Harry's first real job was for the City of Los Angeles where he did many different things including bridge design. He then decided to go back to graduate school and did some work for Western Concrete Structures to earn enough money to fund his graduate work (see his story about Western Concrete Structures and Fort Calhoun below). Armed with a Masters in Civil/Structural Engineering, Harry joined Ecodyne where he designed cooling towers. He then did a brief stint at the Nevada Test Site. Following that, he became the Civil/Structural Section Manager for an engineering firm in San Francisco, Sverdrup & Parcel, which is where we met.

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Fort Calhoun totally changed my life.

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It was 1968, and I had been working for the City of Los Angeles for over eight years (which is about the length of time where you get so comfortable with the security of working in the civil service environment, that it becomes almost impossible to leave). But I wanted to go out into the “bigger” engineering world and do more interesting things, and had concluded that to do so, I must return to college for my Masters degree. I had tried doing graduate school at night (one course per semester), but found that after a day of work, I could not really learn (I passed the courses, but learned very little) so I felt I needed to again become a full-time student. Doing so, however, would require having sufficient funds on which to live during that one year I would be back in graduate school, and I didn’t have that kind of savings.

 

One evening, when attending a Structural Engineers Association dinner meeting, I met an engineer named Herman Reuter. I described to him a computer analysis program that I had recently written for analyzing the new aircraft loadings (i.e. 747’s, L1011’s, etc.) as they crossed over the Sepulveda Boulevard tunnel at Los Angeles International Airport. Large computers were relatively new at that time, and I had become proficient with them while working for the City. Herman seemed very interested in my computer skills. A couple of days later, he called me about doing a job for the company where he worked.

 

Herman was Vice President and Chief Engineer for a company called Western Concrete Structures that designed and manufactured prestressing tendons for prestressed concrete applications. Their work was primarily in buildings and bridges (where the technology was well understood) and they had become very successful. This success prompted them to become the low bidder for designing the prestressing for the “containment structure” at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Generating facility. 

 

A “containment structure” is a large building designed to hold in all the released nuclear gases in the event of a reactor breach, and must be massive in both size and strength. The one configured for Fort Calhoun was a new concept with vertical walls that were 4-feet thick and a parabolic roof about 3-feet in thickness. The walls were designed to contain four layers of 4” diameter prestressing tendons in reversing helical patterns, and the prestressing in the roof consisted of three layers of the same tendons staggered 120-degrees. The intersection where the roof tendons had to pass through the wall tendons is amazingly complicated.

 

Western Concrete Structures was required to prove by July 4 of that year that it was possible to thread the roof tendons through the wall tendons, or face $1,000 per day of liquidated damages. Herman asked if I could help them meet this deadline and I brashly said that I could. He offered me a job plus a $5,000 bonus if the July 4 deadline was successfully met. That $5,000 was equivalent to about $50,000 in today’s money and would allow me to finance graduate school so I quit the City and went to work for Western Concrete Structures.

 

I had underestimated the complexity of the job I had just undertaken; and even with the help of a fine computer programmer using the very large computer system at Cal Tech, found myself overwhelmed. For the next two months, I worked about 15 hours per day, seven days per week to accomplish what was needed to show that the threading concept was feasible. I even helped with the making of a large scale model of the facility that demonstrated exactly how the wall and roof prestressing tendons would miss each other spatially. We made the July 4 deadline and I collected my bonus. More importantly, I learned that I could rise to some pretty sophisticated challenges and survive.

 

I applied for graduate school at UCLA and was accepted beginning in the Winter quarter of 1969. I continued working for Western Concrete Structures until school began, then quit so I could focus on my education. The rest is just history—the cooling tower job in Santa Rosa; my time at the Nevada Test Site; my 5 years with Sverdrup; and, ultimately, the 20 fantastic years I spent at NASA.

 

But I often wonder: If it hadn’t been for Herman Reuter and the Fort Calhoun project, would I have ever left the City?? How different (both wonderful and challenging) my career has been because I had this opportunity—it’s amazing how a single event can have such a profound effect on one’s life!!