Gene and Mary Ellen McKinney have been residents of the West building at Russellville Park for about a year. Gene appears much younger than his 84 biological years and his life in the last half of the 20th Century is a personification of America’s in that same time period.
When Gene was born in 1937 it was only 34 years earlier that the world was stunned to learn that a couple of brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina had made a powered air flight for the first time ever. And today, if Gene possessed a million or two dollars of disposal income, he might be able to book passage on a 15- minute rocket ride to outer space. Gene’s working life was in the telecommunication business and his first job as an adult was installing rotary dial telephones for American Telephone & Telegraph (AT & T) that put Tilly the telephone operator and her massive board of tangled cables out the back door. Replacing old technology with new technology was what kept Gene involved in America’s quest to lead the world in communication technology.
You’ve never heard of some of the installations Gene’s teams made because you don’t know what a “hot box” is. Ask the engineer of that 100-car freight train streaking through the Columbia River gorge and he will tell you it has to do with the wheels on all those box cars and flat-bed container haulers, The load weight rests on an axle attached to the wheel and the axle turns in a box filled by fibers soaked in an oil based solution that controls the heat generated by the turning axle. If the oil fails the heat creates a “hot box” that can make the wheel lock-up and possibly derail the train. So Gene’s team wired in sensors along the track to detect any hot boxes that needed attention.
The yearly advances in technology had sent thousands of workers to join Tilly on the sidelines and in 1989 At&T offered thousands of their employees a plan to leave the company. At age 52 Gene elected to take a lump sum buyout that included lifetime health care and drug coverage. As years passed and health care cost went crazy, Mary Ellen and Gene knew they had made a good decision.
The two met in 1956 and married a year later. They raised a family of three boys and a daughter. Their oldest son, Mike, grew to be a 6’3”, 237 lb. football tight end who played at the University of Oregon for coach Rich Brooks.
Gene’s working life gave him an up close and personal view of the disappearance of Tilly’s massive obsolete equipment to his daughter’s 3” x 5” cell phone that could do everything but fry an egg. From 1937 to 1989 it was a trip of wonders for both Gene McKinney and his home, America.
