Posted on May 15, 2024
In 1974, Marv Hrdlicka was a student at St. Paul Humboldt High School, and a counselor told him about an on-the-job-training opportunity in the print shop at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Paul District.
The print shop doesn’t exist any more, the district has moved to four separate buildings in that time, and the typewriters have been replaced by computers. But Hrdlicka’s presence is still being felt, and he marked his 50th work anniversary at the St. Paul District in February.
Hrdlicka works as an engineering technician in the hydraulics and hydrology branch, where he takes field measurements, compiles data and supports various other functions within the branch.
But back in the 1970s, he was working on big, bulky offset printing machines. Engineers had some early Unix computers, but he remembers large typing pools with manual typewriters, and drafting departments before the advent of computer-aided design.
