PROFILE
Continued from page 6
his favorite term for the row of offices across the front of the administration building where most of Airbus Helicopters’ other senior executives work. “Part of my job is listen to all that from both sides and translate it, filter out the unnecessary stuff, and pass on what’s important in terms the other side can understand,” he says. It’s a job for which Pence seems to have been born. Grand Prairie today is a sprawling, mostly industrial and
lower-middle class suburb of 175,000 people. Fifty-nine years ago, when then-two-year-old Pence moved there with his family from Colorado, it was much smaller and very different place. There was Naval Air Station Dallas and the Vought Aerospace plant on the east side of town. Workers (including his father) built Navy fighter jets and Navy airmen practiced flying, but not much else happened in Grand Prairie. “When I was growing up, this place was a cotton
field,” he recalls about the airport. “My family was all in agriculture.”
After high school, he spent seven years in the Marines and
learned to fix and maintain Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallions. In 1979, Pence came home and found a job turning wrenches at the Grand Prairie plant then run by the U.S. division of Aerospatiale. He studied agriculture at a local community college at night but never earned a degree.
01.02 2014
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COWBOY UP After 13 years, just as Aerospatiale was about to merge with Germany’s MBB to form Eurocopter, Pence decided to fol- low his heart. He quit to become a full-time cowboy. “I cowboyed for seven years,” he says. “I broke horses. I mended fences. I worked in a saddle shop. And I did a little bit of rodeoing.” Even though it made him an unusually old rookie, an almost 40-year-old Pence joined the Pro Rodeo circuit as a steer wrestler. Steer wrestling or “bulldogging” (as it is also known) requires a cowboy to jump off a perfectly good horse that is running at full speed. The cowboy’s goal is to land across the shoulders of a fleeing steer. If the cowboy lands successfully (which means not hitting the dirt face first or impaling himself on the steer’s pointy horns), the cowboy digs his heels into the dirt and “throws” the slowing beast to the ground by twisting its horns and neck. “I never won any money at it, but I had fun,” says Pence.
BACK TO BIRDS Despite his rodeo days, Pence never quite left the helicopter business. He returned to American Eurocopter three times as a contractor hired to write maintenance manuals. “They brought in some technical writers for those
projects, but they couldn’t translate ‘Fren-glish,” he says, referring to the sometimes-odd English renderings of
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