Oral-History:Don Heirman

Don Heirman

Donald Heirman is president of Don HEIRMAN Consultants, training, standards, and educational electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) consultation corporation. Previously he was with Bell Laboratories for over thirty years in many EMC roles including Manager of Lucent Technologies (Bell Labs) Global Product Compliance Laboratory, which he founded, and where he was in charge of the Corporation’s major EMC and regulatory test facility and its participation in ANSI accredited standards and international EMC standardization committees. He chairs, or is a principal contributor to, US and international EMC standards organizations including ANSI ASC C63® (chairman), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the International Electrotechnical Commission’s (IEC) International Special Committee on Radio Interference (CISPR) where in October 2007 he was named the chair of CISPR moving from he previous role as its subcommittee A chairman responsible for CISPR Publication 16. He is a member of the IEC’s Advisory Committee on EMC (ACEC) and the Technical Management Committee of the US National Committee of the IEC. In November 2008 he was presented with the prestigious IEC Lord Kelvin award at the IEC General Meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This is the highest award in the IEC and recognizes Don’s many contributions to global electrotechnical standardization in the field of EMC. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE and a Life Member of the IEEE EMC Society (EMCS) and a member of its Board of Directors, chair of its technical committee on EMC measurements, past EMCS president, newly elected vice president for standards, and past chair of its standards development committee. He is also past president of the National Cooperation for Laboratory Accreditation (NACLA). He is also past president of the IEEE Standards Association (SA), past member of the SA Board of Governors and past member of the IEEE’s Board of Directors and Executive Committee. He is also the Associate Director for Wireless EMC at the University of Oklahoma Center for the Study of Wireless EMC. He has presented numerous workshops, tutorials, and technical papers internationally and is listed in several Who’s Who publications. He is a retired Commander in the US Navy.

Don Heirman was born in Mishawaka, Indiana. Heirman earned BSEE and MSEE degrees at Purdue University while a member of the Naval ROTC.. Following graduation, Heirman joined Bell Laboratories, though he spent his first two years fulfilling his ROTC obligation at the Pentagon. At Bell Labs, he worked on many EMC projects until his retirement in 1997 Over his lengthy career, Heirman has served IEEE in a variety of roles, including President of the IEEE EMC Society, Vice President for the Standards of the IEEE EMC Society; President of the IEEE Standards Association and member of the IEEE Board of Directors and its Executive Committee,

In this interview Heirman provides a broad picture of his training and his professional career, both at Bell Labs and as a Consultant. However the primary focus of this interview is Heirman's long history as a leader of the IEEE, especially the EMC Society and Standards Activities. For additional detail on Heirman's career see the video that Heirman made in 2010.

About the Interview

DON HEIRMAN: An Interview Conducted by Sheldon Hochheiser, IEEE History Center, 25 February 2015.

Interview #684 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

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Don Heirman, an oral history conducted in 2015 by Sheldon Hochheiser, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Interview

INTERVIEWEE: Don Heirman
INTERVIEWER: Sheldon Hochheiser
DATE: 24 February 2015
PLACE: Lincroft, NJ

Introduction

Hochheiser:

Okay, it is the 25th of February 2015. This is Sheldon Hochheiser of the IEEE History Center. I am here with Don Heirman at his home office in Lincroft, New Jersey.

Heirman:

Good morning.

Early Life and Education

Hochheiser:

Good morning. Okay, if we could start, back at the beginning, where were you born and raised?

Heirman:

Well, I come from Northern Indiana. It was a little town of 30,000 people, called Mishawaka. It's an Indian name. It's about 90 miles east of Chicago.

Hochheiser:

Now that's fairly close to South Bend?

Heirman:

It is a sister city.

Hochheiser:

Okay.

Heirman:

In fact, you can't tell when you're in one or, or in the other. And in between them is Notre Dame University, so that's even worse because they have their own zip code but everyone says it's South Bend. So, yes, I was, born there many years ago. And I grew up, through the time I went to college, which was in, 1958. There was one high school in those days, but it was a very large high school. My graduating class was almost 400 people.

Hochheiser:

What did your parents do?

Heirman:

My dad was a foreman at Uniroyal, US Rubber. He worked there 43 years before he retired. And the plant is right in downtown Mishawaka, by the river where they could use some of the cooling water for their processes. And he could walk to work. He was only six or seven blocks away. My dad was very strong in not allowing my mother to work at all. So she raised me. And I was the only child. Even though she wanted to work, and she did some work in high school at a local movie theater. When she used to come and visit I made her a little project of reproducing some papers that I needed to be reproduced. And she just fell in love with that. So I gave her probably her one job as an adult, but it was pro bono, so Dad didn't mind. So, again, my dad, and mom scrimped and scraped to get me into college. And I'm grateful for that.

Hochheiser:

Were you interested in science and technical things as a youth?

Heirman:

The answer is when I took shop in high school, I took the telephone shop where they had a step-by-step switch. And I played with that. But I also did mechanical things with lathes and making various types of metal tools. So it was clear I was on a pre-college curriculum, so math and the usual stuff was what I did. We had a very good high school such that in my senior year I was taking freshman year college courses in the high school, so when I went to college like two thirds or almost three quarters of the courses that I would've normally taken in college was already accomplished, at my high school.

Hochheiser:

What led you to choose Purdue for college rather than another institution?

Heirman:

Of course, everyone in the South Bend/Mishawaka area has to walk past the Golden Dome of Notre Dame and all of my relatives with the goal that they were just completely enthralled, in addition to the football team, of course, but Notre Dame at the time didn't have in my opinion a good technical offering. And Purdue had a tremendous engineering reputation and in fact Bell Laboratories used Purdue as a good source of employees. So I felt that, that was something that at least I wanted to try. And the old story is I know how to wire a light switch, so I must be a candidate for electrical engineer. And, so that's kind of where I focused my energy. And, again, my pre-college courses had technical work that dealt with electrical.

Hochheiser:

Right. So you, you went to Purdue with an initial plan of electrical engineering?

Heirman:

I entered Purdue to do engineering, and they got us all together in the class of one thousand or whatever in the auditorium. And they said what do you want to do? And the head of every college came in and talked about there’s. And I thought that electrical engineering had the most interest to me. But I didn't know walking into that auditorium.

Hochheiser:

What was the electrical engineering curriculum at Purdue like at this time?

Heirman:

Very interesting. We were working with motors and AC power. We had a tremendous motors laboratory, in the electrical engineering building with motors that ran using probably thousands of amperes. And, of course, that was the fun thing to see how big of a spark you could make. There was no digital electronics in those days, of course. And because of that, I chose a special curriculum, which was more technical, more mathematically-based, problem-solving, and ended up entering into my specialty, fields and waves. And there were about 30 of us in that particular curriculum. It was a trial if you will. And fast forward later on, I still meet occasionally some of the people I had in that class and we were all fairly successful. But if you go back presently, all of the power labs, all of those big motors, are now turned into computer labs. It's that simple.

Hochheiser:

Yes. Now during your curriculum at Purdue, did you get exposed to EMC problems? Or did that not come till later?

Heirman:

That came later and we're still suffering because EMC is not a mainstream curriculum.

Hochheiser:

I know.

Heirman:

That's why I'm teaching a course on EMC at Purdue right now, trying to get them involved a little bit more. I can tell you one of the stories. After I graduated, I came back, and I saw a shielded room in one of the floors of the EE Building and that whetted my appetite so I said, what are you using that for? He says well, there was a reason for it, but we're not sure. So I said well, what are you using it for now? Well, because the door has a lock on it, we store more sensitive things in there that we don't want stolen. On the other hand, I was in the laboratory and I saw on one side of the room half of the students just sitting looking straight out. And the other half was busily doing something. And after a while they switched. The other side started doing work. And I asked “what is the problem?” He said well, it turns out that when everyone starts working on their power supplies, they interfere with each other. So guess what? That was EMC, but they didn't know it was EMC. But that's why I had to come back later on, many years later, to make it more official and put it in the curriculum, which we can talk about later on.

Hochheiser:

Did you join the IEEE Student Branch while you were at Purdue?

Heirman:

That's a very interesting story. I had nothing to do with the IEEE. In fact, even my first almost ten years working for Bell Laboratories I was not involved with the IEEE. I joined in '73 and the reason for it is, well, I'm not sure there was a reason. It's just that at times I was making a long trip, which was a three-hour round trip up to Northern, New Jersey to the Whippany Laboratories from my home on the Jersey shore. And I didn't have time to do more volunteer work. The bottom line is what got me started, though, in '73 is I published my first two technical papers that were peer-reviewed for a conference, then the IEEE National Telecommunications Conference, which is a conference of the Communication Society. And then I got into interference cases and then all of a sudden the EMC Society seemed like a nice home.

Hochheiser:

If I can circle back to your college years, I know you were in ROTC.

Heirman:

Yes.

Hochheiser:

How did demands from your ROTC obligations mesh with your academic demands?

Heirman:

Well, obviously it's an additional layer.

Hochheiser:

Yes.

Heirman:

And at Purdue at the time, the first two years were mandatory ROTC. And then you had to make a choice starting in your junior year whether you wanted to continue on. And, of course, you got some tuition reimbursement and books, paid for by the military. I enjoyed the military. In fact, I retired from the military. It was something I liked. I became the executive officer of the battalion. And it then helped me be more disciplined, which, of course, helped me during my EE work. And then after graduation I got commissioned and we'll talk about that later in the next stage in my life.

Hochheiser:

Yes. What led you to continue directly to a master's at Purdue from getting your bachelor's?

Heirman:

Well, I always wanted to completely my college work, including up to getting my PhD. It turns out that in those days when you graduated as an undergrad your military commitment started the next day. So I actually sent in a special request because I started off at Purdue with most of my freshman year work done. By the time I got to my senior year I had quite a bit of my master's work done. And I would like to at least have completed that. And it was a rare situation that the Bureau of Personnel of the Navy allowed me to continue on to get my master's degree. Now it's fairly commonplace, but in those days it was absolutely rare. In fact, I may have been one of the only few that ever got that extension. So that's why I continued on, because I had it virtually done. And then subsequently to that when I joined Bell Laboratories I went to Brooklyn Poly, which is now the Polytechnic Institute of New York, and had all of my course work done for my PhD. But then they moved the fields and waves activity from Brooklyn out to Long Island, Farmingdale, and there was just no way I could commute with taking night courses. And by that time my career took off at Bell Laboratories. And I really wasn't in a position of needing to have the additional degree. So it's a missing link, but certainly has not held me back in what I’ve been doing.

Hochheiser:

Was your master's work then basically a continuation of your waves and fields studies? -

Heirman:

[Interposing] Yes. And throw in some antenna work. The professors for the master's program and the graduate school were much more into what I was interested in, but even in those days, this was a very small, small segment. And even today, work in microwaves is by a couple of professors who are really into it, but you don't go to Purdue to be a microwave expert, although you can if you do due diligence.

Hochheiser:

Any notable professors who were influential?

Heirman:

Yes, Professor Schultz reminded me of Stalag 16 (laugh). First of all, he was a personable individual. And he liked the discipline of fields and waves. And that's what you'll find you need-- a champion for these courses. And, because he was interested, he had friends that worked in the University of Illinois, Balman and Jordan that were very much into antenna design. He was the reason that I still enjoyed continuing, but there's only maybe one or two other professors, which I can't even name now that were contemporaries.

Hochheiser:

Anything else about your years at Purdue before we move on?

Heirman:

Maybe just, a little note, in my first two years I was getting 4.0’s (which at the time were shown as 6.0’s), straight A’s. I stayed in the residence hall system because it turns out when I tried to pledge some of the fraternities, it was clear they just wanted my grade point average and not me. And, it turned out to be very beneficial in a couple of ways. First of all, I became more engaged in student government. I became president of the residence hall club and member in all of the honoraries that ensued. But probably the biggest thing is that I met my wife because she was in the administrative office of the residence hall, which had over 700 men, and I always joke to her and said, I lucked out, not you. And the manager of the residence hall made sure that he called me down to his office on a regular basis. And we had business, I was club treasurer and then president, but I always had to go through her office to get to him and I think there were things being plotted, going on in the background. But nonetheless, we married on campus. We had been married for 45 years before she passed on. So that was probably the best point. The rest of it is the usual stuff you get with being on honoraries and in the military, so I think that's probably enough. One of the things that they're doing now for me is with the Purdue University Special Collections archives which are collecting all of the things I did in my four years or five years at college. And so that would be another resource of my college years.

Active Military Service

Hochheiser:

What led you to Bell Labs?

Heirman:

Well, it's kind of an interesting one. Well, first of all, I was on a state scholarship and that got some attention from Bell Labs and Western Electric, too, at the time. And I got an offer to work at Western Electric Hawthorne Works. It's in Cicero, in the Chicago area. And, it was my junior year I believe. I got to know the Bell system if you will. And, then when it came time for looking for a job, they were after me to interview. It was kind of an obvious thing for me to matriculate into the Bell system. And they did well for me. For example when I was in the military, I was also an employee of Bell Laboratories.

Hochheiser:

Yes, I was wondering how you did that.

Heirman:

That's because they really wanted me. And I worked for about a week and a half at the Whippany Laboratories. And since I had no military clearance, we would just sit there and tell jokes and read magazines. Then I had to go report for active duty at the Pentagon. And so I had for retirement purposes the years I had on active duty added to my calculation. The real surprise was about a month into my active duty I got a check from Bell Laboratories for three months' pay. And I said but I only worked five days. So obviously I sent a note back saying this must be a mistake. They said no, we have a policy that when you go on active duty, we pay three months' pay. And I said fine and then I walked out and got myself a new car. So the point is it was clear after that that when my active duty was over with, I had a natural home with Bell Laboratories.

Hochheiser:

Right. So you did—except for those five days, you didn't really work at Bell Labs until you finished your military obligation?

Heirman:

[Interposing] I was just sitting there. And I had to even get escorted to go to the cafeteria because I wasn't cleared. There was about five of us in that situation for that week.

Hochheiser:

So what did you work on during your two years of active duty?

Heirman:

Well, that's interesting. There are lots of stories here. I was scheduled to go on a destroyer for my active duty. And before I got my foot on the destroyer's deck, the Bureau of Personnel sent me a letter saying you have been reassigned to the Pentagon. And I said well, that's nice. So it turns out, I assigned to be in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations or OP-94, which is communications. Well, they looked at my Purdue transcript and saw that I was a communications guy in some sense. And so I walked in and the assignment they gave me, you're talking about a 21-year-old person, was to determine the HF frequencies to be used by the fleet in the both surface and submarine each day. Now I had input from the National Bureau of Standards, which is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology. So I put that into a Fortran deck. It took eight hours to run the program. And I was responsible, then, for getting a message out to the fleet, here's the frequencies to use in the HF frequency band. And to me that was extraordinary to have a young officer like that given that responsibility. So that's the story for why I got into the Pentagon and, again, my education was prime and Bell Laboratories must have seen the same thing.

Hochheiser:

So you had a two-year obligation?

Heirman:

Yes.

Bell Labs

Hochheiser:

So you finished that. And now you really go to work at Bell Labs?

Heirman:

Now I really go to work at Bell Labs. And my wife goes to work for Bell Labs. The two of us combined had 60 years of service. She started in the typing pool, she became a secretary, then she ended up in the vice president's office doing performance review and finances, which helped when I set up my own company because I had that built-in activity. So we both did my consulting business. We both started off in Whippany, then moved on down to Holmdel and my management was in Murray Hill. It was kind of all over the place.

Hochheiser:

So what was the first area you worked in at Bell Labs and how was how did you end up there?

Heirman:

Well, a couple of things. I came in with a military background. And at that time, Western Electric had a contract with the Navy on the Dew Line (distant early warning system) that stretched across the northern part of Canada out to the Aleutian Islands, Adak, Kodiak, and they thought that I should be knowledgeable and of help in what was needed for that. So they immediately put me on a classified project because I had my clearance by that time. I had the clearance because I was at the Pentagon. And that's started me on the military side, which is Western Electric, and I stayed on that for a couple of years until they moved me down into the commercial sector when Western Electric started believing they should be into the telephone business, not in the military business. So then I started at Bell Laboratories in earnest. And then the word EMC comes into effect.

Hochheiser:

How did you get into EMC because as you said earlier, it's not something that you get exposed to during your education

Heirman:

[Interposing] Yes.

Heirman:

It wasn't called EMC in those days. But one of the things that we were worried about at the time was how to bury a power line and a telephone line in the same trench so that the coupling wouldn't affect the other. And at those days, we could only go about a half a mile before the noise was so loud that you couldn't hear dial tone. And we had to determine how to mitigate that, to reduce it, and that's an EMC activity. And then I ended up surveying noise in the telephone plant in major parts of the country, how it varied from time of day, day to day, month to month, which is six, seven months of surveys, which now you can't afford to have a whole group of people out for six months doing surveys. No one can now as it is prohibitively expensive. So that work I did, which is my original noise survey paper in IEEE in '73/'74, still is referenced because no one else can afford to do that. And it's probably still pretty current.

Hochheiser:

Now when you were doing this work, is this when you relocated to Holmdel or you?

Heirman:

I started in Whippany and then I relocated to Holmdel in 1966.

Hochheiser:

Right. There was very little nonmilitary work at Whippany.

Heirman:

Yes. That's right, and Holmdel, of course, was actually switching and bigger things. But then five or six years into that, I was transferred back to Whippany. So I had to make a decision, do I move my house and everything. And the answer is I did not make that decision. I stayed here. That was before they had the interstates completed. I-287 was not completed, so I had to go local roads. We had four people in the carpool. And the joke was who could find the shortest way to get to Whippany. And the winner, I don't know what it was, a dinner or whatever, was can you get to Whippany going up the [Garden State] Parkway in less than 33 stoplights. And we tried everything. And you could not do it in less than 33 stoplights. That's why it took three hours round trip. So I then had my job moved back up to Whippany and I commuted. I started my work, then, on getting back to Holmdel, which I subsequently did in about six years. It took six years. But then I had the rest of my career down in Holmdel.

Hochheiser:

I'm trying to get this in the right time frame. So the years that you were working on this project dealing with the interference between power and telephone lines was this the latter half of the sixties.

Heirman:

Yes. That's a good time frame. And then, of course, as years passed, the interference got higher and higher in frequency. And, of course, now it's in the GigaHertz region. And as that occurred, I went to those projects that were higher and higher in frequency. So just by standing still, I got more frequency!.

Hochheiser:

Because the nature of the problems moved as the frequencies in use changed.

Heirman:

[Interposing] Exactly. A speakerphone, for example, had an immunity problem, essentially in the FM frequency band, 100 MegaHertz roughly.

Hochheiser:

Yes.

Heirman:

And that's where we stopped testing because we didn't have anything causing interference above 100 MHz. Of course, when the computers came out in the eighties, then we started getting things up to 300, 400 MegaHertz. And, of course, now we're in the GigaHertz region. So the answer is correct, the RF environment has changed and we had to make telephone equipment that could work in the RF environment.

Joining IEEE and the New Jersey Coast Section

Hochheiser:

So we're now up into the early seventies and you're joining IEEE.

Heirman:

Yes, when I got transferred back the second time from Whippany to Holmdel.

Hochheiser:

Did do you move to a different project when you moved back to Holmdel?

Heirman:

Yes, it was a different project. But they were kind of related, in the same area.

Hochheiser:

Meanwhile this is by now you have a track record of expertise in dealing with...

Heirman:

[Interposing] the low frequency stuff. And then when I got back, we got into the modem EMC problems. The interesting part, going back to IEEE involvement, is that in moving from Whippany to Holmdel, all of a sudden I had three hours a day given back to me.

Hochheiser:

Sure, because Holmdel is a hop, skip, and a jump from here.

Heirman:

Exactly. It was a ten minute drive. And then one of my close friends said you want to come to an IEEE chapter meeting? And it happened to be an EMC chapter. And I said, well a vacuum is always filled? So I did. And within seven years, I was president of the EMC Society.

Hochheiser:

Okay. Now we can go through those seven years. So your initial involvement is with the EMC chapter in?

Heirman:

The New Jersey Coast Section. Yes, so let's fill in some of the gaps. I started off as just coming to chapter meetings.

Hochheiser:

Okay.

Heirman:

Then I got, do you want to be the chapter newsletter writer? It was very small one or two pages. And I say okay. Do you want to be vice chairman? Okay. Do you want to run for chairman? Okay. Do you want to be section newsletter editor? Okay. Do you want to be vice chairman of the section? Okay. Do you want to be section chairman? Okay. When do I stop saying okay, as my wife would say? And that, then, got me in the position of moving up into shall we say the society level.

Hochheiser:

Okay. But let me ask you a few follow-up questions. How large and active was the chapter in this period?

Heirman:

Well, the chapter had between 30 and 50 members. It was sizeable and it was not affiliated with any other society. Now Antennas and Propagation and MTT, tend to have a joint chapter with EMC.

Hochheiser:

But this was just EMC?

Heirman:

Just EMC. Why? Because we had Bell Laboratories. We had the Army Electronics Command. We had the Bell Communication Research. We had the hotbed of communication and they all had interference issues. So the section was quite large in those days; a section meeting could have a couple hundred people show up. Now it's dribs and drabs. It really is. It's not the same because all three of those organizations are gone. They're gone.

Hochheiser:

Right. So what did you do as both chapter chair and then section chair?

Heirman:

Well, in that time, Ralph Showers was a guest of our chapter a lot of times because he worked with the military contracts and tended to be up at Fort Monmouth occasionally. I got interested in standards. After World War II, there was more interference with what I call EMC. And, Dr. Showers was one of the ones that worked on the instrumentation to measure it by. And then the Army picked up a lot of that instrumentation at Fort Monmouth. So when I was chapter chair, I tried to get people interested in the standards side of the house, which generally was what I was doing. . Obviously the chapter was also a social organization, too, but I felt more that we had to get involved. And we held seminars, the first seminar with some of the new technology coming out of the Bureau of Standards, which is now NIST, I held them at our chapter level; it’s all in my special collection at Purdue, so that was standards-related. Within I guess maybe three or four years, we were doing so much that the EMC Society gave us Chapter of the Year Award. And that was really a nice thing for them to do. And then when we had our anniversary, our ten-year anniversary, I invited back everybody that had been in the chapter and that were obviously still alive. And we had a tremendous reaction to that. So we had a good reputation. And then when I moved into the section activities, I tried to keep it going but, of course, for all of the chapters, all of the society chapters.

Hochheiser:

What led you to want to move to the broader, responsibilities of the section?

Heirman:

Well my philosophy of life is that I like to contribute in as many ways as I can. And I don't like to put constraints on it. My wife would always say “can't you say no?” But seriously, I didn't like and I still don't like to put myself in a box. I chair international organizations, which have 25 countries and 20 or 30 different types of disciplines. And enjoy doing that because, again, I'm an organizer as well as a technical person.

EMC Symposium

Hochheiser:

When did you first attend an EMC symposium?

Heirman:

That was in the seventies. And it was in San Antonio, Texas, probably late seventies. But the thing that stuck out was being at an EMC symposium…

Hochheiser:

[Interposing] That's what’s really important, what are your recollections of the meeting?

Heirman:

First of all that Southwest Research Institute was nearby. And they started with basic work, some of it was classified to start with, but they ended up in automobile EMC issues. And so they had a good presence there. And, again in those days, the EMC Society and the local chapters were largely military, personnel because that's where the EMC was because obviously you want your equipment to work in a terrible environment. So the commercial side was not very much stressed. And in those days, we didn't have what I would consider a lot of activity, at least that I was exposed to. So this particular symposium had two parallel sessions. And I think it was two days, so we're talking about just a very few parallel sessions. Now most symposia, symposia have six to eight parallel sessions and go for five days and, in fact, the one I'm working with goes seven days. And another the interesting thing is that it was at a Holiday Inn. In those days, the River Walk was not even in existence. And the way in which they separated the two parallel sessions as the presentations were going on was to have a drape. And not an acoustic drape, just a drape. So we could sit anywhere in that room and listen to both at the same time. So the cacophony was terrible so I didn't get a whole lot out of those presentations. But anyhow, it was the start. It was military-based and it moved later on, of course, to commercial, manufacturing, industry-based, which it is right now. In fact, I believe on the board of directors of the EMC Society, I'm the only person with a background in the military that is serving and, I’m retired.

Hochheiser:

And even so, most of your career, of course, was with Bell Labs and was not military-related.

Heirman:

Yes, I was kind of strange at Bell Laboratories, too, because there weren't that many military people that drilled every Wednesday night, a weekend everymonth, and then two weeks' active duty for training each year away from my job to keep my reserve credentials going, which I did for 18 years and then retired.

Hochheiser:

Yes, come to think of it, that's true. As you know, I've spoken to lots of Bell Labs people over the years.

Heirman:

You'll find very few.

Hochheiser:

[Interposing] Yes.

Heirman:

I had a special coding in my application, Vietnam-era person, because I was in the Vietnam era. And, I couldn't find anybody else to talk to about that situation.

Hochheiser:

Not in Bell Labs, I never gave that issue any thought, but come to think of it, yes, I don't recall anyone.

Heirman:

[Interposing] And I didn't want that to have an advantage, so I never brought it up as a minority type of thing where I'd get special treatment. I never brought that up.

Hochheiser:

Yes. When did you, first become active in the national EMC?

Heirman:

Well, as I said, it's probably '76, '77. And, again, I have notes here that go with that era, but it was clear that it was a small society. I think we had a little over 3,000 at the time, I mean, compare that to now, we only are at about 4,500.

Hochheiser:

Yes.

Heirman:

And mainly because, in EMC in my opinion, one person signs up and then distributes all of the information to his ten colleagues that are in the same discipline, which we know, and I get involved in the copyright issues, too, but let's leave that aside. And it was strongly military, strongly military, because it was mainly people from the Washington/Baltimore corridor. And so I was kind of a fresh face, not regulatory, not government, not military per se because I was with Bell Laboratories. And apparently it struck a responsive note because three years later I ran for president and made it and my term of office started in the first part of 1980.

Hochheiser:

Okay. Now I understand why so you with your background were attractive to the powers that be in the society.

Heirman:

Yes.

EMC Society Board Activities and Operations

Hochheiser:

Was your first major activity actually being on the board or did you do things before you joined the board?

Heirman:

Well, we're talking about society level.

Hochheiser:

The society level.

Heirman:

At the society level, it was called the administrative committee, AdCom, in those days. Then we changed it to board of directors, which is some confusion because people think of the big IEEE board of directors, which [for me] came much later. So I got involved and had my two-year term of office. And those were kind of interesting days because that's when the Federal Communication Commission came out with their digital device rules where computers have to reduce their emissions not to cause interference. And that was in that 1980-1983 time frame, actually was even back to '78.

Hochheiser:

So this was going back when you were on the AdCom before you became president.

Heirman:

Yes. And when I left the office in '81, I joined our society's standards committee. And then served as chairman for 17 years.

Hochheiser:

Right but let’s back up a bit. So you joined the board, right? I assume that was an election of the membership?

Heirman:

Yes. Yes, the president is always membership. The other executive officers are from the board itself.

Hochheiser:

Okay. So what are your recollections of the issues facing the board in the years between when you joined the board and when you actually became the president of the society?

Heirman:

Well, again not to belabor it, changes came because of the FCC rules coming out in '78 and implemented four or five years later. We had mainly military work going on and military people, they were not familiar with [the commercial side]. Now all of a sudden the entire world of manufacturers has to listen to commercial stuff. So the transitioning from that viewpoint to a more global viewpoint of manufacturing in general, who are the general public, was a challenge. I remember the Baltimore symposium in 1980. We had a room set aside that held, I don't know, 20 people for announcement of the FCC ruling, and we had one on another subject in the ballroom and had 12 people there. And at the break, the morning break, the boss must have called all of the people to say you better be there to listen to this FCC presentation. So all of a sudden there were 200 people trying to get into a 20-person room. And this is the only time that I've ever seen in all of my years at IEEE symposia that people were punching each other out to get into a meeting room. And they come up to me as president and said Don, can you do something about it. I said I wasn’t going to do anything about the fighting. I did change rooms at the break, but I wasn't going to get in the middle of a fistfight.

Hochheiser:

Yes.

Heirman:

I mean, my mom didn't have any dumb children. So that was a challenge. And the standardization work, but just trying to keep people interested in the field, was difficult because EMC, again, wasn't a dinnertime conversation. So that was really trying to keep the membership going. We got into standardization. We got the military input and went into the commercial side. And then the big thing like as I said, the computer rules that just played right into the EMC hand.

Hochheiser:

Right, which suddenly made EMC more important to far more people

Heirman:

It's really important if you can't sell the product.

Hochheiser:

Yes.

Heirman:

I mean, even I can handle that logic.

Hochheiser:

What led you to want to be president of the society?

Heirman:

I just think I really wanted to serve. And the other people had their turn. And, some of us, it was time for our turn. I thought I could contribute. And I think I did. And, again, we have all of the minutes of those meetings and it's inches thick.

Hochheiser:

I know, you've provided them to me and I went through them in preparation.

Heirman:

And there's a lot—looking at the names of the people can tell you how we went through that period of time because unfortunately most of them are dead now, but the bottom line is I remember those people. And, it brought me back to things we talked about.

Goals During EMC Society Presidency

Hochheiser:

So were there particular things that you hoped to accomplish when you entered your term as president?

Heirman:

Well, I think I kind of repeat myself, I wanted to make sure that there was growth in membership, that there was recognition of EMC as a needed, discipline and at the time to get other people involved rather than reelecting the same old people and fast-forward to today people are probably thinking about me as old and should get out of the wayso that other people can get in and I have an answer to that, but I won’t go into it right now, but the answer is that I still contribute.

Hochheiser:

When I looked at the AdCom minutes from your first meeting as president, you gave three priorities So I thought it might make sense therefore to go through them one at a time.

Heirman:

[Interposing] Good. That'll remind me what I said, too.

Hochheiser:

The first one was double our efforts on standards activities with particular emphasis on those standards for which the EMC Society is responsible.

Heirman:

And right on. When I joined, when I became president, the standards were circa 1950s. And we were in 1980s. So one of the things, as I was in the standards committee chair, is to bring everything up to date. And, of course, now in the IEEE Standards Association, you have a ten-year deadline to update standards. If you don't do anything, it's withdrawn administratively. In those days, it just would stay on forever.

Hochheiser:

So were you successful? How successful were you in getting standards out of the 1950s?

Heirman:

By the time I retired from the standards chair, which was you count 17 years from 1980, by the late nineties, we were up to date. And furthermore, we added many more standards. Now what's many? Probably six to ten more. For a small society, that's a lot. So the answer is it's done. And today we got to start doing it again because we got stuff dating back to the nineties.

Hochheiser:

Yes. When you made this a priority back in 1980, did you realize it was going to be close to a 20-year task?

Heirman:

It's interesting. The person who was in charge in of the committee was Bud Taggart from the National Bureau of Standards, again, I keep saying, it's NIST now.

Hochheiser:

Right.

Heirman:

And, I said I’d take over because I think he got frustrated in not being able to bring our standards up to date. So he said to me, he says Don it's like pulling hens' teeth, trying to get these people to do anything. And that just triggered a challenge to me. I like hens' teeth and I like doing it. At Bell Laboratories I wrote some standards. In the military, I wrote standards.

Hochheiser:

Right.

Heirman:

So, but it was operational. We called it an OPNAV instruction and I did one on propagation of medium wave frequencies that went out to the fleet to use. And, again, I was doing this as a 20, 21-year-old person, which is I don't know how I even did it, frankly, but I did. Purdue did help me in doing that, no question my education made it possible.

Hochheiser:

Okay, well, how widespread was the interest in standards across the membership?

Heirman:

I would say almost invisible except to those that may have written it. And so the general membership probably not high, but to the military people that were largely on the standards committees, it was much higher.

Hochheiser:

The second thing you mentioned was bring new members into society participation at the chapter, section, or board of directors level.

Heirman:

Yes. And I got a couple. One of the things we didn't do in those days was have a job description and how much time it will take, how much travel it will take, and what is the job. And so we started putting together a guide that has some of this criterion so we could say I think you should join and here is the minimal requirements for the job—minimal is probably a poor word. Here is at least introductory things you might want to consider doing and here's stuff that as your career progresses, you might want to consider. And that's what I have in my professional life video that I did in 2010. First of all, we stabilized the society membership, we didn't lose many people, in the society. We gained probably a couple hundred. So I'm not sure I would call that a success, but at least it's in the right direction.

Hochheiser:

Let's see, recruit a new person for each board of director member to be indoctrinated into the functions of the office so that such persons would assist the board-of-directors member and when circumstances might require, take over the responsibilities of the office. Another advantage would be that the new recruits would become more active in the society, the overall objective being 100% increase in the persons participating in the work with the board of directors.

Heirman:

That was a goal that was not achieved. We did get an assistant treasurer. That assistant did end up being the treasurer when the treasurer retired . But we have others that kept doing what they were doing. And because they were doing a good job, no one wants to vote them out of office. The goal even of the present president of the society is to get assistants. But what is an assistant? What is their responsibility vis-à-vis of telling their boss I'm going to a meeting, a board meeting, to be trained on taking over a job in five years? That doesn’t sit very well with today's economy and the manufacturer, who just doesn't have the time to let people do that. So that is unfilled, but we had one or two incidences where it worked. So, job, not quite accomplished. You can't win them all.

Involvement in the Symposium

Hochheiser:

Well, as president, what involvement did you have in the symposium?

Heirman:

Of course, I recall giving a keynote address, but largely it was to run the meetings of the board. And most of the attendees as we have even now are not even IEEE members. And why would they want to listen in to the management structure of the society because they're interested in the technical aspects. So, as I said in the 1980 symposium, I guess I was the one to break up the fight, For most people, it looked like a ceremonial activity, but, in fact, it was not because you're trying to keep things going.

Hochheiser:

Yes.

Heirman:

So we didn't have anything really formal to do other than one or two instances where we might give a talk to a committee or a technical session, to lead it off.

Hochheiser:

Yes.

Heirman:

Because back in those days, the first half day of the symposium, and it's only a three-day symposium, was given to keynote speakers. And when I took on the general chairmanship of the 1991 symposium in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, I said that it's a waste of half a day. So I put in technical sessions and I said we have people that like to work problems and do things of that nature, so I introduced the Monday and Friday workshops. So we had a full week, technically engaged and as well as obviously some social functions. And that was the first time a week was set aside for the symposium.. Now there's a tendency to go back to a keynote speaker, but only one. That's obviously a local thing to do, but, I thought we needed more technical work on getting our discipline moving ahead. And that’s why I decided this to do in the early nineties, so that's what we did.

Board Meetings and Issues

Hochheiser:

Now as the person that you were in charge of running the board meetings.

Heirman:

Yes.

Hochheiser:

How does one do that?

Heirman:

Especially when some of the board members just want to show off and get to be president next, which happens at the big board, too. First of all, you have to accept everyone's opinion and not immediately jump on them saying “that's nonsense.” So it's like a brainstorming session. On the other hand, I felt that success would be if we had to take a vote on a motion, that it's not either all yes or all no, but it's actually a split vote because people are thinking. And you'd be surprised the number of times that I can count on two hands in which there has been a split vote on anything. To me, that is not doing your job challenging the board members.

Hochheiser:

Sure.

Heirman:

So my point is I got all of the business done in a half a day, four hours. And now it's eight hours and three hours, eleven hours total. Now, of course, there are more things that are being discussed. It was kind of amusing, though, when I took over as president, the previous president said do a good job and thank me and all of that, but the board meeting is getting too long because they were seven, eight hours. So I looked at the agenda. And I said only present motions; anything that's for information put it in an attachment to the minutes. And you can see why the minutes are that big. And then about a year and a half into that, some of the board members came up and they were very upset that I made it more streamlined. They said come on, you got to help me. What were you telling me? Well, now I can't get the money to travel because my boss says why should I pay for you going for four hours? So the subsequent president went back to an eight-hour day. And he didn't need to. I don't know what else I can say about that, but I was absolutely flabbergasted when someone told me I was doing too good a job. Think about that for a minute.

Hochheiser:

Yes. How were the finances of the society during this period?

Heirman:

At least one of those years, we had a negative surplus. But it wasn't much in those days. You're talking about $10,000, $12,000. And we were operating on a budget of less than $100,000 type of thing. And we had one major income revenue, the symposium. So we had enough to operate as needed in my opinion. And, all we needed was the leadership to make it happen. So, we really didn't have more fund raising ideas—although that was the time we started looking at investments differently, the IEEE did. Also they started coming up with, you need a 10% surplus on the symposium and all of these rules started coming in.. And we had to work with that. But I had a good treasurer. He worked for the Communication-Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth, Warren Kesselman. And he kept the books. And, in fact, just fast-forward to the symposium in '91, we made $80,000 and it's because he kept control and working with the committee on expenses. And he did that even back in the eighties.

Hochheiser:

Are there other things besides these priorities, and the FCC issues that faced the board and the society during your term?

Heirman:

Nothing strikes me. Now the thing is it could've been some secretive stuff that I didn't know about happening in the military. And I'm sure there was. The IEEE decision long ago that there would not be a classified session. In fact, we had the EMC symposium in Asbury Park in '69 and there were two symposiums, one open to the public at the hotel Berkeley Carteret in downtown Asbury Park. And the other one was on Fort Monmouth's campus, which was classified. And from that point on, they said no, it's got to be open. And therefore that was I think the last classified split. And it made sense really.

Hochheiser:

I noticed that all of the, members of the EMC board during this period were from Regions 1 through 6. To what extent was there an international presence in the society? And to what extent was this an issue that came up?

Heirman:

First of all, the issue really didn't come up because people still thought of IEEE as a US organization. But back in those days, we had a representative occasionally from Japan. We didn't have anything from South America, from Region 9. And at the time, if there was a military, a NATO-type thing, we may have gotten one or two from Region 8, essentially Europe. But it was primarily an East Coast society, not even all regions, including Region 6 and California, et cetera. We had a hotbed of EMC activity in Chicago, Region 5. Armour Research had a symposia, the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute, IITRI, was very active. So we had East Coast, we had a little bit of in the Chicago area, Illinois, Milwaukee, et cetera, and then a couple on the West Coast, and almost nothing in between. I mean, there's stuff in Texas once in a while, but Texas is a different country!! So the bottom line is now we have in our bylaws that we will find people from regions 8, 9, and 10. And we were successful most of the time in 10, but Region 9 is still tough. And at most, we only get one person.

EMC Society Relationships

Hochheiser:

What, if any, were the relationships between EMC symposium and the Zurich symposium in Europe and the Wroclaw Symposium in Eastern Europe?

Heirman:

We essentially had, although it wasn't signed as an MOU, a memorandum of understanding with the Zurich symposium especially which started off in the seventies. And it was until five, six years ago, the place to go for the intense technical EMC application. It was solving problems if you will; it was more mathematically-oriented. I mean, not totally, but it was at a university, the Federal Institute, ETH, in Zurich. It was run by the professors. The people that supported it were students. And, in fact, we had it at the break of the semester so we could have all of that free labor. Therefore the quality was quite good. Not to say that the EMC symposium that was in Region 1 through 6 was not good, but it was just a different focus. In Wroclaw it was kind of, one or two professors that tried to alternate at least timing with Zurich. And, I think I only attended one of them. But in Zurich the peer review system was quite, quite deep, deep, and critical. If you got a paper at Zurich, you did something. So we had this arrangement and then we exchanged our proceedings from ours to theirs. We had an exhibit booth in Wroclaw and Zurich for the EMC symposium. We gave them space in our Region 1 through 6 symposium. So there was good cooperation. And the Swiss always liked us to come over and give special sessions or tutorials or workshops. They wanted to know what's happening in the rest of the world outside of Switzerland Earlier on, that was before the days that the European Union was strong. So we had a good relationship and still do, but now instead of EMC Zurich we have what's called EMC Europe. And this year in, in 2015, it's the first time we're having our international symposium with the EMC Europe folks in Dresden, Germany, so it's a real challenge because we have our local one earlier in the year in Santa Clara. Now we got to do double paper reviews, not only that but the number of papers for the Dresden symposium is 400. We generally only get about 150, so it's going to be something. And I do paper reviews, so I'm pulling my hair out. And I have very little left to pull.

Hochheiser:

What were the relations or how closely were things coordinated if at all between the local chapters and the national EMC in these years?

Heirman:

In those years, we had a preference to have our symposium at a location where there was a chapter. We have deviated from that in recent times, but, for example, for the 1991 symposium in Cherry Hill, we had the New Jersey Coast section chapter, we had the Philadelphia chapter, we had even up to New York and the Mohawk Valley chapter that all came together and was our team. In Washington, it was clearly the Northern Virginia/Washington chapter and up to the Baltimore area. So there was a close coupling between chapters. For our 50th anniversary in 2007, we decided to go to the 50th State. And there's no chapter in Hawaii, although I'd love to have another one there because I'd visit on a regular basis.

Hochheiser:

That's a good place to have an excuse to visit.

Heirman:

And by the way, they actually showed up to the sessions. They were not on the beach, which is saying something about engineers. They don't know better.

Hochheiser:

Now did you continue to be involved with - the New Jersey Coast chapter while you were a national leader?

Heirman:

It dwindled off I would say pretty fast.

Hochheiser:

Yes, I would expect so.

Heirman:

And because at this point I don't go to the meetings, although obviously I want to, but my responsibilities have to go beyond that.

Hochheiser:

Yes. Do you have an idea about how large a time commitment being the society president was for you?

Heirman:

I would say probably the equivalent of a day a week. And, of course, most of that was outside of work hours. I had a very intense job with the Bell Labs and the infancy of a compliance laboratory and I couldn't say for two hours I'm just going to work on IEEE stuff. So it was weekends and at nights. But, yes, just keep things going and incentivize the board to do what they said they were going to do.

Hochheiser:

So you basically during the work week you'd be involved with your Bell Labs work in the compliance lab and then for the most part the work for,—

Heirman:

[Interposing] IEEE would either be the weekend or after dinner.

Hochheiser:

One of the other activities I note as I'm looking through the AdCom minutes for these years was an EMCS handbook.

Heirman:

Yes, we started that when I was president, yes.

Hochheiser:

What was it hoped that that handbook would accomplish?

Heirman:

Well, a couple of things. First of all, it was meant for the society members. So we had our bylaws in there. We had a list of our technical committees. We had a list of contact names so that people could talk to, and so forth. So it was kind of like the homepage website of today, except it was a piece of paper.

Hochheiser:

Because there weren't any web sites.

Heirman:

There were no web sites. The good news is you do it, but then the next day it's out of date.

Hochheiser:

Yes.

Heirman:

Of course, I can say about websites, too, that people don't update them except maybe once a year, and in the between, it's junk because, for example, there's one web site I love, the next meeting, it will be in 2013. And that's today. What good is that? My website is up to date.

Standards Efforts

Hochheiser:

During this period, one of your priorities here at EMC was standards.

Heirman:

Yes.

Hochheiser:

In what ways did the EMC standards effort work together with the standards board, the Standards Association, broader IEEE efforts?

Heirman:

Well, obviously we needed the approval of the standards board to get our standards published. By the way when I left the presidency, I joined the standards board as the EMC Society rep.

Hochheiser:

Right, That is the next thing on my list.

Heirman:

Yes, you'll get into that because that's, that's a whole other story. But the bottom line is in those days, believe it or not, there was a decision made on how to assign editors based on the potential sale of the standard. So if you had a very specialized standard, like an EMC standard, it may take a year or two to get that out the door, through the system, because they're working on things they could get more return on investment And that was a tough one for me to handle in the society. I got all of these people churned up to get good work and get it out and it got into an inbox somewhere buried. That's changed since then, but in those days, it was tough for EMC.

Hochheiser:

Another thing that happened in 1981, I saw was a proposal to revise the EMC's official field of interest statement.

Heirman:

Yes. We're still doing that, by the way. One of the questions that came up that I recall was, how you handle human exposure to RF energy. Everyone thinks that's a safety issue, but it's also an EMC issue because to measure the fields that would impinge upon a human, is what you do when you worry about emissions from a product in an EMC context. And the question always is when you start looking at fields of interest is it conflicting with other societies' fields of interest. The ones that we always are concerned about are MTT, Microwave Theory and Techniques, and Antennas and Propagation, because they're in our same part of the world if you will. I think we stabilized that by not getting involved with the human exposure because COMAR ended up doing more of that, the Committee on Man and Radiation. So I think it was good that we looked at it, but there wasn't a major thing that came out of changing things there. But if you change one word in that field of interest, the world says you can't change that one word. And that's what we're running into today.

1984 Tokyo Symposium

Hochheiser:

One thing that was in I guess the planning stages while you were president was the planning to hold the 1984 symposium in Tokyo.

Heirman:

Ah, my favorite subject.

Hochheiser:

Which I assume was the first time that the EMC symposium was held outside of the United States.

Heirman:

Well, two things. First, the Tokyo, the Japanese chapter, the Tokyo chapter, wanted to hold the symposium. And all right, that's fine. The board had never met outside of regions 1 through 6, okay? And we say we are an international organization. So I pushed pretty heavily. Fortunately on my standards committee at the time was Professor Sato, who was the chairman of the EMC chapter in Tokyo. So we had this nice link. If they're going to offer it, can we make it the symposium for the year? It was agreed that the Tokyo symposium should go on and that we should hold our board meeting there. It was the first time, and that was groundbreaking. The Japanese, the Tokyo chapter, had over a hundred people. And, in fact, one of our standards was written by the chapter in like 50 days, which is unheard of; most of the time it takes two years to write a standard. But they put 50 people on it. God bless them. And they still are willing to do it even today. So, Gene Knowles, who was the president at the time in '84, he was from Boeing, he agreed, the board agreed, let's try it. The EMC chapter sponsorship of the Japanese symposium is every five years, so do the fast-forward; 2014 was the last one that was given. We had a delegation from the board that went over there and gave a presentation of what the society is all about. We had lunch with the planning committee. We exchanged niceties and so forth. I'm on of the associate editors of the EMC Society magazine. I wrote an article on that whole situation. The bottom line is that the Japanese folks are very much into EMC. And they show it. And five years is fine for them. I've only missed maybe one, every five-year window. And they always give us a session to talk about the society and all. But having the board there was a big deal.

Hochheiser:

Yes. To what extent did other US members of the EMC go to the '84 symposium in Tokyo?

Heirman:

There was a handful. And the ones that went, usually, had a paper approved to be presented. In fact, I gave a paper there, a peer-reviewed paper. I gave it with one of my colleagues from the Georgia Tech Research Institute. It was well-received. It's all English. There's not a real-time translator. Obviously there are still issues of being asked a question to a non-English speaking person. It's got to be converted in the head into the native language and put back out in English which is difficult. I'm just guessing now, but my guess is we're probably talking about 25 or 30 US members in attendance. It wasn't a big number. But we're not talking about 1,000 people who attending the symposium either.

Hochheiser:

Right. So how many people would've attended? About how many people would've attended this symposium in the US in the early eighties at?

Heirman:

We're probably talking about fully registered.

Hochheiser:

[Interposing] Yes.

Heirman:

Five or six hundred.

Hochheiser:

Okay.

Heirman:

When you start counting one day attendees, the exhibitors and all of that, it goes way out of sight. It goes to maybe 1,500 now a days. But we want people there that paid for the full three days or four days or five days.

Hochheiser:

One other thing I note is that EMC has a series of technical committees. And how do they operate and what's their relationship to the whole?

Heirman:

Well, the society has split up into disciplines. There's one on electromagnetic measurements. There's one on RF environment and the list goes on because there are people that specialize in that. That system helps then in generating the agenda for the symposium because in our call for papers, we call by technical areas. So now the author says I think his paper is on a topic handled by TC2. So that goes to the TC2 for paper review. And someone might say TC10 on signal integrity, power integrity, so it helps in not only identifying where to go to get information from the society, but also generates essentially the agenda for the symposium. And therefore we can reach out to get papers in those areas. So it's all run by a technical advisory committee and it's under one of the vice presidents. And our biggest job, of course, is paper review, but we also worry about making sure that these technical committees remain viable. If you go on the web site, each one has their own web site presence, meetings, officers, and scope. So it's very important. We are very careful not to add a technical committee because “Joe Blow” only might want to get his own discipline in as a TC, so there is a high bar to get a new, technical committee. And, in fact, we've cut down on one or two in the past. It just became inactive and things have moved on. We had a TC on “sequency union”.—it's hard for me to even determine what that was anymore. But it moved out of being a TC. Product safety used to be an EMC society TC. And that moved on to become a separate society now, but its birth was in the EMC Society.

TAB

Hochheiser:

As the president of the EMC Society, you were a member of TAB.

Heirman:

Yes.

Hochheiser:

Do you have any recollections of the TAB meetings during this period?

Heirman:

It was always interesting. That was the time they started the presidents’ council where they have the presidents as a separate resource group beyond just showing up at the TAB meeting. My recollection is limited. One of the things is that we had a fiduciary duty to handle the finances. Well they're flashing all of this financial stuff in front of us. How can we even make a judgment, at least how could I?

Hochheiser:

Yes.

Heirman:

When I became a member of the big board, that was, that was much more streamlined. So, I don't recall that we came up with a resolution or a recommendation that we wanted to push through. It has just faded from my mind as, something that was other than you had to go to a meeting. Which maybe it's my fault, I don't know

Hochheiser:

So you did not find there were things that came out of TAB that you could take back

Heirman:

There probably was, but I can't name them right now.

Hochheiser:

Then I assume this was your first exposure to the overall IEEE?

Heirman:

Yes. And, it was by virtue of the society president’s office, so it wasn't something I ran for.

Hochheiser:

[Interposing] Right.

Hochheiser:

EMC is part of a Division. During this period, TAB was trying to get the number of divisions increased from seven to ten so it would be equal to the number of regions in terms of representation on the board.

Heirman:

I don't recall that discussion. I recall that we were asked to run for office in one of the divisions.

Hochheiser:

Right.

Heirman:

So they were reaching out. And over the years, we have had a couple of past presidents of the EMC Society become a division director. But that wasn't on our radar as a concern.

Hochheiser:

Now anything else about your term of president before we move on later into the eighties?

Heirman:

No, I don't think so. I think the point is that the IEEE involvement became much more intense beyond—and it was a good stepping stone. And, again, it was a change from military to more commercial that took place in my term and I think that was a natural progression. We didn’t do it in terms of kicking anybody out. In those days we thought we would hold a symposium in Atlantic City or Vegas because those are convention towns. And the military absolutely said no. And, of course, now we have conventions in and around Vegas all the time from the IEEE. So we had constraints. I wanted to hold the Cherry Hill convention in 1991 in Atlantic City for obvious reasons. It was a great place to visit, and we could get the rooms at half rate between Sunday night and Thursday night because no one is there. The gamblers come on in on the weekend. And I was voted down; my head spinned. Philadelphia was second choice, so we met in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

IEEE Standards Board

Hochheiser:

One thing you briefly mentioned was that after you completed your term as president, you became the EMC representative on the standards board.

Heirman:

Yes.

Hochheiser:

Was this your first exposure to the broader world of standards?

Heirman:

Yes. As the EMC Society rep on the Standards Board, first of all, the standards board didn't even know who I was and as far where I came from, from EMC. And it was mainly the Computer Society and the Communications Society, as well as the Power Engineering Society at the time, Power and Energy now. Between power and these other societies, they had 500 standards. And the EMC Society walks in with 20. Should they listen to us at all? So I had to walk a tight line to comment on things that they said. Well, who is this guy who is commenting? He’s small potatoes in this big field. But you run into that all the time in life, so I handled that. And then I enjoyed being chair of the New Standards Committee, being chair of the Procedures Committee and I worked my way up to vice chair of the standards board, then finally chairman, and then beyond that obviously the next step when the Standards Association was formed 20 years ago now I guess. But the big thing is we got the recognition of the EMC Society. And we weren't looking for recognition for recognition purposes, but a lot of things that they're talking about in some of the other standards were compatibility issues. So they may not have recognized it, but when I had an opportunity to say maybe you want to do a joint activity with the EMC Society, I gave it a shot. Not many took me up on it because it was too new. But I had to do it. And I served on the board for quite some time.

Hochheiser:

You had mentioned earlier that there had been difficulty in getting the Standards Board to pay attention to EMC standards.

Heirman:

And getting it published.

Hochheiser:

Were you able to improve that once you were on the standards board?

Heirman:

I think the answer is yes. I think maybe because they said well, it's just a standard that might sell 20 standards and we don't worry about it. In those days when someone says no, the standard is wrong, it's competing with such-and-such, you could say it doesn't deserve to be approved. On the other hand if none of this happened with our EMC standards, I was able to accomplish helping get those things out the door.

Hochheiser:

You have remained very active for many years in the EMC standards, as well as the Standards Board, right?

Heirman:

It has not stopped. I am vice president for standards for the society right now. I've been that way for a decade. I’m trying to train a replacement, but people don't want to put in the time and effort.

Hochheiser:

You also became head of EMC Technical Committee 2 in the eighties, EMC measurements, so what area is that and how does that relate to your other activities?

Heirman:

Well, that is a morphing of what the military was doing because they had to measure interference. Then the FCC came out with their rules on how to measure interference from computers. They had to have instrumentation to measure it with. And so—the Technical Committee 2, TC2, is electromagnetic measurements and instrumentation. And so we worry about—not worry about, but we are interested in the next wave of instrumentation, new technology, and we're interested in measurement methods, which permeate everything nowadays, for product EMC conformance. The lion's share of what we did in those days was essentially look at the military requirements for instrumentation and measurement methods, the so-called MIL standards, and made sure that if there anything we could add to it maybe from the commercial side, we tried to do. Nowadays most of our work of TC2 is paper reviews to be quite honest with you because we are very concerned that we have good quality papers for our symposia. And that make sense, especially if they have to be instituted with new technology. So it's still viable. I'm also involved with Smart Grid, that's Special Committee number 1, which is all covered under the technical advisory area. And there I'm trying to assemble all EMC activity that is being done so then we’ll have a repository much like we were talking about, i.e.archiving, so that if we have to come up with a position paper, there is the stuff we could use.

Career Progress at Bell Labs

Hochheiser:

So back in the eighties while you're serving as a leader of the EMC society and on the Standards Board, meanwhile how was your career at Bell Labs progressing? AT&T was going through enormous changes in the 1980s.

Heirman:

My career just skyrocketed. I went from a member of the technical staff, to distinguished member of the technical staff, became supervisor, and became department head. But the big thing is when I moved into and set up the compliance laboratory. When the FCC rules came out in the early 1980’s, you had to have a special building to make these measurements in. And I designed those buildings that were first constructed the Bell Labs Chester facility, then in Holmdel, but also it's been replicated at Oklahoma City, at the Oklahoma City manufacturing works, which doesn't exist anymore. It was copied by Xerox and other companies, not the exact design, but the material used and things like that. In fact, that's how I got my IEEE fellowship, based on making accurate electromagnetic measurements. A lot of that had to do with my early work on testing with a particular type of test facility with the conductive ground plane. So I was recognized for that work and I wrote an American National Standard on it (ANSI C63.7), as well as the IEEE stuff. Bell Laboratories was fully supportive. And the other thing I did for my people, if they wanted to advance, I said you would have to be a chair of a working group of a standards committee in EMC. I don't care if it's IEEE or the International Electrotechnical Commission. And three or four of them took me up on it and I was able to promote them. I also set aside budget for their travel as part of the budget, not something you're going to take from somebody else. So this was a good time. And it's still continued because my laboratory still exists in Alcatel-Lucent in Murray Hill, NJ.

Hochheiser:

You were involved not just in IEEE standards activities, but the IEC and ANSI C63.

Heirman:

Yes.

Hochheiser:

What's the relationship between these various activities?

Heirman:

You don't have enough memory in your camcorder. I'll give you a partial answer. First of all they're all different. The IEC, the International Electrotechnical Commission, the membership and the work is comprised of delegates from countries. The IEEE Standards Association is largely individuals contributing, although they have an option to be entities which are organizations. But the lion's share is individual members, which is a good attraction because you and I could join a committee and make a direct impact, whereas in the IEC, no, it's got to go to the national committee to approve you to be a participant. And then when the work is completed, it's a series of countries that approves it, not just the Standards Board in the case of the IEEEor so forth. So it's a different schema, but they all write technical standards. And the electromagnetic part is in two main committees, the International Special Committee on Radio Interference (CISPR) and technical committee 77 (EMC). ANSI does not have any committees. They just accredit committees to do standards development. They used to in the past, but they dropped all committees. So there's not a real structure to develop in ANSI; it's in the accredited standards committee that they accredit to do the development. IEEE is one of the accredited committees, as well as one of my independent committees-- C63, in which Showers and Hoolihan are involved with or were involved with. Showers obviously was involved with it from close to the outset of the committee existence and Dan is presently the chair. I was past chair. So they're different. The thing that's missing is that C63 does not get involved in the military standard-writing. So that's others, although there might be common people among a couple of these.

IEEE Standards Association

Hochheiser:

You mentioned that you worked up from the Standards Board to the creation of the Standards Association?

Heirman:

Yes.

Hochheiser:

So what led to the creation of the Standards Association (SA) above the Standards Board?

Heirman:

Well, as I understand it, the SA wanted to have a business model different than the IEEE to sell standards.

Hochheiser:

Okay.

Heirman:

The IEEE doesn't necessarily get into selling things if you will. So there was a business case to be made that as an independent organization, for tax purposes, that it made sense to have the standards as a major organizational unit of the Institute to work on standards development, standard sales, standards follow up, and so forth, and the big IEEE board agreed to that. And then it was set up and now we have separate membership fees even though we're under the IEEE banner and it gives us a little more flexibility to work in the world of standards and be competitive. But that was a hard sell to get the association started.

Hochheiser:

Oh, I bet.

Heirman:

It took years.

Hochheiser:

Now through the nineties, then is it fair to say that your IEEE activities very much ran to the standards on the one hand and the EMC Society on the other?

Heirman:

Yes. That’s a fair statement.

Retirement from Bell Labs

Hochheiser:

Good, so I didn't leave anything out. In what ways did when you 1997 retirement from Bell Lab and becoming someone with a consulting business affect your activities both professionally and insofar if at all with respect to IEEE?

Heirman:

Well, first of all, the Bell system supported me in my IEEE work throughout the time. And then when I took over the group, the compliance group, I made sure that standards was part of the scope of the work. So I was running onto 35 years in the system; the Bell system treated me very nicely. And I decided that it was time to do something else. It's sort of a normal sequence anyhow. You work as a worker bee, you go into management, then you become an expert and you're a tutor; the usual stuff. Well, I followed that schema. Then the opportunity came for me to be the associate director of the Wireless EMC Center at the University of Oklahoma. This was back in the days when cell phones were starting to come out and everybody was worried about interference caused by the phone to pacemakers and hearing aids, interference, et cetera, an EMC problem. And they offered me an adjunct professorship and a senior scientist position. And I well said, why not? And at that point I made the decision and told the executive vice president at Bell Laboratories that I'm going to move on. So when that happened, I looked at, well, I want to do other things for other people too. And the best way to do that is to set up your own company. And I set up my limited liability corporation in 1997. So a year after this year it's going to be 20 years beyond the almost 35 years I gave Bell Laboratories. And it's been great. It enabled me to do more of what I wanted to do and not worry about performance reviews at Bell Laboratories. So with that the word got out and people wanted to use my services for standardization, for what's happening next in the world of EMC standardization, for example, and then my business started with training I got into. And it hasn't stopped. I'm going to be giving about ten workshops this year. Next week I'm off to Japan and Korea to give two EMC standards presentations. And so it's spread. It's much more than just US or Lincroft, New Jersey, that's for sure. So it was a good stepping point. Then I decided I didn't want to continue going out to Oklahoma City once a week to teach a three-hour course, because you can't get there from here. You got to go through another airport. It was seven hours to get to Oklahoma City. A day out and a day back for three hours didn't make sense after a while, so I decided to focus on my own consulting business. And then soon giving back to Perdue came up, can I do something more? You know, I'm in the give-back mode at this point. In fact, I started that, several years ago. And fortunately since I own my own business and I have my own timetable, I can parse out what I do and when I do it. So I think it was a natural progression. I don't see anything further that I have to do. Except I have to put all of my stuff in the archives, right?

Evolution of Standards Activities and the IEEE Standards Board

Hochheiser:

In what ways, if any, did the standards activities and the Standards Board evolve over your years on the board?

Heirman:

Well, the system to get a project authorization requires that you go through the new standards committee and they agree with the proposal (the Standards Board makes the final approval) and then you can start work. Then after the work is done, you go to the Review Committee, RevCom, and they review if you followed all of the processes and took care of all of the objections and resolved them in some way. And then you go up to the Standards Board and then they look at the recommendations from their committees. And there's seldom a vote against a recommendation. But the Standards Board is where the rubber meets the road. But in my time, I can probably come up with one or two instances, I don't know which instances they were, in which there was a conflict in the system. Now there are some societies that if you write a standard in the discipline of another society, that's a problem to the one in which specializes in that discipline if they're not involved. That one has raised its head in recent times. We have the ability to have a standards coordinating committee, which is multiple standards and societies, but it really boils down to the people. Some of the people, you wouldn't want to have dinner with. Let's put it that way. But I always am up for someone inviting me to dinner.

Member of the IEEE Board of Directors

Hochheiser:

Now being president of the Standards Association made you a member of the big board.

Heirman:

Yes.

Hochheiser:

And of the Executive Committee.

Heirman:

At the time they had an Executive Committee. Now they don't.

Hochheiser:

I know. How would you characterize the board during the years you were on there?

Heirman:

I would say, first of all, it was a very interesting experience to start with. We had around 35 members. What interested me was there was only six or seven that talked. And the others sort of stared into space. And you didn't know what they were thinking. What the “talkers” said had made some sense, no question about it. And I tried to join in, but I wasn't going to join in just to hear my voice. One of the things that I was involved with is to try to start a fellow review committee within the Standards Association; right now all of the committees are in the societies. The question is we have people that are very good standards people and they have no direct representation on the Fellow Committee. We missed making that change to get one by one vote. And that one vote, by the way, I learned later that one Board member confused what yes or no meant. I’ve got scars all over my body yet for that one. The rationale was that the technical excellence is not necessarily the same as excellence in getting a standard into practice and industry benefitting from it, which I think is shallow. The other comment was well, those people are also members of technical societies. They should use that route. Well, then it goes up to this big Fellow Committee. And if you don't have someone that's involved with standards that could appreciate what's on the nomination piece of paper you could see the difficulty. So that one sticks in my mind because I spent at least two board meetings trying to explain that to the board. Now the board has automatic voting, has all kinds of technology to speed it along And, again, the financial part, I thought that people were not as engaged and I knew I had trouble like trying to keep up with all of the numbers thrown at us. Even though at the time Dorsey & Whitney told us what we have to do as our fiduciary responsibility, not the least of which is financial, so we deliberated on proposals for using some money from the reserves. I thought those were interesting, too, the justification. I think that's what the board should do, so it was a good experience. And I think everybody should do it. And it's different when you're sitting around the table than when you're listening at the outside ring because you got to make a decision at the table. You got to vote. And that was true in the Product Services and Publications Board too because that's where the major amount of revenue comes. That was interesting. I represented the SA on that Board. So that was a good experience, too. But that was after I was on the IEEE Board.

Hochheiser:

Do you recall any other particular issues that preoccupied the board?

Heirman:

Yes, we had to interview for the next director of the IEEE. That was obviously a closed session, so I'm not going to say much about it.

Hochheiser:

Nor would I expect you to.

Heirman:

Let me say it was intense. And there you find people talking about the individual that you probably would not have heard. And obviously that's executive session. I haven't spoken to anybody about it and I won't.

Hochheiser:

No, nor would I ask you to. It would not be appropriate. Since as you noted, it's something that like the board later got rid of, what function did the Executive Committee serve?

Heirman:

My view was, since it was just essentially representatives of the six major organizational units, it was kind of like a chairman's advisory group. Presidents act differently. We had in my term on the Board a president who had a trip to Russia and he needed an answer or at least the opinion of how to answer and he calls up, I don't know who it was, saying you got to have a teleconference at ten o'clock at night. Well, you're not going to get 35 people at ten o'clock at night but he had us on the hook. And I think I heard every third word because the connection was so bad. But that was enough to say yes or no. So, I really considered it was an advisory group because all decisions are made by the full board is obvious. And maybe now it is felt that there is no need for an advisory group because you had the board access. And now with the email and the new technology, you can get a quick response. But we were on the hook to get that phone call and be ready. And we were.

Hochheiser:

Anything else that you recall from your service on the board?

Heirman:

No. But I think it was a nice jumping-off to getting more involved in the other organizational units like EAB with which I'm involved with now a little on standards education. I mentioned PSPB that was always of interest because, again, I was looking for equal treatment of all of the societies, not having one over the other, because they may bring in more revenue. So I kept that up. I've been cutting back because my business just doesn’t allow me to have the time I had before because of the IEC work and giving all of these workshops is just taking a lot of time.

Service on other Major IEEE Boards

Hochheiser:

So what can you tell me that you haven't already mentioned about the, publications board I know it has a longer name now.

Heirman:

Product Services and Publications Board, yes, everyone calls it pubs, but it's actually PSPB. Well, one of the things that came up, but not a lot, is plagiarism. And they have their own committee to deal with it. By the way, I'm on the Ethics and Member Conduct Committee. I've been on it two or three times. But now I'm on it, as we speak. And, again, this is something we can't talk about. We can just talk in generalities.

Hochheiser:

Go ahead.

Heirman:

Some of it had to do with plagiarism and the question is is it plagiarism, is it not, does it meet ethical conduct. And the list goes on. Those sessions tended to be obviously executive sessions, too. That was the first time I was exposed to people doing such stupid things as erasing the name of the author and putting their name on it and submitting it. And now the university professors even use software to do comparison for phrases, a lot to check for plagiarism .

Hochheiser:

I know.

Heirman:

So that really opened my mind. The other thing is how the staff works with the publication process in pubs in PSPB. And so we always got a rundown of statistics, we got a rundown, for example, of which user is downloading the entire Xplore system in one night. And so the question is, can you cut that off obviously, but it seems like there's some sensitivity. Well, you can't cut it off because it's a university. Hey, it's against the law to download without paying for copyrighted material. It's intellectual property. And Xplore is our biggest money-maker. So I wish that would tighten up, but we found that stuff all the time in pubs. They report every other meeting, it says well who's doing what, what’s the amount, and we're looking into it. We're doing this and that. We try to support it or not support it and ask questions. Most of the pubs people are editors of their society magazines or transactions. So I came in as not as an editor, so I was kind of unusual; EMC is always a little bit different.

Hochheiser:

Well, I know you can't discuss any specifics because these would be confidential, but what can you share about the way the Nominations and Appointments Committee, which I know you've also served on, does its job?

Heirman:

Well, first of all, they do the job.

Hochheiser:

Yes, people get appointed.

Heirman:

Well, we have a list of nominees. Then we have essentially their CVs if you will. But it goes before this group of people and many of them know the individual. So they have to, as I do, look at their qualifications. I may know this person, but I got to look at all of them. Okay? And these are not one-hour meetings.

Hochheiser:

I couldn't imagine they could be.

Heirman:

They go on for days. They may have a break and then have a meeting a month later. And then there are telephone conferences, so we really spend a good deal of our time. We look for obviously new people, which maybe equate to younger. We look for those that have a track record. But I liked to look more at the new people because that's the next generation to keep our Institute moving ahead. In my time on the N&A, it was so overwhelming. We had hundreds of applications. What we did, we broke up into subcommittees. And I had a couple of slots, positions that I chaired a subcommittee on and we would then go into more depth and then we would recommend to the larger N&A consideration. Now the larger N&A could do what they want, but we had to break it up. It's like the Fellows. They break it up as well in the same way. It’s just too much to do it before the entire body at once. I thought that process went pretty well. I enjoyed that part especially when I could talk with six or seven people rather than fifty people. I think people should be proud of the way the N&A works. I was also on the N&A of the Standards Association. And we mimicked essentially to use our background on both to get the job done. And I don't see it not working. The only drawback is if you're on the N&A, you can't be available for appointment. So my being on the N&A for the SA and the Institute locked me out for four years of volunteering to do any further work on a deployment basis. And I've only now started to catch up a little bit vis-à-vis being on the EMCC, the Ethics and Member Conduct Committee, because I was off of it actually twice because I was on the N&A.

Hochheiser:

Are there any specific events or activities that we neglected to cover or I neglected to ask you about that you can think of?

Heirman:

One of the things I'm involved with currently beyond the EMCC is education on standards. One of the things that we started several years ago, in fact, it may have even happened when I was president of the Board of Governors of the SA, was trying to tell people about standards and why it's useful, why it's, important, why it's career-enhancing and all of those attributes. And within the last two or three years now, the Educational Activities Board joined the SA to have standards education. It turns out that the staff person that was in the SA moved over to EAB to help run this committee from the staff perspective. And what we were doing, we were giving out some money for the best papers, we are reviewing student activity. We have lectures and presentations worldwide. We have a strong relationship with India in this area. Now taking that back to my EMC society has been very helpful because then we have an education committee in our society. And just within the last month I've actually had the staff person from EAB on a teleconference, a webinar, with my society education people saying what is available for the society use from EAB. And believe it or not, I mean, I was familiar with it and I thought others were, but it was an eye-opener. So all of a sudden, I nudged the people in the society to use more the resources of the institute. So to me that's what I probably will focus on continuing in the next year or two.

Evolution of the EMC Society

Hochheiser:

Over your many years of involvement, how's the EMC Society evolved?

Heirman:

From which perspective?

Hochheiser:

Well, whatever, in terms of, in terms of size, activity, globalization, transactions, whatever.

Heirman:

Right. I understand what you're saying. Well, there's been a lot of successes, some not so successful. Let me talk about chapters. In my 1980 era, I think we probably had ten chapters and they're all in regions 1 through 6. Now we have over 80 chapters internationally throughout all of the regions. The membership is static at about 4,000, which to me is disappointing because we know that there is a need for EMC in all new products and hence our membership should be growing. So one of the arguments was well, one person joins and gets the information and distributes it to probably ten people that really are EMC people in his/her organization and why couldn't we have ten of them join instead Well, what we need to do is when you come to a symposium, we pay for your membership in the society, not the Institute, so we have some attractions. So that's one. The chapter activity has grown to the extent that it has its own mini conference (we call them “table top” seminars where some exhibors show their EMC wares) if you will, well, it's a couple hour meeting, but it’s where the chapter members can say what they're doing in their program so that the other chapters can follow that same practice. And if you look at our EMC Society magazine, the chapter sections are pages and pages versus when you go back to when it was only a newsletter back in the eighties, if we had a page filled, it was lucky. So that has definitely been very helpful. I should mention we have this agreement with the EMC Europe, so we are spreading our wings into memorandums of understanding with other society-like organizations, not necessarily IEEE. We mentioned the Tokyo symposium that was last year, a continuation of what happened in 1984. We're trying to do more in South America, but that seems just to be a hangup and Africa as well. So those are probably prime places to focus on membership. India is starting to pick up, which in the Institute, is the same thing. And we're doing it with the same number of board members. We have 24 board members for the EMC society, which is probably too much. If there's about 35 for the Institute, you can do the numbers. But it's kind of like a congressional member trying to say “well, we’ll give up our pay”. No, you won't. I think we're starting to use webinars more than we ever have. Email is just too much. People have got to learn to reply to the sender and not reply to all.

Hochheiser:

Oh, that's universal.

Heirman:

And the one that really is interesting, it's embarrassing if you only want to give it to the author that sent it and it's talking about one of the people that are on the copy-to list which is very interesting in itself. So, in conclusion for this interview I think we have a future that is unimpeded. I think we are looking now at more effort on getting young professionals, and that used to be the GOLD system if you will, graduates of the last decade. We have a position that on the board for young professionals. And I know our president currently is active in getting more. I'm active in the International Electrotechnical Commission on young professionals, getting them into EMC, and trying to get them linked up with their national committee so they can join a working group. So I'm doing it at the IEC level and, of course, supporting what's happening in the society. The thing that we always worry about is finances. And if you have only one generation of annual income, namely the annual symposium, what happens if that goes belly up or has a bad year? We've had that discussion in our executive committee. And we got to find ways to do more than just one. And this year we'll be doing two, so that's twice as good as one. It's always bad to run a business with only one customer. I mean in my own business, one customer and I'd be dead. Especially when they pay four months after you send them the invoice. So I think all in all, from a professional career perspective of any engineer, the Institute is the place to be in electrical engineering in my case. Of course, now it's electrical and computer engineering. They combined them. And that then has led me to use my IEEE background, to get into Purdue to. teach a course. It was interesting. Eta Kappa Nu was on most campuses. In fact, Purdue was the second chapter. And when the IEEE took them over there was unrest if I can use those words. And it's taken a couple of years to say you're part of a larger organization that will give you your professional career after the time you graduate. And that's been my mantra that I try to push. And so when I get a chance to talk to students like I'm doing, I have this nice chat. So with that, it's great to be in the Institute. We all have pluses and minuses, but it worked very well in my Bell Labs career. It's worked very well with my professional company, Don Heirman Consultants. Now we move on.

Hochheiser:

Overall how has the field of EMC evolved over your long career in it?

Heirman:

It's gotten more recognition. There's a small handful of universities that put it in the curriculum. One of the things that's new is going into signal integrity and power integrity to the extent that the symposium we're having in three weeks in Santa Clara, California, is, subtitled, SI/PI because there are people that work on getting signals from A to B and to get there you have to take into account EMC principles. So it's EMC, but it was not well-recognized. So we have a technical committee, a new technical committee on that. And by the way, the committee wants to start making standards. So I'm their guidance person on their making standards on how to do SI/PI measurements. So to me it's a double plus: a new area and they love standards. I could learn to love that.

Closing Remarks

Hochheiser:

So you see my cards now are basically all face down. Is there anything I neglected to ask you that you'd, like to add?

Heirman:

Well, we covered the beachfront and the shorefront, haven't we?

Hochheiser:

Well, that was the idea, yes.

Heirman:

I do like that we're going to capture the documents when I was president, there's a lot of information. In fact, when I read through it recently.

Hochheiser:

[Interposing] Yes.

Heirman:

I could make copies like you made of that one page and I could send it to several of the people that are active right now. And they would say I didn't know that. I'm sure they would be absolutely blown away and, of course, the Global History Network is a great repository for this. And that's why I wanted at the past EMCS presidents to speak up and be interviewed. And I appreciate your efforts so we whatever we have filed, we have good linkages so people can find things. That's important.

Hochheiser:

Yes.

Heirman:

I've been around a long time. And 50 years in the business. So, I wouldn't take anything back. The only sadness is my wife died six years ago and, she was my secretary/treasurer of my company. So now I had to literally hire two people part time to do those jobs. Yes, she was that good. And we made a good combination and she could deal with people very well. The good news is that now you can do a lot of that stuff on the Internet that you couldn't do back in those days. And so I can do it personally and get in there and do the airline tickets. Before you had to call and wait all the time. She was good at doing that. So there's pluses and minuses.

Hochheiser:

Right.

Heirman:

But nonetheless, we decided to put this office together where we are talking. And it was a double garage. And I built a garage next to it. And it's 500 square foot and it's a wonderful place to work.

Hochheiser:

Yes.

Heirman:

And, all of the files behind me here is going into the Purdue archives.

Hochheiser:

Very good.

Heirman:

So, again, thank you and, say hello to Michael.

Hochheiser:

Will do.

Heirman:

And with that, we'll go to lunch.

Hochheiser:

Then I will turn the machine off.