Reader's notes

As a new grad with "exactly the job I wanted," Dave Barker '02 (MS in transportation) has just begun work at the Mass. Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) as a transportation service planner.

In his first update, the well-traveled Charles Wong '90 & '92 writes, "Since I left Parsons Lab (working with Prof. Phil Gschwend) in '92, I went to the Univ. of Minnesota where I got my PhD in CEE in '98. I then spent a couple of years doing a postdoc at the US EPA research lab in Athens, GA (go Dawgs!)." Recruited for a second postdoc at the Univ. of Toronto and the National Water Research Institute of Environment Canada, he has chosen to remain there, "which might have something to do with my fiancee being Canadian. On July 1st, 2002 I started as an assistant professor at the Univ. of Alberta, as the chemistry department's first dedicated environmental chemist faculty member."

At the 2002 A/E/C SYSTEMS Conference, held in June in Anaheim, CA, the late CE Dept. head Charles Miller was posthumously awarded the Ed Forest Award. Dave Weisberg '59 (SB) & '61 (SM) sends details "This award is named after Ed Forest, a moving force behind the adoption of computer design technology in architecture and civil engineering. The award has been made annually since 1993 and has gone to software developers and users who have made significant contributions to the use of computers in this field. I nominated Prof. Miller for the award and was asked to accept it in his honor. I pointed out in my acceptance speech how Prof. Miller worked hard to encourage broad use of the latest in computer technology and the fact that a vast amount of computer work in the field of civil engineering depends, to this day, on Miller's development of COGO."
      Weisberg is the president of Technology Automation Services and publisher emeritus of Publisher Emeritus, Engineering Automation Report and A-E-C Automation Newsletter. He adds, "One of the most significant aspects of Miller's work is that he never considered COGO to be proprietary technology-he made it readily available to the world without any restrictions. The only other similar example I can think of is Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. Imagine where we might be today if these two pioneers had decided to patent their technology and require us to pay a royalty every time we designed a highway intersection or used the Web.
      "I worked as an student research assistant for Charlie from 1957 to 1959, and as a graduate research assistant from 1959 to 1961. Dan Roos, Bob Logcher and Trond Kaalstad were all associates from those days. Currently, I am working on a history of computers and engineering design."

Senol Utku '59 retired from a long teaching career at Duke Univ. at the end of 2001. He will travel to Turkey to read an essay about civil engineering as the opening address at the Fifth International Conference on Advances in Civil Engineering, September 25-27, at Istanbul Technical University.

During the speeches for incoming freshmen and their parents at Carnegie Mellon Univ. in August, the editor was delighted to learn that CMU's president, Jared Cohon, holds an SM ('72) and PhD ('73) from this department.

Mystery pictures

Rebar dangling in air. In what seemed like endless disruption to Cambridge traffic, the Red Line extension stretched the subway past Harvard Square into Somerville during the 1980s. (Complete regional traffic chaos on the scale of the Big Dig was still inconceivable.) Several people immediately recognized the construction picture on p. 3 of the last issue as a project right at Harvard Yard.
      "The photo is the hoisting of the steel reinforcing cage to be lowered into a concrete diaphragm panel that formed the wall to support the excavation for the Harvard Square Station. The building on the lower right is the Harvard dorm behind the bus stop on Mass. Ave. near the Sather Gate," summarizes Rick Simon '72 (PhD).
      In greater detail, John Shriver '80 & '82 dates the picture to 1982, when the Harvard Square MBTA station was rebuilt for the Alewife extension of the Red Line. "The photographer stood where the Out of Town News kiosk is currently located. The Phillips Brooke Houses of Harvard are the brick buildings to the right, the Law School's Littauer building is straight ahead. The large panel of rebars has been built to be lowered into the trench of the 55-ft deep (16.8 m) slurry wall around the new station. This was the first application of a slurry wall for a rapid transit tunnel in the US.
      "This was a great civil engineering project to watch in the Boston area. It wasn't all cordoned off the way most of the Big Dig is, and the subway trains continued to operate through the pit (and two temporary stations) for the entire project. It was very ambitious, working with old historic Harvard buildings within feet of the excavation, connecting a new subway station to a portion of the old one. The east (left) half of the bus tunnels are original, all the rest is new. It is holding up well, with minimal cracking and leaking, mainly at the seam between old and new. Kudos to Parsons Brinckerhoff, who really managed the impact during the project pretty well. They also set a lot of precedents for generous mitigation of the permanent impact of the project, like putting the entire project underground, even along an existing railroad right of-way."
      A frequent spectator of the construction project, Shriver remembered "the pioneering nature of the slurry wall work. Also, we studied some of the planning of that project in a seminar I took with Nigel Wilson as an undergraduate, as well as in the Mike Meyer and Fred Salvucci courses.
      "I tried to get a planning job at the MBTA after graduating with the MS in Transportation in 1982, but Reaganomics made that impossible. Same with WMATA in Washington, DC. The only jobs were with the NYCTA in New York City, and I didn't want to live there. So I used other MIT connections to get into the computer industry. Thus, I've been 'transporting' packets for the last 20 years, writing networking software. I've worked at Proteon, Shiva, Intel, and Sockeye Networks. Familiarity with queuing theory and probability has been useful at times. The sum total of my formal computer software training was Betsy Schumaker's 1.00 class, but MIT taught me how to teach myself. It's been an interesting trip."
      Anthony Centore '62 and Richard O'Brien of Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) recognized their handiwork immediately. "I worked on the design and construction phase services for the Harvard Square station in the late 1970s and early 1980s," volunteered O'Brien. "PB did geotechnical and other engineering services for the station, and Skidmore Owings Merrill was the architect. Although the walls were relatively shallow by today's standards, I believe this was the first US project to incorporate slurry walls as part of the permanent structure. There was sufficient interest in the project that we were awarded a federal grant from FHWA to study the performance of the walls. MIT and Prof. Herb Einstein were part of that study."
      Prof. Herbert Einstein, Susan Gaughan '80, Michael Bernard, and Chris Erikson '85 nailed the Harvard Square location and the Red Line construction in progress. Chris adds, "I am currently living in Winchester, MA with my wife Karen and three wonderful children ages 7 to 12. I am an associate at McPhail Associates, Inc. located in Cambridge, and work on the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Yawkey Center for Outpatient Care, which includes the construction of a six-level deep basement directly adjacent to the Charles River. The project will utilize the up-down construction method and involved the installation of slurry walls and slurry caissons."
      After describing the Harvard Sq. location and equipment, A.M. "Pete" Petrofsky '50 mentions, "I have been on the Technical Advisory Panel (consulting board) for two major sewer tunnels in Los Angeles, the East Central Interceptor (3.35 m diameter by 18.5 km, or 11 ft diameter by 11.5 mi) and North East Interceptor (2.4 m diameter by 8.5 km, or 7.9 ft by 5.3 mi). Both require earth pressure balanced shielded tunnel boring machines. It is the first major job designed in metric for Los Angeles. I'm working only about 20% of the time, which is just right" for him now.
      Along with explaining what was happening in the scene, Walter Steiner '77 (SM) & '80 (PhD) mentions, "I designed a similar tunnel in Switzerland a few years ago. A paper on 'my' tunnel is in the Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Soil Mechanics, Istanbul 2001."

Two men with device. The mystery picture on the back page shows Aziz Malek with Arthur Rudolph, according to Prof. Andrew Whittle '87 (ScD). "They are working on the cyclic load actuator for the Geonor DSS device (Jack Germaine '77 & '82 can explain in loving detail), still housed in room 1-347A. Aziz completed his PhD in 1986 with Profs. Amr Azzouz and M. Baligh - we worked on the same research project together. I believe Aziz is now working in his native Lebanon."

Lunch at Camp Tech. In the dining hall scene, "the young man seated at the right hand table, far side end seat is most likely me, John (Jack) Nevins '51. I was there in 1949 'working table' as well as studying. I only recall a very cold swim in the lake." After graduating, he remained in the Boston area practicing as a structural engineer, and was the engineer of record for several MIT buildings.
      Other readers place the dining hall scene slightly later. Martin Wohl would "bet a healthy amount that the two people at the first table who face the camera were Dave Cravens, left, and Dave Robbins. Both Daves were civil engineers, good students, and brother 'Dekes'."
      Although he graduated in 1957 due to an interruption for military service, Bruce Blanchard had entered with the Class of '54 and therefore attended surveying camp in '51. He also identifies the two Daves, and suspects that he's one of the blurred faces sitting at a nearby table.
      Dave Cravens '53 determined the scene as 1952, and pointed out where he, the late Dave Robbins '54, and a World War II veteran dubbed "GI Joe" were sitting at the far right.

Student staring through complicated tool. The elaborate instrument consuming a student's attention on p. 14 is a very large theodolite, says Bruce Blanchard '57, who used to maintain the devices for the Dept. He speculates that the student is reading angles of 1/32nd or 1/64th of an inch.
      Phil Simmons '51 thinks that it is a direction instrument, "which would be the next step above a theodolite in accuracy," and was used to measure very precise angles between triangulation points. "It has a very large diameter, finely graduated, azimuth circle which was read using microscopic-like magnifiers on the rim. I vaguely recall seeing one once, and I may be incorrect."
      "It is a sad day when the CEE Dept. at MIT cannot recognize a photograph of someone reading a vernier of a theodolite. I am not even sure a total survey station would be recognized now! How about reviving Camp Tech?" inquires M. Scott MacCalden, Jr. '52. As a participant in a US Army survey from Alaska to Pagatonia, MacCalden "occupied a survey station at the highest point in Panama, El Volcan, at 11,400 ft (3475 m). Triangulating during the night at that elevation, I wished I had brought some gloves. It was cold there even though located just 9° north of the equator." He added that National Geographic magazine reported on the project some time around 1956 in a story, "Men Who Measure the Earth."
      As a multi-year Camp Tech instructor, Harl Aldrich '47 writes, "The instrument is a theodolite, or transit, a precision surveying tool having a telescope and used years ago for measuring horizontal and vertical angles. The instrument man is peering through an eyepiece to read the horizontal angle being measured."

"Boston Tech" campus The postcard of the old Boston Tech campus 'bestir[red] some random memories" for Frank Heselton '33 (old Course 4A, Architectural Engineering). "The three buildings in that block were part of MIT before it occupied the Cambridge property in 1916, and the Rogers building, named after the first MIT president, remained in the middle of the three for long after that move. It was occupied by the Architecture Department of the Institute until well along in the 1930s." [Architecture completed its move to Cambridge in 1938, after Bldg. 7 and the Mass. Ave. entrance were constructed.]
      Since he was a commuter student, Heselton's daily beat led him from the train at North Station across the Common and through the Public Gardens. "On the corner of Boylston and Arlington streets was a church with a tower, and high up on each corner of the tower was an angel blowing a long slender trumpet. For that reason the structure was irreverently known as 'the Church of the Holy Bean Blowers'. [Designed by the famous H.H. Richardson, it was originally called the Brattle Square Church. When the congregation dissolved, it was acquired by the First Baptist Church of Boston.]
      "Between Clarendon and Dartmouth streets were the buildings shown in the postcard. In plain sight from the Rogers Bldg. was an excellent view across Boylston St. of the Copley Plaza Hotel, often referred to as the 'Costly Pleasure'. I had classes each year at both the Rogers Bldg. and at the main campus, and left many footprints on the Smoot (Harvard) Bridge, long before Smoot ever was heard of. Incidentally, the second floor front center windows of the Rogers Bldg. served admirably for dropping water bags by bored or unruly students on unsuspecting people entering or leaving the building.
      "My career was a long way from Architectural Engineering. For some years it continued any boy's pleasure at digging in the dirt and laying in the water as I worked on both the design and the construction of earth-filled dams and navigation locks. I finished as Assistant Chief of Operations of the locks system at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan."

Arts

"In August I sang in the Saratoga (NY) Choral Festival, a group of about 75 singers from the upstate New York area," says administrative assistant Ginny Siggia. In addition to performing Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass "plus five gorgeous a cappella pieces from the traditional Russian liturgy," Siggia spent some time at the local horse track enhancing her vocabulary (and losing $8) as she learned the difference between an exacta and a trifecta.

Sports

The resilient George Kocur, senior lecturer, finished fourth in the 50+ age group in this year's four races up local mountains constituting the New England Mountain Circuit. He also ran the Mt. Washington road race, which was shortened for the first time ever because of severe ice and wind at the summit.

Thomas Kilpatrick '05 is a wide receiver for the MIT football again this fall. The Tech ran a photo of him on 9/6 looking very athletic during a recent scrimmage in which Norwich beat MIT 14-0.

Students abroad