Autobiography of William Francis Steagall Sr. Jan. 11, 2013
By
Autobiography of William Francis Steagall Sr
01-11-13
Story by William F. Steagall, Editing by Richard Parks
Richard Parks
“The best thing that has ever happened to me was marrying Barbara Louise Ambrozy,” William Steagall.
I began writing this autobiography after spending all night fishing with my Dad. We were at a lake near Gaffney, South Carolina in the Fall of 1982. Well, Dad fished while we tallied. During the night, I asked Dad about his experiences as a boy and young man. The next day - after sleeping all morning! - I wrote all that I could recall of what Dad told me of his early life. He and I went through three of four revisions before he reluctantly agreed that there was not much wrong with what I had recorded. That became Dad's biography and is in the Family Hedge. I now regret not asking Dad to tell me all he could of his parents. A bit later it occurred to me that my children might like to have a short account of my experiences, so I wrote the first version of this autobiography. There have been several revisions. The January, 1997 revision was written at my daughter’s (Nancy) request to better cover my time at Univac (in particular my patented inventions), my experience on the space program (Apollo and Saturn), our experiences with Mexican customs officials, and my translation of documents from Spanish to English for a friend in the State of Baja California Sur Health Department.
I have not been able to resist including many of what my children call “Dad Stories” - anecdotes about events and people I like to remember and tell to bore others.
I am a Southerner at heart. That I have lived in the South only a small part of my life does not matter in my heart. Just as my Dad was a Virginian first and foremost, and my Mother a South Carolinian, while I liked living in California and also living in Mexico, I am a Southerner. That is so even though I have lived in La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico longer than in any other place.
Infancy and earlier.
Let me begin with Walter, a Virginian, who in 1924 had a shop where he serviced and rebuilt automobile batteries. Yes, in those days, and even up to WW II, automobile batteries were rebuilt with new plates, separators and fresh sulfuric acid. Walter had an Indian motorcycle which he decided to ride to Florida in that Spring of 1924. Of course the roads were all dirt. When he reached the small town of Gaffney, SC he found himself in a rainstorm. He pulled up under a shed roof in front, as it happened, of the local battery shop. There Walter saw a man, Forest Barnhill, working on a battery, but without the skills he needed to reconnect the three cells of the battery by 'lead burning', a form of welding, to the lead straps connecting the battery cells. Walter offered his help, which was accepted. The rain continued, even got worse. As evening approached, Forest suggested that Walter put his Indian motorcycle in the shop and spend the night with him at Forest's parent's home. “There are nine of us kids at home and Mom won't mind another face at the table.” Forest told Walter, who accepted and that evening met Blanche Ethel Barnhill, Forest's sister and my Mom-to-be after she and Walter married. So, without that Indian motorcycle, Uncle Forest's problem and a rainstorm, I would not be here to write this.
I was born at Forest City, North Carolina, on April 3, 1926, the second child of the marriage of Walter Washington Steagall, as I said, a Virginian, and Blanche Ethel Barnhill a South Carolinian raised on a farm near Gaffney, South Carolina. Forest City is in the southwest corner of the State of North Carolina, near the border with South Carolina. Dad had set up his battery shop there. My older sister, Colleen, had died in her first year of infancy, before I was born, dying of what was then called "the colic". We would now call it diarrhea. Mother often told me that Dr. James Sanders, MD, kept me from that fate with a mixture of pepsin and prepared chalk. I think that is what we now call "Pepto Bismol." By such small things are lives spared. A few months after my birth, the family moved to Gaffney. Forest City, NC had been bypassed by the construction of the #29 highway, leaving Dad's shop in a poor location. We stayed in Gaffney a short while and then moved to Detroit in 1928. My sister, Shannon, had been born at Gaffney.
The Detroit years.
My preteen years were spent in Detroit. My brother, Norman, was born there in 1929. I have one early memory of what was Forest City or Gaffney, and a little of Gaffney before we moved North, but most of my early memories are of Detroit. I recall a Victorian house (On Second St.?) where we lived when I was three. It had a large (to me!) lawn and an iron fence. My sister, Shannon, and I played in the vestibule. Brother Norman was born there, I think. Later we moved to Fort Street, then to Meldrum Avenue, then to Ferry Street and then to Peterhunt Street, all in Detroit. That earliest memory is of laughing with Dad while sitting in a high chair while Dad put on puttees prior to riding his motorcycle to work.
I began my schooling at Marcy school, in Kindergarten, at the age of five. We did a lot of crayon and chalk stuff, and I learned that when I wanted only a small piece of colored paper, it was not nice to cut it from the middle of the sheet. I also learned about brushing my teeth, about drinking lots of milk every day, and lots of water, too. And about regular bathing. I learned about the four (?) food groups, and played group games. It was there, in the first grade, that the teachers discovered that I had learned to read while sitting on Dad's lap as he read pulp adventure stories to me. What happened was that I was caught reading an adventure pulp magazine when I was supposed to be reading "Run, Jane, Run", or some such dumb thing. As a result, I was put in the third grade, skipping the second grade. This was very difficult, for I did not fit in the age group, I had not learned any of the other things, besides reading, that one learns in second grade, or even in much of first grade, and the third grade teacher made it plain - how well I recall her! - that she - correctly - did not want me there. Eventually, I did learn such second grade arithmetic skills as long division - around the sixth grade, I believe.
When I was very small, perhaps five or six years old, we all went from Detroit to visit Gaffney. While there we spent time with Great-uncle Charles Barnhill. Great-uncle Charlie was my Grandfather John William Barnhill's brother. Great-uncle Charlie took me with him on his wagon, loaded with raw cotton, to the cotton gin. The wagon was pulled by two mules. I shall never forget that one blew a blast of foul smelling gas at me as I sat beside my uncle. Nor shall I forget Uncle Charlie's laughing at my discomfort. My interest in technical things began when I was about six, taking apart broken lamps and, often, successfully repairing them. Later on, I used scrap wire and bolts from Dad's shop to make electromagnets, telegraphs and such. I wonder now how I managed to avoid electrocution, for I simply plugged them into the house current. I don't think I even ever blew a fuse!
When I reached the fifth grade in Detroit, I was fortunate to be in a class taught by Mr Carl Bachman. This teacher interested me, along with several others, in science. To supplement the regular school lessons, he invited interested students to come to school on Saturdays. About half a dozen of us did so. Mr Bachman taught us chemistry, biology, astronomy, and physics, taxidermy and all sorts of other things, while we were having fun. I decided to become a chemist when I grew up. Dad let me have money for my own laboratory in the basement of our home. Mr Bachman got the equipment and materials for me from the University of Detroit Chemistry Department. I had fun making hydrogen for balloons, oxygen for other experiments, stink bombs, rockets, and black gunpowder. One clear memory is of the outings Mr Bachman arranged on weekend afternoons and evenings. We all (maybe six "Saturday" kids) went out into the country stuffed into his car and learned about trees, plants and the like during the afternoon. As it grew late, we each prepared our own supper - mine was a can of Campbell's soup - over small open fires. When it was dark, Mr Bachman taught us about the stars. He used a strong flashlight beam to point to the stars and constellations, naming them for us. I still remember much of what he told us about the stars, back around 1936 or 1937. I will never forget Carl Bachman. I owe him an enormous debt because he led me to the path I have followed.
All during this time I read voraciously. Library books - mythology, adventure, chemistry, the "Tom Swift and his Magic Whatever" stories, the collected works of Mark Twain from Dad's collections, and even much of Dad's Encyclopedia Britannica. I recall reading Dad's collection of Mark Twain stories and the Britannica in the closet under the stairs, where they were kept. Twain's 'The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg' and his story of 'Puddin' Head Wilson' were among those I read in addition to the usual tales. I think I discovered the marvels and treasures of the public library when I was in the third or fourth grade. I've never stopped reading. (July 1991: I just reread "Life on the Mississippi". It is still worth reading!) I read almost all the fiction books in the Carnegie Free Library in Gaffney. Before I was eleven, I discovered the Boy Scouts of America. At that time, one had to be twelve to join, there were no Cub Scouts or Den Mothers then. So some of my buddies and I simply went on hikes by ourselves, summer and winter, by taking the trolley and buses about fifteen miles out into the countryside from Detroit. We made shelters of saplings and pine boughs, built fires and cooked our lunches.
On one such outing, my buddy and I took the bus out into the country, and simply got off when we saw some nice woods, confident that we could get a bus when we were ready to return. Then we blazed the trees (Which means to chop off a bit of bark, leaving a white mark as a trail.) as we went into the woods to mark our route. You have to mark trees to find your way out, I learned. Sure, we each had a little hatchet. And we carried both our pencil sharpening pocket knives and belt knives. We found a clearing and cleaned away the forest litter from the ground, down to bare dirt, as a safety measure, before starting a small cooking fire to prepare our lunches. When we left, we drowned the fire, and followed our blazed route out. We returned several times to this spot. One visit, we had a caller, a man who asked us a lot of questions about what we were doing and how we did it. Then he left. I am sure now that he must have been the owner, finding out who was trespassing on his property. We must have been behaving acceptably, as he did not chase us off. I wish I could thank him for deciding that we were safe enough to allow in his forest.
I was very happy to be able, at twelve, to join a real Boy Scout Troop. Mr. Colin Houston was my scoutmaster, and I truly benefited from his efforts. I recall, for example, his comment on my report on my 14 mile hike, a prerequisite for advancement to First Class. He said: "Bill, you must have been deaf, dumb, blind and lame in both legs if this is all you saw and did!" The next version of the report was much longer. And yes, I did make First Class. Indeed, I made (later, in S.C.) Star or Life, (I don't recall which - or maybe I made both) but not quite up to Eagle. I remained in the Scouts until I was almost sixteen. We lived in a Polish neighborhood in Detroit for a while. The custom there was for kids to take a couple of slices of bread from home and go to the butcher shop on the way to school for a slice of bologna to make a sandwich for lunch at school. I can still close my eyes and see that butcher, handing out slices of bologna for a penny each.
The years in Gaffney, SC.
On the farm
When I was thirteen, in 1939, the family moved from Detroit back to Gaffney, or rather to Draytonville, a farming community some four miles outside Gaffney, where mother attended Grandmother Fannie Grubb Barnhill during her last illness (cancer, I think). We lived on the 64 acre Barnhill family farm, in a house in the shadow of Draytonville Mountain. The farm had been untended since Grandfather John William's death in 1936 at age 64. I remember Grandmom, even though I had little time with her. She was imposing! I now realize that she was just too ill to deal with such kids as I at the time. Grandmother died on December 30, 1939. Her coffin was installed at home for a day or so before the funeral at the nearby Draytonville Baptist Church. Her funeral was the first I attended. I sat in the front pew with my sister, Shannon and brother, Norman. We all cried for Grandmom. She is buried in that churchyard alongside Granddad and my older sister, Colleen.
Soon after arriving in S.C., I joined a local Boy Scout troop, one that met in the local First Baptist church. To me, as a Scout, the farm was a form of heaven. I had the sixty-four acres of Grandpa's farm, bordered by an equally large farm operated by Great Uncle Charles Barnhill on one side and on another by a similar farm run by Uncle Charlie Sparks and his wife, Aunt Mabel Barnhill Sparks. I had woods, fields, streams, farm animals, and wildlife. The fields near the house, once plowed by Grandfather and his mule, were a mature forest in 1993. When we arrived in Gaffney in the spring of 1939, I had just finished the seventh grade in Detroit. My Aunt Aleta Huskey Barnhill was Principal of the four room elementary school at the Draytonville community. She had to decide whether I had been prepared well enough to enter the eighth grade in Gaffney. I had been, she agreed, somewhat reluctantly.
At that time, Gaffney, indeed all of South Carolina, had only eleven grades in the public school system. High School was the eighth through eleventh grades. When I entered Gaffney High's eighth grade, I found that I was issued the same books that I had in the seventh grade in Detroit! I told the Principal about that but was told that I could not go into the ninth grade. I said to him that I did not want to waste the whole year and at least wanted one new subject. Yes, I really did say that! The principal asked what I had in mind and was astonished that I wanted to take chemistry, a tenth grade course. The principal agreed to let me take the chemistry course provided that the teacher agreed. When I talked to her, she said that if I passed the test scheduled for the next day I could be in the class. I passed, as it was all about symbols for elements, and equations for simple chemical reactions, stuff I already knew from my Saturday lessons with Mr. Carl Bachman in Detroit and from doing experiments in my basement laboratory in Detroit.
Two years later, I repeated the course, for credit this time, in Mr Howard Pegram's class. He had been my advisor for my Boy Scout merit badges in physics and chemistry. He and I got along fine. He let me do pretty much what I wanted - or he led me to think so! I set up a maze of laboratory glassware on one of the lab tables to reproduce the factory process used to make sulfuric acid. I started by burning sulfur in air to get sulfur dioxide - SO2. I used a water faucet suction device to suck the SO2 fumes into water to convert the sulfur dioxide to sulfurous - not sulfuric - acid as it combines with the water. H2O + SO2 = H2SO3. Passing the solution over a catalyst finished the process by adding an oxygen atom, converting the sulfurous acid to sulfuric acid: 2H2SO3 + O2 = 2H2SO4. (Was this his idea? It sure kept me out of his hair.) Mr. Howard Pegram was one of the teachers who pointed me in the direction I have gone. I last visited Howard Pegram at his home in 1988. He seemed not to have changed. He is another teacher I shall never forget. I learned of his death at the age of 83 in July of 1991. I'm glad I visited him several times after I graduated from Gaffney High School.
Another teacher I shall not forget is Evelyn - "Ma" - Boozer. Yes Boozer was her real name. (Not the "Ma" part!) Not only that, it was her maiden name as well, since she married a distant cousin. "Ma" Boozer taught arithmetic, algebra and geometry. And, along the way, instilled in her students a bit of respect for the English language. Every one of her students knows the answer to "Where's it at, Mrs. Boozer?" The answer is: "Right after the 'at' ". Estimates are that in her 40-odd year career she taught half the population of Cherokee County, SC. I believe that!. I saw her in 1988, and she too seemed not to have changed at all. That's when I finally learned that her first name was "Evelyn", a fact unknown to me when I was her student. "Ma" died in 1990. I had two years of Latin in that school. I liked it and I won a prize in a contest the National Latin newspaper, "Acta Diurna," held. I submitted a joke in Latin: "I gazed into her soft blue eyes and smiling face, hoping to hear the three little words I had so long wanted to hear her say: "No homework today." Cribbed it from a Boy Scout magazine, I did. Going back a bit, we moved into town soon after Grandmother died on December 30, 1939. We more or less had to move, as the farm passed to the nine surviving (of ten) Barnhill children, among them, my Mother. The contents of the house, furniture and all, were divided soon after the funeral. What happened was that some of my aunts and uncles came to the house only days after the funeral, where we were living, and divided the furniture, or most of it.
While we were still on the farm, I sometimes worked for the nearby farmers, or helped my uncles and cousins with their farm chores. The work I did was mostly picking cotton in season. I got paid fifty cents a hundred pounds of cotton picked. A hundred pound heap of raw cotton is huge. On a good long summer afternoon and evening after school, I might pick thirty to fifty pounds for which I was paid 15 to 25 cents. To put this in perspective, one could hire a general handyman for a dollar a day at that time. Adults could pick some 100 to 150 pounds of the low-growing cotton in a long, hard day. My cousin Joe Barnhill and his wife Edna (Spencer) were fun to visit while we lived on the Barnhill farm at Draytonville. Joe was my mother's cousin, my first cousin once removed, but he was not all that much older than I, even though he was married. Joe and Edna lived in a log cabin with a dirt floor in a clearing in the woods on his Dad's (Great-uncle Charlie's) farm. The cabin had been John William Barnhill, Sr's (my Great- Grandfather's) home. My grandfather and grandmother also had once made it their home. So did each of Uncle Charlie's children, in turn. My uncle, Roland Barnhill, was born there, but my Grandparents moved to the house near Draytonville Mountain before Mother was born. Joe raised corn, grapes and vegetables and kept chickens - all for his table - in the clearing around the log cabin, about a mile from our house. He seemed always glad to see me and I liked to help him with farm chores. They cooked over a wood fire in a lean-to attached to the cabin, and carried water from the nearby spring. Milk and such was kept fresh in the cool water in the spring. Joe and Edna spoke a version of English strange to me, with many words I, a dam’ Yankee kid, did not know, full of strange phrases like, "Y'all come back, y'hear?” and "Got ary a match?" not to forget such words as “his'n, her'n, your'n and nary” that I had to learn. Speculation: “his one,” “her one,” “your one” and leading to “my one” or “my'n” or “mine.”
When we lived on the farm we got our cornmeal and chicken feed from Uncle Charlie, who both raised and ground the corn. We also got a mix of grain, corn and wheat, from him for our chickens. It was fun to go get it from Uncle Charlie, because he would send me to the corn crib to get the ears of dried corn and to then shuck them while he set up the sheller and grinder. The sheller did a good job of sorting the dried corn kernels from the cobs and worms. Carrying the corn meal or chicken feed home in heavy sacks was not part of the fun. Some said that Uncle Charlie made a bit of "shine" on the side, but I never saw any evidence of it. Perhaps I wasn't meant to see it. Or perhaps the need went away after Repeal. Uncle Charlie would, sometimes, sharpen my axe or even a Boy Scout or sheath knife for me if I would turn his grindstone. I think he leaned on it a bit hard to discourage me from asking too often. He had an old tin can arranged to drip water on the stone as it was turned. I took my axe to him to be sharpened when I became responsible for keeping both Mom's kitchen cook stove and the fireplaces supplied with wood. If the wood I cut up would not fit in the cook stove's firebox I heard about it!
The years in town in Gaffney.
When we moved into Gaffney, we lived on Rutledge Avenue, I found a life-long friend, Carlisle Robbins, across the street. Carlisle was one of five sons of a deceased telegrapher. All but one of brothers became Navy Radiomen, and his only sister married one! Carlisle, his younger brother, Eugene, and I built model airplanes, made amateur radios of junk radios we scavenged, and generally did "technical stuff". One of our fun projects was to launch rockets, the kind one gets at the Fourth of July, by using a pipe driven into the ground at an angle. It worked fine, but it did not take long for us to realize that one could drop a firecracker into the pipe, followed by a marble, to make a kind of cannon. We bombarded the field behind Carlisle's house. We also had a neat sort of swing at Carlisle's house. A large tree grew near the house, and there was a strong-enough limb above the roof line, and about as far from the house roof as it was high. So we tied a rope to the limb, climbed onto the roof from Gene's second story bedroom window, and took turns jumping off to skim the ground with the rope in hand. Tarzan? Who? Us? No one ever got hurt in all of this, somehow.
I graduated from Gaffney High in May of 1943. I recall leaving the ceremonies with my fresh diploma. As I went out the door of the main building, I thought to myself, "Well, what now?" Within two weeks after graduating, Dad found an opportunity for me to get both training and a job with the Army Air Corps. I applied, and was sent to West Va. Wesleyan College for a summer's training, then to Wright Field at Dayton, OH, to work as an engineering aide in the Electrical Branch of the Equipment Laboratory. Carlisle followed in the next class. We roomed together in Dayton for a while. I did my work, snooped around airplanes when I could, bummed airplane rides and stick time when possible, and spent all I could spare from my pay on learning to fly light airplanes at the local (grass runway) field, Dahio Airport. It was at Wright Field that I first heard of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the engineers with whom I worked told me that it was a good school for anyone who wanted to be an engineer. I remembered. Carlisle was the one who discovered that the Navy had a training program for radio technicians, and to get in all we had to do was to pass something called the “Eddy test”. The test was named for a Captain Eddy, USN. If one passed, one got a First Class Seaman's rating right away, skipping Seaman Apprentice and Seaman Second Class. He went first, and then I did. All the test was about was how to add up resistors and capacitors connected in series and parallel. Our hobbies during High School had paid off!
My years in the Navy.
I entered the Navy at Cincinnati, in February of 1944, and was sent to boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in February of 1944. Boot Camp, for those of us who had passed the "Eddy Test", was but four weeks. Just long enough to get our vaccination shots. I spent a lot of time just recovering from the shots! I was in sick bay for several days after one shot, and passed out while marching after another shot. Nevertheless, the Navy kept me on schedule. We were wanted in service, in the field. Then I was sent to Pre-Radio School at Wright Junior College in Chicago for intensive testing and some training. The object at Pre-Radio was to see if one remembered anything from high school and whether one could learn quickly. The washout rate at Wright J.C. was high. About fifty percent of the students flunked out. On graduation I was sent to Primary Radio School at what had been the Del Monte Hotel at Monterey, CA (Now the Naval Postgraduate School). This school was mainly to give us the technical background needed to understand radio, and (shhhhh...) RADAR, (The very word, an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging, was classified SECRET.
So was SONAR for Sound Navigation and Ranging.). Again, about half of the students dropped out. Finishing with good grades in this school earned me the rating of Third Class Petty Officer. Then I went on to Secondary Radio at Corpus Christi, Texas.
Carlisle and I rejoined in Corpus. He had been in a different Primary school somewhere in Mississippi. We studied every radio, radar, loran (LOng RAnge Navigation) and radio altimeter in Naval use, for eight months. We had a different piece of equipment to learn every two weeks. Again, many dropped out. It was believed by us that only some 25% of those taking the Eddy Test passed, and I saw that about half failed the first school in Chicago. Still more were dropped from the secondary school in Monterey, and yet more in Corpus Christi. I wonder what the true numbers may have been.
Serving in the Navy
Graduation with good grades from Secondary Radio School got me a second stripe, that of a Second Class Petty Officer, and assignment to Carrier Aircraft Service Unit 23 (CASU 23) at the Naval Air Station, Atlantic City, New Jersey. Here I first worked on the flight line, correcting minor troubles on the spot, and swapping bad equipment for newly repaired units right on the flight line. We who worked the flight line, running almost all day, kept up our energy by eating pints of ice cream from the Canteen at mid morning and mid afternoon. I still recall how to get into an F4U fighter and a TBM/TBF torpedo bomber. Later, I worked in both the electronics and instrument shops, repairing equipment. The job meant running miles each day to aircraft on the flight line. About this time, I learned that Mr. Howard Pegram, my Gaffney High School physics and chemistry teacher, had been drafted into the Navy. I went to visit him at Annapolis, and still recall being terribly embarrassed that the Navy thought I outranked him, while I knew better.
It was at the Naval Air Station, Atlantic City, that I encountered a group (Project Cadillac) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT - who were there to test a new radar design. Talking with them reinforced my resolve to go to MIT - the school I first heard of while at Wright Field - after the war was over. The visiting group was from the MIT-Harvard Radiation Laboratory (RADLAB) that designed prottyoe electronic equipment for the military during World War II. One of them gave me MIT's address and told me to write for an MIT catalog. When I got the catalog I found it exciting reading - so many courses about things I wanted to learn. I also realized that I had best sign up for some of the military correspondence courses in subjects not available at Gaffney High School. I did that, taking a course in trigonometry among others. I stayed in the Navy after the end of the war and until February of 1947. I did so because I could not get into MIT in the fall of 1946, but was accepted for 1947. Besides, the extra year gave me the full amount of GI Bill time need to go to MIT for four years. The Navy was glad to have me stay on, for almost all technicians (I was a First Class now) were getting out of service. To help me keep the Navy aircraft radios working I had the help of three or four radiomen in the shop.
After the Navy
After the War, I was discharged at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. I went to work for Graybar, the wholesale house for the Bell Telephone Company. That lasted only a week. My medical exam for employment showed a supposed melanoma on the skin of my abdomen, and I was “unhired.” I went to the VA and had an operation (biopsy: benign) in Philadelphia. While I was in the hospital, my application to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard for a job in the Radome Laboratory (the lab both designed and tested fiberglass domes for radars) was accepted. I spent the summer of 1947 at that job. My interest in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) was reinforced (a third time) by seeing and using reports of the work done at the Radiation Laboratory as I worked in the Radome Laboratory. I felt lucky to have that job! That summer I married my first wife, Jean Preston Wallgren. We had three children, William F., Jr. (12-5-1951), Melinda Ann (4-10-1953), and Nancy Jean (7-16-1954).
My daughter, Nancy Jean Turner, is a teacher, and lives in New Jersey. She teaches in Camden, NJ, operating a small classroom truck to go from school to school to help those students needing special tutoring. Nancy is passionate about knitting and spinning. She goes to all the knitting shows to demonstrate both knitting and spinning skills. She and Ron Turner, her ex-husband, have two children, Rachel Naomi (Fourth of July, 1778 - not many see fireworks on every birthday!) and James Daniel, (February 2, 1983 - another holiday! ). Rae is a substitute teacher. Jim, a volunteer fireman, has a job working with people with limited capacities. Melinda is married to Terry Lynam, an attorney. Sean Steagall Lynam, born on Valentine's day in 1985 is a Yale graduate and lives in NYC as of 2010. In 1989, she had a second child, Laura. Sadly, Laura died at seventeen in a car accident. In July 9, 1991 Thomas Steagall Lynam, 11 pounds, 11 ounces, arrived. As I write in August, 2010, Tom is a Yale student.
Will, (Bill, Jr.) is a graduate of UCLA, a retired Captain of the U.S. Naval Reserve. While in the Navy Will became an engineering officer of the watch and a certified surface warfare officer. He is now retired from IBM where he had worked as a computer system salesman. Will is now living in Virginia and, as of 2010, is working for a company as Chief Mainframe Architect for the Pentagon. Will came to live with me and Basha in 1964 when he was but thirteen years old. Will's twin boys, Alex and Eric, were born in May, 1993. Now, in 2010, Will's marriage to Debra is ending, in the hands of attorneys.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The years at M.I.T. were good ones. I was learning what I really wanted to know. I am sure that my education after Gaffney High School and at the radar school in the Navy made all the difference in getting into M.I.T. That and claiming to be from South Carolina. I don't believe anyone else in the class was from S.C. One summer at M.I.T., I worked for the famous Dr. Charles Stark Draper in his Instrumentation Lab. as a technician. Another summer, I worked for the Radiation Center running Geiger counting on the radioactive breath of radium workers. Some of them were the famous people, from New Jersey, who had been poisoned by radium in the thirties by licking (!!!!) the brushes they used to paint the radium compounds on watch dials to make them luminous. During my last two summers at MIT I took advanced math courses, some at graduate level. They were a great help to me in my regular courses. I had stayed in the Naval Reserve after discharge, thinking that we might soon be at war again, this time with the Soviets. I was in the Active Reserve, spending weekends at a base. Then M.I.T. became so demanding that I could not spend the time with the active Naval Reserve, and I told my skipper that I had to drop back to the Inactive Reserve. That was in May, 1950. In June, 1950, the unit was called to Harry S Truman's police action in Korea. I was not called. It was a close one for me.
In spite of school demands, I did manage some recreation. One activity was to join the "Tech Model Aircrafters", a model airplane group. I limited my time for building models to fifteen minutes a day, but planned how I would use the time while walking home so that I really got a lot done in this short time. We had one contest - designed to be fun for easy-to-build models. The idea was that the model had to fit in a shoe box, and be assembled without glue and had to carry a quarter. The winner got to take all the quarters from the loser's models. If yours was glued in, too bad, buddy! After the first event (they were rubber band powered, and flew in the gym), we defined the size of the shoe box. Someone had used a boot box. After three events, we gave up. Gene Larrabee, later Professor Larrabee of the Aeronautical Engineering Department, built a model that had biplane wings, a wingspread of some three feet, a length of two and a half feet, dozens of aluminum tube and wire assembly joints, and flew forever. Every cubic centimeter of space in the box was filled. Rules are made to be beaten.
EMPLOYMENT AND EARLY COMPUTERS
When I left M.I.T. with a brand new degree, I took a job with the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp in Philadelphia. Through various corporate changes the company became UniSys in 1985. John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly were the people who built the first electronic computer, ENIAC, for the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, while they were at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Penn. The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation was, I think, the first company devoted exclusively to electronic computers. Soon after I joined E-M, I had to read a lot of general and internal computer literature. I soon learned where all the computers in the world were. As I recall, there were:
ENIAC at Aberdeen Proving Ground;
ORDVAC at the University of Chicago;
the Bureau of Standards Eastern Automatic Computer, SEAC, in Washington;
the Bureau's Western Automatic Computer, SWAC, in California;
the Johniacs (Named for John Von Neuman, a pioneer) at:
Princeton,
at Cape Canaveral (this one was called FLAC) in Florida,
and at the Los Alamos Proving Ground;
EDVAC in England;
BINAC (built by E-M) at Northrop in California;
the Harvard Mark something relay machine in Cambridge;
the IBM World Headquarters card programmed calculator in New York;
and, of course, the serial number one Univac in our building.
We were to deliver serial number one to the Census Bureau in a few months, when we finished it. I think, there were a dozen or so more UNIVACs built. That was it, no more needed in the world, it was then thought. In 1992, Intel Corporation sold some 50 million central processor chips (computers). UNIVAC Serial number 2 went to the Prudential Insurance Company in New York City. It was dismantled and lifted up the outside of their building to an enlarged window to be installed at their offices. When we delivered - late - the first UNIVAC, it stayed at our facility while the Census Bureau used it. They were so eager to use it that they did not want to lose the time needed to dismantle, ship and reassemble the computer in Washington, DC. We had truckload after truckload of punch cards with census data delivered to our building, run through card-to-tape converters (card to pulp converters as some of us called them) so the data could be processed. These machines read the cards and recorded the data on magnetic tape.
I stayed with EMCC for seven years, from 1951 to 1958. I had the great good luck to be in a leading company in a new industry. I did a tiny bit of the design work on the first digital computer ever to go into production, UNIVAC, the UNIVersal Automatic Computer. Everything we thought of was an "invention", or so we and the Patent Office thought. So, some 19 patents were issued in my name. As a group, we were issued hundreds of patents. What I got out of having patents was credits on job applications, very welcome overtime pay, and the chance to work with two demanding and brilliant men, Eckert and his buddy, Frazer Welch. One of my patents was for an invention I made jointly with Eckert. The inventions were all about the use of magnetic amplifiers in computer circuits. That is, how to use the devices known as magnetic amplifiers to do the various things needed in a computer: shift register, adders, gates, etc. The magnetic amplifier itself was not my invention, I'll cover that later. My work dealt with making practical use of them in computers. So I put together circuit after circuit on 'breadboards' to demonstrate that they worked, photographed the traces on my oscilloscope and made witnessed entries in my engineering logbook whenever I had a new invention to display to witnesses.
Magnetic amplifiers came out of work done by Germany in World War II. The German 'magamps' were slow, ponderous gadgets suitable for driving motors, etc. We made tiny toroidal bobbins - 1/8" diameter - of stainless steel, put a turn or so of 4-79 molybdenum Permalloy (a magnetic material), 1/1000" thick and 1/32" wide, on these bobbins and then wound the bobbins with many turns of extremely fine wire. Why did we take all this trouble instead of just buying transistors? Because we could control our sources of parts of these units and because the transistor - invented in 1949 at Bell Laboratories - was no sure thing in the early or even mid-fifties. And we had, we knew, to stop using power huge, power hungry vacuum tubes. Transistors had highly variable characteristics that were not well suited then to computer use. Even several years later, when we undertook the Livermore Advanced Research Computer (LARC) we had to buy the entire output of Philco's Micro Alloy Diffused Transistor - MADT - line and then sort them into eight classes. That was after Philco had done its best to produce a uniform product.
I was assigned to part of the development of the magnetic amplifier computer, later called the Solid State 80-90 and sold mainly in Europe. As work went on during the first year or so, we had one project leader after another. After one of the leaders left the company, no one seemed to be leading the project for quite a while. I decided to seize charge of it, and did so. After a few weeks, the Chief Engineer called me to his office. I was sure I was in trouble. He accused me of issuing orders without authority. I admitted as much. Then he smiled and gave me a raise. That was the first of three raises in three months. The raises were not my goal, getting the project finished was my goal, but the raises were surely nice.
That brings up another Eckert story. We had found out that Eckert would always tell customers that we could do twice what we had achieved in the laboratory. So, when it came time to propose the Livermore Advanced Research Computer, the LARC, our lab chief lied to Eckert, cutting in half what we had achieved. Eckert found out, and told the customer we could do four times what the lab chief had told Eckert. Did we have problems? You bet! The contract came to use in early 1957, for delivery in late 1958. We soon we had a 'jingle' "We'll be late in '58, and not on time in '59." The specs were so tough to meet that we literally gold plated the entire chassis of the machine. The computer room looked like a treasure house. And the wiring construction was so dense that we used medical instruments called proctoscopes to peer into the innards of the machine. The machine did get delivered, and was a true technical achievement for its time. It was also one of the many reasons I decided to leave EMCC for RCA. The LARC had cost us some $20 million over contract. I thought that no way to run a business. Eckert was interested only in the next technical advance, and that is fun, but how long could the money last?
Back to my inventions: as recently as the early 1960s, I had full copies of my issued inventions, but they are not now to be found. I did find copies of the front pages of some of them in my files in California during the summer of 1996. A list of these is appended. I imagine that the Patent Office is on the Internet. It would be interesting to do a search on my name and see if these are still listed. Of course, the statutory 17 year validity has long ago expired. Magnetic amplifiers were based on a 'hard' magnetic material - one that did not demagnetize when an applied magnetic field was removed. So, a piece of this stuff, wound with a coil of wire, would remain magnetized after a carefully sized voltage pulse was applied to the winding. Of course, it can be magnetized in two directions, depending on the direction of the applied voltage. Then, if a voltage is applied to a second winding, the second coil will appear either as a high or as a low impedance (resistance) to current, depending on whether or not a voltage pulse had been applied to the first winding. It turns out that one of these things will drive several others, so they amplify, or have 'gain'. That is all one needs for a computer. We put silicon diodes as logic 'gates' in series with the input windings, and also used them in the output. The pulses were fairly complex sets of 'square waves'.
After UNIVAC
I left Eckert-Mauchly (It had become the Univac Division of Sperry-Rand) in 1958 for a job at RCA Moorestown on the Ballistic Missile Warning System. This system has - or had - the role of detecting a missile attack on the defended area of America, southern Canada, northern Mexico and the adjacent parts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Since there were, in 1960, some 7,000 pieces of trash and some satellites in orbit, each of these objects had to be tracked to distinguish them from missiles. Since the variability of Earth's gravitational field as an object in orbit circles over mountains and oceans causes the orbit to change rapidly, each object in orbit has to be found every few orbits so it's data can be updated. Again I had good luck - the job I got was on the checkout system and I had to learn how the entire system worked. That was demanding fun. There I developed a special computer used to check the operation of the entire Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS). It did so be inserting signals at radar frequency into the radar receivers and then checking the data as it passed from one subsystem to another. Quite a challenge! In 1961, near the end of the BMEWS project, I was asked to work on new business marketing for RCA, trying to sell new programs to the Government. Marketing would come to dominate the rest of my career.
ASIDES FOR A COUPLE OF DAD STORIES
December, 1991 I read a book, "The Soul of a New Machine," by Tracy Kidder. It tells of the development of a new computer at Data General in the early 1970s. What struck me about it was the parallel with much I have done. I wish I had it when I was being asked "What do you do, Dad?" I was involved in four projects to develop machines that went actually out the door. They were the first production computer, the original UNIVAC, a special machine for the USAF which I took over at Univac - without being asked to do so - when I noticed that no one was running the project, a commercial version of that machine (Univac Solid State 80/90 mentioned above) loosely based on the USAF machine, (The last two were solid state, non-transistorized machines based on magnetic amplifiers operating a one megacycle/second clock rate. That speed was not exceeded for years by transistors.) and finally the Checkout Data Processor - CDP - I did for the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. It was used to verify that BMEWS was working correctly. The CDP was a general purpose machine, except for a lot of special input output and a really state-of-the-art interrupt (IRQ) system. We also pioneered the idea of an executive program on this project. It was transistorized, using discrete elements, making it a second generation machine. I can identify myself with many of those in the Data General story. The logic designer, for I did that on the Univac machines; the overall hardware guy, for I did that too; the architect as I did that for the BMEWS machine, and I was the overall computer project leader, too. Little things reminded me of the work I did. One mention was of a simulator, and it reminded me of the simulator I had made to simulate all the rest of BMEWS so we could debug the BMEWS Checkout computer.
In the development of the UNIVAC Solid State 80/90s, I did circuit design, logic design, printed circuit board design, back plane wiring system design, cooling system design, and on and on. Finally, I seized the reins and ran the project. I doubt any one person could do so much in today's much more complex environment. While at Eckert-Mauchley Computer Corp. the nineteen patents awarded in my name were, of course, assigned to the company. Their main value to me was the overtime pay I got to prepare the applications for patents. Then too, listing them on a job application helped later on. The last time my patents were of any direct use to me was when I became marketing manager for the Space and Range Division of System Development Corporation. At the time, SDC was just emerging from its origins as a not for profit captive of the United States Air Force. Marketing was held in low esteem, and its practitioners not thought, by the majority of technical employees, to be at the same professional level as they were. Indeed those in marketing were thought by the technical staff to be beneath the technical staff in every way, contemptible, really. Marketing people were those who made appointments for them, paid the lunch bills, etc. But in no sense were they able to participate in a technical conversation. As an example, one engineer noticed a copy of the MIT alumni journal on my conference table. He asked, “Where did you get it?” “It comes to me in the mail.” I replied. He then said, "That can't be, you're in marketing, and they only send it to MIT graduates." He was astonished that I, a marketing man, was an MIT graduate.
After all of this, I decided to do something. I got out my patents, made copies of each front page, and made a montage - some 20" x 40" - framed it, and hung it on my office wall. The word soon got around that I was, after all, and to everyone's surprise, even amazement, a respectable technical person who, for some unfathomable reason, was in marketing. And then there was the time I used calculus - simple differential calculus, to be sure - to show senior management that the scheme they had imposed on our division for sharing common costs, which required our division to assume more of the company's common costs as our sales increased, would never allow our division to show an increased profit. That impressed the 'troops', (Marketing people don't know that stuff, you know.) even though it had no effect on management.
BACK TO MY STORY - AFTER UNIVAC
For the BMEWS machine, I wrote the system, input-output and performance specification, and supervised the detailed design of the hardware and software. Then, on completion, I did much of the debugging, using the BMEWS simulator I had built to represent the rest of the system. I did not get to go to the first installation at Thule in Greenland, or to that installation at Fylingsdale in England, because I had a severe reaction to tetanus shots and thus did not qualify for the trip. I then followed one system (only three were needed, at Clear, Alaska; Thule, Greenland; and Fylingsdale, England.) to Alaska and installed it. I helped the technicians pull cables through the under floor spaces and crimped connectors to them. The technicians who did that were surprised to find that I could do that well. My years as a tech before I went to MIT paid off in getting along well with technicians.
It was while I was in Alaska (February of 1960, I think) doing this that the Alaskan BMEWS site got the President out of bed with a false alarm of a missile raid on the North American defended area. The alarm went to NORAD Headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, at Colorado Springs, Colorado. A Canadian general was on duty that night. When the alarm came in, I was asked if I was sending a simulated mass raid into the system. "No", I replied, "I am shut down for tests". "Are you sure?" "Yes, I'm absolutely sure, all power is off." Well, the Canadian general quickly noticed that the alarm came only from Alaska, and reports from both Thule and Fylingsdale were normal. Further, the missiles reported had a peculiar character: They were stationary in space even though the report said they were in motion! Someone soon figured out, after looking outside to see what was in the direction the radars were aimed, that the radar returns were not from missiles, but from the Moon. No one had guessed that the Moon would give us such an effect. With that problem solved, the President went back to bed. The programs were modified to ignore the Moon, and that was that.
As I mentioned earlier, among the many things I did at RCA was to begin working on proposals to the Government for new business contracts. One of these lead to a contract with North American Aviation for support on the Apollo contract. (NAA was the prime contractor for Apollo's flight to the Moon.) We at RCA had a subcontract to prepare the System Performance Specifications and Equipment Performance Specifications for the Ground Apollo Support System (GOSS). I worked on that, with people from North American Aviation in Downey, California. My part was to prepare first the GOSS Simulation subsystem performance specifications and then the equipment specifications. Two things were memorable in connection with this job.
First, when we from RCA delivered our first report to North American Aviation, we were ushered into a conference room, where some six or eight NAA people waited for us. After introductions, the NAA man in charge took our report and began to read aloud, beginning with the title page. After almost every paragraph, he would stop, ask "What does that mean?", nod his head gravely at the answer, and continue reading. At no time did he or any of the others make any technical comment. Back at our hotel, we met to debrief one another. At first, no one spoke. Then one man burst out: "They got them all from Central Casting, they just asked for some engineer types, and that's what they got!" I don't think anyone in our group laughed. We were too appalled by them.
Secondly, after some years, I found out that NASA was doing just about what I had proposed for simulation and training. I was most gratified to find an article, years later, in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazines that described the simulation just about as I had specified it, both for the performance and for the design.
MY YEARS IN CALIFORNIA
I left RCA and Philadelphia in 1962, after separation from my first wife, for a job at North American Aviation, later Rockwell International. I worked on information systems, some of which were peripheral to the Apollo Space program. Some weren't - for example, the studies we did for the Arms Control and Disarmament Commission. On the ACDA contract I had to brief, once only, the director. I was told that after my briefing, he briefed the president. That may even be true. If so, that is as close as I ever came to the Oval Office. We did tests to see if proposed treaty provisions could be verified. One such test was to try to count the tanks at Fort Hood, Texas. It turns out that such a count is not easy, as the Commander of the base didn't know, either. What is a tank? Is it only whole ones, or should you count the disassembled pieces in the shops and the ones used as targets? To further confuse the issue, they were changing models as we tried to count them, with old models getting shipped out and new models coming into the base. So much for counting Soviet tanks!
As Apollo ended, I went to work at the System Development Corporation, getting back into more direct computer work. Or at least into computer systems work. Almost all of the work was on U.S. Air Force or U.S. Government military systems. And most of what I did was to propose them to the Government or to other contractors, managing the proposal preparation. I got into marketing, and into marketing management. I taught others how to sell to the USAF, and to others. I enjoyed it. I wrote a book on how to do the sales work. (Some, as noted above, are not sure that sales is a respectable assignment for an engineer!)
One assignment was to help E-Systems, a Dallas-Ft Worth company, with a proposal. On arrival to meet my counterpart at E-Systems, we went to his office, chatted five minutes, then he excused himself while he made a twenty minute call to someone to discuss his problems with installing "Electric Pencil" (a word processor) on his Tandy computer (a Radio Shack computer) at home. Then we talked a few minutes, and he again excused himself to make another long call about his computer problem, this time to Tandy-Radio Shack. Then another to his friend. When he finished these, I suggested that we just trouble-shoot his machine's diagrams to see if we could deduce the problem. (Really, I proposed to do it myself, believing him unable to do it.) We spent the rest of the morning on that, and I deduced which of the chips was bad. So, we went to lunch. I'll bet you think we went to a nice restaurant. No such luck, we went to McDonald's for a hamburger, and then to a Radio Shack store to talk about his computer! That company never did get its act together on the proposal, and it didn't win the contract, either.
MY MARRIAGE TO BARBARA LOUISE AMBROZY
My wife, Barbara, (nee Barbara Louise Ambrozy, AKA Basha, a Polish affectionate diminutive and AKA Bobcia, Polish for Grandmom), and I were married in 1963, soon after my divorce from my first wife. Marrying Basha is, without a doubt, the best thing that ever happened to me. Basha and I lived first in the Redondo Beach (Walteria), California area, then in Downey, California near NAA, and then moved to Santa Monica, California in 1971. She and I have two children, Mack Walter (10-19-1963) and Francziska Louise (10-27-1964). Bill, Junior, came to live with us soon after we married. Basha is of 100% Polish ancestry. Some of my grandchildren now call me 'Dziadek', Polish for Grandfather, and they call Basha 'Bobcia,' Polish for Grandmother.
Mack is a fine violist, but earns his living in his marine - yacht maintenance and yacht chartering business. He is certified by the U.S. Coast Guard as a Captain for vessels up to 50 tons. He has a thriving charter business using his Mariner Forty ketch. Mack began his musical career while at Franklin grammar school in Santa Monica. One day he declared that he wanted a violin and to be in the school orchestra. He found a good violin at a show to which he took us. Soon afterward he announced that he had to have private lessons if he was to really learn how to play his violin. That was arranged and Mack soon became the first chair in the violin section of his school orchestra. When he was in middle school, he grew taller, his teacher told him that he was too big for a little violin and should switch to a viola. That led to a long afternoon at a violin and viola workshop in Studio City. There Mack tried several violas before making a choice. Of course I had no role in his selection - he made the choice and still finds it, in 2010, to have been good one. Mack is now married to Luningning Encarnacion, a charming lady from the Philippine Islands. Their marriage in the open air atop Point Dume was a wonderful affair and most memorable. They live in El Segundo.
Francziska (AKA Franja (Fraan-Ya), another Polish affectionate diminutive) was an art student, art teacher, and avid cyclist; and now, in 2010, Vice Principal at the Kayne-ERIS school for special education. Franja has a Master's Degree in Special Education. Not long after we, Barbara and I, returned from Mexico, Franja caught the English Disease [ ;-) ] from me and bought a Lotus Elise. She is married to Robert Willis and lives in El Segundo. Bob and Franja are avid athletes. They both ride bikes to work most days. They also have paddleboards and spend much time in the ocean. Franja entered the Rock-to-Rock paddleboard race from the Isthmus on Catalina Island to Abalone Cove on Palos Verdes Peninsula in July, 2010. We took Franja, Bob, and her support crew to Catalina aboard our yacht, Inspiration. Franja was the first woman to finish the race, taking only four hours and forty minutes to cross more than twenty-one miles of open ocean to reach the mainland.
TIME OUT FOR A BASHA AND BILL STORY.
While I was at the race track (see SPORTS CARS AND RACING section below) in March, of 1985 Basha was running an anchoring practice session for the Windjammers' Yacht Club. We then had a 36' sailboat, and were planning to spend the coming winter in Mexico, aboard the boat. She was the Club's Cruise Chairperson. In January, the cruise was a dinghy tour of Marina Del Rey. Then in February, there was a cruise from D basin, where the club is, to E Basin for an overnight "raft up" inside the harbor. She followed this with a seminar on anchoring. For the anchoring practice, the boats went, in March, to the South (protected) side of the South jetty at the marina entrance. She had instructors to help people learn to use their anchoring gear and afterward, a party on the boats. Her objective was to convert the round the buoy racers to cruisers. After my practice on Saturday at the track, I called Basha on the boat's radio telephone to report that all was well and to hear her story. This was the first time I had gone to the track without Basha or a friend as a pit crew. And this was the first time Basha did "bow and stern anchoring" all alone. We have decided that while we each can get along alone, we would much rather not do so.
AND HERE IS ANOTHER “DAD STORY”
I doubt that I have told all of you about the time that I rode a horse one afternoon, all alone, in the winter snow in the Garden of the Gods. That is an area of spectacular rock formations near Colorado Springs, Colorado. I was there on business that kept me there over a weekend with little to do on Saturday or Sunday. Knowing in advance that I would be there, I took along some Levis, boots and such, and wore them as I drove about on Saturday. When I came to the Garden of the Gods, I saw the riding stable and decided to try it out. Now you all know I am no rider, but I did have a little experience. I was wearing old Levis, a hunting coat, and the Mexican boots I used to have, well worn, too. The owner mistook me for a rider, which I denied, and asked for a gentle horse, and got one. A horse that knew more of the deal than I did, but was willing to "go along." It was great, partly because the horse couldn't get good enough footing on the icy ground to run!
BACK TO THE BIO.
RETIRED YEARS
When I turned 55 in 1981, I retired from System Development Corporation. Basha and I had made some investments in rental property that made retirement possible. After retiring in 1981, I did a fair amount of consulting, and I think that I got a good pay rate, since the bookkeepers complained! I did some work for my ex-employer, SDC, from 1981 to 1985, and later worked for both AT&T-TI and for Science Applications International Corp. on the Strategic/Space Defense Initiative Program (“Star Wars”). I quit consulting in 1985 so Basha and I could go cruising in Mexico.
Soon after I retired, I bought a home computer, something I never dreamed of doing in my early days in the computer business. My first was not, to Willy's dismay, an IBM PC, but a Sanyo MBC 555. The operating system was MS-DOS, with 256K of RAM storage, two DSDD 5 1/4” floppy disks, Quadram microfazer 64K printer buffer that also is a parallel-serial adapter, and a Ricoh-built Dictaphone/Radio Shack daisy wheel printer. NO HARD DRIVE! Not available, not designed for one. Sanyo included lots of software in the package. I got Wordstar (a word processing package), Infostar (for file and record management), Calcstar (for keeping books), Datastar (more file managers), Basic (a Programming Language), and, for some reason, Easywriter (another word processor) were included in the Sanyo package.
I put the whole thing together, with some blank 5 1/4” floppy discs and a huge carton of paper for less than the base price of an IBM PC. The Sanyo was a semi-data-compatible IBM work-alike. I bought it solely to use as a word processor, and it served me well in doing that 200 page book mentioned above. I have a modem, a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 so I can exchange data with customers. I have no interest in playing games. It was nice to be able to tell a business client to send me a document to read that way. In July 1991: I replaced the Sanyo with a Gateway 2000 386-25 110MB hard disk, 4MB RAM; and later updated with a 486-33 motherboard. Surely this will seem quaint as I write in 2010. I've left it here to be marveled at. I've gone through many other computers since then.
In August of 1984, we took Francziska with us to South Carolina, and we had a great visit to Gaffney. Would you believe that her (then) boyfriend's mother was a "Gaffney"? And traced their family to the town? Besides all that, I have been working on the book I mentioned earlier, Structured Proposal Management, loosely using the parallel with structured programming, a guide to help managers organize proposal work. I now have it all but ready to print. I hope to use it in a series of seminars that I plan to offer. (This never happened - 1989) (Still not, 1991) (Nor in 1993) (Or in 2010, time to forget the book!) Basha and I took two weeks and went to Mexico in July of 1984. We went on our sailboat, a Cal Cruising 36'. We didn't go far, only to Ensenada, about 80 miles south of the border. Everything went well. We had a great downwind sail from Las Islas Coronadas (near San Diego) to Ensenada, showing 9 knots with only a small jib up!! No main!!
MEXICO
A year later, in 1985, we arranged - as mentioned above - our affairs so that we could cruise Mexico for several months, on our sailboat, of course. We returned after seven months, sold our house, traded up to Inspiration, a 50', 32 ton steel hulled ketch - a small ship, really. We lived aboard Inspiration until the end of 2005 when, finally, we returned to America after twenty years in Mexico. While in Mexico, we learned Spanish, joined both the Lions Club (Club de Leones) and the Junior Chamber (Cámara Júnior) in La Paz, Baja California Sur, the southern state on the Baja Peninsula. and participated in many charitable projects. When one joins the Junior Chamber, one is given a nickname. Mine was “Don Quixote” because at the time I joined I was wearing a removable full body cast because of a lumbar spine operation. I became used to being called 'Don Quixote'. Those twenty years in Mexico were a grand adventure. More on that later.
After spending seven months in Mexico, Basha and I returned to the U.S.A. in 1986 and sold the Cal Cruising 36 in order to purchase a larger boat on which we would live in Mexico. We bought a William Garden designed ketch. The hull was built in steel in Seattle in 1968, and it was launched in 1969 or 1970, at Goudge Island, off Vancouver Island, B.C., Canada We returned to Mexico in December of 1986. We lived aboard our yacht there until we returned to America in October of 2005. We returned to California for August of 1987, and in August of 1988 we returned again to sell the Santa Monica house, our last real property, and for me to have a lumbar spine operation, the first of three such operations. We were once again in Mexico in December of 1988. We spent part of the summers of 1989 and 1990 in the U.S.A. and spent much time in America in 1990/91. By July 1993 it seemed we were likely to be in Mexico for life. I learned to speak Spanish fairly well, and we liked the country. We were in California each summer, though. However, we returned to America in 2005, bringing our yacht, Inspiration, back after twenty years of cruising Mexico. In August of 2010 we had Inspiration up for sale. We are living in a separate house on the same lot as the home of our daughter, Francziska, and son-in-law, Bob Willis.
I was a member of the Junior Chamber International in La Paz for some eighteen years. I worked on the major project of the local chapter of the Junior Chamber International (Cámara Júnior, or JCs) each Christmas, and all during those years as we prepared for Christmas. The project was the Arbol de Navidad del Niño Pobre, The Poor Childrens' Christmas Tree. Through our contacts in the Cámara Júnior we became more or less recognized members of the local community. One of my memorable experiences is that of delivering a long lecture in Spanish at a Cámera Júnior convention in central Mexico. I based that lecture on my experience in business in America.
Nancy asked me to include this story of the translations I did for a friend of mine, a La Paz veterinary doctor, who also supervised the slaughterhouse for the health department. He also has a T-shirt printing business, a motorcycle business and a used car business. Typical lazy Mexican, right? One day he asked me if I could translate some material for him from Spanish to English. As he was a fellow member of the JC's, first I said 'yes' and then I asked 'what'. Well, 'what' turned out to be five 40 page reports from the local fishing industry to the U.S.A. Food and Drug Administration about the tests made to show that U.S.A. requirements were met for sea food - clams and oysters - to be exported to America. The reports covered the geology of the peninsula, its weather, its geography, its hydrology, the physics and chemistry of the ocean waters where the seafood was collected, or grown in the case of the oysters, the technology of growing the oysters and so on, not forgetting the tests for contamination of the product in the sea or in its processing. That took me a while! I did it surrounded by every dictionary I had or could borrow. And of course, it had not occurred to me that Mexican technical authors would write as badly in Spanish as did many American technical authors did while writing in English. That I had dealt with before I retired. Things like the two page sentence without punctuation. I persevered. I translated word for word. I guessed what the author had in mind - if anything. I even condensed. I produced a first document, that was approved! So were the others. Each report had a slightly different account of the weather, topology, hydrology and such of the area so I made them all alike to reduce the translation work. They all went to the FDA, with "Translated by William F. Steagall, ScB, MIT 1951" on the cover of each report. A review meeting of FDA and Mexican officials was arranged in La Paz - of course the FDA came to La Paz for the review, they weren't stupid, it was wintertime. My friend attended the meeting. A day or two later, he told me, with a huge smile, "They congratulated us on finding a retired, bilingual biological scientist to do the translations!" Faked them out, I did!
We have had several notable experiences with Mexican customs. There was first of all, the Loreto airport incident. We arrived there from California with a lot of stuff for the boat - anchored then in Puerto Escondido. All of this stuff was legally importable with fee. However, Senor Fernando Miramontes, the customs official, did not see it that way. We were held at the airport until everyone else had left, until it was dark, and then the customs man, Senor Miramontes, demanded money, while his sidekick twiddled with his sidearm. Is that robbery? We thought so, and I sent letters to every official in sight: Mexican Tourism at the state and national level, the Mexican ambassador to the U.S.A., the U.S.A. ambassador to Mexico, etc. Nothing happened until the issue of Latitude 38 magazine, a sailing journal, with my letter relating what had happened arrived on the desk of the state tourism official, Senor Ricardo Garcia Soto. Then I was called to his office - two months after I had sent him a letter - to hear him say, "Why didn't you let me help you?" Hah! Then, a couple of weeks later, Senor Miramontes showed up in a Port Captain's vessel, alongside "Inspiration," saying to Basha, "We have come to bother your husband." I heard that and used the marine VHF radio to call to the Marina de La Paz for help. I had an almost immediate reply that I was to go to the state tourism office in an hour. We did, met with Ricardo Garcia Soto again, and with the two malefactors. They were 'chewed out' in our presence. Miramontes disappeared, and mordida stopped at Loreto. We did not get our $150.00 back.
Crossing the border in a car is also a problem when one brings in material for a boat. Mexican law says that such material can be imported without duty, but border officials seem not to know that. Once, we crossed at Tijuana, with our VW van filled to the brim. I was driving, and we were directed to secondary inspection. At the moment I parked, Basha jumped out and began to chatter at the official approaching her: "Oh, isn't it wonderful, we are going to be on vacation in Mexico for six months and we need visas, we are going to go to La Paz and lots of other places and we have to have six months visas because we are going to be here on a long vacation and isn't that just wonderful and can you just imagine a vacation of six months....." The official listened a bit and then said "Calm down lady. The Immigration office is over there, and don't forget to lock your car, as you have a lot of baggage. No inspection. Another time, we crossed into Mexico again at Tijuana. The official in the booth told Basha, who was driving, to go to secondary inspection. She smiled, nodded and started off, watching her mirror. The man did not watch her and she just kept going! I was expecting to be arrested!
On another summertime visit to the U.S.A., we got our '95 Pontiac Bonneville back from the shop on a Thursday morning, and left for Tijuana about 7:15 PM, thinking to avoid the rush hour. We were concerned that there might be problems as the car was just out of the shop, but as Basha drove all seemed OK. Until we were on the road for two hours until about 9:15 PM, that is. "I've lost power steering!" Basha exclaimed!. "Can you still steer?" I asked. "Well, yes, but it is not easy." Basha replied. "OK, then, lets exit as soon as we can to a gas station." I said. Then I looked at the dash, finding the voltmeter down to the top of the red. All else was OK. "I think we have thrown the alternator and power steering belt," I told her. She then drove off the freeway and found a gas station.
I opened the hood, and sure enough, my first guess was right. The serpentine cogged belt was off its pulleys. Nothing I could fix. So, we got the clerk in the gas station to help us push the car to the adjacent (Wasn't that a bit of luck?) mechanic's shop. Then we asked the clerk about a nearby hotel or motel, and about a taxi. We wound up in a Budget Motel where the young clerk first told us that the rate was $99.00 for one night, and then said that if we had a qualifying card we could get the VIP rate, just $60.00. "Would this picture of a dead U.S.A. president serve as such a card?" I asked, placing a five dollar bill on the counter. It would do just fine, the clerk said. Who says that experience in Mexico cannot be applied in America? So we tucked ourselves in for the night, with our alarm set for 6:00 AM. On arising, we quickly dressed, had the buffet breakfast included in our room fee, and then to the shop. Once there, the friendly manager told us that the water pump had frozen and thrown the belt. We arranged for his staff to put on a new pump and serpentine belt. We were on our way South again by 09:30 AM.
I had called the dentist in Tijuana to say we would be a bit late. And we were, but only half an hour. They did not mind at all. Minutes after we arrived we were in the dentist's chairs. We had parked on the U.S.A side and walked across the border to our dentist in the Hospital México, a block from la linea. That way we did not need Mexican car insurance or have to wait for hours in line with other cars to return to the U.S.A.
The dental office had three chairs in one small room. Basha and I sat down in two of them and had our teeth cleaned. She was concerned about some wear on several crowns, and thought they should be replaced. The dentist asked her if she had pain with cold or hot foods. She does not. "How long have they been in place:, she was asked, "Is it more than three years?" Forty years, she told them They made her repeat that, not believing that her crowns could be so old. When convinced that they had been in place so long, and that she had no pain, they said, "Don't touch them!" "Leave them in place! Many don't last even three years." Imagine getting that advice from an American dentist. I had two cavities filled and was told that I should use floss every day. The total bill; US$140 for both of us.
On yet another summer's visit to America, we wanted to take a lot of valuable teak wood back to La Paz for repairs to our boat. I remembered the story of the man who, working in a lumber yard, took a wheelbarrow of sawdust home each Friday evening, week after week, year after year. The gate guard carefully checked through the sawdust each time, looking for things the man should not be taking home, but never finding anything. Years later, after both had retired, the two men met in a bar. The ex-guard declared, “I knew you were stealing something, so now that it is all in the past, tell me, what was it? The ex-employee said, “Wheelbarrows.” With that story in mind, I used the twelve foot long, two inch thick and one foot wide teak planks to make a platform atop our VW bus. I loaded the platform with stuff of little value. The Mexican customs folks hardly glanced at the top of the VW bus.
HEALTH AND SURGERY
The October 1988 surgery to fuse my lumbar vertebrae (L4-L5-S1) failed. So did the attempt (new orthopedic surgeon) in October of 1989. The third attempt in February of 1991 worked. Dr Robert Bray, MD, knows his stuff! Those earlier clods masquerading as surgeons did not. I got out of the brace in August, 1991, and hoped to race again. Or at least get to run some practice laps. I did, but after some years sold my Lotus 23. I am still doing fairly well with respect to my spine as of November, 2010. I do now have considerable numbness in my legs but only occasional back pain.
HIGHLIGHTS
I have had a lot of fun in my - as of 2010 - 84 years. I have flown airplanes, worked for the Army Air Corps, served in the Navy, sailed yachts, driven race cars, ridden horses, hunted sheep, goats and wild boar on Santa Cruz and Santa Catalina Islands, became an amateur gunsmith and machinist, and snorkeled in the Pacific Ocean. For a while I was an avid amateur photographer, trying to emulate my idol, Ansell Adams. I did have friends ask me to give them some photos I had made and framed. I have skied down mountains in New England and in California. I have traveled in Europe to Germany, Italy, Greece and Turkey. I have visited Canada and lived in Mexico. I spent part of a winter in Alaska while working on BMEWS. In Germany I saw evidence of bomb damage during WW II in Frankfurt am Main. In Rome I saw the Appian Way, mentioned by Julius Caesar in his book, Comentarii del Bello Gallae (Comments on the Gallic Wars.) In Greece I walked about the Acropolis. In Turkey I saw camel caravans coming from the Kurdish areas to the north. But most of all, I have had wonderful years with my wife, Barbara.
I helped design computers in the early days of the computer business, and I am proud that I once knew where each the world's computers were - all 14 of them. I also am uncomfortably aware that this field has touched the lives of every person on earth, for better or worse. I worked on some of the most exciting engineering projects of the time, from the first computers to the early warning radar systems to protect against the missile threat from the then Soviet Union to the Apollo and Saturn space programs to a more humdrum computerization of the U.S. Postal Service.
In my middle sixties, I decided that I would learn Spanish, and I am, at 84, fluent, if limited. I had, but did not reach, the goal of speaking that language as well as a college graduate from one of the Mexican Universities - at least in the grammatical sense, as I know I shall never learn the "playground Spanish" that all Mexicans know, the common tongue. I don't think I have, as of 2010, met that goal, but I have had native speakers (Two of them! LOL) mistake me for a Mexican. I think they were not listening carefully! The lecture I did in Spanish at a JCs convention was a highlight for me as I was complimented after the lecture by several in the audience on my ability to speak Spanish.
SPORTS CARS AND RACING
I got interested in sports cars and in sport car racing around 1957 after having bought an MG-TD a year or so earlier. I joined the Sports Car Club of America and got a racing license. I installed a Judson blower (supercharger) on my MG-TD back in 1956 or so. This was a belt driven supercharger. And, yes, it did need a modification to the hood. I had my friend Benny Diaz make a bubble of aluminum and install that on the right side of the hood. But the MG-TD did run better on the road with the blower for the short time I had it installed. I installed it thinking I would do better in races. It was a total blunder. Yes, the car was faster. But I was moved from the stock class to the modified class, and moved up one level in engine size because of the blower. I ran no more than a couple of races with it. And all were at the Vineland, NJ track. I recall that in one of them, a twenty-five lap race (long for the time at Vineland) I managed to do just twenty laps while the winner did his twenty-five. The blower soon came off.
I learned a lesson from this. It is smarter to improve a car's performance in its class. I did that later with my MGA 1600. That car was allowed many options. I put in the high compression pistons and connecting rods from the twin cam optional engine. I changed the transmission gear set to a close ratio set, more suited to the local tracks. That set of gears needed a new lower rear axle ratio, and that was done. There were three optional camshafts: stock, one with much more overlap but with a very narrow power RPM range, and that at the high RPM range, and the camshaft used in the Magnette Sedan. I also went to allowed larger carbs, with no air cleaners, also an option. I chose the latter cam for its wide torque range, quite suited to the short, many turn tracks of the Northeast. It was a winner. In my first race, I was up against two MGAs prepared by the factory for Sebring. I left them in the dust. I was protested. Mark Donahue's mechanic asked me privately what I had done, then told the protesters "This car is legal. It is up to you to figure out how to do it." I also ran it in a six hour enduro. At the end of the six hours (I drove the last 3 1/2 hours) I was sixth overall with only some Corvettes ahead of me. Had the race run longer, I think I might just have been first overall, as late in the race I passed many 'bigger' cars.
After being out of racing for 18 years, I got the itch again in 1980. I bought a Lotus 23, a 1963 sports-racing car, to restore. It took me almost four years to get it ready to take to a track. I had to learn lots of new skills, such as nickel-bronze braze welding. I took my Lotus to the track in early March of 1985 and set a new record - for tow-ins. I never once got back to the pits under my own power! It was fun anyway. I was towed in four times! It got to be a joke. In March of 1985 I had two weekends at Willow Springs. The first was an SCCA Solo I event. The idea is not quite racing, but open practice with controlled passing only in specified places and with the permission of the passee. I found I was faster than all but two others. One was a Dolfin driver with a V-8. The other had a FF Swift, and both should have been much faster than they were. (But then so should I have been.) The second was a Vintage Auto Racing Association race event. I really enjoy the Vintage Auto Racing Association events. They have the aspect of a time machine. Same cars, same drivers, two or three or four decades later and I like to work on the car, too. I later found that I had become 1985 champion in my class for the Solo I group, and had set the lap record for the Willow springs course for that group.
On March 27, with new ignition wiring, I tried again and with good results. On March 31-31, I even finished a race; Second place. I raced in the Palm Springs Vintage Grand Prix at Thanksgiving in 1986. I had but one chance to get a practice lap time recorded, and could not do so because of problems with the car. I practiced later with another class, and the times did not count for grid position. So, I started last. I was racing against my own class and against a class with larger motors. I passed everyone except for one car in the larger motor class, to get first in class and second overall. That was my most memorable race. Did I mention that I found two (or was it three?) wiring problems when I went racing? And two more at home? I have no faith in crimps any longer. The only reason to crimp is to hold the terminal in place while you solder it. I now have Mallory and Allison ignition equipment in place of the products of that Englishman, Joseph Lucas, Prince of Darkness. I had new seats for the Lotus for months. They went in finally just before that race event. So did the headlight covers. And the radiator duct. The new seats were needed because I destroyed the others. Combined factors of not being a 5' 9", ten stone (140 lbs) standard English race driver specifications, and some weakness in construction.
In September, 1992, for the first time since November of 1986, I got my Lotus 23 out of storage. I did some sixty laps at Willow Springs International Raceway on a "test" day. I was pleased with my times, and had no back problems. I raced again at Willow Springs International Raceway in February of 1993. This car led me to form a club for Lotus 23 owners. The mailing list for that club led to "Lotus 23 Register" which later became part of the Historic Lotus Register of the UK. I spend a lot of time on the Register. My most recent race was at Willow Springs in February, 1993. I finished third in the last of the three races I ran. It was an "Australian Pursuit" race, in which racers start at intervals determined by each racer's fastest lap in practice the day before. It is “assumed” that each racer will run at that rate for the entire race. If all participants do so, all will finish at the same time. Never happens. In the February, 1993, race, I started fourth, led the race by the fourth lap, held the lead until a lap or two before the end, when two open wheel cars passed me as if I were tied to a tree. They were about two hundred yards ahead at the end of the race. I was satisfied with third place.
I have participated in a couple of "hill climbs." They are timed contests, one car at a time, to see who can climb the hill in the least time. One of the famous ones is Pike's Peak. Before I retired I often was in Colorado Springs, Colorado on business. On what I correctly guessed would be my last trip there, I took time late one afternoon to go to Pike's Peak. I thought that if I did not take that opportunity, I likely would not have another, which proved to be true. The road there climbs from about 6000 feet to about 13500 feet above sea level. One has to pay a toll to use the road. At the toll booth I asked how long it would take to reach the top. "About an hour and fifteen minutes, or a bit less if you hurry" I was told. I floored the gas on the rental Hertz Plymouth Horizon I was driving as soon as I was out of sight of the toll booth, and made it to the top in thirty-five minutes. I claim that to be the record for Pike's Peak for Hertz Plymouth Horizons. On the way down, I also "hurried," only to find that there was a check point where brake temperatures were checked. I had to wait, and wait while mine cooled.
REMINISCING AND COMMENTING
Since I was born on April 3rd, 1926, the society in which we all live has changed dramatically. Even some nations that existed then are gone, and some that exist now are new. But what I wanted to speak of as I reached my 80th birthday, at the end of my 80th year, is the changes in our daily life here in the U.S.A. Here are a few of the things that have changed since my early years. Supermarkets - In the 1930s no market was then 'self-service', one went to a counter, waited one's turn, and asked the clerk for what one wanted. Well, there were bins from which one could fill a sack (bag? poke?) with such things as loose cookies. Liquor? Ever hear of prohibition? The shoe store next to Dad's shop in Detroit was a front for a speakeasy. One entered the store, went to the rear, and went into the basement. Everyone knew it was there, of course, even the cops. And a lot of folks made home brew as did our neighbors in Detroit.
Automobiles with V-8 engines. They came along around 1932, with the first Ford V-8s. Those early Ford V-8s has only 60 cubic inches displacement, about the size of one cylinder of a modern V-8. Of course none of these cars had power steering, power brakes, automatic transmissions or any such. By 1926 the cars had self starters, and cranking an engine to start its motor was needed only for older cars. The last time I saw a man crank his car was around 1954. He was an old man, and had an old car. He must have been at least sixty. Tires? Real rubber came from real, tropical trees back then. There were no synthetic rubber tires. And none had steel belts, either. Ladies stockings were make from silk until nylon came along about 1943. The first paved cross country road, Route 66, was completed in my natal year. It was a few years later when I heard my Dad and his friends speak admiringly of the new, paved road from Detroit to Chicago.
But we did have railroads - passenger railroads back then and now a rarity. And they were real railroads, with coal fired steam locomotives. Of course, the locomotive stacks spewed soot, and that got into all the cars, even if the windows were closed. But you could cross the country rapidly, it taking only three to five days. The time depended on how much you wanted to spend, with some faster trains costing more. Bicycles: Schwinn built them, and they were heavy! Built for the abuse given by newsboys and other kids. I got my first bike, a Raleigh, when at MIT. And I got my first car, a Nash sedan, about a year after I graduated from MIT. Women's swim suits. All of us - Mom, Dad, brother Norman, sister Shannon, and I - all went to a Canadian beach across from Detroit when I was very small. Mom nearly was arrested because the skirt on her one piece swim suit was too short. Really! Some women! Their swim suit skirts should be almost to their knees for proper modesty, don't you agree? The Canadian policeman ordered Mom to go and get properly dressed. Our house in Detroit was heated by a coal furnace. It was sometimes my job to shovel coal into it. Dad had coal delivered to the house by a truck, which ran the coal down a chute into our coal bin. And yes, I was the kid who had to haul out the ashes to the alley, unwillingly, bucket by bucket.
The hot water heater we had in Detroit was gas, but not automatic. When our family wanted hot water, someone went into the basement in Detroit and lit the heater with a match or heated water on the kitchen stove - a gas stove in Detroit and wood-fired stove at Grandmom's in SC. And of course one turned off the heater after everyone in the family had their weekly bath. When we lived on Grandmom's farm near Gaffney, to heat water for baths or laundry we had a wash pot in the yard. I got to fill it with water from the well, which I drew up bucket by bucket. Filling the wash pot took four or five bucketfuls. And then I built a wood fire under the washpot using wood I chopped with an axe. The wood was called 'slashings' and came from the local lumber yard, where logs were 'slashed' to remove the bark and some underlying wood. Dad bought the slashings by the truckload for us to use in our fireplaces, the kitchen stove and for the wash pot. What is a wash pot, you ask? Think of the pots in the cannibal cartoons. Radio. I think it was about the time I was born that Mr Marconi managed to communicate by radio across the Atlantic to England from the USA for the first time.
Radios in homes. I recall that Dad had a radio on a stand when I was around three years old. It had dry cell batteries underneath it for the 135 volt vacuum tubes, and other batteries to light the filaments. And the radio had to be tuned stage by stage. Not easy! It was a so-called tuned radio frequency stage receiver. (Hey, I figured this out much later.)
There were no stations except local stations. No networks. Little or no national news on radio - that come with W.W.II. The Post Office used Ford Model T trucks for deliveries then and up to the 1940s. They were used as long as they could be maintained. Telephones; Well some people had them. We did not, in my parent's home, ever have a telephone. Nor did Dad have one in his business. Some relatives did have one. My Great Uncle, Charles Barnhill, who lived miles out in the country, had one. It was a party line, and the telephone was mounted on the wall in the hall. You had to listen to the number of rings to know if it was a call for you. And of course, there were many snoopers on every call. Better than TV!
But there was no television. The first public demonstrations of television were at the NY World's Fair in 1939. I saw my first one - sort of - around 1944, while in the Navy at Corpus Christi, TX. One of the other Navy students at the radio/radar school there in Texas built it. It had a Nipkov disk to create the image. A Nipkov disk spins a spiral of holes in front of a light sensitive tube to create an crude image. All that "TV" could do was to scan a drawing of Mickey Mouse and show that on the cathode ray tube of the 'receiver'. The first transmitted TV I saw was at the Naval Air Station in Atlantic City, NJ, around 1945, where - again - one of the Navy technicians had built it. RCA was then selling kits - the famous 630TS kit - from which one could build a television receiver. He used a helium weather balloon (Weather balloon? That's another story!) to get an antenna high enough to get a special broadcast - of a boxing match - from Philadelphia, sixty miles away. Such broadcasts were rare then, the stations were on the air infrequently.
Portable radios? Of course not. Think post W.W.II, and ten pounds at least. Carlisle Robbins - Robbie - and I tried to make our own walkie-talkies in the early 1940s. None were for sale then. And we failed. I'm sure each one transmitted and received, but were not tuned to each other. Robbie, his brother Gene and I had other fun 'projects'. One was to drive a three foot piece of pipe into the ground at an angle, and then drop a lighted firecracker into the pipe followed by a marble. Small cannon, right? Our purpose was to see if we could hit a barrel some distance away. I'm not sure we ever did so. And that brings up fireworks. I had lots of fun with firecrackers, roman candles (hand held, of course), sky rockets, pin wheels - all the right stuff. And no one then thought that they were too dangerous for kids. I remember too, that when I was about eight, I lit firecrackers and then put my sandbox pail over them. When the firecracker exploded, the pail went up in the air about twenty feet. What fun! I spent a lot of time trying to increase the height to which the pail was tossed.
And then when I was twelve or so, and had my own chemistry lab in the basement in Detroit, I made my own black powder. Using that black powder, I made all sorts of fun stuff. Even rockets! Computers? Some analog devices were used in W.W.II, but they were not today's computers or even those of the 1950s. The first computer to go into production was UNIVAC in 1951, and I had a very small part in its design. I was the project engineer on what may have been the first 'portable' (if one stretches the idea of "portable") computer. Back in 1957 as project engineer for the UNIVAC Company, I developed and delivered a computer to the USAF in Massachusetts. It took a few days for us to set it up and get it into operation in late October and early November of 1957. Then, just before Armistice Day (Now called Veteran's Day) on November 11th, the USAF asked us to move the computer to the hanger so the people could see it on Armistice Day. We picked it up with a forklift truck and down to the hanger we went. It was again operational in about a day. Does that qualify for the first portable computer? I shall claim it does. :-)
Underarm deodorants? I think some women used one called 'Mum' in the 1940s. Men? Of course not, we weren't sissies. You know what sort of man uses things like that, right? That changed after W.W. II. Nylon and other synthetic cloth? Only around the time of W.W.II. Earlier on, women wore silk stockings, and they were both expensive and fragile things. Linen, cotton and wool were the fabrics we had then. And people weren't so afraid of each other then. I recall that during W.W.II I was able to hitch hike from New Jersey to South Carolina easily. Perhaps it was the uniform. We had no strange people around Gaffney either, just Baptists and the like. Once, in W.W.II, when I was visiting Gaffney on leave, my Aunt Aleta, a school teacher, asked me if it were the Jews or the Catholics who did not believe in Jesus. She was not a stupid woman by any means. There simply was no contact with such as Jews or Catholics or Muslims. People then were truly isolated. In retrospect, I do believe that the owner of the shoe store on main street - Limestone Street - may have been Jewish. But no one noticed.
Were Dad alive now, he too would have this story to tell. I shall tell you in his stead. He visited us in California while I was taking an evening machine shop course at Santa Monica College. The teacher arranged a tour of McDonald-Douglas' high bay machine shop for the class, and Dad came along with me. At one point we saw the machining of fixtures for the space shuttle, using a 60 HP motor to cut the aluminum forging. We stood behind a protective wire screen. As the chips hit the screen almost like bullets, Dad remarked, "I started working in my Dad's blacksmith shop, making wooden wheels for oxcarts. And now I am in a space ship factory!" It was Dad's science-fiction magazines awoke my interest in such stories and in science itself. I am sure that seeing that space ship fitting being machined culminated many dreams for him. Let me end by noting that after spending twenty years in Mexico, I now notice many changes in our American language - don't call it English! As the Romans said, sic transit gloria mundi, (Thus passes the glory of the world.)
SUMMARY
Born, Forest City, NC, 3 April 1926
Moved:
To Gaffney in 1928
To Detroit, MI in 1929
To Gaffney in 1939
To Buckhannon, WV in 1943 (School)
To Dayton, OH in 1943
U.S. Navy:
Great Lakes Naval Training Station, Feb. 1944
Wright Junior College, Chicago, April/May 1944
Radio Material School, Monterey, CA May-Dec 1944
Naval Air Station, Atlantic City, Dec 1944 - Feb 1947
USN Receiving Ship, Philadelphia, Feb 1947
Moved:
YMCA, Philadelphia, Feb 1947 - Sept 1947
MIT, Sept 1947 - June 1951
Elkins Park, PA, June 1951 - June 1952
Pennsauken, NJ, June 1952 - May 1962
Walteria, CA, May 1962 - Sept 1962
Downey (Apt), Sept 1962 - Dec 1963
Downey (House), Dec 1963 - May 1970
Santa Monica, May 1970 - Nov 1988
Aboard "Inspiration" Dec 1986 - Oct 2005
Marriage: Jean Preston Wallgren, 1947 - 1962
Children: William, Jr. 12-5-1951
Melinda Ann 4-10-1953
Nancy Jean 7-16-1954
Marriage: Barbara Louise Ambrozy, June 1963 - forever!
Children:
Mack Walter 10-19-1963
Francziska Louise 10-27-1964
Every one of my children has given me reason to be proud to be their father. I could write about their many achievements but those are their stories, not mine.
Education:
- Grammar Schools, Detroit, MI
- High School, Gaffney, SC
- College Course: Buckhannon, WV - 1943 - Engineering Science and Management War Training Program.
- Naval Schools: 1944 - 1945
- College: MIT 1947-1951 ScB EE
- College courses:
Univ. of PA, 1953, German
Santa Monica College, Spanish, Machine Shop, Welding
- Other:
Spanish evening courses, three years sometime during 1962- 1968
Professional Society Courses, 1962 - 1978
Spanish Language, private, La Paz, 1988 – 1998. Some ten winters of study.
-Achievements:
- Nineteen patents on computers
- Soloing an airplane at seventeen
- Managing marketing for the Space and Range Division of SDC and tripling sales.
- Capture of contracts for millions of dollar value.
- Moderately successful amateur sports car racer. Success is measured in fun, and a few trophies.
- Retired at 55, with major assistance of Barbara, in making and managing real estate investments.
- Sailing the Pacific Ocean from the California Islands to Zihuataneo, Mexico and the Mar de Cortes.
- Learning Spanish after 60 years of age.
PATENTS
Bistable devices using magnetic amplifiers; May 31, 1955, Pat No. 2,706,798
Ring counter using magnetic amplifiers; June 14, 1955, Pat No. 2,710,952
Monostable device; January 2, 1956, Pat No. 2,729,754
Bistable device; January 3, 1956, Pat No. 2,729,755
Phase responsive bistable devices; February 26, 1957, Pat No. 2,783,456
Pulse stretcher; June 25, 1957, Pat No. 2,797,339
Parallel magnetic complementers, January 14, 1958, Pat No. 2,820,151
Asymmetrically energized magnetic amplifiers, May 13, 1958, Pat No. 2,834,894
Parallel adders for binary numbers, July 15, 1958, Pat No. 2,843,317
Delay flop, August 25, 1959, Pat No. 2,901,635
Bistable devices, November 3, 1959, Pat No. 2,911,543
Quarter adders, November 24, 1959, Pat No. 2,914,751
Bistable device, June 7, 1960, Pat No. 2,940,066
John Presper Eckert & William F. Steagall, Amplifier devices September 20, 1960, Pat No. 2,953,692
Signal responsive network, September 27, 1960, Pat No. 2,954,480
Digital Multivibrator, September 27, 1960, Pat No. 2,954,481
Serial binary adders, June 6, 1961, Pat No. 2,987,252
Delay element and circuits embodying the same, April 11, 1961, Pat No. 2,979,697
Serial binary adder, February 20, 1962, Pat No. 3,022,007
Early Memories
The house on Second and Fort in Detroit. Iron fences around the yard. A vestibule at the front door. Sleeping in my crib in Mom's and Dad's room. Playing on the floor with my little white horse on wheels. The horse was, I think, a Christmas gift, or maybe a birthday present. I think it was after Christmas of 1928. So I was about three years old. Dad coming home from work wearing overalls with battery acid holes everywhere, and letting me play with his pocket screwdriver. Riding my tricycle in the vestibule. Shannon playing there with me. Chasing blue-green flies on the floor.
The house we next moved to, unknown address. Remembering that the Morton's Salt box girl had a saying, "When it rains, it pours". Mom thought I was reading it! Maybe I was? Dad putting Vicks' Vapo-Rub on my chest, when I had a cold. The night Uncle Forest Barnhill brought Aunt Lydia to see us for the first time. They soon married They lived with us for a little while. Aunt Lydia came from a Polish family. Her maiden name was Michaels (Americanized from “Miczelovicz” sp?)
The house on Meldrum, half a block from Gratiot Ave. Dad's shop on the corner of Gratiot and Meldrum. The nice black man, Dad's employee, who let me help there, washing cars, removing wire from old generator armatures. Sneaking up on the black man (Dad's helper) in the cellar. That black man and his wife lived near us and to Dad's shop. They let me come to their home to visit. I liked them. Trying with little success to sort screws for Dad ( I did a lousy job.). The nice man in the shoe store next to Dad's shop. It was a front for the "blind pig" - an illegal bar in the cellar during prohibition. "Earning" pennies, dimes and nickels doing jobs for Dad. Spending them in the hardware store on the other corner on Gratiot and Meldrum, buying putty and nails, or for used books or second hand magazines. For a penny, I could get enough nails to pound into a wooden apple crate all afternoon. The putty was like modeling clay to us kids. Magazines were a nickel or a dime - less in the used magazine store.
The family who moved in above us on Meldrum in Detroit, and brewed home made root beer. The World War One Veteran in the family upstairs, who finally got a war bonus. He let me play with his old Army rifle. I killed a rat with it. I threw the rifle at the rat! The store on the next corner down Meldrum from Gratiot. Open bins of cookies, macaroni, bars of Fels Naphtha soap (Mom sliced them into her clothes washer), and boxes of Rinso. A showcase of penny candy. The corner butcher's showcase. Penny candy. Starting kindergarten. Making a locomotive from a Quaker Oats box in kindergarten. Being told not to cut a small star from the center of the sheet of colored construction paper. Water colors, crayons, chalk, scissors. Blackboards. Lessons in nutrition: drink four glasses of milk every day. I used to wonder where I would get that much milk - we got one quart delivered each day for the three of us: me, Shannon, and Norman and I knew a quart did not hold that much.
The house on Peterhunt Street in Detroit. My chemistry laboratory in the basement, outfitted from the University of Detroit Chemistry Department supply center, with the help of my teacher, Carl Bachman. Dad let me have ten dollars to pay for the lab. I don't think I ever properly thanked him for that. Ten dollars was a great deal of money back then. The gas hot water heater that had to be lit when hot water was wanted for Saturday night baths. Taking the ashes from the coal furnace to the alley, under duress. Listening to the adults tell jokes while I sat on the stairs, when I was supposed to be in bed. No, I didn't understand. Then. I'm not going to tell the one I remember. Sharing a bedroom with Norman, and calling each other inventive names in the dark before sleep. Me: You're just a lump on a rotten log in a swamp. Norman: You're just a bug in that log, eating rotten leaves. Fun. We laughed together doing that.
Having J. Paul Beam, the Gaffney High School principal, "borrow" me for a Father-Son outing. It was a catfish fry in the woods, with cauldrons of chowder, yards of hot corn bread, mounds of butter, potato salad, and vats of iced tea. He was a nice man. He borrowed me again for a dinner at a hotel. Leaving Gaffney at seventeen for West Virginia Wesleyan College. Finding out that going to school with a lot of bright kids was a lot tougher that Gaffney High. That lesson repeated, with emphasis, both in the Navy and at MIT. My rented room in Dayton in the home of a nice, older couple. Carlisle came to Dayton and shared the room with me for a while. Carlisle's (Southern) reaction after his first bus ride to Wright Field, where we both worked, on a bus with a Negro sitting beside him: "Sitting beside him didn't hurt a bit, Bill".
Spending all the money I could spare on flying lessons and renting airplanes at the DAHIO airport, a grass strip. Flying in formation with a girl who rented a plane too. We met, finally, on the ground. She was older than I, darn it! Taking the Eddy test to get into the Navy's electronics program. Boot camp - four weeks of illness due to the shots. Going into the Navy as a Seaman First Class, two grades up from Seaman Recruit and Seaman Second Class as a reward for passing the Eddy Test. Three weeks and two days of Preliminary Radio School in Chicago at the Wright Junior College, taken over by the Navy for that school - nothing but tests to make sure you recalled some of what you learned in high school, and some lectures to see if you paid attention in class. I was told that half the students flunked out.
Monterrey, CA. The Del Monte Hotel, taken over to be a school for electronics technicians, Primary Radio Materiel. Four months of intense education in fundamentals that made it possible later to enter MIT. School was on a heavy six day schedule that allowed little time for sleep. Again, half the students flunked out. Graduating with grades high enough to rate Third Class Petty Officer, Aviation Radio Technician Third Class. Making my name of record “Steagall, William F. ART3.” LOL I was glad when the rank changed to Aviation Electronics Mate. Corpus Christi, TX Secondary Radio Materiel School. Eight months of learning equipment, two weeks on each one. Radar, radio altimeters, radio, etc. Spending all my pay on renting airplanes at Cliff Maus Field in Corpus. Carlisle joining me there, a few weeks behind me. Getting free stick time from the Navy in Navy pilot training planes courtesy of Carlisle's brother, Jack, an old Navy (prewar) leading Chief at a training field. Need I mention that again some half the students flunked out? Graduating with grades high enough to win the rate of Second Class Petty Officer.
Navy duty at Naval Air Station Atlantic City, in Carrier Aircraft Service Unit 23. Spending my free time on the beaches there. Making First Class Petty Officer in only 19 months. Working at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on Radomes. Going to MIT and managing to get through the first year by studying every spare moment. Eckert-Mauchley and the first computers in production. RCA and BMEWS. North American Aviation and the Apollo and Saturn programs. System Development Corporation and winning many contracts as marketing manager of my division. Retirement, consulting and Mexico
Gone Racin’ is at [email protected].