EERI’s Oral History Program is proud to launch a new publication series, Interviews by Stanley Scott, with the release today of the first volume, focusing on Frank E. McClure (1924-2004).
Interviews by Stanley Scott: An EERI Oral History Collection preserves and shares the valuable unfinished work of Stanley Scott (1921-2002), a research political scientist at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Beginning in 1984, Scott conducted tape-recorded interviews with pioneers in the field of earthquake engineering, eventually gathering hundreds of hours of audio and thousands of pages of transcripts. Scott completed nine volumes in Connections: The EERI Oral History Series, and the EERI Oral History committee completed another eight volumes posthumously using Scott’s draft manuscripts, notes, and interview transcripts, under the leadership of Robert Reitherman. This new series makes available interviews that Scott was unable to finalize and publish during his lifetime. Members of the EERI Oral History Committee have edited the transcripts to produce the manuscripts, and several more volumes will be published over the course of this year.
Frank E. McClure, the subject of this first volume, was a leading structural engineer in Northern California. Born in San Francisco in 1924, he earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from University of California, Berkeley in 1944. After working at engineering firms in San Francisco, he opened his own office in Oakland in 1955, serving as structural engineer on scores of schools, hospitals and building retrofit projects. The 1952 Kern County earthquake was a turning point in his career, after which he traveled widely to study building damage after earthquakes and draw lessons for resilient structural design. In 1976, McClure left private practice to become the University of California’s top engineer, overseeing projects on all its campuses. Two years later, he became senior structural engineer for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, retiring in 1991. A longtime member of EERI, he served on the Board of Directors, as Secretary, and then as President of the Institute.
Scott interviewed McClure in 1986, 1989, 1991, and 1993, and transcribed and partially edited the first three interviews. Oral History Committee member Charles Scawthorn (M.EERI 1981) transcribed the final interview and then arranged and edited the material into this manuscript. In August 2024, Frank and Augusta McClure’s daughter, Anne McClure Kaplan, and son, Coke McClure, provided family photos and stories. The volume covers McClure’s early life and education, his experiences in the navy during World War II, his career as an engineer in private practice and at public institutions, his experiences with earthquake reconnaissance, and his involvement with and leadership of EERI. These interviews also explore McClure’s perspective on the Bay Area structural engineering community and major seismic design issues in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as his family’s recollections of his life and career.
Download the PDF of Frank E. McClure from the EERI Digital Library here.
