50 Years of Service

Bill Dobie, Physical Plant

William “Bill” Dobie has been a Yale plumber and steamfitter for five decades. A master of pipes, be they for steam heat, hot-water heat, chilled water, or domestic hot and cold water, he has repaired all makes and models to keep the university running and its property protected. There is not a type of leak, break, burst or clog that Bill has not encountered.

Currently a member of the Yale Plumbing Team for Central Campus, he and his fellow plumbers cover 13.5 million square feet of building space that includes the Athletics fields and their buildings. Bill knows many of the 400 building layouts by heart—where to go and what to do for everything from too-cold, too-hot rooms to leaks in ceilings. When not fixing plumbing problems, which often means spending hours locating a leak’s source, he participates in the preventative maintenance program that aims to minimize emergency calls through the inspection and repair of pipes and their related systems.

Bill was born in Rome, New York, and grew up in Cheshire, then Hamden, Connecticut. One of six children, boy number two, he received his first job experience at Yale where his father worked. Bill’s dad joined Yale after graduating from Cornell, beginning as an assistant manager in one of the dining halls, moving to director of food services, and finally to director of operations for his last five years at Yale. Bill joined Yale part-time at 16 years old, washing pots and pans in a School of Medicine dining hall. When he showed interest in following a trade, his dad bought him his first drill. After graduating from high school, Bill spent a year working full-time in Yale custodial services before taking part in the Yale Plumbing apprentice program.

When Bill completed the Yale apprentice plumbers’ program—there were ten graduates—he went on to get state licensed as a plumber and steamfitter. Professional steamfitters are essential to maintaining heating systems that consist mainly of pipes carrying steam to Yale buildings. The pipes were, and still are, located in a maze of steam tunnels under the university—enter a tunnel beneath Ingalls Rink and exit by I-95. Still expertly familiar with the tunnels, Bill works in them mainly to turn valves on and off given the season.

“The time flew by. You stay so busy. And we’ve always had a good group of guys.”

Bill has been a dependable presence at emergency situations over the years. Looking back, he remembers a situation in the 80’s at the Payne Whitney Gym where the sprinkler lines froze, burst, and leaked for days, filling up the entire sub-basement with six feet of water. Most often the culprit has been a New England cold snap followed by a thaw. He also recalls a time at Pierson College when pipes burst, water flowed outside, and froze on the exterior of the building. When the inevitable thaw began, the brick was soaking wet and, as Bill says, “…the building looked like it was crying.” For decades, he and his fellow plumbers have been the first responders on the scene no matter what time of day or night. Today, their plumbing assignments are distributed from their supervisor or the dispatch center at 344 Winchester Avenue while other Plumbing and Utilities shifts cover the university 24/7.

Bill enjoys the variety of the work he has been doing for 50 years. He never knows what the day will bring until he reviews the jobs that are assigned to him. His day can also be unpredictable when dispatched emergency calls need immediate attention. What he enjoys even more are his teammates, who are like family: “The guys I work with, we’ve been together a long time, and we work hand in hand. We tend to brainstorm as we approach each problem. We recall earlier jobs and how we solved them. It is a nice way to work. Everybody splits up in the morning to get to their job sites, but we’re in constant communication.”

And what does Bill think of his 50-year anniversary? “The time flew by. You stay so busy. And we’ve always had a good group of guys.”

Howard Gilbert, Information Technology Services

When staff, faculty, and students currently join Yale, the Microsoft or Google email account they receive is the result of software created by Howard Gilbert, software engineer, whose 50 years at Yale span from the time the information technology (IT) department had a sole IBM mainframe computer to its present network of tens of thousands. Howard is further notable for being a member of the team that developed the original design of Yale’s CAS system and then maintained and adapted it for decades. Today, he continues to engineer university IT systems—all in a day’s work for someone who “finds it very enjoyable” to solve problems following laser-focused research and clear-cut methodology.

Howard was fresh out of Trinity College in Hartford with a degree in mathematics when he arrived at Yale to attend graduate school. Born and raised in Detroit, he had decided to stay in New England to follow a new-found interest in statistics. The study of statistics led Howard to work with early computers in the Yale Computer Center in the 1970s. He became fascinated enough with them to choose IT as a profession. Howard moved from student to staff member when he was hired in what was then called user services and is today the help desk, but back then the whole desk was a group of four.

Howard’s next career home was the IT systems group, which was responsible for configuring and running the large IBM mainframe. “We had so few people,” he recalled, “that I did everything from placing power cables under the floor to taking the computer down, to rebooting it, backing it up, and modifying software to do the accounting function.”

“And it’s this pursuit of the solution that keeps me interested and active and involved. It’s what I call fun.”

Although Yale’s computers were not the most powerful available at the time, Yale provided software and worked on software used by universities around the world. One pre-Internet project was a collaboration between Yale and the City University of New York (CUNY) to adapt IBM software used to build large internal corporate networks so it could also connect universities to each other. The link between these two universities became “Bitnet” which was, before the Internet, a way for all students and faculty at 500 international educational institutions or university systems worldwide to send mail and files to each other at a time before the Internet existed. Yale software bridged this and other gaps between the special communication needs of universities and the mainstream computer networks designed to support business problems.

Howard notes that the whole trajectory of his career has followed that of technology itself. Technology has changed so rapidly that his 50-year career is largely marked by transition: “You see a cycle happen over and over, a decade for something to grow, and then a decade for it to be replaced by something else. And after a while, you realize the cycle is permanent. Even so, you take pride in what you build today without the expectation of how long it will last.”

Pride in his work stands out to colleagues who praise Howard for the generosity with which he shares his knowledge and thought processes on a project. The word “solutionist” seems to describe what he acknowledges himself—his love of solving problems.

“If you give me a computer problem, there’s a set of rules represented by the background information. And I can diagnose the problem. I can learn more than I knew about a subject. I can figure out what the issue is. And there comes that Eureka moment. I figured out how to do it or I figured out what is wrong. I solve the problem. I document the results. I deliver your program. And then I’m looking for the next problem. And it’s this pursuit of the solution that keeps me interested and active and involved. It’s what I call fun.”