Interview with Ronald Wolfe

LB: Alright today is Wednesday, September 24 and my name is Lauren Benditt and I'm here with Ron Wolfe who's going to tell us a little bit about his experiences working at the Forest Products Lab. I guess to start us off, if ah you could give us some insight into your background, what prepared you for work here, what was your education, what was your interest in forest products, that sort of thing?

RW: Well you can say that I started out in Pennsylvania and I did--during high school--I worked in light-frame construction and I also was brought up more in the agricultural farm areas of Pennsylvania--northeastern Pennsylvania. And ah when I initially got out of high school I went to college at Penn State University. I started out in School of Forestry. While I was in the school of forestry they said I should change my major and get over to what they call wood 00:01:00science and technology and then I had a professor who said that I should put more emphasis on the engineering. So I went to the school of civil engineering at Penn State and I was--my degree was still wood science and technology but a minor in school engineering from Penn State. After Penn State I went to Colorado State University where I also went into the school of forest and wood sciences, but there again my minor was in engineering mechanics and so when I got out of school at Colorado State--course this was in the early '70s and there was a sort of a recession going on at the time, a lot of these companies didn't really want to pay the money for PhDs. I went to a few interviews with a friend of mine who had gotten a PhD. I got thirteen offers and he got two offers for jobs and of course that kind of discouraged me from going on and finishing my PhD work and 00:02:00so I quit then because there were a lot of job offers.

And I took a job with a company called Automated Building Components, they were located in Miami, Florida. Automated Building Components basically was a truss plate manufacturer but that plate manufacturer also manufactured all the presses and did all the engineering design for timber trusses for light-frame housing. So a lot of my background then, up to that point was basically training in engineering, and my background as far as the work that I had done before, I had worked in the housing area. And so I worked with Automated Building Components for about--actually only about two years.

After Florida, which I really didn't like Florida at all and I had told them if I had to live there I didn't want the job but they told me I only had to be there for maybe six months training. But the thing is, is after that I was moved 00:03:00out to Los Angeles. Here again I was from the hicks of Pennsylvania and all this was sort of culture shock living in Miami and then living Los Angeles. Then I was in Los Angeles for maybe four months doing research for the company down there developing a machine for doing testing of trusses. Then they shipped me up to Sacramento, which wasn't too bad and I started working with companies where we were setting up the company to build trusses so basically we worked on some preliminary designs and then set the presses up for them, get the plant rolling. And that job entailed a lot of travel though, not only did I travel in California but I was traveling throughout the Midwest. One of the places that I happened to stop while I was traveling through the Midwest was the Forest Products Laboratory. I had a job in Iowa and I figured well while I was in Iowa--well throughout my career in forestry, my education, I had heard about the 00:04:00Forest Products Laboratory because the Forest Products Lab was a, it's a world renowned laboratory for doing research in this area, a lot of the work that I had done actually for my masters thesis, a lot of the resource that I used came from Forest Products Laboratory. So I was anxious to see this laboratory for myself and when I stopped here--the time I stopped here I had a friend who was a teacher in Pennsylvania and he was thinking about taking off for the summer and going to Europe and I was kind of getting tired of being on the road with Automated Building Components so I told him well I think I was just going to quit and then decide, I was either going to go back to school, get my PhD or I would stop and maybe see if there was a job available at the Forest Products Laboratory. So when I stopped here I talked to a man by the name of Alan Freas who happened to be at that time he was the A.D. (Assistant Director) for engineering and he said well he'd hold a job for me when I got back from Europe. 00:05:00So my friend and I went over in Europe, spent a summer over there, and then I came back here I started working at the Forest Products Lab in the engineering wood products division.

LB: What year was that?

RW: It was 1976--'74 excuse me. Yeah fall of '74.

LB: To go back just a little bit. You said when you went to Penn State you were originally in forestry and then were sort of told to switch over to wood products?

RW: Yeah wood science and technology.

LB: Wood science and technology. Well, one, what made you interested in forestry in the first place and two, why do you think they told you to switch?

RW: Well, first of all, being somebody raised in the farm area one thing I 00:06:00decided when I got out of high school--because I didn't want a desk job--I wanted to be out in the outdoors. When I got into the school of forestry my better grades were in the things like the physics and the chemistry and math and not so much--there were other classes you take in forestry like dendrology, which is a lot of memorization of Latin names and not that I didn't--I mean I passed all the classes, but they felt that since my grades were a lot better in the area of the math and the physics, that--and I think they were also trying to get more students into the wood science and technology department. So they said they thought that I would do better if I went in that area rather than go into the forestry area. So that sort of changed my direction the first time, then I started taking some of those engineering classes and that sort of started 00:07:00changing my direction again because some of the engineering professors thought that I'd--well they thought--a lot of the people in engineering think you are wasting your time if you are dealing with wood as an engineered product because most engineering schools you will find teach engineering from the viewpoint of steel and concrete as these are manmade products, which are more control-processed, you know more about what material you have when you are working with steel and concrete. When you are dealing with wood you are dealing with nature's product and you pretty much have to deal with what nature hands you. So it's a lot more variable material, it doesn't have the same properties in all directions, it's what they call orthotropic so it's a lot more complex material and not one that a lot of structural engineers really like to use because there is a lot of unknown attached to wood.

So I kind of got switched around there a little bit and there's not that many 00:08:00schools that teach timber engineering so I figured well that's not really such a bad thing of learning how material that nobody else knows. And I think the material of wood being more complex really makes you look at material properties a lot more than somebody that comes up in steel and concrete. In steel and concrete you can pretty much treat these as an isotropic materials and the whole, the statics and dynamics is more or less just a straight physics, you don't have to worry so much about the material and designing with those.

LB: That's really interesting. Well, so you worked for a few years prior to coming to the Forest Products Lab. About how long were you?

RW: Well I worked for that company about--it was about two years that I worked for Automated Building Components. Then I came to the Forest Products Lab and I 00:09:00started out working in the area of glue then, my immediate supervisor--by the time I came here and by the end of the summer, I came and I interviewed with Alan Freas in the beginning of the summer and he was really basically taking over. He was about ready to retire and he was just subbing for somebody, Billy Bohanan, who happened to be in Washington at that time. But Billy Bohanan came back by the fall, by the time I returned. Alan Freas was about ready to retire and Russ Moody was then the head of the engineering division and so I worked for Russ Moody then and Russ's area--just like Billy Bohanan's--his real strength was in the gluelam (laminated) area. So I worked with Russ for a while doing work in the area of glue laminated beams.

Then because I had a background in housing, I also worked with the truss 00:10:00industry, the Truss Plate Institute, so we did some work on looking at truss performance and truss connections. I also worked with a fellow named Roger Tuomi, we did some work on timber bridges. One of the fun projects we did, we went up to Alaska and we worked up out of the Ketchikan office and we did tests of these large--these were logging bridges. Basically what they would do is they would just take these large trees and in Alaska you have Hemlock and Spruce trees that grow up there on those islands and they'll take these large trees--and at the time most of this was used primarily for pulp and paper and at the time there was also what was called the Ketchikan Pulp and Paper company and that was one of the major employers in Ketchikan. So, what they would do is they'd take these tree, many of them would grow to diameters of between three 00:11:00and four feet, these were pretty large trees and they would just drop them across these streams and you might have six logs that would be dropped across and then they would put shot rock--it was just rock that was dynamited out of a quarry--they'd put that over top of these logs, the logs would be cabled together to keep them from spreading. They'd throw the shot rock in and then they'd have two what were called brow logs and those were just on the sides of these--it's sort of like you might say handrails. These were just logging roads and they figured those bridges would only be used for maybe five years and then they'd be taken out. Well some of them were used a lot longer than that, but the problem was that none of them had ever been designed, they weren't load-rated, nobody really knew what the capacity was, they knew from experience that they would handle these trucks but they didn't know for how long they'd handle them or didn't know what kind of loads they could expect to put on them. So we spent 00:12:00oh about a month up there testing these logs and actually testing bridges.

One day we were out testing these bridges and we had this fellow that was a truck driver. He must have weighed 300 pounds and I had never actually seen him out of the truck before, he was always just driving the truck. But we got up on this one bridge and he was driving a dump truck that was full of rock that was--we were using that as our load for the bridge--we have him pull this truck out on to the bridge in certain locations and then we would measure deflections of the bridge as the truck would roll across. Well I was standing up on one of these brow logs one time, holding the rod; Roger Tuomi was on shore shooting the deflections as this truck came out. I was about mid-span when we started hearing some cracking and of course everybody started yelling get off the bridge, get off the bridge! And of course this truck--I just heard the log cracking, I 00:13:00turned around I saw this guy that we always called Tiny, he apparently couldn't get the truck door open and he actually crawled out through the window of that truck and I guess I'd never thought he could move that fast but he actually crawled out of the window, got off the bridge, and the brow log, or the one end string of the side string the truck was sitting on, one set of wheels sitting on, broke and the truck leaned back and it leaned against one of the brow logs. So the truck never actually fell into the river. Tiny did get it off. Of course we were glad there were no ecologists sitting around watching us because we had to dump a lot of gravel into that salmon stream and this was the time when the humpback salmon were running up stream to spawn. But we did get it all cleaned out finally, but that was kind of a unique experience doing a lot of that work up there.

Of course, we also had kind of a bad reputation up there because we were government employees and we set up this fancy test area in a quarry in order to 00:14:00test a log of these log stringers and there was a lot of people around there wondering what in the world these government employees were dong up there testing logs, basically breaking them and then taking all these logs they thought were good logs and we were breaking them all in half and just leaving them with the rubble. It was a unique experience that people who live in Alaska are kind of a different breed of people and it was very interesting to kind of be in that culture for a month and meet some of these people.

LB: So you were up there for a month?

RW: Yes.

LB: This was soon after you started?

RW: Yeah, this was probably a year, year and a half after I started here. I think one of the reasons I got the opportunity to go up there is because I didn't have any strong, close ties here and so it wasn't difficult for me to take off and go up there for a month.

LB: Right, right. Well maybe to go back to when you started. Do you have any memories of your first day or right at the beginning of your time here?

RW: Well I suppose like anybody, first day is a little bit uncomfortable because you are entering into a new world. I guess one of the things that was always impressive is the fact that you go through school reading these reports by these people, these scientists that you never really get to meet but the reports all played a major role in the work that you did and you came to recognize these names almost as stars you might say. To finally to get to meet all these people was well somewhat intimidating I guess you could say, it's a matter--you are finally putting a face to a name and you might have read three or four reports by each of these guys and all of a sudden you get to meet and actually to them, 00:16:00it was very impressive at that point. I think that's one thing about going through school in the area of forestry and wood science is you really felt that you were very familiar with the Forest Products Laboratory and that it played a major role in your training up to that point and now all of a sudden you really actually get to meet the people that had done this research.

LB: Do you think that's a reason why it gets people interested in forest products and want to come work here basically?

RW: Yeah I would imagine a lot of the--when you get out of school your choices generally are you are going to go into teaching. Most anybody that goes in and gets the PhD, that's really about the only option you had at that time anyway, you either teach or now there are some companies that will hire PhDs. But PhD is somebody basically he's trained to be specialized in a certain area and 00:17:00generally will--most of the jobs that are available would be teaching at a university. So the Laboratory is one of the other options you had at that time, with the PhD is to come to the Forest Products Laboratory. So yeah I think there's a lot of people that go through school that way that learn about the Lab, but there is a lot of people working at the Lab that they didn't major in wood science and technology. Take a look, the Lab covers a broad range of research, some people were entymologists for instance at that time, we did have an etymology department here who studied insects. But, we always had plant pathology is another one. People that are chemists probably never even knew that much about forest products before they came to the Lab, but got hired because they were chemists.

So, I would guess maybe ten percent of the scientists that work at the Forest 00:18:00Products Laboratory actually had background in forestry and wood science before they came so I don't know if that was a major reason. It was something that drew me here obviously because this was the Mecca you might say of people in forestry and wood science, but I don't know how many other people were drawn to the Lab for that reason. They probably heard of it for other reasons. People in adhesives I'm sure heard about the Laboratory as far as research that had been done here and people that had been in pulp and paper chemistry for instance, a lot of those chemists would have probably heard about the Laboratory from some of the work they've done. So I'm sure that the Lab, the reports that are written from the Laboratory, they address a broad spectrum of disciplines and so I imagine that through reports, through scientific societies, it's the work that 00:19:00has been published by the Forest Products Laboratory that drew people here.

LB: Well maybe to go back then. So I guess you told me a little bit about your first day or your first impressions, what about a typical day? Did you have a typical day here or was there a typical day?

RW: I think the typical day is the same as it is just about any place you work I mean it's kind of a--it get's to be--well for me it was like a 7 to 5 workday. Try and come in early to beat the traffic rush and then you'd probably stay around till 4 or 5 o'clock trying to get your work done. But I would say that one of the things about working for the Forest Products Laboratory wasn't for me anyway, it wasn't the same thing every day. It wasn't like working in a factory. 00:20:00You had a number of different areas that you always worked in, one area would be codes and standards for instance, there was a lot of our work where we dealt with the development of standards for product development and for testing. Part of our work would have been where we actually would be writing research proposals and then we would get money to do specific research. And so you always have testing that you might have going on down in the mechanics lab and then you've got work that you are doing as far as just contacting people; as far as work that had to be done for standards, getting ready for standards projects. There's presentations that you had to prepare.

So you had a number of things that had to be done throughout the day and so you could break your day up and try and work on standards in the morning and your research in the afternoon and maybe try and get some of these reports. You also 00:21:00then always had a pile of papers that had to be reviewed for other people, if you want to get your papers reviewed, you need to review quite a few papers for others and you are always being asked by refereed journals to--you know they'll be sending you articles asking you to review these articles to give back to them. So, it was one of those things where you always had more than enough to do and I can't say that it was ever boring, but at times it got to be a little frustrating at not being able to always catch up, there was always a pile, maybe four or five piles.

LB: So I mean you've already talked a little bit about one of your projects up in Alaska. Were there any other projects that really stand out as being particularly interesting for you?

RW: Well we did get into a lot of housing work. There's a number of projects in housing, one of them I had worked with Roger Tuomi on the development of the truss-frame house. The truss-frame house, when we were working on that, our purpose for getting into the truss-frame house--that's Roger's and mine--was primarily that one of the weak points in light frame construction was the connection of the roof to the wall systems. A lot of houses they get destroyed in heavy wind, one of the reasons they got destroyed was that the roof wasn't fastened down well to the wall system. The truss-frame system it was a composite truss that included a floor truss and a roof truss and the wall studs and they were all put together as one module and so each truss then was positively 00:23:00connected to the walls and to the floor unlike standard platform construction where you build your floor platform, you put the walls up, and then you set the roof on top of the walls. So this was supposed to be a more wind-resistant house. Now it had some other advantages too in that it made it easy to construct because this large truss with the floor truss and the roof truss and walls was all done in a plant somewhere under good quality control, shipped out to the site, and then the whole module could be just laid out on a foundation two feet on center. A couple of manufacturers started using this system, they claimed they could get the house up in a day and have it under roof, under cover, under lock and key in one day and so the whole roof, the whole frame, the building was up, all the sheeting was on and the doors were on by the end of the day. Now 00:24:00that really helped them and to set up their shop on the interior in order to do the finish work and so these houses went up a lot faster and they didn't require the skilled craftsmen that light-frame construction normally requires. So these guys could go out with a group of kids out of high school, one supervisor who knows how things are going, but basically it was just a matter of setting the trusses in place, spacing them correctly, and then putting sheeting on and nailing it down.

I was part of that work also in housing, I got an opportunity to go to a number of sites after these sites had been destroyed by hurricanes or tornadoes so we could look at the weak points on some of these conventional construction and trying to make recommendations for how they could improve that. One particularly interesting job that way was to go down after Hurricane Andrew hit Florida. We 00:25:00went down, spent about a week in Florida going around looking at houses and trying to determine why some of them performed well and why some of them didn't perform as well.

Then after doing that then we also got involved with some of the codes and standards in Florida. Actually Florida at that point, shortly after Hurricane Andrew, wanted to outlaw the use of oriented strand board for their roofing systems. It wasn't so much the problem with oriented strand board as it was a problem with the way people were using the oriented strand board--the fact that it wasn't really fastened down correctly. The code people and the people that were building inspectors did not really do a very good job of inspecting these building to assure that they met the requirements as far as fastening goes. So we got involved somewhat in those discussions trying to, in that case I think helped the forest products industry in saying that people need to recognize the 00:26:00problem wasn't a problem with the product, it was a problem with the way it was being applied. Then some research had to be done in order to be able to show them that these materials worked the way we said they would if they were applied properly. After that I went--tornadoes were a lot more interesting actually than hurricanes because a tornado is one of those storms that you really can't design against, any one square mile in Tornado Alley, there's only a one in 700 chance that you are going to get hit so the probability is so small that a house would get hit that nobody is willing to pay the 10,000 or 20,000 dollars extra to make that house tornado resistant. I'm not even sure if 20,000 dollars would do it because tornadoes can have very, very powerful winds and they are coming from different directions and so it would be difficult to do that. Basically the 00:27:00procedure in Tornado Alley is to try and build a safe room so you have one place where people could go rather than try and build an entire building. The building would have to be a concrete bunker and buried in the earth in order to really resist it, so it doesn't pay to do that. But it is very interesting to see what kinds of damage a tornado does to an entire town, you get some indication of the power of one of these storms. A lot of the damage though you also see a lot the damage that occurs during hurricanes it is really due to tornadoes that are spawned by the hurricane but the hurricane itself--Hurricane Andrew--there were probably 11 reportings of sighting of small tornadoes that actually hit some of those buildings so that's part of the reason for some of the damage.

LB: Interesting. So approximately how many different sites did you go to where 00:28:00tornadoes had hit?

RW: Well I only went to about three sites to actually. Barneveld was one of the big ones. Barneveld is a little town in southwestern Wisconsin that was pretty much wiped out by a tornado that came through there. Then there was a couple of towns in northern Wisconsin also. I never really traveled out of the state, we had enough damage here, then you get a pretty good idea of what's involved with a tornado. You also get a pretty good idea that it's probably not--it probably doesn't pay to try and design a house to resist these storms when you see how a tornado can move a house around on its foundation and in some cases just blow it completely off the foundation. I'm not sure what kind of--I think the power is just, it's almost overwhelming to see what those tornadoes will do.

LB: So was that one of the projects that gave you the most satisfaction when you were done with it or did you just find it to be a big challenge?

RW: It was a big challenge, yeah, I mean there were things that we did from there, we started doing research in looking at sheer wall performance after that. Then we did a study on roof systems looking at load distribution in roof systems. A lot of this all got tied in with a lot of the work on codes and standards, design standards, for light-frame. I suppose you could say it was somewhat of a frustrating job in that it was difficult to get funding to do the research on things that might have been outside of the box. Basically the way 00:30:00houses are built, if you take a look at--we build our houses as these rectangular boxes and whenever wind hits a rectangular box you set up turbulence around those sharp edges, the corners, the high stress points on any building, using curved corners, or at the ridge of the house, or at the eves. The only way you can really avoid some of that is to try and design these houses so you are not going to get these stress concentration points, you know that would say you want to build rounded corners, you want to build arch type roofs, you want to build domes. Those types of geometries would not be so suspect or so, I want to say, prone to damage in a heavy wind. But the problem with that is it's so far out of the norm that a lot of people really didn't want to. I mean it's kind of 00:31:00a risky type research, the type of thing I thought the Forest Products Lab should do, but to say that there will be an immediate market for it obviously you are not going to--you have a tough time selling people on trying to build aerodynamic roof systems, which are round or arched or domed. Our entire truss industry and the whole building industry is based on these prismatic or rectangular members, it's based on square boxes, not round. So it's difficult to try and get people to fund research to do something that they don't think the market is going to buy. I thought it was always interesting though if you take a look back at any research that's done at the Lab, anything that was ever--ever came to be popular, it took 15, 20 years from the time research was done to the 00:32:00time that these products really ever got totally accepted. So you always have to be kind of be willing to take some risk but it's one of those things of trying to appeal to the right people, write your research proposals so that you get somebody willing to fund it, but in many cases the funding, if it's coming through the government, some congressman has to be able to take that and sell that to people in congress, of course it's difficult for them to sell some of these ideas that they think might be a little harebrained or too off the wall for research.

LB: Well yeah I can see how that would be really frustrating. So was there a project that you worked on that maybe gave you the most satisfaction out of all the projects that you saw over your years here?

RW: I don't know that I can say there is any one that stands out. Yeah one of 00:33:00the last projects that I worked on was--I'm not going to say this was another one that I think was a little bit frustrating, I thought it was somewhat interesting. And that was, we have a problem with too much small diameter, round timber and that leads to very intense fires because of the fact that small diameter timber will heat up and burn much faster than large trees do. Over the years what has happened in the West with a lot of the harvesting, they'd harvest and they would clear-cut areas and then the area would get either replanted or naturally planted by Mother Nature. They would put this seed out and a lot of these would come up even age stands so you got a lot of small diameter--and especially when it was just allowed to reseed itself--came out very, very thick, 00:34:00very dense. Any one given area, acre, of land will produce just so much fire. Now it can either be a lot of small timber or it can be a few large trees, but the amount of fire that you get out is roughly about the same. But if you get a lot of small ones coming up it is very difficult and it takes years basically for some of these, for the competition, to kill off the weak and for the stronger ones to survive, you would be talking thousands of years for this thing, to by itself, come back in to a mature forest again where we've got some very, very large trees that would be more fire resistant.

So we have a lot of this acreage anyway where they had harvest the timber but didn't get very well managed, it wasn't like the southern plantations where people actually plant the trees, they plant them at even distances, they keep it planted and keep it thinned. In the west a lot of these are natural stands and 00:35:00so they got very thick, very dense--what some people call dog hair stands--of this small diameter timber. Now when that timber gets to be--if it's less than nine inches, generally sawmills don't generally like to deal with this small material because, especially if you are going to saw up dimension lumber, if I'm going to saw up dimension lumber out of anything less than ten inches in diameter, I might only get one or two pieces out of a tree and generally if you take a look at the geometry and you take a look at our commodity markets for two by four, two by six, two by eight; even if you try and mix in there some boards and some odd sizes, generally you are going throw away 40 to 60 percent of the material. You are only going to use maybe 20 or 30 percent of the fiber that's in the tree if you try and saw it in to the commodity market sizes. But if you 00:36:00use it in the round form, you could use the entire tree, you don't waste as much energy trying to saw it up in to lumber, you don't have a waste products, and you are actually using the best fiber because the best, the strongest fiber on the tree is generally the fiber that's on the outside of tree, especially in softwoods. In your softwoods the material that grows up, when the tree is very, very young is what we call juvenile wood, has different properties than a mature wood does. So after a tree gets to be about 12 to 20 years old it starts developing this what we call the mature wood, that's the fiber that have mature characteristics. So you'd be better off actually if you are going to use this small diameter, rather than trying to saw it up in to stud material, two by four, where you are going to cut off a lot of the better material and leave exposed a lot of this juvenile wood, you'd get better material and more efficient use of the material, less energy is involved in really trying to 00:37:00develop a product.

The problem is how do you use this small diameter timber, how can you get some value out of it. Now the Forest Service of course we had like fifty million acres of land that had this problem of small diameter timber, the U.S. Forest Service can't afford to go out and cut all these trees down and you know what would they do with them. So what we are doing is research to say well can we encourage some small entrepreneurs to go in there and harvest this timber, you know you give them a deal on going in and getting it, provided they take these trees out. Also you want to have them take it out somewhat selectively so they don't do a lot of damage to the soil around bigger trees, that they don't damage other trees when they are bringing their machines in order to get the stuff out. So you want to try and come up with some way that they can use these.

Well, a number of people were doing this in a number of different areas, obviously you could take this materials and you could make fuel wood out of it, 00:38:00so firewood. Another one is just chipping it up for particle board. The problem was that chips are only worth about 25 dollars green ton, firewood might be worth 40 dollars green ton, but if you took a look at even the utility industry, what they pay for utility poles, poles for distribution poles, those are not all that large, some distribution poles are less than ten inch diameter. But a pole, you could probably be talking, if you put it on the green ton basis, you probably would be talking 300 dollars per green ton, for poles as opposed to 30 dollars you can get for firewood or for chips. Now if you use this material structurally then, if you get beyond this idea that all our structural members have to prismatic, if you can get beyond the idea that you have to have uniform 00:39:00dimensions, which are obviously very nice to have everything a uniform dimension, but you need to start thinking about how can I use this round timber to form something where I don't need to have those constant dimensions. Or is there a way that I can even--is there way I can still use this in our conventional type of construction.

So we started doing some work in the engineering end saying well how do we engineer this. First thing we did was we started looking at the engineering properties of the small diameter timber and found out that the variability was very low compared to the variability of dimension lumber. Part of that was due to the fact that the strong fiber when you bend the member of round timber, you are bending, you are putting stress parallel to the fiber, which is along the outside surface of this round timber. If I take a tree, you know that all trees as they grow, they grow with a taper and if I start cutting this to make a flat side and make prismatic members, I have to cut through that fiber, I'm cutting 00:40:00through--I'm cutting the taper off, I'm cutting this outside the better fiber off and I'm cutting through the grain so that any piece of dimension lumber you have, has what we call diving grain, it's where you cut through the timber and the surface of it has a number of fiber that are coming to the surface at an angle around a knot. Also if you take a look at the fiber around the knot on round timber it's sort of like a rock in the middle of a stream, the way the water will flow around that rock, also the fibers on the outside surface of the tree grow around the knot so you have continuity. So, the stresses in these fibers kind of get distributed around the knot. If you take a look at a piece of lumber that has a knot through, with the diving grain coming up around the edges of the knot, you have stress concentration points. So if you bend the round timber to failure, it's not necessarily going to fail at a knot, but if you take 00:41:00a piece of dimension lumber that has a knot on an edge and it is going to fail at that knot. So you get a lot more variability. The variability of the round timber in bending strength anyway was about two thirds of the variability of some of your best graded lumber.

So you have these advantages then. You have the advantage of cost, energy cost, the production cost. You also had an advantage that it had less variability as far as strength goes. Alright, so our big hurdle then became well how do we deal with this round shape and how can we get people to use this stuff in the round. So we started building a number of examples, we built a gazebo, we have a gazebo that's here on the Forest Products grounds. We made trusses out of round timber, all the columns are all round timber. We built a bridge, as a matter of fact I'm still involved in a project up in Lodi (Wisconsin), we're building a bridge 00:42:00using round timber, it's part of the Ice Age Trail Foundation.

That bridge is got a couple of things, one of things is it's not only using round timber but it's using an invasive species for Wisconsin, the Black Locust. The Black Locust is the species that does not even have design values in the national design specification because it never grew straight enough and it had problems as far as trying to harvest lumber that nobody was interested in making commercial product out of it. But if you leave it in the round form you get the advantages of it, it's one of the most decay resistant natural species, it does grow like a weed, it is a weed. It's something, for my project anyway, it's been pretty good because I can get it for nothing, anybody will pay me, they'll give me all I want if I just cut it out of there so I've been harvesting this smaller 00:43:00diameter round Black Locust and putting it in--in fact I've got a couple of projects going on right now where we're using this structurally. So we did some tests here at the Lab to come up with design values for Black Locust and then we came up with some ideas of how you fasten this stuff together. I think that, that's probably one of the most challenging research projects I've had is coming up with connections. The weak point of any wood structure is in the connections and how do you connect one piece of round wood to another piece of round wood.

I had a project that we did with a company out in Washington, just north of Tacoma, they actually wanted to use peeler cores though for their project. A peeler core is what's left off over after they've taken off a veneer that they use for plywood and so those are generally uniform and at that point they were peeling these things down to four to six inch diameter, now they'll peel them 00:44:00down to even much thinner than that. But we were dealing with four-inch diameter peeler cores and these four inch diameter peeler cores, we tested those, now there again, now you're back in to a processed timber. In cutting that veneer off you are cutting off this taper again and so you are getting into something, which is much more highly variable. But we had to develop connections for that in order to use these in a space-frame application and we got working with an engineering company in Tacoma and built a space frame roof using these small round sections, which were basically a waste product. Now that we've done that project and seen how well that came out with a product which was highly variable and not very strong, if you were to take that same concept though, the same connector, you could put it on small diameter round timber and in trees where 00:45:00all you did is de-bark them, and in that case you would have something which is much less variable, it's not nearly as variable as the peeler core and here's a way that you could take these and put them in to a space-frame roof.

Now at this point then the next stage in this is to get a company interested enough in this to make a commodity connector because the prototype connectors are very expensive and in order to make it feasible you almost have to mass produce these so you need to get somebody interested in making the connection. But we do have a couple of different types of connections that we tried on that I think would be feasible but hopefully at some point in the future somebody will pick up on that and continue that research in order to get at the point that it would be something worth doing. But I think that we could change, we need to change an attitude in order to get people to use round timber. Anybody 00:46:00that sees this bridge up in Lodi--I mean I had one woman that went up and looked at, of course she told everybody that it wasn't the most attractive--trying to be nice--I mean obviously if you are use to seeing things that are straight and made with prismatic members, everything has nice straight lines to it, would think probably it doesn't look like you think it should. It's got a very rustic appeal and one of the problems with Black Locust is it doesn't grow very straight, it's pretty crooked so it's got a lot of crooked members. You look down a handrail--we just finished putting the handrail in--and we took a look at that and of course the handrail is just--waves all over the place. It's part of the character of the bridge and I think that it's an attitude issue. If you get use to seeing things that are always in a straight line and uniform, maybe you don't like the looks of something which is not so straight. But I think that 00:47:00once people get use to seeing things that are not always straight--I mean the indigenous people that lived here before us used nothing but round timber, they didn't use any sawn timber and I think even before that, you know, we learned to live with this round timber applications in a number of projects. If you go back and look at some of those Norwegian stave churches, a lot of those you use round timber. Take a look at some of those pictures of old rafter roof systems that used logs, those logs weren't straight. You know we learned to live with that but then once we started sawing things and the industry got involved in it; it's more of a marketing thing that says no it's not correct unless everything is nice, flat, straight, prismatic. So it's an attitude issue, I mean it's an interesting project in that you start thinking about the psychology of marketing 00:48:00as well as the efficiencies of Nature's products, some of them are I think we really--we detract from a lot of what Nature does by imposing our own preferences on how things should look.

LB: Well it sounds like for that you got to do a little bit of traveling around too. To Tacoma--

RW: Well not only that, we also did because a lot of work on round timber I also traveled in to South America, we did work in Brazil and Guatemala. A lot of that was involved with the destruction of tropical forests, of course people in the U.S. feel that this tropical forest is being destroyed and that could have a major impact on our weather, they are replanting a lot of those forests down there, right now soybeans is a big thing in Brazil, but there's just vast tracks 00:49:00of area. It's really so much shocking to go down and see how they have just cleared jungle out and as far as you can see it's just this straight, flat land that use to be nothing but tropical forest has now been all cut down and of course the nutrient, the soil, it's not all that good for planting they need to supplement this soil, the nutrient, constantly in order to be able to keep growing crops. There is a lot of fear that if somebody just finally gets tired of putting a lot of lime into this and a lot of nutrient in to this soil, that it would just turn it in to a desert. The way a tropical forest works basically is a lot of the leaves and things that are dropped from these trees supplies the nutrients which feed the tree and when you take the tree away and there's no longer dropping that in, rain comes along, washes that nutrient down the streams 00:50:00pretty quickly because it's not all that thick on the surface, and then nothing will grow. So that's an issue that's still unfolding as to what's going to actually happen down there. But we went down, my area, we had a number there was three or four of us that went on a project down there, some were chemists, I went down primarily for the engineering. We had people in preservative treatments where basically we were trying to talk to a number of research people down there. We went to a number of universities and then we actually went out and talked to people in the field. You know are there ways that they could use this material in housing because there are a lot of homeless people in these areas. Are there was that they could get some value added product out of these trees so that they wouldn't just cut them down and burn them in order to clear the land. So there again that's another interesting project in that you start to 00:51:00be introduced to many different cultures and perspective and it kind of opens your mind a little bit, makes you really glad you were born and raised in the United States, I have to say that, but it also makes you start to appreciate the fact that these people, the one that live in this environment and they are the one that really know the environment, and you really are the one going in and asking the questions as to why and is there anything we can do to help.

LB: So it sounds like you did a fair amount of traveling to do some field research. Did you also do traveling for conferences?

RW: Yeah well everybody went to--I mean that's the way you kind of get your research out there. I imagine you go to about two or three conferences a year, some of them are strictly forestry related, some of them are in the civil 00:52:00engineering department for instance there is the American Society for Civil Engineers, those are things where you actually--you go to those conferences and there's a small segment of those that deals with wood, a lot of it is steel and concrete, but you need to be able to mix these disciplines in order to be able to see what everybody else is doing because a lot of things that they do in steel and concrete that are applicable in wood. One of the major areas I think for wood to be going in is a more composite, what we called engineered wood products. A lot of those engineered wood products the way you would develop your design standards for wood has to be compatible with the way these engineers working in steel and concrete are working. So you try and use as much as possible the same models even though they don't fit exactly, you say well there's a certain amount of error involved but I need to make it easy for them to use this material. These guys learn these formulas for designing structures 00:53:00and they want to apply it regardless of the material they are using. So you have to say alright we need to make wood compatible with what these people are doing in steel and concrete. So you need to be aware of what people are doing and how they are designing these structures and then say how do I fit wood in to that.

LB: Great. So moving on to something completely different, we've heard that there were a number of social functions that the Lab sort of provided to its employees.

RW: Yeah.

LB: Were you involved in any social aspects of the Lab or how did the Lab affect your social life?

RW: Yeah actually I got involved in the--when I first came here they had something that was called the Men's Club and there was a Forestettes, and then there was FPLEA. I'm sure you've heard of all three of these. I was the chairman 00:54:00of the Men's Club in the early--well let's see that was the early '80s so late '70s probably, late '70s, early '80s. Of course this was the time when more women were coming in to the Lab and the Forestettes wasn't necessarily closed to men but just the name itself didn't attract many men who wanted to join the Forestettes and the Forestettes really was started probably back in the'40s when most of the people in the Forestettes were secretaries and maybe the wives of some of the researchers--most of the researchers in the '40s and '50s were male and we didn't see many women coming in to the professions until maybe the early '70s. Anyway, but the late '70s a lot of these women and rightly so I felt were 00:55:00saying well you got something called the Men's Club, but all of the researchers are going to the Men's Club functions. So we had a lot of old timers in there that really liked the name Men's Club but I was kind of put in the spot of saying we need to change the name and we need to make this open to men and women so we changed the name then from the Men's Club to the Forest Products Club. So the Forest Products Club men became more open to everybody. Forestettes then also made their effort invite men to become Forestettes and what eventually happened was that the Men's Club eventually just folded because it was no longer--a lot of the older retirees looked at the Men's Club as a place where guys got together and played cards and it kind of lost that uniqueness and now 00:56:00became something a lot more like the Forest Products Laboratory Employee's Association's FPLEA. So the two of them started to do a lot of the same things and eventually what happened was the Men's Club just got folded in to the Forest Products Laboratory Association. Now I think they still do have that, I also then became chairman of FPLEA for a while.

But FPLEA over the years started loosing its attraction to people, you got newer people coming in and you have to take a look at how things evolved here. During World War II, for instance, this became a lot more of a big family and everything was a lot more structured, they had a noon hour where everybody took the break at the same time and so there was a lot more social interaction there just even during working hours, people would say well we've got an hour, they 00:57:00would play cards for an hour or they would play horseshoes, but everybody always got together at noon hour. In the '80s they started what they call flex-time where you could take your lunch break, it could be an hour or a half-hour, start at 11:30, any time from 11:30 to 1. People took their lunch breaks at different times.

So you didn't get this interaction any longer and as a lot of these retirees left and new people came in, a lot of the newer people, they had kids and families, they had other outside interest, I think their lives became a lot more complex outside the Lab than what it was maybe in the '40s and '50s and so they didn't get involved in a lot of the social functions as much. So the attraction of these social groups started to dwindle. I think that the Forestettes seemed 00:58:00to maintain a fairly good population as far as the women that would get involved with that, they continued to get together but the functions involving everybody like the FPLEA, FPLEA would have maybe--it use to be that we have three picnics a year and one big family picnic every year and then FPLEA would have a couple of other functions. Then the Men's Club or the Forest Products Club always had a spring and a fall pig roast or brat fry or something like that, but that all gradually just faded away and now I don't think there's really much of a social function left here. I think that the FPLEA group has still been trying to have some functions, we did try car rallies and things like but you only get a limited number of people that show up for them and when you are trying to have a card tournament, generally what you get is the old timers will show up more 00:59:00often than the young people would come in. So there seems to be a shift. There's also the problem in the Lab that they haven't really been hiring a lot of new people lately so you don't have that many people to draw from anymore so the whole, that social structure which I think is--it's something that really makes a strong organization when people get together socially and they communicate a lot better--I think you start--when you get away from that, you start getting a lot more--I don't know if I want to call them mavericks--but you get people that are working more on their own and they don't communicate. They don't really know what other people are doing, they sit and they will do their own thing and they'll go after money, they might even be competing with somebody here at the Lab, rather than combining forces and going after a pot of money, they'll be competing with one another for that pot of money. So you kind of get away from a team effort and more in to the individual and I think that if you ever take a 01:00:00look at anything in history you got a majority of things that mankind has ever accomplished, to me, it has always been a team thing. The Great Wall of China wasn't built by an individual or the pyramids in Egypt--it's a team effort, people have to work together. It's the combination of ideas, because one person's ideas aren't enough you really need to have somebody you feed off of, somebody to straighten you out when you are really going a wrong way or somebody to come up with another idea off one of your ideas. People feed off one another and so I think you do a lot better if you are working as a member of a team than you do if you are working as an individual. That's something that I think is sort of a weakness in that a lot of that social function has not really been promulgated or even encouraged I don't think by the administration. Now maybe 01:01:00there is nothing they can do about it, maybe it's just the way things are going. I don't know.

LB: Well that leads very well in to my next set of questions, more about perceptions of the Forest Products Lab and the Forest Service and how those have changed over time. How did you personally feel about working for an agency that's part of the Forest Service? Or part of the Department of Agriculture?

RW: When you go back to an agricultural background the Forest Service to me was, I guess it comes back to this idea of what kind of society are we? It's a socialism thing. I think that the Forest Service to me represents the team approach, it's part of who we are in the United States is the fact that you got 01:02:00a Forest Service who is just trying to protect these resources and I think it is a very worthwhile effort. I agree that maybe in some cases you can get too much government regulation, but think there are some things that need to be protected, people need to recognize them as being resources that are here for everybody and you shouldn't allow any one person to take advantage of that and then destroy it. The Forest Service is just one of those organizations that I always felt was a necessary organization and I hate to see us do away with the Forest Service.

Now the Forest Products Laboratory as being part of that, here again at one 01:03:00point if you take a look at what was happening in the late 1800s where people were cutting trees, not using it very efficiently because they had this attitude that where there's more than we will ever use, I think there is definitely a need, I glad that somebody decided that this is something the government should do. Even today I think there are things the government should do, I would like to see the government develop an efficient electric car, for instance, because I don't the companies in Detroit are going to do it, but once it was developed then like the Forest Products Laboratory we develop products here, once it's developed then it gets put out there in the public domain and somebody can run with it and then they can start their own company and their own business. Plywood industry in the United States was started here at the Forest Products Laboratory, the Plywood Association, that was the first plywood association, it actually had its beginnings right here at the Forest Products Lab and eventually it grew in to an industry and the Forest Products Lab of course let go of that 01:04:00totally. So there's a lot of things like that that can be started by the government where we do research which these companies don't want to do, it seems to mundane or too minuscule to them, too detailed. They don't really want to get involved, they want to start making money right away they don't want to spend a whole lot of money doing research. Well, I think that the government should sponsor some research in things like energy and trying to come up with ways of using the resource more efficiently and that's what the Forest Products Lab was all about. I think we're at that point now where we have done a lot of this work and there are companies out there that are using a lot of the developments that were developed here at the Forest Products Laboratory and it is time for the Forest Products Laboratory to maybe think what direction do we want to be heading. Now we've done a lot of work here on composites while a lot of these 01:05:00companies have taken over a lot of that work so I'm not sure how much more there is there. Energy seems to be, to me, the next big crunch, the next area that we need to look at. I think a very important area is turning cellulose in to ethanol, that's a very complex process and they really don't have a good handle on that yet, but it is something that I think that the Forest Products Laboratory can be working on.

So I think that the Forest Products Lab through its history has evolved that way where it really did the research that the industry didn't want to do, which led to more efficient use of the resource and once we got to the point that it looked like we were develop product, and pushing product then we got rid of it and it got pushed out in to the public sector and became a product that an entrepreneur could then make a living.

LB: How do you feel about--it seems like the Forest Products Lab has been doing more and more cooperative research with industry where industry has a problem 01:06:00and they ask the Forest Products Lab to solve it. Is that true, do you see that being true?

RW: Well I get mixed feelings there, I mean in order for the Forest Products Laboratory to survive I guess it had to get in to this point where it would start working with private industry and it happens. There's a number of products that have been developed here specifically for--you know it had a specific benefit for one company and I don't think that the Forest Products Laboratory should be doing that necessarily. Part of this, in order to be able to attract that kind of money and attract these cooperators, the Forest Products Laboratory put these protections on anything that was found so that the work that was done here--now on the one hand that could be justified saying well the company paid for this information and therefore we're going to protect them, let them have the rights to it. But the taxpayer is also paying for the Forest Products 01:07:00Laboratory so anything that is developed at the Lab by Lab scientists should be published by Lab scientists in order to put it in the public domain. One of the things that really bothered me a little bit is in the late '70s and early '80s we got on this kick of patenting. Generally you don't need to patent anything if it is going to be published, if you publish it and you are the first to publish it and it's in the public domain and published, it is protected in the public domain, nobody else can then come along and patent that idea. So the idea would be to do the research and get it out there in the public domain and it becomes public domain, but we had scientists here that started pushing this idea that they wanted to patent every single idea they ever had and so then this patent would protect this and it is patented, well okay they get maybe some royalties if the idea ever comes to fruition but how many ideas really? One in a thousand 01:08:00actually ever get used so there is a lot of money tied up in doing all of the patent research and the licensing and all of this in order to be able to develop a patent when you could do the same thing by publishing it and not worrying about patenting it. So I think we kind of got caught up in this, it's the money thing. You get caught up in saying that I want to patent this and the patent looks good on a scientist's record and it looks good maybe for the Forest Products Laboratory that you got these patented ideas, but I think there were a lot of ideas that came out of the Forest Products Lab that merely got published and that put them in the public domain and I think that if I was developing something and I came up with an idea but I did it on Lab time, the taxpayers are paying my salary to do that that whatever I came up with belongs to the public 01:09:00that was paying me specifically to do this research. I don't think that I really have a right to say this is mine; I'm going to keep this. I think that that to me--maybe I'm not looking at both sides of this as far as how much money that can bring in, potentially it could bring in a lot of money if you take a look at WARF, had a patent on rat poison, and they did very well. Well every once in a while you come up with an idea which is very good but you spend a lot of money before you are going to come up with that idea that is really going to bring a lot of money back in. Any money that come to the Lab anyway through patents it still goes to the Treasury it doesn't necessarily come to the Lab.

So I think that a lot of that work, the whole protection on ideas--and I can see why private industry might want to do that--I think when you start doing that 01:10:00you are starting to encroach then on the private sector because that's the type of thing that you hire a private testing laboratory such as Underwriters Laboratories or [inaudible] down in Chicago, there are number of these just look on the Internet any time you can find there are lot of private testing laboratories that if you want to get a product developed they are the ones you go to. If a company starts coming to the government because it's cheaper to go to the government, but then they put all these protections on and if the government can't use these ideas that were going to be theirs, then I think that if that's the only way we are going to survive then we should be a private laboratory.

LB: I guess to go back, have you seen change over time in how the--I know we were talking about this a little before we started the interview--in how the 01:11:00Forest Service is perceived or how the Forest Products Lab is perceived?

RW: Yeah, everything changes it's in a manner evolution and the Forest Products Laboratory I think had a major impact. It has been recognized as one of the foremost laboratories in the world doing research on the area of forest products, but we are at that point now where we've pretty much identified properties of every species in the United States, we've looked at a number of different ways that you can utilize wood, everything from the pulp and paper, the fiber products all the way up to the engineered wood products, woodlam--engineered laminated wood lumber--veneer lumber, we've done a lot of work on connections. We are at that point now where there are companies out there that are doing this kind of work, and those companies resent the fact that the Forest Products Laboratory might start developing a product that they 01:12:00already have developed and they have in their archives protected, they don't want us coming up and developing new process which is going to bring other companies in to competition.

Now the Forest Products Laboratory I think has always had a role, one of the important roles of the Forest Products Laboratory was the fact that when you get involved in standards a lot of these companies, they will try and push a standard for a product which keeps other people from competing with them because they have already developed this huge database, now they'll say anybody else that wants to do this has to have a database like our database. Well it might have taken them 15, 20 years to develop that database and in the meantime while they were developing the database they were selling product. But as they sold product they learned more about how this product performed and gradually they developed this large database and then all of a sudden they want to put a stop 01:13:00on that so nobody else can do it. The Forest Products Laboratory comes in as an independent third-party in a lot of these cases. Generally in any committee you have what we call users, producers, and the third-party, which is kind of the independent, which is where the Forest Products Laboratory came in. We were kind of balanced between the user and the producer. So the user wants, he wants good, safe standards so he know what the product is going to have, what the properties are, and the producer, he want to be able to produce a lot of product and be able to sell it. So he's got to produce the product in order to meet what this consumer wants and the consumer doesn't always know what the product needs, what property it needs to have in order to perform the way he thinks it is going to. That's where the Forest Products Lab comes along and says you know no, no you need to run these tests in order to assure that it has this property. On the other hand this consumer wants cheap product and he wants to get, you know, so 01:14:00sometimes you got to wade between that and say well you know it costs money to do these tests and these are the kind of tests we demand in order for you to get the quality that you need so it is important for them to charge these prices in order to be able to get the standards up to where we all feel they should be. So I think there is a need for somebody like the Forest Products Laboratory as opposed to somebody in the University. The University professors can also get involved in this, but generally university professors, they have the ability of consulting, of going outside, so they are usually consulting with these companies in developing the product so the professors have a tendency to be a little biased, more so than a research engineer at the Forest Products Laboratory.

So I think there is a need for this kind of thing but then it is a matter of what research is there left for us to do if you got large companies that are doing this and they are always going to be there to put stops on you doing 01:15:00research if they feel that you are encroaching in their area and obviously anything that looks like product development, they are going to start complaining about the fact that the Lab shouldn't be doing any product development. Well the only way for the Lab to ever to make any kind of money was to put product out there and saying what this can do, start looking at certain types of adhesives and say you know waterproof adhesives that's when we came along with that, that's when glue-laminated plywood really started taking off is because of these waterproof adhesives that were being developed and we put all that together to show here's what the impact is of having a waterproof adhesive. The truss frame even, truss frame systems, you know that was kind of an extension of a truss industry that was already out there and once we showed that they could design a truss with their models, it was kind off our books and was given to them. But you know they don't want us taking any of these products too 01:16:00far to the point that it just opens it up for anybody to come back to their established industry and start competing with them.

LB: Seems like a fine line to walk.

RW: It is, it is and it is getting finer and finer. Of course as time goes on and you get more and more people in industry that are doing this research--and there are more of them now and they are competing with one another--so price is a big thing for them. They want to develop product and they want product that's going to be safe. So they have a lot of good qualities, there are a lot of good standards that are in place, these standards have to be reviewed and usually if you go to somebody like the American Society for Testing of Materials, that's one of the more noted standards organization, they update their standards about every four or five years. You need people there that are going to be involved in that, and you need somebody unbiased. So there is always going to be a need for 01:17:00something like the Lab where you can have scientists that are involved enough that they know what's involved in these test standards and product standards, that they can get involved in them and give an unbiased viewpoint.

LB: All right so I think we are almost at the end of the questions and sort of move in to the post-FPL period.

RW: Post-FPL period?

LB: Well maybe for you personally. So you've retired?

RW: Yes.

LB: What year was that, that you retired?

RW: I think it's 2006.

LB: Was there anything in particular that made you decide to retire or was it just time?

RW: The economy. There's the fact that I--there was a lot of people that were 01:18:00working here where the economy was going down, the budgets were going down, and I couldn't see where--there are people that have worked here that were not paid as well as I was paid. I don't have any kids and so I don't have the obligations a lot of these people have and it seemed to me that rather than sacri[ficing]--I mean I think there's a lot of people here that contribute just as much to the Laboratory's existence. I mean you can't really run a laboratory if you don't have secretaries or messengers; these people are all part of the system. So I felt that it was--I spent plenty of time here, I had my run at it.

The other thing too is I knew people that waited too long to retiree there's 01:19:00just too many other things that I would like to do anyway. And so financially I'm comfortable and I don't really need to be taking up part of this salary, I've already got federal retirement. So I figured there really wasn't any reason to stay around here, it just detracted from what money was available to pay some of the other people that I didn't think were get paid enough.

LB: Yeah that's a reason. So you mentioned that there were a lot of other things that you wanted to do. What have you been doing with your retirement? Do you ever come back here?

RW: Very rarely. Now I did sign in as a volunteer, I do come back periodically. I am working on this bridge that I am building up in Lodi (Wisconsin). That was a project that one of the guys that's still here, he and I worked on the design 01:20:00of it. Then we got money for this Ice Age Trail Foundation to build it. And I thought that between the Ice Age Trail Foundation and the high school up in Lodi, the shop teacher at that point was real excited about it so I thought they were going to build it. But we had done all this design work and then gave it to them and it was like two years and they hadn't done anything so when I retired I said well I'll build it and so I went up. I've been working on that ever since I retired, it is kind of one of those projects--it's going to be a lifelong project getting this thing completed, but we are getting close to it anyway. That's kind of an extension like I said of small diameter timber research that we are doing and also value added use for Black Locust. I am hoping that we will still publish a report on that and encourage people to maybe take a look at utilizing this species rather than considering it to be total waste. But other 01:21:00than then I've also done quite a bit of traveling in Brazil and Italy, let's see last year we went to Peru. So getting to do a lot of traveling which is more leisure traveling rather than just business travel.

LB: That sounds great. I guess this is sort of a two pronged question, do you feel like your work left a mark, or your work that you did here, has left a mark either on the Lab or on the Forest Service, or on the broader society? Also, there anything that you wish you could have accomplished or done that you didn't have the opportunity to do?

RW: I suppose you could say anything. Everything you do is dated so as far as 01:22:00impact it would be kind of tough to say. I mean there is work that we did here, that I worked on a computer program for the analysis of wood structures but that program is in the archives somewhere and nobody will ever look at it again. Maybe the first stage, and after that people started building on it and making much better models, but the improvements in the speed of computers and what computers can do, you know that's not something that anybody will even ever look at again.

I guess everything you do is one small incremental step, yeah you might draw some conclusion that it had some impact and that somebody was able to--it was taken one step and somebody took another step after that, another step, and another step. So it is one step in a long process. I suppose anything you do has 01:23:00some impact like that, it was always somewhat rewarding to know that kids in college read your reports and said that they used that data, but the data now is not really the type of thing that has any impact any more but it was that one step. So I would say from that standpoint I don't think I had any impact here that anybody will look back on in a hundred years and say we are still using this research, no I didn't do anything like that. Most of it was just this incremental steps along the way.

Do I have some regrets? Yeah I mean I suppose anybody would like to become a super scientist and develop something that would save the world, but I didn't do that. I can't say that I really regret not doing it, it would have been nice. I don't have any regrets about what I did at the Lab, you always think there are 01:24:00things--rather than maybe coming to the Lab if I had stayed in private industry. When I was in private industry, actually I took a cut in pay to come work here at the Laboratory and when I look at some of those guys I was working with in private industry and of course they are flying their own planes, you say well on the one hand they made a lot more money, but on the other hand I've got a lot better retirement and a lot better health insurance and I'm satisfied. So do I need more money? I don't think I need more. So I am what I am and I'm not unhappy about it.

LB: Good. So I just have one more question for you and it is a very broad one. This is if you have any memories of specific colleagues or people here at the 01:25:00Lab or stories that you want to share, things that were either indicative of your time here or feel represent the Lab in the way that you remember it?

RW: Well I met my wife here I suppose that was a major impact.

LB: Yes, I would think so.

RW: She's a real character. But I think there again, just about everywhere you work there's a broad range of personalities. One thing about working at a research facility like this where you have a lot of PhDs is there is probably a lot more egos here than there was when I was in private industry, a lot more. You got in to a lot more, I don't know if I want to say, heated debates, but 01:26:00there are times when you really need to work at getting along here, a lot more than I ever did when I was in private industry. Of course when I was in private industry they pretty much left me alone because I was doing--there again I was a single guy and they needed somebody to do a lot of traveling and so I never really dealt with anybody for a very long period of time and the stuff that I was doing, they would put me out someplace and say develop this machine and I was the only one doing it, so it wasn't like I really needed to debate anything with anybody. You came here you got much more--it kind of opens your mind, it's more challenging I think to work with people at that level because they are always thinking they're right and you think you're right and you debate these things and you start, I think, changing your attitude a little bit. So I think 01:27:00that it's a great place to work from that standpoint and that you get a lot of challenge. A lot of strong personalities but you start realizing you are just as an egotist as they are.

I would said that I thought I was very lucky to have landed a job at the Forest Products Laboratory and I liked it so much that I never thought of changing because I didn't think I could ever get as nice a job and as much freedom, the money was not an issue to me, I didn't really care that much about the money. So I think it was a great place to work I think I had met a lot of really great people and I still know a lot of these retirees and I still think they are some of the best people I have ever known. There are characters here, there are some 01:28:00that I could probably get in to arguments with but it doesn't mean that I don't like them or respect them, I think they are just kind of a different brood of people.

LB: Are there people you still keep in touch with like these retirees?

RW: Oh yeah, yeah. Actually the guy that helped me design that bridge, I still come in there once in a while, he's a kid that's in a wheelchair, he was a quadriplegic. A friend of mine over at the University had--this was a student of his--and when he was building his house this fellow was out helping build his house and there was an accident there at his site and after that of course lost the use of most of his body. He graduated though and I hired him here to do work for us in the engineering department and he's just a super kid, I am always 01:29:00amazed at people like that, the resiliency, how they can come back and still really have a love of life and an enthusiasm. He's an inspiration. So if I ever feel bad I just come back to get inspired by talking to him. But he and I worked together on this bridge, of course he really wanted to be--he always wanted to build things and he really enjoys designing them and so I think part of the reason I decided that I was going to make sure that this bridge got built was because I thought it was something he would really like to see. So he and I communicate quite a lot.

But I still golf with these guys and bowl with them. I don't come back to the Lab that much any more, there are a few projects going on but there again I'm 01:30:00not at that point that I don't know that I want to get that committed to one project. It's one of those things where somebody wants to come back and have a little meeting, they want to talk about something that's fine. As you can tell I'm more than willing to give an opinion but I don't know that I really want to get so committed that I have to start writing reports and reviewing reports, that was probably the worst part of the job was reviewing reports because you would always have to read those things over three or four times in order to really get a good handle. You got to read over once and said well did it make any sense, then you go back to detail. That was the bad part of the job I think, I didn't mind writing them so much but I didn't like reading them.

LB: Great. Is there anything else that you wanted to say? Otherwise I think we've reached the end.

RW: Yeah I think we probably reached the end of your tape there too.