Talk:William Gardner Pfann

Creation of WGPfann page
Oct. 2012 will be 40 years since his 1982 death this is 39th year. Can article creator relate why this article is relevant now?

Perhaps a mention could be made of the year teaching at one year Churchill College, Cambridge, England, or trips to Japan (?), recruiting for Bell Labs at UCBerkeley, etc.

There are things about WGP's individual family history in Brooklyn that seem to have led to his intense focus on this work, as well as starting with Bell Labs as a teenager with no college degree. That creative problem-solving may not have been only hereditary as it is portrayed in article; there was a support team (1940s, 1950s), plus the momentum of Bell Laboratories' amazing accumulation of scientists, for the time, to collaborate on projects.

WGP has a surviving sister (91, still coherent and articulate) in FL that could be contacted about early life. Like many other Bell Labs professionals (it seems) he divorced in middle age, for a grand total of 4 marriages, 3 of them within the last decade of life and 2 to the same woman. He did not survive to see any grandchildren. His widow survived til last June, 2010. There were family costs to the support of these scientists' work (e.g., see life of Shockley). Many marriages faltered later on. Wikipedia being a general, not professional, site, a more balanced approach would be more honest. See or which mentions Shockley's paranoia as it affected his work, obsession with eugenics, and deserting a wife with uterine cancer:


 * At Stanford he became intrigued by racial questions and population control, and began publicly claiming that blacks are less intelligent than whites, by genetics and heredity. When his comments were criticized as racist, Shockley doubled down and reveled in the controversy, stating that humanity's future was threatened because people with low IQs were having more children than people with high IQs [from nndb reference].

Shockley's contributions and private values were put on the public profile not for gossip, but, helping "lay" readers become alert to the two sides of the same temperament. It also seems relevant in putting out a history to the development of the Internet, which now tracks so many stats including race, martial status, income, etc. ...

Use of computer-gathered stats now set and justify heavy investment in projects to assess and promote federal welfare policies since the 1990s pushing marriage which when examined closely don't stray too far from Shockley's beliefs, although he was overt about it, and supports the field of social science with statistics. For example:


 * Columbia University School of Social Work professor Ronald D. Mincy :
 * Dr. Ronald Mincy teaches Introduction to Social Welfare Policy; Program Evaluation; Economics for Policy Analysis; and Advanced Methods in Policy Analysis, and directs the Center for Research on Fathers, Children and Family Well-Being. Dr. Mincy is also a co-principal investigator of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, and a faculty member of the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC).


 * "He came to the University, in 2001, from the Ford Foundation where he served as a senior program officer and worked on such issues as improving U.S. social welfare policies for low-income fathers, especially child support, and workforce development policies; he also served on the Clinton Administration's Welfare Reform Task Force."

Example from The Urban Institute: centralizes experts (where Bell Labs had to fly them in, or fly their people out) but distances the discussion from the population most affected -- the young black, low-income, males in question, among others. In short it enables collection of data for mass-management of people for desired outcomes. . . changing government. I think that (in this light) if Shockley was a racist and deserted a wife with cancer, or if WGP came from a broken home in Brooklyn (which he did), that is relevant to this story, for points of reference.

I understood WGP started Bell Labs at 17, not 18, and that he died after (not before) his 65th birthday and days after retirement. Are these cited? Also, no mention made of how sudden the death was. Coworkers K. Jackson, R.Wagner, would confirm.

Wikipedia doesn't recommend identifying users, but I'll say I knew WGP very well from the 1950s onward, conversed/argued (in good spirit) with him regularly in 70s and 80s on non-materials-science topics, and the Jackson/Wagner obit cited is, overall, one of the best characterizations I have seen to date at least as to overall character. "Quiet and unassuming" was a side I didn't see, but as it's published in a book, ....perhaps was true at work.

This is my first contribution to any Wikipedia page after reading policy, please be considerate by responding with reasons, and as to cutting/editing

_ _ _ I am "hurting" to fill in some of these blanks, and request article creator or anyone who personally or professionally knew WGP to contact me on my talk page. MuzTru (talk) 20:25, 18 October 2011 (UTC)