The choice of Rapid City, South Dakota as the location for the Social Security application is also unexplained. Whether Nichols was living there at the time, passing through, or specifically chose that city for the application because of administrative characteristics or social distance from his past locations, is not known.
What is known is that after September 1978, Robert Ivan Nichols no longer appears to have existed in any administrative or personal sense. The man who drove to northeast Ohio and presented himself at Edko Company as Joseph Newton Chandler III, seeking engineering work, was carrying a Social Security card and a birth certificate and whatever personal history he had constructed to support them. He was starting over, at age fifty-one, in a new region, with a new name, presenting a new biography to any employer or neighbor or official who required one.
He would sustain this identity for the remaining twenty-four years of his life.
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## The Lubrizol Years: Professional Competence and Social Distance
The Lubrizol Corporation that “Joseph Chandler” joined in the late 1970s was, and remains, a significant specialty chemical company with operations centered in northeast Ohio. Headquartered in Wickliffe — a suburb northeast of Cleveland — Lubrizol produced chemical additives for fuels and lubricants, and its technical workforce included engineers, chemists, and designers with backgrounds across a range of technical disciplines.
Chandler’s role there was as an electrical designer and draftsman — work that drew directly on the technical skills Robert Nichols had developed in his previous life. Draftsmen and electrical designers in that era produced the technical drawings and plans that engineers specified: precise, detailed renderings of equipment and systems that manufacturers, contractors, and other technical personnel would use to build, install, or modify machinery and electrical systems. It was skilled work requiring precision and technical knowledge, but it was also work that could be performed by an experienced professional without extensive credentials — skills and competence were demonstrable in the work itself.