Jak Kozma

 Joseph A. (Jak) Kozma, III

jakthehack@aol.com
(Note: the “hack” part refers to my golf game)

43993 Cranberry Dr. / Canton Michigan 48187

Spouse: Colleen

Children: Joal (Joseph A., IV) / Michael

Education: University of Michigan BSE-ME, 1974 /
School of Life, in process, graduation date unknown.

BIO: With the song “We gotta get out of this place” ringing in my ears, I moved on from Seaholm to Michigan. My goal was to study Engineering and then join the family industrial furnace company.

At Michigan, I met my wife Colleen when we were freshman and both living at Couzens Hall. We married in Ann Arbor following our junior year - our Seaholm classmate Michael Kelley was my best man. I became an avid (some say rabid) UofM football fan in 1970 and carry on today as a season ticket holder. I also became a dedicated frisbee player. Just me and the guys tossing it around on the street.

I graduated from Michigan in 1974 as a mechanical engineer and joined the family furnace company. The family company failed soon after moving to Monticello, Iowa in 1978. After that, Colleen and I moved around the Midwest as I pursued a career designing and building thermal process systems (a fancy way to say furnace). Our oldest son Joal (Joseph A., IV) was born in Louisville in 1980. Our second son Michael was born in Toledo in 1982.

The early ‘80s were a very turbulent time. At one point, I was playing Mr. Mom as an unemployed engineer and father in Toledo while a movie of that name was running in the theaters. It didn’t seem too funny then but it makes me chuckle when I reflect back on that time. I also took advantage of the slow time to become a licensed Professional Engineer and learned basic programming on my Commodor 64. I remember programming a matrix inversion routine so I could use it to solve multiple simultaneous equations as occur in finite element thermal analysis. My bubble burst when I realized there was no memory left to create a user interface!

Following my Mr. Mom gig in Toledo, we did a 5-year stint in Chicago. I designed heat treat furnaces as a Project Engineer at Lindberg while Colleen practiced nursing at Loyola and our boys learning to ride bikes. One of my photos shows a furnace system I designed and installed at Grumman in 1986 - it was used to solution heat treat long aluminum aircraft components for F-14 (Top Gun) fighter jets. The project was so successful that we sold several more systems that I installed at Air Force Air Logistic Centers around the country.

We returned home to Michigan in late 1987. Colleen and I have lived in Canton, MI ever since. I continued on for 31 years as a furnace engineer working for first Holcroft in Livonia that later became AFC-Holcroft in Wixom, MI. Along the way I held many positions as my company evolved - senior project engineer, engineering manager, senior project manager and manager of custom products. I travelled widely in the US and globally in the course of my career. One of my favorite photos is of me playing frisbee in front of St. Basils Basilica on Red Square in Moscow using my All American frisbee. My “handler” wasn’t too pleased and was afraid we’d all wind up in Siberia.  

During the last 10 years of my career I served on the Technical Committee for the NFPA 86 Standard for Ovens & Furnaces. Like a myriad of other NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) standards, NFPA 86 is an industry consortium that establishes standards for the safe operation of most industrial ovens and furnaces in North America. During my tenure on the Technical Committee, NFPA 86 was completely reorganized and greatly updated to account for recent technological advancements. I was happy to participate and viewed it as a way to give back.

Through it all, I am fortunate to have Colleen as my partner. Colleen has always been a very optimistic, strong and loving woman. She repeatedly restarted her nursing career at every stop of our travels. Along the way, she has spent time as a nursing instructor, front-line floor nurse, nursing unit manager for orthopedics, and then finally moving on to what she calls “sweater nursing” as a clinical documentation specialist.

Colleen and I retired in the spring of 2018 when we turned 66.

Both of our sons are married and college graduates - Joal from EMU and Michael from MSU. It pained Colleen and I that Michael went there but all we could do was to apply copious amounts of Meechigan graffiti to the checks we sent MSU. Our sons and daughter-in-laws have blessed Colleen and I with four beautiful grandchildren - Jak (Joseph V) and Emma in Mason, Ohio and granddaughters Noori and Daon in Osan, S. Korea. Our fourth and youngest grandchild Emma succumbed to leukemia on New Year’s Day this year. I was conflicted about sharing this bit of info but it is a part of my family’s lives and certainly others of us have dealt with the loss of dear ones.  

We spend a lot of our retired life like many others - visiting and FaceTiming with our son’s families - especially our grandkids. The rest of the time we try to golf, visit with friends and closely follow UM football. We have had season tickets at the Big House with a group of college friends ever since graduating in 1974. I remain a dedicated and proficient golf hack.  
I’m also still running around playing frisbee - I carry one in my car at all times (just in cases).

I have enjoyed reading the bio’s that others have already posted on the class website. I’m sure you’ve all had the same difficulty I’ve had - trying to compress 50 years of our lives into a few paragraphs of auto-biographical words. I hope we have the chance to meet this next summer and tell our untold backstories.

My photos:
My family vacationing together along (actually in) Lake Michigan in 2018 / Me playing frisbee on Red Square, 2011 / One of my furnace projects (drop-bottom aluminum solution heat treating system), 1986 / Me and my boys on one of our annual family vacations “up north” in Michigan, 1997 / Colleen and I with our grandchildren in summer 2018.

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