ROCKETS and BOMBS

As mentioned elsewhere, in the summer of 1945, after completing an eventful cruise to the south pacific, my draft board summoned me and scolded me for running off to sea. They ordered me to return to Cal Tech to do research work. As an undergraduate in my junior year, I was hired by the university along with two other undergraduate assistants on the Eaton Canyon Rocket Project. Our duties were in Bridge laboratory, but the main work was in Eaton Canyon, above Pasadena, where extrusion presses pushed out rubber-like tubes of explosives to go into rockets. Actually, the Cal Tech project physically manufactured 60% of all the rockets used by the allies in World War II.  A project of that size today would require a whole department of engineers and scientists. In my case I was a single electronics engineer for the project along with my two assistants.  We designed and assembled various equipment needed on the project for telemetering and safety.

One serious event was when an extrusion press exploded and was destroyed. We were assigned to figure out some solution to prevent further explosions. We found an old huge electric motor under one of the student housing basements. By abandoning the rotor, we ended up with the stator, which served our purpose beautifully as a sensor.  We designed electronics to sense any magnetic material moving through the rotor, which was mounted on the extrusion press.  Any time an iron particle passed through the rotor, the electronics sensed it and shut down the press.  We had no more explosions.

We were under terrible 24-hours-a-day pressure and during the wee hours of the night we often blew off steam with various pranks. Walt and Bill took apart the lock on our laboratory door and mapped all the wafers in it. Then they used that to further catalog the lock for the building. By assembling all this information, they were able to recreate the master key for the entire campus.  If the FBI had discovered this, we no doubt would have had our security clearance canceled, besides other penalties.

The next door laboratory to ours had a graduate PhD student named Abe Zarom, who later, with associates, created a company that was sold to Zerox, making them multi-millionaires.  Abe became senior vice president of Zerox, but he was prankster along with the rest of us. We found that if one person was stationed on the first floor and another on the third floor, we could keep pushing the call buttons and the elevator would go up and down but the door wouldn’t open.  We stopped that prank when the person we trapped was Robert A. Milliken, president of the university.

We worked closely with the scientists at what was the beginning of NASA. One of our problems was the difficulty of getting materials we needed through the red tape. We decided to leave Cal Tech and start up a company called “Standard Engineering Laboratories”. In our naivety, we started with $200 capitol.  Our first contract was with Cal Tech building more of the electronic equipment that they needed, but we had numerous other defense contracts and were able to acquire  various other additional equipment and expanded to a couple of dozen employees.

Under heavy pressure from our customers who desperately needed equipment that we could provide, our employees were under the gun. In the view of one hopeless deadline we had, I told the employees that if they could finish and meet the deadline in time we would take a one day holiday and have a party at the beach.  They took the challenge and really performed. 

Toward the end of the war, we had an extremely high priority contract manufacturing metal housing of two different types with an order of 100 or 200 of each type—I can’t remember which.  When the Hiroshima bombing was announced, I called up our contracting officer and asked if that was one of the things we were working on. He answered, “yes, that was one of them.”  When Nagasaki bomb went off, he admitted that was the other one.  So, without knowing it we were working on parts of future atomic bombs of two types in quantities of 100’s.  Thankfully, the hundreds of atomic bombs didn’t need to be deployed.

After the war, my mentor, professor Potapanko, and his partners were closing down a factory they ran in downtown Los Angeles. He encouraged us to take it over and make use of its extensive metal working equipment. We took over the company and incorporated under Amoran Manufacturing Corp. Its history is yet another story. Bill Haynes became my vice-president. He was extremely clever in designing things.

EARLY MEMORIES

The earliest memory I have we have dated slightly before I was two years old. At that time I remember my father putting me on the back of a horse in our backyard and marching me over to the porch and calling to mother to come out and see her big boy riding a horse. The reason I know it was before two is they got rid of the horses in our yard about the time I turned two.

Those early years were shortly after World War I, so that was still vivid in people’s memories.  We lived on 7^th east.  Across the street was a row of houses, but most of the block was still empty. This block was the next block south of Trolley Square.  We called it the “car barns”. Us boys used to play in the fields across the street and imagined they were trenches in the war.  We would shoot BB guns. It was fortunate that none of us had an eye put out.

Another early memory deals with our neighbor several houses up the street from us. He gave me a job of harnessing his horse to his vegetable wagon and working on it. The horse would pull us up to town to the farmer’s market where he would load his wagon with fresh fruits and vegetables.  On the way we would stop and water the horse at a watering trough which later became a little park and drinking fountain at about sixth south.  We would spend the day on a route selling fruits and vegetables at people’s homes.

Later, I had a job helping on a milk truck delivering milk to homes. This was very difficult for me during the winter because I couldn’t use gloves or the bottles would slip and my bare hands would get freezing holding the bottles of milk.  My pay for that work was 25 cents a day plus a quart of milk to drink for my lunch.

Another job at Christmas time was sponsored by some of my uncles who provided many Christmas trees for me to sell. At the end of the season our backyard still had stacks of trees that had not yet been sold. Many other childhood memories are involved during the three years we lived in Basel, Switzerland, but that should be the subject of some other blog.

FEATHERED FRIENDS

When I was a teenager hiking in the mountains I came across a baby magpie that was lost, so I adopted it. He became a close buddy of mine, always flying to sit on my shoulder, but upsetting my mother because he didn’t leave to go to the bathroom. When I was gone for a week to a scout camp he wouldn’t eat.  He moped around and died before I returned.

Many years later we found we found a baby sparrow that had fallen out of the nest. We fed it and got it to the point where it fledged.  It would fly around the room and outside, but always return. Later it joined a flock of other sparrows on the telephone wires.  Each time when that flock returned and we called him by name, “Jerry”, he would fly down to greet us and then return to the flock.

GRADUATE SCHOOL

I was thrashing around trying to decide on some career to feed my family. I had a meeting with Dr. McDonald who was the LDS president of the state college. I had considered the possibility of teaching in elementary school.  He counseled me to go for a PhD and teach in college. I was admitted to the doctoral program at UCLA. To my surprise, the dean of the graduate school called me in and said he had a request from North American Aviation to choose a doctoral student who had both technical and business experience. He was nominating me.

North American hired me part time to head up a group of other PhD students in a group called the Managing Research Team.  It was a wonderful blessing because my duty consisted primarily of working in the UCLA research library and to report to North American any articles that I found that might be applicable to their company. So, I was being paid for what I had to do for my academic studies anyway. Later North American stepped up my employment to full time. Our division was building the Apollo space capsules. I was shocked at how large these capsules were. When I found it necessary to use more of my time in my studies North American urged me to take a leave of absence and continued my insurance, hoping that I would decide to return full time. That never happened since I became a faculty member at Northridge.

In connection with my doctoral studies I found that I had enough credits to receive an MBA as a side product. When my MBA certificate arrived in the mail there was also a duplicate certificate for my wife entitled, PHT…”Putting Hubby Through”. I completed all the course work and qualifying exams for a doctorate in four fields: information systems, economics, finance and business theory.

I attended an interesting seminar with Harry Markowitz in Simscript computer language. I introduced that language to North American Aviation. Later, Dr. Markowitz said my project was the best of all his students and we became close friends. I finally convinced him to come teach a graduate class at Northridge. When the president of the university happened to mention at a conference that Dr. Markowitz was teaching some graduate seminars, they asked, “do you know who you have?”  He had no idea of Harry’s reputation. Later on Harry Markowitz received a Nobel Prize for work he did for his dissertation, which we studied in the seminar.  

I needed two languages and hoped to get German, thinking that it would come back to me.  However, German was not offered, so I struggled through French I failed the first exam, but passed the second one, thus all my requirements except a dissertation were completed.   

My dissertation committee was selected and appointed and we were negotiating a subject for my dissertation. At this time I was under heavy pressure with my teaching at Northridge, business consulting, and a growing family. I had tenure as a full professor and a doctorate would not have meant anything financially to my career and I was getting very discouraged with the various dissertation subject which struck me as being more make-work than interesting, so dispite the urging of UCLA to finish the dissertation, I reluctantly dropped out, having a ABD, “All But Dissertation”.

COLLEGE

My high school record was straight “A” and I obviously had some interest in radio and science, so some of my uncles encouraged me to try to get into Cal Tech. Since my mother was a widow and didn’t have resources to send me to college, they encouraged me to seek a scholarship.  At their urging, I met with Heber J. Grant, president of our church, and Governor Blood, governor or our state, and asked them for letters of recommendation.  Neither of them knew me, but both knew my family and sent glowing letters of recommendation.

I was pleased to be notified that Cal Tech was admitting me and granting me a one year scholarship. My experience at Cal Tech was very interesting. Out of the total undergraduate student body of 600, the dozen or so scholarship holders had special classes. One semester was taught by Robert A Millikan, President of Cal Tech, a noble prize winner, and considered the foremost physicist of his day. That was a wonderful experience to have a full semester with a small group of other scholarship students taught by such a great physicist. He invited the whole class to dinner at his home and we had an enjoyable time visiting with him and hearing experiences and advice.  The subject of religion came up and he expressed strong belief in a supreme being.

The next semester I had Carl Anderson as a teacher. He had received a Nobel Prize for discovering the positron. Therefore, early in my schooling I had a close association with two Nobel Prize winners in physics. Later on I became well acquainted with two more. That first semester Professor Potapenko took me under his personal wing and arranged for me to have a private laboratory office in Bridge Physics building and I was the only freshman that year to be granted academic credit for research. Just before I arrived at Cal Tech all the workers in Bridge Building met in front of the building to have their picture taken with Albert Einstein in the middle of their group. If I had been just a little earlier in getting there I could have been in that picture.

Elsewhere I’ve posted about the broadcast I arranged with CBS. After my scholarship ran out I was faced with a problem of financing my education. I got well acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Crellin, who lived in a mansion very close to the campus. He had been a close associate of Carnegie and became very wealthy with him. He donated the funds to Cal Tech to build the Crellin chemistry building. He got me interested in amateur telescope making, in which he was actively engaged and was kind enough to give me a bridge loan.

After two years at Cal Tech I took a leave of absence to replenish funds and attended technical school in Kansas City to increase my code speed and earn commercial radio-telephone and radio-telegraph licenses. I had a job for a year with United Air Lines as a field keeper and weather reporter at Akron, Colorado. I returned to Cal Tech for my junior year and then took another year’s leave to go out to sea as a radio operator, during which time the war broke out.  In July of 1942, after a return from a long cruise, the draft board summoned me and chided me for running off to sea and ordered me to return to Cal tech to do research work. The understanding was that I could take classes for my senior year but I was only able to complete one class when the pressure of the war effort required my full time. The faculty advised me that since Cal Tech was not very well equipped to handle part time students that I should complete my degree elsewhere.

As time permitted I’d take various classes in nearby universities where ever I was living. As a result, I accumulated an excess number of units before graduation. I ended up at Los Angeles state college with only one class needed to graduate. I needed a fine arts class. They wouldn’t accept the credit I received for an art class at Cal Tech since they assumed it was mechanical drawing. Actually, we had been out sketching buildings and other things, but they wouldn’t believe me.  The only class I could find open that would complete the requirement in time was “Art and Crafts for the Elementary Schools”, so I spent an interesting but wasted semester doing finger painting and making Paper Mache dragons.

All in all, it took me 20 years to get my bachelor’s degree.

High School

After leaving Irving Junior High School, I attended South High School for two years in Salt Lake City. I was in the ROTC there. The first year we were drilling Manual of Arms in one of the halls using old World War I surplus rifles. Apparently someone had borrowed one of them to go deer hunting and had left a shell in the magazine. When we did Port Arms one of the student’s gun fired. The shell went up through the ceiling and into the room above, but fortunately, no one was hit.

In the second year I was made a cadet captain as plans and training officer. Our commandant was an old World War I solider named Sergeant Sheets. One day as we saw him leaving the far corner of the campus, we decided to play a joke on a fellow student and ordered a cadet corporal to catch him and tell him that we needed several yards of skirmish lines. The obedient student caught Sergeant Sheets and gave him the message. The sergeant recognized the joke and told him, “you go back and get one on them.”

There was heavy competition between South, East and West High Schools. Each year the ROTC had an inspection and a ranking, but South High had never achieved the rating that the other two schools had. We were determined that year to get a high rating. I borrowed field telephones and lines from Fort Douglas and we had communication points set up at various places on our campus. I was president of the radio club and we got an amateur license and somehow obtained radio equipment on the campus.  We put up a big antenna on the building which was there for many years afterwards. The army officer who was reviewing ROTC units rated us very highly and we got our standing.

Telescope-Making

At Cal-tech I became acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Crellin, who donated a chemistry building to Cal-tech named the Crellin Laboratory. He had become very wealthy as an associate of Carnegie before his retirement. At his sumptuous estate near the campus he demonstrated his hobby of telescope making and got me interested. By laboriously hand-polishing circular glass disks we could form a parabola to use in a reflecting telescope. By a simple procedure called the Foucault knife-edge test  we could use a simple light source and a razor blade to check the shape of the mirror to an accuracy of one-millionth of an inch to get it in the right shape. This always fascinated me and was worth the many hours of grinding and polishing. I didn’t have the skill that he had to manufacture an effective telescope mount but could rig up simple replacements that worked. At Cal-tech I simply didn’t have the time to use this hobby extensively, but during the year of leave while I was working in Akron, Colorado, I was able to do so. I spent a lot of time grinding a 6” telescope reflecting mirror which I mounted in a crude wood frame. I never got far enough to have the surface silvered, but even that way there was enough reflection off the glass that I could use it as a telescope and test it by having my replacement shift stopping a mile from the field and holding up fingers which I could count at that distance.