Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Ron Mohr Named 2009 PBA Senior Tour Player of the Year.

Amazing Family ResemblanceIt is finally official. Ron Mohr has been named the 2009 PBA Senior Tour Player of the Year! The announcement has been a long time coming, with everyone speculating that Ron Mohr would come out on top, but now it is in the books.

An article newly posted on PBA.com, features Ron and other award recipients. You can read it in it's entirety HERE.

----------------- taken from PBA.com ---------------------
Ron Mohr, a 53-year old second year Senior Tour member, won the PBA Jackson, Michigan Senior Open and PBA Dayton, Ohio Senior Open, kicking off the 2009 season with his first two titles in back-to-back weeks. Ron won his third title in the Senior Dick Weber Open in Lansing, Michigan, where he defeated four-time defending Senior Player of the Year Tom Baker, 232-175, in the title match.

In 12 Senior Tour events, Mohr cashed in all 12, advanced to match play 11 times and he had five top five finishes. Ron was runner-up in the 2009 Senior Tour earnings race to Wayne Webb by only $250 with his $41,600 total, and he led the full-time touring seniors in average at 223.14.

“I don’t know if it’s a surprise to get the news, but it’s still a shock,” Mohr said. “You hope things will turn out this way, but you never know. After my first year, I realized I could be competitive, but it’s a major step to win a title and then to win more than once is surreal. To go on to win Player of the Year is beyond anything a guy living in Alaska could ever imagine.

“I think it would be easy to accept this, say it has been a great year, and move on,” he added. “But I’m looking for ways to get better. Tom Baker won this honor four years in a row. I’m going to try to get better if I have any hope of doing something like that. And with Walter Ray (Williams Jr.) coming out on the Senior Tour in 2010, even for a few events, we’ll all have our work cut out for us next year.”
------------------ end PBA.com excerpt --------------------

So congratulations to Ron Mohr, and as I told him, it was a well deserved culmination of a year of hard work. Very competitive bowling, rigorous travel and being away from Linda for long stretches has finally paid off with a dream come true.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

The Second Wave Of The Repression..

Yes I am coining a new term here; repression. We have no idea if we are going through (or went through) a recession or a depression, hence the term. It also fits because until we actually get a straight story from someone we can trust, we are holding back, afraid to let loose of our pocketbook filled with investment funds dying to get back into the market.

However that has really nothing to do with what I want to rant about today. I am concerned with the "second wave". The US was based on production jobs. We were the country of manual labor with a workforce that got things done. Then came Nafta, Safta and Afta all is said and done, we are in a heap of trouble.

What scares me is the unemployment figures. The statistics can be skewed to appear as we are coming out of our repression. There are still a buttload of people filing for unemployment every month, just a few less than last month? Is that a good sign? I have no idea, but I have noticed and experienced a trend in the workplace that is alarming.

The system used to be, in any career that involved long term manual labor, as you got older and got more years in at a job, you graduated to a job that was less labor intensive. You had gained the knowledge that made you the "teacher". You made sure things were done correctly, helped out with the hard labor when needed, but generally you ran the equipment, drove the truck or ran the forklift. You WERE the training program for the new hires, the young kids that could break their back earning their way to top of the hill.

With the latest breakdown of this system, layoffs cut deep into the workforce. For factories to stay open, or for municipalities to stay solvent, they had to cut deep into the employee pool. People with up to 10 - 15 years seniority were given notice, leaving a lot of old folk to carry the load. This has a 2 part repercussion that will lead to the second wave. Part 1 is that these old folk like me are pushing 50 and are having to do the work a 20 year old could be doing. I am not saying it cannot be done, but the employee roster is now cut in half, so there is a lot of slack that needs to be picked up. And with 10 or so years to go to make it to retirement, this causes a problem for the employer as well as the employee. The second wave begins with much of the remaining work force off work due to job injury making insurance costs higher and an even smaller work force.

This is not my biggest concern though. The second wave will also be the end of the workplace as we know it. Established in the 1930's in factories right here in the USA, the teacher / student relationship is dying. There was no better instructor on the floor than someone who has been doing the job, and doing it well. This was the best thing that ever happened for an employer. Most supervisors and department heads cannot do the job as well as a seasoned employee ,and to have the best teacher available, free of charge, is what kept the train on the tracks.

Except now there are no students. The tradition that my grandfather learned at the gas company, and the tradition that my dad learned at International Harvester, is dying with me. There is no one to pass on our knowledge to. This is the end result of the second wave...

Saturday, October 3, 2009