Okay today we're talking with Dr. William Feist of Madison, Wisconsin---actually Middleton, Wisconsin---and he'll be talking a little bit about his experience at Forest Products Lab for the Forest Products Laboratory's 100 year anniversary oral history program. Dr. Feist the first question, what if anything in your early years prepared you to work for or with the Forest Products Lab?

[inaudible] and they hired me back in 1964.

Okay. If you could maybe talk a little bit about when you were born, where you grew up, if you had an interest in forestry, that type of thing.

Okay, well I'm a chemist so had other than liking trees, I had no real interest in forestry and all of my work while I was at the Forest Products Lab was involved in some form of chemistry. But I started in St. Paul, Minnesota and went to a blue-collar high school and I had a father and mother who wanted to make sure I went beyond what they did and they helped me to get into a college. And I always had an interest in some of the natural sorts of things and the Forest Products Lab interested me because it was sort of halfway in between an academic life and the business world life and I knew the business world life wasn't something I wanted and the academic life was something that I did not want to go into at that point when I went to the Lab.

Did you attend an institution of higher learning that dealt specifically with---well you said you had a chemistry background---where did you go to school? What were your degrees?

My first degree was a Bachelors of Science in chemistry at a small school called Hamline University in St. Paul and while I was there a professor I was working with suggested I might want to go on to graduate school and he knew a professor out in Colorado who needed a student and in those days students were asked to come and were paid to come and so it was a lot different environment than it is now. But I did get a teaching assistantship and then later a research assistantship at the University of Colorado in Boulder and in 1960---I left at '60 but I got the degree in 1961, a PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry and that's when I moved on out east and worked for a place called Esso Research and Engineering Company. I was there four years and decided I didn't want to raise my children in New Jersey which is too crowded and congested after living in the Midwest and in Colorado.

So aside from your---you had your chemistry background---aside from just an interest in tree, what drew you to Forest Products Lab? What interested you in forestry and different wood products?

Yeah it was a total coincidence. I was looking for a job in 1964 and I was interviewing in the Midwest, in the Chicago area, and I happened to see an ad in the magazine called The Chemical Engineering News by the Forest Products Laboratory and they were looking scientists in the area of pulping of wood and I had enough organic chemistry and polymer chemistry to think I might be qualified. I contacted the Lab and they asked me to come and visit and in those days you had to go on your own money to go any place in the government, but I was going to be in Chicago so I could take the bus up and interview at the Lab. When I got there, the position had already been filled but when a man named Dr. Harold Tarkow, who was a project leader for Wood Surface Chemistry, saw my resume and asked if I could be interviewed and he interviewed me and sort of on the spot wrote a job description for me to work in his project because again my background in chemistry and polymers, and since wood is nothing more than a natural polymer, it seemed to lend itself very good to the sort of position he was looking at. In those days, 1964 when I first came, the Laboratory was still in a growing mode, there were four hundred and sixty people and they were looking for great things, they had money to build new buildings, they envisioned the Lab becoming much, much bigger over the coming years. It turns out it didn't ever get much past four sixty, but I was hired in the year when they were trying to add staff and it all worked out well for me because it gave me a chance to work in an area that was interesting and obviously useful because it dealt with forest products and it was an internationally known, world famous organization, known for its wonderful research and its generation of information useful to almost all aspects of the population, from the common person to the industry to what have you.

Now what was your relationship---or had you heard of the Forest Products Lab before you started working for them?

No, other than seeing their advertisement in this journal of Chemical Engineering News, I had never heard of them.

I see.

I looked them up once I decided if I wanted to go and check them out to see if they had an opening for me but I did not know them at all.

So when you looked into them a little bit what were your initial impressions of them?

Again that it was an internationally known world acclaimed organization that specialized in generating information for general use by everybody on the best use of wood and forest products.

So when did you start working with Forest Products Lab and do you have any memories or any kind of impressions of your---stories of your first days on the job?

Well I started in October of 1964 and I had come from a large oil based research organization that had tons of money and lots of space and every imaginable sort of equipment that could be used and I really came to an organization that had many things, but much of it was older; the conditions in the laboratories were more crowded, there was less space, you didn't get an office. You had a lot of freedom but you ended up working in conditions that were not bad, but certainly more primitive than the rather elegant conditions of a major industrial research organization. So the first impression was it's a great place, built in 1933 and you just have to tolerate that it's going to be a little more inconvenient than it was or what I had been used to. But they were not bad impressions just that I had to appreciate the fact that it wasn't modern elegance. It was a wonderful friendly sort of family oriented place in those days. It still is to a degree, but not nearly as much. But they just---when you came you were greeted by people, you were taken around and they had lunchtime poker---not poker---cribbage games and horseshoe in the summer and people playing catch, it just was a nice relaxed atmosphere unlike the sort of thing that I had left out of New Jersey.

So could you describe a typical day while you were employed at the Forest Products Lab? What do you do in the projects and the different positions that you held?

Well I guess that they are---sort of a typical day would be---first of all, in those days you worked on your own; there were no laboratory technicians, there were people you could go to for help: the librarians, the analytical test laboratories, the engineering test labs. But if you wanted to do a laboratory experiment as a new person you did it yourself, you did all of the preparation, gather together of whatever chemicals or equipment you might need. So you would spend a lot of time planning your experiment and then getting the equipment running and getting parts for them and ordering them. You worked at a desk that was right in the lab where you were and again the lab was, by today's standards, unacceptable to work in, the hood was homemade and didn't have the best ventilation system and chemicals would have been sitting around without any real control. But it was again so much more like an academic environment that if it was not safe, you were expected to be safety conscious on your own and deal with any problems on your own. So you spent much of your time doing work, even though you had an advanced degree, you were a good laboratory worker. Of course there would be occasional meetings---there was a group called Chemistry Research Division, C-R-D yeah, Chemical Research Division, and the main head of it, Jerry Saeman, who turned out to be very influential in my career there, had a big office just two doors away from me and once again the entire group of some twenty-plus people would go in and talk about what they're doing and what problems they're having, what progress they're having and exchange thoughts and ideas and equipment. It was again a very sort of family feel to it, each person helping each other out. A typical day was mostly non-typical as you would do so many different things in a given day.

Now did the project that you worked on or the jobs that you held did they take you away from the office? Did you get to do any traveling? And if so, where did you go?

Well I had over the thirty years I was there I had a very extensive travel life, but in the first few years there was not much in the way of travel. They, the Forest Products Lab, did offer courses---not courses, outings where you'd go and learn about the Forest Service, you'd meet other groups. They were, I guess you might call sort of going out for class type things, but they were not long things. I think my first scientific meeting I traveled to was some oh three or four years after I had been there. The travel was usually done by more senior people and if you didn't have some good research result to present, you wouldn't get to go to a meeting. That's often what you would do is go to scientific meetings.

But I don't know if you want me to go into my later years. But as far as travel---later on about ten years later I was asked to take over the Wood Finishing Project, Wood Surface Chemistry and Property Enhancement is what it became in the name. But it was just a small group at first and it grew larger and as it grew larger my travel requirements became much more and I think the last oh ten, fifteen years I was there I would traveling as much as thirty days out of the year not including all of my personal time, my personal vacation time, is three years of official travel. That took me to all forty-nine states, but not Alaska, so I didn't do much foreign travel, I did a little bit towards the end but it was mostly in the country, a little bit in Canada but I did get to go many places to visit laboratories, to make presentations. In the last fifteen years, I gave a lot of lectures on painting and finishing wood, which was the area I worked in the most and those lectures might be with the National Park Service or condominium associations or the Forest Service or any number of wide ranges of associations, preservation associations, and housing associations, and builders and contractors and painting associations. A number of popular lectures, as well as a number of scientific lectures where I would present the result of the work that I had done. So it was a wide range of travel from almost nothing at the beginning to an awful lot at the end when I was in my later years.

Was there one job or project that gave you the most satisfaction? And if so, why was that?

Well I had a varied career in the first year working all alone on some very basic science things to the last twenty years where I was heavily involved in this painting and finishing of wood, it was called practical. Where I got a lot of satisfaction out of the early part, I think I got more satisfaction out of the last twenty years because first of all I had a lot of control of it and authority and I could choose and work with different people, but I also got to meet an awful lot of people and the results of our research were immediately transferable to people who wanted to paint their wood outdoors or protect it from the weather or varnish it. And the information we generated was helpful to them and them being a homeowner, a painter, a contractor, a wood supplier, a paint supplier. I worked closely with a lot of paint companies and wood companies traveling to their plants, to their research labs and again, giving out information on I guess I could call it a totally free basis. There was never a charge for our services other than paying for travel costs, we didn't consult for a fee we just gave away whatever information we had created at the lab, or we'd gather from other places that wasn't protected by any patents or security things. That gave a lot of satisfaction knowing you could reach so many and be of value to so many people. It actually reached beyond the United States; it reached other countries, foreign countries. We had visiting scientists who would come and work with us and take the information back to their countries.

What was one project or many projects that you found the most challenging and possibly the most I guess difficult to grapple with?

Well I think that again the last twenty years dealing with painting and finishing wood called the technical name, Wood Surface Chemistry and Property Enhancement, the challenge of trying to bring together the paint and the wood industry, trying to get the users of the information to use it properly, trying to get people to recognize the need to protect wood in a certain way, covered in a certain way, not do certain things with it. The challenge of trying to get a lot of misinformation out of the general use, people would believe one thing is that somebody had told it to them in a hardware store, but it was totally the wrong information. So it was a challenge to try and get people doing the right things for wood to protect the property outdoors. We were always focused on wood that was used above ground and not in contact with the ground where the problem of rot and termites comes in and we didn't have to deal with that, we only dealt with wood standing well above the ground and not getting wet by being in water. So it was the challenge of trying to get people to accept often very old information that had been around a long time but they wouldn't accept it for economic reasons or because they had never done it that way or it wasn't the right thing to do to them but it was the wrong thing to do for wood. The idea that it's okay to throw away wood that had been used only a while because there's always more you can get at the lumberyard or the hardware store. That was tough to overcome as the sort of wasteful use of wood and much more so in those days where there were still lots of big trees around being cut versus today where you have a much poorer quality of wood supply for people to choose from.

Are there any colleagues or other people that you were associated with at the Forest Products Lab that you have strong memories about?

Well I have a strong memory about a lot of people, but I guess the first memory was of a fine gentleman named Ray Seborg who worked in the lab next to me and he was heavily involved in my group, the old Wood Surface Chemistry group, he was involved with protecting and stabilizing wood that had been waterlogged. He was just really old school, he smoked cigarettes with a cigarette holder, loved the plays, a friendly practical joker, a wonderful golfer, every summer bring in tons of tomatoes and other vegetables. A real nice man who was always there to help you whenever you had a question like where do I find this or how do I get my paycheck and things like that. He was just a good practical friend. He's passed on now, he retired about five years after I'd been there, but he was a wonderful gentleman and just a colleague not a supervisor.

In the '70s, about eight year after I'd been there, I was assigned to a man named George Hajny, H-A-J-N-Y, and he was just a marvelous boss who never concerned himself with trying to push himself on and get more promotions, he was just concerned with dealing with people and solving problems, and having them work in areas where they most wanted to be. And I worked directly with George for about five years on a project called Outside Chip Storage---again because of my chemical background. Some colleagues in Springer [Edward Springer] and George and Larry Zoch were working on methods to protect chips that are stored in huge piles, dozens of feet high, hundred of feet high out in pulp mills where they store the wood before it's going to be used. And they had a problem of deterioration of the mill piles, might even lead to spontaneous combustion of them; the piles would burst into flames. The Lab was involved in a cooperative group effort with them and George asked me to become a part of that for about five years and afterwards he was my boss in over the wood surface chemistry thing and just did an awful lot to help me out and answer a lot of problems and solve a lot of problems. A man who was George's boss was Jerry Saeman, S-A-E-M-A-N, and Jerry was a division chief when I first came and later became the deputy director for research, I think was his title, he was the first one ever named that. He would help people in conducting their research in ways of getting people, getting money, getting space, getting equipment on a much higher level.

In 1974, after I had been at the Lab for ten years, he came into my office and asked me if I would be willing to take over the research dealing with this wood surface chemistry thing, commonly called the painting and finishing of wood. The man who had done it for many years, dozens of years, a John Black who was and is a very good friend of mine was retiring and Jerry asked if I would take that over since the other work was outside chip storage had come to an end. It seemed again, that I had this sort of right background training to work on those sorts of things, paints and other finishes are polymers, wood is a polymer and I had polymer training and experience, they're all chemicals and I was a chemist. I had done a number of things, other related things with wood and it seemed like it would work well with me and I was immediately given two technicians to work with which meant that I could be doing more things in the way of thinking about research and less time actually having to do a lot of the more time consuming laboratory work. That's what happened and with time the project grew and became a true project, I became a project leader some four or five or six years later and I stayed a project leader until almost the end of my career. The group grew to as many as three scientists and four technicians at one time and we had a lot of cooperative research that was going on with industry, with foreign scientists, with academic research. It was just a marvelous twenty years for me of having a good, active, productive time with lots of individual freedom, lots of choices of what to do and what not to do, and a moderate amount of support from both the industry and of course a lot of support from the Lab.

Dr. Feist lets move on to a couple of questions about the USDA Forest Service.

Right.

Now how did you feel about working for an agency that was part of the USDA Forest Service?

I don't know that I had any feelings one way or the other, I learned that the Forest Service was a pretty independent organization and as it turned out, in all my years at the Lab, you never saw an awful lot of any interference by the major agency, the USDA, and the Forest Service our contacts were mostly from the Washington office and mostly research people and we really didn't have a lot of dealing with the forests. And that was probably a disadvantage at times, we could go on a field trip into some of the national forests and they wouldn't even know who the Forest Products Laboratory was because we didn't deal with growing trees; we dealt with the tree after it was cut down and was being cutup and glued, and burned and tested, and painted and protected from rot and decay so, there was never a real close relationship with either the USDA or the Forest Service. Although a lot of Forest Service people would come but they were in Forest Service research, not in the forests and that was a big separation. We dealt mostly with scientists in the Forest Service, not with people who were in the field growing and cutting the trees.

So did your impression of the Forest Service, did it change at all over the course of the time that you worked at the Forest Products Lab?

Oh not a great deal I think even today it seems that if I went into the forests and said that I worked at the Forest Products Lab they might not know what I was talking about, but if I went into a forest experiment station where research was going they would know who the Forest Products Lab because they are basically a part of it. But I don't think it has changed too much from what it was back in the '70s.

Did you notice any kind of a change in the public perception of the Forest Service in people that dealt with outside of work or in other aspects of your job?

No not really I just didn't ever see anything that had changed that much or was negative or positive, sort of standard attitudes towards the Forest Service.

So in the years leading up to your retirement, what was the---how did you make the decision to retire?

Well I would be eligible to retire after thirty years and I was going to be fifty-nine when I had thirty years of work and I had four years in industry and twenty years at school and I said see if I have a chance to retire and do something interesting and different, I think I would take it. Not that I was unhappy at the Lab but we had declined from four-sixty down to about three hundred and twenty, the budgets were tighter, the number of people were reduced, the number of people you could go to and collaborate with was greatly reduced, the number of projects had been dropped because of people retiring and no funding to replace them. I thought gee, it might not be such a bad time to get out. And coincidentally, a scientist in Switzerland who had worked with me for a full year when he came over and actually lived here for the full year, a man named Jurgen Sell, called one day and he said I have a chance to go to, I Jurgen, I have a chance to go to New Zealand and I'm going to be there for four months would you be interested in coming and living in our house in Switzerland. It turned out he was leaving for New Zealand about ten or twelve days after my retirement date which was October 14th. So I talked with my wife and we decided hey, lets go live in Switzerland for four months and we'll have a house and a wonderful opportunity, it would be in the wintertime, so there won't be a lot of tourists. I said yes, I checked it out, all I had to do was sign one paper and I was able to retire two days after my thirty year anniversary.

So it was a pure coincidence of something coming along at exactly the right time, but it also---since I was relatively young, fifty-nine---I could continue on much of the work that I'd been doing on a consulting basis. I knew there were a number of people who still wanted me to give lectures, practical lectures basically, once in a while a scientific one. There were people who wanted to collaborate on research, especially a man at Perdue University, a Doctor Michael Hunt who was doing work on historic paint restoration in an area in West Lafayette and Lafayette, Indiana where they had a lot of older houses dating back to the mid-1800s and he was trying to get involved again with practical research to try to convince people that it wasn't necessary to teardown the old front and replace it with aluminum or steel or plastic, but you could do things to protect the wood properly and he wanted some research collaboration. There were again, a number of people wanting me to give lectures, the National Park Service and the Canadian Wood Council. I figured, gee I could do some of those things get some traveling in, maybe fit in vacations with some of the travel. So I decided---that was the second main reason I wanted to move on. And I could also be a volunteer at the Laboratory, help continue to answer questions on the phone and people who had paint problems and I did a lot of it at the Lab. My contacts per year would number the thousands of people calling or visiting or asking for information and I knew I could continue to help the Lab do those sorts of things as well as consult. It turns out the consulting also led to some litigation work involving paint failures some work with some companies in improving their processes, quite a number of lectures, up to twelve a year in various places. So it turned out that for ten years I had some marvelous things to do besides spending over four months in Switzerland to start my retirement and when I was there for four months I just spent my time enjoying it I didn't do any work or consulting.

That worked out good. Do you feel like the work that you've done at the Forest Products Lab and elsewhere, do you feel like its left a mark within the organization and just in general?

Yeah the whole area of painting and finishing wood goes all the way back to 1922 at the Forest Products Lab, when the industry came to the Lab and asked them to help with some problems they were having with paint failure. It was failing and they didn't know why and they didn't really understand wood and didn't understand their paint necessary. But they wanted the Lab to develop a program to help them solve problems of paint failure in the field, not indoors but outside and so the Lab created an entire project, which was very successful, very early on they provided a lot of really fundamental work in helping the industry understand what was going on, how they could improve their products, how they could make better products. And also, the Lab could pass the information on to the general population, all aspects of the general population, and that was the single biggest thing they did and ever since 1922, the Laboratory has been know as a major source of unbiased information available to the wide population on protecting wood outdoors by painting and finishing and staining it. I continued that work starting in 1974 and I worked very hard to expand it, I contacted a lot of groups, I generated mailing lists, I would send out the information, I turned out publications, I would go to meetings where I would have a lot of contact with people, I would meet with painters, meeting with painting companies, wood companies.

We generated practical publications for almost every aspect of our research that we ever worked on and so we had a large number of publications, many of which today are still quoted on the internet, in paint magazines, in wood magazines, in universities. They were publications that were never copyrighted so that anybody could take them, literally put their name on it and publish it as an extension publication or an article in a magazine, which many people did, and that was the intent of it. Many times they'd give us credit, they might even mention my name, so people would know where it came from and that, of course, generated more questions and more contacts and more information requests. So I think in the end I ended up with certainly an international reputation as being one of the main workers in the field of painting and finishing wood and that has continued even today. Every once in a while, I see my name in an article in a magazine quoting something that was done as many as ten or twenty years ago.

I guess just in wrapping up, do you have any stories, memories, or other comments that you wish to record for the sake of posterity?

Well I guess for posterity I can say that my time at the Lab for thirty years was very rewarding to me and provided me with a lot of wonderful challenges, a lot of wonderful people, and a lot of chance to do many, many things. I guess I'm going to leave with a negative tone, because I've seen the Laboratory decline so much in the past years, the past oh ten years I guess. The staff has declined, the budget has declined. I think that the public awareness and the stature has declined, since they don't have nearly so many researchers and are not generating near so much information, their general usefulness has declined and their ability to provide useful information has declined. I guess the modern electronics have really messed up contacting people and getting somebody to give you some information.

When I first came to the Lab you could call the Lab and you'd be talking to a real person in a short time because you'd start with a receptionist on a box and she was controlling the phones so you were always talking to a person. Now, you can barely get people to do anything except talk on their answering machines. So their place in the research world I think has declined because of that. I think it's really the great reduction in numbers that have hurt them so badly, I mean the last I heard they are under two hundred, which means there probably are under forty scientists if that many---and in my day they were over two hundred scientists. You simply cannot do any level of research with that. There's been, over the years, a major lack of support from the outside in the way of industrial support, academic support; it may be even the Forest Service Washington office support. So, it's sort of a sad thing to see it reduced so much from the time I first started in 1964.

Do you have any opinions or theories as to why there has been this kind of notable decline in the numbers, funding, and things like that? Cooperation from the industry?

I think it's just a broad thing; it isn't just the Forest Products Lab that has suffered this way. A number of universities have closed down their entire forestry science organizations, the University of California, Michigan State, Missouri---at one time there were literally dozens of forestry sciences research laboratories at universities, Texas is way down--now there are only two or three or four left that are doing any sort of active research. The industry tended to decline in super good quality wood in and the necessity to go to things like plywood and hardboard and particleboard---they've had a great decline. Consumption has gone into synthetic products and away from wood and so it isn't just the Lab that suffered this decline, it was everybody else associated with it. When I look at the number of publications coming out now compared to ten, fifteen years ago it's just a small fraction, very few from the Laboratory anymore but also from other universities which have closed down their research. So it's sort of a worldwide thing, even world orientated labs were closed, just totally closed. For instance, Princes Risborough in England closed, they're gone, they were folded into their equivalent of the Bureau of Standards. A number of other labs have just suddenly, are just gone. There isn't the worldwide support for doing things with a renewable resource like wood for some reason or another.

Real quick. I just want to go back because I think that I might have not caught the first question that I asked, the very first of this interview, so I want to go ahead and re-ask it just so that we have. That was basically what if anything in your early years prepared you to work for the Forest Products Lab? Also, if you could mention when and where you were born and where you grew up, that kind of thing?

Okay. I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1934 and attended high school there then I went to a small school, small Methodist school, it turned out, Hamline University, which really specialized in a liberal education, liberal arts. I got a Bachelors of Science in chemistry and then I was encouraged to go on to graduate work and I went to the University of Colorado and got a PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, leaving there late in 1964 and getting the degree the following spring. From there I went to Esso Research and Engineering Company in New Jersey where I worked in polymers. So I had this training in basic organic chemistry and polymers and it sort of ideally suited me for work at the Forest Products Laboratory in Wood Surface Chemistry. And it turns out an opening was created in 1964 and they hired me and I stayed there for the full thirty years of my career.

Okay great. I guess just to wrap it up to, do you have any kind of relationship with Forest Products Lab now? Do you still speak to anybody?

I'm still a volunteer and I occasionally get calls from people who have paint problems, occasionally they'll send me a manuscript for review. I have a colleague there who we still jointly write publications every, oh year or two. On a social basis I have contact with a lot of people, we have a golf group which meets on Wednesday afternoons and it has twenty lab people in it and most---well half of those are still working. So I have a lot stories from the Lab and a lot of good contact with people. The Lab still has retirement parties and Christmas parties and a bowling league in addition to the golf league, so I have ongoing communication with a number of retirees and a number of people who are still actively working.

Alright I guess in closing is there anything else you would like to talk about today?

I don't think so, that's about enough.