This biography is definitely a work in progress.  Hard data is not easy to come by; most of what I have here is based on oral accounts by Dave Radosevich, Jim Hughes, John Sanford, the late Tom Cave, and people who have contacted me via e-mail.  I would greatly appreciate any corrections, inputs,  additional information, etc.  If you have anything to contribute, please contact me here. 

Bill was born and raised in the Midwest, in or around South Bend, Indiana.  He clearly became acquainted with machinery early in life, as by the age of 12 he was employed at the South Bend Studebaker plant.  His job, in the OSHA-free days of the early 20^th century,  was to make the giant flywheels on the assembly line move by walking on the spokes!   Although he apparently suffered no major calamity doing this dangerous work, at the age of nineteen he was declared officially dead when the great flu pandemic of 1920 swept through the area.  Bill was never ill, but It seems that his family's house was placed under quarantine, and somehow his name was left off  the list of active household members.  The local health authorities assumed he had passed away and duly entered this sad fact in their records.  To the astonishment of the health officials, Bill walked out of the house hale and hearty when the quarantine was lifted.

Exactly how and why Bill migrated to California is not clear, but by his middle years he was living in Inglewood and working at a garage as an auto mechanic.  The best information I have about these years came from a conversation I had with instrument maker and observer Thomas Cave in 2003, about a month before Cave died.   Tom recalled meeting Bill in 1939 at the Los Angeles Astronomical Society meeting at Griffith Planetarium.  This was an exciting place for telescope makers with mirror grinding facilities in the basement.  By the end of World War II Bill was working at an engine rebuilding shop in Hollywood and had developed an interest in making telescope mountings.  Tom recalled that Bill had no interest in optics, only the mechanical problem of making sturdy mounts.  The details of how Bill came upon his classic design are not known, but John Sanford has sent me a drawing of a Russell W. Porter mount which is clearly the basis of the concept.  John did not know the source of this drawing, and I was not able to find it in the Amateur Telescope Making books.  Mountain Instruments manufactures a similar mount today and advertises it as being based on the Porter design.

Tom Cave believed that Bill made his first successful mount in 1947, possibly using one of Cave's mirrors in the telescope (Tom couldn’t recall for sure).  Tom did remember that Bill bought many mirrors from Cave Optical, the company founded by Tom which became a leading manufacturer of amateur telescopes in the 1950s through the 70s.  Although the commercial Cave Astrola telescope series used a mount of different design, Tom Cave had Schaefer mounts for his own telescopes.  In the last conversation I had with Tom he told me that the mounting for the telescope in his Long Beach observatory was built by Bill many years ago and it was still in use.  I visited the Cave observatory a few weeks after this conversation, but Tom was at that point back in the hospital in what turned out to be his terminal stay.  I did get a good look at the telescope and a few pictures of this instrument are posted on my Thomas Cave page.  The critical aspects of the mounting are shown below.  I greatly regret not being able to discuss the details of the telescope with Tom.  I would like to know  when it was built and whether it was a special design for this observatory. Some of its features, like the large RA gear, look very much like the typical Schaefer design. However, the extension out to the declination axis definitely does not.  It would be interesting to know if this was an early stage in the evolution of what became the Schaefer mount or if this particular mount was specifically designed for this telescope.  At any rate it is the earliest example of Bill’s work that I have been able to find.

            Dr. Joseph Miller, recently retired director of Lick Observatory, knew Bill when he (Miller) was a teenager in the '50s.  In 1957 Bill made a mount for Miller's 10" telescope  which looked exactly like the "classic" Schaefer mount shown above.   Dr. Miller remembers Bill as "a very nice fellow, very easy going" and recalls many pleasant evenings at summer star parties at Charlton Flats in the San Gabriel Mountains.  The photograph below shows one of those star parties taken in 1958.

            I became acquainted with Bill in the late '70s.  Bill was getting on in years, but he was still very active, working in his machine shop daily, making mounts, providing assistance and advice to a large number of amateur telescope makers.  I never owned a Schaefer mount, but Bill made many improvements on the scopes I did have.  When Bill started keeping an account book in the 1980s my name was the first entry in the ledger (materials for a 10" Dobsonian I was building).  At this time Bill was living in a condo in Fullerton, CA and had a workshop in one space of the parking structure.  The management kept trying to close him down (technically the workshop was not allowed), but Bill managed to stay ahead of the game and kept his tools in place almost to the end.

            Also at this time a number of machining enthusiasts began working with Bill in his shop.  The ones I knew best were Jim Hughes, Steve Kysor and Dave Radosevich.  I believe it was Jim Hughes that suggested that Bill put his name on the castings.  All mounts that have Schaefer  on the declination axis date from the early 80s (I am not sure of the exact date).  Not all Schaefer mounts were German equatorial.  In the eighties Celestron fork mount telescopes were very popular and the Schaefer mount readily accommodated these. An example of a Celestron C8 mounted on a Schaefer head is shown here, this design was used for scopes as large as 14".  

           Dave Radosevich began working with Bill in 1984 and added a number of features to the basic design.  Dave also added a more professional look to the mounts.  In 1986 Bill received an order from the Mount Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories, and Dave was closely involved in the project.  A telescope on this mount was used to evaluate the seeing at possible sites in the Andes for the observatories' then projected Magellan 8 meter instrument.  The mount is still in use today on a similar mission.