Remembering Howard Fruhwirth

by Eric Johansen

 

Howard Fruhwirth and I got hired the same day to work for the then School of Engineering here at UAF, that day was September 12, 1987. There was some question as to which position each of us would fill but in the end it was decided I would be the machinist and Howard would be the lab technician. The lab technician position was advertised as a 20 hour a week position but it was decided to put him to work at 40 hours a week until things got caught up. As it turned out Howard always worked more than 40 hours a week until his retirement in 2003. Howard literally did the work of two normal employees based on sheer volume accomplished.

He had his desk right outside my office, inside the machine shop, in 109 Duckering until the Duckering remodel of 2000-2001 after which he had his own office up on the second floor. We always got along fabulously well most of the time except that he would try my patience once in a while by getting in a hurry. Despite his sometimes unorthodox methods of doing things he got an amazing amount of work done.

Howard was unfailingly cheerful and his biggest fault was his inability to say no when asked to do something. People regularly took advantage of this character flaw and would ask him to do things they could easily have done for themselves. I have a memory of talking to Howard in the hallway outside the machine shop one day when a faculty member walked up and asked if he could move a filing cabinet from one room to another. Howard cheerfully said yes, he could do that. He used to carry a yellow legal pad with him everywhere he went so he could write tasks to be done. He flipped the top page back on which every line was filled with a task to be done. Then he flipped the second page back on which every line was filled with a task to be done. Down near the bottom of the third page he wrote move filing cabinet from rm 123 to rm 456.

From his first day of work Howard always carried a pocket protector in his shirt pocket and a little black notebook. He logged all phone conversations, date, with whom, and a summary of what was said. For quite a few years he was building captain in addition to all his other duties. He was taken to task for one thing or another in the various meetings he attended in his capacity as building captain and would tell me about being chewed out and say they had it wrong and he would look it up in one of his notebooks. He had quite a stack of fully filled out notebooks at home and next meeting would pull out the relevant notebook and read the date, person, and gist of a conversation that had occurred 3 years earlier. More than one person had to admit to Howard that they were wrong and he was right.

Back in the nineties the electronics technicians, Howard, and I all belonged to TSS, Technical Services Section. We had a compact Nissan pickup truck with a lumber rack on it to use for running errands. One day Howard had driven over to Pay & Pack which used to be located where AIH is located now, to pick up various supplies. Howard arrived back at the machine shop right at 12 noon. I was just sitting down to lunch so Howard decided to eat lunch also and have me give him a hand unloading a couple 4' x 8' sheets of Masonite from the top of the rack after lunch. We were sitting there eating lunch and Howard began telling me about the stupid idiot driving down University Avenue who hadn't tied his load down properly. Howard looked in his rear view mirror and saw two half sheets of Masonite tumbling down University Avenue so he stopped and picked them up. He was pretty proud of himself because he had gone to purchase two sheets of Masonite but came back with three. He went on at quite some length about how stupid that guy had been to not properly secure his load. 

With lunch over I went out to help him untie and carry in the Masonite and sure enough, you guessed it, there were two half sheets of Masonite strapped to the top of the lumber rack. Both Howard and I got a good laugh out of that.

Another memorable incident occurred which caused Howard some considerable anxiety for a period of time. As building captain he used to work closely with various contractors working in the building. The old student rocket lab did not meet code for egress requirements and although outside the scope of work being done by a contractor in the building they were ahead of schedule.  Howard asked the contractor to bore a 4” diameter hole through the floor to allow relocating a breaker panel to make room for installing a door in between the rocket lab and hallway thereby satisfying egress requirements. The contractor was happy to oblige Howard’s request but when the core was slid out of the core barrel there was a 2” diameter conduit filled with copper wires running straight across the diameter of the concrete core. Howard was on pins and needles for the next month or so waiting for his phone to ring and be informed someone did not have power. Happily, in this instance, it turned out to be obsolete wiring that was no longer in use anyway.

Howard was a fabulous human being and I feel very fortunate to have had him as a co-worker for 15 years. He gave an enormous amount to engineering in the years he worked here.