Interview with Robert Lulling (part 1 of 2)

AP: All right, good morning, today is Wednesday October 15, 2008. My name is Allison Page, I'm with the UW-Madison Oral History Program, and this morning I will be interviewing Mr. Robert M. Lulling with his experiences at the U.S. Forest Products Lab. Ah Mr. Lulling if you want to maybe start? Tell us a little bit about, um, your background, where and when you were born? Um, what was your early education and your interest in wood products?

RL: All right, um, first of all my wife's grandfather worked for the Forest Products when it was located on University Avenue, by the mechanics building. I was dating my wife in high school and I got to meet her grandfather and spend quite a bit of time with him. And ah the war began and I was going to school at 00:01:00that time and he suggested that if I were interested, the Forest Products was beginning to hire personnel and that I may inquire as to whether or not they had an opening for me because I was thinking in terms of getting married and I would need outside work while I finished my education. There were seven couples in our high school that married shortly after they graduated, and in 2000 they all had remained married and so the most of them had 60 years in the marriage, which I thought was very nice.

I knew about the national reputation of the Laboratory and it seemed to me like that would be a good place to go. I came to the Lab and inquired as to whether 00:02:00or not they had a position for me and they said, well, they did and that they were interested in hiring me. And so I went home and shortly thereafter I was phoned and told that I was hired, and that was in June of 1942. But I was told at that time that they couldn't hire me or put me to work until later when the government okayed the employment. So it wasn't until September that I actually came to the Laboratory and started working.

I wanted to work in fiscal control because that was part of what my education was and they told me that, well, they were in the process of going through a list and that they couldn't exactly promise me a position in fiscal control, but 00:03:00that I had sufficient laboratory experience that they could put me someplace else and when the opening existed in fiscal, they would transfer me. Well, when that time came I was not transferred. Dr. Hunt at that time was our division chief and he said that I really was too important for him to allow me to go into fiscal and after talking to him a little more I found out that people that worked in fiscal really didn't climb the ladder very quickly because in order to do so they usually had to [transfer to] a different agency and I didn't want to leave town. So that's how I began to work at the Lab.

I started in WPR, which at that time meant the Wood Preservative Research. I 00:04:00stayed in WPR in the adhesives section for 34 and a half years. I qualified as a technician but had hopes of completing my education while working so that I would get a degree and then would be able to go into with the professionals. Well, I worked in research and I continued taking courses at the UW such as wood technology 101 under Dr. Teesdale (Clyde H. Teesdale). I also took a course in report writing and I took a course in understanding personalities, thinking maybe that would fit in with the supervisory responsibilities. The Lab had a 00:05:00fellow that was teaching electronics and he set up a course at the Laboratory and so I also had about eight weeks of electronics.

The FPL had its own library and I was able to get books and articles that were related to the kind of research that I was doing at that time. Dr. Winslow was the FPL director at that time and Dr. Hunt was the head of the WPR and he's the fellow that hired me. H.D. Bruce was the gentleman that headed up the adhesives section and I worked under him.

My duties consisted in bonding wood to wood [specimens], machine testing [their] adhesive joints' strength, and determining the kind of failure, if any, in the 00:06:00adhesive bond and this was usually in a cohesive or adhesive bond. I worked with different adhesives and most of the time I was able to determine assembly times, pressures, and curing times that were [variable]. I studied while the specimens were subjected to various environmental conditions in the various humidity rooms that the Laboratory had--I don't know whether you are familiar with that or not. But we could control the humidity and the temperature. The object was to determine the best procedures that resulted in the best adhesive bond.

I worked there for quite a while, probably six or eight years, and during that time I also worked under this what they call study leaders--project leaders and 00:07:00then there were study groups. Well when the War [World War II] ended, H.D. Bruce retired and Dr. Blomquist took his place and the Lab at that time was reorganized and the technologists were each assigned to a project leader and the project leader assigned work and graded the tech. I was assigned, at that time, to Herbert Eickner and I stayed with him for about 25 years. At that time he was then transferred as project leader in fire research and so I was then transferred to a different project leader.

The organization at that time had a project leader who had one or more techs 00:08:00under him. When I left Herb Eickner the Lab reorganized again--I don't recall just what year that was--however, they had a pool of technologists and the various project leaders could require a certain, or ask for, employees or technologists to do some work for them and so it was a little different arrangement.

You asked about my interest in working in, with, adhesives and it was quite interesting because there were very many kinds of adhesives at that time. During the war a lot of different adhesives were developed. Most them had something to do with casine [and] animal glues--the epoxy resins didn't come in until a 00:09:00little later.

There--when you work with wood[-to-wood bonds it is] called a mechanical adhesion. Wood fibers being porous--were able to adhere simply by [applying the adhesive to the wood surfaces] and, under pressure, the adhesive would either cure or harden and this produced a mechanical bond. Now this is important from the standpoint that after the war the epoxy resins came into being and they were 00:10:00excellent resins in that they withstood very harsh environmental conditions and they were very strong. These adhesives were brushed on and also sprayed on, but the substrates that they adhered to were the non-porous type. And so it became necessary to come up with a method of preparing the surfaces so that epoxy adhesive would be attracted to them--excuse me my nose is running. Now the wood 00:11:00surfaces had to be prepared also for bonding. We had a carpenter shop here and they had skilled carpenters that were able to provide us with substrates that were very, very smooth and flat so that there was no gap between substrates when you put them together. So most of the adhesives at that time were not gap filling type adhesives, they had to have a nice, smooth surface. Now when you come to the non-porous substrates, which included various kinds of aluminum, bare aluminum, different clad aluminums, magnesium, titanium, stainless steel and iron. These all had to be prepared for bonding. The principle adhesive that 00:12:00we used here was epoxy and by the way, we did not make adhesives, we used adhesives that were already prepared.

Now, the war brought on various new kinds of adhesives that were developed [from] chemicals. [Adhesives made from milk (casein) or animal hides were on their way out. So we were working with an entirely new concept and this concept started out in Germany mostly and when our--a couple of our people in the 00:13:00adhesives lab took a trip to Germany, [they] were able to determine what was going on over there and brought some of that information back to us. Now Herbert Eickner was a chemical engineer and I worked with him as I said, but a very unusual--like I said, I worked with him for several years, 18 of those years I did not work with wood. It was very unusual being at Forest Products, but we were--our salaries came from a grant from the Armed Forces, the Air Force and the Navy principally. So it was unusual, people often asked us why the Laboratory was working with metal and we became very experienced in it, so much 00:14:00so that we were nationally known for that purpose.

One of the main things that was accomplished, like I say, was the preparation of surfaces. And we tried all different kinds of preparations, wash with acetone, MEK [methy ethyl ketone?], various solvents, but they were not very satisfactory. Herb Eickner came up with the formula of using a sulfuric acid and a sodium dichromate wash in which the solution was heated [160°] and various metals then were dipped into that solution and remained there for approximately 00:15:0010 minutes until the metal surface was etched and then [the acid] was removed and the pieces were [dried. The epoxy adhesive was sprayed or brushed on the substrate and allowed to cure.] The specimens had to be cut, we made test specimens and because of the strength of the epoxy, the specimen [lap?] was limited to one-half inch because if it were an inch, the machines that we had at that time could not fracture the joint, it was too strong. So all of our [laps?] were one-half inch and the width was one inch. The machine shop here at the Lab 00:16:00cut our specimens for us [pause].

This type of adherence to metals, because it was non-porous, the name was developed for that condition was specific adhesion. So we had the mechanical adhesion for porous materials and specific adhesion for non-porous materials. The Laboratory of course became very popular out in industry because of the success in the type of adhesive bonds that we could produce here at the Lab and when I say type I'm referring to strength under various conditions. [The surface 00:17:00preparation] became known as the FPL Etch and in a lot of handbooks and adhesive periodicals you will find that FPL etch.

AP: How do you spell that?

RL: F-P-L, Forest Products Lab, etch, E-T-C-H. That one thing was so important that it is being used today throughout the automobile industry in which they have large vats and they sometimes put the whole frame of the automobile in to that etching material.

It's used in aircraft. We did research on bonding, like I say, different kinds of aluminum and of course the aircraft was made with aluminum and magnesium. 00:18:00Early aircraft, when they wanted to attach one substrate to another they used rivets. Well, by etching the surface to be bonded and applying epoxy resin and then riveting it, the rivet actually provided a pressure, and the etching provided a substrate with a type of surface that the epoxy resin adhered to. Later on the Air Force went in to putting a chromate coating, a yellowish chromate coating, on the metal after it was etched. This also provided a surface 00:19:00that could be glued with epoxy and withstood the same environmental conditions and also protected that surface a little more than just what the over, unpainted, surface could do. The metal to metal bonding is used throughout the industries for all kinds of things and still being used today. The space program was interested in providing a strong bond that could withstand tremendous heats and so they inquired. We did not know at the time [why] we were actually doing 00:20:00[it] and how it was going to be used, but later on after Sputnik and whatnot, why we begin to learn that actually the work that we were doing at the Lab was instrumental in providing the necessary things that required space flight to be done without the space vehicle falling apart.

Some of our work also included working with fiberglass and fiberglass had to be prepared also. Now it is considered to be a non-porous material too and it's impregnated with an adhesive and then pressed [miscellaneous audio from another interview--00:20:54-00:20:58] thickness variation, the thicknesses. We found out 00:21:00that it was not necessary to etch the glass but it was necessary to dull the surface. Once the surface was dulled with sanding mostly, it was successful to glue it with the epoxy resin under various conditions. We made the specimens that were subjected to various heat and cold conditions over in Timber Mechanics, they had ovens over there that could provide the type of environment that would cool or heat the specimen and then they were tested in an oven and of course all the fiberglass is subjected to hot temperatures, 1200° coming in to 00:22:00our atmosphere. So that was part of the work done here at the Laboratory and the Laboratory never got very much credit, still now it's not credited. We had people in, when we would talk to them, one of the first questions they asked us--well what does the Forest Products make? Well the Forest Products does not make anything, they experiment, they do research with things that are already made or they produce specimens to test under various conditions in order to accumulated data, which is then put in to a reading material and the industry, engineering most generally, used that data that we provided them. I was 00:23:00responsible in some cases to give information for publication in that handbook, which was mostly data that we obtained in our test program. Hey I'm on page four already [chuckles].

One of the things about bonding in non-porous materials is that it's very, very important that no contamination exists on the surface. You probably will recall that the space vehicle has a problem with tiles, heat tiles that are mostly on the bottom of the ship, coming off. While I do not know, personally, what those 00:24:00actually--what was wrong with them and why they fell off, but I have a very high suspicion that they became contaminated because whoever worked with them had rubber gloves that picked up some debris of some sort and it doesn't take any more than the oil in your fingers, just touch to the surface, and chances are that will not bond. So it is very, very important that surface be protected. It does not seem to make much difference exposing the surface to [inaudible] whether it is dust and whatnot going on, but oil especially is bad for it.

As far as my work with Eickner was concerned, having worked with him so much we 00:25:00knew each other's likes and dislikes and whatnot. He got to depend upon me for a lot of the information that he wrote up in report form. He rarely did any research work with bonding and whatnot, his duties were to take that information, compile it, organize it and get it ready for publication. So I was instrumental in doing a lot of this work that was published, I was the only technologist that worked with him full-time. We did have a couple of fellows 00:26:00that came at one time or another later on, but they were to learn what I was doing and it was more or less a training situation and they didn't stay there very long, maybe a year at the most. But I was predominately Herb's Man Friday.

How I got the information from Herb as to what he wanted done, this was done sometimes orally, but usually in the form of a written data sheet or a rough draft. In most cases the techs were not permitted to author publications and in 00:27:00very rare instances they could co-author some publications. I never was given that permission but I did write a lot of reports that were considered library reports and they were catalogued in the Forest Products Laboratory and people would refer by letter as--you know for certain things, and that catalog reference was pulled and by letter form was sent back to the inquirer. But I never authored anything that was published and the reason for that was because I did not have a degree. I had the equivalent degree, but I did not the sheepskin 00:28:00end. If I was ever called in to court I could not appear as an expert so that's one of the reasons, but the technologists in this laboratory did most of the research work and some of their subordinates helped, but it was usually the technologists that did most of it. Herb Eickner received a certificate award from the Navy for work that we did on developing the FPL Etch and I wasn't even recognized but I knew what it was all about.

Now there are many different ways of testing things. In our case we used a 00:29:00specimen that was usually one inch wide and a half inch [lap?], but we made other things too for other divisions here. One of them was in [Stam's] division, I don't remember what that was called, but anyhow, Staypak was developed here at the Lab. Now that is an impregnated, laminated piece of wood and it was very strong, but brittle, but they wanted to bond it. Well in pressing and 00:30:00impregnating it, excuse me, it became not as--the joint was not very tight, usually it had slight gaps in it, which did not produce the kind of bond that we were looking for and so we would prepare that surface by hand sanding it with graphite. The industry would not do that because it would be too expensive, but I did it in the lab, prepare that surface just to show that it could be bonded and we did do that and it was very successful. The automobile industry used that kind of construction for their molds that they used to form various parts of the 00:31:00automobile like fenders, I don't know just what pieces. But the Staypak would, after being impregnated like that, was very stable, it didn't change in dimension.

Another industry that used it was the Army, or the Marines I should say, that was interested in producing a rifle that was easier to aim and shoot. The problem they had was that the wooden parts of the rifle would change in dimension that much that it would throw off their sight and so they wanted a more stable material to use for the wood parts of the rifle and they came to use 00:32:00the Staypak. Also, you could laminate it and get different types of wood and most of it was mahogany but you could bring in some maples and things like that too, hickory. Anyhow that was kind of interesting.

And another thing was skis. During the war we had patrols that would attack--would use these skis to become mobile and they had some problems with skis coming apart, the wood lamination coming apart, so we had a whole mess of skis shipped here and we did some troubleshooting and found out what the problem 00:33:00was and improved that. I was able to get a pair of skis for my son [laughs]. I had to buy the bindings and whatnot, but I kind of resented it after a while because on New Years Eve he went down Holt Field and broke his leg.

AP: Oh no!

RL: These were not skis for jumping, they were cross-country skis, wide you know. That's one of the bad things about it.

AP: With the skis, do you know where those were being used primarily?

RL: The Armed Forces had a ski mobility troop and they would have a backpack to carry their rifles and approach the enemy by skiing in the snow, mostly on the 00:34:00mountains and whatnot. It was not a very large organization but that's how they got around.

I was asked to compare five machines that were made by the industry that was experimenting with non-destructive tests, non-destructive meaning that you did not have to apply pressure or a tension on a bond in order to determine how strong it was or determine whether or not it was a good bond or a bad bond. So 00:35:00they sent five different models of these machines to the Lab and this was my own project at that time even though I was working under Eickner. I was to compare these machines and see which one was operating the best. The machine was a method of applying energy to a transducer and the transducer was connected to a scope, which produced a sine wave. We would get a sine wave of the metal joint and it produced a sine wave that was not under stress and then you would also 00:36:00know that that particular joint was good to begin with. Then I would make on purpose poor joints and I had the darndest time getting a poor joint. I put oil in it, it would show up good on the scope. I put metal filing in it, I put various stuff like that in the joints and I would get an erratic reading. But after a while I was became more familiar with the sine wave and how to set up the scope so it would produce consistent readings.

I arrived at a more consistent information from the Fokker machine and I wrote a 00:37:00report giving the details of my research and we also had a camera hooked up to the scope so that we could take pictures of the sine waves. We submitted that information and it is the Fokker non-destructive test machine that was in use when I retired from the Lab in '77. I don't know whether it was perfected since then or not, but at that time it was the one machine that a mechanic could take the transducer, place it upon a section of wing, and determine whether or not that joint was considered good, or poor, or bad. We were that good at reading. 00:38:00Today it is used to determine if something is cracked, of course where the crack is, and it's a lifesaving instrument now and as far as I know that, that is still being used. It's a non-destructive type of determining the bond quality and I was very excited about being able to do that by myself and coming out with something that was useful.

Later, still working under Herb Eickner--

AP: So this brings us up to around what time period?

RL: Oh, goodness gracious, you are asking me? We are talking about probably at 00:39:00this time in the '60s.

AP: Okay.

RL: HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) approached the Lab and asking us to do some research for them too. They were in the process of remodeling some apartments, brick apartments, in New York for the minority. What they decided to do was to cut a wall, a large section of the wall, and make a kitchen on the site and lift it up in to that hole in the wall and slide it in place. They needed some information to permit them to do this and using [mastic] 00:40:00adhesives was one of the ways that they were interested in. We did work with wood to wood and wood to other types of material all the way from linoleum to wood, to carpeting, all those things that you might find in a home. It worked out pretty well, it was an expensive undertaking and when these minorities occupied these apartments, of course the brick was replaced and no more hole, but--oh my I'm going over time--they found out that the minorities didn't take 00:41:00care of their home and so they did not do that anymore. However, there is a firm in Waunakee (Wisconsin) that does make modular construction and mostly in the medical field where they will build in site, or in the factory, modular types of room and deliver to the site and it's faster, it's cheaper for them and whatnot.

At that time they used a lot of mastic type adhesives. Mastic type adhesives 00:42:00usually are provided in cartridge form and are applied with a gun and they--I got to backtrack a little bit here. On this modular form for HUD, we also did research on studs, metal to wood studs, metal for the strength that it provided, and wood so that the inside of the home you could nail to or screw to. They preferred the wood rather than the metal. Today they have equipment that you could use just plain steel studs, but in this day that I'm talking about now 00:43:00with HUD, they wanted wood to show and so we did research with that. And we used mastic adhesive for that because it was a good gap filling material and it had sufficient strength--[coughs]. Excuse me--to allow them to work with it and build with it. There was one detriment with mastics, there was various kinds of mastics on the market and they were not regulated as to the type of material that they were made from. They had, one time, maybe an MEK, methyl ethyl ketone, solvent or they would have an acetone solvent or they have a combination or something. You never knew, but it was a flammable type of solvent and the base 00:44:00material was a lot of different things, I don't really even know exactly what they all contained. But for my work, for my research, it was important that we knew the flash point of this material because of the various types of solvents and so we determined by trial and error the kind of and the amount of heat that was required to produced a flash point, for the general kinds of mastic adhesive, not a specific kind.

RL: Mastic adhesives are used today and if you went downstairs in--at that time it was the furnace room, now it's outside, but underneath is the basement you 00:45:00might say and there was a furnace room there--for HUD we worked with floor tile, asphalt and rubber floor tiles. They were having problems with rubber floor tiles and we did research on rubber types of adhesives to be used on rubber tile and found out that that was not very successful because a lot of the rubber adhesives contained an awful lot of solvents, which attacked the rubber. So we were able to let industry know that and they came up with another kind of adhesive, I'm not sure just what it was now. But at that time we actually laid floor tile down in the furnace room and we chose that place because the floor 00:46:00was awfully dirty and we figured well if it will adhere to this, it will adhere to anything. And it did, it's still there as far as I know.

AP: Really?

RL: I haven't ever gone down there to check it but I don't know why anybody would take it out of there. I think the room is still there because it was used for storage when the threat was on that we may be bombed with the nuclear bomb--they stored a lot of food and materials in the buckets or what you want to call it and put them in the basement here. Yeah, yeah.

AP: Oh really?

RL: Lots of poor grade Southern Pine forests are located in New Mexico and, of 00:47:00course, good wood was becoming very--in short supply. Industry was interested in trying to find ways of using up the wood that may not be, quality-wise, up to their grade. So we tried at the Lab here to improve the quality of the wood by various means, and one of those means was to--in plywood they made what they call ship patches and Weyerhaeuser actually perfected the method, which is automatically on a conveyor going by and it would stamp out defects--the defects 00:48:00were mostly where the branches were cut off and whatnot and they would leave a scar--then it would be made into plywood. Of course they used [resorcinol?] type glue which actually was formulated in Germany. When I told you about these guys going to Germany one of the things they found was this [resorcinol?] adhesive, which is called a marine adhesive now because it will stand up under wet conditions. So most of your plywood today is made with [resorcinol?] adhesive. And these defects were cut out and the patch put in and this was all done automatically in a conveyor.

Well with the Southern Pine the branches are very small and you can't make 00:49:00plywood out of it--it is very expensive to do so if you try. So what we came up with was a method of removing the damaged area and filling it with a foam type of adhesive. This was very easy to do, however, there was a problem involved in that the foam was difficult to determine how high it was going to be above the substrate surface and it sometimes foamed greater than you wanted it to and sometimes it didn't foam enough and whatnot. Well what we did, we determined 00:50:00that we could provide a certain density of that foam by restricting it, we would put just a sufficient amount of foam in there and put a flat metal piece over that area and restrict that foam from coming outside of the void and that would give it a certain density. Well we did a lot of that work to determine the density and determine what kind of a surface we needed to use so that ever time we wanted to patch a material, we could put so much of this foam material in there and put the restrictor plate over it and foam would harden and it would be of the density that was close to the wood density and we could overlay it with a 00:51:00fiberized type of covering--mostly impregnated paper.

Chet Restler was the project leader for that particular project and I was working for him at that time. Chet, before we finished the project, passed away and so it became my responsibility then at that time to finish the project. Leonard Selbo became my project leader and he really didn't do much other than I just reported to him occasionally. So I carried out the project for its entirety 00:52:00and put the research part of the studies out on the test fence in Middleton (Wisconsin). We had an area out there in which there was a fence that the paint lab put panels out there that were either painted or stained and they were able to get various climatic conditions that way. We had test specimens too that we put out there and one of them was the panels off this foam overlay foamed panel. If I put some out there that were kind of a raw state we called it. Some of them I painted over the overlay and they were in very good condition oh about ten 00:53:00years ago I was out there and checked them and they were still very good. But the ones that didn't have paint on it were bad.

RL: Most of the material at that time was used principally or--how should I say it? Restler, when he was alive, went down to New Mexico and they set up a laminating system, but it was kind of expensive to produce this product. It was made for mill material, or mill material was made from it I should say, and they made floor rounds and things like that to go around the floors or up wherever they needed in the mill. Later, one of the get-togethers for the retirees, I 00:54:00talked to one of the leaders here at the Lab and he informed me that Anderson Windows was interested in doing that. I don't know whether they ever did or not but I doubt it.

RL: Now we come to one of my favorite and my last project and this was in the '70s. Bryan Rivers was the project leader and the project was to determine the amount of movement in an adhesive joint while a dead load was applied constantly and under different climatic conditions. We were measuring movement in a, 00:55:00actually a metal to metal joint and that movement was minute and in order to measure that we needed a machine that was not available, was not on the market. So we went to Raleigh I believe it was in Rock Island, Illinois--I don't know if that's the right name or not--and they said they could make a machine under Bryan Rivers'--what do I want to say?--conditions I guess mostly, or specifications is the best way to put it--under his specifications that would measure in metric terms, joints that moved in what we would say in thousandths of an inch, very, very minute. And they produced a machine that they said could 00:56:00do that. It was my job then to set up the method of testing and it meant that I would have to wire the small transducer that was in the testing stage and that wiring then went through the transducer to the machine. We had bugs. All kinds of problems and since that--oh how do I say it?--that area was in downstairs 00:57:00here, it was in a room all by itself, nothing in it but that machine and the set up for testing. The first problem we found out was that we had to control the temperature and the humidity in that room. Of course it took a while to come up with that, but we had to put in a control method in to the electric wall plugs and whatnot and humidifier. We made some tests and didn't get the right answers and of course it was my responsibility to go in and use this machine to make the test and I had to know what to expect. I wasn't too sharp on my metric systems 00:58:00so I had to learn how to do that and it took a little while before I got the confidence myself, and I would have to rely on Bryan to come in and say well am I right here or am I wrong. Well, no he said the machine is not working right, you are right, you're right there is something wrong with that machine. Well of course we were thinking about the room. Holy Moses we found out that at night we would turn the light off of course when we left the room. Well that changed the temperature enough so that machine picked up the difference. You see how--? Well we solved that by leaving the light on all the time. Well then we found out that when the janitor saw the light on, he'd open the door and turn it off [laughs]. 00:59:00Now we had--not only that but he opened the door which we didn't want too. So we had to put a lock on the room and that wasn't too good because fire problems whatnot, the head of personnel wasn't too happy about it, but they could see our problems. That machine was so sensitive and we still were getting erratic readings. Finally we decided well it had to be something wrong with the machine so we called the people that built it and they sent two men here and they took the machine apart, or part of it, and they came up with the idea that the potentiometer that they were using was defective. So they called the place that 01:00:00they purchased their potentiometers from and told them to send them two brand-new potentiometers by air so they'd have it the next morning. We found out these guys were getting paid a hundred dollars a day just to come here and look at that thing, anyhow it was an expensive deal. They came and, or the potentiometers came, and they installed one potentiometer and I tried using the machine and I said I don't know, but that's not the answer. So they went over the darn machine again, a whole day. They said finally, at about five o'clock at night, they came up with the idea that something isn't right, it's got to be that potentiometer. So I said well maybe the potentiometer is defective. Oh no it can't be defective, this new one right out of the box. Next morning they 01:01:00checked it and it wasn't right, the potentiometer was poor.

They put the second one in and that was all right, but after we got the machine working right then the box that was on top of it that controlled the temperature going in to the specimen, that wasn't working right. So we sent it back to the company and they had it for several months and they sent it back to us and they said well they couldn't find anything wrong, they put it in an oven and then they checked the parts to see the temperature was where it was supposed to be in the box and that area was constant. They said it worked fine for them so they sent the box back and we installed it on the machine. Still got erratic results. 01:02:00And we--I then took that box myself and drove down to Rock Island and told them what was happening, or what was not happening. While I was there why we had conversations with one of the main men there on--he was questioning being this was a prototype machine, whether or not it would be to their advantage to make another one. Was there a demand of any sort out in the industry for this kind of a test machine? So I had quite a discussion with him and I said well there's a lot of labs now that didn't exist at the time that we started doing research 01:03:00along these lines of non-destructive testing and testing with very slight movements and that these, out in industry, they were beginning to make their own labs that would be able to do the tests and maybe they would be interested and the thing to do was to contact some of these companies and tell them what the Lab has got and what they could have. But I said first, I said you better wait until we get this one to work. So they sent the box back and they didn't provide anything either that helped us. I don't know what they did to the box, but it didn't work. There's a fellow by the name of Paul Evans that was the fellow that 01:04:00taught us electronics here at the Lab and he used to work, or he used to be in the submarines during the war and he was in the radio room in the submarine. He knew a lot about vacuum tubes and stuff but transducers were kind of new to him and so he never was too anxious to work with transducers. But he, after talking to him, he said well let me take a look at it. So he looked at it and he came up with an idea. He got one of these little fans that work with a battery, it wasn't hooked up to the electric source that we had in the room. And that little [fan] kept that box a constant temperature, that little fan and battery, kept the box at a constant temperature. That's all it took. And the machine is still 01:05:00down there as far as I know. I retired in '77 and the fellow that replaced me redesigned the room, he and Bryan did, and finished that project pretty much. But I think the stuff is still there as far as I know.

RL: So that takes care of the work. On that machine I wired the transducers to the machine and then I took the initial measurements and all that. Then I had to operate the machine and was instrumental in saying it wasn't working the way it should. That's as important--and finally got it to work.

RL: Things that I did, trips and so forth that I made? I was of course a 01:06:00technician and we weren't always permitted to go on trips or weren't schooled enough, let's put it that way, I guess. But we had the experience and we actually did the research and in a lot of cases we know more than the project leader. But I went to, first of all, to Nicolet National Forest (Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest) up north in Wisconsin. And we made a trip up there to observe lumber cutting, whatnot, that the Indians owned a mill up there, this on the reservation. We looked at the kind of work they did and we found out that one of their biggest problems was they could not count on their help to show up. They were going to do a job this day at--and so and so was to come and he was out fishing or hunting or something and didn't show up. And they 01:07:00had--that existed. Whether it still does, I don't know, but at that time it did. We went to Wausau Homes up in Wausau (Wisconsin) and they were having a racking problem. They used adhesives quite extensively in their building but when they loaded them on the trailer to be delivered to site, that things would rack from vibration and whatnot and so they, in some cases, couldn't get them off the truck without them falling apart. So we found out that they needed to have a little more quality control. I guess that solved the problem--the same thing with Wicks Home out here in Middleton. They built, inside, they called it inside, but what their problem was they often times opened the garage doors or 01:08:00the doors to the room in which they were making construction and this permitted a lot of like today, a lot of humidity in that room, which was sufficient to give them a poor bond. That the lumber was stored in there and it took on the humidity and remained in there because it was in a garage which was cool, it wasn't heated at all time. So it was just a matter of semantics to get them to be a little more cautious. But this, that solved a lot of their problems and that meant money to them and we saved them a lot of money.

RL: One of the things that is kind of interesting--on television, I don't know 01:09:00whether you ever recall ever seeing an advertisement where they have a springboard out over a pool and they advertising Elmer's Glue and this guy would spring off of the board and they'd have the board glued together like this you know and it worked fine, whatnot. Well what they didn't know is that Elmer's Glue is not resistant to moisture and this being right over a pool. While it remained a good bond, it was not for a very long time because Elmer's Glue swells when moisture is around it. And when it swells, it becomes weaker and so if you tried to jump with that board say in twenty-four hours after it's put together, it would come apart, it would have no spring to it at all.

RL: We also made a trip up to Wisconsin Rapids (Wisconsin) and a motel there, 01:10:00the Mead Hotel, Motel [Hotel Mead] I guess it's called. They constructed a pool and they used the laminated timber for the roofing over the pool and they deteriorated, the glue bond, and the same thing. They used a [urea?] type adhesive to bond those timbers and of course the contractors that did the work apparently did not know much about glues. Glues were just glue, you know. So they had quite a problem, they had to take that all down and use [resorcinol?] type adhesives to solve that problem.

RL: I went to Purdue University with Bryan for a seminar, Brian was to give a 01:11:00talk and he became ill and had to come back here, but I stayed there, we skipped his speech and I didn't have to give it for him. But it was an interesting seminar.

RL: Well, let's see I told you about going down to Rock Island with the machine parts. We went to Chicago, this was early on, and Bryan and his wife and me and my wife thought we'd drive down to Chicago to attend a seminar at Drake Hotel. We took the wives along so they could do their shopping on that--

AP: Michigan Avenue?

RL: Michigan Avenue, yeah. Clock Tower I was trying to think of. Anyhow, while 01:12:00we went to the seminar and we had a nice meal provided for us and whatnot and it was underwritten by industry. We got back home and of course our per diem at that time was only sixteen dollars a day. Well we expected to pay for our wives, but we didn't think we had to reimburse the Lab for the meal, but we did. They charged us for that meal because it was a gift to us you might say. And that was taken off of our per diem. Well by the time you paid the hotel bill, the per diem didn't near cover the costs and so we didn't actually put in a claim, but we let the boys upstairs know that we weren't too happy about being charged for that meal. Well as a result of that, plus some other fellows that were not too 01:13:00happy, when you go to New York it even costs more and yet the Lab was operating on a per diem. You got to the point where nobody wants to take trips anymore because it cost them a lot out of their pocket. Finally they chose several cities in the United States where they increased the per diem to where someone wouldn't have to pay out of their own pocket, but that changed in a hurry.

RL: Now social. The Lab started the news pamphlet that came to us monthly, it was called the CHIPS, C-H-I-P-S, and everyone really enjoyed reading that 01:14:00because it was produced by the employees and the director usually had a column or two and it was very informative. We had write-ups of vacations and things like that [inaudible], it was very, very informative. And we had over six hundred people at the Lab at that time and they slowly began to downsize. Unfortunately, when they started downsizing, which was in the '70s, early '70s, things began to happen that didn't happen before. The secretaries couldn't leave their purses on their desk, they had to lock them up. Bryan had a beautiful hand carved picture stolen off the wall. Things like that.

AP: Really?

RL: Yeah. So it--the morale started going down and actually you could see it. The Lab wasn't like it used to be because we had parties. We were a party bunch. And we would go on charter bus, a whole bunch of us would go to the, at that time was the Braves baseball team in Milwaukee. We'd make a big day out of it, go out and have dinner and whatnot, take our wives sometimes and just make a big thing out of it. And Sue Parisi her father in law had the bar down here at the corner and he would come along too and provide the lagivity (sic.) [laughs]. But we made quite a few--and football games. We went to football games like in 01:16:00Illinois and northwestern Wisconsin games. We were, for a long time, we could get faculty tickets, which at that time were 18 dollars a book and we could buy two books, one for my wife and one for myself. And we had good seating. We didn't always have winning football teams, but we got the tickets quite reasonable. And of course you are paying what 46 bucks for them now. They took that away from us after a while.

But we used the facilities at the University quite a bit. There was a computer there, a 1620 computer, which is an old big outfit, you had to punch a card and whatnot, all the data--you can imagine how many punches I made in all those years. But the University finally got a 750 or, a better computer that actually 01:17:00would make graphs and that for us but we had to go there to use it. It was quite a while before we got one here. But the Lab was always suffering for money, they never seemed to have enough.

I played on the basketball team we had here. We had slow pitch a league in the city and we had a team for slow pitch. We had a bowling team, we started bowling in one place and then changed when it got so popular we had to have more alleys. This was men only, but then later the girls started their own league and then I suppose a little later than that I guess they co--got together. Golf, we had golf outings and we used to play at Pleasant View in Middleton weekly, every 01:18:00Friday we'd take the afternoon off and play golf. Then once a year or once a month we went to another course like Cambridge for instance, Lake Ripley, and they had a clubhouse there that we could get a big meal so we always had a dinner afterwards and made a big day out of it. Maple Bluff we got--one of our members belonged to Black Hawk so we got there and that sort of thing. So once a month we went out and celebrated and we always played golf during the season every Friday. Two horseshoe courts in the back here by the Building 2, I guess there was a garage there at that time and then they moved the garage over, but alongside the original garage we had two horseshoe courts and at noon we used to 01:19:00play horseshoe. And of course there were a group of us that got to be pretty good so we were kind of limited to our one bunch. I actually got elbow--what do you call it?

RL: I got a catch in my elbow--Tennis Elbow and I had to get cortisone shots cause I was going to go out to the state of--well I was in Washington and we went up in to the forests. And they had years ago hired one of the forest companies out there, I forget which one now, Weyerhaeuser I believe it was because we were up in Weyerhaeuser forest, to cut a bolt, a five foot long bolt, of Western Red Cedar and send it back to the Lab and then they would cut it up 01:20:00in to small test pieces in order to determine the strength of wood in various areas. Well Weyerhaeuser men got kind of, I don't know what it was, they got lazy and they took everything out of one plot so we didn't get an overall picture. So they sent me and Arnie Okkenen out to Washington and another two guys down in Oregon. We used a random method of determining where to go and where in that area was a tree that we were, a specific tree, to cut down and then within that tree a specific area or location in the tree to cut the five-foot bolt. Well then we had to get it up--usually they are down along the river side so you are climbing hills and whatnot and over dead timber. Sometimes 01:21:00we had to hire guys from the city to come out and wrench that bolt and then we'd send it back, bus or train or whatever it was, back to the Lab. That way they got a more precise overall view of what the [quality] Western Red Cedar was.

Another thing we did, only once, but it was such a feature that they wanted us to repeat it but we never did and that was we put on a minstrel show.

AP: Oh really?

RL: All the men and this was for the Forest Service research group that was visiting the Lab.

AP: So what time period are we talking about?

RL: Oh god. Late '60s. Gordie Logan was our personnel director at that time and we had a fellow by the name of Frank, he was the head of the paint division. He 01:22:00and Logan got together and they put on an Amos and Andy deal you know. Oh it was good. But we had a tap dancer and [a complete blackface line-up]. I had my own dance band from 1950 to 1960--we played around Madison area. One of the things that occurred with that, I was a drummer and I was a good drummer and I was professional and I had taken lessons under Ronald Laylen who was a top drummer at that time, actually played big time with the big bands. And I could read drum music and consequently I was called quite a bit from other bands that needed somebody that could read music. Because I could get off during the day, take 01:23:00annual leave, when the politicians came in town we'd have parades around the square and I'd get called to play field drum in the parade. I had to go up to Gordie Logan and get permission to do that because I couldn't represent the Lab for a political party. It seemed funny you know, but they were very different in those days.

AP: Did you play for any famous politicians?

RL: For what?

AP: Did you play at the square things for famous politicians?

RL: There were all famous politicians. Yeah, I played for--oh god who were they all? I can't even remember now. We used to go out to the University there--what 01:24:00was that building by Babcock Hall? I can't think of it right now. It was a horse barn at one time.

AP: Oh the Dairy Barn?

RL: No, no.

AP: Or Stock Pavilion?

RL: Stock Pavilion, yeah. We played in there for--that's usually where the politicians would have their big talk and I'd get called to play in there. It would be more like a dance band though.

AP: So a little bit more about this minstrel show. Where was that and--?

RL: On the fifth floor.

AP: Okay.

RL: We had a piano, I played the drums, we had guitar. Oh a violin. We were a nice little band. John Black worked in the adhesives on a different floor mostly 01:25:00with adhesives though. He was Paul Bunyan with a big beard and whatnot and he sang "Sixteen Tons" you know. And he gave a talk while we set it up, we had a little wastebasket beside my drum with a plate of glass on it and he'd maybe chewing gum or something, or tobacco I guess it was, and he spit out towards the windows and then I'd drop the rock on the plate of glass and it looked like--everybody got a kick out of that. We had an older guy that was on the ground crew that was quite a dancer and he was in his '60s then and he could really tap. We had to line up the fellows and the two end guys you know, they sang songs and they told jokes. God I can't remember--I got photographs of it at home.

AP: Oh really?

RL: Yeah. All blackface you know and the handkerchiefs in the overalls and that 01:26:00sort of things. They did a wonderful job and that's why we got lots of offers to do it again but we didn't. Of course there was no women, it was all men.

RL: Now the women had their own organization, they had a name for it I forget what it was now.

AP: Forestettes?

RL: Yeah Forestettes? They're still going?

AP: As far as I've heard yes.

RL: Well these were gals that worked at the Lab and then there were spouses of the guys that worked at the Lab, and retirees, women. And they had their little monthly things and that. They did a lot of volunteer work and the men did too. I drove for the Red Cross, blood pickups. One of the guys that worked here, can't 01:27:00think of his name right now, I don't know how many gallons of blood he donated. They won't take blood from him anymore, he reached that age. I'm [86] years old and I don't look that old, but I am, and I'm in fairly good health. But I did have a Myocardial Infarction while I worked here and one of the things that was my favorite was the Lab had arrangements with the University for using their workout--the stuff that they have in the Natatorium--and so I could go down there and take some annual leave and workout. That was very helpful for me, didn't cost me anything, and it was good.

RL: We had card parties up on fifth floor for men and women. We played Euchre, 01:28:00[inaudible], I don't know what else, five hundred--cribbage. Cribbage guys had their own party. They gave prizes for that.

AP: I've heard a little bit about the brat fries or--

RL: Oh yeah, steak fries, yeah. Out in Middleton, yeah. Oh we had a lot of parties. We did have some guys here, Jim Grady who worked in the supply room down on first floor there--it's changed now I guess--he was an outstanding bowler, was a city champion in bowling, at least for one year I know of. We had a fellow that was our welder that was a champion horseshoe pitcher for the City of Madison. Well we had a girl runner here too, I forget here name. But we had 01:29:00some well known people working here at the Lab during the War (WWII). But then we started downsizing and a lot of those guys are gone. We had our own credit union and I think that started in the late '40s.

AP: Was that located here?

RL: Fifth floor.

AP: Oh okay.

RL: The office up there. Les Floeter was the head of that for several years.

RL: Okay, one thing about the Lab--it's the only forest products laboratory in the world and it provides all the services at one time. We could prepare 01:30:00whatever we needed because we had the carpenter shop that would--oh gosh there were seven or eight carpenters in there, they could build anything--display things that went to Mitchell McCormick place in Chicago and other places too, but mostly there. We had an electric shop that not only supplied things for research but also did all the electrical work for the Lab itself, maintenance. We had a machine shop that made lots of prototype tools and things like that that were needed to conduct research and of course they also made whatever was necessary for the Lab. We had a tin shop that made a lot of the things for research in the Lab. We had a welding shop that did whatever needed to be welded 01:31:00and whatnot. We had trucks. During the War we had actually three shifts and when I first started working here it was a five day week and then after the War was on for a little while, it went to a five and a half day week. Then a little later we went to a six day week, we had to work Saturday, all day Saturday, no additional pay, we were on annual salaries and that's the way it stayed. If you wanted to take a holiday off it was mandatory that you took annual leave the day before and the day after that holiday so there was three days so nobody actually took the holiday off.

AP: Was that mostly during the War then?

RL: Yeah, during the War, yeah. All salaries were frozen, all promotions were 01:32:00frozen. It was tough when you saw the guys like my downstairs neighbor at that time; he worked at Badger Ordinance. Man, he was bringing home a bundle of money; he was a steam fitter. People were making money and we didn't. My wife--when I agreed to come here as a technician I started out on the bottom rung you might say, pay wise. Well my wife's grandfather told us it was a good place to work because you climbed the ladder pretty good. We had to live for actually five years with no more pay than what I earned when I came here and of 01:33:00course I had hoped to work in fiscal but worked as a technician instead and the technicians weren't getting too much money in those days. So that was kind of hard during the War. My wife used to get at me, well I worked with the dance band and that's how I actually supported my family. I had one son very soon after we married and then we had another son, seven years apart. I had three boys in all, seven years apart. But I had a dance band and being the leader of the band I got paid double so that helped us through the war but this was no place to work if you wanted to get rich.

RL: I went through all kinds of directors from the Lab, I can't even remember all their names, at least six or seven directors. Fleischer was perhaps the 01:34:00director that I was closest to. He worked down in what we call the veneer mill in the early days and we used to go down there to get veneer to help them out sometimes and shift around. He became the director back in the '70s.

In 1974 I was given a small cash award for performing duties beyond my grade that I was, my grade level. I was at the end of my grade, that would be the tenth step, and they had a rule here that you couldn't go beyond a GS-9, a 01:35:00technician couldn't. Well I was a GS-9 at the end of the grade so I made the same money as a GS-10 or in the professional. I always received a very satisfactory grade evaluation and sometimes I was--or several times I was--told that some of my peers received promotions because they were [older] and closer to retirement so they were favored and that kind of hurt my feelings too because I know two of the guys didn't always receive good grades.

AP: Did that change?

RL: I don't know. It was that way when I retired, that's one of the reasons I retired. Soper, Vern Soper also worked with adhesives and he and I retired at the same time. He was a little older than I was but he was our first-aid man and 01:36:00we provided first-aid to the Lab and to our visitors. He had several occasions where he was called upon to take care of a heart attack for somebody visiting the Lab, we had guys that cut their fingers in the sawing and things like that. If you didn't feel good you could always go and get an aspirin from Vern Soper. He and I were pretty close. But the Lab was not too quick to give promotions. I think in maybe one or two instances that I can recall where a person was promoted a year apart when most of us had to wait until we were up the end of 01:37:00our grade before we got promotions. But I started out in the low rung and I ended up to a point where I couldn't help myself any more. We went to the computer, Soper and I did, and plugged in some numbers and come out with the fact that if we continued to work beyond the grade 10, not grade 10 but the step 10, we would be working for approximately a dollar and a quarter an hour.

AP: Oh wow.

RL: We could go outside and earn more than that. There were some guys, Ed Mraz was one who was in the paint department, he stayed and he got--at that time the Lab had a personnel audit and as a result of that personnel audit, a lot of us 01:38:00received a higher grade because the Lab was giving us what we earned. And Ed Mraz got a ten I know. I didn't get a ten because I was planning on retiring and they knew it. So it's alright anyhow. But Ed only made a buck a quarter an hour. He volunteered his services when he reached the ten, he decided, then of course that was whatever his wage was it was one step above that, so he actually worked as a volunteer for about a year and then he decided to complete his time here. But I received this award and the thing that I remember, Herb Fleischer 01:39:00apologized to me in front of the people. He would say he was sorry he could not give me a larger cash award because the appropriations didn't permit it. Because you can see how close the Lab was to you know paying off their bills and trying to give bonuses to or awards to their workers. It was not a nice place from that standpoint.

RL: One of the things that I think that [pause] the Lab was held back on because the appropriations were always a fight and always very low. We were in the 01:40:00forestry department but under the Department of Agriculture and that Department of Agriculture was very large and the Forest Service was on the low end of the totem pole. So we always got kind of cast off what was left and that's why our appropriations were never very large and our reputation didn't follow our senators around. Because we were the only lone agency, the other agencies, there were nine of us total, the other agencies throughout the states had senators that would get perks for them. We didn't. Never had a senator that could go to 01:41:00bat for us, we had our directors. Al Hall spent most of his time in Washington, D.C. fighting for the forest products and that was not right.