Ronald Cordes:  

"Life 1970-PhD Chemical Engineering, UC Berkeley; 1976-JD, Law, UC Berkeley; 1971-Scientific Adviser to the Dept. of Environmental Conservation - Government of Iran. Worked as a scientist, an engineer, a program & project manager, a corporate attorney, a trial attorney, president of a high-tech startup company. Published numerous books and articles worldwide on fly fishing. Spent two years following the summer seasons fly fishing around the world, from the arctic in the northern hemisphere, to New Zealand in the southern hemisphere until my money ran out. Had a backpack, my fly rod case, and my camera case.....camped out a lot! Needless to say, the travels resulted in a lot of interesting stories. Today you wouldn't dare travel in many of the places I visited, nor would you do some of the things I did....like hitch hike in Kenya, walk the streets in Afghanistan, and go by elephant into the last of the Nepalese jungle. Back then the animals and the snakes were bad enough...but now you have the terrorists. When I was in northern Rhodesia on Lake Kariba making some presentations on fly fishing in Alaska, the government assigned two Rhodesian army officers to be with me at all times. Zambian terrorists was the issue. I had one particularly insane experience when I visited the famous Victoria Falls in Rhodesia. There was a small, single story building that was a tourist attraction. It was situated near a magnificent, old Baobab tree. Inside the building the usual trinkets, carvings, paintings, etc., were being sold. Well done with a lot of beautiful stuffed animals and trophy mounts hanging on the wall. As I was browsing around, a young fellow approached me to see if I needed any assistance. He was the son of the owners. In the course of our conversation he asked me if I would like to see the snakes he has collected. I hate snakes!, but I had to be cool about it and agree. Off we went out the back door of the shop where I saw a large number of small cages stacked here and there. In addition there was a large pit, probably thirty-five feet long and twenty feet wide. It was surrounded by a four foot high, eight inch thick concrete wall. Inside there were pieces of wood lying around, and cactus growing here and there. There were hundreds of snakes, virtually all poisonous! In one far corner I could see a half dozen cobras all intertwined. Spiraling up a piece of wood were four boomslangs, all staring at us with their big eyes..One small snake, about a two-foot puff adder was literally jumping into the air striking at some imaginary target. This young kid had trapped all these snakes, which in most cases means he pinned them down then picked them up and drop in a bag. The kid was insane as far as I was concerned. While my heart was racing, he said to me, "Hey, there's a real interesting snake that only has one fang pressed along the roof of its mouth. Let me show it to you."....as if I really had any particular interest in seeing any of these lethal snakes. What could I say. "Sure...." As if all of this wasn't bad enough, he jumps into the pit! Unbelievable!!! He grabs a small, rather docile snake and jumps back out of the pit. As he's showing it to me, he says "Here. Why don't you hold it. It won't do anything.." Holding any snake is probably one of the things I'm least likely to be found doing. He then literally dumps it into my hands, and there I am holding the one-fanged snake. "Neat!" I said as I quickly handed it back to him. The snake stories can go on and on, but I'll stop here for the moment. For those of you who may be wondering if you h ave the right person, I used to live in Rockford, Ill., Arlington Heights, Ill., LaSalle Peru, Ill., St. Louis, MO, Berkeley, Ca., and Idaho Falls, Idaho. Since I have some time on my hands, I decided to fix the formatting that was lost when Classmates once again change its system. In addition, since I’m creating a record of sorts, I decided to add some more educational detail and some anecdotal experiences. At Washington University in St. Louis, MO, where I majored in Chemical Engineering, I managed to achieve a few academic honors. I made Phi Eta Sigma, a freshman scholastic honorary particularly distinctive given the fact that as freshmen there was that period of adjustment both to life style and to the level of expectations by the instructors. During my junior year I was inducted into Tau Beta Pi, the engineering equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa. That year I was selected by the Missouri Society of Professional Engineers as the outstanding junior engineer at the university, the same honor I received for my senior year. By that senior year there were only seven of us left in the chemical engineering program. As I recall we started out in our freshman year with thirty-five. Chemistry was the primary killer. Be that as it may, during our senior year, a close friend of mine in the program competed in a national chemical engineering competition only open to seniors. I competed as well. It was sponsored by the American Institute of Chemical Engineering, one of the major professional organizations. In retrospect it was kind of amusing. We were given an entry pamphlet that outlined the topic and problem for which we were to find a solution, write it up within the given amount of time (a week or two?), then submit it. It gave us a particular equation that was to be used in the analysis. For whatever reason, I decided to attempt to derive the equation from scratch, and when I did so I found that the equation was missing a simple factor, the number ½. I went to the instructor and told him that I thought a mistake had been made in the materials given us. He was a bit puzzled so he made a formal inquiry with the AICHE. A few days later he came into class and all he would say was “Do whatever you think is appropriate.” So, we were stuck with the dilemma of deciding do we go with what we were given or with what we believe was correct. My close friend and I went with what we believed was correct. He and I were the first students at WU to ever be winners in that annual competition. To this day I believe that the deciding factor was the validity of that equation and whether or not you thought to double check it by attempting to derive it yourself. During my senior year, I decided to work in industry for a year to get a better appreciation of what it was like out in the real world. I ended up taking a position with a company then called Esso Research and Engineering. It was a major international company, and the group that hired me was one that was given the task of addressing any technical problem that arose in any of the refineries around that world. In that group there were, as I recall, about 18 PhD’s, 1 Masters Degree, and one Bachelor Degree, me. It was tremendous experience for me, not only technically, but for the exposure it gave me to people from major chemical engineering programs around the country. When I had graduated from WU, I hadn’t been further west than St. Louis and further east than Muncie, Indiana! It really made me decide to go to a graduated school out west in particular. I had applied to the graduate programs at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin, each of which had renowned graduate programs in chemical engineering. But, which to choose. Well, I was given a distinct boost one evening in Philadelphia where I was to attend the annual national AIChE meeting to receive our awards for the competition we had competed in earlier that year. I was walking down a hallway at the hotel where the meeting was being held when a distinguished gentleman approached me and introduce himself. It was the head of the chemical engineering graduate program at Stanford. In the course of our conversation he said the following. “You know that Stanford is in the city of Palo Alto, just south of San Francisco. Some of my students go there on weekends, but they don’t last long.” What??!!! At that instant I knew it was going to be UC Berkeley or Wisconsin. Ultimately Berkeley, of course, where I eventually won a four year competitive research grant from the precursor to the EPA, the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration. In retrospect one of the most formative decisions I had ever made. That first year in grad school at Berkeley was particularly interesting for a variety of reason. The first one was to simply survive. The school had just switched from the semester system to the quarter system. The lazy professors simply compressed everything they taught in one semester into a quarter. Guys were dropping like flies. One morning I walked into an office being shared by several other grad students. They were all rather silent. A close friend of mine told me to go look at the desk of one of the guys there. This particular guy was starting grad school on a full ride fellowship, an exceptional accomplishment. On the desk was a handwritten note that simply said, “If this is what graduate school is like, I don’t want any part of it.” Wow! He was literally being paid to go to school, but he had had enough. We never saw him again. The second reason that first year was so interesting was the fact that during that year the incoming group of PhD candidates would have to take a series of tests ultimately to enable the chemical engineering faculty to decide whether or not they wanted you to continue in the PhD program or if they were only going to allow you to get a master’s degree. The first exam was a two day written exam. If you passed that you were next given an “oral” exam. In my case I walked into the designated office to find three of the chemical engineering professors sitting at a table. Without any preamble they said, “Go to the board and derive all the equations for the heat, mass and momentum-transfer for the flow of water in a cooling tower.” It was not uncommon for a grad student who started out in the PhD program to get no furt...Expand for more