Interview with Robert Maeglin

AP: Good afternoon today is Wednesday February 13, 2008, and I am Allison Page with the Oral History Program, and I will be interviewing Bob Maeglin

BM: Maeglin.

AP: Today. Bob if you want to go ahead and ah talk about your, your pre-Forest Products Lab history, your previous education, employment, what you did before here?

BM: I went to um school at Iowa State University in the forestry program and while I was going to school there, I had applied for a job here at the Forest Products Lab, and so I came out of school here. While I was in school I also worked for Potlach Industries out in Idaho, but that was a summer job and then I came up here and also working a summer job the first year. And ah after the 00:01:00first year I went back to the University of Iowa to study business administration and I didn't do too well in that and so I asked to come here to the lab and I came back and stayed.

AP: What year was that?

BM: I came in 1961, the first summer that I came up here.

AP: And what kind of summer work did you do that first summer?

BM: I was a part of the wood quality division and we were working on a wood density survey in the western part of the country and I worked on that, in that area, for, for about ten years. We surveyed all over the western part of the United States taking samples randomly for testing the different areas of the 00:02:00country for the density of various species of wood. We began with Douglas Fir and then we branched off into all of the major softwood species in the West. And in that work we were taking increment cores, which are pencil sized core out of the trees, sampling those for the density and looking for a range of densities. We also looked at a range of sizes of trees and after we had selected trees for the sampling we would have a crew that went back and cut trees and took discs out of the trees at the end of logs all the way to the top of the tree. And then in the winter we would come back to the laboratory and analyze the increment cores and the, the discs and then correlate statistically the relationship 00:03:00between the cores and the discs and then we would determine for an area of the country where the samples were taken. And, what do I want to say? We were statistically showing what the averages in the, the range of densities were. This work was correlated then with engineering tests of wood samples that we got so that they could say that the, the wood density was related to the strength properties of the actual wood samples.

AP: Who, who were the people that you were working with on these projects and, and what kind of products came from this kind of research?

BM: Well, as to who we were working with, Harold Mitchell was the division chief and the project under which I worked was headed up by, initially, Maxin Y. 00:04:00Pillow and after he retired, Harold Gus Wahlgren took over as the project leader, and so I worked directly with them. And there was, there was a, a pretty good crew of people that worked. Doctor Larry Lassen was part of that group and we had a number of students that first year um people like Kent McDonald and Dave Lewis, came to work here and Marshal Brunden and there was a technician Arnie Okkonen who was working with us. We traveled all over the West, all summer long getting these samples and.

AP: Did you enjoy your work?

BM: Oh it was wonderful, wonderful. Yes, we got to see, well I traveled in every 00:05:00state in the West except, for Alaska and Hawaii. But all the, the lower forty-eight states, the western states we worked in. And I, I said did this for about ten years, was an extensive project and you are asking what kind of product came out of it? It was mainly statistical reports for the industry so they could determine what kinds of strength wood came from which areas of the country.

AP: Do have any fond memories of, of this specific period the, those ten years out in the West, do you have any fond or exciting stories or with the people you 00:06:00worked with or

BM: Well, yes I, I failed to mention there was one very prominent person that I worked with early, Dimitri Pronin. And Dimitri was originally from Russia and he, he was quite a character that we worked with. You ask about special remembrances out West, yes we were working on the Grand Mesa, Colorado and we had hired a logger to cut the trees down. And he had felled one tree in one direction and he says, "The next tree I fall, I will fall in the opposite direction." And I went to de-limb the tree he had first felled, it was a Spruce tree and the branches held it well off the ground and I was up on the tree cutting the branches off with an axe when I had something say to me look back and I turned and looked over my shoulder and here came that tree that was 00:07:00suppose to go the opposite direction. If you've ever run through the air you'll know what I did, I ran through the air on an incline plane and landed on the ground. I dropped my axe first of all and then ran in the opposite direction of the tree and as I hit the ground, the very tip of the tree brushed my back. I was kind of ram-rodding the crew that day and I simply said, "Were going to take a couple hours off and recover from this." So it was pretty exciting.

AP: So could you describe maybe a typical day during that time period, kind of what you did in the morning, afternoon, what kind of?

BM: When I first started I was on the increment core crew, we would go out and 00:08:00we had a range of diameters of tree that we were to select. And we would find as many as we could of a given diameter tree and then we would take increment cores from those. And after we had collected the full range of diameters we would go back into the motel where we were staying. We had a portable oven and we would go in and dry these cores and we carried a, a balance also, scales, and determined the specific gravity so that we could determine a range of specific gravities for a range of diameters. And then when we had selected the trees we wanted, we went back into the field and flagged those. This was the first year. Then the crew came behind us that would cut the trees down and select the discs out of the trees. These would be cut every eight feet all the way to a top, I 00:09:00think were four inch top of the tree. And they would bag these discs and ship them back to the Forest Products Lab. In later years we combined, or combined the jobs and one crew did all of the jobs so we would stay in the field after we had selected the trees, the next day we would go out with a logger and cut the trees and select the discs.

AP: So you did that from 1961 or so until nineteen, early 1970s?

BM: Yeah, by the nineteen seventies we were working in the South and also the Northeast and lake states, taking samples from trees in those areas.

AP: And after that, after that work that time, that ten-year period, what did 00:10:00you then do in terms of work?

BM: Well, I was working on a PhD, at that point in time and I was relating soil and growth conditions to the structure of Red Oak trees, this was done in the Eastern part of the country obviously. And so I sampled trees all the way from New York down to North Carolina and then across to Arkansas and Missouri, and then back into Wisconsin. And there I was looking at the anatomy, microscopically looking at the anatomy of the wood of these trees, and relating it to what we call site conditions, soil, moisture, temperature and of these things that go into site. And that's what my PhD work was but it was done here 00:11:00at the laboratory and reported as a laboratory report.

AP: Was that for the University of Wisconsin then?

BM: No, actually I was, I was a student at the University of Michigan at that time, this would have been in '69 through '74 that I was doing that, but also at the same time doing the remainder of the wood density work here at the laboratory.

AP: And after the wood density project, what did you then do once you were done with your PhD?

BM: Oh I was, as I was finishing up my PhD, and sitting in the laboratory working on the, anatomy looking through a microscope, one day one of the upper echelon people came into the laboratory and said to me, "Bob we're, we're going 00:12:00to cut out this kind of research here at the laboratory and I think you'd better look for employment elsewhere."

AP: How did you feel about that?

BM: Well, I was kind of devastated. Just, just about to finish my PhD and, and I thought, you know, I was going to be in a pretty secure place. And, and so immediately I began applying for positions throughout the Forest Service, because there are research stations all over the country. So I applied to all of them for a position and it wasn't successful and then I began looking at other options, and I saw a job opening at the, at Iowa State University, my alma mater. And so I applied for that position and went down and interviewed, I was told when I finished the interview that there were only two candidates and I stood a better than fifty-fifty chance of getting the job, said they would get 00:13:00back to me in a week. Oh ten days went by and I heard nothing, and I finally called and they said, "We're sorry, but the deans of the university said this other candidate, who was an Egyptian, was desired because he could speak Arabic." So I was pretty deflated at that point. But the same day, the very same day, Hiram Hallock and Erv Bulgrin who were in the sawmilling project, came to me and said, " Bob, the work you've been doing on anatomy," and I'd also looked at growth stresses, "would tie in very closely to our research in sawmilling."

AP: And that was here?

BM: That was here at the lab. Same day I got refused by Iowa State. And so I then went to work in the sawmilling project and worked in that project from, I 00:14:00think it was about 1975 until 1986.

AP: If you could describe a little about working on the sawmilling project, and the typical day, the products that you did, and that kind of, who you worked with?

BM: Yeah. Hiram Hallok, was literally a genius, he had done quite a bit of work on growth stresses, himself, and he had developed a method of sawing, which was to saw through a log, just one cut after another, just like slicing bread, lengthwise however, and then drying the wood. And so I was asked to further this by looking at growth stresses in, in studying the anatomy of wood, especially 00:15:00the hardwoods. I had to look at the formation of various kinds of cells that would react to various growth stresses, and when I speak of growth stresses I'm talking about wind, light, a tree leaning and so on. And so I was relating those growth stresses to the sawing method and the positioning of a log on a sawmill to determine how to cut it so that we would minimize the stresses in the wood. Hiram had determined that if we dried these, we called them "flitches," it would remove some of the stress that would cause warping in lumber.

We were looking primarily at structural lumber and we thought we should look at 00:16:00hardwood trees. Now hardwoods are not necessarily hard wood, but they're broadleaf trees. And we, we looked at a number of them. We looked at Yellow Poplar from the Southeast, we looked at aspen from the lake states, we looked at Red Maple from the Northeast states. I think I did work on Basswood and then we finally decided we would try some Southern Pine and also Red Pine from the lake states.

It was phenomenal. One day we had the director, or not the director, the chief of the Forest Service come and the then division chief said, "Can you give him a demonstration?" And I said, "Yes." He said, "Now if you give him a demonstration and it doesn't work you're in big trouble." And I had a crew of men that worked 00:17:00in the, in the carpenter shop and in the sawmill that helped me that day. And we ran through a saw, green flitches, and the outcome was warped board, warped, we were cutting studs, two-by-fours. We ran through the dried flitches, that we had dried after cutting, and the pieces came out as straight as an arrow. And we did a lot of work on this and we showed the industry that this was a very viable way of making structural lumber.

But in the years at the Forest Products Lab we looked at the implementation of research done here and it generally took about thirty years before the industry would apply it. And so, when we tried to talk the industry into doing this, we 00:18:00didn't get any good response at all. However, we did get them to sample in the Southeast, I think it was Georgia Pacific, that tried it at one of their mills and they produced Yellow Poplar studs and put them out with some carpenters and the carpenters came back and said, "If we could get studs like these, we would love it for two reasons." One was the stability, the quality of them. The second was, they didn't get splinters from them because the hardwoods are structurally, completely different than the, the softwoods. But the industry never, never tried it. There was a company out of Canada that did and, again Georgia Pacific imported a lot of these, these were Aspen studs, and they got the same response 00:19:00from those.

During the time that we were working on this, we had a builder here in the Madison area that was working with the engineering group, and the engineering group was testing all of this material as we manufactured it. And this company built a couple houses on the west side of Madison with Yellow Poplar studs and were very, very happy with it. I think the houses still stand. And when we were working on aspen studs, we were looking for someone to build, and a friend of mine, out southwest of Madison, was building a youth retreat on a farm and they wanted to build a building for this youth retreat. And they said that they would be happy to build a building and so they did out of aspen studs and that 00:20:00building still stands and is very good quality.

Then, toward the end of this project, we were working with aspen from the western states and we went to Albuquerque, New Mexico and had a company down there that, that sawed and dried the material and made studs. And the Forest Service, and I can't remember which district it was on there in New Mexico, the Forest Service built buildings. Roger Tuomy at that time, in engineering, had developed a house design, and I'm trying to think of the name right now, it was [truss-framed] where they, instead of building trusses for the roof, they built a whole cross-section of a house, or a building, with the, the studs, stud walls and floor trusses. And so down there in New Mexico we built--boy I wish I could 00:21:00remember the name of that--we built facilities down there, buildings for the Forest Service out of those aspens. I don't know now what happened with them, I presume they're still standing and doing quite well.

But during this time, because we were able to show the chief of the Forest Service that this was a viable method, I got to travel all over the country and give a lot of talks on, we called it SDR for Saw, Dry, and Rip, so we were sawing these flitches, drying them. We dried them with high-temperature drying. And at that time I, I can't pass up giving Sid Boone a lot of credit, cause Sid 00:22:00worked with me, he was in the drying project, and he did all of the drying for us. And we did high-temperature drying and conventional drying for the given species. And we tried all kinds of things, I--some of the species that we, we tried also sycamore and I think even basswood. So it, it was an exciting period of time and that, that lasted as I say from about '75 when I started on the project, and then finalized it in about '86.

AP: Well, it sounds like the, the method that you guys were developing here was obviously very good method for, for the industry but for some reason they decided not to be interested. Why do you think that is?

BM: The industry generally is like most people, they want to be the first, 00:23:00second, but never the first, first. And so they're not willing to stick their neck out to try something. I had--an aside--one day, I got a call to come down to the lobby to meet a fellow and he was working up in northern Sauk County here in Wisconsin. And he said, "I, I got your publication on aspen studs by SDR." And he said, "I wanted to talk to you about it." And then he began to tell me that for years he and his sawmill had live sawed and cut these flitches and stacked them for drying, and then when he got calls for various size products, then he could re-saw those flitches into studs or, or other structural material. He says, "It works! I've tried it for years, I've done this for probably twenty 00:24:00years." So it really wasn't anything new, but the main thing is that in the publications we described the technical aspects of why wood warps and how you can overcome that warp and that's the main thing. And we were working with something that had been known for a long while.

AP: Did you do a lot of publication work while you were at the lab or for the Forest Service in general?

BM: Oh yeah. Yeah. In my, my career here at the lab, which was twenty-eight and a half years, I had over sixty publications, technical publications.

AP: I, I think you mentioned at one point working in international forestry. Do you want to say a little bit about that?

BM: Yes. Yeah, in 1986, I think it was in 1985, the Forest Service had offered 00:25:00an early out, sort of like General Motors is doing today. And I had applied for it, and then the director came to me and said, "Bob were going to establish a team to look at the forest products industry in Latin America. Would you be interested in joining them?" And I thought this sounded pretty good.

First of all, the first thought I had was maybe we'll get to travel. So I didn't take that early out and I stayed with the lab from '86 until '89 when I did retire. But during those three years a crew of us, there were initially five of us, Jim Laundrie was the leader, and there was Lee Jovick and Sid Boone and Ron Wolfe and myself; that were involved in this. And we began by going to 00:26:00Washington and talking to the international group there at the Forest Service headquarters. And they had agreed that this would be a good thing for us to do. Our intent was to go into Latin America and find out what the status of the industry was, what the status of research in forest products was. And so we began, Jim Laundrie was about to retire, and once things were kind of organized, he did retire, and the other four of us began to travel. And we went to Brazil and we went to various research facilities and talked with the people, got the status of what they were doing and, and the level of technology and so on. And 00:27:00we also visited a lot of industry. We went from there to Ecuador and did the same thing. We eventually visited--in those countries I went to Chile, we went back to Venezuela, we went into all of the countries except for Panama and Nicaragua and El Salvador in Central America and into Mexico, did the same things.

At the end of this period we wrote a book on the status of the forest products industry and research in Latin America and it was a, a sizable volume, and we did a lot of literature searches, and categorized by various disciplines. And the disciplines we had were, Lee Jovick was in wood preservation, Ron Wolfe was 00:28:00in engineering, Sid Boone in wood drying, and of course I was in sawmilling and wood quality areas. And so we did extensive literature searches and we published this book with citations and then we came back with a bibliography of all of the literature citations that we had, so it was an extensive work and we had a lot of interest in the first years. I don't know what happened because I retired in '89 and, and left, but we had a lot of people wanting to see this, these documents and to review them and to comment on them and learn from them perhaps, I hope.

AP: What type of industries did you visit and what kind of things did you see or people that you talked to while you were down in South, Latin America?

BM: Well, we went with the disciplines, we, we went to sawmills, we went to 00:29:00veneer mills, we saw pulp mill or two and in the research facilities we went to universities, to governmental facilities comparable to the Forest Products Laboratory. We saw some industry research facilities. So those were the primary areas that we, we went to look at. And we saw all levels of industry, we saw from the most primitive sawmills and so on, all the way up to the most modern of facilities.

AP: And how, how do you feel that the Forest Products Lab back here felt about your work down there?

BM: Well they.

AP: Or how it was perceived?

BM: Well I think that they saw it being perceived very well. I might mention, in 00:30:00addition, I was working with Gary Lindell who was in--on the ch--the Director's staff at that time and . We were also coordinating visits of scientists from these various laboratories and universities to come here to the Lab. And we had quite a large number of them that came to study here, to evaluate the work we were doing, and then to return home to hopefully upgrade theirs, in areas where they were deficient and also to bring some of their good ideas here because not everybody's a dummy. These people were pretty brilliant people.

AP: Do you remember any specific projects that you worked on with the, the visitors from Latin America? When they came up here?

BM: Oh we had some that came to work with the drying project, some with the engineering project. I don't recall that any come--I must not have been persuasive, I don't remember any of them coming to work on sawmilling. I, I think those were the, the main, of course those are the main areas that we were representing.

AP: So after, after you were done with that project in '89 do you want to describe a little bit of your, maybe your last year or so with the Forest Products Lab and what made you decide to retire.

BM: Well, I, I decided to retire cause I had turned fifty-six years of age and I had thirty years of federal service even though I had only worked here for eight 00:32:00and ha...eight, twenty-eight and a half years I was in the military. So I was looking for other opportunities and other avenues to work in. But during the last year I would say my time was primarily spent on completing this document on the status of Latin American industry and research. And also at that time coordinating visits of foreign scientists to come to the lab.

AP: Do you still, do you stay active with, with the Forest Products Lab or is that?

BM: Well I was for, for four years after I retired I went into consulting. And the former director of the Laboratory, Bob Youngs, called me one day and said, "There's an opportunity to got to work over in the Philippines with the United Nations, at the forest products research institute there in the Philippines." 00:33:00And so for four years, I went a month each year over there. Primarily because of my work on this SDR, because they wanted to design houses built from small timber and we were looking at a low-cost housing study.

They had worked on a wood fiber cement board over there, done in very, all the way from very primitive methods up to very sophisticated methods. And then we would design--during that time we designed houses using these small timber, or small log timbers, and paneled with the wood cement board. If you're familiar 00:34:00with the tropics, you know that, that there's a big problem with the termites and decay. Well, we were looking at species of wood that were resistant to both, for the solid wood portions, and the wood wool cement board is impervious to fire and insects and decay. And after four years we, actually had the president of the Philippines come to Manila one day. A normal house in the, in the Philippines, in most tropical areas, is built of either mud bricks or cement blocks, and in the Philippines it, they were cement blocks and it generally took about six months to, to build a building. We built one of these demonstration 00:35:00houses in eight hours there in the Philippines. We first of all had a cement platform for it put in, but other than that we put up the house in, in eight hours. It was pretty impressive to President Ramos who was president at the time. But that came out of the Laboratory, the SDR work. And then a couple of scientists came from the, the, FORPRIDE [Forest Products Research and Development Institute], they called it over there, to the Laboratory and worked with the people in the particle board area, looking at cement, wood fiber cement board. So there was connection between my consulting work there and the Forest Products Laboratory.

AP: That sound very exciting, do you have any specific memories about, besides the President of, coming?

BM: Yeah, the most exciting was, I was there about three months after Mount 00:36:00Pinatubo erupted. And I saw the absolute horrific devastation that the eruption of that volcano caused. In the city of Angeles I saw the spire of the cathedral sticking out of between forty and fifty feet of ash. And the people's homes were buried, people lost homes, they lost areas--the Aeta people are, are native aboriginals there, they were displaced from the mountains and it was, it was just terrible. But it was a very interesting time over there.

AP: Did you make any close relationships with anybody in any of these projects that you particularly remember?

BM: Oh yes, yes I did. But it's most interesting--and this is no condemnation of, of people from tropical areas, but I've tried to communicate with a lot of 00:37:00them and have never gotten an answer. Maybe I wasn't welcomed, I don't know.

AP: Here's an interesting thing, do you feel that your work has left a mark on the Forest Products Lab, the USDA Forest Service in general or beyond?

BM: All I can say is I hope so. As I mentioned, you know most of the work done here is done to advance industry in the United States, the wood--Forest Products industry. And as I said the history shows that it takes about thirty years to inaugurate things and so thirty years haven't passed since I finished some of my work so maybe it will come to pass. I would back up a little bit into the 00:38:00sawmilling project--and I mentioned Hiram Hallock--Erv Bulgrin was a project leader and Hiram was a principle scientist. And Hiram developed a methodology for sawmilling that was called the "Best Opening Face." He did a lot of geometric studies on the geometry of a log and determined--using a computer program--which face on the log should be the first one cut by the saw. This was almost immediately taken up by the industry--it was one of those rare cases where it wasn't delayed for thirty years. And the industry told us that they saved literally millions, multi-millions of dollars because of this work. And it 00:39:00was just phenomenal. So that, that came out of the sawmilling project, however, that was before I joined it. Everything went downhill from there.

AP: Well, we're getting close to the end of the interview, at least as far as the questions that I have. I guess if you have any remainder stories or memories or comments about the Forest Products Lab in general, or about the departments, people that you worked with, anything that you'd like to add?

BM: I would say that when I came to work for the Forest Service, Forest Products Lab in 1961, it was the best agency in the whole U.S. government. And I'm not bashful in saying that, and a lot of people said that. There was more 00:40:00camaraderie, more esteem among the people in the Forest Service. By the time I retired a lot of that had eroded, and it wasn't nearly as good as it was in the early days. At the Forest Products Laboratory there was a great deal of, of interaction among the various scientists, and the technicians, and the laborers in the lab. It was an area--well let me give you an example. When I first came the lab, there was a dress code. We as scientists were expect to wear a white shirt and a neck tie, and dress pants. Or a suit even. In the camaraderie, we often had outside activities and one time the men's group from the lab was going 00:41:00to have a pit-barbeque and Hiram Hallock at that time was building a house on the Westside of Madison and he volunteered to have us dig a pit and--he had a lot of slab wood from a sawmill and we built this pit. I have pictures of the crew working all in white shirts and neck ties, working on building this fire and getting this pit ready for a barbeque. So a lot of things changed--by the time I retired there was no dress code to speak of and things had changed pretty dramatically.

AP: Do you still keep in touch with anybody here? Or former colleagues?

BM: Yeah I, I now live about seventy miles from Madison so occasionally I'll come down--some of the group has a meeting once a month and I'll come down and 00:42:00meet with them. Very sad thing recently I attended a funeral of a wife of one of the fellows here at the Lab and there were a lot of FPL people at that funeral. So we get together occasionally and--or I should say I do, the other get together regularly. They live in town or nearby.

AP: Anything else you would like add or comment on?

BM: I'd just back up to one thing.

AP: Sure.

BM: You see I have a little green book here, it's federal supply service. Came out of the storeroom here at the lab. When I first came to work, the first summer, Dimitri Pronin, this Russian fellow, was in charge of the new people that were coming in and he was describing the work that we had to do. And he 00:43:00told me early on, he said, "Bob, go down to the supply room and get one of those green books and make notes and observations." And so for the first number of years, on all of my travels and, and the work that I did around, I kept very good memories. And as I showed you when I came in, I was--I've been working on my memoirs and I've been going through that and, and writing in my memoirs from that book and it's, it's a marvelous thing.

Dimitri was a very special man. He stood about 6'4", I think at the time he probably weighed in at 300 or more pounds, big ox of a man, had a heavy German accent. I thought he'd maybe he'd have a Russian accent but he didn't. And he 00:44:00came over here after the Second World War. Dimitri many times would sit down with us, when we were supposed to be working, and tell stories of his experience through the Second World War. He escaped during the Russian Revolution and traveled to Turkey and then to Czechoslovakia and finally to Poland. He and his family were separated and he eventually came here to the Forest Products Laboratory. As a matter of fact he was instrumental--I was looking to work on a master's degree and he had a friend, Serge Wilde, who was a professor at the university in forest soils, and he got me into the forest soils program to study and get my master's degree. So he, he was an exceptional person. And I think 00:45:00anybody that you talk to that knew Dimitri would say he was a extremely exceptional individual.

And while I'm talking about other individuals, Frank Freese was hired by Harold Mitchell into the wood quality division to do statistical work. And Frank was an exceptional statistician--as a mater of fact, he went to Iowa State University and was among the initial people who developed scientific statistics. And Frank came here to work with us. I got to know Frank and he became my statistical mentor, but he also became an editor for me. And one of the things that he emphasized to me, early on, was "Bob, we are writing our reports for people who 00:46:00may be only at an eighth grade level." He says, "Write in very plain terms." And I tried my best to do that and I think if you look at any of my publications you'll see that I tried to keep it at a ground level. It was interesting because later on as I was being reviewed for a promotion one time, one of the people on the staff, or on the peer review committee, said, "We can't promote this fellow he doesn't write at a technical level." And he made comment on my review. He said, "It's better to use ten technical words than two simple, understood words." I didn't get promoted that time. I got promoted later, I did very well.

AP: Okay, well I'm done with questions and I want to thank you again for coming out and talking with me.

BM: You're most welcome.