News Detail

A Personal Message from Your New President

5/1/1997

It is a real pleasure and a great honor to have this opportunity to greet you, the ACI members, in my first President's Memo.

While many of you know me, there are many, many more ACI members who know little if anything about me. Thus, I will use most of the first President's Memo to describe my background, especially some of my very early experiences with concrete and construction, and how I got started in ACI. I hope this personal perspective encourages you to feel more welcome to communicate with me and share your ideas on how we can continue to strengthen and improve ACI..

I grew up in northern Wisconsin (near Chetek, to be specific, about 110 miles east of St. Paul, Minn.) where I lived on several different family dairy farms until leaving for the University of Wisconsin civil engineering department in 1951. I'm very proud of this heritage, and I feel quite privileged to have had substantial responsibilities at an early age, helping every day on the farm and also working in my father's contracting business while in high school. He built residences, farm buildings, and small commercial buildings as well as running a dairy farm with the help of a "hired man." My father was a careful and honest builder who always put quality first. My first recollection of concrete goes back to when I was seven years old, watching my father and his helpers pour concrete foundations for a family house on a new piece of farmland located seven miles from town. This was followed with concrete foundations for a milk shed and then for a barn. Concrete work in those days in rural Wisconsin produced lots of blisters and muscles --everything was done by hand, including shoveling all the sand and aggregate into small mixers and hauling the many concrete batches into place with wheelbarrows. As I remember, we certainly used too much water; sand and stone were dug by hand out of our own gravel pit. Our only batching was so many shovelfuls of this and so many of that, and no test cylinders were made, but serviceability still seemed to be okay. Concrete can be very forgiving when it is not subjected to heavy loads, cyclic loads, nor harsh environmental effects.

I later helped my father mix and place concrete many times and became increasingly intrigued with construction. One of my more interesting teenage summers was spent tending mason for a rather elderly master mason who specialized in building fireplaces and walls from either field stone or flag stone from Lannon, Wis. (Some of the Wisconsin ACI members will surely be familiar with Lannon stone.) This rather gruff old man taught me a permanent lesson about craftsmanship and "doing it right" to get quality concrete/masonry construction. He had an unbelievably well-calibrated eye-- perched 20 feet above the ground on scaffolding, he would guide me to the next rock he wanted from the hundreds laid out on the ground, and he never made a mistake in getting the right one. I more than earned my meager pay that summer--mixing mud by hand and carrying it and the stones up a ladder, usually under a blazing sun. But the experience was wonderful and I will never forget it.

My parents encouraged me to pursue architecture but I chose structural engineering instead because it seemed closer to my interests in math and science. After four truly great years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, along with a couple of summers spent working for a structural steel fabricating firm in Milwaukee, I stayed on at the UW for a Master's degree in structures. Prof. Willard S. Cottingham taught concrete structures (and indeterminate structures, etc.) and passed on to me his love and respect for ACI; I owe him tremendously for the way he influenced my career and my long association with ACI (now nearly 40 years). I also had the privilege of working with George Washa, Paul Fluck, and Raymond Roark at Wisconsin, as well as having some contacts with Morton O. Withey. After getting my M.S. degree, I served six months active duty in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and then had the invaluable experience of designing concrete bridges and buildings for a couple of years with John A. Strand Consulting Engineers in Madison. I gradually drifted back into more graduate study at UW, sharing a grad student office with Chuck Salmon for three great years, and moved to Cornell in 1961 at the conclusion of my graduate work. My mentors and earliest colleagues at Cornell included S.C. Hollister, George Winter, Bill McGuire, Dick Gallagher, Art Nilson, Floyd Slate, and Peter Gergely. It was a rare privilege to be able to work so closely with these giants of structural engineering.

Next month I'll share a few more personal notes and then outline my plans and priorities for ACI in 1997-98. Many come directly from ACI's "Strategic Plan--1996." If you've not yet studied this document, your "homework" for this month is to click here to read this document. It's chockfull of information on what we see as the most important initiatives for ACI's coming second century.

One of my most important responsibilities as ACI president is to serve you. This will require your active involvement, and I invite (urge) you to direct your concerns, suggestions, and questions to me, either by mail, e-mail, FAX, or phone: Address: Hollister Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y., 14853; e-mail: RNW3@Cornell.edu; FAX: (607) 255-4828; telephone: (607) 255-6497.

Richard N. White
President
American Concrete Institute

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