History and Archives

Chuck Marofske

Head, Laboratory Services Section

I.D. #54

Everyone has noticed it: Chuck Marofske these days is positively radiant. That’s because, after 30 years at Fermilab, Marofske no longer needs his 6:15 wake-up bell. He’s retiring, taking with him a trove of memories.

Marofske started at Fermilab back in the days when men wore ties. He first shed his in the early 1970s, when the energy crisis hit and people dressed more casually to cope with the summer heat. Marofske says he quickly discovered he could “yell louder without a rope around [his] neck,” and never wore one again. Now, if his pension falls short, he says, well, there’s that closetful of ties.

It was in coat and tie in the old Oak Brook storefront that Marofske first took charge of the hiring and firing at Fermilab. He still has the yellowed ledgers with the initial handwritten log of entries and departures, and the numbering system he invented to identify employees. Now, nearly 12,000 people have passed through Fermilab’s doors, all by way of Marofske’s office suite.

Marofske held the same job for 30 years—head of Laboratory Services—but his portfolio kept expanding. Today it includes responsibilities as diverse as the cafeteria, visual media, the library and human resources. He shaped and implemented not only a set of personnel practices, but a policy of reaching out to minorities that was far ahead of its time. Get him talking, and he’s passionate about equal employment opportunity. He effuses, too, about the public relations value of Fermilab’s K–12 education programs, programs he helped save from near-extinction two years ago when Department of Energy funding dried up. Marofske may fret over the number of times he had to say no as head of Human Resources, but there were many times when he said yes.

Marofske has decided it’s time for him, not just his ties, to retire. He thought long and hard about the things he’ll miss: “being part of the excitement, sharing the tragedies and the good times, even the arguments [he catches himself: ‘the discussions’].” A stash of photos in his desk drawer recalls the lively parties—all well-earned, he quickly points out—when staff took turns in the dunk tank and Adam and Eve once showed up with a live snake draped around their naked arms. But he wanted to leave, he said, while he “still felt like doing things.”

Those things do not include golf. Staff remember the time he whacked a golf ball harder and harder, and still it just bumped its way down the green.

But gardening: “I monkey around in my own backyard,” he says, and now he’ll be monkeying around in his daughter’s. She wants lilacs; he wants peonies. He likes the perennials—when they come back, “it’s like renewing a friendship.”

Which he’ll be doing with his long-time friend, former head of Fermilab’s employment office Jim Thompson, who just had a hip replacement. Marofske kids Thompson that, for the winter months, they’ll be mall walkers. “So, if you ever take a day off,” Marofske says, “and you’re walking around the mall and you see these two old guys, be kind.”

Marofske has promised he’ll stay on long enough to train his successor. Then he’ll go, and bequeath to the next boss his old metal desk, the same one he’s had for 30 years.