Thayer School

Widest travelers from the Thayer School faculty during the late lamented spring vacation were Professor of Mechanical Engineering Ed Sherrard who reached Charleston, S.C., with wife Betty, and Professor of Civil Engineering Russ Stearns '38 who crossed the waters to Bermuda with wife Lee.

As an example of both versatility and judgment, Professor Stearns is cited for his travels which have taken him not only to Bermuda during Hanover's mud season but also during several recent summers to Alaska, Northern Canada and Greenland where heat waves are seldom disastrous. In his recent (1957) book, Men Against the Frozen North, author Ritchie Calder recalls meeting Professor Russell Stearns on Victoria Island... "this remote settlement (where) aircraft of the RCAF came in on regular schedule. Mammoth transport planes debauched here and the bay-ice swarmed with lesser aircraft... as busy as a railway junction. And its pristine peace would never be restored.... La Pierre and Stearns were the instruments of this disquieting change.... On their facts and their judgments, and on their signals to Edmonton, great aircraft would take off for the Arctic to land on ice airfields which Nature had made and they had tested. That was their job - to decide whether a stretch of ice like Cambridge Bay would take the jarring weight of 70-ton aircraft landing on it. And it was no guesswork. This was modern science - physics, chemistry and advanced engineering carried out in the toughest laboratory in the world - the open Arctic."

The annual New England Council Conference of the American Society of Civil Engineers was held in Durham and Portsmouth, N.H., on March 29 with two members of the Thayer School staff active in the program. Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering Carl Long was a member of a three-man symposium which constituted the afternoon program of the conference. This symposium presented in words, slides and motion pictures the story of "The DEWLINE - America's Most Northerly Line of Defense." Your correspondent, as 1958 chairman of the New England Council, ASCE, had arranged the Conference and served as chairman of it.

Bill Olmstead '39 paid a visit to the School late in March after close to a twenty-year lapse. In the meantime, Bill has been engaged principally in construction work, in part in the Civil Engineer Corps during the war. He is now President of Irwin and Leighton, building contractors in Philadelphia. This firm has an enviable record of construction of many types: office, industrial, commercial, and institutional. At present they are constructing the new Civil and Aeronautical Engineering Buildings at Cornell.

Rather similarly, the University of Florida has called in a Thayer School alumnus, Thorndike Saville 'ls, to head a study on the development of its new Science and Technology Center. The study is concerned with an integrated center of technology and science in which all the colleges will participate through teaching research. Since his retirement as Dean of Engineering at New York University last year, Thorndike has devoted his time to consulting engagements, largely in hydraulic and sanitary engineering.

Joan Phyllis Swenson was married to Roert Moore Mcllwain TT'sl in the Union Congregational Church in Montclair, N.J., on April 12.

One of the bridges pictured in CoveredBridges of the Northeast by Richard Sanders Allen (Adv. Stephen Greene Press, 1957) spans Vly Creek in the Town of New Scotland, Albany County, New York. Both the date and the builder are of interest here. This "fine example of a modern covered bridge" was built in 1955 by building contractor Gerald Waldbillig and his son Michael, the latter a member of this year's civil engineering graduating class at Thayer School.