College classmates raise professional standards.

In 1938, Yale University graduate Richard “Dick” Ayers, fresh from a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, joined Buckler and Fenhagen. His employment at the firm was interrupted by World War II when he left to serve in the US Navy and tour Japan as a member of the Strategic Bombing Survey. Ayers returned to Baltimore and with Julius Meyer took over the practice. The two were soon joined by Dick’s Yale classmate Kelsey Saint who raised professional standards for quality through his encyclopedic knowledge of construction. Saint helped establish the Construction Specifications Institute’s 16-division format, an organizational system described as doing for building documents what the Dewey Decimal system did for library books.