1956-2025
Gary Irvine came to the Asphalt Institute in 1994 after moving his young family from Southern California to a little town in Shelby County, Kentucky between Frankfort and Louisville. To my understanding he made that cross-country move pretty much on faith. At the time we hired Gary, I was a young(ish) staff engineer working in the lab. I was quietly impressed by the courage and determination to uproot from where he had lived for 38 years to bring his family to an entirely different environment – not only from a climate perspective but also a cultural one – without a new job opportunity waiting.
Part of the reason we hired Gary in 1994 was that we were impressed with his experience in testing materials for the aerospace industry using servo-hydraulic test machines. We had recently made some big investments in servo-hydraulic testing equipment for testing asphalt mixtures – the Superpave Shear Tester, for example – and thought his experience might translate well.
As they say about “best-laid plans” …we quickly found that our immediate needs in the lab outweighed our original designs, and we started Gary out by having him shake aggregate to prepare a mix design, perhaps the furthest thing we could have chosen for him to do based on his skills. Gary never complained. It took us a few years to eventually get him moved over to servo-hydraulic testing because he had made himself valuable to us in other ways in the lab.
In 2003, the Asphalt Institute was at a crossroads in terms of mission, structure and finances. Everything was on the table for evaluation. In the end, the lab experienced a few losses of personnel, meaning some restructuring and refocusing of our mission was needed. Gary stepped up into a new leadership role as lab manager. With Gary as our lab manager, our asphalt binder testing program grew significantly. He was responsible for attracting and hiring some members of the talented team we have now, all of whom started as technicians like Gary – Wes Cooper (Laboratory Manager and Senior Research Scientist), Jason Lamb (R18LabQMS and Lab Quality Manager) and Madison Pohl (Senior Asphalt Technician and Trainer).
While Gary was in the role of lab manager, he started thinking about how he could make the process of achieving and maintaining accreditation for our lab easier. The quality manual we needed to develop and maintain for our accreditation was cumbersome. His solution was to develop a web-based software solution that could help us streamline our Quality Management System (QMS), making it easier to maintain our accreditation. The problem was that the development cost for a customized system was going to be high enough to make its value questionable. Gary’s solution was to design it as a subscription service that could be used by other labs who also had the need to streamline their QMS. With the blessing of our president, Gary worked with software developers and designers, leading the project from inception to implementation. R18LabQMS launched in 2013 and is used by almost 200 labs today.
“Gary valued quality and was always looking to make improvements wherever he could. That’s one of the things I admired about him in his time at the Asphalt Institute. He looked for practical solutions to real problems,” says Wes Cooper.
From the outset, the R18LabQMS program has been an important part of the AI’s emphasis on supporting quality in the asphalt industry – through our technician certification programs, which ensures that technicians are capable of producing consistent, quality asphalt binder and emulsion test data and through our QMS software that ensures labs can effectively manage the maintenance, calibration, and training needed to produce quality test results.
Our belief, which we feel that we can state with some confidence, is that Gary didn’t intend to be at the Asphalt Institute for 30 years when he first took the lab position. We believe that he accepted the offer in 1994 because it supplied a stopgap position for him to make some money for his family and provide some benefits until he could get settled in Kentucky and find something more suited to his skills and interests. But by his own admission, the asphalt industry has a way of getting under your skin and keeping people. His initiative and hard work – from sweeping lab floors on Friday afternoons in the 1990s to developing a new quality management software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the 2010s – helped to elevate the Asphalt Institute.
Speaking for many of us at the Asphalt Institute and others in our small asphalt community, we are thankful for the time we had together and will miss Gary and his spirit.
Wes Cooper contributed to this article.
