sound barrier in October 1947! Then along came the U.S. space program, which took American heroism in flight to a whole new level. I was fortunate to have an inside view of the entire Apollo effort, an accomplishment that I believe will go down as one the most significant ever.

While I was secretary of the Air Force during the Nixon administration, my military assistant was William Y. Smith, an Air Force colonel from Arkansas. He came into my office every morning to brief me. After a while I noticed that every time he sat down, he kept his right leg extended in front of him. When I looked into his record, I saw that he had been shot down during the Korean War, had bailed out of his airplane, and had lost his leg, now replaced by a prosthesis. Further review of his record showed me that he was a West Pointer with a doctorate from Harvard University. By the time he retired, he had been promoted to four-star general. Willie Smith was a person who made the most of what he had, a true hero.

In our family we had an example of heroism ready at hand. General George S. Patton, Jr., married my wife Gene's aunt, Beatrice Ayer. World War II made General Patton a national hero. After the war, he came home for about a week, landing at Bedford Airport. Proud citizens lined virtually his entire route from Bedford to the Hatch Shell on the Charles River Esplanade in Boston, where he spoke that afternoon. Gene's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Keith Merrill, hosted a party for him at their home, Avalon, in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, in the days following. Because meat was still unobtainable, we slaughtered some live chickens, due to war rationing. The next morning, a Sunday, the general spoke at a service at St. John's Church in Beverly Farms. Afterwards we had dinner at Woodstock, Gene's aunt's home in Prides Crossing. In the middle of dinner the general pointed his finger at me and said, "I want you to know that when I came into this family, my father-in-law was very much against war. I told him what I was trying to do in World War I, and he finally said, 'Well, just make sure that, if you're going to be a soldier, you be the best soldier you can be.' The most wonderful thing about this family," the general went on, "is that it energizes people to do the best they can."

I've certainly found that to be true. I couldn't possibly have married a more supportive person than Gene, and I am very grateful as well for the support of her mother, her brother Keith, her sister Romey,

and "the old gentleman," her father. He could seem pretty tough, but he did wonderfully nice things for people, especially behind the scenes. When Gene and I were first married, we were living in a $65-a-month apartment and working pretty hard. He wrote me a note saying that he was proud of how well we were doing and that he thought Gene and I ought to have a chance to get out once in a while and do something by ourselves for fun. So he deposited $100 in our name at the Ritz, told us to go have a good time, and asked me to let him know when we needed more.

I have been lucky in love—and in work. Timing is very important. It just so happened that my professional capabilities meshed well with the timing of professional opportunities. Napoleon, when a soldier was brought to his attention for possible promotion, used to ask, “Est il heureux?" ("Is he lucky?") What he was looking for were men who, somehow or other, achieved their objectives. In that sense of the word, too, I have been pretty lucky. When there was a job to be done, I did not like to sit around debating; I liked to move ahead.

When I was eleven and going to the Tower School, our class was charged with selling advertisements for the school magazine, the Turret. I trotted around to the retail businesses in town and asked them all to advertise. The other kids selling ads found that wherever they knocked I had been there before them. I came into school with a whole sheaf of orders and by far the most change in my pocket. A fullpage ad cost eight dollars.

I don't know why Charles Stark ("Doc") Draper picked me for the first of a series of projects at MIT during and after World War II. Perhaps I was lucky in that, but I usually did get the job done. Each project led to another with greater responsibilities. When the brass came up from the Pentagon to look at something we were developing, Doc used to say, "We're like little boys on the sidewalk watching the fire engines go by." What he meant was that something beyond us was happening and we were little more than observers, happy to be there. Bigger and bigger engines came past me. Finally there was one called NASA. In this case, I wasn't watching from the sidewalk. I was aboard and in the cab. But still like the little kid on the sidewalk, there were times when all I could do was watch with amazement.

Grandfather Bosson-An Early Family Influence

My family has always colored my outlook on life, and a variety of family members have served as inspirations for me throughout my career. I barely remember my mother's father, Albert Davis Bosson (1855-1926), but I would say that he was one of the first heroes in my life, once I became aware of his various accomplishments. He had his finger in a lot of different things-the Hood Rubber Company, the Naumkeag Mills in Salem, the Boston and Lockport Block Company (which made pulleys, originally for sailing vessels and more recently for cargo ships and oil rigs). He was a founder of the County Savings Bank, a relatively small institution in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He also served as a judge on the local court. Apparently, people didn't worry as much about conflicts of interest in those days.

My grandfather died when I was seven years old, having suffered from a bad heart for many years. He used to spend summers in Europe taking hot baths and other "cures." My parents told me that, upon his annual return from Europe, he always seemed worse than when he had left to go overseas. He would return to his apartment and go to bed. After three or four days of this, he would start picking up the phone and calling business associates. Then he might have a board meeting or two in his bedroom, and before long, he would be back in his chauffeured car finding out what was going on. With this involvement, he would come alive again. To me, this has always been an interesting commentary on the importance of remaining active.

I wasn't aware of all of my grandfather's business dealings, but I know that he played the piano, and I do remember that he taught me the Lord's Prayer. He was always reading four or five different books-a novel, a book of poetry, one on history, a great variety of things. He liked to work his way through all of them simultaneously.

My Parents

My mother's maiden name was Pauline Bosson (1894-1969). Although born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, she spent considerable time in Geneva, Switzerland, when she was a very young girl. She spoke French before she spoke English. When she finally went to elementary

school in the Boston area, she was teased unmercifully for her poor English. For secondary education, Mother went to Miss May's School, where she met my future mother-in-law, Katharine Ayer Merrill.

Mother was a superbly complicated person. She was very strong and yet uncertain of herself. She worked hard for the Salem Hospital and for Grace Church in Salem. She was on all kinds of committees, taking on the tough chores that nobody else wanted. But ask her to chair a group, and she wouldn't want to do it. She didn't believe she could run a meeting, though those who knew her well would have said she could run a thousand.

She had lots of friends, people who adored her, but she could be very contrary. We learned as kids that if we had a choice of A or B and wanted B, we had only to say that we wanted A. She would argue with us for a while, whereupon we would say, "Okay, if you insist, we'll do B." In some ways, she was a pessimist. It was her view that summer was over on July 5. "It's downhill all the way from here on," she would say. Somehow that summed up her view of life.

My father, Robert Channing Seamans (1893-1968), was such a mild-mannered man that he seldom fought back when Mother became contentious. They had been married only a short while when Mother decided to splurge on their meager income and buy a roast of beef. She overcooked it, but when Father carved it, he characteristically said, "This is wonderful, Polly!" She said, "You know it's not!" Then she stuck a fork through it, took it out, and tossed it into the swill pail. Coming back into the dining room, she took her corset off and threw it at him, so annoyed was she by his forbearance.

My parents first met at a dance in Salem. As Grandfather Bosson was a director of the Naumkeag Mills, chaired by my great-uncle, Henry Benson, the Bensons invited Mother to visit them in Salem and to attend the dance. Mother said she didn't want to go, but Grandpa insisted: "Polly, it's important to me that you go." Later, Mother was invited back to the Bensons and went more willingly the second and subsequent times. Father knew another young woman named Ellie Rantoul, who had a sports roadster. According to Mother, Father used to tantalize her by driving by the Benson home with Ellie Rantoul when he knew Mother was visiting and might be looking out the window!

At the time of their meeting my father was a student at Harvard

College (class of 1916). He had been born in Marblehead, where my grandparents had the third house on the Neck-in the days when there was no paved causeway, and passage to the Neck depended on the tides. Like many families, they spent the summer in Marblehead and the winter in Salem. Grandma had wanted my father to be named Hugh Gerrish, an old family name. Aunt Rebe (pronounced "Reebee") Benson, my grandmother's sister and the wife of Henry Benson, often invited people to Sunday lunch at her home next door to my grandparents. One day shortly after my father was born, the Episcopal bishop was one of the invited guests. She called up my grandmother and said, "Carrie, the bishop's here. Why not have the baby baptized today?" Grandmother agreed and brought father over to Aunt Rebe's house. When the bishop asked the godmother, Aunt Rebe, for the child's name, she said Robert Channing, not Hugh Gerrish! Apparently Grandmother accepted the choice. I've always been very grateful to Aunt Rebe that my name is not Hugh Gerrish, though Channing was never a family name before that christening. As far as we know, it came straight out of the blue and into Aunt Rebe's head.

Grandmother Seamans, whose maiden name was Caroline Broadhead (1859-1949), was a real sport. On one occasion, when barnstorming pilots arrived at the Beverly airfield to take people for rides in their old open-air two-seaters, she climbed aboard in her long flowing dress and had a grand time. Her husband, my grandfather, Francis Augustus Seamans (1860-1931), ran Perrin Seamans and Company, a Boston hardware supply store.

Father went to Salem High School, Noble and Greenough, and Harvard College. He became interested in architecture as an undergraduate and wanted to continue his studies in this direction. Grandfather Seamans, who had never gone to college himself, figured a bachelor's degree was more than a man needed anyway, and he was certainly not about to send his son to graduate school! So Father became a certified public accountant.

Early on, he served as a bank examiner. About the time I became conscious of what he was doing, he was working in a brokerage house in Boston. After the stock market crash of 1929, however, he lost his job. The following year my father went back to work on a supposedly short-term assignment for the County Savings Bank, the bank founded