Radioman Rusty Fender finds new career in gas industry

Times Leader: September 14. 2014

 By Jon O’Connell joconnell@civitasmedia.com

Dale Mikolaczyk doesn’t credit his brains, work ethic or even a few good-luck streaks for his successful switch between two vastly different industries.

“My motto in life was ‘I was in the right place at the right time,” he said.

Of radio fame for the 26 years he went by the pseudonyms “Rusty Fender” and “Shadoe Steele” for Pittston-based KRZ radio station and others, last year Mikolaczyk made the kind of career move fitting for a kid in his 20s. But at 58, Mikolaczyk of Duryea finds he is fitting in with his fellow engineers and laborers at Linde Corp. Mikolaczyk is now a field engineer for Linde, a pipeline-building firm headquartered in Pittston Township. But before you drop your day job for a promising career in pipeline engineering like his, there’s a little more to his story including an extensive background that has nothing to do with media.

Engineering background

Mikolaczyk went to The University of Scranton and Duke University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace systems engineering and a master’s degree in electrical engineering.
He started his career as a production engineer at WBRE-TV in Wilkes-Barre overseeing the technical side of the daily news, but soon he was called up to the local station’s national affiliate, NBC in New York City.
At 23 years old, Mikolaczyk was controlling NBC’s 36 satellites that orbited thousands of miles above the surface of the earth. Using remote controls, Mikolaczyk, along with his team, operated thrusters attached to the satellites to keep them inside what he called a 40-cubic-mile box or 2 longitudinal degrees. If a satellite drifted outside its box, it could result in signal loss for customers or worse.

“They’ve had satellites what you call walk into graveyard orbit,” Mikolaczyk said. “That’s a $2 billion loss.” he said, explaining further that trillions of dollars were at stake because each satellite handled up to 80 channels, many of which represented multi-billion dollar contracts. Aerospace technology has changed dramatically since then, and there’s no longer scores of engineers guiding satellites from earth.“Now it’s handled by a couple of $400 Dell computers,” Mikolaczyk said shrugging.

Big city fatigue

Even while he worked in New York City, he found he was spending a lot of cash commuting from his home in the Philadelphia suburbs, and the high cost of living in the name of an exhilarating career was growing.

“You make huge money in the big city, but you pay it all out,” he said. “I paid more in taxes every year than my salary ever was at the radio station.”

He had been traveling to the Wyoming Valley every weekend to host the long-running highly-rated “Saturday Night Live at the Oldies with Shadoe Steele” when WKRZ proposed to break new ground in 1990 with the region’s first-ever live-from-the-sky traffic reporting. Mikolaczyk was all in. The station sought sponsors to lease the aircraft. In hindsight, the program was doomed from the start, he said.

“It was even a money-loser in those days,” Mikolaczyk said. “I think we used to make $300 in the morning and spend $400 to fly.”

The program took a nosedive not long after it started, but Mikolaczyk stayed with the station giving daily traffic updates as Rusty Fender for the next decade and playing host for the Saturday night oldies show.
It was February last year when KRZ’s owner, Entercom Communications, decided to drop Rusty Fender and the oldies show. But it was his radio job that helped lay the groundwork for his current job. What some might perceive as an abysmal circumstance – a work schedule that allowed for about three hours of sleep each night — turned out to be the thing that kept him sharp and prepared him for a massive career switch.

“It’s funny how things work out in life, because I never wanted to teach,” Mikolaczyk said. “But because of that horrible, awful, terrible shift, the split shift I had at the radio station … in between that window, I had about six hours that I would teach either two, three or four courses at Wilkes-University.”

The engineering and science classes he taught at Wilkes helped him stay fresh with current technology and make connections among folks who work every day in the industry, he said.

New workplace

At the Friedland Farms well pad in Lenox Township, Susquehanna County, one of Mikolaczyk’s latest projects, he watched intently as an excavator operator started on a trench making way for a new pipeline connection line that will carry gas away from the well to a compressor station. His experience with the TV networks gave him the confidence that he could successfully map out hundreds of miles of gas pipes needed to move natural gas.

“Nothing more is complicated than me flying satellites in ionospheric orbit for 20 years over the equator, you know, 22,397.5 miles up,” Mikolaczyk said. “But this is a complicated business; it really is.”

Now the former radio man spends his days working side by side with engineers and site foremen to design pipelines where each mile demands careful consideration figuring effects on the environment, cost to the company and maintaining the gas flow.

“There’s no book to go to for this job,” he said. “We’re writing it page by page as we go.”