White, my cardiologist, whether he thought I could go into the Navy. "Well," he said, "it wouldn't hurt to try." So I went around to see if I could enter the Navy's V-7 program for college graduates. I didn't pass the physical. Curiously enough, my rejection had nothing to do with my recent rheumatic fever. I got tripped up on the color-blind test. I couldn't believe it. "I'm not color-blind," I said.

The doctor said, "According to these charts you are."

I got my parents to arrange an appointment with an eye doctor, Dr. Dunphy. I told him my sad story, and he tested me. “You are colorblind," he said. So I did not have the chance to enlist.

Later on, everybody who could walk a straight line was drafted, but by then I was an instructor and involved with classified work for the armed services. MIT rank-ordered all employees of draft age, according to who was needed most to help with the war effort. The Selective Service used this to determine who would be more valuable out of uniform. MIT had me in the top echelon of those who were of draft age. As a result, I was never drafted. Later in the war, when I got to know an Air Force colonel while working on a gunsight for fighter aircraft, I explored with him the possibility of getting into the Air Force. "No," he said, “you're doing more good staying at MIT."

It was not an easy time. My brother Peter and my brother-in-law Caleb Loring were in the Navy. My cousin Jim Seamans transferred from Harvard to Annapolis, where he graduated in January 1942. Two weeks after graduation he was aboard the destroyer Truxton when it rammed into rocks off Newfoundland. He was one of two officers who survived. Covered with diesel fuel, he swam for shore in a blinding blizzard and high seas. As he got near land, he heard somebody say, "I'll be right there, Bud," and then he blacked out. He woke up in somebody's farmhouse with frostbitten feet and hands.

The impact of the war was everywhere, and we were inundated with thousands of such stories. In March 1942, after my engagement to Gene had been formally announced in Washington, my college roommate Strat Christensen rode back north with me on the train as far as Philadelphia. I went on to Boston. By the time of our June wedding, Strat's ship had been sunk by a German submarine, leaving only two survivors. I would have preferred to serve in the military; however, I had the satisfaction of performing several jobs for the armed services

developing equipment and installing it on an aircraft carrier when under way, and flying with the Air Force to help test fire-control equipment.

Our Wedding

Mother was terribly afraid that I was going to be late for my wedding at St. John's Episcopal Church in Beverly Farms on June 13, 1942. "You know, that Beverly bridge is oftentimes open. Supposing you get there and you can't cross the bridge?" She insisted that my brother and I leave our house in Marblehead two hours before the service. When we reached the church, we had to kill an hour and a half. Fortunately the minister, who knew my field was aeronautics, got me going on how propeller drives an airplane. Otherwise, it would have been a long wait.

My brother Peter was my best man. Donny was one of my ushers. I had prescribed cutaways for my ushers. Mother thought that Donny, fifteen years old and pretty big, ought to go to the wedding in an Eaton collar and shorts. He announced that under no circumstances would he appear at the wedding dressed in that fashion! He was either going to be an usher in a cutaway, or he wasn't going. My other ushers were Keith Merrill, Caleb Loring, my cousin Jim Seamans, my old Tower School classmate (and the future author of such plays as Billy Budd) Louis Coxe, and my two bicycling companions, David Ives and Johnny Brooks.

The church held just so many people. The decisions about who would sit in which pew were hotly debated. About ten members of the Avalon staff were jammed into the back row. At the very last minute, to everyone's surprise and delight, Gene's godfather, Admiral Emory Land, unexpectedly announced that he and his wife, Betty, could make it. That threw off the whole seating arrangement until it was decided to put an additional row of chairs in front of the first pew.

The church was jammed on one of the hottest days on record. Two ministers performed the ceremony-the Reverend Frederick Morris. from our church in Salem and the minister at St. John's, the Reverend Bradford Burnham. I remember seeing Jim Seamans in his Navy uniform, looking white as a sheet. He was apparently still recovering from the lively bachelor's party several nights before. I thought he was going to faint. About the only other thing I remember of the service was feeling very, very pleased as Gene and I left the church and walked outside.

The reception at Avalon was a great affair and a wonderful family gathering. There were two rooms on the second floor filled with beautiful wedding gifts. Mrs. Merrill's elderly friend Mrs. Linthicum from Baltimore was covered with more jewels than I had ever seen. She asked Gene to select any of her jewels as a wedding gift. Gene found that somewhat embarrassing but finally chose a diamond-and-emerald lizard. Mrs. Linthicum promised to send it, but nothing was ever delivered!

I had arranged for Gene and me to stay at the Hart House, an old country inn outside Ipswich. After driving there together in a getaway car we had carefully hidden from pranksters, I set about doing what I felt I had to do: carry my bride across the threshold. But the front doorway of the Hart House was very narrow, and the granite steps leading up to it were steep. Mr. Eades, the manager, held the door open for me, but I failed to maneuver Gene and myself through the door. So he invited us to use the back door. "That will be just fine,” I said. What he didn't tell me was that the back door opened directly into a screened porch filled with diners, who were surprised and delighted to watch a bride and groom perform for them.

We stayed at the Hart House for a couple of days, then went directly to the North Station in Boston, where we boarded a train for Lodge Grass, Montana. We spent a week with Nan Bosson Duell, my first cousin, and her husband, Wally, at their ranch on the Crow reservation. Then we headed for Pasadena. We spent a night in Butte, Montana, waiting for our train connection to California. We were on the platform in a small crowd of people at six o'clock the following morning when a man staggered over to us and said loudly, “I think we've got some newlyweds here! How long have you been married?” We had been married exactly one week.

We were met at the Los Angeles station at 7 a.m. by about thirty of Gene's cousins, curious to meet the groom and brimming with warm enthusiasm. That summer they included us in many happy events. After purchasing a temperamental 1936 Dodge coupe, we were able to explore that area of California. We spent several days in Indio with Gene's aunt, Bea Patton. In the 110-degree heat, she provided a retreat for her husband, the general, who had established the Desert Training Center nearby in order to condition thousands of troops for the impending North African invasion. We rode in a tank, and Gene

heard the general-in true blood-and-guts style-make an awesome speech to the troops under a broiling sun.

War Work

For the duration of our stay in southern California, some of Gene's elder relatives loaned us their beautiful Spanish villa in Pasadena. Its courtyard was filled with blooming gardenias. While Gene got us settled in our new surroundings, I took on an interesting job with United Geophysical, a company owned by Herbert Hoover, Jr., son of the former President. United had bought from Sperry Corporation the rights to the vibration pickups I had been working on in the Instrumentation Laboratory. The company had been using equipment similar to Sperry's to explore for oil; now it was getting into flight instrumentation by forming a new company (eventually spun off) called Consolidated. Engineering. I spent my summer helping Consolidated get established.

When Gene and I returned from the west coast in September, I worked for about a year with Walter McKay, a professor in instrumentation. Our project was to help determine why some Navy aircraft were falling apart or going out of control when they went into or pulled out of high-speed dives. We worked on developing instruments to be mounted in a test plane. We carefully calibrated the air-speed meter and the altimeter, and we developed a couple of new instruments to measure angular acceleration. Obviously, we couldn't ask a test pilot to go up and “just keep her going, though, of course, she might fall apart." So we planned to fly the test plane by remote control, a novel thing itself in those days. There was no telemetry for sending data back by microwave from an unmanned test plane; so we mounted a high-speed movie camera in the cockpit, then hoped to recover the plane and the film after the flight to determine what was going on. If the experiment failed, at least we wouldn't have killed anybody.

After twelve months of work, the instruments were finally built and put aboard an F-6F at Cherry Point, North Carolina. Under remote control, the aircraft staggered up to an altitude of 30,000 feet and started its dive. All the electronics went immediately haywire. The only observation we got out of the whole effort was that when the plane hit the water, it was going very fast.

The experiment was never repeated, largely because Walter and I were already at work on a new project, the A-1 bomb gunsight. We worked under contract with the armament laboratory at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. The gunsight was for use in air-to-air combat and airto-ground strafing. Its purpose was to provide optical information to a fighter pilot so that he could properly lead his target and shoot it down.

Our project officer was Colonel Leighton "Lee" Davis, a key figure in the history of the Instrumentation Laboratory. Lee wanted to move the program fast. In a matter of four or five months, we had put together an experimental gunsight and its electronics. Once the military started installing the equipment in a P-38 and an A-26, we tested it in various locations, including Eglin Field in Florida. To get there, we took Lee's C45, a twin-engine Beechcraft. He used to let me fly the plane while he went back and worked in the cabin. I did not have a pilot's license; nevertheless, he taught me a bit of maneuvering so that I could go around clouds to avoid passing through them without radar. Once he came out of the cabin and said, "Maybe you don't need to be quite so strenuous with the controls!" On another occasion, I was flying along when suddenly all of the bells and whistles in the cockpit went off at once. Lee came tearing out of the cabin and jumped into the pilot's seat. One fuel tank had run dry and the engines had shut down. Fortunately he was able to transfer to a second tank and restart the engines.

When we arrived at our destination and the equipment was tried out by test pilots, I often went along for the ride. Some pilots, just back from the Pacific, loved to fly at an altitude of about twenty-five feet. I watched with alarm to see whether the tips of our propeller were going to hit the ground, as we made our dives and passes, firing five-inch rockets.

Lee Davis's career and mine ran roughly in parallel. Later, when I was working on the Tracking Control Project, he was the chief of the armament laboratory at Wright Field, where our work was put to the test. Later still, he was the Air Force's number-one man at Cape Canaveral when I was working in the space program at NASA.

While working on these various wartime contracts, I was also teaching in the Navy's V-7 program at MIT, the same program I had wanted to enter. Officers-in-training were with us for three months, hence their nickname "ninety-day wonders." The instrumentation class, which I taught, was five days a week for six weeks. I taught that