________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
his credit with the Army. That was certainly a mixed blessing for me. First of all, there was
the expedited nature of summer school, but second, we had an instructor who certainly knew
his subject but was not interested in the basics. He was interested on the margins of where it
worked and didn't work exactly according to his theory. So, we once again were jumped
ahead beyond a basic foundation start into the midst of his interests.
[Richard S.] Englebrecht was there on the sanitary engineering side of the house, as were
Ven Te Chow in hydrology; Dr. Ralph Peck, one of the greats in soil mechanics; and Don
Deere in geology. One of the really interesting courses I took was with Peck and Deere,
sharing case studies of things that worked and things that didn't work, where they had been
called in as professors at Illinois to be consultants. Peck at this time was such a giant in his
field that he only took jobs that interested him, that were a new challenge to him, something
that intrigued him and piqued his interest. It was really interesting, interacting with those
folks in those case studies.
Another new thing that happened that time--we had this huge box in a room that we went in
to see one day, and it was called a computer. I mean, it was room-sized. Illinois had one of
the first, supposedly, of these computers. So, I took a computer course with Steve Fenves,
who later was big in that business at the University of Pittsburgh, in the department of
engineering applications in automation. Ours was basically a programming course at that
time, and we learned to program and operate the computers and run engineering solutions.
Fenves was an assistant professor of engineering.
I ran into another assistant professor when I got into the construction management arena.
First of all, I took an operations research/systems analysis course, a decision-making kind of
approach. Then I took an elective with another professor by the name of Dick Schafer, who,
of course, later was instrumental as the University of Illinois tied together its proposal to the
Corps that became the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory. He then became the
tech director of the laboratory. So, Dick Schafer and I can get together all the time and tell
war stories about my captain days and his assistant professor days at Illinois.
Q:
When were you promoted to captain?
A:
It was in July of '61, while I was at the University of Illinois.
Q:
To go back, I don't know exactly how to phrase this question, and I don't want to phrase it
negatively, but you were talking about your West Point preparation. I can't think of any way
to phrase it but negatively. Would you fault West Point for not having prepared you better in
engineering, or that's not really the purpose of West Point?
A:
No, it wasn't the purpose of West Point, and that was why--I guess it was recognition by the
Army or the university that they were putting me into a course of study for which I really
didn't have all the concrete, all the structures, all the soils that they thought I had. In other
words, I was being credited with a full undergraduate civil engineering background, and I
certainly didn't have that.
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