I grew up on Circle W Farm in Geauga County, Ohio, in the 1950s and I believe I got my love of music from my Mom who I often found singing while she was doing the housework. One song in particular I would hear her sing, Que Sera Sera, what will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, Que Sera Sera. I can still picture it in my mind and hear her beautiful voice. In the West Geauga school district that I attended, they had an excellent music program starting us out young on plastic flutes followed up in the pre-teen years with a choice of brass, woodwind, percussion or other instruments of choice to form the school’s band. I chose the trumpet and in addition to lessons at school, I also received tutoring from a member of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. I remember playing in the school concerts and marching in the band down the streets in the parades they held in Chesterland, Ohio, near where I lived. In Junior High I was picked to be a member in the High School’s All Star Band, which to me was quite an honor. I also gained experience in reading music by singing in both the school’s choir and the local church choir, although I never have had a very good voice for it. However, because of band’s like the Beatles which were all the rave in the 1960s, I decided to play guitar so that I could sing while playing an instrument at the same time, which you can’t do with a trumpet. I got together with some of my school friends and started a band of our own and played a few gigs around town. It wasn’t long after I began this however that it ended when I moved with my grandparents to Blair County, Pennsylvania, where I entered and finished High School. It wasn’t long after I arrived there that I got together with some local musicians to become part of their band which was called the Lost Breed. I didn’t think we were that bad in comparison to the one I was in back in Ohio, but thinking back, we weren’t that great either. Somehow we got a special gig to warm the stage for a nationally known band called Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. Afterwards we of course changed some of our members and the band’s name was changed to Timepeace, and this repeated and I was in a band called Martha (named after Paul McCartney’s dog), and again another change to a band we called the Amazing Picnic, and so on. And if you look at many of the big name bands at the time, there was a lot of this same kind of thing going on with musicians jumping from one band to another. Seemed like the natural thing to do. Although I briefly played in a couple of bands later in my life, my thoughts of making a career in music came to an end in the ‘70s because of the Vietnam War and my decision to join the Navy rather than be drafted into the Army. (Look at the bands page of this website to hear some of the music of the bands I just mentioned.)
I spent six years in the US Navy beginning in July of 1972 stationed on board the surface ship USS Truckee (AO-147) and the submarine USS Billfish (SSN-676). I was in the A-Gang or Auxiliary Division on the Truckee, where I learned how to weld and maintain refrigeration and various other auxiliary support systems. And I was in the Machinery Division on Billfish. While there I became Submarine qualified (which took me over a year and was quite an honor to obtain), and became an Engineering Watch Supervisor qualified on all aspects of the nuclear propulsion plant. I also became assigned as the Ship’s Machinist, and later held a supervisory position in the Machinery Division. To get to that point I had to attend and complete significant schooling in the U.S. Navy’s Nuclear Power Program. I was trained on the physics, metallurgy, radiological controls, chemistry, operations, and maintenance of a nuclear power plant, and eventually through these studies and hands-on experience at a Navy nuclear prototype in the State of New York, I qualified to hold the highest enlisted supervisory position for both operation and maintenance of a nuclear power plant during criticality and plant shutdown. Leading up to this I had qualified on each of the power plant’s watchstations, including Reactor Operator, Mechanical Operator, Electrical Operator, Primary and Secondary Plant Chemist, and Health Physics Technician. Toward the end of my enlistment, I was appointed to Machinery Division Supervisor responsible for the management of over 20 personnel on-board Billfish. I also served as the Ship’s Machinist and using a metal lathe manufactured gears and parts needed to keep equipment functioning during long deployments, receiving a Letter of Commendation for my work from the Admiral overseeing the US’s Atlantic Fleet of submarines. In addition, I had also trained and received the responsibility for completing tasks and implementing programs as the Ship’s Engineering Department Quality Control/Quality Assurance Inspector. It was an unbelievable six years and the Navy had tried to get me to re-enlist for even longer, but I wanted more freedom in my life and more time to be with my wife, Terrie, and the kids, so I took my discharge in July of 1978.
Click here to see a video of a presentation I made about the U.S. Navy’s “Billfish” submarines during a bench ceremony at the Cold War Submarine Memorial in South Carolina. I had to cut quite a bit out of the ceremony in order to upload the video, but it still takes about 30 minutes to watch. Enjoy !!
Following my discharge from the US Navy, I obtained a civilian job in the commercial nuclear industry at the Toledo Edison Company in Toledo, Ohio. While working there I developed and implemented an operations/engineering design review program for two additional nuclear facilities proposed for the Davis-Besse site. I facilitated the interface between Toledo Edison and Bechtel engineering departments in the assembly of a $3 million scale model in preparation for the construction of the new facilities. This effort unexpectedly ended when I was asked if I would respond to and become a member of the Technical Support Group at Three Mile Island during its March 28, 1979, incident. During the response and subsequent recovery actions, I wrote emergency operating/ recovery procedures, plotted data in the Unit 2 Control Room, and devised methods to overcome many off-normal plant conditions. Later, upon my return from Three Mile Island, I was responsible for re-writing the Davis-Besse’s station emergency plan and for implementing new procedures and processes with utility, state, and local officials. Later I served as an Emergency Duty Officer for the station, responsible for directing the station’s emergency response activities, classifying emergency conditions, and approving protective action recommendations to be given to the State of Ohio for the protection of the public surrounding the facility in the event of an accident. In 1981, I left Toledo Edison and took a position at Energy Consultants Inc., out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where I served as Manager of the Nuclear Support Group. In this capacity, I directly supervised the activities of group personnel in all facets of on-site radiological emergency planning, administrative support, and environmental affairs. I developed proposals and presentations on nuclear support services, delivered lectures and technical presentations regarding the management of nuclear support activities, and actively participated in various client-based projects. I then left Energy Consultants in 1983 and joined Nutech Engineers out of Bethesda, Maryland. While at Nutech, I was responsible for providing consulting services for several nuclear power stations in the US. Next I tried my hand at establishing my own consulting business beginning in 1984. As the owner of this firm, i.e., Reed Products and Services Corporation, I served as a principal consultant. I was responsible for the direction and operations of the business, the management of eventually over 30 employees, and the contractual agreements with other consulting firms and independent contractors. I also provided direct project support for several nuclear facilities around the country. The stress of running the business took its toll and I eventually decided to shut it down and took a job at the Washington Public Power Supply System (now known as Energy Northwest). I was initially hired as their Emergency Planning Manager but eventually became the Corporate Emergency Preparedness, Safety and Health Officer with the managerial responsibility for its emergency preparedness, industrial safety, and occupational health programs. I directed the activities of the staff associated with these three programs and worked with the associated offsite agencies to ensure that company activities were performed in accordance with all program directives, while ensuring that NRC, FEMA, and OSHA requirements were being fully satisfied. I also managed the budget for the company’s activities associated with these programs and ensured adequate resources were available to support Washington
Nuclear Project-2, the Packwood Hydroelectric Plant, and the WNP-1 & 3 construction sites. This lasted for about three years when in 1997, my wife and I realized it would be better to be back east, closer to our aging parents who needed additional support. So in September of 1997 I took a position at Public Service Electric and Gas in Hancocks Bridge, New Jersey. I was accepted into their Quality Assurance Department and initially became a certified Auditor, then Lead Auditor. I eventually became the Operations Assessment Group Supervisor and later the Quality Assurance Programs Manager responsible for oversight of PSEG Nuclear’s QA programs at both of the Salem nuclear power plants and also at the Hope Creek nuclear power plant. In this role I participated as a key manager in business planning, budgeting, and performance review for the Salem and Hope Creek Nuclear Oversight Department. My responsibilities included maintaining the company’s QA Program manual and performing independent assessments of PSEG Nuclear’s corporate functions. I was also actively involved in industry functions, such as supporting Utilities Service Alliance activities (like participating in the USA QA Committee and serving as a team member on Nuclear Safety Culture Assessments at nuclear sites across the US); supporting Nuclear Quality Management Leadership activities (including serving as team lead on Nuclear Industry Evaluation Program audits of utility QA Programs); and developing quality standards for the nuclear industry (serving on the NQML NIEP Standards Committee, the ASME NQA-1 Standards Subcommittee, and the ANSI ANS-3.2/N18.7 Standards Subcommittee). In addition to being a certified Audit Team Leader, I was also a qualified Plant Operations Review Committee member, a Station Qualified Reviewer at both the Salem and Hope Creek nuclear stations, and functioned as a chairperson of the Nuclear Oversight Training Advisory Committee. A challenging job that finally came to an end in 2017, after passing my 65th birthday the prior November, when I decided it was time to retire and spend the rest of my life in a more leisurely manner. My wife, Terrie, and I both believed that we deserved to enjoy however many more years we might have left in a much less stressful environment.
After retirement began in 2017, we began to do things that we had before only done in our spare time. For example, my wife Terrie (Wise) Reed and I had been researching our family’s genealogy in between life’s other duties since the ‘90s and now we could finally spend more time on it. This has really been our passion for over three decades now. We use the Family Tree Maker software to capture what we uncover and with it we’ve created numerous genealogical documents that may be of interest to others. We’ve donated them to several Historical/Genealogical Societies in Pennsylvania, including at the Adams, Bedford, Berks, Blair, Franklin, Juniata, Lebanon, and Lehigh Counties, since many of the individuals captured in these booklets lived or worked in Pennsylvania. We also put some in historical organization locales in Ohio such as at the Geauga County and Noble County Historical Societies, the Berea Ohio Historical Society, the Scotland Station Historical Park, and the Burton Historical Farms Organization. (Look at the genealogy page of this website for a more detailed listing of them.) So if you happen to come across these documents, please feel free to peruse them and Email us (the address is in the front of each booklet) with questions or (more importantly) with additional information or corrections to the data we’ve assembled in them. Although much of the information is tailored to our family lineage, many of the families captured in these documents have so many other potential family branches which could be traced that it boggles my mind to think about them. So how did we get started in this? In my case, my biological father wasn’t around for me and when I was young I didn’t really care about that … it was just another one of those things a young person and later a teenager ignores because there are so many other things that are of a higher priority. Once I got older, however, I found it important and somewhat gratifying to know about my family and where my roots had sprung. And my wife, who had members of her family that had already performed some genealogical research of her roots, was also interested in it. So we continued, and as we continued my wife and I discovered many things about our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, etc., that we not only were not aware of, but that also amazed us; and surprisingly, our own parents weren’t aware of these things either. Unfortunately our parents have since passed away not knowing some of the other surprising things we’ve found since then. They knew of some of the family lore and could describe their parents and grandparents to us in a way that we could never find in a book, and more importantly in a way to fill in the blanks for us since we were so young when we met any of them (if we had met them at all) that we could not describe them ourselves. So we captured as much of this as we could. This source of information, however, can only take you so far … once you get back a few generations, there is very little that the remaining living members of the family can tell you about your ancestors because they lived so far in the past. Thus we began digging, using many different means, such as local and regional historical/genealogical society libraries, state and federal libraries (including the National Archives in Washington, DC), and numerous web-based sources, including Ancestry.com, Rootsweb, MyHeritage.com, Findagrave.com, and Newspapers.com, etc. Even when gathering the data we didn’t always know the significance of it until we started placing the different pieces and parts together. I can’t describe all of them, but there is one general theme that should be interesting to you the reader, and it involves members of our family tree that were alive and trying to make a life for themselves in America when it was essentially only British colonies, Indians, and a few other groups like the French and Spanish. As we continued our research, Terrie and I slowly realized that quite a number of our Great-Grandparents were here and involved when the original 13 colonies in America began to get disenchanted with the conditions placed upon them by their English Monarch. Long before Ellis Island ever existed. Terrie and I found that several of our Great (times 4, 5, or 6)-Grandfathers, and even some of our Great-Grandmothers, were part of the American Revolution. This time period begins around 1765, with the actual war beginning in 1775, the colonies declaring their independence in 1776, and the British signing the Treaty of Paris ending the war in 1783. The constitution of the new United States of America was then adopted in 1787. We even found that some of our great-grandparents were here in North America in the 1600s. In fact, Terrie we determined is a descendant of four people who came to America on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 !! We’ve created several genealogy booklets documenting all of this and provided it to as many of our family members as possible, as well as to donating copies to historical/genealogical societies of the booklets that closely relate to their area of history.
I and my wife Terrie have been married for over 52 years having joined together back on November 24, 1973. While in the US Navy we had two children; G. Jason Reed II who was born in 1974, and Jessica L. Reed who was born in 1978. This led to six grandchildren, including Emma, Clara, and G. J. “Trey” Reed III, from our Son, and Arielle, Sierra, and Samantha from our Daughter. So far we’ve only one great-grandchild named Ella, who is the daughter of our granddaughter Arielle. Our daughter and her family live in southern Delaware, while our son and his family live in Georgia, and with Terrie and I living in Pennsylvania, it makes it difficult to get together. However, since I retired in 2017, I’ve had the leeway to do genealogical research, write books, and finally enjoy some extended periods of time with family and friends when the weather and transportation is amenable. When we were first married, Terrie and I didn’t have the money or the time to have a honeymoon. It wasn’t until our 10th anniversary that we were finally able to get our honeymoon. With Terrie’s folks taking care of the two kids, we traveled to California and had a blast, going to Disneyland, Universal Studios, and a quick jump over to Las Vegas, before returning home. Terrie has been a wonderful companion who made my life successful and complete. When I struggled during my Navy nuclear schools, she helped me study at night to make it through. When I was away for months at sea or during my consulting projects, she took care of the myriad of things taking place at home. She gave up career opportunities in order to support my goals and worked various part-time jobs when necessary for us to be able to make ends meet financially. Without her by my side I don’t know how I could have managed. She has been a godsend to me and got us through the tough times we had. But we had many good times as well. During my consulting years, I would sometimes have Terrie and the kids come join me; like when I was working at the Seabrook nuclear station in New Hampshire, we rented a condo by the beach and enjoyed the ocean and the shops on the boardwalks; or when I was working at the Palo Verde nuclear station in Arizona, we rented a trailer and enjoyed the desert scenes and many of the cowboy attractions. Terrie and I also traveled together, like when we took an ocean cruise through the Bahamas, or when we spent nearly a month in China where we visited the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Hong Kong, and numerous other interesting places. Yes, we’ve had tough times in our life, but overall it has been a good one where we have been blessed in many ways. Hopefully we can continue to enjoy it for many more years.
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