Just a note that Frank passed recently. There was a small Catholic/Military funeral. His son Greg has told me that there will be a memorial later this summer at Greg's here in Olympia.

The services already held were last Wednesday; something coming up probably August.

I am old and when you look back lots of things come to mind. Did not know Frank all that well but I do know this, he had one hell of a good life. Can't ask for much better.

That's for sure. He was involved in a lot. I came to WDF in 80 when he was AD I was a low level bio. Had a few work related meetings and also talked about fishing often. I think he spent most of his life, especially working, doing fun things.

Just to let people know, Frank passed peacefully at home with his family. Quite a guy, for sure. There will be a lot said and written about him - all positive.

One thing that just came to mind was that he was one of the last to come into WDF?WDG?WDFW who started somewhere near the bottom as a field person and worked their way up to the top. That meant that along the way he absorbed institutional memory, worked with, and maybe against, resource users and abusers, and learned the social aspects of management.

Now, folks are brought in from outside to lead and all levels.

If memory serves, Frank had an old friend who left IBM and returned to the PNW. Frank told him about the difficulties WDF was having when trying to mark large groups of smolts for fishery studies. Together, they came up with coded wire tags. The friend started Northwest Marine Technology and invented ways to manufacture the coded tags from small gage stainless steel wire and the machine to insert the tags into the snouts of juvenile salmon. I once visited his home and small factory on Shaw Island in the San Juans. NMT produced tags and machines used for tagging juvenile fish world wide. It's cool that Frank had a hand in developing that.

Pete Bergmann was also at WDF and he was part of NWMT. Another person, whom I never met, was Jefferts as it was called the Bergmann-Jefferts tag in the early years.

I think the NWMT moved at least some of its offices to the Olympia area as Pete and Frank, plus some really good bios, went and worked there rather than WDF. They (NWMT) were especially sensitive to the needs of working mothers, which was not a WDF value.

As to the CWTs one of my first paid jobs in fisheries was putting CWTs into UW Chinook. At Snow Creek, ww put the tags in with a copper syringe as smolt size was too variable, especially the steelhead, to use the machines. We also CWT'd a couple of Bullheads. On them, the tags were inserted subcutaneously and the skull was too damn hard for the needle to penetrate. Nice big adipose fin to clip off, though.

Ah yes, Keith Jefferts was the friend whose name I forgot, as well as Bergmann. These were people for whom "thinking outside the box" was normal.

Box? What box? I even learned to read cwts as my wife read them for a summer and taught me. Back when I was teachable.