Interview with Robert Youngs

BW: Today we're interviewing Bob Youngs of the Forest Products Labs. This is for the 100-year, centennial celebration coming up here, and the Oral History Project. Mr. Youngs, first question: What, if anything, in your early years prepared you to work for the Forest Products Labs?

BY: I'm sorry, can you repeat that?

BW: Sure. What prepared you to work for the Forest Products Labs?

BY: What prepared me to--I'm not sure I'm understanding you correctly.

BW: I guess, what is your early background? Your education, your personal interests, or just sort of your early years--How did that lead to you working at Forest Products Labs?

BY: Ok, I can give you a little and then ask me questions. I think the first 00:01:00awareness I had of the Forest Products Laboratory was when I was studying wood technology as an undergraduate at the College of Forestry at Syracuse. And one of the textbooks that we had was the first--what was it the? I can't think of the name now--wood manual. I can't think of the name right now. It's been repeated over and over, revised and revised. Wood handbook, I'm sorry, wood 00:02:00handbook, which was published about 1932, and I heard about the Lab, which had been the source of this, of course, from my professors there at Syracuse. Then I went on to masters work at the University of Michigan, and one of the professors there, by the name of [Kynock?], had worked at the Lab briefly before coming to Michigan, and was very effuse in his praise of the Laboratory as a place to work. And he was my advisor while I was at Michigan, so when I, when I finished the work, my masters work at Michigan, I wrote a letter to the Lab to see if I 00:03:00might be able to come there to work. And I received a letter back saying no they couldn't hire anybody then - this was in 1950. And, so I did have an offer from the RCA Corporation to come to Pulaski, Virginia and make cabinets, TV cabinets, which were wood cabinets in those days, real wood cabinets. And I worked there as a management trainee for a year and it was fine, except I still was interested in coming to the Lab. And I wrote again in a year and at that time Gordon Logan was the personnel director and he wrote back and said well, we do 00:04:00have some funding from the military related to the Korean War, and we can offer you a temporary appointment. So, in January of '51, my wife and our four-month old child came from Pulaski, Virginia to Madison, and I began my work at the Lab. And at that time I began working in working in wood drying along with John McMillan and Ed Rasmussen. The beginning.

BW: Did you have any interest in forestry or wood previous to going to Syracuse and Michigan?

BY: Oh yeah. Well, yeah, I had interest in forestry from even before going to college. I was very active in Boy Scouts, and had done a lot of outdoor work, 00:05:00and outdoor camping and hiking and things like that, and developed quite an interest in forestry. That's why I went to Syracuse in the first place. And, so I started at Syracuse in the fall of 1941 in the College of Forestry, and you may recall that we had a little event known as World War II then, and everything was upset. And, I was - after about a year and a half at Syracuse, in which I was in, majoring in Forestry - I went into military service for three years. And 00:06:00when I came back, I decided that my interests lay more in science, the wood science and engineering aspect of forestry than in the growing trees, itself. So, I transferred. I came back into the Wood Technology program at Syracuse. I finished my work at Syracuse, and have continued my work in that field.

BW: Just for the record, could you talk a little bit about where you grew up, when and where, and just a little bit about your earlier life?

BY: Ok, I grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a city in the west end of Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Hills. And there was lots of opportunity there 00:07:00to be outdoors and in the forest. And, I guess growing up there was pretty conventional. I was in the usual things, in Scouts and church and high school and so forth. One reason I was interested in Syracuse as I reached the end of my high school career was that my mother had been a graduate of Syracuse many years ago - not in - nothing related to forestry, but in biology. So I went to Syracuse because I knew they had a good strong program, supported by the State of New York. It was really a New York State College of forestry. Since then it's 00:08:00separated, to become a separate college of environmental science and forestry, as part of the State University of New York, but my early interest was prompted by my forestry recreation activity growing up in western Massachusetts, and the fact that my mother had gone to Syracuse, and I therefore looked particularly at Syracuse. So that's how I got started in it.

BW: Now, what were your first impressions when you started work with the Forest Products Labs?

BY: My first impressions. Well, lets see, I was assigned to - my research work 00:09:00that I'd been doing in Michigan had been in the area of wood drying, and I suppose for that reason in particular they assigned me to the wood drying section at the Lab. And there was, at that time, a lot work being done on providing a strong basis for drying woods, particularly the more difficult to dry hardwoods--economically and safely without splits and cracks and so forth. And I had been working in that area in Michigan, as a graduate student. My impression was that here was a rather immense organization with tremendous history, and I wondered how I could ever really become part of such a very large 00:10:00institution, that had already become rather well established in the field of forest products research.

BW: Now, can you describe a typical day working at the Forest Products Labs? What were something you did on a regular basis? What was the-?

BY: I'm sorry; I couldn't understand what you were saying.

BW: Sure. Could you describe a typical day at the Forest Products Labs?

BY: A typical day?

BW: Yes, sir.

BY: Something that's hard to believe now, at that time there was a whistle, and the eight o'clock whistle at the Lab called people to work all over the west side of Madison. And, as I recall, we even had a punch-clock, this was back in 00:11:001951. And I would check in, and I was working with a gentleman by the name of John McMillan on some drying research on Northern Red Oak. And my job was to prepare sample boards to go in the kiln to determine how it was drying, and to go into the kiln and set them and occasionally during the drying process to take them out and measure them, weigh them, determine the rate of drying, and so forth. And I would do that, and so I did quite a bit of work with the lumber dry-kilns. And, when I was not doing that, I began to get letters, to answer 00:12:00letters, written not to me, but to the Laboratory, about wood drying and various kinds of woods. One of the questions that I think of now, that I often received then, particularly now being down in Virginia, in what has been a strong tobacco country, was, "how can I convert a tobacco dryer to a wood dryer?" And I used to answer a lot of letters about that. And also, I answered letters about various woods and how they could be used, or not used, effectively--particularly foreign woods. And I built up quite a reference listing on that topic. And so my days 00:13:00were filled with that kind of thing.

And then another factor of the Lab's support at that time changed the course of my work. During and for some time after the war, the Lab was very much supported by the military. I recall the military provided about half the budget for the place, and after I had been there about a year, I was transferred to the packaging group, and assigned to a team working in the packaging to write an air cargo packaging manual. Well, knowing nothing about air cargo and nothing about 00:14:00packaging, but a little bit about wood, I learned quite a lot on this team--we had about four people. And we did most of our work from reference there at the Lab, a little bit of traveling--I remember traveling to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington to get more background on this. And so this was a completely new field, and the thing about the Lab was it was involved in so many things that one could wind up doing almost anything. And this matter of military support was 00:15:00still a very strong factor, because, as is usual in such an institution, keeping it funded is always a problem. I found out more about that later. And so, during '52 and the first part of '53 I worked in packaging.

And then I decided that if I were really going to get somewhere in research I should really get a Ph.D. And, at that time, George Garret, who was Dean of the College of Forestry in Yale was very familiar with the Lab. He'd been working at the Lab as one of the group of university folks during the war, and he talked to 00:16:00me about coming to Yale. And one of the other wood scientists I had gotten acquainted with at the Lab, Herb Fleischer, had been at Yale, and between them they talked me into accepting Yale's offer of a teaching assistantship and fellowship to go to Yale for a year, and I began that in the fall of '53. So that was another dramatic change, and I spent the academic year, '53-'54, in New Haven at Yale. And the folks at the Lab told me that I could work on my dissertation research when I got back, and I began plans for this at Yale. And 00:17:00actually, and I did pick it up, working in stresses that developed in wood drying and the related physics and mechanics as I got back, at the same time carrying out quite a bit of work related to military support for work on orthotropic materials which the Lab had a unique knowledge of. Orthotropic materials are materials that have perpendicular mechanical properties, in fact in three directions. And so, this could extend to glass fiber glaminates, and many other kinds of things. And so I came back from Yale, spent the next three 00:18:00years working on my dissertation research, mostly at night, and carrying out military supportive research in wood mechanics, and composite mechanics, plastics mechanics, during the daytime.

BW: Ok. Now did your job require any traveling?

BY: Some, yeah. One of the interesting projects I had in my early years at the Lab was again supported by the military. The Navy had established some centers of dry storage, in order to keep their materials dry and in good condition. And 00:19:00they had set these up at naval supply centers in Norfolk, Virginia, in San Francisco, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and in - I've forgotten the name of the other one - in Utah. And they were also using wood containers. The Navy had a very large program of storing material to preserve it and to keep it ready for shipment anywhere in the world using wood containers. These were ordinary wood 00:20:00boxes, well made, but ordinary wood boxes. And they couldn't figure out why it was that when they put these in their dry storage the boxes kept splitting. And so I spent several months working with a gentleman named Ed Rasmussen, traveling to these naval supply centers to examine the storage and to see what the problem was. And it turned out to be a fairly simple problem of the fact that they were using green wood and as it dried it shrank and split. And we helped them set up a program of making sure they had dry wood and it was, the dry wood was well 00:21:00prepared to use in boxes, and I think that solved their storage problem. And that was the year before I got into packaging and then subsequently went to New Haven. And I did, we did a lot of traveling. Traveling then was by rail. Air travel was just beginning--this was in '51-'52. We traveled by - you used to be able to travel by train from Madison then. And we went to San Francisco and to Utah and to Norfolk, Virginia and to Pennsylvania to these naval supply centers by train. And we'd usually arrange for a Forest Service automobile when we got 00:22:00there from a nearby Forest Service experiment station and used that to do the little driving that we needed to do, to go to the naval supply center and do our work there. That was the major traveling. Then there were little calls from manufacturers around who were having problems with the drying and wood deformation, and so occasionally we would do what we could. And so, this was the beginning of my traveling for the Lab.

BW: Ok. Now, during the time that you worked for Forest Products Labs, were there any projects or offices that you held that you found particularly challenging?

BY: I'm sorry I couldn't follow you.

BW: Sure. Were there any projects or jobs that you had that you found particularly challenging, while at Forest Products Labs?

BY: Jobs that what?

BW: That were challenging.

BY: Challenging? Well, they all were. Certainly the work in drying stresses that I began on with John McMillan was challenging, because actually we were setting up a basis for instructions to those involved in drying wood commercially, which came out in the form of a dry kiln operator's handbook, which I cooperated -- I worked with Ed Rasmussen and John McMillan and another gentleman named Ed Rietz 00:24:00- in preparing. And that still - that handbook is still in use. It's been revised several times since, but the challenge in those, then was to prepare the original kiln operator's manual, and I was very much involved in doing that and the research that provided a basis for it.

BW: Ok. What sort of projects did you find the most satisfying?

BY: What sort of projects were most satisfying? Well, I think the wood drying work was satisfying, in the sense that I had a chance to continue it and carry it further. And as I said, I carried that on into my dissertation work at Yale, 00:25:00and then did further work related to it after I finished my Ph.D. work at Yale. I did further, really challenging work in how temperature and moisture and time of exposure affected the characteristics of wood that related to how it would dry and how it would perform under changing moisture and temperature conditions. And I did quite a lot of that work. Then after I had done that about a year or so after I got back from Yale - or finished my work at Yale, I mean - they made 00:26:00me a project leader in charge of work on mechanical properties of wood, and then I had to spend much more time working at that. There it was challenging in the sense that we were getting information on how wood behaved mechanically that was needed for establishing standards in the wood construction industry. And the previous information, which had been gathered over many years at the Lab had to be refined and put in terms of modern engineering concepts and we spent quite a bit of time both doing that research and determining properties of wood under construction conditions and also working with people both from the industry and 00:27:00from other research institutions in applying that information. That was certainly the next challenge.

BW: Ok. Are there any colleagues or people you used to work with that you have any memories or stories that you'd like to share?

BY: Any - I'm sorry - any colleagues who what?

BW: Any colleagues that you have any stories about, or any memories about, that you'd like to share?

BY: I can't think of any. Colleagues. Well, I have lots of them, but I can't 00:28:00think of any particular stories.

BW: That's not a problem.

BY: Pardon?

BW: That's no problem. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the different positions that you had?

BY: Different positions?

BW: Yeah, kind of trace your work history at Forest Products Labs?

BY: Yeah, ok. I mentioned being project leader in wood engineering. I did that for about, lets see it was about '58 -- until - for about six years. And I had a great many challenges as we modernized the establishing standards for mechanical 00:29:00properties of wood. And then in '63 I was appointed the Assistant Director of the Lab, in charge of wood processing. It was called Division Chief in those days, and it was really assistant director in charge of all projects dealing with gluing and laminating and wood protection and machining and all those things. And I did that. And then in '64, after I'd done that job about a year, Ed Locke, who was then the director - Dr. Edward G. Locke - decided that I need 00:30:00more international exposure, and he did something which is quite unusual, even now. He told me to set up a trip of six weeks, in which I would visit all of the forest products research institutions in Western Europe. So, I got busy and set up contacts with all those folks who'd been doing forest products research in the nature institutions in England and France and Germany and Spain and Portugal and Switzerland. And then I made that trip and visited all of them, and that was very good international exposure, and also I got about all the traveling I wanted at that time.

And so when I came back from that I was much better informed about the international situation, as far as forest products research is concerned. And this was very useful, and then the way things go in an institution like the Forest Service, I was asked to take some, take a few weeks and come into the Washington office of the Forest Service, in Washington D.C., and help them with some administrative problems in the research section in there, and I did that. And, let's see, for a few weeks I did that and it was - then you learn how the 00:32:00world of Washington works. And then, shortly after that, I had a call from the Director saying that they had called him from Washington and wanted me to transfer in to Washington. And I did that in - lets see if I've got my time right - '66. And I was on the staff of the Deputy Chief for Research, and then 00:33:00doing various jobs, and communicating with Congress and so forth. And then I was assigned to head up the section dealing particularly with forest products and wood engineering research, in a staff role for the Deputy Chief. So I was in Washington then until 1970, and then they I guess decided that I needed some other experience so I became the Director of the Southern Forest Experiment Station, which is headquartered in New Orleans, and has laboratories--it's not like the Forest Products Lab - it has a whole bunch of projects at universities mostly, scattered all over the mid-south, dealing with forestry in all aspects. 00:34:00A little bit in products, but more actually in the forest and dealing with the wildlife and the relation with cattle and the civil-cultural research going on, and the genetics research going on, and all these things - which was, of course, a tremendously broadening experience.

And I did that for about two and a half years, and then they said we'd like to have you come back to Washington. And then I went back to Washington as Associate Deputy Chief for Research; I was the back-up for the man who was in charge of Forest Service research, which I did for another three years. And in 00:35:00the process of this, I got acquainted with Forest Service research all over the country and a lot of the university research and industry research that related to it. And then in '75, I went back to Madison as Director of the Lab, and was there until I retired in 1985. And in the course of this, and probably as a result of the international experience I'd had early in my career at the Lab, I became very much involved in international cooperative research in forest 00:36:00products and forestry generally. There's a major organization that ties together forest research institutions all over the world that's called the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, and it goes by its acronym, I-U-F-R-O, IUFRO. And I became very active in that and for some years headed up the forest products research within that, which was a matter of communicating with and setting up programs of cooperation of research among institutions all over the world. And at the time I retired from the Lab, I was still very active in that 00:37:00organization, in IUFRO. And when I went to Virginia Tech in 1975, they provided some support for me to continue that work for a couple years, which I did. So, well I don't know what more you want.

BW: No, sure, that's great. That's very comprehensive. Now about the USDA Forest Service, how did you feel working for the Forest Service?

BY: I was really - felt really quite honored to be able to do that. The thing I 00:38:00felt about it was that it was really a very strong, public-related government agency. And I felt that in the work we were doing at the Lab, and the other activities that I carried out in the Forest Service, that was really the aim of it. I know this was a time when public impressions of the Forest Service were changing fairly rapidly. This began while I was working in Washington, began in a very noticeable way when the environmental movement became stronger and stronger, and the policies being used by the Forest Service in managing forests and the policies that the environmental organizations thought should be used to 00:39:00manage forests were not exactly in agreement. And this didn't really upset my view of the Forest Service and working for it. But it did lead to a lot of questions on the part of my friends in industry and in the universities as to why I should want to work with this outfit that was destroying all the trees on the one hand, and from the industry standpoint, not providing all the information they needed. The Forest Service research program was undoubtedly the strongest research program in the world in forestry. And, as such, it led to 00:40:00some questions about why we did that or why we didn't do something else. And there was always more to do than could be done, and it was a matter of making, selecting priorities. And I thought, generally, that the Forest Service was doing that in a very wise manner, in terms of the concern for the public forest resource of the United States. And so I was really quite honored to be a part of that.

BW: Now if you could for a while, talk about your retirement from Forest Products Labs. Why did you retire?

BY: Why did I retire?

BW: Yes sir.

BY: Well, one I had been Director of the Lab for ten years. That's a rather 00:41:00challenging job, and while it was fascinating it was also exhausting in some ways. I really never tired of the challenges there, but I began to reach the point where I thought well, maybe I've had ten years to do my part in this, maybe I ought to turn it over to somebody else. And furthermore, one of the things that I had tried to do as Director of the Lab was strengthen our tie to forest products research in universities all over the country. And one of my particular interests was - having administered much of this from the Federal 00:42:00Government point of view at the Forest Products Lab - working with universities. I wanted to see what this research field looked like from the university point of view. And I was really looking forward to being able to get that perspective.

So I considered the various options and began to get pulled away by various things. For example, during the last year I was director, I spent a great deal of my time on a Special Commission for the Agency for International Development, 00:43:00USAID, heading up a commission to review the agency's forestry program. And I was in and out of Washington much of the time that last year. And that of course broadened my interest. And the fact that people were friends of mine at Virginia Tech wanted me to come there and join their faculty was intriguing. Anyway, all of these things sort of coalesced into a decision to retire. And most of those who have been directors have been directors for not more than about ten years. And I figured, well, it's time for somebody else to get their ideas into the 00:44:00system. So, I was looking for some new perspective then, and took the offer of the people at Virginia Tech to come here.

BW: Now do you feel like your work here has left a mark?

BY: Left a mark?

BW: Yeah, do you think that it has left a mark on other people at Forest Products Labs or the USDA Forest Service?

BY: Well, I'm not sure. I'd say - well, probably a few things, yeah. One, one 00:45:00was that I established that a person with forestry and wood technology background could successfully carry out the function of Director of the Lab. Which may seem a little surprising, but except for Herb Fleischer before me, all the directors had been chemists, chemical engineers, biochemists, and so forth. You know, and at the Lab there are relatively few wood scientists. The whole field is established by the coming together of chemists, chemical engineers, civil engineers, and others interested in using wood more effectively. Anyway, I think I was able to establish that the person with the wood background could 00:46:00successfully serve as director. Two, I think I established a little more strongly the role of the Lab in particular and forest products research in general, as part of the research program of the Department of Agriculture. At the time I first got into this, as they were, as the USDA people were setting up their research programs, forest products was a commodity, like corn and wheat and beans and so forth. And I think we got them to think much broader than that. And I'd say a third is maybe the association with the universities, which I 00:47:00worked very hard to strengthen--the cooperative relationship with university education and research programs in wood science. And I think probably fourth would be the international aspect, which had begun in a smaller way by people like Ed Locke and Herb Fleischer. But I think I was able to add a great deal to that through the international relations work I was able to carry out. I guess that's about it, all I can think of right now.

BW: Sure. Do you have any other stories or memories or comments that you'd like to make?

BY: Well, it probably doesn't relate to the Lab directly. I probably could think 00:48:00of some more, but when we first went there, I said I'd been working in Pulaski, Virginia, right near where I am now, and it was in January, and my wife and small child and I went, drove up to Madison in January. And shortly after we got there the temperature dropped to thirty below zero and our car froze up. And in the process of heating the baby's bottle we cracked the mirror in the hotel. And we had several adventures in Madison. But then I remember - oh what was his 00:49:00name? I can't think of the person's name right now, who was a distinguished researcher - if I had more time I could think of it, maybe I will. He'd been there a long time before I got there, and he used to go fishing in the ice, through the ice out on Lake Mendota and one of his tricks was to fish through the ice and catch some fish in the middle of the winter and they would be frozen. He'd come into the Lab over the weekend and leave them in people's wastebaskets. They would come in Monday morning and would find their place reeking with fish.

BW: Do you have anything else you'd like to discuss?

BY: I don't know there's much more I can add.

BW: Sure, no this is all really good. I appreciate your time.

[End of oral history interview]