Page 316 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
P. 316

  CORE VALUE: EXCELLENCE
  Top to bottom: Ernie Fierro in the SL component shop in 1964; Ernie Fierro as VP of Product Support in March 2003
TRAIN EARLY, TRAIN OFTEN
In May 1964, a young mechanic named Ernie Fierro took his first Caterpillar service training course. It was held at Cat’s Davis Street facility in San Leandro, just six blocks from Peterson headquar- ters. Fierro had only been a mechanic for Peterson for two weeks. “Peterson’s in-house training was very limited in those days. There wasn’t any real structured, formalized training then. Fortunately, we did have Bill Richardson who did the best he could with af- ter-hours training. It was on a voluntary basis and very informal. He would hold classes in the auditorium off the showroom. It was primarily movies and lectures on different topics like fuel systems and transmissions. But for the formal training, they would send us over to the Caterpillar plant on Davis Street.”
After a thirty-seven-year career at Peterson, the now-retired pres- ident of Peterson Machinery has racked up many accolades, but one of his proudest is hanging on the wall of his home office. “It’s
a diploma for a Caterpillar training course on Heavy Equipment Electrical Systems from May 1964,” says Fierro. “That was my first class. And it’s one of my favorites because it meant that Peterson had the confidence in me to send me to school when I’d only been with them a couple of weeks. I went to several other schools the following years for hydraulics, truck engines, power genera- tion, and transmissions. I was really excited about learning, and that’s why they kept sending me back. And I took advantage of all that training with a whole lot of gratitude and happiness.”
Before coming to Peterson, Fierro spent three years in the Army Corps of
Engineers. “We were in Guam and Okinawa upgrading airfields from WWII. And in Korea, we built missile sites right near the DMZ. It was a great experience.” But qualifying for the heavy construction battalion wasn’t easy. He’d enlisted for three years in order to attend a heavy equipment repairman school in Virginia. And he passed all the entry tests except one. “I failed the color-blind test, so they wouldn’t let me in because I would have difficulty reading the color-coded electrical and hydraulic schematics. And since I had placed first in rifle marksmanship in the training battalion, the Army’s solution was to send me to sniper school.” Long story short: Fierro fast-talked his way out of sniper school—his idea of a good way
to die—and back into the heavy equipment repair school.
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