A conversation with William Q. Meeker

Bill Meeker is a Professor of Statistics and Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University. He has done research and consulted extensively on problems in reliability data analysis, warranty prediction, reliability test planning, accelerated testing, risk assessment, nondestructive evaluation, and statistical computing. He is the coauthor of the first and second editions of Statistical Intervals and Statistical Methods for Reliability Data, both published by Wiley and Achieving Product Reliability, published by Taylor and Francis. He has won numerous awards for his research and publications. He is a fellow of the American Society for Quality, American Statistical Association, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Necip: Please tell us about your childhood. Bill: I would like to start by thanking you and Quality Engineering for organizing this conversation. I am deeply honored. What I remember most about my childhood, say 1955 to 1962, is playing with my friends in the woods near our home. I recall being frustrated in the winter months because it would get dark shortly after we were out of school every day and there was little time to spend outdoors. We lived a couple of miles from the ocean on the north Jersey shore. In the summer months, I was allowed to walk with my younger sister and brother to the beach to play, as long as we did not go in the water by ourselves. My mother would finish her chores and errands and then bring us lunch and we would spend the afternoons swimming and enjoying the sun. Sometimes Mom would return home to make dinner and then Mom and Dad would return and we would enjoy dinner on the beach too. Once each summer (my father’s vacation time) our family would visit my great uncle’s cabin on a secluded lake in upstate Sussex County, NJ. We would have 10 or 12 days of hiking in the woods and swimming, boating, and fishing in the lake. It was a nice contrast from the crowded beach. My grandfather was a carpenter and my father had a good collection of hand tools that he used to build things and do repairs around the house. One weekend, when I was perhaps six years old, family members gathered to help clean out an old house in which my father’s recently deceased great aunt had lived for many years. To keep me busy and out of the way I was given an old radio from the house and some hand tools with the suggestion that I dismantle the radio. I think that I probably destroyed what today would be a valuable antique radio! Some years later during our municipality’s “junk weeks” (during which people could put out for pickup anything they wanted to throw out) I acquired old radios and learned that by swapping out bad tubes, I could get some of the radios working again. The others were dismantled for their parts from which I would attempt to build various gadgets. Thus, began my life-long interest in electronics which led me to ham radio—a hobby in which I am still involved when I have some spare time. My primary interests in ham radio have been experimenting with propagation and antennas— including the underlying physics—and working long distances with weak signals. The vast majority of my operations are using Morse code, because it works much better than “voice” for weak signals. Young Bill Meeker (1956).