Interview with Robert Lulling (part 2 of 2)

AP: All right, ah good afternoon today is Monday, November 3, 2008. My name is Allison Page and I'm here today ah doing a second session interview with Robert M. Lulling about his experiences at the U.S. Forest Products Lab. Ah first of all thank you for coming back for a second interview um and I guess I just wanted to kind of start off by just clarifying um when you came to the Lab--what year was that?

RL: 1942.

AP: Okay.

RL: September. I was hired in June. Well I was told they couldn't let me go to work until we had the okay from Washington. So that was three months that I didn't have any work.

AP: Just kind of waited?

RL: No I took a part-time job delivering groceries.

AP: Oh, okay. Just in town?

RL: Pardon?

AP: Just in town?

RL: Ah yeah, Maple Bluff.

AP: Okay. Then when you started here in '42, what were some of your first impressions of the Lab? On the first day of the job, the first year or so? Any specific memories that stand out about that first year or so?

RL: Not in particular, everything was kind of routine then. It was testing specimens--and in our research we were not, in most research, you don't know what the end results going to be and so we didn't know either. We knew that we were supposed to test some glue bonds, put down the weight in pounds per square inch, and we had machines--I think we had three machines and three 00:02:00operators--and we would test, break the specimen, look at the surface, if it broke in the wood well that would be a hundred percent. If it broke partially in the wood and partially in the glue bond, then we would have to give it either an adhesive or a cohesive rating and percentage. Of course the best reading would be eighty, ninety percent of cohesive.

AP: I remember from our last interview session you said that you had first learned about the Lab through your wife's--

RL: Grandfather.

AP: Grandfather.

RL: He worked at the Forest Products when it was located up on University Avenue by the railroad track there, it was by the mining school.

AP: And from what he told, how did you go in to this job thinking about the 00:03:00Forest Products Lab?

RL: Well, of course there was a possibility of going to war and he said that the Forest Products was going to have to expand because of the research that they were at the time. There was a fellow here by the name of [Don] Brouse was his last name, B-R-O-U-S-E, Brouse--and he was working on propellers, wooden propellers, laminated, and he was having--they were having some adhesive problems because they used urea type adhesives that are not really good for exterior exposure, especially in an environment that they would be taken off at one temperature and humidity and being up in the air in another temperature and 00:04:00humidity. So they were really interested in finding an adhesive that would bond successfully to wooden laminates. So we knew that was going on. My wife's grandfather's name was [George] Clark and he said that they thought it would be a good place for me because I was young, out of school, and wanted to get married and just looking for something. So he suggested I go and get an interview so the gentlemen that interviewed me was the head of the adhesive--at that time was Wood Preservative Division--it was George Hunt. So he interviewed 00:05:00me for the job.

AP: What was he like?

RL: Oh he was quite a gentleman, very nice man, very well known in his profession. He became the director of the Lab eventually for a short time. He told me that I was going to be hired but he couldn't give me an exact date of when I could start working because [it] had to go through the Washington office. And so I guess I took three months. Yeah.

AP: And if you don't mind me asking, how old were you when you started working at the Lab?

RL: [Twenty] I believe I was.

AP: And during those war years, did you--were you ever up for the draft?

RL: No.

AP: No?

RL: Well, I was and I wasn't. I got married and I wasn't eligible for the draft for a couple of years but towards--well when the United States got involved in the war--because by that time I had a child too, so I was married with a child and that put me in a category that was lower than most people. But oh--I can't remember just when in the '40s the United States entered the war--and a couple years later, towards the end of the war I got a draft notice along with a couple of other guys, [Schowalter?] was one and I went with to Milwaukee. And I've had a sinusitis problem and I have this left ear full of scar tissue and whatnot so 00:07:00I didn't pass the draft. But then when I got back I--Gordy Logan who the personnel director at that time was a close friend of ours and we belonged to the same church and we did things together quite a bit, especially he and his wife and my wife, but he told me that well they never would have let me go anyhow. [laughs].

AP: Did you have any close friends either here at the Lab or personally that went?

RL: Into--?

AP: Into the war?

RL: Well this fellow that worked with me, Kennedy his name was, Don Kennedy, he went in. I think Les Floeter I believe he went in the service too although he 00:08:00wasn't working with me, but he was a close friend. Ed Mraz was drafted but he was 4F too so he came back. Ed Mraz and I were probably close, very close, we--his wife and my wife were very close. His wife had cancer of the uterus and had x-rays and it made her sterile and she couldn't have any children. Well about that time I moved to the west side by the Glenway Golf Course and his wife and my wife were very close and my wife would bring our child over to visit with Louise and she just loved kids and of course she couldn't have any, which was bad. But Ed and I used to bowl together, we golfed together, we went on picnics 00:09:00together. We only lived two blocks [apart]--I lived on Waverly and he lived on Zwerg. Henry Zingg was another one that was pretty close, we went to the same church, Covenant Church. But we had all kinds of friends, we played golf and bowled Jim Grady and I bowled together and lived just within the same block on Wilson Street. Oh gosh I can't remember all of them now, Voss, Arnie Voss. Just quite a few.

AP: How would you describe the environment at the Lab during those war years? What was a typical day like and what kind of projects were people working on 00:10:00throughout the Lab?

RL: Well I think I told you we were a party going bunch and very happy-go-lucky. We did a lot of research, we pushed out a lot of good data. I don't remember the abbreviations for all of them, they had silverculture relations, we had a wood preservative, and they kept changing them sometimes as they reorganized and whatnot. We had Timber Mechanics, we had wood identification, we had the printing place, the editing division, the photographic division--what else? All the carpenter shops and metal mechanics, I told you about all of those. I'm 00:11:00probably leaving some out. But we had quite a few and we were the only lab at that time, we were number one in the agencies, and they had nine agencies throughout the United States. However, the Laboratory being in the situation that it was, had no senators actually [representing us, or] went to bat for us in Congress. Being in the Forest Service--the Forest Service seemed to be the last agency in the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Agriculture was probably the largest department so when they got their appropriations, they 00:12:00went down the ladder and the Lab got what was left over. In fact Al Hall who was the director at that time spent, I would say 80 percent of his time in Washington, D.C. trying to get on the good side of some senators [who] would be willing to go to bat for us, but we were always wanting for money, we still are, and we never will be able to do much as long as they are part of the Department of Agriculture.

AP: Do you think that's surprising given what the role is of the Forest Products Lab?

RL: It is to me, but to the outside people I am quite willing to say that even the city of Madison doesn't know what the Forest Products does. The name's kind 00:13:00of misleading when you say products. There is also another Forest [Products] Service, it's a publishing house, it's located in Doctor's Park. A lot of people got confused. They'd go there instead of coming here. But when you say forest products the first thing they ask you is, "what do you make?" Well, we don't make anything; well, we didn't at that time, all we did was research, all we did was push out data. So that was a bad situation.

AP: Do you think that's changed in recent years?

RL: It's gotten worse.

AP: Yeah?

RL: Our--I went to the last meeting we had for the retirees and your present director, I don't remember his name, but he was saying too that things have changed and that their numbers here at the Lab have gone down and the 00:14:00appropriations are also going down. So things haven't gotten any better.

AP: Well kind of on the subject of change, how, if at all, do you think the Lab changed between the World War II era and the post-War era? Was there a change here do you think?

RL: Well a definite change. These are negative things, which is not good but I think I told you about them having to hire the minorities. The first people who came in were Spanish people. I don't know just who they all were and I really didn't pay much attention because I was close to retirement and I wasn't really 00:15:00all that interested, but I know a couple of instances where some of the secretaries had their purses either taken or stuff taken out of them, when they had to lock their [disk] doors. I know [Bryan] Rivers who had an office next to mine had a beautiful hand carved figure of a woman and that disappeared. There were other things and of course we talked about it after we retired. Bryan Rivers and I were pretty close and Arnie Okkenen--maybe you know him too, he worked for Rivers. After I retired, Arnie took my position. He said the same thing that I felt all along and that is we used to be a real close bunch of 00:16:00people and a change in that everybody seemed to be for themselves and it was very obvious and even more so after I retired because Arnie stayed on and he said it wasn't any better. So that definitely set in. Now that's what this group of retirees I talked with. Now how other people looked at it, I don't know. But with the bunch that I know why we all were of the same opinion, that it just got dog-eat-dog. In fact Bryan Rivers quit more or less because of the way he was treated by his supervisor.

AP: Oh really? So that changed too?

RL: Oh yeah, we lost our supervisors that retired you see. Bob Gillespie was one 00:17:00of them, [Dick] Blomquist was another one, then [Len] Selbo another one. Those were all our supervisors.

AP: Do you think--did the science change in the post-War era? Did the focus of the type of projects that were going, did that change? RL: Yeah, yeah. It had to change because they didn't get the money from Washington so they took money from grants. So they worked on private projects and I think they are still doing some of that like adhesive stamps for the mailing and I don't know what they're working on now, I really couldn't tell you. Something to do with paper. That was one of the better money producing things because the paper companies supported 00:18:00them. Now I worked here for 18 years working on non-porous materials, working with metals, and that had nothing to do with wood, but we were--if somebody asked you well how come the Forest Products works with the preservation and promotion of using wood, "how come you guys are working with metal?" Well at that time we said, well, if a glue would glue metal, it certainly would glue 00:19:00wood. We found out later that that's not really true any more because the epoxy resins, which were the primary resins that we used on the nonporous materials, they cure by mixing with a catalyst and the catalyst generates heat, which sets the primary resin. That heat also destroys the fibers of the wood so it actually decreases the strength of the wood. So that was a no-no.

AP: Just to kind of go back and clarify a couple of things that I noticed or had questions about from the last session, did you attend an institution of higher learning?

RL: Mmhm.

AP: And where was that?

RL: Well the University of Wisconsin--one year at U.W., one year at Madison Business College. I had a course in report writing, I also had a course in understanding personalities, I thought that would help me in a supervisory job. Mathematics. They had courses here at the Lab one of them was in electricity, I took that here. I went to symposiums which were usually given by a company and 00:21:00we would travel to wherever it was.

Another thing that I don't know whether anyone told you, but when the War was over and the GIs came back they were hired based upon their civil service grades. Well us guys who were hired and didn't take a formal civil service test, we did take a test but not that civil service [test]. [Later] we had to take our civil service [test]. Well these guys, they came back [from war] had five and ten points already, depending upon if they were wounded or not. So we were 00:22:00competing against them and we took our civil service [test]. Then, in my case, I got a grade promotion because I got a higher grade on my test and there were a couple of other guys that did the same, a fellow by the name of [Carl] Miller did well on his test, he got a promotion too, and Soper only completed half the test [laughs]. He got called back. But there were quite a few people that had to be--how do I want to say this?--Gordie Logan of course looked at the test and the grades and then some of them flunked and he wondered why they flunked and while there were some questions in there that were kind of ambiguous and if you didn't guess right, well you got them wrong. There were too many people I guess 00:23:00that got low grades and he went over some of them and actually raised their grade so they were eligible, which was not indifferent [laughs]. But then we had a down you know and they let a lot of people go. So I don't know whether that answers your question or not.

AP: Well I guess the thing that I was trying to find out, was did you complete a degree following high school?

RL: No, no. I had two years of college, like I say I thought I was going to be hired in fiscal and that didn't come to be and I was quite happy after a while with what I was doing. It was more interesting. But when I--well after the War 00:24:00and a couple years later, back in the late '60s, early '70s, some place in there, they had a personnel audit here and found out that a lot of the technologists here were not graded properly. Of course we could have told them that anyhow [laughs]. But we got big promotions and that helped a lot, but I was told then at that time that both [Soper?] and I were equivalent of a B.A.

AP: So your status here at the Lab was technician right?

RL: Mm hm, [at grades SP4 to SP9].

AP: Okay. Do you think your experience here was different because you were a technician rather than a scientist and, if so, in what ways?

RL: In one way, the only way, that it really bothered me is that I did a lot of writing because I just--Eichner and I carried on almost a hundred percent of our research and I did most of the research and Herb did most of the writing about the results and making reports, and publishing them, stuff like that. Well most of the time my stuff was in written form, not oral, and I would present that to Herb and he would write it up almost word to word sometimes and then of course we had to go through the editing department too and sometimes it was changed, but Max Davidson was one of our head editors and he and I went to the same church and knew each other too. Our families were quite close and he told me 00:26:00right out, he said that you should be, you know, writing reports and getting authorship. Well I didn't have a college degree and so we didn't get authorship, sometimes we got co-author, but very rarely. And sometimes even Herb didn't get credit for publishing, sometimes Blomquist did it and when he had to go to give reports to the outside sometimes the [author]. The author of the report wasn't 00:27:00the one chosen to give the result, the reports.

That happened with Herb quite a bit and that was probably one of the things that we argued about because--now over in Germany the head of the division gets his name on every report, there's no sub-authorship or anything like that, the guys name doesn't appear in the report. So that was one of the things that bothered a lot of us and--I lost my train of thought now. But anyhow we didn't get our names on the reports, but in my case I wrote a lot of reports and got neither 00:28:00author or co-author. These were library reports and they were all catalogued. Well when things changed and then they took the publishing away from the Lab, all that stuff that was in the files got tossed out, so there's no record of it.

AP: Kind of your sentiment about this, was that a view shared by other technicians as well? Were they frustrated with the fact that they weren't getting authorship?

RL: Well, [Soper?] was, he definitely had some problems with it. He did, later 00:29:00on, the last things that happened before he retired, he did get full authorship of one report and when he died that report was on the table with all his memorabilia, it was the only one that he ever--I know how he felt and how his wife--well his wife died before he did. Now I don't know about Arnie Okkenen; I don't know whether he wrote any reports or not, I'm sure he must have wrote some things. The other divisions I don't really know about because we didn't get to see all the reports, stuff like that. But I know Soper and I both felt that we 00:30:00should at least get co-authorship because we did most of the work and wrote up the original rough draft of this thing and that was given to our supervisor and the supervisor put in comments and he may suggested for us to do some more research, substantiate what we put down on paper, or stuff like that. Then it went to the editor and Max would come in and make other suggestions. We did graphs too, oh yeah, we had charts. It was more than just writing.

AP: Was that the really only division between technicians and scientists? Were you otherwise treated pretty much the same, everybody got along do you think?

RL: As far as I know. Bill [Kruel] was the youngest one coming in and he was 00:31:00single, I don't think he ever did get married, I don't know. Yeah, he's dead now. But I never did get to see his, or find out what grade he was in, he wasn't on the par with us, he was probably one or two grades below us, that's all I know. Now whether he was a bona fide technician or whether he had some other title, I really couldn't tell you.

AP: Well kind of turning more towards the work that you did. Is there one project or aspect of your work over the years that gave you a lot of satisfaction? And along the same lines, is there one job or aspect of your work that was particularly challenging or frustrating? I know we talked a little bit about that, but is there anything that stands out in your mind as being 00:32:00particularly memorable?

RL: Well, yeah I have some. Of course number one would be the coming of the FPL acid etch, we did a lot of work--I worked 18 years on that. We etched all different kinds of alclad aluminum, alclad, different grades of aluminum, magnesium, titanium and steel, stainless steel as well as iron. We worked on compreg--I told you Staypak last meeting we had and that was the outgrowth of compreg. Stamm was head of that section and they gave us pieces of compreg to 00:33:00glue and we had to figure out how best to glue it because it was really a non-porous material because it had saturated resins impregnated in the wood and then [bonded] under high pressure. But it was very brittle and it wasn't too successful, but out of that came Staypak and that is still being used. That acid etch is as far as I know still used in the automobile industry, they actually submerge large pieces of automobiles, fenders and stuff like that. Of course now a lot of the cars are made out of fiberglass and plastics so that's kind of gone by the wayside. But in the aviation they, that's mostly in aluminum and 00:34:00magnesium, well some titanium now too, but they originally would rivet pieces together and that little rivet was only maybe an eighth of an inch in diameter. Well, by gluing them you increase the area that was being held together so it wasn't just one spot and then a space and then another spot and space, it was one spot and then the space was bonded so it all came together and made it much stronger. And that way they were able to come to a knife edge with modern aircraft in the service, real fast pursuit aircraft has got knife edges on their wings. Other parts were bonded and still are.

One of the things that may be interesting, during the war the English perfected the mosquito bomber (De Havilland Mosquito), which was an all wood aircraft made out of mahogany mostly and they shipped one wing over to the Lab and it was mounted out here and subjected to heat and cold, whatnot. And we had thermometers that measured the environment that went on and that was glued, everything was glued together in that mosquito bomber and that was quite successful in World War II, probably the fastest bomber that they had at that time.

AP: What happened to the wing?

RL: Well we tested it in Timber Mechanics and they cut up different pieces to 00:36:00test the joint you know. It got destroyed that way. By the way, when I started working here this was the only building.

AP: Yeah?

RL: There was no [UW] hospital, no VA Hospital. Billy Albers who was in the carpenter shop at that time had the house where the credit union sits now, that's where he lived so he got to work every day. That poor guy. He used to be quite a bowler and had diabetes and he ended up with both legs cut off up to the hip--no, no up just above the knee--and we used to carry him, put him in the wheelchair. He could drink, he couldn't do anything else, but he could drink [laughs]. So if he was in a wheelchair all we had to make sure is he didn't fall out, poor guy.

AP: Well kind of talking about people that you worked with. Are there other 00:37:00people that are particularly memorable about your time here?

RL: Oh yeah sure. I know a lot of people [laughs]. Bob Kurtenacker you know I mentioned him. Wayne Hutchins was on our basketball team, he went to--he applied for a job in Michigan at a furniture manufacturing company and he came back and he said god, I don't know whether I want that job or not. Wayne what's wrong with it? He says, well, he says--I think this was in Dry, Michigan if I remember right--he said that's a dry city he says, you can't buy liquor down there. Well that's a big jolt you know. But we made up his mind, and he's going to work anyhow. Well he went there and he tried to introduce the modern adhesives to 00:38:00these guys and they wouldn't have it, they're used to using the animal glue in [wood] joints and that was the way it was going to be, you know, these old Germans, they were pretty stubborn. He tried to show them how the newer bonding adhesives melamines, ureas and that, formaldehydes and all different kinds of caseins. But resorcinol was the glue of the future as it held up under different environments and very well, but they didn't want to monkey with it. But what he had to say was, you know he said, that city he says might be dry but he says you aught to go to their parties. He says everybody gets tanked, you got whole basements full of booze [laughs]. I don't mean that this was a drinking group 00:39:00but it was one of those things.

Yeah Hutchins and oh golly Miller was another one. Of course I know H.D. Bruce was the head of the adhesives group when I started. And Blomquist was another one, Dick Blomquist. He went down to Athens, Georgia and worked down there and he came back for a visit and he says you know, he says, I must tell you, he says, you guys--how did he put it?--those guys there wouldn't hold a feather to you guys here, that's the way he put it. We were good and even though we weren't graduates we could do all the work that was necessary here.

[Lauris,] Anderson, Foellmi [Geimer] gosh I had all kind of them. And these three guys here of course, [Don] Kennedy was another one of them, Les Floeter was quite popular in the Lab, he worked in Timber Mechanics. We had Earl Geske. Page is another one, she died. Tall gal. She married the fire chief of Madison, his name was Page, last name. She took his name and he died and they found her laying on the floor outside her bed, she just died in her sleep I guess. Yeah quite a few of the girls we knew.

We had a thing about Christmas, when Christmas came around we always had a Christmas party, divisions had their own Christmas parties. By the way, before I 00:41:00started working here I went to a Lab Christmas party at Tripp Commons (University of Wisconsin, Memorial Union) is where they used to have it, at the University. And they had a band and dance and whatnot. George Clark and his wife Martha and my wife Jeanne and I went I think two of those parties before I even started working here. So I knew a little bit about the Lab. Gosh I'm sure I'm leaving some out, but Charlie Coen in the paper. Foley, Chuck Foley another one. I'm sure I'll think of more. I knew quite a few. We knew each other here, in each division we had friends. Fred Warren is another one that was quite popular. 00:42:00Oh what was his name? I can't think of it right now.

AP: Sounds like a very close group.

RL: Well we weren't really close. Let's put it--we weren't as close as we were in our own division, let's put it that way. But the divisions got along very well together, yeah. Max Davidson of course was another one. Another one his brother just died here. Okay.

AP: Well kind of moving in to your later years here. When did you retire form the Forest Products Lab and why did you decide to retire? Was it just time?

RL: No things weren't going so good, we reached the end of our grade. I couldn't go any further because I had people that were just a little bit older than me that were going to retire. Bob Gillespie, I wasn't that much older than him and so he had a PhD and he was the head of the adhesive section at that time. We talked about things too, but he always said the same thing, I always got excellent on my personnel report and he always apologized, he couldn't give me a promotion because of--John Welch was another one in the adhesive department, he was a much older man, what they were trying to do when a guy would get closer to retirement, they tried to get him in to a higher grade so he'd get a better 00:44:00pension and we knew that. But I was in--and Soper, the same way, and we both retired at the same time. We were at the top of our grade and we had a 1620 computer upstairs and we plugged in some numbers and we found out that if we stayed at the Lab that we would only be making approximately a buck and a quarter an hour. So we could go out and bag for that. That was one of the influences.

The other influence was that my wife's mother was living with us at the time and she had bought some property in Lodi (Wisconsin) and her idea of retiring was to 00:45:00build a little shop in the main street and retire and use the shop to produce some income. She was the [salad?] gal at the Memorial Union and could get a pretty good retirement. So she built the apartment underneath and then instead of building the shop, she bought an older building and built the apartment underneath it and on the main street in Lodi. She would go to garage sales and stuff and pick up mostly picture frames and bring them back, and fix them up and made them real nice, then put them up for sale. Well she didn't last very long, she died when she was 68 years old and so we, my wife, inherited that property--her and her brother--and her brother lived up by Wisconsin Rapids and 00:46:00he didn't want anything to do with it so we bought him out and then we built a store.

Well this was in our mind you might say as I'm getting close to retiring and I couldn't really do any more as far as money was concerned so I could see myself up there in Lodi and selling stuff. Well what were we going to sell? Well we said, well, we don't want to work too hard, this ma and pa shop, it's going to be a retail shop and something that we will want to sell to tourists. Well up there you don't have many tourists but they come after schools out in Illinois 00:47:00so we decided on having a Christmas store cause they were starting to pop up those times, especially in the big cities. We went to Minnesota and we went down to Chicago, Illinois a couple of places [in] Michigan and we got some ideas so we built the shop and we planned on staying there 10 years. Then within that ten years my wife would have reached what 65 I think it was at that time that you get your social security pension so we based everything on that. Well we opened the shop in June as school let out and closed it after Christmas and bought a motor home and we traveled. We did that for 15 years, we stayed there five years 00:48:00longer than we had anticipated. But this store was never--you wouldn't get rich there, but it paid for itself, we didn't owe it any bills or anything like that, and we had enough money leftover at the end of the six months or whatever it was to travel. So that entered my mind and so I said well I'm going to retire when my birthday--my birthday's May 1st and I retired I think May--I've my retirement thing here, I think it's May 7 or 5, something like that.

AP: What year?

RL: '77.

AP: '77? Okay.

RL: So I've been retired almost as long as I worked here. Yeah, somewhere I got it [pause, as he digs through his wallet]. Here it is. May 6.

AP: Oh wow.

RL: Thirty-four and a half years. That's what the Lab gives you, that's all you get.

AP: Yeah? I think today you don't get to keep your badges.

RL: I got two of them.

AP: [That is fair?]. Well kind of looking back on your work here, do you feel that your--we may have covered this already, but do you feel that your work has left a mark on the Forest Products Lab, the USDA, or even beyond that?

RL: Well I did until I found out that all of my work went in to the trash barrel. I think that was a terrible thing. Certainly [doesn't] say much for what we did, in fact some of the stuff that we did is being redone. One of the things 00:50:00you were asking about, most popular, one of the popular, that acid thing was one of those that really is still being used I'm pretty sure. But in one where I got full credit for author was in evaluating Fokker non-destructive tests and that's still being done. But I had five machines that were sent to the Lab I did all the research on it myself and out of the five I came to the conclusion that the Fokker machine was probably the most reliable. And I know up until maybe 20 years ago that was the machine that is being used on commercial aircraft over 00:51:00the wing section to determine whether or not there is a strong glue bond. If there is a crack that shows up they'll do a non-destructive test of it, which is pulling a transducer over the area and then you have a scope and you can look at the sine wave and determine whether or not the bond is air worthy. I know it's being used there.

The other one was I worked with Chet Restler who became my supervisor for a couple of years. He was a guy that Herb Fleischer, who was the [FPL] director, worked with during the war and they worked on the [Northwest] coast. I guess and 00:52:00picked out some Sitka Spruces being the one veneer that is usable in aircraft. Anyhow, they had a bunch of Western Red Cedar--oh no it was either, it was Pine, Southern Pine, it was Southern Pine in New Mexico--it had a poor grade of Southern Pine. Southern Pine has a lot of branches and whatnot and it was not usable for lumber purposes. Various companies that tried to come up with some kind of use for that particular stand of material and [were not] able to produce 00:53:00satisfactory use for it, mostly because of cost.

Well, Chet Restler got this project assigned to him to see what he could do with it and he came up with the idea of cutting the poor area out of the wood material and filling the void with a foam patch. Through trial and error we came up with the idea that it had to be a certain density, the patch did, because the lumber keeps changing dimensionally and the patch had to go along with it or it 00:54:00would crack. Then after we came up with the density then we had to go to a covering so the patch would be covered, you couldn't see it had a defect, and we used a paper that was impregnated and had different thicknesses and whatnot. So we had to subject that particular overlay to various environments to see how it held up and measure what dimensional changes were made. Well Chet up and died suddenly so I took over that complete project myself and I wrote up all the reports and nobody else did any of it and I was pretty pleased about that. I came up with five different reports. By that time I was working for Leonard 00:55:00Selbo and he was very pleased with my work. In fact there may still be some samples out on the test fence because I not only came up with the best solution, but found out that if we put paint on it, it would uphold even better out in the environment. So the last I looked at it was, I think it was three years, no two years, been out there two years. And I went out and took a look at it and it was fine. The paint wasn't other than being full of soot and whatnot. The overlay itself looked good. And at one of our retirees' parties one of the guys here asked me if I recalled what I had done and I said well most of it and he said 00:56:00well Anderson Windows asked for the report. Of the course the report had been chucked and so he said he'd give them my name but I never heard from him or anybody else after that so I probably figured it was too expensive. It would be used on small milled works and not on a big board or anything like that, but it could be set up on an automated system, which would reduce the cost of it quite a bit but you have to have a market for it and apparently that didn't come to be.

AP: Well kind of turning towards the U.S. Forest Service. How do you feel about having worked for or with an agency that's part of the Forest Service?

RL: I think I already told you [laughs]. I think the Forest Service should be part of another agency, not the Department of Agriculture simply because of the location the Forest Products, or the Forest Service is on the low rung of the ladder.

AP: That's true. Okay. Well looking back at your career, do you feel that you accomplished everything that you wanted to in terms of your career such as goals? Did you have any goals? And I guess along the same lines, do you have any regrets about your time here?

RL: I have regrets as far as pay goes because during the war everything was frozen, promotions and pay, at least that's what we were told. I lived above a 00:58:00couple that he worked for Badger Ordinance. Money was no object. Those people made lots of money. Farmers--after we moved to Lodi with our little store why I found out that farmers, most of them, were working for Badger Ordinance. So I regretted that, if I had to do it over again I would have left the Lab and went to Badger Ordinance, got the money. But I thought that the U.S. government, civil service, had a wonderful retirement situation at that time and Jeanne's grandfather told us about sick leave and annual leave. Today I have no problem 00:59:00as long as the pension comes, that we have a good insurance, health insurance policy, I'm fine. But [pause] other companies have got to the point where they are trying to come up with the same type. In fact Obama (Barack Obama) right now is saying well if you can't get your own health insurance you can get what the government's got. Well that was the one thing that we had that they didn't at that time. You understand? We did have an annual salary but now we worked--well when we started working here it was five days a week. Then when we got involved in the War more instead of putting on more personnel like they should have, they 01:00:00made us work Saturday mornings. No additional pay. And then we got to put out more than we had a lot more personnel too. But they have so much research to do and they were really pumping that out. We had to work all day Saturdays, so we were working six days out of the year, I mean out of the week. But another thing we had to do, if you wanted to take a holiday off you had to take the day before and the day after and the holiday on annual leave, that's three days of annual leave you were forced to take just to get a holiday off. So there's things that other people didn't realize you know. Wasn't all candy [laughs].

AP: Did you go back to working five days a week after the War?

RL: Yeah.

AP: Okay.

RL: Well another thing that happened, you know they got us on a COLA (cost of living adjustment) situation, there was an automatic increase every year. There was one year and I think there was two, but I know there was one, when we didn't get the COLA but they said they would give us additional money the year after. They didn't do that either. I got kind of sour taste in my mouth about the government and of course since then I've, you know, you hear about other things that the government really isn't all that dependable. They say one thing, but they do something else. But that doesn't mean we don't have a good government, it just means that's the way sometimes things are done.

AP: But in general did you enjoy doing the science part of it here?

RL: Oh sure, yeah. Yeah, I did. When I got in to writing more, yeah, I like to write and that course I took at the U helped me a lot. But there is one thing, another thing, a lot of guys that hired had a hard time writing because the government has a definite way in which they want the reports written and you got to follow that. Chet Restler couldn't and he had a report honest to god it was an inch and a half thick and Len Selbo wouldn't even look at it, he'd say I don't got the time for that, you go back and rewrite it. Well he didn't, I ended up rewriting that report and I got five reports out of it.

AP: Oh wow. Well this is just kind of a note because you were here during the 01:03:00'70s and I thought it would be interesting to ask you this. Were you present at the Lab around the time that Sterling Hall was bombed in 1970 over on the UW campus? And--

RL: I was home the day it was bombed and I was outside and I could feel it and I could hear it. I just lived up beyond West High School.

AP: So really close actually then. What happened here at the Lab in response? Was there a response at all?

RL: Not anything unusual. Everybody was talking about it, but no we didn't change our research or anything that I know of.

AP: Were there any additional safety precautions this being a federal agency?

RL: Yeah. During the War we were fenced in to a point and down at the entrance 01:04:00down there was a gate and we had a guy, a fellow sitting down there that let people through the gate and you had a badge that permitted you to go through. That was during the War. After the bomb I don't think anything tightened up very much because from the War there was already there, but we were more aware of knowing who was walking around the building and we were alerted to be on the lookout for people who did not have a badge on, to make sure that they would go back to the front office area and get signed in. Now the door at night had a 01:05:00lock on it and you had to activate that lock by a switch at the front office area or front desk. Now [pause] I don't know if that is still being done or not, I imagine it is. But we had guys around here with the clock. You see we had a third shift here too.

AP: Oh really?

RL: Yeah, we worked nights. That's another thing, that was sometimes a volunteer but not always, but I volunteered to work every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at night, just testing specimens and that was the early part of my employment. 01:06:00There were a couple of other fellows that also volunteered, Soper didn't because he lived way out of town, but I could walk back and forth to work. But again I got no differential pay for that. We had another building that was leased by the Lab up town. Have you been told about that?

AP: No.

RL: Kurtenacker should have known about that.

AP: He may have, I talked to him a long time ago.

RL: Oh, well we transported people up there that did work up there and I'm not just sure what kind of work they did, something to do with timber mechanics. But all during the war they leased that building and then they built the garage back here [laughs]. And one of the things that happened, we had a travel--automobile 01:07:00I guess you'd call it that held six people and it was used to go and get the mail, bring it here, and transport people back and forth to that building up there. We also had Lab cars, but we had, one of the fellows that drove that car one morning--we had five bays in that garage. He walked in one door, got in the car, and backed right through the garage door. Well come and find out he didn't last very long, his name was Garfoot, John Garfoot. He was kind of, he fired me. So the guy that took his place was also a yard man. He did the same darn thing [laughs]. I said to him you got to leave those doors open. I don't know. Funny 01:08:00things happen like that. But none of those building were here, they had built the garage--well they had some little small garage, it wasn't where the present garage is but on the other side. When they built that new garage, why I can understand, I mean they walked in one bay and drove out the other one.

AP: Were those put up in the '50s, '60s, or--?

RL: Yeah, '50s I think.

AP: Okay.

RL: Well during the '70s--I retired in '77 so I--When was that bombing? I don't remember.

AP: '70.

RL: In '70. I was working with Chet Restler then, yeah, I was downstairs then. 01:09:00But I was home when that went off. Now one of the other things I did--Arnie Okkenen was working with timber mechanics at that time and he was assigned to go out to Washington, state of Washington, in the Weyerhaeuser forest out there and using a randomized system to pick out an area to go to and within that area pick out a tree to go to and within that tree to pick out a five foot bolt and cut that and get it back up on the road. Most of Western Red Cedar is down low 01:10:00around the creek. So I was chosen to go with him. I had no experience because that--I was out there 21 days and 17 days we had rain. And everything was wet and I didn't have the right kind of boots with me, they were slippery, and you fall, you walk over a lot of down trees, trunks and whatnot, and limbs of trees, foliage and whatnot. At the same time looking out for bears and whatnot. But Arnie was good at that, he could do that very well. I was a gofer more or less. But that was interesting. We only got one place we couldn't get to and I think 01:11:00we sent back 26 [bolts]. There was another crew of two guys working in Oregon doing the same thing and we--I think we only missed one bolt. We hired a sheriff to come with a jeep that had a winch on it because we couldn't roll that thing up over a bunch of fallen limbs and whatnot, up to a load that was quite high.

But now the other thing that I enjoyed doing when I worked with Bryan River--he designed and got the specs for making a prototype testing machine that we were interested in knowing how much movement under a what we call a dead load, a 01:12:00weight on a glue joint, when the transducer mounted between the specimen and what held it. This machine was to measure that movement in metric inches, which were oh nano-inches, you couldn't see the movement. We had an awful time. It was located down in the first floor, in the back, there was one room there that was like a humidity room, but it was emptied out and we used that to mount our specimen in this machine. Raleigh Company I think it was in Illinois was the one 01:13:00company who said they could build this machine according to Bryan's specifications. They built the machine and sent it here and I [pause]--I can't think of her name. There's a gal that was helping me. We soldered joints and whatnot and [attached] the transducers to the specimen and we checked it out, see that it was a tight fit, whatnot, a good circuit in other words. Well anyhow to make a long story short, when we checked the machine out, there was something wrong.

AP: Oh yeah, is this the one where you had to send it back over and over again?

RL: Yeah. That was--I enjoyed that because that was new.

AP: Change of pace.

RL: Change of pace, yeah. You know you see some numbers up on the machine and this is the metric system and my metric system didn't work too good up here so I wasn't always positive that what I was seeing is what I thought I should be seeing. I couldn't believe what I saw in other words, and I hated to go to Bryan, I didn't want to tell him well god I'm still kind of fuzzy about the metric system in these small dimensions, small numbers. So he'd come back and check it and sure enough it wasn't working. So we checked out all of it, we had 01:15:00to go through all of the connections that we had soldered and whatnot and they were all okay. So we called the company and they sent two men, they spent two days here and they said that one of the potentiometers on the machine wasn't working properly so they ordered two more. Well the new one that they put on the machine, instead of checking it out they went right home because I think they were charging a hundred dollars for each of them a day, that's two hundred bucks a day for those guys. Well we didn't have to pay it, they had to pay because the machine wasn't up to spec, but nevertheless.

We found out that that new potentiometer had been supposedly checked by the guy 01:16:00who signed the okay didn't perform right as it should either. So, [the two guys returned and] they took that out and put the other potentiometer that they ordered on it and it worked okay. But you had to know whether it was working or it wasn't working and that was kind of a challenge for me, but I enjoyed it. Then after I got through with that pretty much we had a box on top that [another] company built and that was supposed to provide a certain temperature, we could adjust it up or down. That wasn't giving us the right answers either. So that came from a different company so we sent the box back to them. Well we waited and waited and waited for it to come back and it didn't come back and 01:17:00finally Bryan wrote them a letter--or called them, I guess he called them. They hadn't even checked it out yet, the only thing they do to check it out is they put it in their oven then they know if the temperature of the oven is then the box should register that same temperature. Well they found out it didn't so they made some changes and whatnot and then they sent it back to us. Well about the time we got it back on the machine and checked out the machine and we checked out the box then put the specimen in it and found out that the results that we were getting weren't right. So where do we go from here? Well a fellow who was working, Bob Evans his name was, and he did a lot of work at timber mechanics because they used a lot of electronic measuring devices. So we talked to him 01:18:00about it. So he checked it out and--there goes the ambulance, they must have had an accident up there. That's three sirens that went by. He checked out the box and got some ideas of maybe what it could be. So what he did, he mounted a little battery fan inside the box, that's all it needed. [laughs]

AP: All that work for--

RL: Yeah. I think it was almost a year before we got that thing working right. Then after I left, Arnie Okkenen took it over and they changed the whole setup down there and it looked pretty nice when I came back for a visit and checked it out. I guess it was doing what it was supposed to be doing. Oh another thing too 01:19:00was we found out that one of the problems was the voltage in the room. Did I write about that? It had to be a constant voltage we found out so we had to arrange for that. Then the temperature wasn't right because the janitor was opening the door at night and we had to put a lock on the door. Oh boy, talk about--But you're measuring stuff that's in very, very small numbers and it didn't take much to change it. Yeah.

AP: Well I'm pretty much out of questions that I brought. I know that you brought a list of things that you had thought of.

RL: Well one of the things that the Lab did that wasn't really publicized--and that's another thing. The Lab made publications but they went to other companies that were doing the work that involved the research or went to other research 01:20:00agencies, but very little of it got put in to paper. The Lindberg thing didn't--well that was the big thing. But there were a lot more things. Almost daily the silverculture would get pieces of wood that were involved with some accident or killing or something like that, to identify it and whatnot. That was never published. So there wasn't common knowledge about what kind of research that Lab was really coming out with and we did a lot of it and we haven't heard much about it since I retired. Still don't hear. I don't know what you guys are doing here now. And I think that's--should be publicized.

But one of the things that actually came out was we had a fellow by the name of 01:21:00Al Higgins here, roly-poly man like I am. But he used to tell stories, and you always heard the same story but with different names [laughs]. And he and Len Selbo used to go back and forth with stories and they'd keep you in stitches, very good. But Al worked down at that what we call the veneer lab and one of the things--I'm not sure whether this was a project or not, I think it was just Al's idea that came up out of the blue--but railroad ties, wooden ties, are all chipped and cracked eventually from the environment and different weights on it, whatnot, cracking it. And Al came up with a real simple idea of covering the top and the bottom of those ties with a piece of plywood, just gluing it down. And 01:22:00that was so, such a big savings for the trains at that time because they replaced a lot their ties. But Al Higgins, we called it Higgins Cap, that's its regular name. Of course trains are going to become more numerous now, it sounds like, so they're going to have to hold those rails down some way, I don't know how other than what they've already done. And I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they didn't use the Higgins Caps on those ties to keep them from chipping and splitting.

AP: Who knows, when they bring Amtrak back through Madison, maybe.

RL: Well they'd have to redo the railroad bed. I told you about the parties in 01:23:00Tripp Commons. We always had little prizes, we'd go around the neighborhood and get--down at the corner here, across the street, was a Rennobohm's drugstore around the corner. We had a fellow, [John] Black, he was in the paint lab, and he walked out of that drugstore one day and went right through the frontdoor, it was a glass door.

AP: Oh dear.

RL: [laughs]. That's--but there was no buildings around here like I said. Nothing. This was out in the sticks.

AP: Yeah?

RL: Even have all the nice intramural fields and that around.

AP: The hospital wasn't there?

RL: Nothing. Told you about Bill Alber's home. About Washington. Oh the paper 01:24:00machine, the original paper machine, was right here.

AP: Oh really? Just down the hallway?

RL: Yep, extension of this hallway. That was, I don't know what size it was, but it wasn't full-size obviously. But when they built the new paper building they put the new machine in, that was enlarged, the machine was enlarged, they had more to work with.

Oh this building, originally, when I came here, was heated by two big--my memory is going.

AP: Boilers?

RL: Boilers I guess you might say. Downstairs. And I told you about the food 01:25:00being stored down there during the scare for the Atom Bomb?

AP: Yeah.

RL: Well those I think were fed--the boilers were oil boilers if I remember right. Well they decided that that was an expensive way to heat this building. This building was like a sieve, it wasn't insulated or anything like that. So they built a new heating plant over here and they built that with oil and then somebody said well we ought to have coal, that's cheaper than oil. Fellow by the name of Miller was the head of that. So they changed that over to a stoker light system and they had siding put in, rail siding, and they brought the coal cars 01:26:00right on that siding. And they had a kind of like an elevator like and the doors would open and the coal would go down to be shoved right in to the burners. Well the first thing that happened in the first winter, the coal froze [laughs].

AP: Oh no!

RL: So we didn't get much heat.

AP: So it was cold here.

RL: And of course with this system it froze the coal wouldn't come out of the cars, you know. Boy that was fun. Then they changed it all over again back to oil--no, I guess they did go back to oil boilers, but then I thinks it's natural gas now. But that was a lot of fun. We had no air conditioners at first, but 01:27:00then later on we got the window jobbies. They made plans to air condition the whole building, central, I think it is air conditioned isn't it now central?

AP: Some of it. For instance this room is still window units.

RL: Yeah, but I know the new buildings are central air. But this place was hot.

AP: I can imagine.

RL: Well it's all pretty much concrete. Oh we had to take out war bonds during the War.

AP: Oh yeah?

RL: Of course we were on a fixed income. They wanted (you to take) one bond a pay period. That was a lot of money. But for the effort you know [laughs]. Well 01:28:00those are the extra things that I thought of, there's going to be some more stuff too I suppose.

AP: Well I would like to thank you then for taking the time to come back and talk with me some more.

RL: Yeah well you getting things you need?

AP: Mm hm.

RL: When they had the fiftieth anniversary we had set things up down in the veneer mill and we had people coming through. And I had a project on one of the big presses down there. They had a papier-mâché type of space vehicle that was all glued together. That was kind of a conversation piece. We had vats down there were stainless steel. We did a lot of work with corrugated aluminum that 01:29:00the aluminum bases or surfaces on the wing are held apart by corrugated aluminum and of course that doesn't have much surface to glue on to so we did a lot of work and while we used the back part of the veneer mill to set up these big vats of sulfuric acid and dichromate to submerge these corrugated pieces. I think they were 30 by 30. I think some of [the pieces] were quarter inch thick and some of them thicker than that. But that was a job that I had to do. That was a messy job and some of my clothes got kind of holey [laughs].

Another thing we had to do early on when I was working with Eichner--the 01:30:00University had people that were working with chemicals and most of the Lab was working with chemicals in one sort or another. You had to go to the University and get shots for--I don't know what it was--but they gave it a shot. And Herb was afraid of a needle and he says I'm going funny he says if I start fainting you have to grab me [laughs].

AP: Did they have--did you have facilities set up in case there was some incident with chemicals?

RL: Oh yes, but not like it now.

AP: No?

RL: You've got these water fountain things, that eye wash--we didn't have that. Most of the time you went to [Soper?] and he'd wash out your eye or whatever you needed and take care of it. I had mercury in my thermometer that fell and broke. 01:31:00That room was off limits all the rest of the day, it was contaminated, and they came in with baking soda and I don't know what else to decontaminate it.

AP: Well thank you.