[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Nothing that helped with the calculations. All the numerical calculating was done on Marchant calculators, which were things that sat on the desk and you pressed in the numbers, and you’d do multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, on these calculators. In the early ones, you had to drive them by turning a crank. As time went on, they became motorized, electric motors, but they still had to be operated by hand. I made the first transonic airfoil calculations, and it took three young women about one year to do the necessary calculation, and the only reason they assigned them that much time, was because this was considered important enough. Those calculations could probably be done today [by electronic calculators] in less than a minute. To think it took three young ladies one year, and now, we do things like that without giving it a second thought.

[Assistant] Share with us some of your personal information as you spent those 17 years at Ames, you mentioned that you had lived with your parents for the first year or so. Did you live close by Moffett Field and the Ames Center after you worked there a few years?

[User] Yes. I lived in Los Altos, if you know, which is about four or five miles from Moffett Field. There were other people that lived out there, and we had a ride group that would go there every morning and bring us home, and take turns. I would drive a week, then one of the other people would drive for a week, and so forth. That kind of thing went on. That was during the war as well as when I was working at Ames during the 1940s, but I got married in 1947. My wife and I lived together. She’s no longer living—it’s why I’m here alone. She died a year ago.

[Assistant] Sorry to hear that.

[User] The paintings there are her work, in the other room, and that’s a self-portrait of her. She was an artist.

[Assistant] Was she local? Was she from this area when you met her?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. I lived in Los Altos, if you know, which is about four or five miles from Moffett Field. There were other people that lived out there, and we had a ride group that would go there every morning and bring us home, and take turns. I would drive a week, then one of the other people would drive for a week, and so forth. That kind of thing went on. That was during the war as well as when I was working at Ames during the 1940s, but I got married in 1947. My wife and I lived together. She’s no longer living—it’s why I’m here alone. She died a year ago.

[Assistant] Sorry to hear that.

[User] The paintings there are her work, in the other room, and that’s a self-portrait of her. She was an artist.

[Assistant] Was she local? Was she from this area when you met her?

[User] I met her on a railroad train in the freight yards at Council Bluffs, Iowa, when the train was stalled by the floods. She was living in Southern California. We met on the railroad train, and three months later, we got married. We were married for 66 years. She was a very accomplished abstract artist, and the large painting, Sandra can see it there, over my bed, is one of my favorites of her paintings, and the others are hers, too.

[Assistant] That is beautiful. The colors are just beautiful.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] The paintings there are her work, in the other room, and that’s a self-portrait of her. She was an artist.

[Assistant] Was she local? Was she from this area when you met her?

[User] I met her on a railroad train in the freight yards at Council Bluffs, Iowa, when the train was stalled by the floods. She was living in Southern California. We met on the railroad train, and three months later, we got married. We were married for 66 years. She was a very accomplished abstract artist, and the large painting, Sandra can see it there, over my bed, is one of my favorites of her paintings, and the others are hers, too.

[Assistant] That is beautiful. The colors are just beautiful.

[User] Yes, she had a wonderful sense of color. There’s another one you can’t see, back in that corner, which is more colorful. She sold paintings and had several shows in San Francisco.

[Assistant] That’s quite an accomplishment, especially around here.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I met her on a railroad train in the freight yards at Council Bluffs, Iowa, when the train was stalled by the floods. She was living in Southern California. We met on the railroad train, and three months later, we got married. We were married for 66 years. She was a very accomplished abstract artist, and the large painting, Sandra can see it there, over my bed, is one of my favorites of her paintings, and the others are hers, too.

[Assistant] That is beautiful. The colors are just beautiful.

[User] Yes, she had a wonderful sense of color. There’s another one you can’t see, back in that corner, which is more colorful. She sold paintings and had several shows in San Francisco.

[Assistant] That’s quite an accomplishment, especially around here.

[User] Yes, yes. San Francisco is a very active place.

[Assistant] You mentioned you had brothers that were engineers—did they work at Ames as well?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, she had a wonderful sense of color. There’s another one you can’t see, back in that corner, which is more colorful. She sold paintings and had several shows in San Francisco.

[Assistant] That’s quite an accomplishment, especially around here.

[User] Yes, yes. San Francisco is a very active place.

[Assistant] You mentioned you had brothers that were engineers—did they work at Ames as well?

[User] No, no, they weren’t engineers. They went to Stanford, but one was a lawyer and one was a businessman. The one that was a lawyer became the president of the Tournament of Roses in Pasadena.

[Assistant] Your father must have been very proud he made the choice to move you all to California.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, yes. San Francisco is a very active place.

[Assistant] You mentioned you had brothers that were engineers—did they work at Ames as well?

[User] No, no, they weren’t engineers. They went to Stanford, but one was a lawyer and one was a businessman. The one that was a lawyer became the president of the Tournament of Roses in Pasadena.

[Assistant] Your father must have been very proud he made the choice to move you all to California.

[User] My father and mother were born in Italy. My father came to the United States as a boy of 16, with very little money, and an eighth grade education. He let his children know he came to the United States so they could amount to something. My siblings, I had two brothers and two sisters. We all worked hard. Our mother had a sixth grade education. It’s a classic story of the first part of the 20th century, people coming from Europe and raising families in the United States.

[Assistant] What did your sisters do? You mentioned that one of them was going to Stanford, the youngest one.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, no, they weren’t engineers. They went to Stanford, but one was a lawyer and one was a businessman. The one that was a lawyer became the president of the Tournament of Roses in Pasadena.

[Assistant] Your father must have been very proud he made the choice to move you all to California.

[User] My father and mother were born in Italy. My father came to the United States as a boy of 16, with very little money, and an eighth grade education. He let his children know he came to the United States so they could amount to something. My siblings, I had two brothers and two sisters. We all worked hard. Our mother had a sixth grade education. It’s a classic story of the first part of the 20th century, people coming from Europe and raising families in the United States.

[Assistant] What did your sisters do? You mentioned that one of them was going to Stanford, the youngest one.

[User] My sister was a teacher of romance languages, and then, during the war, she went into the Navy. She was a Naval, what did they call them?

[Assistant] WAVES [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service]?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] My father and mother were born in Italy. My father came to the United States as a boy of 16, with very little money, and an eighth grade education. He let his children know he came to the United States so they could amount to something. My siblings, I had two brothers and two sisters. We all worked hard. Our mother had a sixth grade education. It’s a classic story of the first part of the 20th century, people coming from Europe and raising families in the United States.

[Assistant] What did your sisters do? You mentioned that one of them was going to Stanford, the youngest one.

[User] My sister was a teacher of romance languages, and then, during the war, she went into the Navy. She was a Naval, what did they call them?

[Assistant] WAVES [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service]?

[User] She was a WAVE, and spent most of the war in Hawaii, doing work for the WAVES. After the war, she went into the early days of the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], and was sent abroad in Southeast Asia.

[Assistant] That’s an interesting area to be in at that time in the history of the world, too.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] My sister was a teacher of romance languages, and then, during the war, she went into the Navy. She was a Naval, what did they call them?

[Assistant] WAVES [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service]?

[User] She was a WAVE, and spent most of the war in Hawaii, doing work for the WAVES. After the war, she went into the early days of the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], and was sent abroad in Southeast Asia.

[Assistant] That’s an interesting area to be in at that time in the history of the world, too.

[User] Yes, she did a lot of interesting things. After the war, she was assigned to the embassy in London [England], but she was doing work in a group that was studying what they should do about Fidel Castro in Cuba. They didn’t want to have this group in Washington for fear that it would be discovered. They wanted this group to work by itself without any notice, so they sent them to London. She was involved in that, and she went through a couple of marriages and then she became, after the war, in the CIA, and spent quite a few years in their office in Chile. She did all kinds of things.

[Assistant] Amazing woman. For the time period, that’s just amazing, what she did.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] She was a WAVE, and spent most of the war in Hawaii, doing work for the WAVES. After the war, she went into the early days of the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], and was sent abroad in Southeast Asia.

[Assistant] That’s an interesting area to be in at that time in the history of the world, too.

[User] Yes, she did a lot of interesting things. After the war, she was assigned to the embassy in London [England], but she was doing work in a group that was studying what they should do about Fidel Castro in Cuba. They didn’t want to have this group in Washington for fear that it would be discovered. They wanted this group to work by itself without any notice, so they sent them to London. She was involved in that, and she went through a couple of marriages and then she became, after the war, in the CIA, and spent quite a few years in their office in Chile. She did all kinds of things.

[Assistant] Amazing woman. For the time period, that’s just amazing, what she did.

[User] During the war, before she went into the WAVES, she applied for a job at Douglas Aircraft. She was living in Southern California. She wasn’t getting anywhere, so she sat down one evening and wrote a letter to Donald Douglas, the president of the company, in Spanish, and sent it to him. Two days later, she got a phone call from Douglas’ secretary, who said, “Come on in.” That was one way to get a job—to go around the Navy red tape.

[Assistant] You mentioned earlier that you had a student that later became the Center Director of NASA at Ames, and you also mentioned that when you were a student, your professors had told you about NACA, so what did you share with your students about the qualities of NACA?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] During the war, before she went into the WAVES, she applied for a job at Douglas Aircraft. She was living in Southern California. She wasn’t getting anywhere, so she sat down one evening and wrote a letter to Donald Douglas, the president of the company, in Spanish, and sent it to him. Two days later, she got a phone call from Douglas’ secretary, who said, “Come on in.” That was one way to get a job—to go around the Navy red tape.

[Assistant] You mentioned earlier that you had a student that later became the Center Director of NASA at Ames, and you also mentioned that when you were a student, your professors had told you about NACA, so what did you share with your students about the qualities of NACA?

[User] He was already employed at Ames, and when he was my student, he was given time off from his work at Ames to do his Ph.D. work. At that time, he and another of his colleagues from Ames were both my students, and they both did their Ph.D. research in related fields, so they both used to come to my office, the two of them together. Ames was closely involved, and another man that we hired very quickly after Washington started pushing money at us was Milton Van Dyke. We had quite a few. Ames was sending people over to us to take advanced training. We were creating quite a service for Ames. We had some excellent students as a result.

[Assistant] What lessons or what do you believe you learned while you worked at NACA that you could share with your students as valuable lessons to take to their jobs?

[User] Just talk very positively about Ames, as my professor had done, who had been, gosh, why can’t I remember his name? I did my dissertation under him.

[Assistant] We’ll have to see if we can find that for you.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Just talk very positively about Ames, as my professor had done, who had been, gosh, why can’t I remember his name? I did my dissertation under him.

[Assistant] We’ll have to see if we can find that for you.

[User] It’ll come to me, probably after you leave. He had worked for 10 years at Langley Field before he came to Stanford and had talked very positively about NACA, before Ames came into existence. Russell Robinson, who had graduated from Stanford in aeronautics 10 years before I did, had been his student. This professor became a full professor at Stanford at the age of 27. He was the youngest full professor, I think, at Stanford, maybe in any department, but at least certainly in the School of Engineering. He was quite a brilliant man, and he had written a book which was very important, which we used. So our professor, who was such a distinguished person in the field, had worked for NACA. That itself was testimony we didn’t have to hear about, we just knew. William Durand was, I think, the [second] chairman of NACA, and he was one of the people that had to do with the formation of NACA. NACA and Stanford had a close connection.

[Assistant] Did you have any regrets of going to Stanford at the time that the space age was beginning? You could have had an instrumental part.

[User] No, I felt very fortunate that I had done that because people needed this kind of education we were giving them. The country needed a department like ours, and we very quickly became, along with MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge] and Caltech, the three top departments in the United States—and still are. Those were the three outstanding aeronautical departments. A Stanford graduate was Brad [Bradford] Parkinson, who was the key man in putting up the global positioning satellite [GPS] system.

[Assistant] The list is long, isn’t it?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It’ll come to me, probably after you leave. He had worked for 10 years at Langley Field before he came to Stanford and had talked very positively about NACA, before Ames came into existence. Russell Robinson, who had graduated from Stanford in aeronautics 10 years before I did, had been his student. This professor became a full professor at Stanford at the age of 27. He was the youngest full professor, I think, at Stanford, maybe in any department, but at least certainly in the School of Engineering. He was quite a brilliant man, and he had written a book which was very important, which we used. So our professor, who was such a distinguished person in the field, had worked for NACA. That itself was testimony we didn’t have to hear about, we just knew. William Durand was, I think, the [second] chairman of NACA, and he was one of the people that had to do with the formation of NACA. NACA and Stanford had a close connection.

[Assistant] Did you have any regrets of going to Stanford at the time that the space age was beginning? You could have had an instrumental part.

[User] No, I felt very fortunate that I had done that because people needed this kind of education we were giving them. The country needed a department like ours, and we very quickly became, along with MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge] and Caltech, the three top departments in the United States—and still are. Those were the three outstanding aeronautical departments. A Stanford graduate was Brad [Bradford] Parkinson, who was the key man in putting up the global positioning satellite [GPS] system.

[Assistant] The list is long, isn’t it?

[User] After he got his doctor’s degree at Stanford, he went into the military, and then after he got out of the military, he came back and was a professor at Stanford. There has been that kind of thing going on.

[Assistant] Was it Elliott Reid [professor at Stanford]?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, I felt very fortunate that I had done that because people needed this kind of education we were giving them. The country needed a department like ours, and we very quickly became, along with MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge] and Caltech, the three top departments in the United States—and still are. Those were the three outstanding aeronautical departments. A Stanford graduate was Brad [Bradford] Parkinson, who was the key man in putting up the global positioning satellite [GPS] system.

[Assistant] The list is long, isn’t it?

[User] After he got his doctor’s degree at Stanford, he went into the military, and then after he got out of the military, he came back and was a professor at Stanford. There has been that kind of thing going on.

[Assistant] Was it Elliott Reid [professor at Stanford]?

[User] Elliott Reid, where did you get that?

[Assistant] Out of this article right here.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] After he got his doctor’s degree at Stanford, he went into the military, and then after he got out of the military, he came back and was a professor at Stanford. There has been that kind of thing going on.

[Assistant] Was it Elliott Reid [professor at Stanford]?

[User] Elliott Reid, where did you get that?

[Assistant] Out of this article right here.

[User] Yes, Elliott Reid, good heavens. I know that as well as I know my own name. What is that?

[Assistant] It’s an article that was from Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics. It’s a little history. I found it online.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Elliott Reid, where did you get that?

[Assistant] Out of this article right here.

[User] Yes, Elliott Reid, good heavens. I know that as well as I know my own name. What is that?

[Assistant] It’s an article that was from Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics. It’s a little history. I found it online.

[User] Is it about Reid?

[Assistant]
They mention him, but it talks about Durand and Reid and you and different people in the aeronautics department. It’s the history of the founding of that department.

Do you have any questions?

When they made you part of the Navy, when you couldn’t get the deferment and then you became a chief petty officer and you had people working under you that were higher ranked, during that time, did you still receive the same pay as you were before? Or did it revert to Navy pay?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, Elliott Reid, good heavens. I know that as well as I know my own name. What is that?

[Assistant] It’s an article that was from Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics. It’s a little history. I found it online.

[User] Is it about Reid?

[Assistant]
They mention him, but it talks about Durand and Reid and you and different people in the aeronautics department. It’s the history of the founding of that department.

Do you have any questions?

When they made you part of the Navy, when you couldn’t get the deferment and then you became a chief petty officer and you had people working under you that were higher ranked, during that time, did you still receive the same pay as you were before? Or did it revert to Navy pay?

[User] Navy pay. For the first six months or so, I lived there on the Naval base in the Navy dormitories. We were required to, and we went through boot camp. We were part of the Navy, for sure.

[Assistant] I was just wondering, since you had already been established at a federal level with Ames, and then you have to go into the Navy, was that a cut in pay?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Is it about Reid?

[Assistant]
They mention him, but it talks about Durand and Reid and you and different people in the aeronautics department. It’s the history of the founding of that department.

Do you have any questions?

When they made you part of the Navy, when you couldn’t get the deferment and then you became a chief petty officer and you had people working under you that were higher ranked, during that time, did you still receive the same pay as you were before? Or did it revert to Navy pay?

[User] Navy pay. For the first six months or so, I lived there on the Naval base in the Navy dormitories. We were required to, and we went through boot camp. We were part of the Navy, for sure.

[Assistant] I was just wondering, since you had already been established at a federal level with Ames, and then you have to go into the Navy, was that a cut in pay?

[User] Yes. Definitely.

[Assistant] Then people working under you were making, I would assume, more money than you because they were commissioned.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Navy pay. For the first six months or so, I lived there on the Naval base in the Navy dormitories. We were required to, and we went through boot camp. We were part of the Navy, for sure.

[Assistant] I was just wondering, since you had already been established at a federal level with Ames, and then you have to go into the Navy, was that a cut in pay?

[User] Yes. Definitely.

[Assistant] Then people working under you were making, I would assume, more money than you because they were commissioned.

[User] Yes, that’s right, but we didn’t think about that because the war, after all, there was a war going on. We were right here in California, worried about the Japanese. At Ames, the dirigible Macon was gone, but Moffett Field, the Navy station there was the base for blimps that went out over the Pacific here, patrolling, looking for Japanese submarines. There were 13 blimps in that hangar, and one day, in order to take some photographs, they put all 13 blimps in the air at the same time. They were all flying close to each other over Moffett Field, so that they could take a photograph of all 13 of them in one photograph. A fellow that shared the office with me, looking out the window, said, “Now, I know what it feels like to live in the bottom of a goldfish bowl.” Those blimps were all around us, day and night, they were always on patrol out here.

[Assistant] Did they beef up security at Ames during the war? Was it any different?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. Definitely.

[Assistant] Then people working under you were making, I would assume, more money than you because they were commissioned.

[User] Yes, that’s right, but we didn’t think about that because the war, after all, there was a war going on. We were right here in California, worried about the Japanese. At Ames, the dirigible Macon was gone, but Moffett Field, the Navy station there was the base for blimps that went out over the Pacific here, patrolling, looking for Japanese submarines. There were 13 blimps in that hangar, and one day, in order to take some photographs, they put all 13 blimps in the air at the same time. They were all flying close to each other over Moffett Field, so that they could take a photograph of all 13 of them in one photograph. A fellow that shared the office with me, looking out the window, said, “Now, I know what it feels like to live in the bottom of a goldfish bowl.” Those blimps were all around us, day and night, they were always on patrol out here.

[Assistant] Did they beef up security at Ames during the war? Was it any different?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Did you have, like now, when we go through the gates, we have to show a badge and that sort of thing because of security. Was it similar when you were there?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, that’s right, but we didn’t think about that because the war, after all, there was a war going on. We were right here in California, worried about the Japanese. At Ames, the dirigible Macon was gone, but Moffett Field, the Navy station there was the base for blimps that went out over the Pacific here, patrolling, looking for Japanese submarines. There were 13 blimps in that hangar, and one day, in order to take some photographs, they put all 13 blimps in the air at the same time. They were all flying close to each other over Moffett Field, so that they could take a photograph of all 13 of them in one photograph. A fellow that shared the office with me, looking out the window, said, “Now, I know what it feels like to live in the bottom of a goldfish bowl.” Those blimps were all around us, day and night, they were always on patrol out here.

[Assistant] Did they beef up security at Ames during the war? Was it any different?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Did you have, like now, when we go through the gates, we have to show a badge and that sort of thing because of security. Was it similar when you were there?

[User] Yes. I’ve forgotten the details, but yes. It was very much a Navy base.

[Assistant] Mr. Vincenti, were you working the day of Pearl Harbor [Naval Base, Hawaii, attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy, December 7, 1941]? Were you actually at work? I know it was a Sunday morning, but I don’t know if you were working.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Did you have, like now, when we go through the gates, we have to show a badge and that sort of thing because of security. Was it similar when you were there?

[User] Yes. I’ve forgotten the details, but yes. It was very much a Navy base.

[Assistant] Mr. Vincenti, were you working the day of Pearl Harbor [Naval Base, Hawaii, attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy, December 7, 1941]? Were you actually at work? I know it was a Sunday morning, but I don’t know if you were working.

[User] It was a Sunday morning?

[Assistant] I believe so.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. I’ve forgotten the details, but yes. It was very much a Navy base.

[Assistant] Mr. Vincenti, were you working the day of Pearl Harbor [Naval Base, Hawaii, attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy, December 7, 1941]? Were you actually at work? I know it was a Sunday morning, but I don’t know if you were working.

[User] It was a Sunday morning?

[Assistant] I believe so.

[User] No. I was playing tennis with one of my fellow workers from Ames, Carl [Carlton] Bioletti, who had been one of the three people working there when I was hired. I heard a car drive—we were playing tennis on a tennis court in the Stanford campus, and there was a street that went by—a car went by and I heard something about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. It had happened on a Sunday, as you say. I yelled across the net to Bioletti, who was on the other side, farther from the street, “Carl, the Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor.”\n\n He said, “That’s Orson Welles again.” Orson Welles had put on a show on the radio about some fictitious military happening [1938 War of the Worlds broadcast]. Afterwards, we found out it wasn’t Orson Welles. That evening, we were having dinner in the home of Carl Bioletti’s sister, in the hills back of Redwood City. On that evening, that woman was serving Japanese food for dinner, so there we were. We figured if word got around about that, they’ll come and raid us.

[Assistant] The years that you were able to do your research and your work at NACA, you were always seeking new challenges. How did you know what areas that you wanted to go into? How did you know what theoretical work you wanted to research?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. Engineers learn a lot from each other. I’m glad you found the name Elliott Reid because that would be troubling me the rest of the day.

[Assistant] I’m glad we could provide that for you.

[User] That’s one thing I find, that in getting old, the memory for names—because names are arbitrary. They don’t logically connect for anything else. I find it very difficult to remember names, some of the times, of people that I know them and I have to track them down in some way.

[Assistant] It’s good that it’s easier to track down now. We have more tools to find things.

[User] Yes, Google is a big help. I’ve used that to sit there at that thing [pointing to computer].

[Assistant] Are there other stories or experiences that you want to share with us today? Any other pieces of information that maybe haven’t been?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That’s one thing I find, that in getting old, the memory for names—because names are arbitrary. They don’t logically connect for anything else. I find it very difficult to remember names, some of the times, of people that I know them and I have to track them down in some way.

[Assistant] It’s good that it’s easier to track down now. We have more tools to find things.

[User] Yes, Google is a big help. I’ve used that to sit there at that thing [pointing to computer].

[Assistant] Are there other stories or experiences that you want to share with us today? Any other pieces of information that maybe haven’t been?

[User] No. I don’t think of anything else that pertains to—I’m trying to think if there’s anything more from Ames.

[Assistant] Any experiences in the wind tunnels that maybe you haven't shared before, talked about?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, Google is a big help. I’ve used that to sit there at that thing [pointing to computer].

[Assistant] Are there other stories or experiences that you want to share with us today? Any other pieces of information that maybe haven’t been?

[User] No. I don’t think of anything else that pertains to—I’m trying to think if there’s anything more from Ames.

[Assistant] Any experiences in the wind tunnels that maybe you haven't shared before, talked about?

[User] No. When I first went to work there, I worked on the design of the wind tunnels and when the 40 x 80 Full Scale Wind Tunnel was being built, they put me to work on the design of the doors that open above the test section of the wind tunnel. I didn’t have anything else to do with the 40 x 80, but I did design those doors. If you ever go to Ames and see the 40 x 80 doors open, those are my doors.\n\n When they were designing the laboratory in Cleveland of the NACA, what’s the name of that?

[Assistant] Lewis Research Center [now Glenn Research Center].


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No. I don’t think of anything else that pertains to—I’m trying to think if there’s anything more from Ames.

[Assistant] Any experiences in the wind tunnels that maybe you haven't shared before, talked about?

[User] No. When I first went to work there, I worked on the design of the wind tunnels and when the 40 x 80 Full Scale Wind Tunnel was being built, they put me to work on the design of the doors that open above the test section of the wind tunnel. I didn’t have anything else to do with the 40 x 80, but I did design those doors. If you ever go to Ames and see the 40 x 80 doors open, those are my doors.\n\n When they were designing the laboratory in Cleveland of the NACA, what’s the name of that?

[Assistant] Lewis Research Center [now Glenn Research Center].

[User] Yes, the Lewis Laboratory. We designed their refrigeration wind tunnel. Carl Bioletti was in charge of it and I was working with him. Their wind tunnel was a high speed, pressurized tunnel, but it was also a cool tunnel. I’m not quite sure why, but they wanted to run these at very cold temperatures. When the tunnel is running at cold temperatures, the shell of the tunnel tends to shrink and pull away from the reinforcing rings on the outside. Very fortunately, one of my top professors at Stanford was the great Stephen Timoshenko. Is that a name you’ve ever run into before?

[Assistant] Yes, when I was reading that history, I was reading about him.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Well, I got to the Ad[ministration] Building, which is here, Building 200, and there were not too many others. The big forty-by-eighty-foot wind tunnel was here. The sixteen-foot wind tunnel was here. The seven-by-tens were here, which were subsonic, and this building, which had a little supersonic wind tunnel in the back of it, was here, and this is where they sent me to work in January of ’47.

[Assistant] And this building is 207?

[User] It’s Building 207. So I’ve come full cycle in almost sixty years, and I’m back where I started, as a historian now, but I started here in this building working on the supersonic wind tunnel.

[Assistant] What was your official title when you started?

[User] I think P-1, Aeronautical Engineer, as simple as that. They had P-1s, P-2s, P-3s. That was the different grade levels, like GS [General Schedule] now. So just called P-1, Aero Engineer.

[Assistant] What were your first duties when you arrived here at Ames?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Other organizations—I gave papers away from Ames on occasion. Other Centers?

[Assistant] Other Centers or national organizations. Did you belong to any engineering organizations?

[User] Yes. It wasn’t called the AIAA then, it was called the American Institute of—I think it was AIA. Yes. There were organizations that young engineers, or old engineers, belonged to if they chose to, and they would have annual meetings on occasion, and you’d give papers there, too. You would publish papers. You’d give papers at the NACA conferences, and you’d give papers at academic locations or industry locations. I gave maybe half a dozen in that first six, ten years. Most of the time we spent on-site, writing, getting data and writing. Didn’t do much traveling in those early days. If we picked a conference to give a paper, it was usually not too far away, like L.A. [Los Angeles, California] or San Francisco [California], Washington [D.C.] sometimes.

[Assistant] Did you have the opportunity to visit any Laboratories while you were working with NACA?

[User] Some. You mean other than NACA. Did you mean NACA Labs?

[Assistant] Other NACA Labs


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. It wasn’t called the AIAA then, it was called the American Institute of—I think it was AIA. Yes. There were organizations that young engineers, or old engineers, belonged to if they chose to, and they would have annual meetings on occasion, and you’d give papers there, too. You would publish papers. You’d give papers at the NACA conferences, and you’d give papers at academic locations or industry locations. I gave maybe half a dozen in that first six, ten years. Most of the time we spent on-site, writing, getting data and writing. Didn’t do much traveling in those early days. If we picked a conference to give a paper, it was usually not too far away, like L.A. [Los Angeles, California] or San Francisco [California], Washington [D.C.] sometimes.

[Assistant] Did you have the opportunity to visit any Laboratories while you were working with NACA?

[User] Some. You mean other than NACA. Did you mean NACA Labs?

[Assistant] Other NACA Labs

[User] Yes, we went to Langley and Glenn [Research Center, previously called the NACA Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory, Cleveland, Ohio] and the desert; it was called Dryden [Edwards, California]. It was called the [NACA Muroc Flight Test Unit, renamed the NACA High-Speed Flight Research Station, and later called the NACA High-Speed Flight Station] in those days until it was named after Dr. [Hugh L.] Dryden. Yes, see, that’s all there were; there were just the four sites. The others hadn’t come about until after 1958.

[Assistant] When you went to these other Laboratories, what was the purpose of going?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Some. You mean other than NACA. Did you mean NACA Labs?

[Assistant] Other NACA Labs

[User] Yes, we went to Langley and Glenn [Research Center, previously called the NACA Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory, Cleveland, Ohio] and the desert; it was called Dryden [Edwards, California]. It was called the [NACA Muroc Flight Test Unit, renamed the NACA High-Speed Flight Research Station, and later called the NACA High-Speed Flight Station] in those days until it was named after Dr. [Hugh L.] Dryden. Yes, see, that’s all there were; there were just the four sites. The others hadn’t come about until after 1958.

[Assistant] When you went to these other Laboratories, what was the purpose of going?

[User] Mostly to review data other people had gotten that was similar to your own, or to coordinate on writing papers. But fundamentally it was exchanging information, each other’s, so you could take another step forward and not do the same thing they were doing. You usually kept up with them that way and with reading their papers. You became good friends with your competitors. Everybody always thought of them as friendly competitors, particularly in NACA days.

[Assistant] How much time would you spend down at one of the Laboratories when you would go?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, we went to Langley and Glenn [Research Center, previously called the NACA Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory, Cleveland, Ohio] and the desert; it was called Dryden [Edwards, California]. It was called the [NACA Muroc Flight Test Unit, renamed the NACA High-Speed Flight Research Station, and later called the NACA High-Speed Flight Station] in those days until it was named after Dr. [Hugh L.] Dryden. Yes, see, that’s all there were; there were just the four sites. The others hadn’t come about until after 1958.

[Assistant] When you went to these other Laboratories, what was the purpose of going?

[User] Mostly to review data other people had gotten that was similar to your own, or to coordinate on writing papers. But fundamentally it was exchanging information, each other’s, so you could take another step forward and not do the same thing they were doing. You usually kept up with them that way and with reading their papers. You became good friends with your competitors. Everybody always thought of them as friendly competitors, particularly in NACA days.

[Assistant] How much time would you spend down at one of the Laboratories when you would go?

[User] Two or three days. It took longer to get there, so you wouldn’t just go for an overnight visit.

[Assistant] Would you take the train?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Mostly to review data other people had gotten that was similar to your own, or to coordinate on writing papers. But fundamentally it was exchanging information, each other’s, so you could take another step forward and not do the same thing they were doing. You usually kept up with them that way and with reading their papers. You became good friends with your competitors. Everybody always thought of them as friendly competitors, particularly in NACA days.

[Assistant] How much time would you spend down at one of the Laboratories when you would go?

[User] Two or three days. It took longer to get there, so you wouldn’t just go for an overnight visit.

[Assistant] Would you take the train?

[User] No, I only took the train once. Our director here, who had been a pilot and had lost an eye during a crash, actually, promised his wife he’d never fly again, and he didn’t. He took the train when he went to Washington [D.C.]. I generally would fly. The first flights I was on was like the old DC-7s, which were slow; it took you seven and a half hours to get across the country.

[Assistant] Were those Ames planes?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Two or three days. It took longer to get there, so you wouldn’t just go for an overnight visit.

[Assistant] Would you take the train?

[User] No, I only took the train once. Our director here, who had been a pilot and had lost an eye during a crash, actually, promised his wife he’d never fly again, and he didn’t. He took the train when he went to Washington [D.C.]. I generally would fly. The first flights I was on was like the old DC-7s, which were slow; it took you seven and a half hours to get across the country.

[Assistant] Were those Ames planes?

[User] No. No, no. We didn’t have passenger planes. In fact, we’ve never basically had passenger planes that we owned. Most of them were research aircraft. We did have a few that could be utilized on occasion for passengers, but fundamentally we didn’t have passenger planes, no. It was all commercial.

[Assistant] Did you have the chance to visit other non-NACA laborator[ies]?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, I only took the train once. Our director here, who had been a pilot and had lost an eye during a crash, actually, promised his wife he’d never fly again, and he didn’t. He took the train when he went to Washington [D.C.]. I generally would fly. The first flights I was on was like the old DC-7s, which were slow; it took you seven and a half hours to get across the country.

[Assistant] Were those Ames planes?

[User] No. No, no. We didn’t have passenger planes. In fact, we’ve never basically had passenger planes that we owned. Most of them were research aircraft. We did have a few that could be utilized on occasion for passengers, but fundamentally we didn’t have passenger planes, no. It was all commercial.

[Assistant] Did you have the chance to visit other non-NACA laborator[ies]?

[User] We’d go to the company labs, like Boeing’s up north in Seattle [Washington], McDonnell in L.A. See, the West Coast had a tremendous number of aerospace labs. So I didn’t go—Texas, occasionally; used to be a place called Chance Vought in Fort Worth, Texas. I went there. They were the ones who built the supersonic bomber that used our techniques, called the B-58 bomber. So we’d go there, but mostly it was the West Coast labs. But, as I said, in the early days, like the first ten years, you didn’t do much traveling. Mostly people came to you to collect the data.

[Assistant] And when you went to these various laboratories, were you working on research, or what were you doing there?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Not much, no. We knew of their work, and Bob [Robert R.] Gilruth was running it at the time, as I recall. Some people here may have. I did not, no.

[Assistant] Who were some of the other people who were working on these studies with you?

[User] Well, people like Dave [David E.] Reese and Al [Alvin] Seiff. Harvey Allen, of course, guided us all. Vic [Victor L.] Peterson, who later became the Deputy Director here, worked on them. Another guy named [W.] Pat Peterson worked on the entry studies. Charlie Hall was my real mentor in doing some of the high-speed aerodynamics, which led to the conical camber work. And, of course, the ones I’ve mentioned before, Van Dyke and Vincenti and people like that who were here.

[Assistant] What do you think was the ultimate impact of your work on—

[User] Another guy, Murray Tobak, Murray Tobak. He came to the six-by-six about ’48 or ’49, and he was a dynamic stability guy, as opposed to pure static stability, which I tend to focus on. He was very helpful, and bright guy. He’s still around, actually. He retired a couple of years ago, but it’s another name. What was the next question?

[Assistant] What do you think has been the impact of your work on planetary probes?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Well, I guess it helped shape some of the probes and determine that there really was some real gas effects—other gas effects, like carbon [dioxide] and [nitrogen]—on certain shapes, so you had to be fairly selective about the shape you used and design it properly, depending on what planetary atmosphere you were going in and what its composition was, if you knew it. We now know pretty much that Mars and Venus are made up mostly of carbon dioxide, which is a very heavy gas; with some nitrogen; very, very little oxygen, if any. So a heavy gas causes a flow field that would be different than, say, nitrogen, so you have to understand the complexity of the different gas mixtures. So I think helping to start understanding that, long before we sent probes out to the planets.\n\n The ranges were great things to do this with, because you could get much higher speeds. See, the wind tunnels were limited to Mach numbers of about five, maybe ten. If you heated the air, you could get to ten. But these ranges could get velocities up to 15[000] or 20,000 miles per hour by firing the models, so you could get speeds approaching planetary entry speeds. Well, you couldn’t do that in the wind tunnels. You had to take the data and at the end, extrapolate as best you could. Now, each facility has its own disadvantages, but you use what you can and put them together. Al Seiff and Dave Reese were kind of precursors to working those range sort of problems, though.

[Assistant] While you were working at Ames, the Korean War began. What impact do you think that the Korean War had on Ames?

[User] What year was the Korean War?

[Assistant] I’m going to say ’52, ’53.

[User] It was fifty-something. Not noticeably. Not noticeably. A few people who were in the Reserves probably left. I know one I can recall. The Korean War really had not too much effect on the research we were doing, I don’t think.

[Assistant] I’ve heard there was some discussion of perhaps inducting members of Ames back into the Navy. Do you recall those discussions?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] What year was the Korean War?

[Assistant] I’m going to say ’52, ’53.

[User] It was fifty-something. Not noticeably. Not noticeably. A few people who were in the Reserves probably left. I know one I can recall. The Korean War really had not too much effect on the research we were doing, I don’t think.

[Assistant] I’ve heard there was some discussion of perhaps inducting members of Ames back into the Navy. Do you recall those discussions?

[User] A little bit, but I never took that awfully seriously. It could have been more serious than I thought, since I was just an engineer. We didn’t pay much attention to politics, actually, as we do now. Now we know. By reading NASA Watch, you know everything that’s happening to everybody every day, every hour. But at my level, we didn’t worry much about politics.\n\n One thing about it, the Center had a Financial Management Office with two people in it, two people. The money came in, in the NACA days, and these two people managed the whole budget. Now we have, what, fifty people in the Financial Management Office, and you look at every detail. Engineers at my level never worried about money, ever. We just did what we needed to do. We built the models and tested them, and nobody ever talked to us about dollars. Now, this changed soon after NASA started, probably in the sixties. Then you had to really pay more attention to your budget, I think.

[Assistant] What do you think was the impact of the Cold War on NACA?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Casual Friday or casual any day. I remember starting from bang, wearing a jacket and a tie. You were permitted to wear a sweater, as long as you wore a tie with it. So the dress code in the first ten or fifteen years, as I recall, was—there was never any debate. It didn’t seem strict. It was just something you did.\n\n The other reason for it, I think, in his view, was we had a lot of outside interface with company execs and engineers from other companies, and he just wanted the presentation to be right. I don’t recall that the women—it seems to me I don’t recall them wearing slacks in the early days, but I think that was typical wherever you were. It wasn’t just here. Women wore dresses to work, I think, at least in the early days. The ladies that worked in here did.\n\n It’s interesting, too, though, talk about the engineers marrying their computers. There were a number of engineers who really married their computers. I mean, they met them here, they worked with them here, and they married them. I didn’t happen to, but a number of my friends did, married the young ladies who were reducing the data for us.

[Assistant] Where did you meet your wife?

[User] I met her in Palo Alto [California], which is close by. I ordered some Christmas presents to send home to my family in Virginia. Came back a week later, and they arrived at my house in Palo Alto, and I went storming into this store. “These are Christmas presents that were supposed to be in Virginia. What do you mean sending them to my house here?”\n\n And she happened to be the one I—she didn’t do it, but she happened to be the one at the counter. She worked in this clothing store. So after raising hell with her, I asked her to go sailing. And she did, and that was fifty-five years ago. Fifty-six years ago; we’ve been married fifty-five years.

[Assistant] Congratulations.

[User] That’s a long time.

[Assistant] It is. … You’ve got a full house.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I met her in Palo Alto [California], which is close by. I ordered some Christmas presents to send home to my family in Virginia. Came back a week later, and they arrived at my house in Palo Alto, and I went storming into this store. “These are Christmas presents that were supposed to be in Virginia. What do you mean sending them to my house here?”\n\n And she happened to be the one I—she didn’t do it, but she happened to be the one at the counter. She worked in this clothing store. So after raising hell with her, I asked her to go sailing. And she did, and that was fifty-five years ago. Fifty-six years ago; we’ve been married fifty-five years.

[Assistant] Congratulations.

[User] That’s a long time.

[Assistant] It is. … You’ve got a full house.

[User] Yes, and my birthday was just held last month. There were twenty of us in the picture, so almost everybody was here, but one or two of them were missing. It was fun. Yes, putting them up that week was an interesting chore. We used a neighbor’s house and a motel uptown in Saratoga [California]; our house. But it worked. It just cost about $10,000 to feed them, I think. Or a lot. Fortunately, they all cook. And we had the swimming pool, so the kids were all happy, so that worked well. …

[Assistant] You mentioned that some of the engineers married their computers. Can you talk a little bit about social activities at the Laboratory while you worked for NACA?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That’s a long time.

[Assistant] It is. … You’ve got a full house.

[User] Yes, and my birthday was just held last month. There were twenty of us in the picture, so almost everybody was here, but one or two of them were missing. It was fun. Yes, putting them up that week was an interesting chore. We used a neighbor’s house and a motel uptown in Saratoga [California]; our house. But it worked. It just cost about $10,000 to feed them, I think. Or a lot. Fortunately, they all cook. And we had the swimming pool, so the kids were all happy, so that worked well. …

[Assistant] You mentioned that some of the engineers married their computers. Can you talk a little bit about social activities at the Laboratory while you worked for NACA?

[User] We didn’t go out socially too much. I guess most of us had three or four friends that we would interface with and have dinners with, and then our kids started growing up together with each other.\n\n One thing we did do, which I thought was fun. We’d have a Christmas party every Christmas, and this hangar down here, we’d put on a show in the hangar. For about two or three years, we had a barbershop quartet, and I was a member of it. But we put records on, and we mimed to the barbershop quartet. Nobody knew it for the first few times, and then they caught on. Santa Claus would come in in a helicopter. Can you believe us flying a helicopter into that hangar with Santa Claus now, with all the safety regulations? Every year we’d have something like that for the kids, and that went on probably for ten or fifteen years.\n\n But offsite, there was not a lot of gathering of large gatherings. They were two or three at a time. As I say, you’d have two or three of your friends.

[Assistant] Did you have any yearly picnics that were sponsored by the Lab?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] There were picnics. I don’t recall ever participating in them much. That was kind of spotty. Each branch or division would have a picnic, generally, not the whole Center. The only thing I recall the whole Center doing together was the Christmas parties, and, of course, the conferences that we had were sort of a bringing together of the technical family.

[Assistant] Were you involved in any intramural sports?

[User] I wasn’t. I never was good at sports. I liked to read and listen to music, and travel a little bit in those days. Now I’m tired of traveling. It’s been so many, so long. But my wife hasn’t gotten over traveling. She loves to do it. So I wasn’t, no. I wasn’t in sports. Even in high school, I wasn’t in sports.

[Assistant] When you first arrived at Ames, how did you get around the Laboratory? It seems fairly large now. How were you able to get around?

[User] Walk. Just walk. It’s not all that big. I still walk. It’s grown a fair amount, some of the outer forty, but you could walk from one place to the other in ten minutes, no problem. Cafeteria used to be over under the auditorium, not here, so that’s where people would gather from the outlying branches and buildings for lunch every day, and breakfast. The walking was no problem. A number of branches would keep two or three bicycles around, so some people used bicycles.

[Assistant] Let’s talk about the transition from NACA to NASA.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Mostly I took courses at the universities. We did some research grants. You’re given a university grant, and it’s kind of open-ended. You do what you want to, but in this field. So we had a few grants from Stanford and Caltech and places like that, but most of my interface with the universities was actually going back to learn. I went to the Stanford Sloan Program in ’65, which was an attempt to train engineers with some business sense, because none of us had any. Since that time, I think we’ve sent about eighteen people to the Stanford Sloan, and MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts] has a similar program of business. We focused on Stanford, I think.

[Assistant] And how long was that program?

[User] It’s a year. It’s a year long. You come out with an M.B.A. [Masters in Business Administration] of some kind in business.

[Assistant] If you had to look back over your career with NACA and pick one program or project that you thought was your most significant accomplishment, what do you think that would be?

[User] It would probably be a toss-up between the conical camber research that I did and the early planetary entry studies. It’s probably a toss-up between those two. One was aero oriented and one was space oriented, and they were both equally exciting in their time.

[Assistant] What do you think was your biggest challenge while you were working for NACA?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It’s a year. It’s a year long. You come out with an M.B.A. [Masters in Business Administration] of some kind in business.

[Assistant] If you had to look back over your career with NACA and pick one program or project that you thought was your most significant accomplishment, what do you think that would be?

[User] It would probably be a toss-up between the conical camber research that I did and the early planetary entry studies. It’s probably a toss-up between those two. One was aero oriented and one was space oriented, and they were both equally exciting in their time.

[Assistant] What do you think was your biggest challenge while you were working for NACA?

[User] NACA? Working around people who were much, much more brilliant than I was. It was fortunate, in a sense, because I learned a lot. But just to come in to work in the same office, the same building, with people like R. T. Jones and Harvey Allen and those folks, Dean Chapman, it was a real challenge. You always felt a little intimidated, and then when the outside ones came in, as I said, like von Karman, Lippman [phonetic], and Puckett [phonetic], who are famous names in the aviation world still, written books about the subject, that’s intimidating. I think that was my biggest challenge. It still is sometimes, but now I’ve gotten smart enough to know that I can tell them things they don’t know, too. Like von Karman said, “You know more about this subject than I do, even though I’m more brilliant than you are.” He didn’t quite say that.

[Assistant] When you first arrived, what sort of advice did R. T. Jones give to you as a young fledgling engineer?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It would probably be a toss-up between the conical camber research that I did and the early planetary entry studies. It’s probably a toss-up between those two. One was aero oriented and one was space oriented, and they were both equally exciting in their time.

[Assistant] What do you think was your biggest challenge while you were working for NACA?

[User] NACA? Working around people who were much, much more brilliant than I was. It was fortunate, in a sense, because I learned a lot. But just to come in to work in the same office, the same building, with people like R. T. Jones and Harvey Allen and those folks, Dean Chapman, it was a real challenge. You always felt a little intimidated, and then when the outside ones came in, as I said, like von Karman, Lippman [phonetic], and Puckett [phonetic], who are famous names in the aviation world still, written books about the subject, that’s intimidating. I think that was my biggest challenge. It still is sometimes, but now I’ve gotten smart enough to know that I can tell them things they don’t know, too. Like von Karman said, “You know more about this subject than I do, even though I’m more brilliant than you are.” He didn’t quite say that.

[Assistant] When you first arrived, what sort of advice did R. T. Jones give to you as a young fledgling engineer?

[User] He said, “Read. Read everything you can read about aerodynamics, about everybody.” He knew people; he even knew [Ludwig] Prandtl, who was another famous German aerodynamicist, and Max [M.] Munk, who trained him, another famous aerodynamicist at Langley. He said, “Just attach yourself to these people and learn from them.” So we did.

[Assistant] Can you give us a sense of how Ames has changed since ’47 until today?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] And it’s been fun.

[Assistant] What do you think has been your most significant accomplishment while working for NASA?

[User] While working for NASA, that would have been in the sixties, starting in the sixties. I’m not sure I did much. I did mostly management. It’s hard to define a management—I guess the most enjoyable thing, and probably the most useful thing, is I get along with people well, so I enjoyed working with people, and I could generally persuade them to do things they sometimes didn’t want to do. Most of them have turned out, they’ve come back and said, “Gee, I’m really glad I did that.” So I think mostly in the personnel relationship with NASA, because I’d done all the technical stuff, actually, before that.\n\n Getting people hooked up together. I enjoy getting the right people hooked up, at whatever Center they may be, to pursue a project or a program. I did the same thing in Texas, to a large degree, but I was called the Chancellor for Research, but that’s not the only thing we focused on, because that was a good opportunity to teach and interface with students.

[Assistant] What do you think was your biggest challenge while working in management?

[User] I think doing just what I said, trying to get people to go along a path you’d like to see them go for the benefit of both them and the agency. It’s always tough. They have their own idea of what they want to do, and sometimes they may be right. But you’ve got an objective, they’ve got an objective, and to make them meet somehow is the best of all possible worlds, so I think that’s it.

[Assistant] I just had one additional question. You had mentioned John Denver. Was there anyone, other famous people, who came while you were working at NACA?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] My kids had the advantage of meeting a lot of these people, too, which they loved, particularly the astronauts who would come by.

[Assistant] How exciting.

[User] We knew one of the astronauts you might know. Did you know Al [Alfred M.] Worden? He was Apollo 15.

[Assistant] No.

[User] He worked here for three or four years after the mission, and he married a young lady from Spain who was a bullfighter, and the headline around here was “Astronaut and Bullfighter Wed.” They had a big party for them. But she really was apparently the second-ranked bullfighter in Spain at the time. …

[Assistant] Now, I know you made some notes. Is there anything that we might have overlooked or something that you’d like to talk about?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] We knew one of the astronauts you might know. Did you know Al [Alfred M.] Worden? He was Apollo 15.

[Assistant] No.

[User] He worked here for three or four years after the mission, and he married a young lady from Spain who was a bullfighter, and the headline around here was “Astronaut and Bullfighter Wed.” They had a big party for them. But she really was apparently the second-ranked bullfighter in Spain at the time. …

[Assistant] Now, I know you made some notes. Is there anything that we might have overlooked or something that you’d like to talk about?

[User] Yes. My wife of fifty-five years, who stuck with this the whole time, having kids while I traveled, sending five kids to college with not much money. How she did it, I don’t know. And now that the kids are all finished and they come back home, she’s having her fun traveling. She loves to travel, and I’m tired of it. I do go to Hawaii with her. I like to go to Hawaii.\n\n I don’t think we’ve missed much.

[Assistant] All right. Well, I thank you very much for your time today. I very much enjoyed it.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] We knew it was dangerous, but we didn’t know how dangerous. I didn’t think it was a very good thing for him to do, but he did that. I think that got resolved—they actually went in and cleaned up the home. Radioactivity is dangerous, but you can find it because of Geiger counters, you know where it is. They did take care of that, but that was something that stood back in my mind. What time period is this? Probably 1956, because I got married in ’56, so it would be about that—’56, ’57.

[Assistant] When you first started out there, we’ve heard that they had classes and training programs, sometimes, that they would send people around to learn different things. Did you have any kind of training when you first started, since you were fresh out of college?

[User] I don’t remember that. I did a lot of training, but I don’t remember any training when I was with NACA. With NASA, I remember quite a bit of training, but I don’t remember any with NACA. I don’t remember going to any classes, although I did get a master’s degree while I was with NACA. They gave us time off from work to go to school, and then I did that and night school, and so on. I got a master’s in 1954. I had a bachelor’s in 1951, but I got a master’s in 1954.

[Assistant] Where were you located on site?

[User] M&S building, it was called, and I don’t even know the number of it anymore. It was called the M&S building, Materials and Structures building. For a while, we were in a room that we called the DP room. They called it dislocated persons, or something like that, where they put the people that had not gotten clearance because you had to go through a major clearance to get into that building because that’s where the cyclotron was. Eventually, I got that clearance, and so I was in that building someplace.

[Assistant] What did it entail to get that clearance?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I don’t remember that. I did a lot of training, but I don’t remember any training when I was with NACA. With NASA, I remember quite a bit of training, but I don’t remember any with NACA. I don’t remember going to any classes, although I did get a master’s degree while I was with NACA. They gave us time off from work to go to school, and then I did that and night school, and so on. I got a master’s in 1954. I had a bachelor’s in 1951, but I got a master’s in 1954.

[Assistant] Where were you located on site?

[User] M&S building, it was called, and I don’t even know the number of it anymore. It was called the M&S building, Materials and Structures building. For a while, we were in a room that we called the DP room. They called it dislocated persons, or something like that, where they put the people that had not gotten clearance because you had to go through a major clearance to get into that building because that’s where the cyclotron was. Eventually, I got that clearance, and so I was in that building someplace.

[Assistant] What did it entail to get that clearance?

[User] FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] checking you, checking your family, and so on. I remember my family saying, “Did you know that somebody called here?” or “Somebody visited us,” or something like that. That’s all I recall on that. I know you’re going to eventually get into 1958, but do you have any other questions before that time period?

[Assistant] We were talking about some of those earlier projects. You said that you went to a laser system—was that still within NACA?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] M&S building, it was called, and I don’t even know the number of it anymore. It was called the M&S building, Materials and Structures building. For a while, we were in a room that we called the DP room. They called it dislocated persons, or something like that, where they put the people that had not gotten clearance because you had to go through a major clearance to get into that building because that’s where the cyclotron was. Eventually, I got that clearance, and so I was in that building someplace.

[Assistant] What did it entail to get that clearance?

[User] FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] checking you, checking your family, and so on. I remember my family saying, “Did you know that somebody called here?” or “Somebody visited us,” or something like that. That’s all I recall on that. I know you’re going to eventually get into 1958, but do you have any other questions before that time period?

[Assistant] We were talking about some of those earlier projects. You said that you went to a laser system—was that still within NACA?

[User] That was still with NACA, yes, and we were interested in lasers. At that time, we didn’t know exactly what they could do, like we know today, but we wanted to know what the effect of different things was on lasers. I had done some experiments with, it was called a ruby laser at that time, and boy, I can hardly remember. Different temperatures, different reactions on a ruby laser and what it did to that. I think I even wrote a paper on that, but I don’t remember that very well. This was a long time ago, you know?

[Assistant] Yes, I know. We’re asking you to stretch that memory a little, aren’t we? Let’s talk about some of those early years, and as you mentioned, you got to organize a picnic, and the feeling at the site at that time, when people were first working here in the NACA, we’ve heard people describe it as a campus, or very congenial.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I guess so. If you want to go on to that, we will, but if you want to go back to NACA, we can do that.

[Assistant] We can talk about NACA for a while. You mentioned the events and everything. I was thinking about the open houses, and when people would actually come here to Lewis, famous people or dignitaries.

[User] Yes. I sort of remember [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower being here at one time. I don’t know when that was, but I sort of remember that. We did have open houses. I wasn’t so much involved in those except that we were all asked to do something at an open house. Whoever came around looked at everything. It was kind of interesting. Then, you had to spruce everything up and get everything working properly. That’s basically what I remember about that.

[Assistant] The projects you were working on, were they assigned? You said you were good at organizing and you tended to set things up and then get it going, and then go to the next thing. Were those assignments that came down, or did you have the freedom to see that something needed to be done?

[User] No, these were all assignments, at that time. Somebody had an idea and they wanted to create something or make a test on something, and they were all assigned projects. It didn’t get until later on where at least for me, where I had the opportunity to modify what was going on, some ideas I had to see if they really worked, but I had the freedom to do that, but that was later on.

[Assistant] When setting those things up, did you actually have anything to do with setting up, like, testing rigs?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. I sort of remember [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower being here at one time. I don’t know when that was, but I sort of remember that. We did have open houses. I wasn’t so much involved in those except that we were all asked to do something at an open house. Whoever came around looked at everything. It was kind of interesting. Then, you had to spruce everything up and get everything working properly. That’s basically what I remember about that.

[Assistant] The projects you were working on, were they assigned? You said you were good at organizing and you tended to set things up and then get it going, and then go to the next thing. Were those assignments that came down, or did you have the freedom to see that something needed to be done?

[User] No, these were all assignments, at that time. Somebody had an idea and they wanted to create something or make a test on something, and they were all assigned projects. It didn’t get until later on where at least for me, where I had the opportunity to modify what was going on, some ideas I had to see if they really worked, but I had the freedom to do that, but that was later on.

[Assistant] When setting those things up, did you actually have anything to do with setting up, like, testing rigs?

[User] Exactly, exactly.

[Assistant] Talk about working with the technical services groups and maybe photographers or whoever you worked with on some of that.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Exactly, exactly.

[Assistant] Talk about working with the technical services groups and maybe photographers or whoever you worked with on some of that.

[User] Actually, I worked with just about everybody at the laboratory. I had an excellent experience with technical services. We had what we called mechanics in our building that we worked in. They were all part of technical services, but they were assigned to different buildings. They were all excellent. They were excellent teachers to me. For some reason or other, they helped me. I guess they liked me. They showed me how to operate all the machines. I was able to operate a lathe, a milling machine, a grinding machine, all those machines that the mechanics use. They showed me how to operate so I could do that, which helped me in the future, so that when I needed to draw a plan for something to be built, I knew how to design it so that it could be built. They didn’t have to come back to me and say, “I can’t do it that way; you have to do it this way.” I knew that ahead of time because of the teaching that they did. I was very fortunate to have that.\n\n I met with technical services. When I wrote papers, I had to meet with the people who, at that time, were the typists who typed the papers out. It’s so different now, with computers, I just can’t imagine. Every time you made an error, you had to sort of retype it. They didn’t have copy machines, even, then. That’s hard to remember, that they didn’t have copy machines. If you made an error, you had to do it over again. I worked with the photographers many times. Just about everybody at the laboratory, yes.

[Assistant] It’s interesting that the photography had so much to do with what people got out of these tests.

[User] Absolutely.

[Assistant] If you don’t mind, just for a moment, if you can recall working with the types of photography that may have helped with some of the work that you were doing?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, space flights.

[Assistant] Talk about that transition between NACA to NASA.

[User] That happened in 1958, in October ’58. We were all quite interested and happy about that, but there was some dissension, and I’ll tell you why. There were a number of people here who were well-qualified to do anything. At that time, they hired in a bunch of new people because we expanded, obviously, to become NASA. They hired in a bunch of people to be project managers, etc., and they hired them at a higher grade rate than the people that were working here. There were a lot of people who were quite annoyed at that.\n\n I don’t think it changed the quality of the work at all, but there were a lot of people that were annoyed that they could have done that job if they had been told to do that, but they were not asked. They brought in new people at a higher rate, and there was a lot of problems with that.\n\n What else happened? I think everybody took on the new tasks that were assigned and recognized that we had a race on our hands, basically, to do what we could. Everybody just buckled down and did what they were supposed to do.

[Assistant] You mentioned earlier that you don’t recall the training so much in NACA, but you do in NASA. Was it at that time that you started different training?

[User] No, it was actually later, when I got in to training.

[Assistant] What were you working on after the transition?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That’s what I did, and then I mentioned the LESAC in ’63, got involved in that. That LESAC took quite a bit of time, but the Director wanted us to do that. He thought it was good for the laboratory to get together and party together. I think the idea was if you partied together, you could work together better. As I said, we had two functions a month. One was a function which was lab-wide but involved wives, you could bring your wife into the party, picnic, whatever, dance, it was. The other one was solely for a mixer for the people at the laboratory. They happened on the weekends; they did not happen during work time, but they happened on a Saturday, usually. That kept you pretty busy.\n\n We didn’t take work time off—we did it after work, so it was Friday afternoons or in the evenings, or so on. It was interesting. We did a lot of it. We had a lot of fun, actually, the people had a lot of fun. It was a big, big group of friendly people, actually, as I recall it, and they all looked forward to these parties. They were well attended. We were young then, actually. It was interesting.

[Assistant] That is something because I know in this Center and a lot of Centers, so many people were young, and it was a very exciting, young, vibrant time.

[User] It was, it really was. Everybody was excited about the work we were doing. In spite of that downside, that thing that I mentioned before, that didn’t seem to alter the working system, it was really good.

[Assistant] The spirit of it.

[User] The spirit was excellent, yes.

[Assistant] In the early years with NACA and when you first started working there, it seemed like a lot of the work that they were doing was in partnerships or helped to benefit industry and other things like that. Then, once it became NASA the goal changed.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was, it really was. Everybody was excited about the work we were doing. In spite of that downside, that thing that I mentioned before, that didn’t seem to alter the working system, it was really good.

[Assistant] The spirit of it.

[User] The spirit was excellent, yes.

[Assistant] In the early years with NACA and when you first started working there, it seemed like a lot of the work that they were doing was in partnerships or helped to benefit industry and other things like that. Then, once it became NASA the goal changed.

[User] There was very little of that because there weren’t very many people working on space systems at that time. Now, because once they got developed, of course, now there’s a lot of technology transfer going on, but at that time, there was very little. It was all done by NASA at that time, and the NASA people. In fact, I think we had very few outside contractors at the time, and that was kind of interesting, too. That was a new environment that we had to get used to, the outside contractors.

[Assistant] Did that happen pretty quickly after it switched to NASA?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] The spirit was excellent, yes.

[Assistant] In the early years with NACA and when you first started working there, it seemed like a lot of the work that they were doing was in partnerships or helped to benefit industry and other things like that. Then, once it became NASA the goal changed.

[User] There was very little of that because there weren’t very many people working on space systems at that time. Now, because once they got developed, of course, now there’s a lot of technology transfer going on, but at that time, there was very little. It was all done by NASA at that time, and the NASA people. In fact, I think we had very few outside contractors at the time, and that was kind of interesting, too. That was a new environment that we had to get used to, the outside contractors.

[Assistant] Did that happen pretty quickly after it switched to NASA?

[User] I don’t remember when it happened, but I know little by little, more and more outside contractors came in. I’m going to say we had, like, 5,000 people at one time, and I don’t remember how many were civil servants and how many were outside contractors. The only difference between the two is that they got paid from somebody else rather than from NASA. I don’t remember anything that said, “Oh, Jerry, you’re just an outside contractor.” I don’t think there was any difference there. They were treated the same as a NASA employee.

[Assistant] Even with the social events, did they participate?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] There was very little of that because there weren’t very many people working on space systems at that time. Now, because once they got developed, of course, now there’s a lot of technology transfer going on, but at that time, there was very little. It was all done by NASA at that time, and the NASA people. In fact, I think we had very few outside contractors at the time, and that was kind of interesting, too. That was a new environment that we had to get used to, the outside contractors.

[Assistant] Did that happen pretty quickly after it switched to NASA?

[User] I don’t remember when it happened, but I know little by little, more and more outside contractors came in. I’m going to say we had, like, 5,000 people at one time, and I don’t remember how many were civil servants and how many were outside contractors. The only difference between the two is that they got paid from somebody else rather than from NASA. I don’t remember anything that said, “Oh, Jerry, you’re just an outside contractor.” I don’t think there was any difference there. They were treated the same as a NASA employee.

[Assistant] Even with the social events, did they participate?

[User] Yes, I think they were invited to the social events. I can’t swear to that, but I think they were, because they had badges, they came into the laboratory.

[Assistant] On the notes you gave me, right before you said that you’d been an active member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers since 1966, and you’ve served as chairman on numerous committees, and internationally recognized photovoltaic expert?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I don’t remember when it happened, but I know little by little, more and more outside contractors came in. I’m going to say we had, like, 5,000 people at one time, and I don’t remember how many were civil servants and how many were outside contractors. The only difference between the two is that they got paid from somebody else rather than from NASA. I don’t remember anything that said, “Oh, Jerry, you’re just an outside contractor.” I don’t think there was any difference there. They were treated the same as a NASA employee.

[Assistant] Even with the social events, did they participate?

[User] Yes, I think they were invited to the social events. I can’t swear to that, but I think they were, because they had badges, they came into the laboratory.

[Assistant] On the notes you gave me, right before you said that you’d been an active member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers since 1966, and you’ve served as chairman on numerous committees, and internationally recognized photovoltaic expert?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] You want to talk about that for a minute?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, I think they were invited to the social events. I can’t swear to that, but I think they were, because they had badges, they came into the laboratory.

[Assistant] On the notes you gave me, right before you said that you’d been an active member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers since 1966, and you’ve served as chairman on numerous committees, and internationally recognized photovoltaic expert?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] You want to talk about that for a minute?

[User] Solar cells—photovoltaics is a fancy word for solar cells—was basically my career. That’s what I did. I worked on developing power systems. Part of that overall area was that, and I mentioned it in the notes that I was on a Space Station task force, that went to [NASA] Headquarters for a year with a group of NASA people from all the Centers, and we essentially developed the Space Station Program.

[Assistant] What year was that?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] You want to talk about that for a minute?

[User] Solar cells—photovoltaics is a fancy word for solar cells—was basically my career. That’s what I did. I worked on developing power systems. Part of that overall area was that, and I mentioned it in the notes that I was on a Space Station task force, that went to [NASA] Headquarters for a year with a group of NASA people from all the Centers, and we essentially developed the Space Station Program.

[Assistant] What year was that?

[User] In 1984; ’83, ‘84 is when I went to Headquarters, but in 1984, January, it was my recollection, President [Ronald] Reagan announced the Space Station Program. We were part of that task team, and that was an interesting time of life. I had moved to Washington [DC] for a year, and the system allowed us to come home once a month, which I did. My wife traveled to Washington to visit me once a month, so I got to see her every couple of weeks. Back to organizing things again, they had a party for this task force, and guess who organized it? I don’t know how it happened—I don’t know if they were looking at history, or what.

[Assistant] Your reputation preceded you, I guess.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Perhaps, perhaps, but I organized that party for the Space Station task force, as a matter of fact. That went also very well. That was a good time period, too. That was very exciting. It was a good group of people. They were all interested in getting the job done. In fact, they did do the job, they did have a Space Station Program. There were people from all the Centers, which was quite helpful, got to meet a lot of different people. Interestingly enough, they’re pretty much the same, regardless of where you came from.\n\n That was a different kind of environment. You didn’t work in the laboratory, you didn’t do any tests, it was all head work and organizing and creating and designing and just matching things together and seeing what’s the best here and what’s the worst here, and so on. That was a good group. That was very interesting. I enjoyed it a lot. I can’t tell you much more about it except I can’t give you any details. We had a lot of meetings and a lot of interaction.

[Assistant] And your wife got to come to Washington?

[User] She came once a month. She came once a month and I went home once a month, so I got to see her for two weeks. When she came up to Washington, she would bring some friends of ours, and we would party that weekend. It was kind of fun.

[Assistant] A nice opportunity.

[User] It was. Then, of course, there’s very many things to see in Washington, which you don’t normally—unless you get there. We got to see a lot of things that we would not have.

[Assistant] Right, on just a vacation or something, yes. Quite different if you live there.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] She came once a month. She came once a month and I went home once a month, so I got to see her for two weeks. When she came up to Washington, she would bring some friends of ours, and we would party that weekend. It was kind of fun.

[Assistant] A nice opportunity.

[User] It was. Then, of course, there’s very many things to see in Washington, which you don’t normally—unless you get there. We got to see a lot of things that we would not have.

[Assistant] Right, on just a vacation or something, yes. Quite different if you live there.

[User] My kids were in college at the time, or just graduating from college, so they were busy creating their careers. I guess my two sons did come to see me in Washington, and that was kind of interesting, too. It was a fun time.

[Assistant] What did you do when you came back here?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was. Then, of course, there’s very many things to see in Washington, which you don’t normally—unless you get there. We got to see a lot of things that we would not have.

[Assistant] Right, on just a vacation or something, yes. Quite different if you live there.

[User] My kids were in college at the time, or just graduating from college, so they were busy creating their careers. I guess my two sons did come to see me in Washington, and that was kind of interesting, too. It was a fun time.

[Assistant] What did you do when you came back here?

[User] When I came back here, I think I became a deputy division chief of an organization on advanced development, is what I recall. It was primarily for the Space Station, worked on advanced development systems, actually. I’m trying to remember the projects we worked on. Why is that part a blank?

[Assistant] I don’t know, I could probably try to guess, but maybe they weren’t as exciting as maybe some of the others?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] My kids were in college at the time, or just graduating from college, so they were busy creating their careers. I guess my two sons did come to see me in Washington, and that was kind of interesting, too. It was a fun time.

[Assistant] What did you do when you came back here?

[User] When I came back here, I think I became a deputy division chief of an organization on advanced development, is what I recall. It was primarily for the Space Station, worked on advanced development systems, actually. I’m trying to remember the projects we worked on. Why is that part a blank?

[Assistant] I don’t know, I could probably try to guess, but maybe they weren’t as exciting as maybe some of the others?

[User] No, they were—they were exciting, but I don’t know why. I’d have to think about that.

[Assistant]
That’s okay, and you can always add it later. That’s not a problem.

The [Space] Shuttle Program had started, too.

Yes, during that time period.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That was right before I retired. They decided to make the External Affairs office into an External Programs Directorate. It was basically the same people. They added some additional responsibilities, and they brought in somebody from the outside to be the Director. I was the Associate Director or Assistant Director. At that time, in my mind, the office became involved in a lot of political things, and it wasn’t to my liking. I had been here for 41 years, so it was time to retire, so I retired. Then, that’s a whole new life.

[Assistant] Looking back over NACA and maybe those first early years in NASA, which project, or what do you think you did that would be your most significant contribution to the program at that time?

[User] You mean other than the parties?

[Assistant] Yes, other than the parties.

[User] I think a significant thing was the LDEF experiment that I mentioned. I don’t know if there was anything outstanding. I did co-invent, and I’m not sure anything came of it, something called solar cell shingles. They were solar cells that you could put on the roof of a house, but they were really antiquated compared to what they’re doing now. We had a technique for making flexible solar cells, they were in flexible systems, and we actually made some shingles that you could put on the roof of the house and connect them together. I have a patent on that, but nothing came of that patent.\n\n This was the days before they have the system that they have now, where you created a patent, it was NASA’s patent, and you couldn’t get anything from it. Nowadays, if you have a patent, you can collect royalties from it. I couldn’t do that, and I don’t think anybody would want that patent, anyhow. It was the beginning of solar cell shingles, anyhow. I’m not sure anybody else developed the shingle for the roof of a house before then, but that’s what we did.

[Assistant] That’s very interesting.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] You mean other than the parties?

[Assistant] Yes, other than the parties.

[User] I think a significant thing was the LDEF experiment that I mentioned. I don’t know if there was anything outstanding. I did co-invent, and I’m not sure anything came of it, something called solar cell shingles. They were solar cells that you could put on the roof of a house, but they were really antiquated compared to what they’re doing now. We had a technique for making flexible solar cells, they were in flexible systems, and we actually made some shingles that you could put on the roof of the house and connect them together. I have a patent on that, but nothing came of that patent.\n\n This was the days before they have the system that they have now, where you created a patent, it was NASA’s patent, and you couldn’t get anything from it. Nowadays, if you have a patent, you can collect royalties from it. I couldn’t do that, and I don’t think anybody would want that patent, anyhow. It was the beginning of solar cell shingles, anyhow. I’m not sure anybody else developed the shingle for the roof of a house before then, but that’s what we did.

[Assistant] That’s very interesting.

[User] It was interesting, yes. When I look back at it, I wouldn’t take that patent and try to build something like that. It was a precursor of some of the later ones, yes.

[Assistant] That seems NACA did that a lot, that they led other research being done in the industry.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I think a significant thing was the LDEF experiment that I mentioned. I don’t know if there was anything outstanding. I did co-invent, and I’m not sure anything came of it, something called solar cell shingles. They were solar cells that you could put on the roof of a house, but they were really antiquated compared to what they’re doing now. We had a technique for making flexible solar cells, they were in flexible systems, and we actually made some shingles that you could put on the roof of the house and connect them together. I have a patent on that, but nothing came of that patent.\n\n This was the days before they have the system that they have now, where you created a patent, it was NASA’s patent, and you couldn’t get anything from it. Nowadays, if you have a patent, you can collect royalties from it. I couldn’t do that, and I don’t think anybody would want that patent, anyhow. It was the beginning of solar cell shingles, anyhow. I’m not sure anybody else developed the shingle for the roof of a house before then, but that’s what we did.

[Assistant] That’s very interesting.

[User] It was interesting, yes. When I look back at it, I wouldn’t take that patent and try to build something like that. It was a precursor of some of the later ones, yes.

[Assistant] That seems NACA did that a lot, that they led other research being done in the industry.

[User] They did a significant amount that way, yes, they did that.

[Assistant] Is there any other memories of things that you worked on that we haven’t talked about?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was interesting, yes. When I look back at it, I wouldn’t take that patent and try to build something like that. It was a precursor of some of the later ones, yes.

[Assistant] That seems NACA did that a lot, that they led other research being done in the industry.

[User] They did a significant amount that way, yes, they did that.

[Assistant] Is there any other memories of things that you worked on that we haven’t talked about?

[User] Nothing comes to mind right now, but probably when I go home, I’ll say.

[Assistant]
That’s fine, and you can certainly do that. I was going to ask Rebecca if she had any questions, if you don’t mind?

I’ve just got a couple. One is you mentioned so much about the reports—what are your thoughts, or what were you told when you first got here about the importance of documenting your work and doing reports?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] They did a significant amount that way, yes, they did that.

[Assistant] Is there any other memories of things that you worked on that we haven’t talked about?

[User] Nothing comes to mind right now, but probably when I go home, I’ll say.

[Assistant]
That’s fine, and you can certainly do that. I was going to ask Rebecca if she had any questions, if you don’t mind?

I’ve just got a couple. One is you mentioned so much about the reports—what are your thoughts, or what were you told when you first got here about the importance of documenting your work and doing reports?

[User] I knew that reports were important. They were not the same as they are today, where what’s the word, I guess, that they use about having it written down? People in academia have a—

[Assistant]
Like they publish or die, that sort of thing?

Publish or perish?