Bill passed away April 11, 2015, five years and a half years ago at age 79. He was a friend. Bill was born in Chicago. He worked at Automatic Lift Truck Company and at an early age was promoted to Engineering Manager. It’s impossible to find any reference to Automatic Lift trucks today but back in the 1960’s and 1970’s Automatic was a well known and highly respected manufacturer of Electric Forklift Trucks including some very high capacity lift trucks for the steel industry. It’s days were numbered however when it was swallowed up by some jerky managers at YALE in Philadelphia who were hell-bent on getting as much money as possible from Automatic and putting it in their pockets. They closed the Automatic factory and put Automatic out of business. The salesman for the large automatic brand steel mill trucks was Charles Rooney. Bill O’Connell moved from Chicago to Philly in 1968, 52 years ago and eventually became the head of both the manufacturing-production engineering and the engineering research department called Advanced Engineering at YALE brand forklifts where his vision of the future and his winning personality would work to help maintain YALE as a worldwide leader in forklifts. Bill’s hair had turned white at an early age and perhaps that helped him as he managed all of the engineers, many of whom were older than him. He was affectionally called: “The Silver Fox” because he was a really smart man. A really great individual. He is missed.
In Holland he had a sign made for his lawn that said “Time On The Hill” in Gaelic. He became a legend.
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