA courses, except for his thesis. Mobil asked him to be the terminal manager in a small upstate location. He said, No, thanks. He had enjoyed his last few months working with E.R. who had noticed his work as well. The Division General Manager gave his permission and Mobil asked if he would like to transfer to the New England division in Boston, as an Employee Relations (E.R.) assistant.

In this position he would learn the basics of payroll, benefits and salary administration, recruiting, training and career development. He would do job descriptions and evaluations, conduct salary surveys and construct salary ranges such as the minimum, midpoint and maximum pay for each of the salary groups in the division.

Mobil had P&P’s, that’s policy and procedure manuals, for everything you could think of. In those days if one didn’t know how to do something, the first place to look was in the P&P’s. They were the original yellow pages and huge. Peter told me that in later years he hadn’t seen one anyplace. But in the early days, the manuals were used to make sure there was consistency throughout the Company as to how you handle Company policy.

The New England division was large geographically covering six states; Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Mobil has facilities in all these states including service stations, distribution centers and warehouses, storage and delivery terminals, port facilities as well as marketing district offices within the various sales districts but it was still not as large as the New York State Division in sales volume, customers, marketing representatives and operations personnel and other support staff employees.

A month or two after our daughter was born we embarked on our first corporate move from Staten Island to Framingham, Massachusetts. We didn’t mind the move off Staten Island as one could see all the changes coming and none of them looked good as the new bridge brought a flood of people. The old Staten Island airport became a shopping mall, the vacant and open land was turned into high density housing and the vacant land along the shore became the home of the rich and famous although on postage stamp lots!

Lambchop in Framingham

The New England division office at that time was located in downtown Boston very close to Fenway Park. You can still see the old office building from the Stadium as it was located in the building that has a large Citgo sign on the roof. In 1969, the office was moved to Waltham, a suburb outside