He was one of those "greatest generation" guys who fought WWII (both fronts), got educated on the GI bill, created the baby boom (me and my two sisters) moved to the suburbs and took the train every day into the city.
His parents were from Eastern Europe. He was the first one in his family to be college educated, I think. Attended CCNY after the war like so many NYC Jews, finishing a year before I was born. Got a Columbia MSCE (soils engineering) doing night school for many years when I was a little boy. I remember hearing him coming home after I was supposed to be asleep. I remember (at seven!) a man spoken of with great respect — Dr. Tschebotarioff, clearly a great and important man. Dad's mentor, I realize now. I'm sorry I never looked before; Dad would have appreciated knowing the Doctor has a
wikipedia entry!
Moving to the suburbs and raising a family makes him sound very ordinary. But I remember as a little boy learning about the things he had done and was doing, and to me he may as well have been building the pyramids. In my mind's eye now I see him at one of many drafting boards at Ammann and Whitney working on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and the Thomas Dewey Thruway.
Then he moved out of the bullpen. Stabilized the Jefferson Memorial by driving cooling pipes through and freezing the mud underneath. Built the foundation for a NASA radio telescope in West Virginia (Greenbank?). He'd come home and show me blueprints before and pictures afterwards.
He took me on soils survey jobs a couple of times. Reconstructing my boyhood memory I realize he had started his own consulting firm. Was I nine? I got to hold the surveyor's stick for him, tried to dig the holes deep enough with the big post-hole digger. I'd pour water in the hole and he'd time it with a stopwatch and write it down in a notebook.
Some of these jobs required what seemed like long drives. I got to sit in the front with him and sing Gilbert and Sullivan to keep him awake. He loved G&S like no other music, and taught me all the words. I've got to say, the man was completely tone-deaf. He favored the fast "patter" songs and liked to hear my tongue work out all the words:
I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical
I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
I'm very good at integral and differential calculus
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I suppose he must have been 35 or so when he started his own company and I find it interesting that 27 years later, at about the same age I left a big company for my first Silicon Valley startup.
The consulting firm didn't work out, but he found an exotic substitute that would shape the rest of his life. He went to Pakistan in 1963 and was part of the Louis Berger design & supervision team that built the east Pakistan road and rebuilt the road over the Khyber pass. We didn't see him for most of a year. Maybe this
was an ordinary life for the greatest generation. No joke, they're still shooting at Berger supervising engineers in Afghanistan to this very day, building the Kabul-Kandahar road. He spoke with great respect of "Doc" Berger, but that didn't keep him with the firm very long.
Pakistan was the start of a fifteen year career in Asia. Airports in Indochina and Cam-ranh Bay naval base in Vietnam. Built for the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam war, but in the eighties when people asked him what he did during the sixties he'd sometimes say that among other things he built the Soviet Navy their only all-weather deep-water port.
He showed me pictures of bringing down a mountain for Sattahip Air Force Base in southern Thailand. This was where the B-52's later took off to bomb North Vietnam — I saw them take off there when I was fourteen. When he arrived there was a big mountain and a bigger swamp. When he left, there was neither because he tore down the mountain to fill up the swamp and build maybe the longest airstrip the world had ever seen — and fully loaded B-52s needed every inch of it.
There was plenty to do after the Vietnam war. Two ports in Northern Borneo, and a road past Mt. Kinabalu. Being his son made my life pretty exotic too — he sent me (at sixteen) to operate a sonar station on a survey ship sounding that northern coast of Borneo.
And then at seventeen I left home for college, and my view of his life, professional and otherwise, becomes hazy. He went through the revolving door, moving from spending the money of the international aid agencies to handing the money out. He moved to the Asian Development Bank (in Manila) and then the World Bank (in D.C.). I can't picture him as a bureaucrat, but from the few conversations I had with him about the Banks, I suspect he was a subversive one.
There's more I could say. How he loved science fiction when young but preferred science writing when he got older. How smart he was, how worldly, how decisive. Decisive to the end: in his last hours of lucidity, he wrested control of his life back from the hospital staff by refusing further treatment. I could tell you about the hour I spent at his bedside on his last night singing from the
Mikado. If I keep writing then this would be more about me and how I feel rather than him and what he accomplished. I wanted to say this: he did some amazing things and I'm very proud to be his son.
