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.

Rescued Pilot

For a year while on leave from Cal-tech, I got a job with United Airlines as a field keeper at Akron, Colorado. They were able to cut quite a distance off their flying time by establishing an emergency field and beacon which the government was slow in accomplishing. My duties were to take weather observations every hour and report them by radio to Denver.

One time we were in heavy fog when an Air Force Pilot was running low on fuel and needed to land. He couldn’t find the field so I had to guide him by radio. He zoomed by the field following a line of telephone poles but failed to see the field as he went by. Of course I had turned on our beacon to help him and guided him to do a U-turn and come back along the line of poles and talked him down to safe landing. He was heavily bundled in flight gear. After re-fueling his fighter plane he insisted on taking off again as he was on his way to visit his girl. The Denver operators cautioned him not to leave as the fog was very serious over quite an area, but he safely took off anyway. The next time I visited United Airlines headquarters in Denver I learned the dispatchers there had experienced a nervous attack listening to me talk down the plane as I was not qualified as a dispatcher and they were afraid of a law suit, however, it all worked out safely.

I used my time when not doing duties to pull a dumb stunt. As part of a weather study I had to release hydrogen balloons and track their course. I filled a balloon partly with hydrogen and the rest oxygen to make a nice explosive mixture, then made a long paper wick under the balloon which I lighted and released. It had just enough lift to rise slowly and drift over the town of Akron at a low level before the hydrogen exploded with a loud boom, which startled the residents, not knowing what was going on. I never got in trouble over that stunt. It was while working at that field that I listened to news reports of the developing serious war events in Europe.

A Radio Hobby

In Switzerland I was impressed by a movie showing Jackie Coogan, the boy hero, using their radio transmitter. That whetted my interest so on the ship home I got acquainted with the ship’s operator and observed their spark transmitter. At home when I got hold of a Ford spark coil, and reading in The Book of Knowledge about spark transmitters, I rigged up a crude transmitter. I tried it out at our neighbor’s house with a friend and went home and encountered my sister, Zan, on her way to check with me to see what I was doing with their radio, which had been buzzing. That was my first, though illegal, radio transmission.

We used to imagine that our upstairs porch was the bridge of a ship and we transmitted Morse Code messages for Alice to copy on the radio downstairs. We must have messed up the broadcasting for some of our neighbors. As a teenager, I passed the test to get an amateur license as W6LXI and later W7NOE. With a homemade receiver and vacuum tube transmitter I was an active HAM operator communicating world-wide. By submitting proof to the American Radio Relay League, I was issued WAS and WAC certificates that I had worked all states and continents.  I formed pen pals (or radio pals) by radio with many across the globe, including the fire chief of Capetown, South Africa. Later I took time out of my Cal-tech studies to go to a radio school in Kansas City to increase my code speed and obtain radio-telephone and radio-telegraph commercial licenses. These served me well later as ship’s operator and as broadcast engineer.

The Broadcast

Cal-tech held an annual open house for the public. As president of the radio club, I was appointed communications chairman for the event. Being somewhat of a promoter, I went to the CBS studios in Hollywood and suggested they consider doing a broadcast of the event. They appointed Chet Huntley, who became the well-known anchor with David Brinkley, to work with me. I understand that one phone call was made to Cal-tech to verify that I was for real. Other than that, all contact between CBS and Cal-tech was only through me. Chet and I worked together to write the script and make plans for a coast-to-coast broadcast from various points on the campus. They supplied microphones and cables for us students to arrange all of the pick-up points. Then I arranged for the various faculty members to participate in the broadcast. It went over 100 of their radio stations. At the beginning of the broadcast Chet interviewed me briefly and complimented me on my organizational ability. The half hour broadcast was recorded and we have an MP3 audio copy of the broadcast.

Computer Symposium

The Rand Corporation, the think tank, is occasionally mentioned in the news. Each year they hold a symposium to discuss computer matters. I was honored to be invited to the 10^th annual computer symposium along with several other recognized computer authorities from universities across the country. Among them was my cousin, David Evans, from the University of Utah, who formed the very successful software company, Evans and Sutherland. The symposium was taped and the proceedings published. Our subject was the future of computing. Ten years later, a well-known computer magazine reviewed the proceedings to compare what actually happened with what we predicted would happen. They were impressed with how accurately we had seen the future. The Rand Corporation gave me round-the-clock access to their building to use software on their computer that was not otherwise available to me.

Professorship

Joe Buckwald was a fellow PhD student at UCLA and on the accounting faculty at California State University Northridge. He was apparently impressed with my comments in classes and tried to persuade me to apply at Northridge. I declined to do so until after my doctorate was granted. A year later when I was at the dissertation stage, he said he had made an appointment for me to meet the president of the University, the Vice-president and the department chair, and that he would be extremely embarrassed if I was not willing to keep the appointment. I had a long meeting with them until they asked me to step out of the room for a few minutes. When they called me back into the room, the president offered me a full professorship to teach computing in the accounting department. After additional discussions, I decided to accept it since I wouldn’t do any better than that after my degree was granted.

I was on the faculty for 20 delightful years, being granted tenure and then emeritus professor status upon retirement. I took part in a revision of the engineering school to form the school of engineering and computer science, and of course, moved to computer science. I was deeply honored by the faculty, who voted me as chairman of the school personnel committee for several terms. We had responsibility of passing on all hirers and promotions. I was called on to host lunch with various distinguished visitors and had other interesting experiences including invitations to speak in front of various civic and professional groups. I had a unique way of teaching the basics of computers to my classes. In addition to being invited to critique various manuscripts being published, the publisher asked me to write my own book setting down my teaching approach. Being busy with my academic responsibilities and outside business interests besides having a young family and not having word processors in those days, my book bogged down because it was just too much for my wife to type and revise for me. 

When I started teaching at Northridge in the early sixties we only had a small, old fashioned computer at the campus. I was able to persuade the trustees for all the state universities that if they spread their computer budget over many campuses it would not do much good at any one. I said that if they would concentrate the budget on our campus, we would set a pattern that would later be useful for all the various universities and colleges in the system. We got over half of the total budget and I was responsible for negotiating our first big computer and becoming the first computer center director. General Electric flew me in their private jet to Arizona to see their computers at that university. Later, GE sent me a letter thanking me for my efforts and saying they felt the university system would never fully appreciate all of my contributions.

I gave one of my classes a true-false test answered by their punching the answer in the card. At the end of the test I had the computer center ready to rush in and gather in the cards and grade them. Before the class let out, they returned and gave each student with their grade printed on it. The students could hardly believe that that was actually the results of the test they had just taken.  The newspapers got hold of the story and featured it in their paper. Up to that point students expected to wait for several days to get their test results back until the professor had time to get them all graded.