Endings of Eras -John Cerino and
Katherine Cantwell

- R. Gould

In the early 1530s the eras of the Peruvian Inca kings ended with the arrival of the Spaniards. In the late 1990s two other eras ended when John Cerino retired and Katherine (Cantwell) Cerino sort of did too. What have these events to do with each other? Nothing, except that I just came back from Peru and want to let the Cerinos know that they didn't have to look at 295 glossy photos (most of them in focus) or eat an exceedingly rich Peruvian dessert made with honey and candy.

On Thursday, June 20th of this year, SSRL hosted a farewell party for Katherine and John at the Stanford University Faculty Club. The announcement read "Together They Have Contributed Over Forty Years of Dedicated Service to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory." To help illustrate this point, I read selected portions of SSRL staff minutes from the Lab's early years. A few of these are worth repeating here.

June 4, 1974: Sally Hunter, Brian Kincaid, Nick Webb, Norm Dean, Fred Brown, Peter Eisenberger, Vic Rehn, Dale Sayers, Howard Etzel, Fred Hall, Joe Jurow, Ray Larsen, Mark Baldwin, Ben Salsburg, Axel Golde -not to mention several of the rest of us -were on the distribution list for minutes of the staff meeting -- July 2, 1974: "from midnight to 4:00 am, SSRP [the original Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Project] was given time [4 hours! We even called it prime time!] to run a single 45 mA electron beam at 2.4 GeV" -- December 10, 1976: "sleeping facilities are now inside trailers" [rather than on the floors] -- December 22, 1976: "feminine experimenters especially have problems with EXAFS II" [which John designed] -- February 16, 1977: "had a call from Berkeley (no name given) saying they had left a poisonous gas on our premises four months ago" -- April 6, 1977: "there was much discussion about an experimenter having connected city water to the LCW system after being on line for 30 hours; the SLAC storage tank overflowed; SLAC was within two hours of shutting down the 2-mile linac because of deterioration of the LCW" -- August 31, 1977: "the Activity Report arrived with all back sheets reversed" -- November 29, 1978: "would like to get a SPEAR energy commitment that would be absolutely good for a week or more" -- June 12, 1980: "the general purpose hutch was delivered but was completely welded shut."

John Cerino and Herman Winick worked together until 1973 at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator (CEA) at Harvard where John started as a vacuum technician. (Other familiar alumni were Ewan Paterson, Albert Hofmann, John Rees, Gerry Fischer and Gus Voss.) John shortly became an accelerator engineering operator and then a project manager. After Herman came to SSRL (then SSRP), he recruited John "for a few months" in 1975 to work on Beam Line 2. The few months ended in 1996. During one of those early years, John worked extensively with Oak Ridge's Cullie Sparks on the rather famous super-heavy-element experiment on Beam Line 2. John, working with Jo Stöhr, designed and implemented the pioneering Beam Line 3 jumbo monochromator. Thereafter John was involved in the commissioning of many early SSRL beam lines before becoming Operations Manager in 1978 and the first SSRL Safety Officer in 1980. Later John coordinated the UC/National Labs Beam Lines 8 & 10 projects and made major contributions to the 3 GeV booster injection and extraction systems. Most recently, John was the project manager for Beam Line 9. Herman has written that: "John is an extremely talented, creative, broadly capable, dedicated technician, designer, engineer and project manager -- perhaps the best I have come across in the 40 years I have worked in accelerator laboratories. . . He can deal effectively with tasks in virtually all technical areas. . . In his work. . . he has little patience for bureaucracy, unnecessary rules and paperwork, foolishness and incompetence. . . He is merciless in criticizing these elements when he sees them. . . [SSRL] would be a different place, and very likely not as successful and growing a place as it is now, had John not been here for the past 20 years."

Katherine Cantwell started at SSRL in May of 1977, probably as a Secretary (a title of only anthropological interest now) and was promoted to Administrative Assistant in early 1978. An October 1978 memo described her roles in User Proposal Administration, Beam Time Scheduling, Facility Administration and Periodic Reports. Then, at the October 1980 User Conference, Art Bienenstock announced that Katherine would also be the Assistant to the Director. In these roles over the years, she developed an international reputation and earned the respect of the NSF, the DOE, the Proposal Review Panel, the Science Policy Board, let alone the SLAC, Stanford and other lab's administrations. She also achieved equitable user beam time schedules in the face of severe over- demands on available beam time. Over the years, Katherine edited more than 14 annual activity reports. Her name, as editor, first appeared in the 10th Anniversary Report for 1983. In those days the report looked rather like a xerography production, rather than a print job. After a few years, Katherine, in her expressive way, wrote a memo to the laboratory management about the look of the report. In 1990 the document finally met her expectations by taking on the appearance of a national-scale laboratory report. Katherine's last edited annual report is the just-released 1995 Activity Report. Katherine also set new standards for the annual user conference and was instrumental in coordinating technical workshops at SSRL and elsewhere. One illustrative anecdote came from Novosibirsk, Russia, when the physicist coordinating the meeting responded to Herman Winick's compliment about the fine organization and planning of the meeting, saying "And I have to do all of this myself since we do not have a Katherine Cantwell on our staff." Herman was delighted to learn that Katherine's reputation extended to Siberia. Katherine was also invited to The People's Republic of China to share her insights, experience, and wisdom. Later she trained user administration colleagues from France and the new synchrotron radiation labs across the United States and was the SSRL correspondent to Synchrotron Radiation News, the international synchrotron radiation news magazine.

Katherine and John left SSRL and California and drove their 5th-wheel recreational vehicle up the west coast, across Canada, then down the east coast, getting used to the whole idea of retirement. Katherine's early e-mail messages expressed some discomfort about "not working a regular schedule." As time went on, however, the amount and type of reading she was doing increased; John's golf handicap started to decrease; and their hiking and fishing excursions became more numerous. Now we are hearing only about the pleasures of their retirement. In Peru, I learned that the word for retirement means jubilation. I think the Cerinos are now achieving that meaning.

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December 2, 1996