Remembering George Martin...

I worked for the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) from 1980 through early 1984.  My title was Associate Director of Technical Studies in the Division of Continuing Education.  The job was fairly straightforward -- Develop and administer graduate-level training courses for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The office next to mine was occupied by another gentleman with the same title.  His name was George Martin, and his job was to develop and administer technical training courses for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.  George had retired more than once and worked because he loved technology and enjoyed interacting with people.

There are a few wonderful vignettes about this friend that I was thinking of the other day and that are worth relating here.  They have to do with the National Air Races, John DeLorean, and the Apollo program, in that order.

National Air Races -- There was a picture in George's office of a plane in a steep bank rounding one of the pylons at an air race.  On the ground was a Ford sedan of about 1947 or '48 vintage and two gentlemen looking up at the plane.  I asked George about that picture.  He informed me that shortly after he had earned his engineering degree in the late forties, he taught aeronautics at a technical college in Detroit.  One of his senior classes in aerodynamics decided they'd like to build a plane as part of their practical lab.  George had gotten permission from the administration of the school and guided the students in their project.  The plane, which had twin booms and a wide tail was successful enough that they entered it in the National Air Races, held in the late '40s in Cleveland, which is where the picture was taken.  George brought in some of the design documentation from that class in neat, 3-ring binders (so typical of how George did things).

A few days after we had our conversation about the plane, George informed me that he had called the FAA to inquire about the ultimate fate of the plane.  It turned out the the college where he had overseen its design and construction had sold the plane to an individual in the mid-1950s.  That person had flown it for a few years before they had damaged it in some unpleasant incident.  They had sold the wreckage to someone in Mississippi who currently was its registered owner.  It was being restored!

George promptly contacted the then-current owner and explained his connection to their airplane.  Not long after that George made a weekend excursion to Mississippi, where he presented the owner with his cartons filled with drawings, photographs, correspondence, notes and calculations detailing the birth of their prized possession.  He asked for no payment because that's the kind of guy George was.

John DeLorean -- One day while George and I were working together, there was something in the news about John DeLorean.  He had been charged by the US government with trafficking cocaine following a videotaped sting operation in which he was recorded by undercover federal agents agreeing to bankroll a cocaine smuggling operation.  George surprised me by informing me that he had taught De Lorean's brother while teaching at the same Detroit engineering school where he had built the air racer.  George went on to inform me that he was not at all surprised.

He explained that while he was teaching John's brother, John had gotten in trouble with the law over a "Yellow Pages" scam, in which John was allegedly selling advertising in a non-existent yellow pages listing service and collecting payment from duped merchants.  According to George, DeLorean avoided jail time by making financial restitution to the victims.  Small world.

The Apollo Connection -- George had informed me that while he was a Chrysler employee he had worked on the design of the Saturn V rocket that was the backbone of the Apollo program.  One day we were talking about his contribution and I learned that he was responsible for the stress analysis on the fins that surround the bottom skirt of the Saturn V.  The kind of analysis used to calculate stress is referred to as "finite element analysis," and it typically involves hundreds or thousands of interrelated calculations.  Before the use of computers, it was a tedious repetitive arduous process.

The day after we first broached the subject, George asked me to come into his office.  There on the desk was a stack of three-ring binders about a foot tall.  "There are the stress calculations for one of the Saturn V fins," he informed me.  I looked at page after page of orderly calculations, all meticulously recorded in George's distinctive precise printing.  "I did every calculation and then it had to be verified by two other guys.  This represents about 18 month's work."  You couldn't help but appreciate what a monumental effort the Apollo program had been.

George passed on a few years later.  A lifelong avid fisherman, he was buried with his favorite rod, reel and tackle box.  I've often wondered whatever became of those precious notebooks that represented so much of a man's life.

The Day the Eagle Landed...

The Apollo 11 Astronauts -- Neal Armstrong, Michael Collons, and Buzz Aldrin

There aren't too many days on which I can tell you precisely what I was doing 50 years ago.  Today, on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing of the Apollo program, I can.

In 1969, I was living with Forrest Frueh and Jim Mouser at 1212 Woodland Drive in Norman, Oklahoma.  I had returned to school to earn an engineering degree and was beginning my senior year.  Forrest and Jim constituted the entire department of business law in the College of Business at the University of Oklahoma.  We had been living under the same roof for a couple of years.

The latest in technology!

The moon landing began to unfold on a Saturday.  The mission had launched a few days earlier on July 16, 1969.  We had watched the launch on a brand new 21" (!) RCA color television that Forrest had purchased for this very special occasion.  We had a TV room with plenty of comfortable seating in what had originally been the master bedroom in the house.

As I recall, we started watching the landing coverage with Walter Cronkite on CBS at around noon on Saturday.  To fully comprehend how slowly things would unfold, you have to recall the complexity of the mission, its equipment, and its procedures.  There was a three-stage Saturn V rocket that launched the whole operation.  Only the third stage made the trip to the moon.  Upon this stage were mounted a command module (CM) with a cabin for the three astronauts, and the only part that returned to Earth; a service module (SM), which supported the command module with propulsion, electrical power, oxygen, and water; and a lunar module (LM) that had two stages – a descent stage for landing on the Moon, and an ascent stage to place the astronauts back into lunar orbit.

The procedure that the astronauts followed on that day is well described on the Space.com Website (I've corrected all times to Central Daylight Time): "Lunar landing operations for the Apollo 11 crew officially began around 8:27 a.m. July 20, when lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin crawled through a tunnel separating the command module Columbia from the lunar module, Eagle, to power on the lander.  Four hours later, Buzz Aldrin and his commander, Neil Armstrong, stood in Eagle while it separated from Columbia. At the controls of Columbia, command module pilot Michael Collins turned on the ship's engines and moved it away. He watched as Armstrong and Aldrin fired Eagle's engines for the lunar descent. "Everything's going just swimmingly. Beautiful!" Collins said over radio to Mission Control.

But not everything went to plan after that. Eagle's computer experienced several task overloads that tripped program alarms in the spacecraft. Just after 3 p.m., Armstrong looked outside the window and saw the automatic landing system was taking Eagle to a rocky field. He took control of the spacecraft, steering it down to the surface with just seconds of fuel to spare. Apollo 11 was on the moon.

"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed," he radioed Mission Control at 3:18 p.m.

The main event, the moonwalk, began at 9:39 p.m. when Armstrong opened the hatch of Eagle and backed outside, watched by Aldrin. He carefully moved down the ladder, turning on the TV camera on the way. His first step took place at 9:56 p.m. "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind," he radioed Earth.

Armstrong quickly moved to take samples from nearby Eagle, and Aldrin followed him on to the surface. The moonwalk lasted 2.5 hours, in which time the men picked up several rock samples, deployed science experiments, erected a flag and took a phone call from U.S. President Richard Nixon. Eagle's hatch was closed, astronauts inside, at 12:11 a.m. the next morning."

Buzz Aldrin with U.S. Flag on Moon

The astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin actually slept for several hours after the lunar walk and before the lift off of the ascent module.  I recall that it was some time around noon on Sunday before they left the moon's surface. And all this time, the newscasters had to find subjects to fill their coverage programs.  There were interviews and discussions of the hardware, reviews of the history of the space program -- unending diversions to fill the time until the module would ascend to rejoin Michael Collins in the Command Module for the return to earth.

The astronauts used Eagle's ascent stage to lift off from the lunar surface and rejoin Collins in the command module. There was some concern that the ascent engine might not ignite correctly because Aldrin had bumped a circuit breaker and damaged it earlier, but the ascent engine started as planned.  They jettisoned Eagle before they performed the maneuvers that propelled the ship out of the last of its 30 lunar orbits on a trajectory back to Earth.

The whole world breathed a sigh of relief that they were on their way back home.

It was a unique moment in which the entire nation was united in an immense sense of pride and accomplishment.  A visionary president had laid down a challenge ten years before and we as a nation had accepted and run with it.  There aren't a lot of times in U.S. history that are as unifying.  And this one unified us in a joyous way rather than a shared tragedy.  It was as if every American had a kid on the winning team in a national championship.  What a very special moment it was.

The Rewards of Genealogical Research...

In late February of this year, I posted an article called "Interesting Genealogical Findings..."  In that entry, it was clear that I had learned a fair amount about my great-grandmother, Mary Jane Duffy, who married James L. McLaughlin, my mother's paternal grandfather.  I expressed my frustration at the constantly-changing names that Ms. Duffy used over a period of years as evidenced in this list of references I had compiled:

The main problem I had in February was that I hadn't established her parentage.  My grandmother McLaughlin had informed that her mother-in-law had "come from Malone, N.Y."  Several years ago I had written to the Catholic Church in Malone hoping to locate a baptismal record for Mary Jane Duffy, who probably would have been born around 1850.  That search turned up nothing.

Last weekend I decided to continue looking for some original source material regarding Ms. Duffy.  I turned to a Website called Fulton History, where you can "Search over 47,059,000 Old Newspaper pages from US  & Canada."  I don't recall the exact combination of search criteria I entered but I discovered an article in the social column of a Malone, New York, newspaper from 1922, the year Mary Jane Duffy died.  The text gave me shivers: "Mr. and Mrs. Phillip Duffy, of Elm Street, and Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Duffy, of West Street, and Daughter Gertrude, returned home from Schenectady last night, after attending the funeral of their sister, Mrs James McLaughlin, who died in that city last Saturday.  Mrs. McLaughlin was formerly Miss Jennie Duffy of Malone,  The funeral was held at Whitehall on Monday morning."

The reason I was so excited was that I now had other family members for whom I might search to determine Mary Jane's parents.  I need not go into the gory details, but I'll let this picture tell the story:

By the way, those little green leaves you see on certain boxes are indicators that Ancestry.com has located some possible source material that might help find even more connections.  What fun this is when you break through a brick wall!

And with this breakthrough, I have now identified all my ancestors back 4 generations.  I now know all my great-grandparents and great-great grandparents.  It's interesting that I have an English surname while the majority of my ancestors appear to be Irish and French.

The Price You Pay for Shade Trees...

I have lived in the same house for the last 35 years.  It's not just that I don't like moving.  I like the place.  One reason is the abundance of shade trees.  Our 2 acres of God's green earth is covered with dozens of oak, maple, hickory, dogwood, poplar, cottonwood and sweet gum trees.  We are blessed.  Until they drop stuff or fall over.  Then they are a huge pain in the rear.

Every autumn, as I rake and blow the detritus of another season, I seriously entertain thought of stripping the place and putting up plastic props.  Then spring arrives with the emerging signs of life and I love my trees again.

A couple of weeks ago, another Elder Statesman bit the dust.  I'd been watching him for several years, concerned that he might succumb to a swift breeze and fall on my shop.  I even had a tree man out to give me price to cut it down and he assured me it was not going to fall toward my shop.

When it did blow over, it missed the shop by a scant few feet.  I contacted a fellow who was recommended by an acquaintance, but he had trouble showing up to do the job.  After concluding that he wasn't going to work out, I contacted a neighbor whom I recently learned was a tree removal contractor.  I called him on Thursday.  He came that evening and gave me a price.  It was fair.  The tree is now gone.

The Buick Banjo is Finished!

Today, I finished the banjo that I started to design and build in November 2012 -- nearly 7 years ago.  Better late than never!

What took so long?  Largely, it was distraction with other projects.  And then, there were those pesky navy spoons.  Somewhere, I got the goofy idea of using old navy spoons to make the clamps that put tension on the drum head that produces sound in the banjo.  Normally, these brackets are rather simple:

I had decided to do something a little more fancy that would pay tribute to the years I spent in the U.S. Navy:

I searched eBay for weeks to find my first batch.  They had to be teaspoons, I learned.  Tablespoon handles were much larger.  I learned that there were several patterns of navy silverware.  Then I learned how easily these spoons break when you try to form the hook that goes over the edge of the tension hoop.  Then I miscounted the number of replacement spoons I needed to replace the ones I broke.  Finally, I had to ask my friend Dan Shady to do all the tedious silver soldering that attaches a square nut at exactly the right angle to the back of the spoon.  All this takes time, but mostly, I kept getting distracted by changing priorities.

I bought a tailpiece a few weeks ago that turned out to be junk and wouldn't work on my "Buick" banjo.  Then I ordered a replacement that arrived yesterday.  

I already had acquired a bridge and a set of d'Addario strings.  So today, I was ready to perform the final assembly and set-up.

I installed the tailpiece and made the needed adjustments to get it in exactly the right position.  Then, I installed the third (center) string.  This gave me some tension to hold the bridge in place.  I then had to determine the exact location for the bridge so I would get a perfect octave note when I pressed the string down at the twelfth fret.  Then, I slowly added the other strings.  With each string installation I filed the v-shaped groove in the nut (the bridge near the tuners) until the string clears the first fret by a few thousandths of an inch.  The objective is to have a "low" action for ease of playing without producing a "buzz" when the string is plucked.  After a couple of hours of careful filing and testing on each string, I think I've got it about right.

I'm very happy with the results.  Now, I need to practice in preparation for my trip to West Virginia in October to take Old-time Clawhammer Banjo classes at the Augusta Heritage Center.