_A Short Man with Santa Claus Eyebrows_
During my four years at the University of Washington, from 1946 to
1950, the free-thinking, curious, intellectual atmosphere was a
pleasure and a delight to me. I ate it up. Most of this time I held
firmly on my course, but there were brief interludes when I was
buffeted by contrary winds. Once, as I related at the beginning of
this account, I was ready to chuck it all to fly the Bell X-1 rocket
plane. On the opposite tack briefly, I seriously entertained the
idea of remaining at the University as a teacher. For a time, at the
University, my mind became overly absorbed in detail of theoretical
analysis. A man named Seeger reversed this trend and sent me on my
way.
From the outset, my father warned me against becoming an academic
bum, an all-too-familiar figure on our college campuses. “Let’s be a
little careful here,” he said. “You don’t have the patience to be a
pure theoretician. Your inclinations are to see things grow out of
ideas and theory; you’re interested in things, pieces of hardware,
that you can feel with your hands, proofs of theory.”
This may have been a calculated taunt; I’m not certain. In any case,
the remark stuck in my craw. It was a clear challenge, and it spurred
me into a pile-driving effort at the University. Over the gentle
protests of my academic adviser, I registered for an extraordinarily
heavy load of classes, with the full knowledge that I had mapped out
a grueling course of work and study. Since boyhood, long hours and
hard work were routine for me. Every course of my free choice was
“engineering,” applications of theory to adapt the things of nature
to man-made shape.
Alice and I readjusted to an austere budget. My income dropped
drastically from Navy days, and we drew heavily on our savings to
bolster the GI Bill income of about $90 a month. We moved into a
microscopic apartment in a temporary wartime housing area. Here in
this space, decorated with a few sticks of furniture, I studied until
one or two every morning while Alice read or listened to the radio
through some earphones I had rigged.
The earphones didn’t last long. Whenever anything funny was said on
the radio, Alice would naturally burst out in laughter. This was a
weird experience--to sit in a small room with somebody who laughs
periodically for reasons unknown. In time, rather than put up with
that, we chucked the earphones and I resorted to natural powers of
concentration.
Our wants were quite modest and we purposely avoided the heavy social
life of the University campus, but the rising cost of living forced
me to seek part-time work. Alice, who found that the tiny apartment
left her with time to kill, returned to the telephone company and
took a job operating a small switchboard in the evenings while I
studied. My first part-time financial venture, a car-repair business,
was a flop. I enjoy working with my hands and tinkering with engines.
But I made an ill-timed bid to repair a fleet of company cars and
lost my shirt. After that I took the job in the University’s wind
tunnel at fifty cents an hour.
From the outset I was completely fascinated by that job. A wind
tunnel is basic and fundamental. Here airplanes are born and grow to
perfection. Here the imperfections are discarded--at least, that is
the final objective. Here a man’s idea in miniature is tested against
the great forces and laws of nature. Here the airplane grows to life,
amid a thousand calculations and tests.
The wind tunnel was for me a happy combination of study, theory,
model airplanes, wonderful machinery, and work. Not surprisingly, we
found that a pilot has a natural aptitude for wind-tunnel operations.
Several other pilots were on the staff.
Our tunnel team, mostly World War II veterans such as Joe Tymczyszyn,
was a conscientious, energetic group. We devised new techniques to
increase the efficiency of the tunnel and, as a result, set new
records for operational speed and data output. The work was no
schoolboy drill. It cost a company about $1,500 a day to use the
tunnel. Company engineers were usually on hand when we ran the tests,
and for us students this contact with the men in the industry was
invaluable. In time I was promoted to Chief Operator of the tunnel
and my salary was raised accordingly.
Older and wiser now, I retraced a path through two years of basic
college engineering. Then I advanced to my major, aeronautical
engineering. In spite of my heavy academic load and the part-time
work in the tunnel, I was so much in earnest that I was able to make
all A’s and B-pluses in my courses, graduating in June, 1949, with a
bachelor of science degree. I was elected to Tau Beta Pi and to Sigma
Xi, the honorary scholastic societies for science and engineering. My
father, a Sigma Xi, was surprised.
Now ready to go on for my master’s degree, I was determined not to
hang around and be an “academic bum,” as my father so tersely put
it. I’d allow one school year, three quarters, not recommended, but
I felt it necessary to set a limit rather than mark time waiting
for an end point to appear. This may have been a mistake; my
responsibilities were growing. Our oldest daughter, Becky, was a year
old. Alice had left her job before Becky was born. After a few months
the hard pace began to tell. I was wearing down--but too stubborn
to admit it. My father got wind of this and stepped in. After
elaborate subterfuge to avoid “helping” me, he lent me money that
made it possible for me to give up all part-time work and concentrate
exclusively on my studies. I was very grateful and studied all the
harder. The loan meant that I could complete my course in three
quarters, as planned.
The University of Washington graduate course in aeronautical
engineering is considered one of the best in the country. I found it
lacking in one important respect. I felt that too much emphasis was
placed on theory and philosophy and not enough emphasis strictly on
engineering.
My father was absolutely right in this respect: I am no theoretician.
I deal best with application of ideas, not theories. Since, under my
concept of it, I was working for a master’s degree in engineering,
not theory or scientific philosophy, I became impatient with the long
hours of theoretical work, the hypothetical cases which required
abstract analysis and had no example in nature. I longed to deal
with specific problems against which I could apply natural physics
and come up with a physical solution. My approach brought me into
frequent and sometimes stiff conflict with the graduate-school
professors, most of whom were theorists at heart, like my father.
The time came to submit my thesis. Nowadays, regrettably, theses
are not required for master’s degrees at most schools. According
to the concept, I was supposed to make a “new contribution to the
art or science of aviation.” Most of my fellow students presented
theses which contained some elaborate mathematical analysis. I tried
something different. My thesis was “A Semi-Empirical Method of
Obtaining Static and Dynamic Aerodynamic Parameters of Swept-Back
Wings Analyzed on a Basis of Plan Form.” It was, if you please, a
new and simplified method of predicting aerodynamic characteristics.
It could be done with a slide-rule in a matter of minutes in place
of hundreds of hours of computing-machine time. It was a tool to be
used to attain adequate accuracy but replace the laborious rigid
mathematical methods which were guesses anyway. It was influenced by
my work in the wind tunnel and was, I think, a profitable blending of
theory and practical application, the essence of engineering.
This thesis stirred up tremendous consternation among some of the
professors. One problem was that it wasn’t long enough, or didn’t
weigh enough, for a master’s thesis. My wish was that I could have
cut it to one page. Their position was certainly understandable. I
hoped that mine was. The paper was accepted, probably by default. The
faculty, who were all respected friends, agreed to let me disagree
and certainly were not of a nature to flunk me for disagreeing.
* * * * *
I think Alice has a slight touch of claustrophobia. She soon tired
of the four walls of our small apartment and set out house-hunting
around Seattle. One day she came home bubbling with news of a
two-bedroom house in Clyde Hill, a section of Bellevue which almost
fit our budget. The house was really charming, set in the middle of a
small cherry orchard on a hillside. We splurged and moved in.
The house was owned by an amazing character named Oscar Seeger, who
lived on an adjoining tract of land. Seeger, a short man with Santa
Claus eyebrows, was one of the most direct and dynamic men I have
ever met. One night when he visited us, Alice suggested our house
might be improved by installing a counter between the dining ell and
the kitchen. Without a moment’s delay Seeger found a saw and ripped
out an eight-foot section of the wall. The finished job was not
thorough, but neither was it unsightly. I was somewhat stunned by his
speed and skill.
Seeger was the president of a small electrical contracting company.
During World War II he tentatively branched into the manufacture
of small aircraft accessories for Boeing--wash basins, seat arms,
tables, and the like. When he discovered that Alice and I were
scraping bottom financially, he arrived at the house one day with his
company’s billing lists and asked if I would type and mail them out.
(I had learned to hunt and peck on my father’s 1910 Corona portable.)
For a time this billing was a regular monthly job. It helped
Alice and me considerably. Later when Seeger had to submit formal
blueprints on some job, I drew them for him on my drafting board set
up in the bedroom. And after that we became very close friends.
One day Seeger made me a business proposition. The airlines, he
said, were asking for bids on 20,000 aircraft tables. Seeger located
some surplus aluminum material which he thought he could get for
a low price. If I designed the table, he said, and drew up the
specifications, he would take care of the manufacturing. We would
split the profits on a percentage basis which, the way Seeger
presented it, was very generous--too appealing to ignore, in fact.
Designing a table is no great feat, but I wanted to do it right for
Seeger. I made a federal case of it. I set out to design the perfect
aircraft table. I worked for hours, days, weeks. That damned table
absorbed me as deeply as my studies at school and the Navy stunt
team. Seeger became impatient.
“Look, Scotty,” he said. “You’ve got the wrong idea about life.
You can’t waste your time trying to design the perfect table. The
important thing to do is design a table that will do the job, win the
contract, and bring in the money.”
“When I do something, I like to do it right,” I replied. I thought:
Seeger is not an opportunist, but how different he is from my father,
the absolute perfectionist.
“We all try to do the best we can, Scotty. But do you realize that
you could spend the rest of your life trying to design the perfect
table? Did you ever see a table with four legs precisely the same
length? The thing to do is give it all you’ve got for a reasonable
time and then move on to something else. Absolute perfection is
highly desirable but unattainable.”
Reluctantly I hurried the design of that table. At the last
minute--just under the wire--we got our bid in to the airlines.
To my complete astonishment, we won. Seeger’s generous percentage
brought in a nice piece of change. But more important, perhaps, was
the total, amazing impact of Seeger. He gave me a new perspective on
life. I gave up trying to build a table with four legs precisely the
same length. From then on, I made the decision that the important
thing was to do a job well, to the best of my ability, and move on.
Had I not, it is possible that I might still be at the University,
seeking perfection in my studies, or in the wind tunnel, or else
energetically at work in some shop, striving to build the perfect
valve or cotter key. Instead I moved on to Edwards.