As the Tower job endured one disaster upon another, good guy Doug Williams, who headed the Dallas Branch, kept assuring us that his company would make things right. Neither he nor we had any use for his new assistant Mark Lavoy, who made most of the overview trips to Montgomery.
Doug Williams and Wife Nancy in a PicTaken from a Xmas Card Sent by Them18 Years Later.
After the column fiasco, and while the first floor pour disaster was yet to be resolved, the chiller hole poison flume issue arose, and a job shutdown was considered. Sonny Phipps was still acting like a rear end. Things got so bad that I demanded that Doug Williams himself come to Montgomery. On his arrival I reviewed the job’s dismal record over the first six months and implored that he replace Phipps. “Sonny Phipps enrages everyone,” I insisted. “No one can get along with him. He does not solve problems–he creates problems. Your project here is already 60 days behind schedule and it’s been underway only six months.”
Williams wailed that he had no one with whom to replace Phipps, but he knew it was a step that could not be avoided. Then Williams solved two problems with one fell step. Sonny would go but Mark Lavoy would take his place as fulltime project manager on the Tower project. That relieved Williams of his class-less assistant as well as getting rid of Sonny Phipps. Sonny was arrogant, but Lavoy was a snake. I wondered if our poor job would be any better off. For months thereafter Lavoy flew to Montgomery every Monday and departed every Friday. That meant that we actually had a 3-day-a-week project manager directing our $75 Million undertaking.
I’ll not forget Mark Lavoy’s first meeting at the site after he took over. The jobs’ two tower cranes were 12 stories high and the concrete pour operation had smoothed out a little. The meeting was held at the job trailer on a Wednesday afternoon, and in the middle of the meeting, at exactly 3:30 PM the civil defense siren went off on its scheduled test blast. The closest horn was only a block away and its sound was deafening. Everyone at the table knew what it was and sat quietly awaiting the test to be over. Everyone except newcomer Mark Lavoy. He barked out, “What is that!!?”
I calmly told him that a few years before a construction crane had fallen near Court Square and cut a city bus in two, and ever since, the City had signaled a fallen crane with the siren. Lavoy gasped. He knew that his own job had 2/3 of the tall cranes in Montgomery. His chair crashed to the floor as he jumped up and ran out the door to behold the calamity. That was one of a very few enjoyable moments I managed to have over the duration of the entire venture.
Our job continued its slipshod way with 3-day-a-week project management. After months of this, another project manager became available to HH&N and he was shipped in from Memphis. His name was Monte Thurmond. Mark Lavoy returned to Dallas as number two man over the branch. Not too many months later, Doug Williams, our last and only manifestation of the Huber, Hunt & Nichols that we had anticipated, became fed up with the directives of the home office to his Branch. Two years after the construction start, Doug Williams resigned from HH&N and to us was no more. The class-less Mark Lavoy took over. The unprincipled motley crew of branch managers, project managers and job superintendents that followed Williams would (did) make a grown man cry.
In December of 1995, Monte Thurmond was made Lavoy’s assistant and he moved his family to Dallas. He commuted to Montgomery each week and we were back to a 3-day-a-week project manager. By September of ‘96, it grew so bad that I wrote Monte, “On Friday afternoons in particular, after you have departed for Dallas, the job gives the impression of a ghost town.”
-Charles Humphries (“Peril and Intrigue Within Architecture”)
This is one of many RSA Tower stories. The rest can be found here.