LYNN — General Electric (GE) Aviation’s Tony Rosa, 92, will celebrate a whopping 70 years with the company June 11, earning the title of the longest continuously-serving GE employee worldwide.
Rosa said the “amazing” people at GE have kept him employed for decades, and he described his coworkers over the years as brilliant, friendly and helpful people.
Rosa, a staff engineer and technologist at the River Works GE plant in Lynn, graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1951 and began his career at GE the following day. He has lived in Lynn ever since and described his last 70 years with the company as rewarding — and interesting.
“When I first started, we relied on slide rules, log sheets and calculators … we didn’t have computers,” Rosa said. “Now you can initiate and monitor an engine test while you’re actually sitting there.”
He said the biggest change he’s witnessed while working at GE was the transition from doing everything by hand to adapting to the myriad technological advances computers brought.
“The engine development instrumentation techniques have changed dramatically over the years. There are so many things that exist to improve the quality and quantity of work,” he said. “You have all these electronic tools that generate a ton of information instantaneously so you can be more precise and timelier,” Rosa said.
The work at GE is always changing, and Rosa said a variety of assignments, coupled with the ability to learn from people in different fields with different skills, kept things exciting.
“Whenever you think your job is becoming stale, things would change, and new experiences would evolve — that’s the beauty of working in GE. And I always enjoyed interacting with all the people around me,” he said.
Working from home for the past year had been a difficult adjustment, Rosa said, but the intensity and demand of his work kept him busy.
“I never have a chance to get bored here,” he said.
At 92, Rosa is still employed full-time by GE and said that “retirement is not in his vocabulary.”
He stays active at his CrossFit center, where he meets with his trainer every Saturday to work out for an hour, and books time with the massage therapist there every Tuesday and occasionally on Thursday.
“I am so relaxed after that, so I might as well keep doing it while I’m able to,” Rosa said.
In addition to maintaining his health, Rosa enjoys family time with his two sons, one of whom is a lawyer and the other a software development engineer.
Rosa said the people at GE also feel like his family and he is thankful for the support and knowledge the company has provided him over the past 70 years.
“I don’t feel like an icon, but I guess a lot of people know me, or of me,” he said. “But I don’t want people to consider me an old relic. Just treat me like everybody else in our engineering community.”
Rosa said he is looking forward to continuing his work at GE and with the “great people that the company fosters.”
