Today's Featured Biography

 
Johannes Peterson

Activities for: JOHANNES PETERSON . . . Student Leadership Conference 3, Inter-club Council 3, band 1,2,3, pep band 1,2,3, Chess Club vice-president 2, president 3; Science Club 2, Math Club president 3.

After graduating from EHS, I attended summer school at EJC. (I just looked it up—it was still called Everett Junior College at that time.) In the fall of ’60, I went three more quarters at EJC, majoring in Mathematics. At that point I had taken or waived all the Math courses they offered and went off to WSU to finish my degree.

Do you remember the Vietnam War? Part of my reason for going to college was to maintain a college deferment so I wouldn’t get drafted and sent to Vietnam. Through some skillful planning and working a lot to pay college fees, I managed to take five years to finish a four-year degree. So, I wrote my draft board and told them that I wanted to go to graduate school to see if I could extend my deferment. They said that I could go to graduate school afterwards; but, that next week the board was meeting and I was going to be drafted. If I didn’t want to be drafted, I could enlist in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or the Coast Guard. I ended up enlisting in the Air Force thinking that I would go to Officer Training School (OTS). Wouldn’t you guess it; about 10,000 other guys ahead of me had the same idea. It was at least a year after I enlisted before an opening came up for me to attend OTS.

I ended up serving out my tour of duty at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico as an enlisted guy. (Today when people ask me what brought me to New Mexico, I say that the Air Force offered me a job that I couldn’t refuse.) It was in the Air Force where I learned computer programming. My boss took me to the computer (it was a CDC 6600, the first of the so called super computers) and said there is the computer, there is a keypunch, here is a book (it was McCracken’s Fortran 4 programming book), and told me to figure out how to program the computer. I had a great time.

I was assigned to the Minute Man Project and ran computer simulations of ground motions to get some estimates as to how strong Minute Man silos had to be to withstand shock waves from explosives that may go off near a silo. The Minute Man Project actually had a higher priority than the Vietnam War. Those of us who were assigned to the Minute Man Project were never sent to Vietnam.

After getting out of the Air Force, I worked for about five years for the U.S. Geological Survey maintaining water quality and quantity databases and running groundwater movement simulations on computers. About half that time was in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the rest of the time in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. (While in Mississippi, I actually lived in Louisiana just north of New Orleans but worked in Mississippi at what had been the Mississippi Test Facility where NASA tested the Apollo Moon Rockets. The rockets were tested in Mississippi before they were shipped to Cape Canaveral in Florida.)

After the USGS, I worked for a couple years in Albuquerque for a start up company that never really took off. Seeing the writing on the wall, I took seriously the job of looking for a new job and found one at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) in Los Alamos, New Mexico. (I got the LASL job just in the nick of time. Shortly after I started working there, the start up company in Albuquerque where I had worked went broke.)

Not very long after I started working at LASL, the Laboratory’s name was changed to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). I worked there for almost 30 years, retiring from there about three years ago.

For the first almost 20 years I worked there, I maintained computer programs that were used to simulate explosions and to display the results in a graphical form. The last 10 years or so that I worked there I did computer security and electrical safety things.

For computer security, my job was to try to make sure that the computers were located in secure facilities and managed in a way that made it difficult for information to be compromised. For electrical safety, my job was basically the county electrical inspector’s job. You see, the computers were located inside secure facilities. The county’s electrical inspectors did not have security clearances to enter any of the facilities or in some cases even come close to the facilities. Because I had the required security clearance, I was assigned the job of Electrical Safety Officer.

Another hat I wore at LANL, was the job of what I called the Grim Reaper. When computers were decommissioned, my job was to make sure all the disks that contained data were removed from the computer components and properly destroyed to make sure that information on them could not be recovered, that the computers were disconnected and removed from the facility and then destroyed, and finally, remove all the wiring for power and data cables for the computer from the facility. Without exaggeration, each computer consisted of tons of components and, in some cases, thousands of disks. It literally took multiple 18-wheeler trucks to haul all the components and wiring for just one computer. (Man! I loved that job!)

To keep in shape, I have done a lot of bicycling. When I was at WSU, I was one of only two or three students at that time who got around campus by bicycle. (It’s much more common today. If you go onto the University of New Mexico campus today, you will see hundreds of bicycles.) I generally ride about 30 miles a day. I have ridden a bunch of centuries. (Centuries are 100-mile bicycle rides. The objective is to ride the 100 miles in under 12 hours.) Over the years in different rides, I’ve ridden all the latitudes between the Tropic of Cancer and the Artic Circle. I’ve bicycled in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Norway. In the US, I’ve bicycled in about a dozen states. I’ve done a lot of camping and used a lot of sunscreen.

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