Features: March 25, 2002

Machinist Chuck McKeown To Retire

Chuck McKeown's name is acknowledged on countless student thesis papers — but you won't find him listed on the faculty roster. McKeown, who has had a hand (literally) in thousands of projects produced on campus and who retires March 29 after 35 years of service to Rensselaer, is the supervisor of the machine shop in the basement of the Jonsson-Rowland Science Center.

A modern-day Geppetto, McKeown and his crew have made real many a professor's intricate projects. Some, he is very proud of — his team built Leik Myrabo's "lightcraft," a delicate flying aluminum spacecraft capable of soaring on a laser beam, when other fabricators scoffed that it could be built at all. Other projects — repairing a broken toilet seat or a professor's favorite ballpoint pen — he did just because someone asked.

"I've been in this building, this room, this place for 35 years doing the same thing," McKeown says. "Everything changes, but nothing changes."

A toolmaker by trade, McKeown says much of his job has been spent working directly with students to produce the projects they conceive in classes such as Introduction to Engineering Design (IED), Inventor's Studio, and more. McKeown helped build and then reinforce the frame for Tahira Reid's Double Dutch jump rope device that won national media attention.

McKeown has been a silent partner of sorts to numerous faculty members. He and his staff have fabricated equipment that flew in a space shuttle (for Prof. Martin Glicksman '57), extreme-pressure compacting presses (for Bruce Watson), and numerous devices for Ken Connor and the plasma lab.

McKeown, who is looking forward to more time for hunting and fishing, says he hopes that people will most remember that, "I got the job done."