Spanning the Tagus River in Portugal is a bridge with the graceful lines and distinctive orange color of the Golden Gate Bridge. There’s a good reason for that. Bridging the Tagus at Lisbon means facing challenges familiar to those in the Bay Area — deep water, high winds and the possibility of earthquakes.

When Portuguese officials started planning the bridge that would be nicknamed the “mini Golden Gate,” they turned to engineers who had encountered such conditions before. Among them was Stanley H. Froid, who now lives at The Terraces of Los Gatos in Los Gatos, Calif.

The Tagus River bridge went up in the mid-1960s, and Froid’s group was in charge of designing the piers, the underwater supports that keep the structure in place amid river currents and seismic rumbles. It wasn’t his first — or his last — civil engineering achievement.

By the time he took it on, Froid had plenty of experience rising to a test. He graduated from a North Dakota high school in 1941, when jobs were scarce. At 18, he found himself leading a survey crew in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He wound up in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), assigned to a camp that built small earthen dams to hold water for irrigation and stock ponds.

His crew leader went on leave and never came back. So Froid stepped up. “It was a fabulous opportunity to learn the basics of surveying,” he recalls. He didn’t know it then, but that training would set his future course.

He was in a CCC camp at Fort Meade, S.D., when news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came over the radio. He finished his tour with “the Cs” and followed his father to Long Beach, Calif., to work in the shipyards.

“When I was inducted into the Army, they went down through my work history and saw surveying,” he remembers. “So they assigned me to a company that would need civil engineers as part of the cadre.” From basic training through his service in Europe, Froid was an Army surveyor.

“After VE day, before VJ day, my closest buddy and I were standing in front of our hotel in Germany,” he says. “I told him, ‘When I get discharged, I’m going to go to school to be a civil engineer.’ That’s how my lot was cast.”

Froid went to the University of California at Berkeley on the G.I. Bill, married while still a student, and joined Tudor Engineering, a San Francisco bridge design firm. Froid and his wife, Harriette, raised three children while he helped Tudor solve one engineering puzzle after another.

He found the geometry and mathematics his work entailed exciting, and he enjoyed taking a project from concept to fruition. He had plenty of opportunity for that.

With Tudor, Froid helped design four bridges — “each one a little different,” he says — across the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. Then the company got in on the highway-building boom. Traffic engineering fascinated Froid. “That subject was just being formed and started, and being in a new field you were cutting some of the cloth there,” he says.

He and his family lived in Honolulu for several years while he supervised Tudor’s work there on highway, port and harbor projects. Then it was back to California to oversee the building of the Palm Springs aerial tramway. By the early 1960s, Froid was managing Tudor’s role on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, including BART tunnels, aerial structures, transit stations and maintenance yards.

Froid’s career left no shortage of tangible evidence. A railroad line from Valdez to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, was another one of his many projects. He discovered he had an innate ability to work well with people of different nationalities and to motivate those he supervised to do their best work. Some of his success, though, came from the willingness he showed as a teenager in the Black Hills to welcome, even relish, the challenges that came his way.

What he says of his time in Hawaii applies to much of his working life: “When they saw I could take responsibility and discharge it, they threw the whole joint venture on my shoulders.” It’s clear he didn’t mind a bit.

Founded in 1949, ABHOW is widely known for its pioneering leadership in senior housing and health care. The company serves more than 4,700 residents in 33 retirement communities in California, Arizona, Nevada and Washington.

To learn more about ABHOW visit www.abhow.com.
This article appeared in the January 2010 edition of ABHOW Words.