No Stopping

Retirement doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon. Baker promised himself that he would work 32 hours a week last year and 24 hours this year, but he still is highly in demand. He gave a talk to geotech engineers in San Antonio in January, followed by supertall consulting work in South Korea and another talk in Dubai, with a few vacations in between. “I still like going to work,” Baker says. “People say to me, ‘Why aren’t you retired?’ I say, ‘I am retired.’”

Baker is starting to feel uncomfortable with all the attention he is getting. Has was elected to the National Academies in 2000. In 2006, the earth-savvy Moles bestowed Baker with its non-member award. Later this month, Baker will receive the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Opal Award along with Dionisio, who started out as a geotechnical engineer. Next year, Baker will give ASCE’s Terzaghi Lecture, named after the father of soil mechanics, Karl Terzaghi, who cast the science’s manifestoes in the pages of this magazine in the 1920s.

Clyde Nelson Baker Jr. calls himself an accidental engineer, and to some degree, he is. Born in Flushing, N.Y., in 1930, he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis as a young man. At the urging of his father a surgeon who had wanted to be an engineer Baker tried several fields before settling on soils. He had a pilot’s license at 16, before he could legally drive a car. He received a physics degree at The College of William & Mary and went on to study electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His illness flared up, forcing him to drop out for a semester. After experimental cortisone treatment, Baker shifted into civil engineering and graduated with a master’s degree in 1954. He had been working in MIT’s Soils Stabilization Laboratory, taking classes offered by Terzaghi.

John Gnaedinger, who founded STS in 1948, discovered Baker in Washington, D.C., while giving a talk to the Highway Research Board on his thesis, which detailed an early use of radioactive isotopes as a technique to investigate soils. Gnaedinger, who died in 2001, asked Baker to come to Chicago in 1954, even though the company couldn’t really afford to hire. “John was the kind of person who would give you all the experience you wanted,” Baker recalls.

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Shelbourne Development Group Inc. Skyline from Spire site.

He married shortly afterward. Baker was set up in 1949 on a blind date on Long Island, where he met his future wife, Jeanette, a Quaker from Indianapolis who was visiting a girlfriend. “She’d have a Tom Collins with nothing in it,” says Baker. “I’d have my Tom Collins with something in it.” They danced together, but the two lost contact.

When Baker packed up his car and moved to Chicago, he looked her up for a Saturday-night date. She insisted on a Sunday-afternoon walk. They married in 1955, adopted three children, Mark, Lynn and Glenn. For his wife’s milestone birthdays, Baker writes a poem. He often refers to Jeanette as his “supportive partner” and “soul mate.”

Just about everyone in the Baker family has spent some time dishing the dirt in the STS soils lab. Mark Baker is STS’s chief driller, and Jeanette Baker calls herself the “Hydrometer Queen” for conducting 38 concurrent tests in one day, a company record that has lasted for years.

Pier Pressures

Baker’s first major assignment in deep foundations was at the Air Force Academy in Colorado. He has since worked on other infrastructure, but buildings became his...