Interview with David Green

AP: Okay good morning today is Wednesday April 16th, 2008, my name is Allison Page and I'm with the UW-Madison Oral History Program, and today I will be interviewing David Green with the Forest Products Lab. Mr. Green if you want to start by kind of talking about your academic background, professional background, any early history that would be applicable to why you came to the Lab and how you found out about it?

DG: Okay. Well, I have a bachelor's and Master's degree in wood science and technology from West Virginia University and a PhD in organic material science from Syracuse. So that gave me training in this field directly, kind of a hybrid between engineering and wood. And uh, I worked for five years in industrial 00:01:00research in Canada, in the suburb of Montreal, Quebec. I was a college professor, assistant professor, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute for about two years.

AP: Around what time period is this?

DG: I came here in January of '79 and so for the couple years before that I was at V.P.I. and Canada before that. And I did learn to speak French, trouble is I had such a southern accent nobody could understand me so [laughs]. I was therefore extremely aware of the Lab before I came here and in some of the conferences I would attend and things, I actually had met seven or eight of the scientists from the Lab, so I knew a few people. It turned out, although I 00:02:00didn't know it at the time, there were a couple of employees here who graduated from West Virginia University, one of which I had been a lab partner with in a class [laughs]. So I didn't know he was here. So to me, coming to the Lab was a desirable thing to do and that's the reason I came here, was I had an opportunity to work here at FPL.

AP: Who kind of introduced you to the position that you applied for here at the Lab?

DG: I got a phone call from a fella who was the, what we call the project leader at the time. I had met him a time or two. I sort of let some folks in the Forest Service know that I was interested in working here so, you know, sort of word of mouth sort of thing. And he called me up and said he had a job that I might qualify for and would I be interested and explained it a little over the telephone. I was a professor at V.P.I. at the time and he was going to be in DC, 00:03:00so he said I'll come down there, so he came down and interviewed me. So I arrived here as a new employee having never seen the place [laughs, pause]. So what else would you like to know?

AP: Well could you maybe describe your first day on the job, first couple weeks, months, the first year or so and the division that you worked in?

DG: I was part of a larger group, assistant director area. Basically, it was generically called engineering, its actual title changed over the twenty-seven years I worked here and changed before that, but it still more or less the same thing. So it was groups of projects, of research work units that dealt with 00:04:00various aspects of engineering, from structures to material properties and so forth. My first official day at work was January 1st of '79, which is a federal holiday, so I started off on holiday the first day. Came the second day and of course they take you in and I was, visually I was impressed by how long and linear the hallways were, they just row after row of offices and so forth [laughs].

But at the same time I was very impressed about how organized they were. They were ready for me to show up, they had certain things that I needed to do, some of which was just the mountains of routine paperwork but other things more or less was orientation and that continued probably for the next month or two. And so they knew exactly the sorts of things that they wanted me be involved in and, 00:05:00you know had meetings to explain that and met people I'd be working with and so forth. And so I was really impressed that they were organized and knew what they were doing [laughs]. I was very impressed with the mountains of paperwork you had to fill out, but I kind of expected that for the federal government so [laughs]. Oh you know I got to meet some of the people that I didn't know but had heard of and that was good also.

I was hired to work on a very specific project initially, which is generally known as the Ingrade Testing Program. It was a new program, cooperative with the lumber industry in the U.S. and Canada, to come up with a total new basis for 00:06:00assigning [alignable?] properties to lumber. And it was a very large program. Although I worked under the project leader for that particular project, and I had others, I reported to his boss and so there was, you known, you have to be careful about slighting one versus the other, so [laughs], but they got along okay so it worked fine. And certain parts of the program were, or most of the program, actually was yet to be defined so there were a lot of meetings with the industry folks and so forth. Fairly early on they--you know I was never expected to be able to grade lumber, but I need to understand how to do it--so in the winter of '79 they sent me to Duluth, Minnesota for a week for training.

AP: Oh, a little cold there.

DG: Everybody felt very sorry for me because they knew I came from Virginia, 00:07:00what most people didn't know is I spent five years in Canada getting three hundred inches a year. I think they get about 150 inches average so [laughs]. So until this year that had been our previous record snowfall winter [laughs]. They did have orientation programs about the lab, they had orientation programs about the Forest Service and therefore a little about U.S.D.A., mainly how it fit in. So initially, I had a very favorable impression that here were folks here that knew what they were doing; they were connected up with other good groups of people, both academic research people and industry. It fit the impression I had of the Lab before I came so [laughs].

AP: Great. [pause].

DG: I'm just reading through your questions here [laughs]. You said describe a typical day, there's no such thing as a typical day here [laughs]. It's a lot like a college professor, you'll spend an awful lot of time doing deskwork, it may be writing, it may be analyzing data, it may be having meetings and talking to people. But you also had the opportunity then to go out and travel and sometimes budgets were better then and they would send us out sometimes for travel for orientation. Send you to a sawmill, send you to a manufacturing facility, meet people in a forest and so forth, as well as things that related directly to whatever you were working on. So it was a really nice kind of introduction and I came to like the opportunities to go out and you know work in 00:09:00a mill, or forest, or something [laughs].

AP: What kind of--where throughout the country or internationally or?

DG: Internationally really. I basically had studies all over the United States. Now what tends to happen because of the objectives of a particular program you're working on, or the Forest Service, or even U.S.D.A., you may go to one particular part of the country, a lot for a few years and then you may not be back there again for a number of years and you're in some place else. So it varied, but over the course of my career I was in virtually every state that has forest [laughs]. And interestingly some of the things that I remember about those are not necessarily the research study itself, but the places you got to go and so forth.

In this initial ingrade testing program the locations would vary when we would meet with the industry folks. Sometimes they would come here, sometimes we would 00:10:00go to the south some place, we'd go out west to Portland, Oregon or some place. And so they'd be moved around so nobody had to do all the traveling and so forth. Those, although I got to travel a lot, I also mainly saw the inside of meeting rooms and so forth [laughs], but as we, you know, after about the first year we got more into the testing sort of phases and then I would be out with some of the industry people making sure that we mutually understood exactly how their program was working and so forth, and they'd have training for the people--industry supplied most of the testing for that program--to make sure they understood how they were supposed to do the testing and so forth. So that might involve going for a week or two and sometimes you'd be all in one place for a week and sometimes you'd be in a different place everyday for a week. And 00:11:00so initially I did a lot of traveling for that sort of stuff.

Another program I worked on later dealt with improving the structural gradient properties for hardwoods. Hardwoods in the United States for houses and so forth have not been used a whole lot, they've been used more for large structural members such as in railroads or something. But we had opportunities to go to central West Virginia, go to a little town of maybe two thousand, drive over to a mill that's ten minutes out of town, work all day there. Really get to know the problems directly of the people that you're trying to help. This is not a place that sort of somebody tells you a problem and you go work on it, you actually go work with these folks and they'd be very interested all the way from their technicians up to the company president who'd sometimes come down and meet 00:12:00with us and talk to us. Going out with some of your colleagues and some of our technicians and our testing lab, you know, it was also a great opportunity to get to know them a lot better. And we'd often would put in long days. Basically we followed the schedule the mill would have, so if they started work at seven in the morning, we were there at seven in the morning. If they quit at five, we quit at five. If they quit at seven we might quit at seven [laughs]. You didn't want to interrupt their schedule, so you put in long days and that was fine, it didn't bother us at all [laughs]. And often in some of these situations you'd, over a period of a year, you might go back there two or three times so you got to know the area a little bit. In my case, I was from West Virginia so for that one I already knew a lot about it, but you know you get to know those local restaurants that are good and things like that [laughs].

Had the chance to go to Alaska on several studies. At the request of a Forest 00:13:00Service in Alaska, in fact they paid for some of the trips, and so probably I've been to Alaska nine or ten times. At least three of which were on research projects. Nothing less than a week, sometimes up to two weeks, and usually not in the tourist season. Luckily in southeast Alaska it's a rather mild climate, not like what we anticipate for the interior of Alaska, but also very rainy and so forth. So I can remember being, climbing up mountains that you almost had to go up on your hands and knees to go up in order to locate some trees and cut down and roll down the hill to a truck so they can be shipped back here for testing. Some of these places there's maybe only one place in town that you can 00:14:00stay and we were--Wrangell Island, got to stay in a lodge that we would--basically it was closed. I think there was only one other guest there for one night, the rest of us, there was three of us there from the Forest Products Lab. And so the owner would come out--the owner was also the cook and he'd cook and we come back and shower and you know eat [laughs].

And later the director at the Lab that time, and this is back in the time of the spotted owl, during the Clinton administration. The Forest Service was directed to stop timber harvests, which had a great impact on a lot of these communities because that was their primary economic base and they had begun to look at the 00:15:00Forest Service as the problem. In other words, we simply were the people that were giving them what the administration had decided, but we were on the ground with them so the Forest Service often got kind of a bad name because of that. The Forest Products Lab came and tried to help them say, okay are there some all forest based alternatives you can do? Are there some mills that are still here that perhaps could benefit for some improved technology or some increase efficiencies and so forth?

So we would go, lets say to Alaska, and we go to Wrangell Island and there'd be a meeting scheduled and people, both Forest Service people, industry people, and town people could come. And we'd give them a little presentation to tell them who we are, the kinds of things we might be able to help them with, the kinds of 00:16:00things we couldn't help them with. We didn't have a pot of money, were not there to give you money, and so forth. And we'd have discussions of things and as often happens in the academic world, sometimes maybe half the questions you get are things that are known, it's just that they don't know them. So we could help them out by just supplying them the information, but there were a number of good research studies that came out of that too and we got to help out some of those folks. And so I participated in about six or seven of those over about a three month period in Alaska. We did the same thing down the continental United States in Oregon and Idaho and in sort of in the west. And I thought it was a really good opportunity for us to learn a little bit more about the problems of small companies, in particular towns that have ideas of things they might want to do. It was an opportunity for them to see a portion of the Forest Service that 00:17:00wasn't just telling them that you can't do this, whatever this is [laughs]. It also got us a lot of favorable input from the Forest Service itself, from the national forest system and in the process we even got recognized by some governors and senators and so forth so [laughs]. So, I thought, you know, overall it was a really nice experience to be able to go out and do that.

AP: So would you say that your reception by the industry in general favorable?

DG: Yes. By the industry it was always favorable. Mostly it was favorable by the townspeople once they kind of understood who we were and who we were not [laughs]. But, you know some communities had put a lot of thought into what they might want to be doing and some of them were just barely starting. Depending on their level of knowledge we could either tell them where to go to begin to 00:18:00collect information or if they pretty well decided an area, somebody wanted to open a new mill of some kind and so forth, we could help them with providing information or where to get information on equipment, and contacts, and maybe some opportunities that weren't things that were known in the area. They might be something that was being done, you know, down in southern Oregon, but the folks up in northern Montana didn't know that you could even do this. So basically I think our reception was very good [laughs].

Towards the end of my career I was doing a lot of work on the properties and uses of small diameter trees; there are just a tremendous number of small diameter trees that need to be removed from the forest in the west in order to 00:19:00reduce the fire hazard, to make the forest more healthy. Forest is a living organism and it is young, it has weird--young trees have weird properties, sometimes like young people do [laughs]. Then they get old they get other kinds of problems [laughs]. And in the west particularly, they were use to using much older, larger diameter trees. So it was surprising what was not known about the properties of some of these smaller diameter trees and so some of what we were doing was basic research, some of if it was more applied research. And often because it was convenient we would work with university departments, so if there was some testing needed we would cooperate with them and get the testing done there. Some of the testing was done here, but often it would be done there. Professor Tom Gorman at the University of Idaho was one I've done a lot of work 00:20:00with, in fact I still have some projects with Tom, but I can remember going out to southern Idaho. And we had to go up and take measurements on quite a number of trees and some small diameter stands, and then a certain number, twenty or thirty had to be cut down and brought back for further evaluation at the Lab.

And we were in places that the general public does not normally get to, you know the Forest Service, in the national forests in order to prevent theft and so forth, they have a lot of locked gates. Well we had a master key so we would drive up into the Rockies, you know, every day and I can remember sitting up there one day, on the side of the hill about two-thirds the way to the top, and had this great view down the valley and we were having lunch. Well turns out 00:21:00there's this bear up behind us and she's up there, maybe she's having lunch too I don't know, she could hear us and we could hear her, but she didn't bother us and we weren't about to bother her so [laughs]. So sometimes, although the research was the important stuff, sometimes what you remember is the experiences like that. Tom has a cabin over there and three, four times when I've been out on trips I've spent the weekend with him or were taking a couple days vacation and we've stayed at his cabin and gone trout fishing and stuff like that so [laughs].

I've had a lot of foreign travel. Again sometime your foreign travel is more meetings than you'd think. One of the unique pieces of foreign travel that I went to, I went to a conference in East Germany. This was when the European Union was in its early stages of formulating what today we would really 00:22:00view--they've had these plans for a long time, for a long time it was on paper. And this conference was setup, it was an international conference in wood engineering, and it was setup to share information between the East and the West, so there were Russians there, and East Germans, as well as all the European countries and so forth. And I had the chance to fly into East Germany and it turned out I was in East Germany about a month before the wall came down.

AP: Oh wow.

DG: [laughs]. And to get to East Germany I had to go to Amsterdam, I was not allowed to go to West Berlin and cross the border. The East Germans were giving Americans, especially Americans on official passports, a lot of hassle; they just delay you all day before they let you through. So I flew to Amsterdam and then got on East German Airlines, Interfluge it's called, and flew directly into East Germany. That was kind of interesting, you know, they had a so-called 00:23:00classless society. So the door is about a third of the way back on the plane and you get on and it seemed like some people were directed to the left and most of us were directed to the right. Now we all had coach class tickets, but their coach seemed to be a little bit better than our coach so [laughs]. Got to see the, you know, what East Berlin looked like from the other side. In fact I've never seen West Berlin, only the east side.

AP: What was that like?

DG: Very interesting. Although they had a, you know a going economy, they still had a--if you went down alleyways there were still places in the building where shells had hit, you could still see damage from World War II. Their economy was very skewed. They wanted to guarantee people jobs and one of the ways they guaranteed people jobs is if you couldn't work for anything else you could work 00:24:00either in the coal mines or producing coke to burn. And so energy was almost free, there was a little charge for it, but not much. Well in one of our tours that we had one afternoon they showed us these whole area, many square blocks of apartment buildings that were being refurbished and basically they were tearing them down to the walls and totally redoing them. And we were very impressed with the work they were doing, nice work and everything, and one of the things we noticed was there was no insulation being put into the wall. Now it snows in East Berlin in the wintertime, it's cold there. The reason they were not putting in insulation into the walls is because it wasn't economical. It wasn't economical because of this virtual free supply of coal and coke and it totally skewed their economy. And after the wall came down and after, you know maybe a 00:25:00year had passed, I got to thinking about those poor people that got those apartments. Now they had to pay market going rates for energy the same as they did in West Berlin and just nice brand new houses, but not a drop of insulation in the walls [laughs]. So it's the kind of example how sometimes you know the government policy can skew the economics and for the typical East German, it probably looked normal, it the way it had been ever since the end of World War II probably. It was totally skewed [laughs].

But I've had opportunities to go to England several times, sometimes on research studies, sometimes on you know to attend meetings. When they were forming their building codes for Europe, foreigners, non--people, countries that are not in 00:26:00the Union were not allowed to attend some of those meetings, but they would have some kinds of meetings we could attend and so we would try to attend to see what they were talking about. We would also try to explain to them what we knew about wood as a way of inputting into what they were doing and one of the things this did was help prevent technical trade barriers [laughs]. I mean if a country just puts a ban on products from your country then you'll be taken to the appropriate world organization and there will be all kinds of hassles and so forth. So an easier way of accomplishing the same thing is to claim that the other country's product can't meet your technical requirements [laughs].

In a lot of these countries the research that goes on is done by a federal lab and the federal lab may make the final decisions on things, unlike the United 00:27:00States. And in some countries they didn't recognize the authority, the input, of a university professor or the technical person. And sometimes you almost had to be from a federal lab before they'd pay any attention to you [laughs]. But it was good, got to meet a lot of really nice people. I've been to Portugal, to Finland, to Sweden. So although the foreign travel was not predominantly what I did, I did have a chance to do some travel out of the country and a lot of travel to Canada. Until we got interested in more security, you know travel across the boarder to Canada was almost like going to another state, maybe California where they check you for pests and anything you might bring in your 00:28:00car. But anyway [laughs].

So that was, you know, sort of a side benefit of working here was the opportunity to go out. I would not want to travel all of the time and most of the travel would be in the summertime, most of our studies would be in the summertime. But you know you go out for a couple of times in the summer for one or two weeks at a time and bring back your specimens that you can analyze and so forth later. It was kind of nice to get out you know, it's nice to be in a mill without having to work there and the noise and the dirt and so forth [laughs].

AP: When you did do international travel, did you get a sense of the international community's perception of the Lab and the Forest Service in general?

DG: The people I dealt with probably don't, most of them, the Canadians would be an exception, they don't really have an impression of the Forest Service. This 00:29:00laboratory was one of the original labs that worked on wood from a technical point of view and some of the early grading and property assignment procedures that were developed here were adopted by other countries. The kinds of people we dealt with were well aware of the lab. Sometimes they had a bias against us. When I first came to the lab you were not allowed to do much international travel except as kind of a reward. And some of these meetings, particular meetings with the, as I was describing for the European effort, they may have meetings at least once a year, sometimes twice a year, and these were the kinds of meetings where you're actually discussing technical issues, not just 00:30:00presenting a paper. And so it's important to have a continuing presence. Well there were some people in Europe that were older and from the days when the Lab didn't go over very much, that I think felt a little slighted that we were ignoring them or something and so we sometimes got a little of that bias too. But in general, you know it was fine. We learned a lot of good stuff from them, I think they learned some things from us.

AP: I'd like to go back to--you mentioned doing collaborative work when you went to other places throughout the country working with universities.

DG: Yes.

AP: Did you get a chance to work closely with people here at UW-Madison and what was that kind of like if you did that?

DG: Yes, we did do some work here with UW-Madison. The, in the engineering area, 00:31:00this often meant that we working with somebody in lets say Civil Engineering or something. I think the Forestry Department at UW might have been hindered a little bit over the years because we were here. And we have a long history of teaching courses there and giving short courses and things there, but I think because of that they've not traditionally gotten very strong in the wood utilization area. They've had some nice people there occasionally, but they may only have one or something. So often when we were cooperating in the kind of area I was in, we were working with one of the engineering departments, sometimes it was Ag [agricultural] Engineering, sometimes Civil Engineering, sometimes Chemical Engineering. There was a good opportunity to have cooperative 00:32:00students from UW. We had a lot of cooperative students from other parts of the country too, but just because of the closeness, we could have a student who would actually work here during the school year, not just in the summer, whereas generally speaking a student lets say from Idaho could come here perhaps for the summer but was not likely to be here any of the other times [laughs]. So from that point of view we probably had more students here over the course of that period. These were not always related to a project we had over there. And sometimes if the student worked out real well for us and they were going to be around a while, you know this might be sort of a continuing relationship. I think we had one student almost four years [laughs].

AP: Wow.

DG: Most of the time, in the summer, and to what degree they were able to work 00:33:00during the school year. About the--just before I became a project leader we actually hired one of the students who'd worked for us two or three summers, a fellow named Dave Kretschmann who's still here. Eventually I became a project leader and became his boss. And so it also occasionally provided some opportunities for hire. Now we've obviously hired people not from UW also, but sometimes in one summer, especially if get a student at a lower grade level, they get put on a lot of fairly menial work and it's not until you know they get up to maybe a junior level or something that you can really begin to utilize some of their technical skills. And so sometimes for students from other parts of the country, we might not have the opportunity to see them at that level [laughs]. But we've always had a good relationship with the University of 00:34:00Wisconsin, in fact that's one of the reasons the lab is in Wisconsin because of their emphasis in the beginning, and continuing, on solving practical problems, not just academic problems. [Pause].

AP: Well, would you like to maybe say a little bit more about being a project leader and maybe a little bit about the people that you worked--that worked for you?

DG: Or with me.

AP: Or with you.

DG: I never actually technically viewed my employees as employees. We not like the [inaudible] department chairman looks at his faculty [laughs]. Yes, I was the one that had to sign for their trips and so forth--But until the last few 00:35:00years when our numbers of employees started to get quite small, our project, individual projects were never very large. I think, when I first came we might have had twelve people, twelve scientists in the project and we probably got down to the point, we maybe had five. And then they started consolidating and so the numbers grew. Well that was nice because we sometimes didn't have to hold formal meetings, I mean we'd call a meeting because we all got together in the back hallway and discussed something or if it was some very specific to something one particular scientist was doing, you know we could just talk with that person. And so that was always to me a very nice thing. I have worked in big companies, the company I worked for in Canada was a fairly large company for the wood industry at the time. I had been in the military.

Volume, in terms of size, forces a lot of formalized things because you can't get anything done otherwise. The hindrance is that it begins make things less personal and so forth and so I always sort of appreciated that. Like any place there's people that you know you get to like that will do anything for you, there's people that you respect, but they're kind of unique [laughs]. The assistant director that I reported to when I first came to the lab was a fellow named Billy Bohannan. Billy was his legal name [laughs] and Billy had had a nice career as a engineer and then went into administration maybe a third of the way 00:37:00through his career and spend the rest of his career in administration. Now if you'd like know something about Billy I can probably tell you about Billy in about three things. He wore cowboy boots all the time. He might have suit on, but he had on cowboy boots. Imagine a combination of Maverick and Donald Trump. Put those together and you have Billy Bohannan [laughs]. And for his day he did a lot to advance the Laboratory, he worked well with industry and so forth, he would not survive in today's environment [laughs], things were different in his day, but he was you know, today would be viewed a fairly dictatorial. Sometimes he was vindictive. On the other hand, you never went into a review with him that 00:38:00he didn't know exactly what you already had done. We would have to meet at least once and sometimes twice a year and you know the twelve scientists in the project would all sit down with him and he'd go through all of our studies. Well if it was an ongoing study he remembered your objectives, he knew what you told him the last time, you know he wanted to know what's different since then and you better not try to tell him something that you didn't tell him last time [laughs] change the story on him cause he'd remember [laughs]. So he was one of the sort of unique people. I got along with Billy, but some people didn't and I can understand why [laughs].

James Evans who's a statistician here, came about a year after I did, and he was assigned to work on this seven million dollar, ten year program, the Ingrade Testing Program. James is still here and I was very impress with James, he's 00:39:00probably one of the best consulting statisticians I have ever seen. He was a faculty member at the University of Kentucky before he came here and he and I did lots of trips together, we'd go to lots of meetings. And these are planning kinds of meetings so you'd work all day and some question would kind of come up that needed to be answered by the next morning. James and I spent a lot of all nights you know working all night in order to have something ready to present to the group the next morning [laughs] and so you know you kind of--it's not something you want to repeat, on the other hand it's you know something you kind of remember. I remember going with James to a meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, the Canadians were part of this group for most of its existence, and James and I had been to Vancouver a time or two, but we weren't very familiar with the city. And we were going up and it was one of those times when budgets were tighter and we decided we would save some money for the government and we'd 00:40:00share a room. No problem, we'd you know had done that sometimes before when we needed to. So we go up and we shared a room and came down and there was a restaurant down on the bottom floor of this building and then we had to catch a bus over to the lab for a meeting so we were having breakfast and suddenly it became obvious to us, we were in the gay part of Vancouver. The guy at the hotel desk probably figured we fit right in, you know [laughs].

We had a lot of good technicians at the Lab, still do, guy that work hard and pay attention to what they're doing, very contentious. One of the fellows that stands out is dead now, but fellow named Roy Traver. Roy was a great big hulking guy, I mean not quite as big as you know Dan Blocker or somebody, Arnold Schwarzenegger, but a big hulking guy. Really nice personality, scared to death looking at him and as soon as you talk to him you know. And he was married to a 00:41:00small Korean lady and he had a little bit of a problem with eating and so she had him on a diet, and particularly a Korean diet. He had more kimchi than he probably wanted to think about. And he really liked some of our trips. I remember going on a two week mill study to southern Georgia in August. I mean it was hot. We hoped it would rain so it would lower the humidity [laughs], but and again we would show up at the mill at seven in the morning and usually quite about five, five thirty in the evening. The mill was out--there was no place really to eat so we'd had the place we were staying fix us up a lunch and so we'd you know take an hour off to eat lunch right at the mill. There wasn't many places to eat in town where we were staying either, but there was one very nice place and it was--it served everything family style so they had counters all 00:42:00around the room and you'd go pick out whatever it is you wanted to eat, and then you'd go sit at a table, and you'd eat. And Roy was in seventh heaven, he could just have anything he wanted, nobody told him you know what he could eat or couldn't, except he made us swear we'd never tell his wife what he was eating. And one of the things that they had a few times was alligator tail. Roy got so that he loved alligator tail [laughs].

AP: What's that taste like?

DG: I don't know, it's a nice tasting meat, it tastes like alligator tail. Maybe some of the rest of the alligator tastes good too, but you know the tail is a big muscle. Sometimes they'd have it there in a sauce like a spaghetti sort of sauce, sometimes it was fried, lots of different ways.

And in a lot of these studies we'd cooperate--the Forest Service has regional 00:43:00research labs also. In that case there was one, it's still there, in Athens, Georgia and there was a group of people from there that came down and they were working on some different aspects of the same study. And so you know there might be, on any given day, there might be fifteen of us there all working together on some of that. So it was a nice opportunity to actually work with other researchers in the Forest Service. Often they have really more expertise than we do in how the tree grows, things that might effect its properties, and so forth. We may have more engineering expertise about what happens to it after you start to grade it and then in use. It's often, it's almost always better to know both parts of that. Well, by cooperating with them we could get both parts of that 00:44:00knowledge. We do the same things with the research station in Portland, Oregon, the Pacific Northwest station when we'd work out there. Some of our co-op studies with universities would involve us, the Forest Products Lab, the Pacific Northwest station and let's say the University of Idaho or a group in Alaska or something.

It's expensive to travel to some of these places and so besides getting the knowledge then if you got somebody out there that can sort of continue the more mundane parts of that. I remember going on a study with a person, there were three, two scientists that went out and a lady who was at that time was my 00:45:00statistical assistant. It's always good to have some of those folks go out and see how the data is collected, they have a much better feel for the study and when they are analyzing the numbers they're more likely to recognize there's a problems and so forth. So this lady's name is Pam Byrd, she's now a secretary for the unit I was in charge of before I retired. And we'd been out in Hayfork, California. Hayfork, the town of Hayfork is perhaps four hundred people if you count the greater area [laughs]. There's almost no place to stay there so we had to stay over in a little town called Weaverville, which almost burned down about two years ago in forest fire, but anyway. It came right up to their high school and they managed to stop it. And we were out there, I was out there three weeks, she was out there for two, but every day we had about an hour drive to get back to our hotel. Well, this was a Friday and we were working kind of late and we 00:46:00found out that a lot of the locals were taking a Forest Service road over, go over the mountain a different way. And it probably wasn't any quicker, it was shorter, but you couldn't go as fast and so we thought, you know, for something different we'd do that. So I don't know how many thousand feet we were up, we were something like fourteen thousand feet maybe, maybe twelve. But anyhow, we're going, we get to the top of the mountain; we have a flat [laughs]. We're sitting there and it's probably, if you walk downhill back you know back to where we came it was probably and hour and a half walk. We'd never been over the other side so we had no idea what it was that way and it's late enough, because by now it's like six o'clock in the evening, all the locals that were using that road weren't going to be there and the Forest Service weren't likely to be there either. So I took some pictures of us changing a tire up there. We did manage to 00:47:00get the tire changed, did manage to get off the mountain. [long pause]

I almost hate to mention people's names because I've know so many good people here and at universities and in the industry that it's, you know, you're afraid you won't mention somebody [laughs]. It's really been a good group of people and one of the things I can say aobut my time here, and I would hope anybody can say this about wherever they work, I think I worked here for the best twenty-seven year period in the Forest Products Lab's history. Not that there might not have liked it before or after but I mean every job since I've been a university professor, worked in industry, and worked here I know that every job has things 00:48:00you don't like and there's b.s. you have to put up with and so forth, but I think the Forest Products Lab has been a great place. I think I've been able to have much more impact on wood utilization and more of my stuff used by engineers than other place I could have been. More so than when I did work for research in private industry, there you either get pretty good support for a project or you're not allowed to do it at all [laughs] and of course they only want to use the product themselves, they don't want to let somebody else use it. But the reputation, the contacts, the fact that you had a good core group of people in a variety of disciplines here and at UW close, meant to me this was just a great place to work. I couldn't have picked a better place I think.

AP: So kind of leading into that, what made you decide to retire, was that just your time or?

DG: Yes, all of the above. It was about the time that I had sort of thought about retiring. I hadn't thought about retiring too much until about five years earlier when one of my employees was retiring. And although at one time the retirement system was explained to me that didn't mean I kind of remembered it and I didn't realize I was getting close to the point I could retire and that started me to think about it. And then as it got closer, as I said, the, you know the budget started getting very tight and we started downsizing. Now in the federal government, every time well every five years you would have to go through a whole planning procedure to decide you know what research you are 00:50:00going to be doing for the next five years on a fairly broad scale. Then you focus down on more specific projects underneath that. Now that can change as you go along but you have this plan and that has to be approved by the Washington office, it gets sent out to the industry, it gets sent out to universities, we get comments on it and so forth. It's a big deal. By the time, if you're the person in charge of writing it, it wipes out about six months of your time mostly.

I did do that reorganization, well first I did it just as part of the normal five year plan, a year later they closed out the group that had concentrated exclusively on structures, moved those people into my group. So we had to go through a planning process to integrate them into our plans because they hadn't gotten around to their five year, their five year date wasn't up yet. And then about a year after that I got all of one, another project and part of some 00:51:00others and it looked like I was going to do it again. Well, after a while I mean I'm a person who probably was more of a, interested more in the research than in administrative part. I did the administrative part, but it wasn't something that I particularly wanted to do so I kind of didn't want to do this again. Besides that I knew that even if I did do it again I probably wouldn't be here more than a year or two and I might as well, it would be better if the people that were going to still be here did the planning than me. Then they came through and they wanted to reduce the number of employees so they offered economic incentive to retire and I though hey this is about the time I was thinking about retiring anyway, if I retire now I don't have to go through all of this planning and stuff with the reorganization, and I have a little money to ease the transition into retirement because for about a month you don't have a lot of income until 00:52:00you start, your annuity starts. So the timing was good.

AP: And what year did you actually retire then?

DG: I retired in May two years ago, so that's May of '06. And I had some things that I wanted to spend some more time on not work related. I was never one of these people whose entire life was work, I always had a life outside of work anyway. I'm interested in genealogy and I've done a little of that over the years, but you know couldn't devote a lot of time to it. My wife and I built a new house, there's a lot of landscaping needed to be done all kinds of work needed to be done. And I just had a number of things that I wanted to do too. Now I've continued, I'm still writing papers, I still have some studies that I'm analyzing data for, and I'm still a cooperator with particularly with Professor 00:53:00Gorman on some ongoing studies. Those will phase out, that's an area for example that I knew that they've, that Dave Kretschmann would also, because he was in a more or less related field that I was doing, and so I started getting Dave involved and so I'll phase out and Dave is phasing in. It was just a good time for me I thought.

AP: Now, you've mentioned a couple of times that downsizing towards the end of your career, do you know what kind of sparked that?

DG: [laughs] Budgets, budgets. But I think, this is not unique to this particular time period, I've written a number of what we call technical history articles in my field. For example the Lab was expanded greatly during World War 00:54:00I; wood was one of the defense materials for World War I. And at the end of World War, and during World War I they ran three shifts a day here. I'm exactly sure I know exactly how they did that. You know did you start a project, work on it for eight hours, somebody took it over, or was he doing something different then you picked it up the next day? I don't know how they did that, but anyway. At the end of World War I their budgets went way, way down and I'd seen you know they would look at areas they could continue to work on so they continued to give some support. Research on wooden airplane propellers was one of those because they knew that not only was the military interested in that, but civilian airlines were also.

I think for a lot of government organizations things ebb and flow depending on what the problem is, depending on what the overall economy of the country is. 00:55:00When I first came here in '79 budgets, at least in the Forest Service, were relatively good. Then came the first oil crisis and budgets went downhill a lot and we did some downsizing and then it recovered and we came back out. I think we're also switching modes for better or worse there's advantages of both ways since I've been both sides of the fence. We're switching more from a, what I call sort of a national lab mode where you have some overall sets of objectives that are agreed upon in a very formalized way. Perhaps over fifty percent of your budget is coming from the federal government, that doesn't mean you don't do take in other money. We're switching a lot more over to the university system 00:56:00where almost all of your actual operating money has to come from grants, you're writing grants and so forth. There's good and bad.

Although this lab has helped out some of the big companies of the United States, Weyerhaeuser can get along just fine without us, they have some of their own research people, they can tune that up or down depending on how they want. The people that we help more are the medium size and smaller companies, the towns, the people, and in a lot of things dealing with engineering codes and so forth, we are the independent advice. There's a whole system that I won't even both to explain to you is to how you get lumber properties approved in the United States 00:57:00and we have been since their inception their technical advisor, we do not vote, we can make input or comments, and we meet quarterly and so if industry wants to get some new procedure approved or something it's sent for us for comments. We don't approve it, they do. In that respect we represent the Department of Agriculture not the Forest Service, not the Lab. And we do that sort of thing for lots of codes and standards organizations, things that deal in our areas. Things were you get so technical that most people wouldn't even want to try to understand it and in areas where often university faculty aren't going to want to spend that time to do it, it requires historical knowledge as well, but is 00:58:00critical to this smooth functioning of the economy, in the forest industry.

We get calls sometimes, lets say from the National Transportation Safety Board, if there is an accident of some sort that involves wood, there still are wooden planes, most of those are classified as experimental, but sometimes they crash and if there's something unusual about it we will get called, sometimes we go to wherever it was. Usually not to look at the crash itself, but to look at the wooden members and comment on them. Sometimes there have been things that involved railroads. I got called once to look at some material they, in this 00:59:00case they sent the material to me after some lengthy phone conversations and letter exchanges. But there were wooden rails on the side of a flatcar that were holding in logs, they broke, and some people got killed and they wanted to know was there a problem from the wood perspective, they would look at the other aspects of it. And so we'd get called in on that sort of things too, we in fact this Dave Kretschmann that works for me that is one of two people that got called when a lady got killed in Sauk County, she fell out of a tree. Turns out she was on drugs and who knows why she was in the tree, but they wanted to know--and they found her body laying underneath the tree with some broken limbs and they wanted to know whether you know if the wood failure was consistent with somebody falling out of a tree. So they wanted to make sure that somebody didn't fake her falling out of a tree. There's always something interesting here.

AP: What's one of the most interesting cases that you've heard of?

DG: Oh [laughs]. Not necessarily the most important case? Sometimes the questions that you get turn out to be interesting. At least half the questions that we get are things that we already know, but they don't so we help them out by telling them. But one of the most interesting questions I ever got was a lady called up once and said she and her husband had bought an old church and they were going to renovate it for a house and they owned it for several years and they hadn't done anything much to it yet, but now they're getting ready to start actually doing the work. So they went in and in the process they begin to smell some odors and they finally located that there was bat guano in the attic and their question was does bat guano affect the properties of wood. I had done some 01:01:00work for my master's degree on the effect of anhydrous ammonia on wood properties so I got the question. So I talked to her and she told me a little bit about the situation and so forth and then I asked her well how much is up there. Oh said she didn't but it was probably foot, foot and a half deep. I said your problem is that it's not going to have any effect on the mechanical properties, but you're not ever going to get the odor out of that wood.

AP: Oh my goodness.

DG: So that's probably one of the most unusual questions I've ever gotten.

AP: Well, we're at a little bit over an hour and I guess I don't have--we covered most of the questions that I had, but if you have any other stories or 01:02:00memories of people, places, things that you would like to add.

DG: Oh I could go on for hours and you probably don't want me to do that [laughs]. Oh I think I've covered in sort of a general way enough things. I could list people forever.