147 Sugar factories were generally located near the cane or beet fields, far from big cities. Local accommodations were nothing like New York’s four-star hotels. Bill Duersch recalled a hotel in Kenya with a hole in the roof and mosquito netting that was full of gaps, adding that it appeared to have never been cleaned. On a trip to Swaziland, Ed Dunsmuir watched a pack of monkeys try to make off with Carter LaBarge’s (a Western States Sales Manager) luggage. Roger Fair recalled a trip to Colombia in which a private guard with an M-16 was posted outside his hotel room door to discourage kidnappers. Today, we take global travel for granted. Wherever we need to go, we can count on fleets of jetliners to deliver us quickly and comfortably. However, for the employees who represented Western States overseas in the early days, those journeys were often months-long adventures to rarely visited places and climates that weren’t always hospitable. At first, travel to South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia entailed lengthy ocean journeys. On one South American trip, Eugene Roberts reportedly opted for a faster, newfangled approach, becoming one of the first people to fly over the Andes Mountains. After World War II, air travel became the norm, but in the pre-jet era, that meant long trips on piston-powered, DC-3s and lumbering (albeit luxurious) Stratocruisers. It would take days to get to the Far East, with multiple stops in places like Guam. right: Western States held a Mechanical Training School at Peikang Refinery, Taiwan, November, 1988. Back Row: Ron Burns (2nd from right, Electrical Dept Manager); Front Row: Bill Duersch (3rd from right, Sales) and Leonard Drew (4th from right, Service)