The Best of Both Parshalls

As I reflect on my time as a civil engineering student at CSU, perhaps my most unforgettable memory is attending meetings of the student chapter of ASCE. Many times, Mr. Ralph Parshall would join us at those meetings and tell us a few stories about his research in developing the Parshall flume. One story in particular was interesting. He described how he would shoot a hole through a clay tile with a .45 caliber pistol to make the perfect hole to which to attach the piezometer tube. I always assumed that story to be true. Then to have had Ralph Parshall's son, Dr. Max Parshall, as a professor in water quality and surveying and as a boss at the Campus Weather Station was equally memorable. Max spent some of his time completely cleaning the old surveying transits with gasoline in the weather station office. He would strongly caution us not to smoke in that room when he was doing that. So, between the two Parshalls, I had a connection with the previous 40-50 years of civil engineering at CSU.

My look into the future was while taking a computer class in 1961, in which we would program by wiring large circuit boards; then punch our batch of data on punch cards; then send the stake of punch cards to UCLA to be processed; and then find out 2 weeks later that the program needed some adjustment. What advancements have been made from the circuit board days to today's PC's, where we get instantaneous results! So, I feel very fortunate to have been at CSU during those years when the transition between the old and the new is remembered as being very pronounced.