Bernard "Tink" Pelkey 

In memory of Tink, this is his Hallam Story...

"My story is how I came to Hallam-ICS and what it was like in the earlier years. It was 1991 and the company I was working for at the time was in the process of going out of business. I had a young family and I was quite concerned about my future and how I was going to support my family.

John Butterfield and I had worked together at Omya in the late 70’s/early 80’s. I ran into John on the street one day and told him what was going on in my life at the time. John said that Hallam Associates (which was how the company was known at the time) was looking to diversify and he would get a meeting set up with Dave Hallam to discuss bringing a controls construction group into the company.

A meeting was held with John, Dave Hallam, Bill Fyfe (who were the three owners at the time) and myself, to discuss the future. It was a positive meeting and within a few weeks I joined the company and we formed Hallam Technical Services. I brought along an IBM contact that I had, and two of the instrument technicians that were with me in the former company.

It was a challenge for me in the beginning, having a construction group intertwined with a consulting engineering group. The first time that I had to buy materials, I went to the accounting department and asked for some purchase orders. They looked at me like I had two heads! Prior to me starting, Hallam had just written checks for any purchases that were made and used the check ledger to track things. I worked with the accounting group to set up a purchasing system to track materials and costs on a per project basis.

Over the next 3-4 few years Hallam Technical Services really started to grow; primarily doing business with IBM in Essex Junction, VT. In the mid 1990’s we started to look at other industries and geographic locations to expand the controls construction and systems integration services. Dave, John, Keith and I sat down and decided that Hallam Technical Services should take on a different name to better separate consulting engineering with controls construction and systems integration. A decision was made to call the group Integrated Control Systems (or ICS) which is still part of the company name today.

It has been 25 years since the beginning of “ICS”. There have been a lot of good times and a lot of trying times along the way. We worked for many great clients and developed long standing relationships with them along the way. I’m getting to the tail end of my career with the company but, I am proud to have “ICS” be part of company name to this day."