Registration for freshmen at MIT was scheduled for October 1, 1929. I wanted to get there a few days early, which meant leaving on September 26 for the four-night & three-day trip. I could travel light because I had the use of my mother's steamer trunk, a small trunk she had been given for her trip to Europe after graduating from the University of Michigan. Railroads in those days picked up trunks and delivered them for free. My father and sister took me to the train station. After good-byes I stood on the rear platform of the observation car to wave and saw them turn away from the gate to go to their car. Years later my sister told me that as they walked my dad had said to her, rather sorrowfully, “Well, Ann, we will never have him at home again.” At the time I would have scoffed at the idea, but as it turned out, my dad was a good prophet. Aside from occasional visits I have never lived in Seattle since high school.
The railroads have two stations in Boston: South Station, the main one, and Back Bay on Massachusetts Avenue, about five minutes before South Station. As we pulled in to Back Bay I was surprised to see my friend and planned roommate, Clint Backus, walking down the aisle accompanied by two others unknown to me. “Quick,” said Clint. “Get off here with me. It is closer to MIT than the downtown station.” I got off with him and the other two. As he introduced them he said that they were fraternity brothers, that he had pledged to the Phi Kappa Sigma house, and that he would like me to meet the other brothers.
At the time, of course, I knew little about fraternities. My father had told me that he had been a Beta Theta Pi, and he hoped I would take a look at the chapter. Both of Mr. Edison's sons had been members of a fraternity called Delta Psi; they also hoped I would take a look at it. I did have lunch with both chapters, but I was really very impressed with Phi Kappa Sigma. Not only were they a fine group, they were a lot closer to MIT than either of the other two. After about a week I accepted their offer and have never regretted it.
Meanwhile, Clint and I moved into our dormitory room and started getting acquainted with MIT. In this activity I was very fortunate. The Dean, Harold E Lobdell (Lobby to everyone), was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma. He took a personal interest in seeing that I got off to a good start and introduced me to various members of the Institute staff, particularly Horace Ford, Treasurer of the Institute and the head of the office that actually delivered my scholarship funds. Through Lobby I also met Jim Killian, publisher of the alumni magazine, later to be a President of the Institute. On registration day we signed on. Still 16, I thought I might be the youngest member of my class, but it turned out that there were two others aged 16 and born a few months after me. I enrolled in chemical engineering, probably because I had enjoyed Mr. Landau's chemistry at Lakeside. Actually, it made little difference what I registered in; almost all freshmen took the same courses.
As members of Phi Kappa Sigma we had all meals at our fraternity house, a walk of about a mile across the Charles River Basin from the MIT campus. The fraternity took a keen interest in our getting involved with campus activities. Clint became an assistant to the manager of The MIT Crew. I joined the staff of the Tech Engineering News, a monthly engineering magazine published entirely by students. When the time came to elect class representatives to the “Institute Committee”, as the student government was known, I ran and was elected, not surprisingly considering all the Edison publicity.
After about three weeks in the dormitory my father, with church business in Boston, dropped by for a visit. That morning Clint and I had encountered a mouse in our room, cornered and killed it, and hung it by its tail in the stairwell. I am not sure why we did it, but on our return with my dad the room had been opened and all our belongings piled high in the middle of the room, mouse on top. Of course we were dismayed, and on further thought decided we might as well accept the urgings of our brothers to move to the fraternity house.
On the whole my freshman year went well. My classmates were kindly reticent about mentioning the circumstances of my arrival at MIT. One day in late October I realized that I had a very sore throat and checked into the infirmary. The next morning I was advised that I had a well developed case of scarlet fever and would be transferred to the Peter Brent Brigham Contagious Diseases Hospital where I would need to stay for six weeks. I was devastated but made the best of what turned out to be a very interesting experience. Today a shot of penicillin would have been the end of the matter. In those days the only treatment was a serum made from the blood of horses, which had a number of allergic reactions, all unpleasant. The fraternity house was quarantined for a week while the authorities waited to see whether anyone else had scarlet fever. The result of the quarantine was a one-week vacation. Most of the brothers took off and went home!
Missing six weeks of the MIT curriculum presented quite a problem. My friend Lobby arranged for me to drop several “minor” courses and tutor in the remaining part of the term in the major courses of math and physics. He also arranged tutors. The young math tutor gladly accepted a small fee. The older member of the physics faculty (I wish I could remember his name) kindly said it had been a privilege and declined any fee.
During the second semester there was a course in organic chemistry that I found very frustrating. Filter papers saturated with various members of the hydrocarbon family were passed around, and we were expected to identify them. Formulas of organic products easily stretch across three lines of text and were not easily remembered. By contrast, in my physics text starting with f=ma (force equals mass times acceleration - Newton) one could do anything. I decided to transfer to physics but not just yet. There was a requirement to take a summer course in qualitative analysis, six weeks for chemical Engineers, three weeks for physicists. It was reputed to be a very interesting course, and I decided to delay the formalities of changing departments until after the six week course was over. A very interesting byproduct of this decision was being able to attend the inauguration of Dr. Karl Taylor Compton as President of MIT. It also meant that I was able to accept Mr. Edison's invitation to attend the second scholarship contest in August. Arthur Olney Williams of Rhode Island, who also elected to come to MIT and major in physics, won it. Another member of the physics department in my class was my friend Ivan A. Getting, a runner-up in my contest year and recipient of a tuition scholarship. He has been kind enough to say in his autobiography ( All In a Lifetime: Science in the Defense of Democracy - Vantage Press) that he was glad he had not won as he could not have withstood the glare of publicity as well as I did. He had limited financial resources, and I think I could not have survived that limitation as well as he.
My second, third, and fourth years at MIT fell into a pattern. I think I did well in most classes and always took at least one extra class. I did not do well in the major junior year course, a new one taught by the distinguished physicist Dr. John Clarke Slater (with his colleague Dr. Nathan Frank). That first year Dr. Slater taught it from mimeographed notes. I flunked it despite the valiant efforts of two classmates, Dayton Clewell and Quimby Duntley, with whom I studied one evening a week. I did no better the senior year. I continued in student activities, each year elected to the Institute Committee, and rose from editorial assistant through advertising manager to general manager of the Tech Engineering News. My senior year I was elected chairman of the Senior Week committee. During freshman, sophomore and senior years I was a member of the respective honorary societies. The experience of these student activities has stayed with me all my life: learning to run a productive meeting, learning to organize a group effort; all these experiences have been valuable during my career, and I am grateful for them and the fraternity system that encouraged them.
During my sophomore year there were several special events prompted by my friend, Clinton Backus. I had decided to accept my Aunt Edith's invitation to spend Christmas vacation with the McKinney family in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Clinton's father was giving him a Ford for Christmas. Would I mind picking it up at a dealership in Detroit and driving it back to Boston? And so it was a very pleasant Christmas. That summer Clint proposed that we drive home after classes were out and back to Boston in the fall. My family had no objections nor did the Edisons. “I could do whatever I wanted with my transportation money.” Our companion in both directions would be Clinton's younger brother, LeRoy, known to his friends as Junior, a student at Phillips Exeter Academy. It was a great trip, mostly dirt roads west of Chicago. We stayed at homes along the highway. People put out signs. We would call them bed and breakfasts today. We weathered a dust storm in South Dakota. We also saw in the distance what looked like a great tree trunk. On closer view it turned out to be Devils Tower, of which none of us had ever heard.
On the way back to Boston in the fall we spent the night in Cheyenne, and I took the opportunity to look up a family friend of years before: Robert Walton, a Ford dealer. About fifty miles east of Cheyenne, while I was driving, we had a collision with a truck on the other side of the road. The car was totaled; the passengers survived almost intact. Mr. Walton was a tower of strength. After telephone negotiations with Clinton's father, Mr. Walton came up with a Ford that would get us to Boston and beyond. By early afternoon we were on our way again. Thank you, Bob Walton.
Senior year was a distracting time. The Slater and Frank physics course did not go well for me, and I flunked it again. There were distractions at my fraternity; as treasurer I was wrestling with a double-entry accounting system mandated by the National Chapter. Chairing Senior Week was demanding. I had wanted my father to preach the baccalaureate sermon, which proved impractical. But I did graduate, and the Senior Prom went well and within budget. Thank goodness for all those extra classes that gave me enough points to make graduation possible. I applied for several graduate schools but needed scholarship help. None was forthcoming. The letter from Theodore Edison telling me that he had formed a small company that would permit him freedom to do some things that he could not do as Director of Research for Thomas A. Edison Industries and would I like to come and join him provided a welcome opportunity. I promptly accepted. Ivan Getting also joined the group for the summer before going off for his Rhodes scholarship year at Oxford.
After that big Edison Scholarship adventure and graduating from MIT in 1933, with a BS degree in Physics, I worked for Theodore Edison in a little company he set up, which gave him freedom to try some things that his other job (Director of Research for Thomas A. Edison Industries) didn't. It was a great privilege, but in 1937 I got very interested in some ideas of Dr Frank Buchman's program of Moral Re-Armament and decided to work with him on a volunteer basis full time. I was deferred as a volunteer religious worker until 1943 when I was drafted and assigned to the Air Corps. After basic training the wheels of assignment ground on and put me in a program that gave hands-on experience in celestial navigation to bomber crews before they went overseas, which I did at Mountain Home Air Base near Boise, Idaho. That turned out to be a very interesting job, but in November 1944 the powers that be decided they could use me to better advantage as a physicist with the (then) National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (now NASA) and they transferred me to something called the Civilian Reserve Corps at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The most notable part of that was the assistance given to engineers like me by a group of Mathematical Aides, who were young ladies with degrees in Mathematics, prospective teachers who were doing their bit for the war effort and were known as "computers". Every bit as fascinating as the boxes now known by that term. One of them, Dorothy Beadle, of Davidson, North Carolina, accepted my proposal and we were married in her hometown by my father on September 21, 1946. After discharge from the Air Corps the NACA invited me to stay on, which I was delighted to do.
“Aeronautical Research Scientist,” my official title, was a rewarding career and a happy time for me and our family, which by 1961 included four sons, followed by two daughters, and NACA had become NASA. I was invited to transfer to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to work with a new program called Nimbus, a meteorological research satellite designed to exploit our new involvement with space to the benefit of weather forecasting and our understanding of the physics of the earth-atmosphere system. After our first launch in 1964 I was made Deputy Project Manager and served as Mission Director for seven subsequent launches. In 1974 I was part of a group charged with planning the future of the earth observation program. It was abundantly clear that there were a number of new projects that would soon be starting and that although I could be involved with them, I was too old to expect to be around to finish them, while there were a number of younger men and women who could. It seemed like a good time to retire, so I did—with 32 years of government service.
I retired without any clear plan for the future, but found that satellite meteorology was a very marketable commodity. I worked for a contractor, who provided a variety of services to the space program, until 1983 when it seemed advantageous to retire again and go the self-employed route as Huston Associates, Inc., which I did until 1988. Meanwhile Dot had been working in pari-mutuel sales at the local racetracks, Bowie, Laurel, and Pimlico, a neat job for a gal who also wants to be a homemaker—short hours. She retired in 1987 and by 1988 was looking for new opportunities. On a trip to Florida to visit her brother we came upon an adult retirement community in central Florida away from the traffic and hustle of the coastal areas. It also had lots of activities and a great recreation department. We bought on the spot, went home, and told the children we were moving next month. I retired again! This time for good.
Orange Blossom Gardens (now The Villages of Lady Lake) was a great experience, but by 1995 Dot was beginning to show signs of a deteriorating near-term memory. Our children decided that I ought not to have to face that by myself and we should be closer to family. Our younger daughter, Kathy, and her husband came up with a plan to pool our resources and buy a house near her husband's work that would be big enough for both families, which we proceeded to do.
It has been a happy time here in Fountain Hills, Arizona. Both Dot and I have happy memories of grandmothers who lived with us as children and we hoped Kathy's two little boys (now 9 and 6) would have the same. The only problem has been a stroke, which Dot suffered on November 11, 1996. She died on November 21, just 50 years and two months after our wedding.
I have done a lot of traveling during my lifetime and have thoroughly enjoyed it, some of the best of it with Dot. My family is reluctant to have me doing it alone (and they may be right). But I have continued, in 1997 three weeks in Europe with my eldest grandson—24 years old, and to Bermuda with a group of friends. In 1998 I took a Grand Circle Travel cruise from Amsterdam to Vienna, and with a friend, a trip around the world. That trip involved a 63-day cruise from San Francisco to Rome with 23 stops along the way (23,000 miles) and airplanes from Rome to Phoenix. This year [1999] I am scheduled for a three-week trip to China with my Seattle-based younger brother in June, a cruise-tour in August to the Black Sea and Turkey, which includes the total eclipse of the sun on August 11, and leaving on October 31 a one-month cruise from Athens to Cape Town with many stops along the east coast of Africa including trips to Petra in Jordan and Karnak in Egypt, as well as the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
Copyright © 2003 by
Wilber B. Huston.
All rights reserved.
Inquiries to
Herb Huston
<herb_huston@yahoo.com>.