Re: Weinberger stencil? (was: rtm) - TUHS

17 Oct 2002

Lehey wondered:

...
   ....  can
 you shed any light on the "Peter Weinberger stencil" incident?  ... 
...
  Somebody came across the idea of
 making a large stencil of his face in death-star like technology,
  and used it to paint an image of him on a nearby water tower.
  Allegedly the costs were charged to Peter's department. 
...
   Some years later, this stencil arrived in Greg
Rose's office in
  Australia from an anonymous sender.  Greg has a suspicion who the
  sender was, but no proof, so he doesn't want to comment.  He gave it
  to our own Warren Toomey, who still has it in his garage. 
...
   At some point, Peter Salus suggested that the image
was of Rob Pike... 
I could recover some of the dates, but
not accurately from memory.  Weinberger was promoted,
first to department head, then to being director of a
newly-created but next-door center, then to our own
executive director.  This would have been mid-late 80s,
early 90s.  He was being groomed, it appears.
Shortly before trivestiture, 1994ish, he went to
the business part of AT&T, possibly in preparation
for coming back to a higher management position
at the Labs.  When the Lucent/AT&T split occurred
he was somewhat caught on the AT&T side.
He ended up leaving AT&T and going to a financial
quant company.

His image was particularly striking, and was used
to kid him in various ways, e,g, as a default image
in mail icons.  The image rendering his
face with the Deathstar styling was done by
Tom Duff, and it appeared, for example, on
T-shirts worn publically at venues like Usenix
and elsewhere.  Other versions of it
appear inscribed in concrete now buried
beneath floors at the Labs.  There is a
bitmap version (rendered in 1cm magnets) of the
full image, not death-starred, high on
a steel wall above a landing on a nearby
stairwell.

The large stencilled image of the Deathstar/PJW
rendition did indeed appear suddenly one day on
a water tower; it must have been about 10 feet
tall.  Kernighan had  a photo of it, and Gerard
Holzmann just scanned it:

    http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/pix/watertower.jpg

It was painted over quite rapidly,
a couple of days at most.  (The tower itself
is now gone, though not because of this.)
The image was certainly not of Rob Pike.

After this happened, a voucher was pinned up
on a communal corkboard, claiming expenses
for several cans of blue spray paint.  The voucher
was signed by one G. R. Emlin, a fictitious personage
with his (later her) own history.  Attached to
it was a handwritten note from our then Executive
Director (Vic Vyssotsky) saying approximately
as follows:

	Unfortunately, this voucher cannot be
	approved by me; I am not empowered
	to approve Real Estate improvements.

	If Mr. Emlin would like to arrange a transfer
	to the Building and Grounds department,
	I would be happy to assist.

So: who did it?  If Greg Rose suspects certain
aviation-inclined buddies, I in turn think his
suspicions are likely to be well-founded.

I managed to retrieve the image used to create the stencil;
it's now linked-to near the bottom of

 http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/10thEdMan/v2pix.html

	Dennis