Officers:

President-elect Jeff Colvin was born on the U.S. Naval Base in New Jersey where his father served during the Second World War, just five days before President Roosevelt died (but he would like to assure all the conspiracy theorists out there that there is absolutely no connection between these two events). Since his father's Navy career kept him away from home a lot of the time, Jeff spent many of his growing-up years with his mother and maternal grandparents, who came to this country as refugees from the Soviet Union in the early 1920's, in a non-English-speaking immigrant neighborhood of New York City. It is there that he first heard stories about the struggles for worker rights from uncles who were activist union organizers in New York City. He paid his own way through college (Rutgers University, not far outside the City) with scholarships and various union jobs. After earning a Ph.D. in Physics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and spending a year as a postdoc in the Physics Department at the University of Rochester, he entered into the DOE lab system, first at EG&G in Los Alamos. It was natural for him to become involved early on in the human rights struggles of Soviet scientists, serving as an active member of the Committee of Concerned Scientists and several other national human rights organizations. He has been working in the UC labs for more than 16 years. He has been an outspoken advocate for employee rights during this entire time, most recently as one focus for the opposition to wide-scale polygraph testing of lab employees. As a newly elected member of the SPSE Board, he has pledged himself to re-open the issue of a union certification vote and help organize approaches to how SPSE might succeed in winning certification; work to give voice to employees to compel management to abolish, or at least open up, the rank ordering process (he believes that we must stop the continued theft of the raise money by lab management); work to undo the damage done by the various changes to personnel policies over the past few years (particularly the growing reliance by management on temp and flex term employees); and continue to oppose all forms of discrimination, ethnic profiling, anti-foreigner hysteria, and all attempts to undo the protections of minority employees built into Affirmative Action laws.

Board Members:

Sandra Brewer has worked as a Computer Scientist in the Livermore Computer Center for over twenty years. Previously she worked on a number of large scientific application programs where she gained an appreciation for the needs of LLNL computer users. Most of her work in the LC has centered on programming support for compilers, loaders, utilities, and libraries. Helping users debug and adapt their programs to new machines and new software has been inherent in all her efforts. Sandra finds it exciting to work and interact with people to help them solve their problems; so she enjoys her assignment to the Hotline staff of the LC Customer Services and Support Group.

Sandra can be reached by phone at 422-4190, or e-mail at sbrewer@llnl.gov. Her office is in Bldg. 113, room 3012.

Carolyn "Sue" Byars
Sue Byars joined LLNL in 1980 as a contract clerical worker. Sue was quickly hired into an FTE position as a Senior Engineering Assistant. She observed that working as a craftsman offered one of the few jobs in which women were treated with equality pay-wise. Sue was accepted into the Maintenance/Operations electrical apprenticeship program and became a journeyman electrician. After working as an electrician for 8 years, she became a 300 series Coordinator. Sue completed her Bachelors of Science Degree in Organizational Behavior in 1998. Sue now works in Space & Site Planning as a Facilities Planning Analyst.

Sue has been a SPSE member for 10 years, joining as soon as she became eligible as a 300 series employee. Sue is a newly elected board member.

Sue's main workplace concern is pay equity. Sue first encountered pay inequity when she worked as a clerk in private industry. A promotion came up for which she was well qualified. A man of lesser capabilities was hired. Sue filed a complaint about it and eventually ended up getting the job but not the pay he received. This lit a spark in her that ignited a passion for workplace pay equity, not only for women but also for minorities.

Sue believes that women and minorities have a number of major issues to deal with in the nation's government and industry workplaces. Many business organizations do not study the pay issues at all. Enforcement of laws in this area is weak. It is not uncommon for women with equal work experience and education to not be paid the same as men. Women are frequently not in positions that directly impact policy and financial matters. Discrimination in access to schools and good jobs is still a problem for all minority groups and women.

In Sue's personal life, she and her husband own and operate the Del Puerto Canyon Bison Ranch. They are committed to the bison industry and to the preservation of bison for future generations. Bison meat and products have become a thriving business, and will ensure the continuation of bison. The history of the near extinction of the bison by the U.S. Government and the current resurgence of bison through the work of both American Indians and private ranchers, serve to remind us of the consequences of man's greed and of our responsibility to take care of this earth and all the creatures who dwell on it.

Sue's heroine is Susan B.Anthony, the famous fighter for women's rights. Sue would like to be remembered as a person who truly believed and lived Susan B.Anthony's creed that " failure is impossible".

Douglas B. "Doug" Clarke,
Academics: Undergraduate: AB Oberlin College, 1965, Physics major.
Graduate degree: Ph.D. physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Thesis in the area of weak interactions & rare K-meson decays.

I joined LLNL in October 1972 and spent my first few years in L-Division (Test Program.) There I learned the skills of computer simulation of hydrodynamics and shock waves. Despite my thesis work in high energy physics I consider myself a computational physicist. A common theme in my career has been the use of computers for hydrodynamic simulations, including explosions (nuclear and non-nuclear), high velocity impacts, and shaped charges. In March 1976 I joined D-Division (now Q-Division, and part of NAI) where I worked on cratering and other nuclear explosion effects, ballistic missile defense, and analysis of damage to hard targets. In the late 1980's I worked on plutonium contamination and nuclear accident safety.

In January 1992, I joined the Computational Physics Group in Geophysics and Global Security Division (GGSD), in the E&ES Directorate. A major activity of GGSD. is research in support of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; the goal of that research is to evaluate the capability of US and future international systems to detect signals from clandestine nuclear explosions. Some of my most interesting recent work was analysis of underwater acoustic signals from nuclear explosions in or above the ocean. My most recent projects have been an Energy program CRADA shared with B-Division physicists, and a project supported by DNT through Q-Division.

While in GGSD I was pleased to be a co-author on three papers on the phenomenon of single bubble sonoluminescence. The most recent of the three was published in Science in May 1997. (Moss, W. C., D. B. Clarke, D. A. Young, Science 276, 1398, 1997; "Calculated Pulse Widths and Spectra of a Single Sonoluminescing Bubble,")

After being an interested observer for a number of years, I joined SPSE when Lab management introduced the new Layoff Policy. That policy and the issue of adherence to University personnel policies are examples where Lab Management has seemingly felt free to make their own rules. The arrival of the new category of employees who can be laid off at will is bad news for all of us. I am concerned about the potential for abuses by managers with the Lab's present policies. I intend to do my best to help strengthen SPSE and further its work.

Patrick Weidhaas is a native of (formerly West-) Berlin. He received his Master's degree in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966. He joined the Lab in 1972 as a Computer Scientist. His work has involved software development in support of computational physics. From 1977-1987, Patrick was a group leader in the Computations Department. His group supported the Lab's Atmospheric Sciences Division. In 1987/88, he spent a year on Professional Research and Teaching Leave at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. After returning to Livermore, he stayed in the technical field and witnessed the rapidly increasing salary gap between technical workers and their managers. These inequities led him to join SPSE.

Richard Yamauchi
I was born in Omura, Nagasaki prefecture, Japan, twenty-three days before the Doolittle Raid. My father was a communication officer in the Japanese Imperial Navy in Saigon sending Vietnamese rice to my mother at the time. My mother was a Nisei, born and raised in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii. She met my father when he visited Pearl Harbor as a cadet on a training cruise. My mother's father asked the ship's captain to send a cadet for dinner from Hiroshima, since he and his wife came from Hiroshima. They fell in love, wrote letters, and my mother used her sewing money to visit him in Japan twice. Unfortunately, her father forbade her from marrying my father, because my mother's family was descended from a samurai family, and my father's family was descended from farmers. She was kicked out of her family for marrying my father. There was another obstacle to the marriage. The Imperial Navy insisted that she give up her American citizenship. She refused and my father backed her up. The Imperial Navy yielded, but my father would have to serve on the front line. He agreed. They were married on January 1, 1941.

In June 1944, the B-29s began bombing Kyushu from a base in China. We lived half a mile from a fighter base where the Zero fighters were assembled. There were not many military targets on Kyushu, so the airbase was bombed repeatedly. Bombs did fall near our house.

My father was killed in January 1944 when his ship was torpedoed a night out of Yokohama on a return trip. The Yamauchi family wanted my mother to bring me to Hiroshima. Fortunately, my mother didn't get along with her mother-in-law, although she did transfer her widow's pension to her mother-in-law. My mother decided to evacuate to Ikiliki, northwest of Omura, and six miles from Nagasaki. The house we rented was half way up a valley in an orange orchard. The train track to Nagasaki ran east/west at the bottom of the valley.

One day, I was standing outside the house next to my mother. She was wearing a brown skirt. Then the skirt and everything turned bright white, and the back of my neck felt warm. The next thing I remember was standing by myself at the same place and watching a tall, slim, column of smoke with a rounded top tilted slightly to the right.

According to my mother, a medical student had taken the train from Nagasaki, and hiked up to our house. He wanted to rent a room from her. She turned him down. Just as he started down the trail, the atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki. He was aware of what happened at Hiroshima. He ran back to us, and told us to run into the house. As a typical country Japanese house, ours didn't have external walls on two sides of the house. We got into the house just in time for the shock wave to knock the shoji doors on top of us.

On August 6th in Hiroshima, the best guess is that my grandfather was killed while going to work on a streetcar. My grandmother and an aunt were in the living room when the ceiling collapsed. The aunt was killed. My grandmother lost an eye to a flying glass. Two aunts in the bathroom were not injured.

I attended first grade at Yamate Shogako in Sasebo. In 1949, we moved to Honolulu from Sasebo. We sailed on a gray, U.S. Navy, transport ship. I learned my first two English words on the ship. I saw some kids with balloons. I asked my mother if I could have one. She was laid up by seasickness. She gave me a nickel and told me to go to the ship's store and ask for a "blue balloon".

As an automatic citizen, born in a foreign country with at least one parent a US citizen, I was required to spend five years in the US or a territory of US between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. I attended Waikiki Elementary School just across the street from Waikiki beach and the zoo. Every morning, we lined up in front of our classes for the raising of the flag. In class, we pledged to the flag and recited the Lord's prayer. All the boys and most of the girls went to school bare footed. After a year, my mother decided that she didn't like the way I was growing up. She said I was turning into a punk. We returned to Yokohama on President Cleveland, a real passenger ship. I returned to Yamate Shogako in Sasebo.

In 1953, we moved back to Honolulu, after a month tour of the Bay Area. We flew from Los Angeles on a Pan American Strato Cruiser, a derivative of the B-29. My mother was afraid the Korean War was going to turn into another world war. She didn't want to be trapped in Japan again. I returned to Waikiki Elementary School. When we moved to Kaneohe, I attended Benjamin Franklin Elementary School and Castle Intermediate and High School. In the seventh grade we were all required to wear shoes.

In 1956, we moved to San Francisco. I attended Marina Junior High School and Galileo High School. During the summers in the junior and senior years, I worked at the Presidio Army commissary as a bag boy. The bag boys worked only for tips. We were required to work an hour stocking the store before the commissary opened, and an hour after it closed rounding up all the shopping carts. I saved $1,400.00 of the tips for college. With 500 hours washing dishes in the Unit I dining halls in Berkeley, I had $25 at the end of two and a half years. I lived in Putnam Hall.

From 1963 to 1972, I worked as a lab assistant in the analytical lab of the Shell Development Company in Emeryville, California. I was a member of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union. In 1969, we went out on strike for two months. In 1972, Shell decided to consolidate all its research labs in Houston.

On August 10, 1966, I was drafted into the US Army. I had basic training at Ft. Lewis, Washington. I was the acting sergeant for my training platoon with my own room. I won the "Outstanding Trainee" trophy from my training company. I had advanced training as a bread baker at Ft. Lee, Virginia. I arrived in Vietnam on January 31, 1967. My mother was sure she would lose her son in the Vietnam War, as she lost my father in World War II. Her belief was reinforced when our neighbor's son my age and a Sansei (third generation Japanese American) was killed in the Mekong Delta two months after I arrived in Vietnam.

I was assigned to a bakery platoon in Vung Tau. The bakery had three gasoline-operated ovens. The bakery was producing 2,000 pounds of bread a day. Each loaf weighed two pounds. The bread was baked in sheets of six loaves. Ice was mixed with the flour to keep the temperature of the dough from getting too hot for the yeast. A year later, we were baking 25,000 pounds a day. I started working as an oven man. Within a month, I became the issue clerk. I was responsible for maintaining the inventory of flour, Crisco, and yeast. I also issued the bags of bread to the various units, including enough bread for 25,000 Australian troops defending the base of the Vung Tau peninsula.

As long as one had to be in Vietnam, being stationed in Vung Tau was like winning the Super Lotto. Vung Tau was the in-country rest and recuperation (R&R) center. It has a beautiful white sand beach. Nancy Sinatra came to entertain the first month. The joke was that the Viet Cong took their R&R in Vung Tau. I took my out of country R&R in Singapore. Vung Tau was so peaceful, I extended my tour by four months, so that I could get out of the Army by four months and go on another out of country R&R.

In January 1968, Marines were besieged at Khe Sanh. General Westmoreland decided to send Army units to help the Marines. The Marines complained that they could not supply food to the Army units. The Army collected 24 Army bread bakers from southern Vietnam and sent a dozen to a Marine bakery twelve miles south of the DMZ and a dozen to Phu Bei, 12 kilometers west of Hue. I was one of four bakers from our platoon selected to go north on January 31st. We were half way up the coast sleeping at an airport waiting room, when fighting broke out. We thought this is what the real war was like. We weren't aware that the Tet Offensive had started. We were lucky to be in the group assigned to Phu Bei. Those who went to the bakery just south of the DMZ were subject to periodic artillery barrages from the North Vietnamese. We were raked by 60-mm mortar one night. The Marine baker's barracks took a direct hit, and burned down. Our barracks took a direct hit on the front steps. I worked as an oven man in the Marine bakery, which had two ovens. I read more books in the seventy-five days I spent in Phu Bai then any other period in my life. I read two books a day. "The Fixer", a Pulitzer winner, was as heavy as I got. The rest were westerns.

I managed to get back to Vung Tau after seventy-five days to go on R&R to Hong Kong. While I was there, the Viet Cong attacked Vung Tau for the first time, with 100-mm rockets.

I started at the Lab on October 7, 1974. I started Teller Tech (UC Davis, Livermore) in 1975. I passed the four days comprehensive exams in May 1980 and received the MS degree in Computing Science. From 1975 to 1979, each Computation employee who passed the comprehensive exam received a year of experience credit and enough raise to keep the salary at the same percentile. I went to my division leader, and I informed him that I had passed the test. A week later, he told me that the Computation Department Head said that the raise was an unwritten policy, so he was not giving the raise. I did get a year of experience credit. The Department Head had passed the comprehensive test in 1979 and he received the extra raise.

Staff:

Office Manager, Eileen Montano

Web Designer, Cheryl Remillard is a native of Livermore. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Humanities from the California State University, Chico. During college vacations, Cheryl worked for SPSE as the Office Assistant. Following graduation, she returned to SPSE becoming Office Manager in 1989. Cheryl continued as Office Manager until December 2001. In 1994, Cheryl implemented the SPSE Internet website and became a "Webmaster."

11/29/01

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