A oral history interview with Robert Ormsby, class of 1945, conducted by Marilyn Summers on October the 24th, 1995, at Georgia Tech. The subject of this interview is student life at Georgia Tech. Mr. Ormsby, thank you so much for joining us here today. My pleasure. We're anxious to hear your story, and I'd like you to begin at the beginning, if you would. Okay. 

One interesting thing, I think, is that in talking to young students of today, they wanted to know, how did you decide what to take? 

And my recollection is I never had any question. From the time I was seven years old, I wanted to design airplanes. 

As a matter of fact, when I was nine years old, I wrote a paper which floated around the family archives for a long time on the joys of designing airplanes. 

So I have a hard time identifying students that don't know what they want to do. And I was a rather poor student in public high school. 

As a result, my mother packed me off to military school, where they concentrated on physics, algebra, you know, those kinds of courses. 

And then the question became, this was in Mississippi, and the question became, what engineering institution should I attend? 

Being a native North Carolinian, my father looked at NC State, and I'm not sure how we kind of rule that out, but I think I wanted Georgia Tech. I don't even remember why. 

This was 1939, 41, and so I ended up here with a full intent of taking aeronautical engineering from day one. 

I remember the first day very well, as I recall you reported to the administration building and they gave you a room assignment and mine was room 303, Knowles Dormitory. 

And all my earthly belongings were in one big suitcase, big old beat up suitcase, and I walked up to three flights to room 303 in Knowles Dormitory and there was a little card on the door, saying, James E. Carter, Plains, Georgia. Late 17, you have to have a certain amount of braggadocio. 

So I slammed the suitcase into the door and pushed it open and said, Where in the world is Plains, Georgia? 

And Jimmy was sitting at the table. He gave that very famous grin. He looked at it and said, Near Albany, which, of course, is the way Southerners pronounce Albany. 

And so with that, I was at Tech, and I must say that the first year was not particularly traumatic in that many of the courses that I had taken in military school were the same ones I'd had in military school. Yeah, the same course in military school were the same courses at Tech. Even the algebra book was the same book. 

So if Jimmy remembers me as being a very good student, it was that I kind of cheated by having some of those courses at military school. That was the summer, the fall of 42. And as everyone knows, those were rather difficult times for everyone. And one big difference was that we went to school year-round. We did not have any summer breaks. I guess I didn't give much thought to military service. I figured if they needed me, they'd come get me. 

Although in the spring of 1944, I concluded maybe I ought to go do something, so I tried to enlist in the U. S. Merchant Marine, which wanted engineers for running ships, you know, cargo ships. 

And I was foiled in that, and I went down to enlist, and you had to take a color blindness test, issue her a color dot test. 

And they didn't have those plates there, but on my record, they saw I had applied or was admitted to Georgia Tech. And so all I had to do was go out to Tech, get the physical report. The trouble with that was it had notes on it that I was an asthmatic, which I was. 

But I figured that didn't bother anybody, it wouldn't bother me, but I was rejected for military service based on the history of asthma. And also, at that time, I was in, and I can't understand why, I was in Club 72. And you've probably never heard of Club 72. 

Well, there were 720 civilian students, that is, without any military attachment, without any reserve, ROTC, or Naval Reserve, or anything else. And in the spring of 44, I think it was, they decided to draft all but the top 10%. And I was all packing to be hauled off to Fort McPherson to be drafted. And somebody said, no, you're in that magic 72. 

So I think it was a combination of a history of asthma, which was correct. And the fact that I was doing, to my surprise, rather well in studies. 

In deference to all my buddies here, the threat of either being called up in a reserve program or being drafted really just tore everybody up in terms of grades and concentration. 

So it was not a fair competition that I was from Club 72. Some of the things I do recall quite well. one advantage of living in Knoll's dormitory was at that time there were no West football stands. On the third floor you could look out and see Grant Field and watch the games. And the Boys High and Tech High played their annual game there. Alabama, as I recall, used to play some games there, maybe Alabama and Auburn. It was kind of a neutral site, or maybe Alabama, Georgia. 

I don't remember what they were, but we'd sit up in the windows in the third floor of Knoll's dormitory and watch the game for free, which is as good as you can do in the West Ends now, and some of the more daring guys would sit there with their feet hanging out, but I wasn't that brave. Nobody fell. And so student life was mainly serious. 

There was not a lot of horseplay, and everybody knew that this was, that your education was very important in a lot of different ways. Do you think that's because of the war? 

Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. And it wasn't long before we'd be hearing classmates being killed in action and that sort of thing. And that gives you a very serious outlook on things. 

I remember, well, first of all, no Georgia Tech alum can talk without talking about football, right? 

Right. In those days, Georgia Tech was, we were number one at the end of the season. 

They would beat Notre Dame at Notre Dame for the first time, beat Navy at Navy, beat Alabama, and then, unfortunately, it fell apart against Georgia. 

And Bobby Dodd took it on himself to blame himself for that by saying he's scheduled too tight a schedule, too tough a schedule. 

But football was, we just knew Tech was going to be in the top ten, and usually was. Other things I remember, the one professor that stands out in my mind is Doc Smith, taught calculus. 

I still remember him, and in fact, I was working on a calculus problem some years later as a graduate, and I could hear it. His English grammar was not the best. He was not a sartorial example. 

For example, I think he had his watch on an old shoestring which he tied to his belt strap, but he did know calculus and he knew how to teach it. 

It was always entertaining at the end, well, at the Monday morning class when we got the results of our Friday afternoon quiz. He'd go up to the board and say, well, I've seen new kinds of math here. five of you must have studied somewhere in darkest africa or somewhere where they don't teach calculus and they had a favorite number called the number of bunnies i guess dumb bunnies and he would say the bunnies went to the bad on some facet of the of the problem and his favorite one was like it all drops out for zero well if you haven't taken calculus you don't know that your upper limits, lower limits, and you have to substitute in the limits for the various terms. And so many cases, if the lower limit is zero, that term all goes to zero. 

But if you stick a cosine in there, cosine zero is one. And you can count on Dr. Smith to stick at least one of those somewhere in and just exult. 

Well, five of the buddies went to the bad by saying it all drops out for zero. 

But he was an outstanding instructor in that his quizzes were, you could roar through them in 20 minutes if you knew what you were doing. 

But he always had little things in there to trap the unwary and the ones who were not well prepared. And like I say, I could still hear him years later. I'd be working in calculus probably. I'd hear Dr. Smith saying, don't be a buddy, don't go to the bed on this one. I think he's a good teacher. He was, outstanding, outstanding. He liked football, too. And we had a famous, I guess he's still on the record just somewhere, Eddie Procott. He was in our class. And in those days, football players had to go to class, too. 

Now, they didn't get tutoring, but we didn't have the current crop of, I don't know about tech, but many of the big education institutions, they'd take, you know, folk dancing, basket weaving, pottery making. At those days at Tech, you didn't. And Eddie was a fullback. And we were invited to, Tech was invited to Sugar Bowl in 43, 44. And we were trailing 18-0 at halftime. We'd been throwing a lot of passes. In the second half, they gave the ball to Eddie Prokop. He must have carried it I don't know how many times. And we won, 20-18. 

Well, the first day of calculus with Dr. Smith, After that game, Dr. 

Smith just exulted in this, and he did tell a story that he was watching the game with his mother, and she couldn't hear too well, and she kept wondering, who was this pork chop? 

It was Eddie Procott. 

So there are little things like that that stick out in your mind. I do remember it dawning on me that this was a competitive business attack. 

When I wanted to be, I mentioned I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, And somewhere along the line, I found that 600 of my classmates assigned to be AEs. 

Well, of course, World War II, flying, airplanes, all were very important. That wasn't so bad until I realized there were only 16 design boards in the AE building. 

So somehow 600 had to get down to 16. And so I took things much more seriously after that. Do you remember any of your AE courses or anyone there? 

Oh, sure. Don Dutton. 

Don Dutton was the, well, Don Dutton, Al Pope, and Bert Bricker taught, and Dukov, four instructors, I remember. And unlike, I guess, tech today and most good engineering schools, it was very practical. Our professors had just come out of the aircraft industry. They had worked for Chance Vaught, for Curtis Wright. 

And today, of course, you tend to find PhDs from Stanford and Tech and others who've never worked in industry. I'm not putting that down as bad. I'm saying it's different. As a matter of fact, Georgia Tech in those days were very much like Southern Tech is today. 

As a matter of fact, 10 years ago, my older daughter, who got a master's degree in geophysics from Tech, went to Southern Tech to get a course in drafting or surveying or something. 

I mean, I looked at the catalog, and her catalog of courses was almost identical to the one I'd had at Tech in 42. 

And by the time the 80s had rolled around, or 70s even, Tech's freshman class curriculum was very much the same as my sophomore. 

You started right out in calculus and physics, whereas when I took, as I mentioned, overlap here in my high school. 

So you were getting more practical things. Oh, yes. Hands on. Yeah, that's right. It's like another school like that is Cal Poly in California, as opposed to Cal Tech. 

And so our profs tended to have come out of the aircraft industry and were very real problems of aeronautical engineering. And so Don Dutton was one of my major profs. Al Pope taught other courses. 

Because Dukov, who was a head of the department later on, taught dynamic stability, and Burke Bricker taught several courses, I don't remember which ones, but they were very dedicated, and that was fun. 

They had a sense of humor, even sometimes macabre when they would give us a shaft on a quiz and tell us in advance that that's what they're going to do to us, and did. 

But there's a very personal relationship that may not exist these days. I don't know. Our classes were small. As I mentioned, there were only 16 spots for seniors. That meant that the courses at the same time in stability control structures were 16. And so we had a very, very small class, unlike most classes today in big universities and colleges. 

So, another thing I'm struck by the difference then and now is we did all our calculating on an old Monroe calculator, which you had to punch in the numbers and flip something to go over to tens, hundreds, to do our weight and balance, and later I went back and found the kids using calculators, and I said, that's not fair, it's simply not fair, they had girls hearing calculators and both of which would have changed things very dramatically and then I said maybe I can lie about my age and come back again and and that didn't work so the another thing I recall and applaud is the fact that we did have humanities studies in Shakespeare and so on and And one of the knocks engineers get is that their single mind is single track, logic, ABC, if it can't be integrated, it doesn't exist. And I was pleased to find that people who say that know nothing of the sciences, nothing. 

In fact, I found I was better prepared to discuss Shakespeare and art and so forth than were the liberal arts students who were knocking us for being hard-nosed engineers. I think that has been expanded since those days. But, and I enjoyed them. 

The funny thing about it, of course, is you can't really appreciate a lot of the things you learn in those kind of courses. 

How can you appreciate Lady Macbeth until you met one? 

And after you've been out in the corporate world, you meet them. 

Now, they may not do you in with a real dagger, but it can come anyway. 

So I very much appreciated Tech's emphasis on trying to give us some bit of the humanities. and make sure we weren't totally locked in on F equal M-A. I might pursue that a moment while I'm thinking of it. Lockheed, in his wisdom, whatever, sent me to Stanford for a year in 1959 and 60. It's a program called the Sloan Program in Executive Management, which was put together by Alfred P. 

Sloan, the guy that assembled General Motors, where the express purpose of the course was to take narrowly focused engineers and make them broader individuals so they'd be better able to manage at top levels. 

And presumably those of us who were picked, you had to be between 33 and 37 years of age, were picked by our companies as potentially corporate leaders, which I think is a great idea. 

But again, it wasn't all that strange to me. We studied Shakespeare. Heck, I had this at Georgia Tech. Really? 

Yes, Georgia Tech. 

So I think maybe I raised the reputation of the school by speaking favorably of the humanities courses here. The student life was not without its happier moments. All I might say, we went to school five and a half days a week. week, yeah. My daughters went to Emory and Georgia Tech, and I think they had a wonderful Wednesday off. I said, I'm paying way too much. Curriculum, I mean, tuition at Tech was $72.50 when I entered here as a Georgia resident, and here I was paying several thousand dollars for my daughter at Emory to go to school four times a week. I couldn't see that. No, Saturday morning was a regular, regular day. And with all the labs, we went to school until five in the afternoon, many days. 

But when we relaxed, we relaxed. And perhaps the high point of the social season was inter -fraternity council dance. And I was a member of a fraternity here, Delta Sigma Phi. 

And what happened was that the big dance bands, the Les Browns, at least may not ring a bell with you, but Krupa and Les Brown, the other really big bands would be moving from New York to Florida or Florida back to New York as the season changed. And when the action, social action moved back and forth, they did too. And so we would hire them to play here on the way through. 

And we'd have a tea dance on Friday afternoon, no, Saturday afternoon, and then a formal dance Saturday night. And in those days, formal white tie and tails was not unusual. It wasn't required, but the student dress today perhaps is not what it was in those days. And my cousin went to Emory. He became a doctor, MD, and they did the same thing. 

We finally combined it, so he had a tea dance on Friday afternoon, formal dance on Friday night for Emory, and then Saturday for Tech. 

And since he and I were on the two inter-fraternity councils, was we managed to get tickets exchanged. 

So it was from Friday afternoon until a wee hour Sunday morning, we kind of had a great time. You were a dancing fool. Yeah, right. 

I remember at least a couple of times I didn't get to bed from Friday until, I'm not sure when it was, but turning time into a gray mist. It was a lot of fun. 

And you knew you were building something you could talk about later, talking to your kids about it or anyone else about how tough it was at times. Did you have regular girlfriends, or did you go look for girls for that? 

Typically, yeah. I usually had one or two that were steadies. 

And for one reason or another, over a period of time, they decided we would break up, or I did, or whatever. It was never traumatic. I don't remember. 

Well, one thing in those days, we all knew we had to go get a job. The idea of getting married in college to us, that's ridiculous. Who's going to feed us? 

Because my dad couldn't. There were no social programs to pay for my way. I was there on my own. 

So I don't recall any of my classmates getting married in college. No, I hadn't even thought about it. I didn't even consider it. And some were desperately in love, you know. And some later got married to the girls they dated here at Tech. 

But it was priorities. First priorities, get a degree and go make a living. Did you hold any jobs at all while you were here? 

Yes. 

I worked over in the wind tunnel for Al Pope, pick up a little extra money, and I remember my salary was 50 cents an hour. That was a little money. In those days, it went a long way. Did you have a vehicle? 

No. 

In fact, very rarely, I think in the whole fraternity, there was one guy with a probably well-walked or rode, as we call Mr. 

Arkwright's electric taxi cabs, and that doesn't ring a bell with you, but in those days, Georgia Power had the big trackless trolleys, And Arkwright was president of Georgia Power, so Arkwright's trolleys were the big electric trolleys that went out to Buckhead and Emory and out to the airport. 

So transportation wasn't all that bad. Of course you walked downtown to Atlanta, that was, what, a 10-15 minute walk. 

So when you went to a formal dance, you picked your girl up on the trolley, and... 

Well, there was another way. We called them push-its. They were car Reynolds that were not... The cars weren't in good shape, we ended up pushing them half the time. 

So we'd get together and pool enough money to rent a car, which took some very careful scheduling to get the various girls in and so forth, particularly since we didn't want them to know we were that hard up for money that we're in. And that, of course, created another little occupation, too. You had to pay for the mile when you got through. 

Well, it didn't take long for some of my fraternity brothers and others at Tech you to realize if you put a car up on jack, jack up one wheel, and put it, it had a standard shift, you didn't have, put it in reverse and pull out the throttle, the modometer counts backwards. And of course, that does sometimes create problems. 

If you sleep too long and you end up at less miles than when you checked it out, and you haven't got any gas because gas was rationed, so that created some intellectual challenges. 

Didn't they catch on to you? 

How would they prove it? 

You bring it in with 10 miles on it, what can you say? 

And, of course, I didn't do that, you understand. You just drove it. Yeah, right. 

And one of my good fraternity brothers got picked up by a cop who was backing all the way from Emory down Postoli and taking miles off. 

Well, at 2 in the morning, there was no traffic, so there shouldn't have been any problem, but he nonetheless got a ticket for it, which we thought was totally unfair and not a good reward for his ingenuity as to how to get some miles off the car. 

And no one felt ill-used or this is a problem or complaining we were all in this together and things were tough, tough scholastic, tough living and so on. 

But it was a happy time, it sounds like. It was, it really was. 

It felt like you were doing something important and it was not easy and as you well know, no one enjoys, you don't get the satisfaction out of doing something easy. The tougher the challenge, if you beat it, the greater the satisfaction. And we all had it every semester that we survived at Tech. It was a hot dog, and we got by another one. And with good reason. Let's see, of course, George P. Burdell was in every class. And that was, of course, a big thrill. We trapped a new prof by Henry George P. Burdell. and he would call the roll, and George P. wouldn't answer, and we'd burst out laughing. 

So as you say, it was a lot of fun. Those inside things that made the culture of the campus. 

So you had to watch for someone who would come that wouldn't know who George was? 

Is that the idea? 

Oh, yeah, any new prof. They always liked Doc Smith. You'd never get him on that. 

During the war, of course, there was a turnover in profs that probably would not, well, some were drafted. or went for other jobs. Some were needed, of course, in things like the Manhattan Project and other special programs. 

But you get a new prop. I thought we got one here. And run George P. in on him. There was another interesting guy here, Coach Freddie Lanoue. And I'm sure you've had people tell you about his drown-proofing. Did you experience that? 

I did. And it was one of those cases where I did do the real engineering thing. I sat down and thought it out very carefully. I was not a good swimmer, not at all. I could make it across the pool, and that was about it. And his announced intent was to teach you, train you until you could swim a whole mile. You could take as long as you want. You could float as long as you want, but you had to stay in the water and swim the mile. I was 72 laps in the tech pool at that time. 

So I figured, well, I could play his game and kind of splash around and build up. 

I said, why go through all this agony? 

So the first day, I said, Coach, I'm going to do the 72 laps. 

Well, there were some problems with that. We had a swimmer on our tech team who was in the same little class. And I'd be plowing along, and he was going back and forth like a speedboat. And then he drowned me. Of course, the first 15 minutes, he was through and out. 

So I survived that. And then, of course, the old muscles give out, and they just would quit. 

So I'd lie there and float. I suddenly realized I was the only one in the pool. Everybody else was gone. 

The hour was up, and there was a dude sitting on the side looking at me, and I was shaking his head, and I said, I'm going to make it. I think it took me an hour and 25 minutes to swim the 72 laps. 

But I was all through. Didn't have to come back to drown-proofing anymore before that swim in the mile. 

But like many things at Tech, you look at that and you say, that's a good idea. It's a good idea. You don't say, this is ridiculous. Why am I doing something dumb? 

And so that was true of almost everything we did here. Things made sense, and they were hard. The culmination, of course, was graduation. and my mother had died by this time and my father was here very proud of course. He never had a high school degree but my mother was bound and determined I was going to get a degree. 

And of course she was the one that put me off at Georgia Tech where I would work instead of goof off which I was doing in public school. Mainly pictures of airplanes is what I did in public school. I remember my art teachers were very upset. Other guys would draw birds and flowers and I would come in with an airplane. 

And I thought they were pretty good, because I could hold them up, and the boys in the class could recognize what they were. Oh, yeah, that's a SPAD 3, that's a Fokker D7. 

But the art teacher never shared my enthusiasm for that. He wasn't consistent, though. 

So I got packed off to military school. 

So Dad was very proud that he made it possible for me to go to Tech, and then I got a degree, which he never had. 

So it was a very, very pleasant time. Where was your graduation? 

It was in the gym down here. I say down here. It's probably not there anymore. It's where Tech played basketball. The old Heisman gym. Yeah, okay. It's not there anymore. I'm not surprised. And I had had several job offers. I took one with the Glen O. Martin Company, which is now the Martin Marietta Company. 

And so I'd met some of the engineers while working at the Tech Wind Tunnel and I guess I impressed them I showed up and I didn't cut my initials on the table and didn't sleep on the job so they hired me so I was off to Middle River. Mr. 

Ormsby let's go back and talk a little bit again about your living arrangements where you stayed and some stories about that please. 

Okay we our fraternity was not one of the bigger ones in fact it was one of the smaller ones Delta Sigma Phi it was in a what It had been a residence on Williams Street, 763 Williams Street, and I don't think that exists anymore because I think they paved over it when they made the freeways. 

The fraternity was founded by some returning veterans from World War I, so it had been here for a while. 

The big challenge we faced was that most of the members were in one of the various reserve programs, ROTC, and they lived, therefore, in the dormitories. 

And somehow I ended up with the job of treasurer, which was an education in its own right, because we had no money coming in and a lot going out, but somehow we managed to survive. How? 

Was it on dues or fundraising? 

Well, I'm not sure how we did it. I don't think I stole any, I don't think I broke any laws. 

But we tried to offer meals as long as we could, but that finally we couldn't do it anymore because they were eating, had to eat in the naval or the military facilities. and somehow we made it. I think we did pass the hat several times just to keep the sheriff off the front steps. 

Living in a dormitory, I mean, living in a fraternity house that's in a residential neighborhood, which it was, was interesting in that next door to us was a very nice family, but always, and they had boys too, and you can imagine that you'd think of ways to bug each other, and one memorable evening, I remember one of our guys was coming in. He parked the only car in the fraternity out back. 

He was walking beside the house, and the young man next door had a huge water ****** made out of a charging device for a refrigerant. 

We should throw a good stream of water a good distance, so he thoroughly soaked one of the good brothers who came in mad as the proverbial wet hen, and we decided we had to respond. Right. 

And so we quickly realized we did have garden hoses that were long enough to reach from a tap that had a thread on it. It was down in the basement. We did all this very quietly. 

Turn on no lights and very querically I ******* the thing to the tap in the basement, ran it up the steps and into my room and this chap and they took in a Georgia Tech student roomer and they were right at 10 feet away. 

So we very carefully, in the summertime, we dropped there our window from the top, put the hose there, and we had a signal worked out because you had to turn it on. 

So once we got it all pointed, yell at her and let her go! And so downstairs they turned the water on, a string of water went over, and we managed to hit their desk where they were working. 

And homework papers went, and they were thrashing around to our intense glee, and we figured we'd won that one, and he never again wept down any of our fraternity members. 

But it was one of those, it was kind of a competitive fun. 

How long did you stay in residence at Knolls with Jimmy? 

As I recall, it was a matter of three or four months, somewhere around the turn of the year. 

Did you get to know each other very well? 

Yes, well, as I've told everybody, the thing that wants to know about Jimmy, he was a very hard worker. I don't think I knew any student that put more time in on the books than Jimmy did. I would leave on the weekends for a good time. I'd leave him studying, and I'd come back to change clothes. He's still sitting there. I never caught him away from the table where he was studying. 

I come in on a Sunday night and I'm all ready to relax and go to bed after a hard weekend and he's still pounding the buck. He was an extremely dedicated student, so I'm not surprised that he achieved many of his goals. 

If you work that hard, you can usually get an awful lot done, and he did. The fraternity experience was a good one. for one thing it brought me up against the reality of making ends meet which many kids today are the ones I see they get married and suddenly they buy everything on time and suddenly find they can't pay for everything mom dad well there's no mom or dad for us and so early on I realized you had to have a budget you had to check how much money is going to be coming in and then and very carefully ration how much is going to go out. 

So in that sense, it was good. 

And because of the war and so many of the members of the fraternity being in the military, one of the reserve programs, there was not a lot of activity there during the week. The ones of us who lived there studied. And so it was not a distraction. It was a nice, quiet place to come to grips with calculus, physics. differential equations. You mentioned that you had taken a CE course. Civil engineering, yes. 

The professor there was, in keeping with all of the other profs I had, he was an experienced surveyor and I remember one of the assignments was to lay out a railroad curve, which most people don't know unless you're an engineer. 

It's not a simple curve, it's a parabola, which is not all but easy to lay out, and our prof had done that, so when we did things, he would, kind of like Dr. Smith, give us the equivalent of a bunny. 

We didn't know how to handle the chain, the thing you measure with, and he'd make fun of us, but we learned a lot, because he knew what he was doing. He had been a surveyor. That was valuable training to him. Oh, yes, yes. 

Even though you probably never laid out a railroad line, did you? 

No, never did, but the reason it was in the aeronautical curriculum is there's a kind of tooling that's called optical tooling in engineering, in which if you're only going to build one or two or three airplanes, you don't make what's so-called hard tooling, which is very expensive to make. You shoot it in with a transit, just like you do in civil engineering, and that was why we took it. You could lay out the points on an airplane optically if you're just going to do one or two or three. and so that was on our curriculum for that reason. 

So you really can see the value for it now. Oh yes, yeah. The funny thing, we didn't have much of that questioning. It was a different attitude. There was a feeling if someone is older than I, that person has learned something. 

They may not be right and they may not be totally on target, but they probably have something that I ought to know and this is quite different from the current 10 years ago, you guys, all that stuff is passe, you don't know anything, and why should we do it your way, which I think had an unfavorable impact on curricula, where, for example, at most of the big universities like Stanford, you can graduate from there without having had what I call a real tough course. It's all touchy -feely, opinions, and I didn't take time to kind of give a sermon here. 

I gave a commencement speech at Tech here in 84 or so, and I got some good comments on it from various people. 

And the point I was trying to make is that engineering, above just being able to teach you how to make something, is a frame of mind. 

And I made the point that under Plato's Academy, over it was written, let no one ignorant of geometry enter. 

Well, what did that mean? 

Well, it meant in the Greeks' time, no one was interested in your opinions about the music of the spheres and all these esoteric things until you demonstrated you were possessed of a logical mind. And somehow we got that backwards now. and so I did a little bit of looking into it and concluded the reason is the dark ages all learning retreated into the monasteries in which obviously the here and now is not important you're preparing yourself for the afterlife and we are now still trying to struggle out oh it was a bad experience in the dark ages the Greeks had it right if you can understand Pythagoras theorem if you can do these things now we will listen to what you have to say about something else But the answer to the calculus question is pi squared over four, or it isn't. It's not a matter of opinion. 

And so that is, to me, a significant difference between the student body and attitude, and a lot of reasons for it. And I'm not saying one is bad, terribly bad, but you can guess where I come down on that one. And I began to feel somewhat justified. 

I began to see a somewhat of return not going back to where it was in the 40s that the old person says that's the way It is that's the way it is but there is some understanding that maybe You don't don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and even Stanford Now we'll let you fail you can get an F at Stanford up until a year or so ago you couldn't there was no F grade Well, you might hurt somebody's feelings. You might crush their legal egos. And a bunch of egos need a lot of crushing if you're going to live in the world. Sometimes adversity builds. Yeah, right. 

So then even talking about putting a science course in Stanford. I want to go up there and see what it is. If it's teaching how to spell science, that's not it. 

But if you teach a philosophy that start out with the best data you have and don't just stop there. And of course, that's what everybody accuses engineers of doing. 

But I like to start but knowing what I know, and then I'll take flights of fancy. Maybe I want to disregard it. Maybe I want to buck the odds. 

But at least know where you're starting, and engineering tends to do that, and that is the difference. 

Well, here you are with your tech degree. You've gone through graduation. 

What happened to you? 

Well, I was hired at the Glenelg Martin Company, it was called that then, at Middle River, Maryland. At the, I think my starting rate was $1.05 an hour in all that it would buy. and we were not salaried, we were hourly even graduate engineers, you punch the clock just like the guys on the assembly line which is okay too I was in the wind tunnel group because I knew the guys there having worked at the Tech wind tunnel so I spent a fair amount of my time coming down to the Georgia Tech wind tunnel and hobnobbing with my old profs and all, it was a great time being young and unmarried, I could work the night shift no problem, travel was no problem because I roomed with two other guys, two other engineers at the Martin Company. And it was fun. I got promoted. I got, you know, reasonable advancement. The trouble was the Glenelg Martin Company was running into a problem, a deep-seated one. 

The old management, Glenelg himself, who founded the company in 1909, was still chairman of the board. And so, and his whole top management was of that persuasion. You know, you had to be kind of stupid to get in an airplane in 1909 and fly it. An engineer in those days would say, that thing will never fly. A lot of them didn't. 

So they had vision and guts, if you want to call it that. 

But they hadn't kept up to date with engineering, and so they turned out several very bad airplanes. I'd run some wind tunnel tests, and I'd show my boss, and go, this airplane's unstable. You can't get an FAA certificate for it. 

And he'd go show the chief of aerodynamics and run up the line, and they'd say, well, hey, why have you guys been fooling around wasting money in the engineering wind tunnel, we got the airplane already built. And so they had. 

So after a few of those, I could see Glenn L. was in for some rocky times. And being young, I said, well, maybe I'll do something else. I got married in this time. My wife was a weights engineer. And so we were a two -slide-room family for a while. That was good. Anywhere you had a log-log duplex desensory slide room. I didn't have to argue with her about engineering matters because that's what she was. And so we moved to Washington and I worked for the Navy. They were building a new, well they had a very good wind tunnel lab there. Washington, D. C. or Washington State? 

Washington, D. C. Just outside, it's up the river from Washington, D. C. 

But it's basically in Washington, D. C. area. Then I found they were building a, had plans for a supersonic wind tunnel. In those days, supersonics was, you know, rare. Airplanes flew at 40 miles an hour, and he said, wow. 

So I said, hey, here's a new field. 

So I took some graduate courses over at the University of Maryland, which were interesting because they were taught by, guess who, Germans. In fact, my professor was Dr. Hans Kritzvig, a very, very lovable guy. He was the number three guy, Pinamunder, working on the P-2 and those things. 

So all of our class problems were German World War II rockets. he bought all his papers and stuff and supersonic flow and all that so it was fascinating look forward to it and I was the number I was the deputy head of this new wind tunnel supersonic it was fun we got it all invented things I haven't patented invention which I never made money on but looks good your resume patent number two million okay and that was fun until we got settled down to just putting models in the tunnel. And that bored me. It's so easy to do. We weren't inventing it. We weren't doing anything new. We were just testing missiles, which is fun, but... 

And then a friend of mine, who was a Georgia Tech grad, who had worked at that same place, moved down to Lockheed at Marietta. 

And they were looking for aerodynamicists, and he put my name in the barrel and said, I got a call from Lockheed. Would you like to come look at us here? 

And sure. 

So at This time we had a small baby, 15-month-old or so. And I told my wife goodbye, and a small baby. Got in the car and drove down here. And you came in on US-23, I think it is. And I didn't remember exactly how to get from there over to Marietta. 

So I stopped and said, can you tell me where the Lockheed plant is? 

The guy was filling the gas tank and says, Lockheed. Oh, you mean the bummer plant? 

I said, yeah, I mean the bummer plant. because the plant was built World War II, built B-29s. And people still call it the bomber plant or the bummer plant. 

So I got over to Lockheed and found out that the job they had for me was basically in the aerodynamics group running wind tunnel tests. I said, hey, man, been there, done that. And so I started asking around, and they were opening up a new group called Operations Research. I said, what's that? 

Well, it was a science or a field of study that developed during World War II. Let's say you have a given submarine, a given torpedo. How do you best exploit it? 

And so you'd run studies on various assumptions. 

Should the submarine run deep? 

Should it run shallow? 

You have to consider the probability of detection running shallow, but you have a greater probability of hit. 

So with all these assets, what's the optimum way to run a given problem? 

World War II was basically using equipment that had already been built or designed, but you quickly see what you do is translate it to new system development. 

If you're going to design a new transport aircraft, how big should it be? 

What kind of field should it land on? 

What should it carry? 

How big should the cargo compartment be? 

Should it be 9 feet wide, 15 feet wide, all of which are possible, which is an optimum way to do it? 

If you're the Army, you give me your division with all the vehicles in it, and by computer, I can stack them in and change the size of the airplane to minimize the cost. 

Well, that sounded like fun. 

So I started in operations research, and we worked with nuclear airplanes, nuclear transport aircraft, all kinds of ideas. And whilst there, Lockie selected me to go to Stanford. 

And I went there for a year, and when I came back, they made me the division engineer for operations research, and shortly after that, preliminary design chief, preliminary design being where all the new designs take place, and I've often pondered why they did that, because I did not have the usual background of having designed airplanes. 

The preliminary design chief usually was a guy that had designed the cells, landing gears, hardware, you know, physical pieces of airplanes. 

But I concluded that maybe the management wanted a broader view of operations research, of designing airplanes, and we had good guys in the group that could lay out the structure, the fasteners, and the aluminum, and so on. 

But for whatever reason, they put me in as a head of preliminary design, and And somewhere through there, I guess I was the head of the C-5 preliminary design studies, which was exactly operations research. 

Should you have four engines, six engines, how big should it be? 

And, of course, you know how the C-5 ultimately developed. 

And so I was not the engineer on the actual design and production of it, but I was the guy that shaped the airplane and turned in the proposals that won the contract for us. 

So that all kind of fit together. And you look back on it, and you figure you were lucky. You did the right thing at the right time, not through planning, not through engineering. I happened to want to be an aeronautical engineer back in 1930. 

Who could have foreseen in 1942 the country would be talking about building 60,000 airplanes a year? 

I happened to get some good training at Martin Company through the Navy and end up at Lockheed, Georgia, which was starting an operations research division which appealed to me and I had kind of the training for it and through that developed a reputation that got me to Stanford so every one of these things was a very fortunate set of circumstances later as president of Lockheed Georgia young man, I would head the door open anybody and a young guy came in and he said I've just started with Lockheed, I want to see your plan I said plan for what? 

Well, you're planning to become the president. I said, I didn't have any plans. He said, you're a kid. He thinks I was lying. And he said, well, I'm laying out the steps. And he had it all laid out. Three years, he was going to be a group engineer. And we would be chairman of the board and retire at age 65. I said, well, friend, good luck. Because I never had such a plan, and I don't think you can. 

It's good to have a plan, but don't be a prisoner and be disappointed when these milestones don't click off as you have laid them out. Anyway, I look at all these things as a very fortunate set of events. 

So in addition to being reasonably good, you've got to be darn lucky. You really do. That's what you're telling me. Yeah, that's true. At the time I went to work for Lockheed, nuclear power was becoming a big issue. And a lot of guys took nuclear engineering. Look what's happened to that. Are they bad engineers? 

No. It just happened for a lot of reasons, nuclear engineering. 

Nuclear engineering did not become a front runner or a preeminent kind of vehicle to become chairman of the board or something or chief engineer or president or so on. 

So my advice to young students is be lucky. Be very lucky. 

At Lockheed, as I say, I became a primary design engineer, and later on we had an idea of selling the C-5 as a commercial transport for cargo. 

And so through that I got to travel extensively, and we were trying to sell it to the various foreign airlines, Lufthansa, SAS Air France, and that was interesting too to deal with foreign personalities and they're quite different. 

The American approach is, well I got a contract here, I'm Bob Ormsby, I'm president of the company, here's the deal for you, sign it because I got to go back at 5 o'clock. 

And this friend was looking at me and saying, who in the world are you? 

Do you mean what you say? 

Can I rely on you? 

Can I trust you. It took me a little while to figure out what all this was, but I'm not a really slow learner. 

But I figured you'd better go have some wine with them, have a little dinner, break a little bread, eat some cheese, and get to know each other, which is not good for the ulcers, too. 

But the Europeans, and in fact people all over the world, are quite different in that regard from Americans. 

So you had a learning curve. Yeah, a learning curve. How to do business with foreigners. And to them, a handshake. You can't say, well, this is okay, but I've got to go back and check with the board of directors. They expect you to commit your company at that time to whatever it is you want to do. And then once they've made that decision, then it's a decision with them. And they don't tolerate much. 

Well, you know, we have a new chair on the board. We decided not to go do business in that field anymore. You do that once you're through. 

But anyway, the idea of selling the C-5 as a commercial airplane was really fascinating. 

And we got into some, well, you probably don't know that we could carry 120 Volkswagen Beetles in the C5 commercial version. Why would you ever want to do that? 

Well, there was a good reason. People at that time were buying the little VWs in great numbers. 

But it took about five weeks to get from the factory to here. And if you wanted to wait for a blue one with a white stripe, you might wait a year or so. because what the plant was doing was turning them out and putting them on a ship. They could sell all they could make. 

Well, if you airlift them, think about it. 

You could put the order in one night, comes off the end of the line, goes on the ship, and you've got on the airplane, and you've got your car two days later. And it makes all kind of sense. 

First of all, you don't have the damage on the docks, damage due to salt air and all that sort of thing. 

But there's a big problem, and we quickly learned. 

And the best way to go broke, other ways too, but a good way to go broke is to haul a big airplane around empty. And so what do you haul back to Germany? 

And you have to match it up. You can't just be sometimes, it's got to be a full load because air transportation is expensive. 

So we found that was a big problem in everything else we did. We looked at hauling bananas. Bananas? 

Yes, bananas. From South America to the U. S. the market price varies day to day well a ship when it's headed for New Orleans it docks in New Orleans an airplane on route can suddenly be told hey the price for bananas in St. 

Louis is up 10 -20% today it lands there and you sell them again what do you haul back to South America anyway those were fun times and then got you into more than you might have thought yeah I hate to be bored and somewhere along the line They asked me to be Vice President of Research and Development Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale. 

They make the naval submarine missiles, Trident, Poseidon, Polaris, and had quite a research and development group. 

We looked at everything, solar power for houses and buildings, a flywheel thing to drive vehicles, special batteries for electric cars. Does that sound familiar? 

That's a lot of stuff I hear today I laugh at. because you were doing oh yeah I know what the problems are and yeah well I thought it was goodbye to Georgia my wife and I sold our house here and hauled off to Sunnyvale and one year and thirteen days later I got off an airplane in Washington DC and I was being paged and it was my boss the president of the corporation who asked me to come down here and be president Lockheed Georgia and I said well that sounds good but let me check with my wife, so I called Margaret, and she said, well, okay. In fact, she was good about moving all the time. 

She was not one of these wives that got her feet down and moped when she wasn't there, and we found that typical lot of Atlanta girls. 

Atlanta was the center of the universe, and we had them out on the West Coast from time to time, and they were just miserable. Instead of going to Yosemite and enjoying that, they wished they were back in Atlanta. 

My wife's attitude was, I'd say, want to move? 

She said, yeah, and I'd don't you don't you want to know where she said nope when do i have to be packed and when do we go so she was she was never anything but a total help to me in that regard and so she enjoyed the moves as much as you can enjoy them and we came back here as president of lockheed georgia which i what year was that 1975 and i think i have the dubious distinction of being the longest-running president, I guess I didn't mess up or didn't do anything particularly outstanding for nine years. 

And then they asked me to be group president of all the airplane companies, the Lockheed Georgia California Company, and we had several more, with the idea of consolidating them. And we badly need to consolidate them because the war was long over. You're not going to build 60,000 airplanes a year. and we had excess space but the difficulty is a person as a people one how do you consult what's the big corporations are all doing and I tried to do it in 84 85 86 somebody has to go you have to go and I don't think Lockheed was prepared to suffer the personal enriching experiences of taking a guy who's president of the company and saying I'm sorry we don't need you anymore And I'm not sure that it worked out any better. What happened is that it just kind of trickled itself down. 

Being a planter, I wanted to decide what it ought to be like and then try to prune off the parts we didn't need. And so I could see that wasn't going to go anywhere. I was 62 by this time. 

If I were a younger man, I would have waited him out because I've done that. He's 55, okay, I'll wait until that guy's gone, and then we'll go do what we want to do. 

I was 62, I couldn't see anything but just kind of goaltending, and so why be a problem? 

And so I decided, besides which, you know, retirement sounds pretty good to me. 

If we can afford it, it turns out we could. 

So it was a happy dissolution. It was like a divorce in which both sides mutually agree. We'll both be better off. I'll stop. 

I told my boss, Larry Kitchen is the guy, and I said, you know, if I stick around here, I'll just keep telling you what you ought to do, and you'll keep telling me you don't want to do it, so why should I stick around and get a big salary for doing that? 

He laughed. I said, yeah, I guess that's probably right. We're still good friends. 

So at 62, I punched out. And what do you do in retirement? 

Well, I'm the chairman of the board of a little company. Not exactly retirement. Which makes windshields for, guess what? the Lockheed fighter, the F-22. 

Now let's talk a little bit more about this retirement you're in. 

You're the CEO of a windshield company? 

Well it's a company called Sierras and Corporation that has several things. 

One of the subdivisions or corporations is Sierras and Silmar Corporation, which does make transparencies for aircraft. 

Transparency being a window or a cockpit cover with plastic or glass and I'm the chairman of the proxy board is called because the owner is a German national and we do classified work and the U. S. 

Defense Department won't let him run the company so he signs all the stock over to so-called proxy holders and we are therefore an unusual board but we're the board of directors and we meet once a month and one of the items of course is how are We do it on the Lockheed programs, and a name will come and say, Yeah, I know him. Good guy. 

So that's fun. 

And Sierrasen does business with all of the major aircraft manufacturers, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Learjet, Canadair. 

So I kind of keep my fingers in on what's going on in the air, which is B -1, B-2 bomber, and things like that. That's not a full-time job, but it does take some time organizing the agenda. discussions and so on. 

I'm also president, I guess, and chairman of a not-for-profit company called the Educational Benefit Corporation of the College of the Canyons. 

We have a two-year college right there in the little city I live in, and California, to be blunt, is broke. 

California has no money, and yet the two-year colleges are the pressures on them are growing and there's no more money so under California statute if the trustees of a college determine there is land that is surplus to educational needs it can then set up an educational benefit corporation which will then try to convert some of that unneeded land to revenue producing purposes and so that that takes more time almost than anything else that I do, and we're hoping to be able to realize an income to the college of like one to three million dollars a year by developing some of the land to revenue producing purposes. That's very satisfying, I'm sure. It is, yeah, because I believe in education. 

To digress a moment, at Lockheed, I used to rail at the news media for all the ***** things they said about the C-5. 

Some of it was true, some of it was sort of true, and about an equal amount was totally wrong, just wrong. And then I got very critical of the news, and then I realized that's not the problem. It's not the news. The problem is, quote, the people, we the people. We don't ask the right questions, and by and large, we're not well educated on many things. 

So I said, well, if we're going to really change this whole world of ours, we need to concentrate on education. start in the first grade and improve the educational system. 

And when I moved to California, I was retired, I started, what could I do? 

And I didn't ask very long before somebody said, well, how about this? 

That's fine. Education is education, wherever it is, from grade one through college. 

So that's why I got into that, in the hope and belief that money will provide additional educational opportunities for kids that otherwise couldn't go to college. And as I say, I'm hoping that we can do something in that regard. I also have been president of our local hospital foundation, mainly raising money. We have a private hospital that doesn't rely on any government funds at all, which is not easy. but we do all kinds of things to get income from people who want to contribute, corporations or what have you Robert Ormsby likes challenges I don't know I'm not sure, I just don't like to sit around I didn't sit around watching television all day that doesn't do it when I finally get to the point that I sit and watch television, then come get a wheelchair and roll me off to the old folks burial ground. I can't picture doing that. 

So those things keep me reasonably busy, but on the other hand, we come to Georgia four times a year to see my daughter, Robin, the mechanical engineer. Tell me about your family. Tell me about the rest. 

Well, first of all, my wife has been, I've seen so many guys' careers hindered and hampered and ruined by their wives. And Margaret has an interesting case. She says what she believes. And every now and then He said, well, I may have ruined your career. I said, honey, if they can't take the truth from you, I don't want that career. Because she would tangle with wives of the big executives. You know, this is what I believe. Instead of, oh, yes, miss so-and-so. She's not that kind at all. And she always has supported me. I've worked sometimes night and day for days on end at Lockheed. 

We scheduled birthdays around my availability, which many times weren't on the birthday because Daddy didn't get home. And many of the time when I was on the C-5, we didn't have dinner until 10 o'clock at night. 

But she'd keep the girls up and give them a little snack and make sure the homework was done. 

So when I came home, we'd have dinner and I'd go back to work and the kids would go to bed. 

So a lot of wives won't do that. That company's intruding, they're not fair to my husband. 

Well, see, she worked for seven years. And she knows what work is and when it calls, you have to go do it. 

So she's been, I can't imagine a better wife for the kind of life that I've lived. And being an engineer, she understands engineers. In fact, she told our daughters, don't try to marry anybody but an engineer. They're the only good ones around, to which I smiled. Neither one of them did, but it kind of correctly represents Margaret. We have two girls. The older one was born in 1953. She started out wanting to do oceanography. She and I used to do scuba diving down in the Keys, and that's a lot of fun. 

But then she realized that there's not a wide market for ogenographers. You know, you graduate the first six in a year, and you just saturate the market for the year. 

So she thought about history. 

And we've always, we didn't want to give them an attitude you have to do, have all the money in the world. 

But the sad thing is to see people take courses of action, which by the time they're 30, they can't afford to do the things they want to do. 

So think about how you want to live, and then think about is what you're planning to do, will that equate? 

And if you don't want much, fine, you know, don't worry about it. 

But she likes her stereo and color TV, and so I said think about it. 

So then she thought that maybe geology would be a good choice, so she went to Emory, got her degree in geology, did very well scholastically, and she knew that the geology undergraduate degree doesn't do you much. 

What you do is work for a soils company or a consulting engineer. 

And then the younger one, little Robin, our mechanical engineer who lived life to the fullest here at Tech, she was on the team that takes the rambling wreck to the place and maintains it, so she went to all the football games and had all the thrills of that. 

Little sister to Ki-Fi, had my old red convertible, which you could get an amazing number of kids and inner tubes in it for rafting. 

But she graduated as a mechanical engineer and worked for Delta. She was the first lady engineer at Delta. I don't mean flight engineer, engineering engineer. And I love the story that she told us about ****** harassment. And somewhere along the way, that became a big thing. And I asked both girls, no, that's not a problem. I said, surely somebody must have made some kind of... Rob said, oh, yeah, yeah, I was at Delta about two or three weeks and it was a staff meeting. And, of course, Delta's dress code didn't allow for girls at that point. I had to win them in the engineering department. 

So I was going to go to the staff meeting, and the young engineer across from the table said, you can't go. She said, why not? 

He said, you're out of dress code. She said, what? 

Delta's dress code requires you to wear a necktie, you know, for guys. She reached in her, he threw a necktie across the table. He said, you can put this on, you can go. She opened up her desk drawer and took out a package of legs. He's a pantyhose, threw him over and said, you'll wear these, I'll wear the necktie. He said, I can't wear those. She says, why not? 

Joan Namath does. That was the last ****** harassment that she ever had at Delta. 

I mean, it's not a big ****** harassment, but it ended the conversation about your girl in a man's world. 

And Marca at Chevron has had a few, but the thing she says, if you don't invite it, the other guys will shut up the guy. I said, I have to worry about it. Some guy will say, oh, well, boy, you've got a real shape to a geophysicist here. You know, cool it, knock it off. You know, you sit at the other end of the table and that takes care of it. 

And then she had to go out on an oil drilling, a rig, a chevron rig, where there's nothing but roustabouts out there. Not many girls or females of any kind. 

So I was curious. I didn't say anything. How did he go? 

She was great. They treated us like they were knights in shining armor. 

They loved to have was there, no one ever made a even a faintly suggestive remark, and then we all were leaving by helicopter, they all lined up, waved to us and asked us to come back. 

So my wife's opinion about a lot of the ****** harassment is at least part of it is generated by the girl, by the female. 

Now I can't speak to that, see I'm not qualified, but my two daughters and my wife say that, so I simply pass that on for further discussion if you want to pursue it with them. Mark has done very well, at Chevron, she'd been promoted, she has a little house, never married. 

And everybody said, oh, when is she going to marry? 

And I said, when she finds the guy that she truly loves. 

Well, she should be married. I said, wait a minute, I know a bunch of them that shouldn't be married that are. 

And so it would be great if she did, but until she wants to get married, I think it's great that she does just what she's doing. And so we talked about one time, she said, well, Daddy, it's very simple. To be married is a lot of give and take. I've yet to meet the guy I want to give anything for. When I want to go down and watch television and watch that program, I want to watch it. And she said, if some guy comes along and changes my mind, I'll marry him. 

Well, so far he hasn't come along. 

But she loves her life, got a cat, you know, a nice little house. 

And we come, she comes up here several times a year, and she comes out to California two or three times. 

And so I kind of got into this line of discussion where you say, well, what do you do in retirement? 

We spend about four or five weeks here, more than that, six weeks out of the year. We come into spring, summer, and this is the fall one. Through very careful planning, our family birthdays clump in the spring, fall, and summer. 

Of course, you look at it, the Jesus Christ birthday is December, so we have four birthdays that we come to Atlanta around. 

So we're moderately busy. It's a good life. Busy enough, let's put it that way. 

Well, when you look back on what we've talked about today, the time you spent at Georgia Tech, the investment of your labor into your degree, was it worth it? 

Would you do it again? 

Absolutely. Of course, it fit totally what I wanted to do. I wanted to design airplanes. And you can't do that without an engineering degree. 

And Tech's education was just what I needed, It's very practical, very realistic, and very useful bit of information, which, as I say, I can still hear old Doc Smith. 

Well, it all drops out for zero. 

Well, the buddies did that, but it don't, and he would say that, it don't drop out for zero. His English was not for the best, but his math was sheer genius. 

So you'd do it again? 

I'd do it, you bet. but I was a chairman of the National Advisory Board for several years and I got to know some of those guys who were about some older than I and we were talking we well we reviewed the scholastic requirements and we got all through that we're both very impressed and this other guy says you know I'm real proud to be a graduate of a school that I couldn't even get into today so So if you say do it again, I don't know. Depends if I could get in or not. Which you could do, huh? 

Yeah, if I could, I'd do it again. 

Is there anything else you want to share with us, sir? 

No, I think I've covered all the highlights and a lot more than that, including a lot of lowlights. 

So unless you have some specific thing you'd like to ask me about. I'd just like to thank you very much for your time. 

Well, it's fun, you know. It's another great contribution to Georgia Tech. I hope so. Thank you. Thank you.