Honorary Member since 2005

The following text is adapted from Gordon’s obituary written by his son, Dan Ray.

Gordon Keith Ray, 86, of Arlington Heights, Illinois, one of the country’s best-known paving engineers and an internationally recognized authority on the design and construction of concrete pavements for roads and airport runways, passed away on January 4, 2006.

A registered professional engineer, Mr. Ray was employed by the Portland Cement Association (PCA) for 38 years, directing the Skokie, Ill.-based trade group’s paving and transportation department and later the public works division. For many years he also taught courses in pavement design and construction at Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin. His many lectures about the use of concrete and soil-cement earned him the title of “Dean of Concrete Paving.”

As a young civil engineer at PCA, Mr. Ray teamed up with Kansas State University professor Gerald Pickett in 1949 to create the Pickett & Ray Influence Charts, a scientific guide to designing concrete pavements to withstand increasingly heavy modern trucks and aircraft. He confirmed the charts with field-based research and pavement surveys in Illinois and Ohio in 1946 and 1947 and as PCA’s observer at the McPherson Test Road in Kansas in 1949 and similar studies in Maryland, Idaho, and Illinois in 1950s.

When this research conclusively demonstrated that concrete pavements outperformed competing asphalt, Mr. Ray and other PCA engineers toured highway departments to promote the use of concrete in the then newly authorized Interstate Highway System and other roads. Mr. Ray traveled to all 50 states, 10 Canadian provinces, and 19 other countries and wrote numerous technical papers to promote concrete pavements to public works agencies, engineering schools, and others. Eventually 65 percent of interstate highways were built of concrete.

Ray’s Influence Charts and their successors guided the design of roads and civilian and military airports during much of the postwar construction boom. U.S. and international highway authorities often sought his counsel on concrete pavement technology.

A Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Mr. Ray served on ASCE committees on structural design, construction, maintenance, and operation of roads and runways and on the Permanent International Association of Road Congresses’ Technical Committee on Concrete Roads. His contributions to his profession were honored with several awards, including the American Road Builders Association’s Paul F. Phelan Memorial Award and the American Concrete Pavement Association’s H.W. Hartman Outstanding Achievement Award. The International Society for Concrete Pavements also conferred the status of honorary member to Mr. Ray during the 8th International Conference on Concrete Pavements in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA this past August.

For more than 30 years, Mr. Ray participated in the National Research Council’s Highway Research Board. There, he chaired its Steering Committee for the First International Conference on Concrete Pavement Design in 1977 and its successor in 1981. Over time, as traffic and weather led to the need to upgrade and replace roads, Mr. Ray also helped shape the agenda for the Transportation Research Board’s National Seminar on PCC Pavement Recycling and Rehabilitation in 1981.

Mr. Ray’s enduring interest in concrete pavements extended beyond working hours, according to his daughter Katherine Nelson. “Dad loved to drive the interstates, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to pull off a highway on a family vacation to walk along a shoulder inspecting pavement,” Ms. Nelson said. “He would look for symptoms like cracks or scaling in the pavement, and could diagnose whether a stretch of rough or crumbling road was caused by the wrong aggregate, improperly sawed joints, poor design, or some other problem.”

The International Society for Concrete Pavements offers its condolences to Mr. Ray’s family and regrets the loss of a great leader in our field.

[button new_tab=”no” special_style=”no” three_d=”yes” size=”default” color=”default” animation=”fade-in” animation_delay=”2000″ title=”View All Honorary Members” link=”https://www.concretepavements.org/honorary-members/”]