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action sncan Society of Civil Engineers . )Box A0367 ^Antonio, Texas 78229-1367 r-TOE CENTER FOR AMERICAN WSttBCt l^l^VBBStTVCP'IEXASATAUSral Non Profit Org. u.s. postage PAID Austin, Texas Permit No 879 *s;V- 70 Years of Service - Texas Section 1915-1985 TEXAS CIVIL ENGINEER 1983 P7HIS ISSUE Efom the President............................ 2 i ng Ahead....................................... 3 ranch Reports..................................... If Hews Notes............................................. 6 sriam - GeorgeR. Brown.... 12 and Transfer Members to the Jexas Section........................ 19 afessional Directory.................... 22 `to**:- ECHNICAL PAPER !> Initial Response of Foundations Stiff Clay" by C. E. Williams Tohn A. Focht, III.................... 14 JOHN A. FOCHT, JR. ZONE III VICE PRESIDENT NOMINEE PAGE 9 j|CE Members Honored By TSPE Pg.9 JjEl Paso Summej^HiiiiiiAe Helps yiing People Intol "*png Pg.10 In Memoriam GEORGE R. BROWN George R. Brown, fnternationa 1 i y known engineer, one of Texas' best known citizens, and an Honor Member of A5CE (1971) died January 22, 1983 after a brief illness. He was 8*4. As retired board chairman of Brown and Root, founder director of Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation and retired chairman of Rice Univer sity's board of trustees, he had spent his last years in a continuing program of philanthropy, benefiting not only Houston but science and the humanities for the good of human kind. He is survived by his wife, Alice Pratt Brown, and three daughters, Mrs. Nancy Negley, Mrs. Ralph S. O'Connor and Mrs. Wallace S. Wilson; a niece, Mrs. Fayez Sarofim, and a nephew, M. S. Stude, nine grand children and seven great-grandchiIdren. Born in Belton, May 12, 1898, Brown was a member of a distin guished Texas family that came to Texas before the Civil War. A grandfather organized Lee County and was its first county judge. Brown entered Rice Institute in 1917 with the hope of becoming a doctor. He left the campus in 1918 to enlist in the Marine Corps. While in the service, he dis covered engineering. '*1 never thought I'd make any real money as an engineer," he said years later. "What was important was the romance of engineering. Engineers were men who went to far places, who built things all over the world...as far away as China." With that vision he returned to a civilian life that ultimately took him all over the world to build things. After a term at The Univer sity of Texas, he entered the Colo rado School of Mines and graduated jn engineering in 1922.. His first job was as a geologist for the Ana conda Company in its early copper (pine at Butte, Montana, j Meanwhile, his brother Herman, financed by his brother-in-law Oan Root, had been busy building roads Across Texas. Herman persuaded George to join him. In those days road contractors could be put out of business by a run of rainy weather. "All you had to build was roads nd streets, levees and railroad beds," George 8rown said. "We Cook two jobs in West Texas, where there was no rainfall, for every job we took in East and South Texas, where there was a lot of rainfall. So we had a balance at the end of the year Herman Brown, as president, ran the business. George Brown, as exe cutive vice president, mapped the future and won the contracts. 12 In 1925, George 8rown married Alice Nelson Pratt of lometa and found in her the life partner for his long career in industry and phi1anchropy. It was an era of change, when the dirt roads suitable to the mule, the horse and buggy were giving way to the paved highways needed by automo biles. The firm built roads and bridges. In 1926 it seemed sensible for George Brown to move to Houston because*the city was laying out steets in rapid growth, and the port of fered contract possibilities. The Oepression years brought fede ral projects. The biggest was the Marshall Ford Dam on the Colorado River near Austin. Brown and Root had never built a dam before, and this one required 2 million tons of concrete and millions of tons of dirt fill. It was 27 stories high and a mile wide. It Cook four years to complete. This was the kind of adventure that had lured George Brown into en gineering, "We had imagination and were willing to gamble," he once said. "By having imagination and being willing to gamble, if you're reasonably good in your judgment, you'll be sucessful." Other bigger leaps of imagination lay ahead. In 1940, with Marshall Ford still under construction, the Browns began to build the naval air station at Corpus Christi. By the time Pearl Harbor was attacked. Brown & Root was ready to meet the demands of a nation plunging into world war. The biggest test came when, on 24 hours notice, the Brown brothers accepted a lump sum contract to build a shipyard near Houston and deliver a specific number of ships at a specific price by a specific date. Nobody in the company had ever seen a ship built. But as George Brown once said, "Timid money has created very little In our economic history." And, "You name it, we'll build it." The Browns invested $2 before the first ship slipp*. the way. Although material* hard to obtain and workers j` Che Brown Shipyard amassed e of 25,000 men and women, a1 first ship moved down the ship': neI on schedule, its launch gr by overripe bananas in lieu 0* avaiiab1e Iubricant. By 1945 the company had deli to the Navy 359 destroyer and landing craft. Brown and; won Che Army-Navy E (for excell'1 and a presidential citatio~ speed and excellence of product When the war ended, the B shifted the shipbuilding team t work. In 1946 Brown and Rooiv nounced its new petroleum and c cal division to be housed f shipyards on Greens Bayou. The company headquarters mov Houston from Austin, and years, George Brown began to t" to the far-off places he had sioned when he fell in love!, engineering. Brown and Root's first big seas job was as managing partne Che recon s C r uc t i on of -Guam,.' South Pacific island so'badly, aged in World War II. The wor' gan in 1946 and continued fo years. In the 1950's the Browns pion in the construction of offs drilling and production plat and in laying submarine pipelin the Gulf of Mexico, moving on t North Sea, the Persian Gulf and* Maracaibo. Brown and Root built the wor longest highway bridge - the 24. Lake Pontchartra in Twin Causewa* By 1962, Brown and Root had pleted hundreds of project scores of countries. But the'' gest imaginative leap of that p was made in the United Scat- leap that would change househ and corporations throughout country. Built to meet the"- emergency, the Big Inch andf Little Big Inch pipelines had vered crude oil. By its size, the 24-inch Big from East Texas to New Jersey de contemporary engineering idea, the possible and revolutionize economics of pipeline transpo^ tion. If oil, the Browns thou why not gas? Natural gas was burned off in flares that light^ the countryside for lack of *- ket. Cities of the eastern seab were still burning oil, coa coke for heating, cooking power. The 8rowns saw that it wool cheaper and quicker to conver* oil pipelines to carry gas eh build separate lines. Inviting, men to bid in the project with they bought the pipelines fr~ federal government for $143 mil; 98 percent of the original Brown considered it a fair The Browns organized the -j^Jcas5 Eastern Transmission Corpora tion to operate the system. revenues were running to $j%4*blHion. The bonds were fully ^Moff in '973. J2[hroughout these years, George involvement with Rice Un i - vefS'fty was growing as the school ara?S' Elects t0 the board of trus- n 1943 r he pushed the board *?nto - purchase of the Rincon Oil Field' by giving the first $50,000 toward the $1 million down payment `anb^bring i ng in another $50,000 from .his brother Herman. In the 'first':'quarter-century after the pur chase,. the Vestment yielded Rice $27 million for its endovenent fund. J^^-the 1940's, Rice Institute's football was Houston's only contact wltfiijnajor college sports. Crowds ;/jguJarly overflowed the old stadium to>jatch the Owls play. CAt'.T the end of the 1949 season, Brown'^and Root set out to build a 70^000-seat stadium and have it ready-'for the next year's homecoming game'.'5ept. 30. It was, of course, a non-profit contract. . Although the last:'rwheeIbarrows were still rolling aiit^as the spectators began to come . {n^the stadium opened on time and Rice'beat Santa Clara, 24-6. ^ffi^-1950, George Brown became the first' Rice alumnus to be elected chairman of the board. He once of ten think the younger generation has more common sense thatj-their fathers did at the same iige":. His faith in the young was proved by a quarter-century of ser- I tricep to and financial support for colleges and universities. 'While building a strong financial structure for the university. Brown continued to stimulate excellence in teaching, scholarship and research, in the mid-1960's, after being shown a rjdimentary heart pump by. a sur geon at Baylor College of Medicine, he suggested that engineers might prove helpful. This led to the Rice-Baylor arti ficial heart project. In 1967, he established an annual award for the best undergraduate teaching, with a fund of half a million dollars. The Browns were among those in strumental in bringing the Manned Spacecraft Center to Houston. In 1951, the Brown Foundation was established to channel gifts into charitable works. But in I960, when Herman Brown underwent heart sur gery, the Browns began to plan for the future. In 1962, in the midst of negotiations with the Halliburton Company for the sale of Brown and Root, Herman Brown died. After the sale was completed, George Brown still had the BrownCo Oil Company which later became Highland Re sources . In 1970, Texas Eastern announced that it had bought 32 blocks of downtown Houston. It planned to transform them into an entire city section, larger than Rockefeller Center. George Brown moved his of fice into Two Houston Center, a soaring and beautiful building at the heart of the enterprise. This decade allowed George Brown more time to expand his career as a phi1anthropist, civic leader, patron of the arts and humanities. * In all these ventures he had as partner his wife Alice. They had been major supporters of the Museum of Fine Arts for years when they gave the Brown Pavilion, which stretches across the museum front on Bissonnet. It was the last work of the great architect, Mies van der Rohe. Through the Brown Foundation they gave major gifts to most of the larger colleges and universities in Texas and a number of others else where - in all the foundaion has given away about $ 17Q million. The plan, Brown said, "continues the foundation policy of acting as a catalyst through our gifts to the arts, science and institutions of higher learning In 1977, six national engineering societies joined to give George Brown the John Fritz Medal, the pro fession's highest honor for scienti fic and industrial achievement - an honor given in the past to Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Thomas Edison and Herbert Hoover, In 1979, after several years of planning and effort, the Browns gave the city of Houston 840 acres, much of it shaded in pines and hardwoods. It is named Herman Brown Park, the second largest in the city. An Episcopalian, Brown was a mem ber of Saint John the Divine Church. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards and the holder of several honorary doctorate degrees. He held the Texas Society of Pro fessional Engineers license No. 4; in 1971, he was designated an Honor Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. George R. Brown, the Texan, through his life and work, surely discovered the romance of engineering, but also brought to his profession his wide-ranging in terests, innovations and concerns which have inspired and served his fellow c i t izens. {The above was excerpted from the The Houston Post. Jan. 23, 1983.) ASCE Continuing Education Services SHORT COURSES offered in conjunction with the OFFSHORE TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE OFFSHORE PILE FOUNDATIONS DESIGN OF COASTAL STRUCTURES f s Please register me for the ASCE course indicated below, to be held May 6*7, 1983. Enclosed is mv check made payable to "ASCE Con . 1 tinuing Education" in the amount of SAll checks must be payable in U S. dollars and drawn on u.S. banks. :i CHECK. C OFFSHORE PILE FOUNDATIONS O DESIGN OF COASTAL STRUCTURES NAME--------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------- NICKNAME FOR BADGE TITLE ........................... ........ .... - ______TELEPHONE # FIRM__________________ ADDRESS ________________________________________________________ -AODRESS IS (CIRCLE): HOME BUSINESS CITY/STATE/ZIP _________ ___ Fee: $350 OTC Co-Sponsohng Society Member (Circle): ASCE AAPG AlChE AlME A$ME IEEE 5420 Non-Member MTS SET SME SNAME SPE TMS O ASCE Membership #_ ONon-ASCE Member Sooal Security #_ (For ecu fWoorAi Please complete if paying by Credit Card: Payment Assured by my Credit Card (O American Express Visa Master Charge) Credit Card Number'___ Expiration Date Signature____________________________________ ___________ MAIL BY APRIL IB TO: Dolores Nix. Continuing Education Services. ASCE. 345 E. 47th St.. New York, NY 10017. If mailing deadline la missed, telephone for confirmation: (212) 705-7316. 13