Remembering Karl Hummel ’67

Welcome to the PAW Memorials podcast, where we celebrate the lives of alumni. On this episode, PAW Memorials editor Nicholas DeVito sat down with Jim Kempf ’67 to discuss Karl Hummel ’67, who died July 23, 2023.

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Hello. I’m Nicholas DeVito, class notes and Memorials editor of Princeton Alumni Weekly. On this month’s Memorials PAWcast, we remember Karl Hummel from the class of 1967. Karl was hired by the Central Vermont Public Service Corp to install and implement his quality management techniques. Later in life, his final years found him seeking new challenges in education reform. Karl died July 23, 2023. I spoke with the memorialist from the Class of 1967, Jim Kempf.

Nicholas DeVito: Hello. Today we’re talking about Karl Hummel from the Class of 1967. We’re talking with the class memorialist, Jim Kempf. So Jim and Karl first met when they were both in Dial Lodge. So Jim, do you remember the first time you met Karl or where about your first meeting and how you knew each other as undergrads?

Jim Kempf: We met spring semester of sophomore year, because in those days, we were one class before the co-education. So Bicker was in January after exams, and we all came into Dial Lodge that winter in sophomore year. It had been a rather monastic life, all male classes up until then. They didn’t have much social life. Anyway, Karl roomed with five other classmates in ’67, four of whom all came into Dial Lodge, and they became good friends and stayed friends and stayed with Dial until... I think Karl was vice president of the club senior year, but he was also very active as social chairman, organizing a lot of the social activities, the notorious weekend parties at Prospect Street. But one thing I remember about him and all three of the roommates who came with him was they were all very active, very busy, very enthusiastic.

Dial was mostly a club full of high school graduates and probably 30-40% Jewish students, many of whom were going to be doctors and lawyers, but a lot of the public high school kids were science and engineering majors. It was interesting, one of my classmates reminded us that the Class of 1967 got publicity in The New York Times, different journals, Saturday Review, long articles. First time in history that public high school graduates outnumbered prep school, private school graduates. It was a turning point. A year or so after we graduated of course, another big turning point, they brought women in. So, we didn’t see that, but those two things in the mid to late ’60s were a real watershed for the University, I think.

And Karl was from southern Jersey, a Jersey boy, and the thing I remember about him, every time I ever talked with him, he’s always so enthusiastic, so full of energy. Some of us, like me, were probably pretty quiet and dour, but not Karl. He was always upbeat, always energetic, and I think that’s probably why he led the club in social activities and as vice president. So that’s what I remember about him and Dial Lodge. He was on a cross-country team, but after two years, he quit and led a lot of the intramural sports inter-club athletic programs, and he participated in a number of those.

ND: All right, great. And so after graduation, Karl was a chemistry major and then he went to work for DuPont Chemical in New Jersey. And then you guys reconnected during Reunions, correct? About how many years after?

JK: Well, I saw him at the ... I didn’t go to that many, but at the big ones, the 20th and the 25th, I remember briefly dealing with him and the clubmates, of course, all of us when we’d got together. But the big conversation I had with him was at our 50th reunion. Somehow, we got pulled aside. He and I got pulled aside and sat on a couple of chairs and under the trees, and we had a long two-hour talk. I might say, I didn’t do much talking because he was so enthusiastic. He was just really explaining to me what he’d been doing for the last decade working with this reading corporation. It was an organization, a private nonprofit I believe that was attempting to help underprivileged children all across the nation. They had offices around the country and he was a director of ... let me see if I get my note right on that. I had it down here, national sales director.

He was the national sales director for this world reading corporation, and he was just so enthusiastic, and along the way, critical of American education for failing so many of these kids. I think if you remember, there was another writer, a Boston writer, Jonathan Kozol, who Death at an Early Age became a best-selling book back, I think it was in the ’80s, about how kids who were from poor backgrounds were just getting left behind in schools because they didn’t have good teachers, didn’t have good facilities, didn’t have good budgets.

 And once you get behind that track, I think it’s probably like they’re finding in this pandemic era. You miss a year, two years of school, and it’s very difficult to catch up. And what Karl was noticing when he went to work for this company and what Kozol wrote about was, if you can’t get these kids preschool, if you can’t get them into a habit of reading and be surrounded with verbal culture, not only books but conversation, a vocabulary building, and incentives for kids to have a desire to achieve and not feel defeated. He was just very passionate about that, and I was so impressed.

 I just mostly listened to all the things they did and what he was involved with, and I think all the other things that he did during his life led to that because he had all this varied background, science, management, private small entrepreneur. He ran his own small business for a few years, but he realized the necessity of this and he had taken a $20,000 pay cut and a promotion at his final job to join this company because he was, typically, so enthusiastic about it. He was always just so ... He was just a guy with a lot of energy. That was my impression of him every time I ever met him.

ND: Yeah, and it sounds like it was something he was so passionate about, he just wanted to make it happen. So right before that though, he was running his own business, and I know the two of you connected over quality management techniques and the ’80s management techniques of Japanese businesses that influenced American manufacturing. Can you talk about that a little bit?

JK: Yeah. Well, as I said, when I think about Karl, I look at his career, he represents the whole generation of the ’60s. When he graduated from Princeton, he had a chemistry degree, as did his roommate Dave Bryan, also a Dial Lodge guy, and they started out working for chemical companies chemical, typical career path from the post-World War II era, where you go join a big corporation and stay for your life and keep slowly rising up and live a comfortable middle-class life, or management life, senior. He quickly, in four years, he wrote about it in his 50th reunion book, he realized, he said, “I don’t see myself being here for till I’m 64 and quietly retiring.” There was an awful lot of energy in the early ’70s, not only the Earth Day in 1970 that got everybody conscious of that, but the post-Civil Rights movement, which we were all involved in in the ’60s. I couldn’t avoid that, and Vietnam of course. And Karl said, “I want to go out and work on my own, start my own company.”

So, he got interested in motorcross, which I know nothing about, but he built or started a startup company in Hightstown,N.J., I believe it was, which evolved into an auto repair shop over a nine-year period that he was there. And that action, again, seemed to me represented, when I go through a lot of our classmates, a number of people were quickly disabused of corporate life, the white collar job of the 1950s and post-World War II era and the early ’60s, mid-’60s, and this impulse in the ’70s for people to go out on their own and start their own businesses. We had a lot of classmates who did that or became individual consultants, and so I thought that was representative.

Of course, what happened was he wrote about ... Nine years later, we had a great recession that brought the Reagan administration in, and his business went. He had to give it up. He said he was living on a margin with his wife and a partner, and a friend of his, a classmate in Dial Lodge a year ahead contacted him and said would he come up to Vermont where two of his roommates, Larry Karlson and Dave Bryan, already were. They were already out in a Thoreauvian world of building their own homes and their environmental consciousness and going back to nature, and that was another big part of our class.

We had a guy in the department who was an architect who went on to be chairman of a couple of big universities, architecture ones, but he built the first solar passive home in Princeton, N.J., it’s still there, and he wrote books about that and got a whole part of that movement to not use so much energy in buildings and homes. And Karl was part of that, a representative of that movement, of that impulse of at least part of the class that got involved. I had another good friend from Dial, Tommy Houston, who was a corporate lawyer and a government lawyer for Jerry Brown, and I think he was high up, executive secretary or something in the state of California. And late in life, he switched, and he is very much involved in carbon offset work with private corporations, governments, farmers in Latin America to not burn up the Brazilian forests and to switch to as much clean energy as possible.

So that impulse in our class was broad and fairly widespread. Some dedicated their lives or late careers to it, but Karl was right there representing that too. So, when he moved up to Vermont, he and Laird, they built homes and created an environmental friendly residence and community as best they could, and they tried to drop out of the energy economy as much as they could, so that was there, too.

But this job that he got was with Digital Equipment Corporation, and they were struggling, as many were. That was a new technology. It was changing America, but if you remember, there was a book called The Soul of a New Machine by a journalist named Tracy Kidder who was all about digital equipment out of Boston, and there was a network where you had terminals at different places, but everything fed into the VAX Central Computer, and so you worked that way. Well, that lasted for about 10-12 years, but there was another wave of technology change coming in the computer industry called the microprocessor, which hit in the ’80s. And so Karl spent 10 years at Digital, but he got to be an expert, got, again typically, enthusiastic about quality management, and he wrote about that and he talked about it with me because I think he carried that over to his reading business too.

He became a master at implementing these new quality management techniques coming out of Japan, and it caught on in America. And in the 1980s, the 10 years or 12 years he was with Digital, he became their corporate head, the leader of all their quality management implementation, all the processes and all the techniques and mathematical statistical techniques, and I think he became, from what I can gather, a real expert on it.

Well, when the microprocessor came in, a guy named Bill Gates came in, and Apple, and others started building their own terminal on your desk, and so that did it for Digital and they closed that plant down in Vermont, so now Karl had to move to another career. But he took with him, he had a reputation obviously, and he got a job quickly with the power company, Central Vermont Utility Company, which he spent the next, as I can gather, 14 or 15 years with. And he implemented again all of these things that he had done at digital to make them as good as they could, given the fact that they had old technology that was obsolete.

There was a book in the 1980s, two of them actually, one called De-Industrialization of the U.S., which was that other market force of outsourcing and globalization, but then a couple of Harvard professors called Re-industrializing the United States, Re-Industrializing America, which was a case study of all of the auto industry over the 40, 50, 60 years. How they had instead of going obsolete like the horse and buggy did, or how airplanes became jet engines and got rid of all of the prop planes, they had to adapt and change. And Digital didn’t do that, and so therefore got overtaken by that wave of new technology.

But Karl adapted, and with that computer on a desk and the growing capacity of the microchip, he and a number of classmates, I can’t tell you how many I wrote memorials about, who quit their jobs or quit being math majors or professors and went out and became entrepreneurs, working out of their home, consulting with small businesses, other ones, showing them how to run programs, how to write programs for their businesses, and how they use the technologies that were there. And they spent their lives doing that and never had to go to work for the corporation again, which was a combination of their earlier dislike of the big corporate culture and the entrepreneurial impulse that Karl had when he was doing the bike shop.

So he was, again, representative of this kind of shift, but what I was so impressed with about his ...  in our 50th-reunion book, he wrote about... Well, he mentions at least a number of these quality things. By the way, there’s a good book I have here published in 1994 with a good Princeton Alumni Weekly review in 1994 of a Princeton guy of 1950 who was a editorial board of Fortune Magazine senior editor called Jeremy Maine, called Quality Wars. If anybody wants to read a good book about the whole history of how the corporations adapted that Juran and Deming and all of the gurus of quality management, and it was not easy. Maine has a really good description of how many corporations succeeded and many didn’t because they didn’t fully understand it or weren’t able to understand it as he describes it, as Deming himself did.

They were really going against the hundred years of American business, which was mass manufacturing, labor strife, anti-union, profit at all costs, cheapening, and it totally had to turn around, and you recognize the costs involved in repetitive training. For example, McDonald’s, if you have a 30% turnover and it costs you a thousand dollars to train a kid for two months before he can work effectively in your corporation, and that 40%, that means you’re losing 40% of your expenses right away. I was just thinking about this because Maine talks about it in his book, opens it with a train wreck in California, Pacific Southern. We recently had this train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, where Norfolk Southern has ended up now paying $450 million in various legal claims to settle all the damage. Think if they had spent $2 million and had had more train engineers, which they had cut to save money, and had not had such long trains and had maintained their track better, they would’ve saved hundreds of millions. Well, that’s the essence of quality management, and Karl understood that.

And when he mentions the Toyota manufacturing that he studied and learned, and then the corporation at Digital First and then later at Vermont Utilities, he implemented all that. Unlike me, who reads about it but never had the ability to implement it, he was a practitioner and a really good one obviously, because he wrote to our class that the highlight of his career, the thing he was most proud of was the fact that Forbes Magazine voted his utility the fourth most respected corporation, small business in America. And this debate has gone on and over. Many economists that I have read said that part of the great revival of the economy in the ’90s was both at the end of the Cold War, but also it took 10 years to implement this quality manufacturing. And so all of a sudden, Ford and General Motors are building better cars and now able to compete, while they were losing billions in the ’80s coming up to that.

I can remember my wife who was involved in this as an interpreter for Japanese corporations, and Jeremy Maine talks about it in his Quality Board book. Ford Motors was on the rocks. There was an NBC special called “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” and Tom Brokaw narrated it, and they went around the country and showed how all of a sudden, the markets had changed. People were not buying cars because they were cheap. They were buying them because they were high quality, and in the long run, cheaper because you didn’t have to keep getting repairs or going back every three years and buying a new car because it was falling apart.

My wife was brought in to a manufacturing managers conference in Detroit in 1981. Jeremy Maine talks about it, and the then-president of Ford got up in front of all of these manufacturing plant managers and said, “Now, we’re going to have a presentation from this expert from Japan who learned it from Americans, because the Japanese always tell you, well, Deming and Juran quality management were Americans who told us, copy everything that America does except their management, because their management was so bad.” They always were saying cheapest, how we can cut labor costs and everything. And quality management, the Toyota manufacturing, kaizen, constant improvement. You have to go to your employees and listen to them, work with them. The whole culture, it’s like a university. You’ve got an department here. If they work against each other instead of helping each other, you’re going to destroy the university.

But a corporation, they started to slowly get understanding in American business, especially the large corporations, that it was a system, and of course statistics, the statistical methods of quality management were taking data from everywhere. And I remember Mitt Romney one time talking about how he was managing and saying, “We manage by data. As we learned to data, we have to collect all kinds of data. Where are your defects? What can you do to cut your waste?” And one of the things that the Ford and others did, they had all this inventory piling up, steel sheets and things sitting out on the ground so when they needed them, they could bring them in for the production process. They’re all rusted. They were all getting rusted.

ND: Right.

JK: And so they said, “Wait a minute. What if we just get the supplier to bring a week’s supply in ahead of time and we’re constantly doing that, and it’s fresh and we’re not wasting?” They were finding 20-30% of their inventory was being thrown out because it was wasted, just like the employees if you’re turning your employees over. And so all of a sudden, there was this shift in American manufacturing in the ’80s that led to the boom of the ’90s, and I think Maine is right in saying that a number of companies really adopted it. Others failed utterly because they couldn’t fully comprehend or get out of their old habits, and those old habits have come back, and they were coming back even in the ’80s because of those of us who went through it and worked and saw corporations. You had the finance boys on Wall Street who were doing leveraged buyouts and doing all kinds of outsourcing, trying to get cut costs again and trying to manufacture with... And then take over a company, bleed it dry, load it up with debt, and then crash it.

That led to the early 2000s, Enron and all of the great scandals. What was it? The WorldCom, and again, they were just sucking the corporations for themselves. Colbert, Kravitz, Roberts, Barbarian. There was a book called Barbarians at the Gates, these management people, and those two forces were always at play, but Karl was involved in the environmentally friendly but also the managerial revolution that said, “A corporation is a system that has a public service and a public good.” And he felt most proud, I think, at the end of his life when he talked to me about that, was that he led a utility to get that kind of ... customer satisfaction was the heart of quality control, and Deming always wrote about it and said, “If you can get one customer and spend $2,000 to market to him and get him to your company and he’s loyal to the company because you provide him good service, it doesn’t cost you $2,000 to get the next guy because this guy keeps coming back and renewing the contract.”

And so that whole revolution of business that went on, along with the environmental movement and environmental quality, and of course the women’s movement to get women into the more managerial jobs I think was part of our generation, class of ’60s, ’67, mid-’60s, late ’60s, and Karl was a representative. He went through all of that. Then he got to the point where he was, again, tired of it I think. When he’s in his 60s, when everybody’s ready to retire, and he said 50 years before that, “I don’t want to spend 50 years with DuPont and retire in my early 60s doing the same thing.” He looked and said, “I got to turn another leaf,” and that’s when he joined something called The World Reading Corporation, which was to help underprivileged kids, poor kids in poor areas of the country, get a head start up ahead of school.

Because the research showed that when these kids went to school, they were so far behind that they started struggling in first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade, and never could catch up, and there was nobody there to catch up with what they had lost in age 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever. Most of these child medical people that I’ve read, said that if you lose those first couple of years of brain development and verbal skill, being inundated with ... so they tell you, which I always did with my grandkids and my own kids and others did those, those of us who are lucky enough to have this information ahead of time, you read bedtime stories. Every night your kid goes to bed and you read them, and surround them with books.

I remember my little girl, I had a little bookshelf in her room, and every morning, I had to go in and clean up the books because she would pull them all down. But then when I went to bed at night, she always insisted I read her a story, and that verbal, that neural, whatever it is that is beyond me, how it develops the human brain with the verbal skills, Karl dedicated the last 10 years of his life to that and building this company. The company had offices all around the country, and he took a big pay cut and a promotion, denied a promotion to do that. So that’s another part of the journey, the arc of the Class of ’67 with a number of kids who did that.

I can’t tell you how many of them in our class in their late years have volunteered for environmental groups or work in environmental areas or education or foundations or philanthropy. It was just part of that era, part of that generation. And it’s surprising because we all came out of the 1940s, ’50s post-war generation where you’re middle class, you’re comfortable, but you became aware in the 1960s of the other America, Michael Harrington’s great book about the part of America, the inner cities that had been left behind. And so that impulse was there with I think our class and never left it. That’s in us.

ND: No, that’s great.

JK: I’m talking too much.

ND: I think you really summed up Karl’s life and your class, all your classmates. It was the beginning of wanting to not just do well for yourself, but go out and do good for others. And it shows, we’re much more conscious of everything these days, and it’s a good thing. We need to be aware, and people like Karl and your classmates and you, you started that, so that’s great.

JK: But I think what’s unique about him is what I said, is he represented all of these phases, all of these different trends, these great, broad, national economic and management and philosophy trends. He touched on every one of them. I don’t know many other classmates who did all that he did.

ND: Yeah. No, that’s great. Jim, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about Karl and to do this podcast, so thank you.

JK: Thank you.

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