Interview with Charles Gerhards

AP: Alright, good morning today is Thursday, August 7, 2008. My name is Allison Page, I'm with the UW-Madison Oral History Program and this morning I will be interviewing Mr. Charles Gerhards about his experiences at the U.S. Forest Products Lab. Mr. Gerhards, if you would like to just maybe start by telling us your name, giving us a brief background on maybe when and where you were born?

CG: Okay, Charles C. Gerhards, that's my official name and I was born in ah near a place called Loring, L-O-R-I-N-G, Kansas, but Loring does not exist anymore, it's just a crossing--road crossing a railroad track. I was born in what was called The Bottoms and my parents had a small house there that my dad had built and I was born in 1930 and um we lived there ah for ah probably three years or 00:01:00so of my life and then we moved up to his grandmother's farm which was up the bluff and lived there another year or so and then we lost whatever we had in the depression and moved to Kansas City. Lived there a year then moved to Topeka, Kansas where I went through ah grade school, no kindergarten, and then after grade school we went to Portland, Oregon because my dad and older brother, oldest brother, got a job in the ship building war effort and then I spent my high school years there and then I was doin' odd jobs and sometimes I didn't have a job for four years. Then I went to the University of Portland where I got a degree in general engineering. And then I started work for General Electric 00:02:00and worked for them for five years and um the job I was working on was a government contract and it was cancelled and so the story really begins there with FPL.

AP: Okay. When did you get your degree from the University of Portland?

CG: 1956.

AP: So then you moved immediately from university to General Electric then?

CG: Yes.

AP: Okay. Was there anything in your early childhood that kind of sparked an interest in forest products or wood sciences? Did you ever have that kind of interest before?

CG: No I didn't, however, my dad was a carpenter and my oldest brother was a 00:03:00carpenter for a while and they contracted to build a house when I graduated from high school, I was seventeen, and I worked for them two months. I had become a carpenter apprentice and then I worked for the--what do you call it, somebody that builds houses--speculator building houses and I got laid off from there. I had applied for--or I had taken a test for a post office job and that same day I got a letter in the mail saying I would have a job there so I went there. So anyway I was familiar with wood and the getting on the Forest Products Lab was just a happenstance, I didn't even know it existed. Okay?

AP: Okay. Well kind of along those lines, how did you hear about the position that you eventually took at the Forest Products Lab?

CG: Well it was out in Idaho and there were a bunch of people that came from different companies, corporations to interview engineers and scientists for potential jobs and Bob Youngs, who was from the Forest Products Lab, came and I signed up to interview with him. My wife had spent some time in La Crosse, Wisconsin so she was a little familiar with Wisconsin--I had never been there. The alternatives weren't as enticing and so I agreed to come to work at the 00:05:00Forest Products Lab not knowing that Bob Youngs was going to be my project leader, I thought he was a recruiter.

AP: What were your initial impressions of Mr. Youngs?

CG: He was a quite man, straightforward, and he was good. I didn't realize he had a doctorate but anyway that all came out later when I arrived at the Forest Products Lab.

AP: What year was that that you moved out here?

CG: 1961, in June.

AP: In 1961 you moved out here, and what was the position that you accepted at Forest Products Lab?

CG: I was--you know I can't remember the exact title but I know in a year or two I was called a research general engineer. Really that was my title all the way through then.

AP: Do you have any memories or first impressions of the first couple days, months, years while you were at the Lab?

CG: Well my first impression was that I was surprised that I was going to be working for Bob Youngs. So we met in his office and he explained--well he actually gave me a tour of the area, the engineering lab, and I can't remember about the rest of the building. Then he had a project that he wanted me to work 00:07:00on and the first thing was the effect of a couple of different chemicals on the strength of wood as small beams. I also didn't know anything about the science of wood and there was a good--the Wood Handbook had first been written in 1935 and then it was revised later and several times after that too and that was the first thing that I read through and I studied, learned all I could about wood and I had other articles to read, to study up on wood. So I spent a lot of time 00:08:00doing that rather than actually doing any research, I suppose maybe it was three months before I really got into it. So that's my early memories.

AP: Was the Wood Handbook, was that a publication of the Forest Products Lab?

CG: Yes, yes it was. Nobody had mentioned it to you in your interviews?

AP: I think one person did actually and I wasn't sure if that was publication of the Lab or not.

CG: Well lets see how would it be--it was written by laboratory people but I suppose it would be a USDA publication.

AP: Okay. Besides Mr. Youngs, who else were you working with at this early point?

CG: Well being an engineer I was supposed to plan studies, research studies, and 00:09:00then have technicians do the actual work on testing the wood for strengths and related properties. Each person, each scientist really worked pretty much alone so I had a couple technicians to do my work and of course there were interactions between the scientists and particularly what was--lets see what was it--wood engineering division, that's what it was called at the time. So but really we pretty much worked on our own projects. Then of course if I had questions I could go over to Bob Youngs and get some help from him.

AP: So after this three month kind of introductory period, what kinds of 00:10:00projects did you start to work on more actively?

CG: It was a first I worked on the effect of chemicals on strength of wood and then there were some projects on individual engineering properties of a couple of species of wood that were collected out west. Somebody had started that project and got promoted to a job in Washington, D.C. so it never got finished so my assignment was to finish that project and that involved analyzing the data and writing a report. So I eventually moved--well I did other species, studying 00:11:00the engineering properties of other species--some from Hawaii--and did the same thing, you know wrote up reports. Other things I worked on later were involved in the effect of temperature and moisture content on engineering properties of wood and it involved kiln drying at high temperatures. I also studied defects--I'll call them defects but they're really natural--when you cut up trees you end up getting some lumber with knots in them and I studied the effect of knots, knot sizes, on the strength of wood. Eventually--I'm really moving on 00:12:00in my career--I got involved in longtime loading effects. This involved loading beams with a certain amount of load and leaving the load on until the wood failed over time. All the other tests that I had worked on were done on machines that increased the load at a steady rate until the specimens broke in about one to five minutes, say. But some of the specimens that were loaded design loads and a few of them failed before ten years but some never failed in the ten year and a twelve year time period. So that's really in a nutshell the type of work that I did there. I had to learn statistics, I didn't have that college, and 00:13:00then of course--well you had other questions that I see are coming up, just wait for that.

AP: Okay. Was some of these projects that you worked on, did they ever take you way from the office? And if so, where did you go?

CG: Well I had two reasons for going away. One was to give speeches at conferences on properties of wood and I didn't go on a whole lot of those, particularly at first because I was not expert and so later on in my career I went to several and they took me in different places in the United States. I also was involved in going out into the field, actually in the forest with 00:14:00another researcher, Al Bendtsen--maybe you've talked to him--to collect, to sample logs from various areas of Douglas-fir for shipment back to the laboratory for a study that somebody else was doing. I also went to sawmills to select lumber for some of my research studies, I was after specific types of lumber with certain characteristics and I went to a couple different places for that. I did go to Vancouver, British Columbia to meet with people who were working in the same load duration field that I was in. I also designed some 00:15:00machines to test lumber and bending and beams and also as tension members. So those were my primary reasons for going away from the Lab.

AP: Any memorable travel events?

CG: Do I remember them?

AP: Well any that stand out particularly in your mind, some that were more exciting than others or more interesting?

CG: No it's not specifically--the ones that I went to I was there to give speeches and a lot of the stuff there was not particularly interested in. A few 00:16:00were of interest of course. I remember going the lumber mill in I want to say--oh it was Texas and selecting lumber for studying high temperature effects on southern pine. Oh then another one I remember going out to Oregon--and I can't remember the specific place--to select a lot of two by fours for my longtime loading studies and I had specific characteristics again that I was looking for there. Those were the fieldwork things. So far as conferences--my first one was in Washington, DC when Martin Luther King big event was and I 00:17:00think it was 1963 and I saw some of that.

AP: I bet that was really interesting.

CG: Yes. Well I was involved in setting up a couple of conferences, one on high-temperature drying and that was held in Virginia and then--wait a minute no I think that was held at the Lab--and I was also involved in one longtime loading effects in Virginia. Those two were memorable because I helped to 00:18:00organize them. I guess that's about it. There were some people that got to travel a lot and they actually made speeches, general speeches that told about the Laboratory and summarized a lot of research efforts that I never was involved in that.

AP: Well your work here at the Lab itself, could you maybe describe a typical day while you were at the Lab?

CG: Oh man. I would have to say that a most typical day would be I would be sitting in my office either planning research, or evaluating data, or writing reports. Less typical was when I went out to the engineering laboratory and 00:19:00actually observed a test being conducted. I like to observe because I wanted to be sure the technicians were doing what I wanted. In that regard I'd like to mention a couple of people--their names probably won't come up--but one was Roy Peen and I think his name was spelled P-E-E-N. The machines that we had when I first went there were mechanical electric driven by motors and gears but you had to record the data manually and he was the only person that I ever come across who could sit and watch two different things, the load and the device that 00:20:00recorded deflection, and he could plot them on a graph and he was the only one that could do that, that's how most of the data was eventually done was plotted on graphs and various calculations were made from the data on the graph. Other technicians that record--well other people record, two people, one recording the data and the other running the machine--the other technician I'd like to mention is Mary Doran, D-O-R-A-N. She was excellent at the job she did; I could trust her to be one hundred percent accurate in the data that she recorded.

AP: She was a technician?

CG: Yes, she was a technician too.

AP: Were there a lot of female technicians there?

CG: No there weren't. There were a couple of women that probably were technicians during World War II but they were in an office and they actually were responsible for all these graphs I was talking about and calculating data from them. Then the data from them actually went up to another unit that summarized the things in a format that I wanted things summarized. I can't think of the names of those two ladies--I'm sorry about that.

AP: That's fine. Did you work with Mary Doran very long?

CG: In so far as research or scientists and technicians worked on, yes quite a 00:22:00few years. Roy Peen not as long because he was older and he eventually retired, I can't tell you the year. But Mary Doran was still there when I retired.

AP: Was there one job or project that gave you a lot of satisfaction? If so, maybe why was that?

CG: Well the most challenging job I had was the last that I had on the effect of load duration on strength of wood. I developed a theory and eventually analyzed the data with that theory and got, oh I don't know, a few publications out of 00:23:00it. The last one actually was probably ten years after I retired, I had followed the project as a volunteer and when the project was done--well I actually called it--I had planned the load to be on for ten years and then it went twelve and a half and then I told the technicians that it was time to quit it. So I analyzed the data on that on my own at home and eventually wrote a final report on it so it probably got published oh thirteen, fourteen years after I retired. That was the most challenging project and the one that I enjoyed most working on.

AP: Did you do a lot of publications?

CG: Well I had quite a few, I really can't tell you how many. Certainly not as many as some of the people in the pulp and paper and wood chemistry field but I felt I did pretty good with the bachelor of science degree, probably did as well as a lot of the people that had PhDs. Just bragging a little bit.

AP: Well maybe kind of switching gears from your work to other aspects of the Lab. What was the social atmosphere at the Lab like? Who were some memorable colleagues that you worked with? I know you mentioned a couple. Were there any 00:25:00social activities that you could take part in as a Lab employee?

CG: Yes, there was an annual picnic that many people went to, not everyone, in fact maybe only a quarter or a third showed up but that was one. I did bowl in the Forest Products League for one year and I didn't like being subjected to all of the cigarette and cigar smoke that hung in the air so I didn't bowl anymore. I was not a golfer at the time so I didn't go with the people that were golfing as groups at Forest Products Lab. That's about it. Of course there were little 00:26:00parties you know like fifteen minute parties given when somebody had a birthday and sometimes they were Lab-wide if the person had been there a long time and had been through several jobs. But most of the time it was just in small groups. Another thing--for many years we had to take an hour's time for lunch and some people played cards like there was a group that played cribbage and I wasn't into that, there were some table tennis tables and I played that. So there were a group of us that played that, others played cards, and other went just wherever I don't know.

AP: Well table tennis sounds like a fun activity for lunch.

CG: Yes it was. That was about it, there were some other things--well they really weren't connected with the Lab so I won't mention [them].

AP: As an employee did you ever get a chance to work with the University, with any students from the University?

CG: Oh dear. I know--I can't think of any specific time. There might have been 00:28:00some student that came over but I really can't remember that.

AP: Okay that's fine. Maybe kind of moving towards the end of your career at Forest Products Lab. When and why did you decide to retire from FPL?

CG: Okay I had had twenty-five years in--and let's see that's maybe federal service maybe count the post office time--anyway in 1986 the Laboratory employees that had enough time were given a chance to take what's called an early out. Have you heard that term?

AP: Yes I have.

CG: Okay and there were some things coming up that made me decide to go ahead to retire February 1, 1986. I was reluctant to do it in one respect but not in a lot of others. The advantage for me to do that was well I could go and do my own thing you know I didn't have to worry about reporting to anybody, write reports and things like that. Also at the time if you didn't use your sick leave up much you had an accumulation of sick leave--no wait a minute, how does this work? Oh annual leave and sick leave I guess, you could accumulate it--and no I'm wrong. 00:30:00Oh I know what it is, that's another thing that one could use. We paid into a retirement fund and up to--well about a year later or during--no it was during 1986 in July the law was changed about how one could account for the retirement monies. We paid taxes on that money too as we earned and so we could draw down that credit, that retirement money that we had contributed, and not have to pay income taxes on it. So I decided that I was going to take advantage of that so I 00:31:00think I had a year and a half worth that I didn't have to pay taxes on. If I had waited until July or retired after July then there was a proportioning thing, you couldn't claim it all right away. So that was really the primary reason, well those two primary reasons the one I just wanted to be own boss and the other was to take advantage of the not having to pay income tax for a year and a half. However, I still had work that wasn't finished at the Laboratory besides this ten-year loading thing and I talked to the director and he agreed that I could work there for another year as a temporary employee so the income I got 00:32:00from my retirement offset the income that I could get as a temporary employee so I really got paid from two different sources that I made the same amount of money as I had made in 1986. So I stayed on an extra year, finished my project, and official was February 1, 1987. But my official retirement date was February 1, 1986.

AP: Since retirement what have you been doing? Have you been maintaining any sort of relationship with people at the Lab?

CG: Not very many. I never felt strongly drawn to go back and visit people at 00:33:00the Lab, I did a few times but I know there were other people that left the Lab and they came back and came to talk and they wasted your time, but they wanted to come back and visit. You know they would maybe spend a half an hour but I didn't do that. I went back when there was a specific reason. I did keep in contact with a few people. I went backpacking with two of the people that had been at the Lab, one was Hank Montrey, M-O-N-T-R-E-Y.

AP: I've heard of him.

CG: He had transferred to Fort Collins. So--wait a minute, I may be confusing 00:34:00the time--but he had transferred to Fort Collins but then he went to work for Weyerhauser in Tacoma, Washington too. Anyway, John Zerbe, Z-E-R-B-E, and I and Hank Montrey and some other people that he knew went backpacking in the Olympic peninsula together. I was to go on a "Ride the Rockies" bicycle trip, it was a week's effort with Hank Montrey but he fell off his bike and broke his arm about two weeks before so he couldn't go.

AP: Oh no!

CG: I went with twenty-four hundred, well twenty-five hundred people minus two. 00:35:00It was a thing you had to draw to get chosen because there were too many people applied, it was limited to twenty-five hundred people. But anyway I went to stay with him and he drove me to the starting point and then I stayed with him before I came back home. But with John Zerbe I did some other backpacking with him a couple of times and we still walk together on Saturdays, take hikes, we used to take real long ones but we still go about every Saturday, we miss a few--we just got done camping with some older people oh about three weeks ago too. Dave Green, have you got that name down there?

AP: Yes the name sounds familiar.

CG: Okay, I also am a volunteer at Donald Park, it's a county park up by Mount Vernon and I've been doing that for about oh maybe six years now. I got started by another employee, Bob Geimer, G-E-I-M-E-R, he's retired, in fact we used to live about a quarter of a mile from each other out in the country. So after Dave Green retired I saw him and his wife one day walking on a bike trail and stopped and talked to him and I mentioned that I was a volunteer and lo and behold he showed up the next time so he's been coming too. We do it once a week, Tuesday mornings, and so I see him frequently.

AP: Oh that's great.

CG: I have seen some of the people at retirement luncheons--I don't intend to go to those anymore. Let's see what else--this was in general what did I do?

AP: Yes.

CG: Okay. I did a lot of jogging when I was in my forties and I ran one marathon when I was forty-three, did a lot of bicycle riding and I still do some bicycle riding but I'm out walking almost every day. I took up golf about ten years ago and enjoy that, in fact I golf with a lady that was at the Forest Products Lab many years ago named Judy Kent, K-E-N-T, she was in town visiting with other 00:38:00people and came out with Mary Jane Klein, K-L-E-I-N, and so I had a round of golf with those two ladies. I see Mary Jane Klein frequently when we golf, we're in same--we belong to the same organization. I could mention more about her. She and Esther Vetter, V-E-T-T-E-R, were typists and they typed before computer got in came into vogue they did all the typing of the reports, the rough drafts and then the final drafts, she was one of them. So lets see. Well I did a lot of work out in the country, we had ten acres out there and I planted a lot of trees 00:39:00on it and I pruned spruce and pine trees that I planted, mowed a lot and we had a lot of gardening, cut down trees and cut up logs for firewood--I actually had some logs I took to a lumber mill and had some lumber made. So I built some furniture and I enjoy doing things like that. So then in 2003 I talked my wife into moving into Verona and so we did and so here we are--we live in a smaller house and it takes me about forty-five minutes to mow my lawn instead of two hours.

AP: Great. Well I have just have a couple more just general questions. This kind 00:40:00of applies more to your reflections on your work. Do you feel that your work has left a mark on the Forest Products Lab, the USDA Forest Service, or even beyond that?

CG: Well, yes to some extent. Supposedly my research--and I'm saying supposedly because I don't know for sure--but it would get incorporated into the engineering design properties of wood that would be done by ASTM or another organization so from that standpoint, yes. I certainly know that people have 00:41:00referred to some of my reports when they write reports and I know some of the people I have talked to at the Lab said they asked about my work so there is something there. I guess that's about all I can say about that.

AP: In terms of the Forest Service, which is the higher body of the Forest Products Lab, how do you feel about having worked for or with an agency that's part of the U.S. Forest Service?

CG: Oh I think it was great, I'm very glad that I took that job instead of taking something else that would have taken me to the state of Washington or somewhere else--or Cleveland. It was not a mistake, I enjoyed my work at the Lab 00:42:00and I think the Forest Service at the time was well looked upon and maybe still is. I never knew about the Forest Products Lab until I was interviewed for the job. I knew about the Forest Service, I had come across some Forest Service employees some of my times when I was out in the woods some places. I guess that pretty well summarizes it. I had good feelings about the Forest Service.

AP: What do you think the general public's view of the Forest Products Lab been and do you think that has changed over time?

CG: Well the Forest Products Lab is unique, it's well world known with people who work in forest products industry and in the United States of course it is too but I suspect there are a lot of people at lumber mills and other places that work with wood that don't know about the Forest Products Lab, it's a special lab and it's probably the same thing could be said for other government laboratories, people don't know about them because they don't work in that field. So I suspect there's a pretty good percentage of people that live in the Madison area that never heard of the Forest Products Lab. So you have to be in 00:44:00the field to know about it.

AP: In terms of maybe your personal goals, do you feel that the Forest Products Lab has helped you meet any of your personal or professional goals, or helped you accomplish things that you had wanted to as you set out in a career? And if so, how?

CG: Oh dear. Well, when I first set out I thought I would be in electronics and things didn't turn out that way, I didn't have enough background for it for one thing and I didn't take differential equations, which wasn't really encouraged 00:45:00when I went to school. So because of lack of some courses that would have helped I never really developed that desire and it was just happenstance that I ended up doing research on wood, just happenstance. I had never in the wildest imagination dreamed that I would do something like that. There were some government jobs when I graduated that I could have worked for the Bonneville Power Administration and some others, there were public roads--I had worked summer jobs for Bureau of Public Roads for a couple of years when I was going to 00:46:00college. But I decided that I didn't want to work for the government so that's why I went to work for General Electric, then when the project was cancelled that a bunch of us were working on well the government seemed a little bit better, at least it was stable, and that's what attracted me to it. So that's not a very good answer to your question but that's all I can give you.

AP: Well thank you. Well that's kind of the end of my questions. Do you have any other stories, memories or comments about your time at the Forest Products Lab that you would like to record for posterity?

CG: Wow. Do you get responses from that?

AP: Oh sure.

CG: [long pause]. You know I was pretty much a loner, I have been all my life, so I don't have the kind of stories other people might have.

AP: Well any last comments maybe about your time?

CG: When I first went there, there were like four hundred and twenty employees and the new engineers and wood scientists had to share offices so I had an 00:48:00office with Al Bendtsen for a while and I was a smoker and he wasn't and I suppose somehow or other he may have suggested to somebody--but anyway I got moved to a different office and I was with two other people, three people in one office. So that was kind of the status unless you were a long time researcher and well known, you were two or three people to an office. It was several years before I got an office of my own.

CG: Bob Youngs went on to better things, I don't remember how many years he was 00:49:00my project leader, probably not very many, maybe five--I don't know if my phone is giving me a signal, it looks like the battery is good.

AP: Okay.

CG: Then Bob Ethington--you know the name?

AP: Yes I think I do.

CG: Okay, he became project leader and--well I wanted so--well you know the story of Bob Youngs probably--and then Bob Ethington was my project leader for a number of years. Bill Galligan became my project leader for a few years and then I was assigned to Joe Murphy's group with a project created that involved--oh shoot--a long-time loading and other things. So those people were not exactly my 00:50:00bosses but people that I had to report to. Oh let's see. One thing that we had--Joe Liska, you know the name?

AP: I don't think so.

CG: Oh he was a wood engineering division chief, L-I-S-K-A, and I'm not sure he might still be alive but I'm not sure. But he used to have a project meeting--it seemed like it was every Tuesday--for an hour or so, get everybody get together and go around the room and ask people if they had any input to give and a lot of people didn't, it just seemed like a waste of time, it did get us all to know 00:51:00each other a little bit. Then when he retired Bill Bohannan became division chief and he pretty much done away with those meetings. Oh there was another thing too, each project had to give reports to the division chief individually and so each of us scientists would update the projects that we were working on and progress we were making and plans for the future and that sort of thing.

AP: You mentioned the story of Bob Youngs, is that something that you had 00:52:00already talked about or is that something else?

CG: Well I would expect that you've already got the information on him. He was a--he had a PhD and he ended up going to Washington, DC for a job and worked there for several years and then he came back as Director of the Forest Products Laboratory and he was that. I'm wondering if he wasn't that until he retired and then he went to Virginia or West Virginia where he got a job directing something, I can't tell you what. But he's still alive, somebody must have 00:53:00interviewed him. Any particular stories? You know I really can't come up with something.

AP: Okay. Well do you have any final comments about your time at the Lab that you would like to make?

CG: Well it was a good place to work and I was given the chance to work on my own, my own thing--somebody's trying to call but that's okay. The idea that you can do your own thing, make your own plans and not be bossed by others, I thought was good. So I guess that's about it.

CG: --Division chief when Joe Liska was division chief. Wayne Lewis was an engineer. Gosh I had some names--I just can't remember. I'll let it go at that.

AP: Okay. Go ahead.

CG: I reviewed papers, submitted to some of the wood science publication. I took that task seriously and I was probably more critical than most reviewers. I 00:55:00think I did help some people you know make some changes in reports that maybe would not have been caught by somebody else had reviewed the reports. I didn't do a lot of that but I did do some and I did enjoy editing and I think I was pretty good at it.

AP: Was there a high emphasis on publications at the Lab?

CG: Oh yes, yes that was a main output for the Laboratory, scientific publications. There were a lot of publications that were done by the Forest Service or USDA under those headings but also it would be like Forest Products 00:56:00Lab, Forest Service, USDA. But there were a lot of paper published in scientific journals too, many of mine were in a couple of different scientific publications. My research that I was doing on fundamental properties of wood early on in my career, they were mostly government publications. Okay well I enjoyed--

[End of Interview]