Harald Malcolm Westergaard

Harald Malcolm Westergaard, Rachel's husband, received his undergraduate training at the Royal Technical College, Copenhagen. A professor at Copenhagen, "the wise Professor Ostenfeld," Peter relates, "guided my father first to Gottingen and then Munich. There was no point in remaining in Denmark, Ostenfeld said, because of the kind of university system they had where there was only one professor. He told my father there was, however, off in the middle of America, in a place called Illinois, a man named Talbot who had studied some of the same problems that my father was interested in, and it might be a very good be a very good idea to find that person."

Indeed, Westergaard studied with Talbot and completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Illinois on "Tests and analysis relating to the strength and elasticity of concrete and reinforced concrete under bi-axial stress" in 1916. He then served on the TAM faculty for 20 years. During that time he also received a doctoral degree from the Technische Hochschule in Munich. He became well known for his early analysis, in the 1930s, of earthquake resistance of Hoover Dam. "I remember the big model he had of Hoover Dam there in the house," Warren Goodell Jr. says. "He was very proud of that." He also was consulted on other major projects, including the Panama Canal. "One time I can remember on very short notice he simply flew off to San Diego because they were having trouble with their airport," Mary says. "When he came home he said, 'Of course they had trouble -- they had only three feet of concrete in it and they were trying to land planes that were too big for that. They need at least six.' That was the end of the story."

He later contributed a fundamental paper in the field of fracture mechanics. After he had become dean of the graduate school of engineering at Harvard, he began writing a pair of textbooks on elasticity and plasticity, but he completed only one. He died in 1950 when his children were just reaching adulthood.

Mary recalls that, as a father, Malcolm was extremely fair, and "clearly a generation distant -- that is, he interacted with us but he didn't play with us." He was intensely interested in his children's education and their preparation for life, perhaps in part because his own sister, Elizabeth, was not encouraged to pursue professional training even though she was quite clever, and ended up teaching at a girl's school. "At the dinner table you could be expected to explain something that had happened in the news, what you had done at school, what you had learned. The idea of a child getting through adolescence without being able to speak to adults in an intelligent fashion would have been an anathema to him."

For example, Mary says, "if we made an assertion, he expected us to back it up. One day he asked me what a sonnet was, because in school I was expected to memorize one of these darn things, and I didn't pay very much attention to them because I didn't particularly like poetry. But my brother Peter wanted to know what a sonnet was. I produced the definition, and Peter said, 'I could write one of those.' So my father said to Peter, I'll bet you a dollar.' At that point Peter came to me for the details and he produced a sonnet entitled My Dog. I looked at it and it followed the rules I had been taught in class, so Peter took it to my father. Although my father felt the subject wasn't very lofty, the rules had been followed and therefore Peter got his dollar."

Mary also recalls that music was an integral part of her home life, even though neither she nor her mother claimed musical talent beyond "playing the piano for fire drills in school." But Malcolm "had a huge collection of records. And I do mean huge because he started with 78's and they took up a the whole wall -- it was like a library. My mother liked them too," Mary says. "At the appreciation level, Peter and I were in fine shape. My parents always had symphony tickets. Although I got to go fairly often, * always disturbed me that when there was somebody like Bartok -- that was when I always got to go. It took a long time for me to figure out that when my father said he was terribly busy and didn't have time to go, it was because it was Bartok or somebody he didn't like!" Malcolm's son Peter later became a professor of music. "I realize now," Peter says, "that that record collection is at the core of the musician that I became. It represented the very best of the symphonic and chamber music performance traditions of the 1920s and 1930s."

Malcolm had initially reached the United States with the financial assistance of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. "I think in part because of these people, most of whom were Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes who lived in the United States, and who were supporting the foundation financially as well as with their efforts, my father became a very strong American patriot," Mary Westergaard says.

"For instance, before World War II he was active in bringing to the United States Jewish intellectuals, who were mostly in German universities and having a hard time because of the policies of the Nazis," Mary continues. "The most famous of these was physicist Reinhold Rudenberg, who helped develop the electron lens. The two families became friends." "Richard von Mises was another," says Peter. "He was an extraordinary man who had been part of Viennese literary circles; he had known Rainer Rilke and Stefan George. He always brought flowers to my mother -- I remember that! Others were Karl Terzaghi and Arthur Casagrande. They were not only valued colleagues, but also family friends."

Malcolm became a reserve officer in the U.S. Navy, and served on active duty for two years during World War II, attaining the rank of captain. One week after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Malcolm aand other naval officers headed up a damage control team for the Bureau of Yards and Docks to make a critical assessment of structural damage in the bombed regions. A few of the Japanese structures had been designed to withstand earthquakes. "I t turned out that, except at ground zero, the earthquake-proof buildings stood up pretty well against the atomic blast," Mary recalls, "but all the traditional Japanese structures were pretty well flattened."

"The tradition of earthquake-proof buildings, according to a Japanese engineer I met many years ago," Peter says, "was very much my grandfather's legacy to Japan, and I believe that my father said that one of the buildings that withstood the atomic blast was one designed by Grandfather."

Malcolm also kept a certain loyalty to the University of Illinois. Barbara Goodell Fuller recalls that when she graduated from Radcliffe in 1948, Radcliffe held its own graduation ceremony, with selected members of the Harvard faculty sitting on the platform. "A few days beforehand, I was in Belmont visiting," she says. "Uncle Malcolm summoned me with some ceremony upstairs to the master bedroom. There, laid out on the bed, in a dazzling display of color, were all his academic hoods, earned and honorary. 'Now, Barbara, which one shall I wear in honor of your graduation?' he asked. So we looked at them all. In the end, we decided that because we had first known each other in Urbana, the orange and blue of the U of I should have the honor."