“I went to work for Dad and two months later he says: ‘I’m selling the business.’ He had gone to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands for a vacation and fell in love with the place — being from Detroit, that’s not hard to do.
        “He decided to buy property there and build a motel. He gave me a choice -- to stay and work in the machine shop or go with him to St. Thomas and help build the motel. I thought that was kind of cool so I went to St. Thomas.”
        But Thomas quickly learned that life in the Virgin Islands was not what he was looking for. He said, “I ran across all kinds of strange people down there and decided, this is not for me. It was about two days before Michigan State was going to close enrollment to graduate school that year so I decided to head back and start graduate school.”
        Thomas got on a plane and headed north back toward Michigan, but when he landed in Miami for a plane change, airport officials announced the airport was closing - hurricane Betsy was headed straight toward Miami. That was September 1965. Thomas said, “So I checked into a downtown Miami hotel to wait out the storm. The hurricane came right through Miami. I remember the whole building was moving. When I went downstairs to the lobby I found the whole place covered in eight inches of water. The bar was open and everyone's just taking whatever they wanted to drink. By the time I was able to get out of Miami I had missed the deadline for graduate school registration.
        “So I got on a Greyhound bus the next day and went to Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. I don’t know to this day what made me get on that bus.”
        When he got to the bus terminal at Cape Canaveral, he checked his suitcase into a storage locker and walked across the street to a bar — the Vanguard Lounge. He said, “Nobody was there except one girl and the lady bartender. I sat down to have a beer and think. I remember wondering — what am I doing here?
        “The bartender and I started talking and it happened that her friend had an employment agency. So she drove me there and I filled out an application. And just like that I got a job writing test documents at Brown Engineering.
        “Then she took me out to find an apartment. I had only been there a few hours and had a job offer and an apartment. It was a lucky break.”
         Thomas’ work was connected to the space program during the time the National Aeronautic Space Administration (NASA) was preparing for the lunar landing mission. He worked for Brown Engineering about two years writing test documents for the liquid oxygen system.
         Thomas recalled, “I knew the entire system. Since I was the only single guy there, the company would send me to all these manufacturer’s who were testing launch pad components, for instance a 10,000-gallon-per-minute liquid oxygen pump. I’m representing NASA, signing-off on test documents. What did I know about this, me some kid from Detroit? I had never seen a 10,000-gallon-per-minute oxygen pump.”
        When Boeing Aircraft was awarded the contract for operating the ground systems for the lunar program and learned about Thomas’ experience they immediately hired him. “I was on the launch team for the Saturn V moon program. It was really a neat job.”

Prior to shipping, every product produced by MaxxAir is fully tested to assure the unit is operational when it reaches the end user.

         In the meantime Thomas’ mother and father had built the motel in St. Thomas. It was a time of social unrest and turmoil in the Virgin Islands and it became too dangerous to stay so they returned to the mainland. According to Allen, a “slick” local lawyer promised to protect their investment, but ended up confiscating all the Thomas’ property. “Dad got hood-winked and lost everything,” Thomas said. “So he worked all his life and then lost it over some “lawyer’s” greed. He went back to Detroit and into the tool and die business.”Continued