Will the Real Motor Ladies (and Gentleman) Please Stand Up?

#Confessions of a Motor Gal

To Whom It May Concern:

I obviously didn’t know it when I was young, but I am a natural born Motor Gal. Heartland roots now in city slicker Boston (steel-toe) boots, that is me. Some people’s families do horse breeding, run banks or are doctors, that is not my story. Nothing like being 5 years old and trying to explain what your dad does to a class full of kindergartners, I will never forget it.

I mean what we do is interwoven into our lives so much so that it is going to be hard to find a Fritz family barbecue when words like motor, horsepower, voltage, and RPM doesn’t get brought up in every five sentences. It’s all was ever talk about and I would challenge that if the work you do hasn’t almost taken you to the brink, you may never know what I mean. I have also learned that almost any topic can somehow be related back to motors and it reminds me of the dad in the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” with a Windex obsession. Our family has a motor obsession.

We could start the story from the beginning of time but I don’t want anyone reading this to fall asleep. So we can start from the middle. My great grandfather had died and my paternal grandfather, William Fritz, was tasked with the impossible. Take your 8th grade education and take care of your family or starve. They say necessity breeds invention but you have never seen a channeled obsession create such wonderment. That less than an 8th grader, began inventing. I can’t imagine the millennials of today who lick ice cream and put it back on the shelf, comprehending this idea. When the War hit, he was tasked with going as an American Veteran in the Korean War but was sent to Western Germany to rebuild. Nothing like being called back to the land of your ancestors and helping to rewire and rebuild a nation nearly destroyed by two World Wars.

When he returned from my grandfather invented fans, blowers and steel building pipe manufacturing facilities and motor rewinding facilities in Nebraska. (Yes, to answer a question I am frequently asked Nebraska is in the United States we’re the guys in the middle above Kansas). I think about the destiny shift that would have been altered if he hadn’t returned from that war.

He would hire people with disabilities and anyone willing to work hard, stating something like “I don’t see what that has anything to do with their ability to do their genius.” He was constantly on the look out to invent, create and the rewinding facilities. Rewinding electric industrial motors up to 10,000 Horsepower. To give any of you non-technical folks uses enough power to run neighborhoods in one motor. Many of his facilities, run by my uncle and cousins, still exist to this day since 1955.

In our family there was no such thing as “Child Labor Laws”, there was “if this family has a need you, work family laws”. So, at 10 years old my father would go to my grandfather’s facilities to learn the trade and to work. He always said that the didn’t know it at the time but he got the education of his life and when he went on to college, he furthered his career in motor technologies and electricity well before the invention of the Variable Frequency Drive.

So, then my father bought a motor rewind shop in California and we moved from Nebraska where I was born. Just like his father he rewound and repaired motors for pumps, fans, agricultural motors, oil pumps, factory motors, in thousands of different industries and applications. I loved going “down to the shop “on Saturdays to see the motors being worked on and wondered where these motors were going when they left. When the dawn of the invention of the VFD or Variable Frequency Drive occurred, my father was written up in EPRI magazine as the company to go to electric energy savings. I had no idea that that one article, the power of a handful of words, was going to spear a destiny. An unbelievable story which will be told another day.

At 20 years old, back when I knew everything, I put my word in with my maker, I was not going to be a Motor Gal. Eldest of four kids, I was going to spear my own fish and make the world shake. So, I started working with kids, did that for several years believing I was making an impact. Then I realized that to help kids, I needed to help their parents, and help them think beyond limitation. Then I worked in housing realizing that if I wanted to make a change to where people live, they need better jobs. So, then I worked in Workforce Development believing that I just did enough I could change the world by helping to find better jobs. Then I helped in the family business (I was never going to do) companies with saving energy. Realizing that all of what I had tried to do should have been done in reverse! So like the Fritz before that, and the Fritz before that I too became a Motor Gal.

So, I spent 5 or more years helping to free up money using the Energy Efficiency Rebate Programs through a variety of energy efficiency methods and products. I realized that if I could help on that end, and public and other advocates could apply additional resources that by strengthening the American Businesses and American Factories this saves 700 jobs instead of just one. Employed people could return to their families with food on the table. Kids with food on the table would see a life of opportunity and not a life of lack. So, if I was going to help those kids, I started out helping, I needed to start from the economic top of their lives and work downward with help of like-minded people.

Now I believe in this country’s ability to overcome from tragedy and as above, so below. This is the foundation of the core beliefs of Re-Motor America. Now, as a family we tried to help one by one, returning starfish to starfish back to the sea of energy efficiency. But what if the way for this to be wide scale, and full implemented a lot quicker than 3097 years from now, would be for us to show you the way and connect companies with sources of motors, equipment, entire system upgrades and financial resources as well to help with implementation.

Here is my confession, I won’t be able do it without help. I am focused on fixing company energy problems from the user experience (UX) designer’s view, but there are no way big impacts can happen without a global vision and delegation. I told my Maker that if I was going to leave non-profit arena, I was going to do something big. I can’t do it without companies in business, electricians, vendors, financial people, motor suppliers, VFD suppliers, lighting guys, phone operators, social media folks, engineers, countless others and the like. So maybe it is true that you have little hold over your destiny, but I believe in this country and I believe that America’s strength is our unique ability to work together when tragedy strikes. What if I told you, we don’t have to have a fight or a tragedy to do this all the time?

I was at a Rotary meeting some years ago and a gentleman had gone to a NASA Facility after it had closed and stamped on the buildings where picture after picture of “Abandoned in Place.” In Tibetan astrology the interesting thing about that is that the prediction of future is understood with the capacity that that is your circumstances now, but the idea is that you still have the power to change and shift the outcome. Fortunately for us there is so much traffic on American Roads of people going to work in America we can rest assure, at least for now, that that won’t be the wide-scale outcome from sometime. I beg of you, this is my public outcry for help, let’s not wait till the American Flag has “Abandoned in Place” stamped across its beautiful stripes. The time to help American Companies is now and it will take way more than my family destiny to do so. If an 8th grader can do it, we can too.

Now I have a vision and I want you to know I am all in. I will be working on this until I take my last breath. Will you join me to Re-Motor America?

Motor Namaste