Although I have officially been retired from teaching in the Civil Engineering Department at Pitt for over eighteen months, up until now I have been able to retain my office. Before Covid-19 I would go into school one day each week, loaf in my office, help out with Senior Design, and enjoy lunch with my daughter Elizabeth.
Alas, all good things must come to an end; recently I was advised that the Department had four new hires coming in and that they needed my office. Elizabeth and I waded through the red tape maze, acquired an entry permit, and were able to spend two hours retrieving my valuables. I had already moved a lot of books and documents home before the pandemic, but we still managed to fill a cart to move things to my van.
This, of course, was an extremely nostalgic event, particularly since it was the third time I had celebrated the end of a career by filling a vehicle with treasured artifacts and moving them somewhere else. Nonetheless, acknowledging the end of my career as an academician was especially poignant.
The first couple of years at Pitt I was treated like a typical adjunct, bereft of an office and of the services available to the full-time help. Eventually I was rescued by Reidar Bjorhovde, the Department Head. There was a pair of chairs attached to the floor in the hallway between his office and the men’s room, which I appropriated as an office between classes.
Each time Reidar had to relieve himself, he passed me and a student in the chairs, working diligently. On the way back he would stop and eavesdrop on our conversation. He quickly realized the value of what was going on, and resolved to find me an office. I ended up in a vacant office, with prestigious neighbors – Rafael Quimpo, Lin Chiu, T. K. Hung, and Ron Neufeld. Pretty fast company for an outsider!
A few years later John Fleming retired, and I inherited his office, in the middle of a neighborhood dominated by structural engineers whose language I spoke fluently. When Benedum Hall was renovated, we were all moved from the ninth floor to the seventh floor, with our offices in the same relative locations. That is the one that I reluctantly vacated this summer. My first office had a lovely view to the southeast; the view from the latter two left a lot to be desired – mostly the O’Hara parking garage.
In addition to the cartful we transferred to the van, we overfilled two large dumpsters. The recyclable bin was loaded with the contents of the one large file drawer I hadn’t already purged – mostly file folders from my Advanced Materials class. I could have easily spent a day going through them one at a time and reminiscing.
Into the non-recyclable bin went a host of other items from the Materials classes – concrete test cylinders, asphalt core samples, geosynthetic fabric samples, and fiberglass-reinforced plastic structural shapes.
We threw out half a dozen small wooden planks that we had tested when a Senior Design team entered the National Timber Bridge competition. Once the properties of the selected species of wood had been determined, they designed and built a timber arch bridge spanning twelve feet, which won a national prize; the actual bridge is now in a park on Pitt’s Bradford campus.
We didn’t trash my bricks. Students aware of my brick-collecting hobby have continued to bring in unique samples. Even my colleagues have caught the fever. One of the ones we took home was the prized “Athens Block” that John Sebastian brought back from a visit to Ohio University. It is immortalized by being in my official retirement portrait.
I reciprocated by giving John an excellent souvenir of Pitt Stadium. When the stadium was being demolished, I retrieved a handful of pieces of concrete from the DeSoto Street face. The one I gave John actually has a streak of blue paint on it – part of the iconic “Pitt Stadium” name on it.
I had previously brought most of my personal textbooks home. Most of the rest of them have been donated to the ASCE chapter for the library in the Michael Gross Student Lounge.
I chose to move my old surveying tools home, though I really have no need of them. They include a two-hundred-foot tape, a plumb bob, and a very old “Locke” hand level.
My first two offices had a large chalk board, which I used effectively as a one-on-one teaching aid. Whenever I assigned a difficult homework problem, I knew that I soon would be visited by a student asking for help. My approach was to give the student a piece of chalk and send him/her to the board.
“Give me a free-body diagram.” At this point other students would begin to show up and watch carefully. I would then slowly talk the student through the problem-solving logic until he/she suddenly caught on and could finish it alone.
My wife used to shake her head when I came home from school with my trousers covered with chalk dust. When we moved from the ninth floor to seven I insisted on moving my chalk board, without avail. We settled on a dry-erase board with crayons of many different colors.
I reluctantly trashed the prototype “popsicle stick” truss bridge my grand-daughter Rachael and I put together when I introduced that project into the Materials class as a student competition. That was also the fate of the sample balsa wood box girder lab project.
The office was filled with ghosts of students and faculty colleagues from the past (as well as present). Each item we evaluated was associated with someone special from the past. Pleasant memories!
My last tangible tie with Pitt has now been broken. I will still visit occasionally and participate in some events, but, sadly, it now will be as an outsider.