Charles Wayne Woerner was born in October 1910 in Philadelphia, PA, and lived most of his life in that area, except for his years assigned to the Manhattan Project during his employment with Stone & Webster Engineering. The son of an engineer/inventor, Charles was a mechanical engineer who trained at Drexel Institute (now part of Drexel University). Before and during the WW2 years, he worked on the Project in various locations, including Texas (possibly near Houston), Utah, and Almogordo, NM.
Charles had two daughters—Billie Jane with his first wife Jane, and 10 years later Danielle with his second wife Marguerite. In the early 1950s, wanting to stay closer to home, Charles left S&W and opened his own general and electrical contracting business in Glenside, PA. He was the man who could fix anything, and tended to say, “If I don’t have the right tool for the job, I’ll make the tool!” He was also a fine bass singer, performing in musicals at Philadelphia’s Shubert Theater and as a regular soloist/chorister with the city’s Fortnightly Club, Northeast Oratorio Society, and several churches and synagogues. (During wartime while he was in Utah, he had filled in as a bass with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which did not normally admit non-Mormons.) Charles was a Mason, and active with the Shriners and Shriner’s Hospital in Philadelphia.
In the late 1960s, during the “Race to the Kilowatt,” Stone & Webster approached him to return to train its new generation of engineers, for his quality control expertise—specifically, conducting burn tests on the multi-strand cables that by then were being manufactured for nuclear power reactors. He worked for S&W until his retirement in the late 1970s.
He died at his home in Glenside in April 1984, with his wife Marguerite at his side.