Among Cranston 'Chan' Rogers's many awards, medals, and accoladesis a plaque presented to him on his retirement in 2002. Embedded inthe wood is a sketch of the old elevated Central Artery near DeweySquare next to a photograph of the same stretch of downtown Bostonnearly 50 years later, now utterly transformed by the Big Dig.
The inscription on the plaque reads, 'To Chan Rogers. He definedthe Central Artery in the 1950s and again in the 90s.'
From the swimming pool at the Charles River Country Club to theCambridge Street underpass in Harvard Square to the Big Dig tunnelunder the South Station rail lines, Rogers has shaped Boston for halfa century frequently by burying it.
Rogers didn't set out to be one of Boston's foremost engineers. Heoriginally wanted to play football.
'My personality was not to be a bookworm,' says Rogers, now avigorous 81 years. An all-state halfback at Orlando High School inFlorida, he won a sports scholarship to the University of Georgia.World War II got in the way of his youthful athletic ambitions, andat the age of 18 he joined the Army Specialized Training Program, amilitary course that gave him a background in engineering before hewas packed off to southern France with the 103d Infantry. It wasOctober 1944, just before the Battle of the Bulge.
'I'm lucky I didn't get killed,' says Rogers. 'In the infantryline companies of 150 men in the first six months you had about 40killed and 120 wounded. That's 160 out of 150, which is a completeturnover in six months. I was lightly wounded, but I wasn'thospitalized.' He recalls his first experience of seeing his friendsdie, and of having to report their names to his company commander. 'Icried,' he says. 'I don't think I cried again for 20 years.'
Rogers survived the fighting and was one of the soldiers wholiberated the Dachau concentration camp. Then, when he was mentallysteeling himself for transfer to the Pacific Theater, the atomicbombings of Japan came at the end of the war. Rogers was sent back tocollege, along with hundreds of thousands of other young men on theGI Bill. Football, by then, had lost its allure, so he switchedcolleges and studied civil engineering at the Citadel. By the early'50s he was at MIT, simultaneously working on his master's degree andthe new Central Artery project.
'I was the chief engineer for the Dewey Square tunnel,' saysRogers. 'It was the first piece of the interstate system to be putunderground, and it's the only part of the original Central Arterythat's still in use.'
His retirement from the Maguire Group hasn't slowed him down.
'His mind is as sharp as a tack,' says Francine Rogers, his wifeof 38 years. 'He can tell you what he had for lunch on the second dayof the war.' After the Hurricane Katrina disaster last year, Rogerscame out of retirement to work on the New Orleans cleanup and assessthe engineering failures.
Apart from an eight-year stretch in Houston working on a designfor a heavy rail system that never got built, Rogers has contributedto Boston civil engineering projects for half a century. During theBig Dig, he helped design the 'jacked' tunnels built under theoperating rail lines at South Station considered by many people to beone of the most difficult stretches of tunnel to be built.
Rogers looks pained when he talks about this summer's catastrophictunnel ceiling failure, which killed one woman. 'I really don'tunderstand how it could have happened. It was a tragic accident and ablack eye for the engineering profession.'
But for all his expertise in building highway tunnels, Rogers isdismissive about their importance. What Boston really needs, he says,is a north-south rail link to improve commuter rail service.
'The automobile is a very inefficient way of providing forcommuters,' he says.
FACT SHEET
Hometown: Medway
Family: He and his wife, Francine, have eight children together,and he has three from a previous marriage (the oldest is 51; theyoungest is 26). They are expecting their first grandchild later thismonth.
On Katrina: 'The levees failed because of imperfections in bothconstruction and design, and some of them still have flaws.'
Ambitions: Honorary membership in the American Society of CivilEngineers.
Hobbies: Playing bridge at the senior center in Holliston. Also,lecturing, writing, and working with veterans' associations. 'He hasmaintained friendships for 60 years,' says Francine Rogers. 'I thinkthat's pretty special.'
