“Ground up” — as in, destroyed.
That is how Harry Wyatt, associate vice president for facilities, described the current state of a roughly 1,750-pound cast-iron pier, or pedestal mount, that supported Ohio University’s 10-inch J.W. Fecker refractor telescope for decades.
The telescope is useless without the pier, which was removed from the roof of the Research and Technology Center by a private contractor, taken to a dump, and lost or scrapped there. The entire roof was cleared shortly after the fire on the roof of the building Nov. 30 at the order of Mike Gebeke, executive director of facilities management.
“These telescopes — it’s like a Stradivarius violin … they’re not making them anymore, and every one we lose is lost forever,” said John Allseits, the owner of a telescope that is similar to OU’s.
Allseits said he believes only six of this model were ever made.
The telescope, which has been off the roof since the beginning of 2012 while awaiting repairs, left behind a wooden shack, which burned down in the fire, and a metal frame supporting the shack, in addition to the pier.
“In the urgency to get the temporary roof repairs done, the metal frame … was charred (by the fire) and removed, and we believe the contractor thought that the (telescope) mount was part of that metal frame,” Wyatt said, stressing the need for urgent roof repairs to beat a coming rainstorm.
A Post investigation has discovered, however, that Wyatt, Gebeke and other high-ranking Facilities employees knew the Department of Physics and Astronomy, which owns the telescope and pier, would not have wanted the pier to be trashed.
Despite this, no one in Facilities contacted anyone in Physics and Astronomy before allowing the contractor to remove the pier.
Restoring the Fecker Refractor
During the past few years, Physics and Astronomy machinist Doug Shafer has removed the telescope piece by piece from the building’s roof of R-Tech, leaving just the pier to be taken down.
The 63-year-old telescope is currently sitting in the basement of Clippinger Laboratories awaiting refurbishment.
“(The telescope) in that room right now is absolutely useless without the pedestal and the base,” Shafer said, referring to the two pieces that make up the pier. “We shouldn’t have to worry about our research instruments being sent to the scrapyard.”
Physics and Astronomy has been planning on refurbishing the telescope for several years, said David Ingram, chair of Physics and Astronomy.
“The plan was to rebuild it once we’d establish where we could put it,” Ingram said. “The sad part is that you need (a specific) base to put it all together.”
To remove the pier in one piece, the department needed the assistance of Facilities because a crane would have been required, Shafer said.
Joshua Kranyik, a project manager in Design and Construction at OU, was tasked with figuring out how to remove the pier, and the two departments discussed the process from May until after the fire.
Kranyik was not made available for comment by OU Communications and Marketing.
In email correspondence between Kranyik and Shafer, Kranyik names Gebeke and Richard Shultz, director of Design and Construction, as being consulted about removing the pier. Facilities had named a price tag of $7,850 to do so — a price Ingram and Shafer found too steep.
Scrapping the Mount
The morning after the fire, Shafer and Mike Myers, another machinist in Physics and Astronomy, climbed to the roof to make sure their pier was unharmed.
The wooden shed that housed the pier was destroyed in the fire, but the mount remained mostly untouched.
Photos taken by Myers and Shafer show the pier was not damaged and was not in the way of repairing the roof, as it was bolted to a concrete pad, Shafer said.
However, Gebeke said it is “wrong” to say the mount did not interfere with repairing the roof.
“You’re talking about one professional judgment versus another professional judgment, and I have no further comment on it,” Wyatt said.
After receiving an email from Kranyik Dec. 7 stating that the pier was removed and taken to Parkersburg, W.Va., Shafer said he drove to the Waste Management facility in search of the mount but came up empty-handed.
Additionally, Shafer learned that Facilities had a contractor cut the base into multiple pieces before removing it because the use of a crane was unrealistic.
“They should have conferred with someone in our department before they made that decision (to remove the pier) … because that decision they made was not their decision to make,” Shafer said.
J.P. Hushion, an employee of Tri-State Roofing and Sheet Metal, which performed the roof repairs, confirmed that the pier was taken to a Waste Management facility in Parkersburg but declined to comment further.
Although Waste Management employees searched for the pier for several days, they were unable to locate it, said Amanda Marks-Cunningham, a public affairs representative for Waste Management.
Preserving the ‘Glass’
“One of the beauties of glass (telescopes) is it doesn’t age if it’s well cared for … this telescope can go on for centuries,” said Bart Fried, president of the Antique Telescope Society.
He estimated there are roughly 25 to 30 telescopes left in the U.S. in the size range of OU’s that were made between 1850 and 1950. He added that the piece is a part of American history because of the company that manufactured it.
The blueprints for the telescope were destroyed in the 1950s, Fried said.
However, a telescope very similar to OU’s was made in 1949 and is currently in Illinois. Allseits, its owner, has said OU can take measurements of its pier to reproduce castings.
“The bottom half (of the pier) will be easy to replicate, but the top half will be (difficult),” Allseits said.
Allseits bought his telescope and pier for $22,000 in 2005 from the University of Alabama, said William Keel, an astronomy professor at the university.
Fried estimates, however, that reproducing the pier will cost at least $10,000 to $20,000 and could be as high as $100,000.
“I plan to submit a claim to our insurance person, but I do not know yet for how much,” Ingram said.
Wyatt, through OU Communications and Marketing, said he would not comment on who he feels is responsible for replacing the pier.
“Since there’s so few left, it makes what remains that much more valuable,” said Tom O’Grady, an observational astronomy instructor at OU since 1980 who has worked extensively with this refractor.
During the 1980s and ’90s, the telescope was looked through by thousands and was critical to OU’s community outreach efforts, he said.
“It was not only a loss for what it was but for what it could be,” O’Grady said. “Just as it was a centerpiece of the past, we had every notion it would continue to be the centerpiece once it was refinished for service.”
dd195710@ohiou.edu
