Abstract
Once the Census Board became part of state government, its staff became permanent and more professionalized over time. The statutory basis on which the Board was based was enlarged over time and this continued after it moved to state government. This chapter traces these developments and identifies key players involved in them.
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Notes
- 1.
Five years after the Census Board was abolished in 1967 and its functions moved from the University of Washington to the newly-created Planning and Community Affairs Agency in Olympia, Dr. Calvin F. Schmid retired as a Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. By then, he had authored or co-authored more than 100 books and refereed journal articles, supervised 30 Ph.D. dissertations, and many M.A. theses. The techniques and data systems he developed represent lasting legacies to the state of Washington and the profession of demography in terms of the basic and applied research he conducted (Van Arsdol and Wendling 1995). The same year of his retirement he and his son, Stan completed a study for the same agency (Schmid and Schmid 1972).
When he retired in 1972, Calvin Schmid and his wife, Helen, moved to Whidbey Island. They settled into a vacation home near the incorporated town of Clinton that the family had started building in the 1940s and completed in the 1950s (with the assistance of some of Schmid’s graduate students, such as Maurice Van Arsdol and Aubrey Wendling, among others, whom he employed to provide them with summer jobs). The Schmids had purchased the land for $600 in 1939, which was only two years after he returned to Seattle to take a position as Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. Calvin remained in their Whidbey Island home until his death in 1994. He was in good health until 1988 when he suffered a stroke. It did not impair his cognitive abilities but left him with a paralyzed left leg and wheelchair-bound. Upon his death, Helen moved to Panorama City, a retirement community in Lacey, Washington. She died in 2010 (Schmid 2013).
Calvin Schmid was born in Ohio in 1901. His father wanted him to become a baker but, instead, he moved to Seattle to pursue adventure and higher education. He got a job as a janitor at a drafting shop, where one of the employees took Cal under his wing and taught him drafting. He moved up to work on boat plans and related forms of drafting, an experience he applied to his later work on graphics. While in Seattle, he lived at the YMCA and finished a bachelor’s degree (liberal arts) in 1925 at the University of Washington. He was drawn into sociology by Howard Woolston and George Lundberg and even started graduate studies at the University of Washington, but he received an attractive offer from the University of Pittsburgh, so he transferred there (Miyamoto 1995). Shortly after earning his Ph.D. in Sociology in 1930, he accepted a position at the University of Minnesota. While there, he met and later married (in 1932), Helen (Ellingboe). Their daughter, Barbara, was born in Minneapolis and currently lives in Honolulu; their son, Stanton (Stan), was born in Seattle, and currently lives in Palm Desert, California (Schmid 2013). It is difficult to view Calvin F. Schmid’s decision to pursue adventure and higher education in Seattle instead of a bakery in Ohio as anything but a great choice.
- 2.
John R. Walker served in the US Army before obtaining a B.A. from San Francisco State University. In 1960, he completed his M.A. Thesis at the University of Washington, “The Impact of Residential Mobility on Junior High Students.” With Warren Kalbach, an expanded version of this thesis was published a chapter in Schmid and Miller (1960). After completing his M.A., he took a position at an office within the University of New Mexico that was similar to the Washington State Census Board. He remained there until he was hired to supervise the research and population unit in the Planning and Community Affairs Agency, which was where the State Board functions went when the Board was abolished in 1967. The group shortly moved to the Office of Program Planning and Financial Management, the Governor’s Budget Office, which is where it remained until 1977 when it was renamed the Office of Financial Management when Governor Dixie Lee Ray took office. He died in Olympia, Washington in October, 1983. Walker is credited with the idea of the Washington State Data Book, which was first published in 1970 and became a model for similar books published by other states (Washington State Office of Financial Management 1984: iii).
Theresa Lowe (nee Patricelli) obtained her B.A. and M.A. in Sociology at the University of Washington. While a graduate student, she worked as a research assistant with the Washington State Census Board and moved to Olympia when the Board was abolished and its functions moved to PCRA. She moved to Office of Program Planning and Financial Management when the population unit was moved from PCRA. She stayed with the group through its name change to the Office of Financial Management until she retired.
Richard (Dick) Engels received his BA (1962) and MA (1964) in sociology at the University of Washington. Like Walker and Patricelli, he worked as a research assistant at the State Census Board. He was working at the Santa Clara County (California) Planning Agency when the Board was abolished and its functions moved to PCRA. He joined the population group there and stayed through its transfer into OPP&FM, when he took a planning job in Tennessee (1969–74), a position with the Southern Regional Education Board (1974–75), and then joined the US Census Bureau (1975–90). He then worked for the Arriyadh Development Authority; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (1990–1999), and then returned to the US. He currently resides in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he operates a private real estate investment business.
William S. Packard also received his BA and MA in sociology at the University of Washington. Like Patricelli, he moved directly from Seattle to Olympia when the State Census Board’s functions were transferred to PCRA. He died in Seattle in 2007. He subsequently accepted an offer from Tacoma Community College to join its faculty and remained there until he retired.
- 3.
The US Census Bureau has a long history of using new technology in terms of processing decennial census data, starting with the Hollerith electro-magnetic sorter used in 1890. By the time the 1950 census was being processed, it was using “UNIVAC,” one of the first computers. By 1960, it was using mainframe computers and tape technology. However, it had not thought of making these tapes publicly available until 1961 when Edgar Horwood, a faculty member in the University of Washington’s College of Engineering, placed a call to Jack Beresford, then a member of the US Census Bureau staff (Horwood 1977). Horwood had called to get block level data for Seattle and was told by Beresford that it would not be available for a couple of years in printed form and the only place it currently existed was on computer tapes used by the Census Bureau for processing. Horwood recalls that he then asked Beresford “Well, then why don’t you send us a copy of the tape and a write-up of what’s on it?” After a pause, Beresford replied “Well, there’s nothing I know of that tells me I can’t. Provided there is appropriate suppression to avoid disclosure on small entries, I’ll send it to you at cost.” With the assistance of Arnold Rom at the Boeing Company who had experience with the IBM 709, Horwood and his colleagues produced “ROMTRAN,” the world’s first known macro-compiler for processing US Census Bureau data tapes (Horwood 1977). By 1970 the US Census Bureau was ready to release machine readable data tapes. In the meantime, Jack Beresford and others at the US Census Bureau had departed to found “DUALabs,” which developed user documentation and the software commands (in COBOL) needed to process the 1970 census tapes and sold these products to users (Swanson and Stephan 2004: 785).
- 4.
Along with Jerry McKibben, Ron Prevost, and Kimberly Wright Sinha, Yi Zhao received her advanced degree at Bowling Green State University (BGSU). These four BGSU alumni also can be counted as third generation students of Cal Schmid. David Swanson was an assistant professor of sociology when they were graduate students and along with other demographers in the BGSU Sociology Department at that time (Ted Groat, George Hough, Mostafa Nagi, Ed Stockwell, and Jerry Wicks), he had a hand in training and mentoring them. McKibben, Prevost, and Zhao all work as demographers at, respectively, McKibben Demographic Research, LLC, the US Census Bureau, and the OFM Population Unit. Kimberly Wright Sinha is Statistical Programmer/Analyst at Scannell and Kurz, a higher education consulting firm based in Rochester, New York. Along with George Hough, Swanson had a hand in training and mentoring another graduate student, Tom Bryan, while a faculty member at Portland State University. Bryan is employed as a Market Research Manager by Altria Corporation. Swanson also chaired the dissertation committee for Matt Kaneshiro, who earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California Riverside and is now a research demographer with Nielsen/Claritas.
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Swanson, D.A. (2016). The Demographic Legacy. In: The Washington State Census Board and Its Demographic Legacy. SpringerBriefs in Population Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25948-2_3
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