Chapter 12: ►

_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.