This is a living history interview with Albert Al Hainland, class of 1947 and class of 1950, conducted by Marilyn Summers on September the 14th of the year 2000. 

We are at his home in Atlanta, Georgia, and the subject of our interview is his life in general and his experiences at Georgia Tech. Mr. 

Hainland, it is a pleasure to be here with you this morning, and thank you for your hospitality and allowing us to come hear your story. 

Where does it begin? 

Well, Marilyn begins back in 1921 in Homestead, Florida, when my parents, my mother was Alice Mary Prescott was her maiden name, and my father, Neil Ernest Hanlon. 

And the thing that started me off in this excitement of a lifetime, it was, as I look back on it, there's three things that I think are significant as to why as to who I am and why why it all happened is the people that I came from the the overriding impact of the depression and then God himself so with that thing there I'll start out with the folks that on my father's side my grand great -grandfather came over from Alsace Lorraine as an immigrant here he was a hat maker and when he got over here he found out that lo and behold there was an industry that already made hats. 

So I don't know what he did for a living there after he ran into that problem. 

The significant thing about him that I'm told is that although he was a well educated man himself he had come to the persuasion that education was the source of unhappiness and so he vowed that he would not have any of his family receive any formal education which made a problem for my grandfather whose name was Wellington Blood Hanlon and he went fortunately by WB all his life rather than carrying that around and he had a brother called Perry and he had two sisters Ida and Mary and the the Mary I think never married but the other the other three married and my grandfather which was which was WB was was my grandfather and he became persuaded that education was important to him and he broke away from home as a youngster and they were up in the Minnesota area where they had where they had where the family was living and he broke away and he went to some town and in my mind I just always picked Milwaukee I don't know whether that's correct or not, but he went there and he tended fires to pick up pocket money to where he could put himself through school and get an education. And when he got his education, he became a teacher. How interesting, in light of his own father's opinion. Exactly. 

And pick up with Ida, she married a man named Nelson, Edwin Nelson, and I suspect In fact, he was the businessman of the family then because three of them, WB, Perry, and Ida, the three of them left Minnesota and moved down to Merritt Island in Florida where they set up and they owned tracts of land adjacent to each other which went from Banana River to the Indian River across the island. 

And they had three properties adjacent, and they put in orange groves to get their fortune back there. 

So that had to be very early in the farming time. Yes, this was back when mosquitoes were all important. Not to mention Native Americans all down there. Yes, it was very wild in those days. 

The fruit was sold by a steamboat that came down from Jacksonville, and they'd get it across from the island over to the mainland there. 

Is that where your father was born then? 

My father was born in Minnesota, but he was moved to Merritt Island there as a kid. When they went. 

And one of his favorite expressions was he said he was glad they finally moved from there, else he'd still be in the third grade it was a one-room deal and they repeated last year's learning over and over and he said you went through the third grade until he moved but then they the thing that caused them to move was very interesting apparently teaching and orange growing wasn't at all exciting But WB, my grandfather, he was able one time to salvage the wreck of a ship that came wrecked out there on the Cape. And the wreck was, the cargo was big timbers. 

And he got them ashore and had them all in there and thought he had it made and he found out there was no market for big timbers. 

But then he found that there was a market for boards. 

So he bought a cheap little old sawmill, set it up, and sawed the things into boards, and that became his way out of there. 

And as I say, I think Nelson was the businessman of the operation, though, because shortly at that time, Homestead opened up down in South Florida where they were giving 40 acres of property to anybody that would occupy it and live on it. 

So he got, the three of them, packed up and left Merritt Island and moved down into the Homestead, Miami area. 

So they turned out to be pioneers. 

They were pioneers, and there is a pioneer association in the Miami area of which they were one of the names there. And my wife and I were members of the descendants of the Pioneers. That's very interesting. And the sawmill business, they set up sawmill down there. 

So down there now, even now, there's a road way south of Miami that's named Haineland Mill Road. After that very mill. After that mill. 

So, but W. B. was a person that's hard to know too much about because in all of the people that I'll talk about, nobody ever said, well, W. B. or Daddy and I went to Soul Place. 

But the one thing that I have is that he was, I have a little pamphlet that he wrote as he was an elder man after they'd run the sawmill. It was a family-run sawmill. Everybody was in it. All of his sons, and I haven't mentioned his sons yet. 

He had a set of twins, Orlo and Osro, and he had Neil, which was my dad, and then they had a sister, Elsa, and they were all into the sawmill business. 

Orleo and Osro were working at the mill and my dad was a salesman for the outside work trying to do that. 

But WB, to give you a little insight onto him, he became a very religious man to the point to where the only time I knew him was as a very young person, seeing him sitting in a chair with a shaking hand, palsy, a white mustache, and white hair. He had hair and the rest of us didn't. He had hair. 

But he had gone so far as to build a little church house, a screen room church house out in his front yard. 

And he had services there anytime time he could get a preacher and uh my cousins tell me that he that he hired a person in there and paid their salary to be the preacher in that in that little church house so picking up on there from uh uh the uh back to ida the nelsons that he was the businessman of it he when he moved to miama he opened up miama furniture company and he he ran all sorts of things out of that one of the things that came out of that is the furniture business was the ones that supplied the coffins for the funeral businesses there and as a result of that operation he sold off that business later in life to combs and combs funeral home as far as I know it's still established there in in the Miami area. And he owned great pieces of property. 

One of the pieces of property was the downtown city block that was just east of the courthouse in Miami, downtown Miami, the whole city block east of that. And he let it go to some Yankee that was... We don't want to go into that one. Right, right. 

But he had an enormous amount of property there. 

His wife, Ida, my aunt, was a colorful lady on her own, obviously coming out of the family where no education was supposed to be a virtue. She was one of the early women's rights people, and a Suffragette. Suffragette. Suffragette. That's the name. That's the word, right. And she was a big buddy of Cary Nation and a great booster of prohibition ideas. 

So as a kid, all of us got roped into going to endless prohibition Siemens and so forth. 

You can remember being part of that, huh? 

And you couldn't get out of there without signing a card saying you'd never drink. 

So you pledged away. Good for you. Colorful relatives. Very colorful. And the, well, another thing, well. In your own family, sir, you were the third child? 

Yes. 

So tell me about who your siblings are. Yes, I had an older brother who was a junior, Neal Ernest Junior. 

We called him Junior all the time he was growing up, but now we called him Neal, only from later years we called him Neal when my dad passed on. 

But to go back to how this all happened, as I say, my mother died when I was about nine months. I think that's correct. It was always a mystery. 

Nobody would ever discuss why she died or how she died until just within the last year So I found out from records out of the state, Florida records, what the cause of her death was. And it was a strange thing. It was pellagra. 

And she died in Chattahoochee Hospital, which is the reason nobody ever talked about it, because Chattahoochee was where the crazy people are in the state of Florida. Oh, for heaven's sake. 

So all the time. 

So they just kept that down from you. Kept that. 

But there was records. You were able to find the records on them. Yes, yes. And they said it was pellagra. 

Well, it's kind of interesting to know that, isn't it? 

Well, pellagra, which is a horrible thing, but it's a dietary thing if you just caught on to it. Yeah. And they didn't. 

But they didn't. 

So you, you were left without a mother and a tiny, tiny child. 

So that was the problem then with the, at the, at the sawmill then, everybody working together, they just kind of passed the family out among folks there. and my sister ended up with with my uncle Orlo and his and his wife Helen and so that was my uncle Orlo and my aunt Helen and Clara went with her and she lived with them and we knew very little about her just off and on although they lived in Miami we just with with the depression nothing was going on extraordinary. 

Who took you? 

And I was raised until I was about three years old by my grandparents, my mother's father and mother, the Prescott's. And we were up in Stark, Florida, up in Central Florida. And he had, he was, he had an interesting background. He was a drummer, if you're familiar with the music man. He was a salesman on the road. And it's just like in the music man, he was a drummer on that. 

But I don't know what he sold, but he was a drummer and he rode the train just like music man folks. 

And how he met my grandmother was all of the correspondence and all the communication came through general delivery of all of these towns, and she was a little lady that he got acquainted with picking up his mail. it's some town along the way who took you after you were three years old well then then my father remarried and then we that's he came up to Stark and picked me up and took me took me down into on the train down to Miami but before we left one incident in Jacksonville he stopped him and decided I needed a haircut which was a disaster as I've never been in a place like that before You remember it though now. I remember it. They fed me green grapes to keep me shut up to where I could get the hair cut. 

But anyway we got down then. 

So did you, were you raised primarily in the Miami area there? 

Yes, yes. Elementary school there? 

Yes. 

High school? 

Went through kindergarten which my Aunt Helen was a big part of the Cushman school there there, which is a significant piece of the puzzle. Then I went through that and somewhere along the way I skipped a half a grade. They had it split up and that was always a problem from then on up through high school. 

Where did you go to high school? 

I went to Edison High School and then as I point out, in my family my dad, well I didn't tell you what my dad did. 

My dad, when he was a student at the Gainesville University of Florida and he was among the things that as an upperclassman, he was with the agriculture department in the state of Florida and he said that he spent more time, more nights on a Pullman car than he did in the dorm as a senior in school. And it was a kind of frightening thing that he had to do. He would go to a town and get out. There was a blight on the citrus, and he'd get out here. 

Here's this kid, get off the train and get across, get a buggy or something, go across and look at the groves around here. And he'd announce to the owner of the grove, hey, you've got blight, and I'm here to burn your trees. Oh, is that what they did? 

You got rid of them? 

That was the only cure, was to burn them. 

So here it is. That couldn't have made the grove owner very happy. No way. You talk about a revenue officer coming in to break up. He had a rough job. 

So I don't know how he survived that. 

But he did. 

But he did. He survived that. 

Now, your dad was a believer in education, obviously. Oh, yes. He went on. 

So did he raise you to believe you would go to college? 

We were, yes, my stepmother was also a schoolteacher, and she was, so yes, we were always, always had to excel in school and had to work at it, but we went to the public school system after I spent kindergarten in a private school, which my Aunt Helen was a- You mentioned that, yes, and then the rest of your time was public education. Yes. 

Now, when it came time to think about going to college, this was in 1937-38, along there. 

Well, there's more to it than that because I got, because of the depression and the terrible times going on, I got passed out among all of my relatives. 

The summer times, I would spend a number of summers up with my grandparents in Stark, but there was also times where I spent with my with my other aunts and I spent time with my aunt Ida which her husband had died a number of years before and the she was she had inherited a tremendous amount of property that he'd acquired and the property then was from so-and-so to the bay it was that kind of thing now they and then they learned how to fill in the the bay to where the property kept going out until the somebody down there decided well hey we're not going to do any more filling so they'd pumped islands up out in the bay and all of this foolishness going on back in those days but they stopped all of that there but he was a party to that and she inherited all of that but But because of her background, she was so, and I spent a number of months living with her, and one incident that we were removed from any inheritance that she had because she told me to go upstairs and get a folding table for her, and I came whipping down with it and said, well, did you want this card table? and her response was oh I didn't know you you would know what it was do you do you know what it was oh yeah we got a card table at our house you mean you play cards at our your house yes and that was the end of any consideration of anything there she was opposed to card playing opposed dramatically to card playing very oh it was very no Sunday paper because that had the funnies in it and you weren't permitted to that. Very extreme points of view. 

But she was very, they paid out large sums of money. The organ in the White Temple, the Methodist Church was her. She was a philanthropist for things she believed in. Right. 

But obviously not her family. Exactly. 

And a section or a half a section, I'm not sure, was of South Coral Gables she donated to the church in her in her estate and the church was too smart to hang on to that they let it go for nothing and now that's part of South Coral Gables just just just unreal type of thing let's go to your decision to go to college okay how did you make the decision well in in my summer vacations with my grandparents my uncle my mother's brother was a and the reason that my dad and my mother ever got together is my dad had met my uncle Ford Prescott in college and and Ford had invited my dad to go home with him sometime or a Thanksgiving meal or something and he met my mother there at visiting over there and start and so they had gotten together there and Ford was an exceptional engineer and he was for years on the staff at the University of Florida or he was employed by by the government and during the war he was responsible for developing a very the largest the most powerful aircraft engine that of the piston like an Allison engine it was a liquid cooled inline engine and he got it developed finally it never went into production because there's a guy across there in England named Whittle that had to come up with the gas turbine by that time and the gas turbine came out to put the so this influenced you to think about engineering so engineering was in the background and this gentleman was a part of that the next part of the influence was in in the Miami area before I had the my next-door neighbor for a number of years was the Dade County engineer and I got well acquainted with him and And he advised me and told me about Georgia Tech and the co-op program. 

So that's how you heard about Georgia Tech. 

And he told me that Georgia Tech had the advantage over Gainesville's program because Gainesville made you go a whole year to school first before they would put you out on a job. And there wasn't enough money anywhere around to where I could go. 

But Tech had the one semester thing, so that's the thing. 

So you decided that was the thing you were going to do. Had you ever been to Atlanta? 

Oh, no. You never had been to Georgia Tech? 

Oh, no, no, no. 

So how did you, what did you do, write a letter? 

No. 

What was the process in those days? 

In those days, the best I can recall is that I told them when I was going to come, and I showed up. It was none of this, please, Mr., may I come. It was just that. You just came? 

Did you not have to show a transfer from high school? 

I don't recall. Oh, yes, I had to. You had to show you had competency. Some way or other, but it was awfully casual, I'll tell you. And did you apply for co-op before? 

Oh, yeah, I came as a co -op. 

So you knew you were coming as a co-op? 

Oh, yes, I wouldn't have come without being a co-op. 

And when you showed up, presumably the end of summer, the beginning of fall of 1938? 

I came here in 39. 39, okay. And it was August, the summertime, section one. And first time for you to come so far by yourself? 

Oh, yeah, yeah. On a train? 

On a bus. On a bus. Came into a bus. That must have been, that was a long haul from all the way down South Florida. Right. Yeah. 

And here you had what, a few clothes and a suitcase probably? 

I had a footlocker, but the aggravation was I had a Panama hat. 

My dad thought that was appropriate at the time, and here I arrived on campus in front of Cloudman Dorm with a Panama hat. And, of course, the upperclassmen waiting to receive us, hey, buddy, in here. 

And the only thing that got me out of having to haul everything upstairs for all these guys was my buddy, Omax Jaffe. 

He came in, he's a New York Jewish boy, and he came and he had a tweed coat on and smoking a cigar, and that took all the heat off of me. 

They were ready to jump on anybody who looked different, though, weren't they? 

They were ready to take him on. 

And what did you think of that kind of a welcome at Georgia Tech? 

Well, I knew it was, I'd come into the, into Cloudman Hall, which was the raunchiest place I'd seen, filthy, there was papers on the floor. the floors were warped because it was oak floors but they had mopped them and they had swelled and buckled out and there was no screens in the building. You sat there, no air conditioning obviously, no screens. Rough, rough, rough. You thought what were you doing here? 

Well I knew that this was the answer to doing it. And the first thing you did was go to school. yes and were you challenged very much so yeah I had I had I remember in in algebra class dr. former former he was he was a man that could write very small letters on the board and he was very precise very quiet everything and I didn't think a nice little gentleman like that could ever give out as low grades as I got on my first test. I didn't know they would mark a 50 on a paper. That just stunned you, huh? 

That was a... 

So it was tough. It was tough. It was tough. You had to study. Yeah. And just to go back to Max Jaffe, he was flunking algebra, but that was a man that had guts. 

If you ever saw somebody that had guts, he had guts. And he took that algebra of a book and he worked every problem in it over and over and over again. Memorize it if I have to. He did it and he survived and got out and he's been very successful. 

Did you make friends quickly? 

Did you find there were lots of friendly people too besides the upperclassmen harassing you? 

Oh, I got to tell you about this. Rat court was a real event there in those days. I mean, hazing was in full swing. And so, yes, you made friends because the upperclassmen beat you to pulp. 

I mean, but the one story that you got to hear is that later in the semester, we had a Saturday afternoon encounter of a pajama parade downtown. 

And your equipment was you had to be dressed in your pajamas, had to have a leather belt on, and have at least one roll of toilet paper. 

So, as freshmen you were told this because... This is the direction. 

Okay, and this was what we sometimes called a shirt tail parade? 

Well, yes. No? 

Yes, no? 

This was a pajama parade. A pajama parade. And it was related to a football game? 

No. No? 

There was no football in the summer. Oh, this was in the summertime. We're the only ones on campus. Very few regulars. Oh, okay. This is something I haven't heard about. 

This is just, there's just nobody but co-ops on there and there's, I mean, the upperclassmen I mean the regulars which were strange people we didn't know about them but in winter winter terms we ran into them but but it was just co-ops so we were all the rat court is the one who gave you the orders then yes yes okay and so the okay back to that strike so we go downtown and on the way down we of course pull the trolley you know back then there were streetcars and up and down Peachtree and so we'd pull the things off and go by and cause mischief there but the main thing was we got down to five points and some place down there there's a statue of Henry Grady. Henry Grady. Henry Grady. 

And so we decorated him with toilet paper, decorated of course we had no idea who Henry Grady was, I'm still not sure but anyway we decorated him and of course the streetcars keep coming by and so the paper got there's a trolley go by it set the paper on fire so here's fire burning over old Henry Grady's statue and of course that was well probably gonna run into trouble with the police and so the upperclassmen said well now it's time to go over to to the theater well the theater was Lowe's Grand Lowe's Grand was the place were gone with the wind, and I was in town at that event, but that was another time. 

Anyway, the idea was that they took us, and there must have been 35 or 40 or 50 of us like that, and they took us around to the back of the Lowe's Grand, and some upperclassman, he paid a ticket and went inside, and at the appropriate time, he went to one of the doors down at the alley and bumped the door open and we were pushed in so we ran into the Lowe's theater here and of course from outside to inside you didn't know but you can see so naturally I'm one of the first ones in however that happened but anyway thirteen of us made it on in up and sat down and of course sitting down up there in Lowe's Grand you're not hidden very well with your pajamas on, but in looking down, we were up in the balcony, and I looked back down to see what was going on, and the ushers in Lowe's Grand were neat as could be because they just, they had, our guys were running in one door, and they had got three or four of them together, and they had herded them and go down the aisle, and they had another the door open and had them running right on out. 

But there was 13 of us, 12 of us underclassmen and one upperclassman that were trapped. And here, by this time, the police force showed up. And you talk about a show of force, there was policemen everywhere. And of course, no way to escape. 

So we get picked up and the policemen on the stairs all the way down to the lobby and out the door to the patrol wagon sitting out in front of Lois Grand and they load us on in here and in those days the cops stood on the back of the thing there and so here we're still crazy about it so we're singing Ramblin'' Wreck going to the police rocking the thing and this guy's hanging on us so we had a ball going there but when we got down to the police station all fun quit boy. It was for real. Boy it was real. get up there and finger print you and finger print you and throw you up there and went upstairs up there the drunk tank and it was all so they got in here and they opened the door and shoved shoved us all in this little room little little thing maybe eight by twelve or something some little room and then one of my buddies norman rubach little jewish fella the big buddy of of Max Jaffe. The two of them were inseparable all through the years. 

But Norman, he's up there and everybody's smiling and laughing and all. 

But Norman goes up and after they'd slammed the door and all, he walks up to the door, gets a hold of it, and his face changes and he turns around. It's locked. This is for real. This is for real. And the other P. S. to this, the thing that got us off of the hook was, of course, the head of the co -op department and everything showed up, but we had to go to a peer in a court trial, and a Sunday school teacher in the Methodist church down there got up in court and swore that all of us were members of his Sunday school class, including Norman. The idea being they were good characters and characters indeed. 

Now they were holding you accountable even though you were under the gun. You had to do it because the seniors or the upper class were making you do it. 

And that just was part of the deal, huh? 

Yeah, well it was part of the experience, so I have a record in Atlanta. And that happened in the daytime. 

Well, it was getting close to night. We were in the pokey, it was at night. Yes, and it was getting late in the night. 

Well it was interesting. 

There was a metal bed in there that had straps in it there that were metal straps about two inch on centers and it had the angles were bent up about three by three angles and if you wanted to sit down that was the only place to sit. 

Well of course that with pajamas you didn't have much cushioning between but surely a whole bunch of college guys in their pajamas they had to know it was all just a prank it's funny they would treat it so seriously but they it was well they when it got to court then it kind of cleared up but but they had made us go to court and the only reason for it is that you were just rats you were first year yes and that was that was when they declared it from there and on, there would be no more hazing. Too much trouble. Too much, yeah, right. 

But you remember this all very clearly. Oh, yes, yes, yes. 

And you did have to wear a rat hat all the time you were on the campus? 

Yes, yes, yes, we had rat hats. And they were very diligent guys. 

They apparently had gone through the stuff ahead of them, and they were trying to get even, balance the book, so to speak. What was the leather belt for? 

So you could hang on to the guy ahead of you. Oh, so it was like a conga line then, you had to go one after the other. Yeah, you just don't break the chain. 

And the guys that didn't get pushed into the theater didn't get arrested and didn't get to go through that. No, no, no, I don't know what that. You were one of the privileged ones. Right, right, I was one of those. One of the lucky guys. One of the lucky. 

So that was, that was. It was memorable first semester there. What kind of a co-op job did they find for you? 

It was King Plow Company. King Plow, a real interesting place. They made all sorts of plow equipment. It's there on Marietta Street and it's closed now. 

But the two things that I'd tell you about it is the one, they had me working a machine, punching bull tongues as they called them, and you would take the thing and put it in the machine and it would chop it, either cut it off or then you had to turn it off and it would cut off another thing to make it a sharp pointed thing or else it would punch a hole through it to make a slot in the end of it. 

But the first day you were on there, there was always a flash where the machine would leave a barb on there that when you'd pick up the next piece it would cut you. 

So you'd cut you. 

So by the end of the day you had a ****** mess here your hands just just cut so the thing was I found a way to buy a pair of leather gloves and so I paid a quarter for them leather gloves and I went and and the thing that I wanted to pass on is that when I went into work the next morning this is my second day at work you see, all of the folks in there just laughed. 

But they didn't laugh because of, well obviously I was so stupid about the thing, but what they laughed at was they were so sorry that I had spent a quarter on something that was so useless that that, that they knew that a leather glove. Somebody had already tried it and it didn't work. It doesn't work. 

And Before lunchtime, they were ribbons and shredded, but they were so sympathetic that I was so stupid to waste a whole quarter on that. Because it was a big deal to have a quarter. And as I recall, that was when Roosevelt was starting to kick up and all. Something, first wage in our law or something. Anyway, I got a raise. Twelve dollars and a half a week. 

Which was pretty good money then, huh? 

And I had a landlady, what in the world was her name, anyway, six dollars a week she would charge me and she would give me a lunch. 

So that included your meals. That was my meals. 

And the room was just a place kind of shoved off from her living, a bed pushed off from her living room. 

So you had to move back and forth between semesters. 

When you went off to work, you lived somewhere else, when you came back to school it was back to Cloudman again. Right, right. They kicked us out of Cloudman there when the semester came that way. Yeah, so the next crowd can come through. Tell me about any memorable professors, someone you remember. 

Okay, I mentioned the algebra professor, but when's it, I guess, well, in August in Atlanta with no air conditioning and sitting in a room down in the ground floor of the mechanical engineering building and the professor was Harrelson and he was in metallurgy and he talked one of these through his nose event he was an excellent man but he talked a little through his nose and the class was scheduled for one o'clock right after lunch oh boy and it was for a lab class and the labs run three hours you know and a lot of time it was anyway get he was a he was as the war went on he was a very valuable man in helping I think it was script oh was in the business of making the wartime things but he was working with somebody trying to get armor -piercing shells to work properly and so he did a very valuable piece of work for the school and for the country out of that so even though I'm mocking him a bit and and so you're just telling it like it was the the situation and the and the area was but anyway one day one of the guys he had so many words that were new to us about what you would see under a microscope after he would take a sample and treat it and so one time one of the guys would set him up and he would come out there and well what's this professor I can't tell and he goes over and looks through the microscope and he comes up well this is a tendency of sorbidic troop site and this is laying on he was shot on there and then he stops and then oh you got it out in the lead what it was was you'd take the sample and you'd embed it in a piece of lead and then you would polish the whole thing and the guy just moved the sample out into the lead and the prof was giving us a bunch of stuff, what he knew was supposed to be there and he looked at it finally, no way. 

So they tried fooling him. Keeping awake must have been a challenge. Oh, it was impossible. Everybody was zoned out, huh? 

It was dreadful. Another one where they talked about tricks on the prop was in physics class with Ewald. No, Bortel, Shorty Bortel. And Shorty had the subject was capillary traction and surface tension, that kind of an experiment. and what he was trying to demonstrate was how certain elements would break down the surface tension on the water and he had a little balsa type little thing shaped as a boat with a V cut in the back and he put a little pill of camphor back there and the camphor would break the surface tension and the boat would just go sailing around. 

That was the idea and he had it set up to where you could see it from back up in the place there, you could look down on it. 

So he put it in there, the thing wouldn't move. Push it and push it and it didn't move. He'd take the pee out and rub the pee out, clean it up a bit, put it back in there, didn't move. 

Then after minutes and minutes of no, he finally picks the whole dish up, dumps the water out and mutters something like detergent that somebody had got to him. 

But he was a colorful guy. 

He ran all sorts of experiments there in front of you, sitting on a stool and putting the, holding weights out and turning them and when you'd pull the weights in you'd spin faster showing the angular momentum was conserved. Did you feel they were good professors, Mr. Hamlin? 

You were learning a lot from them then, so you had a respect for them. And the thing that was unique is they were co-op professors. They were, because the others were on semesters, I mean, well, we were on quarters. We were on quarters and they were on semester. And so the co-ops, we had the same profs and they were, they knew the co-op business and all. But, let's see. 

Did you continue to get good co -op jobs where you were learning things? 

No, at the end of that first one where I had no income at all, I was through if I didn't get a better job. 

So the next semester I had to tell them I just couldn't make it and if I didn't get a better job. 

So they let me interview with Grinnell Company and I got a job with them and made $84 a month, which was a big thing. 

And that was, the office was out on Highland Avenue, and the railroad track came, it was built right against the railroad track, and there in the summertime, I was summertime in school, but there was, you know, summer's a long time in Atlanta. 

But you'd sit there at the drafting table, and you'd have towels under your arms, no air conditioning in those days. Towels under your arms to keep the sweat off of your drawings. 

And then the coal-fired trains go by there, and smoke stuff come in, so you'd have to clean your drawings. We talk about air pollution now. You had plenty of it going then. And that's what I say. This is a joke. What they talk about, this is a non-attainment city. They are out of their zone. 

Because when I first got her up here, a little thing there, first brought her to this town, went home to lunch with her, and here she was in tears because she'd try to wash her white gloves and lay them out on the windowsill to dry and come back spotted with soot. because there was so much of it in the air. The trains really did spew a lot out, didn't they? 

But the whole town was heated by coal. Oh, and everybody had a coal-fired thing in their house. 

So the air was filled with it. 

So you talk about pollution, the town, you look out there now, hey, it's a joke when they talk about that these are tough days here. It's an absolute joke. You know better. It is, yes. The war was going on during these years. 

You were at Tech, and you were in the ROTC program, and eventually Uncle Sam called on you, and that would have been your junior year? 

It was long like that. 

Yes, I co-opped there with Grinnell, and for many semesters, several semesters, I was put in as a field representative, field engineer for Grinnell out in a paper mill in Bogalusa, Louisiana. 

So when the war broke out Pearl Harbor Day there, I was sitting in the hotel lobby Sunday morning in front of the radio, and here the announcement came that the people had bombed our Pearl Harbor. And so that was the- Did you realize that that was going to change your life? 

Oh, yes. You knew right away it was a serious thing. Oh, yes, yes. 

And how did you come to come into the service? 

What happened? 

The arrangement was that they put us, all of us in ROTC had an angle to become officers eventually. 

And so to kind of keep a finger on us, as I recall it now, there was so much going on, I may not have it exactly right. 

But at any rate, we ended up joining what they called the Enlisted Reserve. And we had a card ticket that kept us where everybody else had draft cards. We had this card. And so we continued on in schooling there until the machinery worked and so forth. 

And the way it was that depending on which academic program you had at Tech is which ROTC program you were in. And the electrical guys were in the signal corps and mechanical and chemical and so forth. We were in the ordnance department. 

So as things finally got down to where everybody was called, the armed forces were up to 9 million or so were in service, going toward 12 million or so. then we were all given induction orders and I had to report to Camp Blanding in Florida and then was immediately after some time I was shipped to Aberdeen Proving Ground where a bunch of the fellows there that you met Monday at the table there we were in there together and I got pictures of it. 

It's kind of ironic that a bunch of Georgia Tech people ended up in the same place then so you knew where you were and how long did you stay at Aberdeen well we went through it was a many months sort of on operation we went through basic training which we thought well being ROTC we wouldn't have to do that but no we went through we went through basic training and then then after that there was a period of time trying to wait on OCS to arrange itself and so that was a hard time coming and they there was a also a program going on called ASTP and don't ask me what those stand for but at any rate they sent us from while waiting for the program to to open up they sent us back to Citadel where we stayed about a week and then from there we were sent back to Tech where we've stayed for several months, and of course this time, by this time I was married, and so Gene was here, and we had a room on Spring Street there with about six other people were in this house, and it was, anyway, but the place where we, as being students in the AST program, There was temporary barracks out there on the Tech campus, right there on Techwood Drive, just beyond where the tennis courts were. Tennis courts were right next to Cloudman on the corner there, and so they were over there. And Billy Camp will give you a picture of that thing. I heard him promise you a picture of that. 

So you were staying in the barracks there. 

So we were staying in the barracks there, and then I've got to tell you this one story about teachers, about professors. 

Of course, under this circumstance, nobody really had a full, I mean, education and the war, I mean, the war was catching most of your attention, but nevertheless, we were here and had to go to school. 

So one of the courses we had was electrical engineering for non -electrical programs. 

And there was a man there that was a, and I'm a firm believer in the Christian belief and preachers in particular. 

But this gentleman was a part-time preacher on the side, and he was of one of these just fanatical persuasions that everything had to be exactly right. 

And if he heard the word, a cuss word, a block away, he'd make it a point to get over and apprehend the individuals. This was his background. 

So here we are in the course, in the program, and it comes final exam day, and we get in there, and all of us in test formation, you know, spread out blue books on the table, and spread out everybody, at least a seat between everybody. 

And so he writes the first question on the board, and there's a muttered oath in the back of the room. He turns livid and turns around. 

Finally get the class back together, and he writes the second thing on there and another oath for coming out. 

Finally, after a number of this, he finally gets all of the questions on the board, and the guy in the back, he stands up, takes a blue book, slams it down on the table, storms out of the class and says, If all the tests I've ever seen, this is the chicken, this blah, blah, blah, blah thing I've ever heard, boom. Out he goes. Who was that? 

Who was that? 

No profit. 

So he calls a roll, and we're all present. He says, somebody answered for him. 

So he called a roll again. We had to walk up to the board and stand up, everybody up. 

So we were all present. Who was that? 

So I'm forever. That's the first time I ever had a real fondness for an Auburn guy. He was a buddy of one of the guys that set him up and brought him in there. It was a buddy from Auburn. 

So the whole thing was a joke. The whole thing was a joke. Knowing the background of this man, that was the most... What an exam day that was. And I forget whether I passed or not, it didn't make a difference. 

So they would go through some very elaborate preparations to fool a professor. That was one of them. And of all the years, I was also on the other side of the thing as a teacher for many years. 

But that's the worst one I ever saw pulled on a professor. 

Driving him crazy with the whole idea, huh? 

So when did the war impact you that you were shipped out? 

What happened then, after we finally, ASTP, we finally got an opening in Aberdeen to go back and take the OCS program. And that's when all of the fellows at Remdubos and all of us gathered together up there. 

And those of us from Georgia Tech and another bunch of them from Purdue pretty much made up the class there. and that was a real excitement there trying to get a training there but then finally after we left there then we were reassigned to across the across the world really and I ended up in floral Mississippi after stops at Warren Robins and places like that we ended up Florida Mississippi you know in a plant that place that had been built to manufacture artillery shells but for some reason or other they never got in there I suspect the Remington's or whoever was building them had come on production and found it that we didn't need they were able to supply all they needed so here was a whole facility that was just wasted and so the army decided well they'd use it as a training area so they dumped us into that and we were in there just among all of this equipment and all but then we finally got our unit together and we were in the large there was five companies like ours designed during the war we were the largest company that the army had and we had the most equipment we had shop trucks and all we were what was called a fourth echelon repair company and we were assigned to the Air Force so where where our destination was was to be put on a base with a with a major air air operation and we were to take care of all of the weapons and the trucks and the equipment that was on the ground there and so all right we ended up on Tinian when the finally where where our company moved and Tinian is the place where we had the ******* we had the B-29s we had two wings on Tinian had I don't know how many wings on Saipan which was right across within easy eye shot of Tinian and down on Guam there's three islands there we had the v-29s and we made the attacks on on Japan from that and it was 1,500 mile kind of a trip up there and 1,500 miles back and terrible terrible piece of work you had a typical operation, you had two airstrips, and every minute, every 60 seconds, an airplane would be running down one, and on the other one, on the 30-second interval, the other one would be there. 

So every 30 seconds, there would be an airplane taking off, and the things were so heavily loaded with bombs and gasoline that they would get to the very, as far out as they could to begin, clamp the brakes down, put the engines full, open, turn it loose and they would roll over the green lights at the other end of it and stagger into the air and at one time at one of the airfields on our island there were six wrecks, six airplanes. 

So it was not uncommon for them not to make it. Any time you saw a big bonfire or any kind of a thing, you... You just know. You just know. 

And it was your job to keep these planes in check? 

Well, in my particular job, I had the watchmakers, the binoculars, the rifles, the small arms and that stuff. I had a couple of trucks, maintenance trucks and all. 

So that was my particular area. 

Did you not tell me that the Enola Gay came from Tinian? 

Yes, and one group, separate from the two wings, there was another group that came on the island later. And they came on, and we had to build them another hard stand for their planes. 

And their planes, because they were testing strange-looking weapons, and the weapons were so big that you couldn't put them under the side of an airplane. 

So what you would do is you took the hard stand, you dug a hole down into the middle of the hard stand, put a ramp down there, and you would put the weapon down in the hole, put the airplane over it, and then you could hoist it up into the bottom of the airplane. 

So that's the way it was loaded? 

That's the way it was loaded. And you'd go by there every time. 

And their method of operation was where whenever one of the wings or all of the wings were going, they would take a couple of their airplanes and repaint the tail to match the insignia that was on whichever the planes that were flying. And they would fly along with them and go up and fly over the Empire on their own. This was a way of being inconspicuous, not singling them out. Right, that's right. And were they actually testing some of these atomic weapons at that time? 

Yes. 

No, they were testing, and in the officer's club, and all their story was that they were gathering data on large, high explosives, very large, high explosive bombs was their cover. And one day you'd go by there, and it would look like a big bowling ball out there on the thing. And the next day you'd go out, and it'd look more like a pear. And then another time it would look like the tank off of a 5,000 gallon fuel truck or something. 

So they were all different shapes. 

But it was always kept confidential. You were not to know. Yes. And so it wasn't until it was dropped that we were told. 

So you found out when the rest of the world found out. Exactly, exactly. 

And one of our, one of my friends in the mechanical co -op class, we were known as the H class because about, oh, 10 or 12 of us had names beginning with H. 

And John Holmes was in that group, and he was one of the guys that set the thing, the fuse and so forth, to make sure that that bomb fired. 

But anyway. 

But you never knew about those things. until after they took place and yet you you told me you firmly believe had it not taken place you wouldn't even be here to tell your story because you know you would have been right because because on our island they're getting ready for the invasion and on our little island we're very small island laid out like Manhattan where everything was laid out with the roads and everything were named after Manhattan, but on our tiny island, we had eight hospital units put off there to receive the casualties, eight units. Because you knew, it was expected they would come. Expected. Had the war not ended. Right. 

And then just in recent years, I heard that the Japanese, their effort on the atomic work, which we never heard about before, but they had in mind that if they were successful, Well, one of the targets would have been one of them, and Tinian would have been the target because that was all that was there. 

So while we were doing our research, they were doing equally the same research. 

Well, they were trying, but of course, way behind, fortunate. Thank goodness. And as I say, my next-door neighbor is a Japanese fella, and neither one of us would be here. You've talked about it, and you know neither of you would be here. I haven't shared that with him. 

When the war was over, you came back to Georgia Tech in a college career that seemed like it was going to go on forever, right? 

You had been there for a lot of years and you came back to finish up. 

Yeah, just to finish up with Tinian, they closed Tinian down and they moved one of the wings over to Philippines at Clark Field and in Pinatubo you know a few years ago blew it up and buried the thing we were there all that time and had no idea those hills out there were volcanic hadn't never entered our mind and and when we first got there the little the little ******* the little people they would get in the line after chow time and those little people would be out there. 

So there was lots of interesting things there in the Philippines. 

But trying to get home and all of that, we finally came back. And yes, coming back to Tech was the quickest. Mr. Halen, you came back to campus, a much different campus than you left because of the GI Bill. Lots of returning veterans in addition to youngsters. 

It was a different things not so much foolishness anymore everybody was focused on what they had to do which was get out right yes was the idea to get out get on with a career so what how would you look at that last year as you finished up well it was pretty much realizing how much you'd forgotten how much background work you had to scratch back and and get into and uh it was a it was a tough thing to get reoriented, but fortunately we got through okay. 

And that way we ended up going into regular program, but we still got credit on our degree as being co -ops. 

Well, the majority of your time was co-ops. 

And so we took a job with a person that had moved to Serene over in Greenville, South Carolina, but I had worked for him for years over in Grinnell before I had gotten in the Army. 

So it was an old contact that got you the job? 

So an old contact got me the job. Did you stay for graduation or did you just take off for work? 

No, yeah, I didn't go to graduation. You just went out of work? 

Right, right. Okay. Went to work. In that work area, the assignment was in that to electrify the southeast. All of the mills in the, up until that time, were run by steam engines with rope drives in there. 

They would put a steam engine down on the ground, and even though the building may be three or four stories high, they would take rope and go up to a shaft up in the top of the building, and multi-ropes, I mean hawsers, big ropes, and they would, maybe as many as 12 of them, would be up there to transmit the power up to a shaft up there. 

And from there on down through belts and shafts, the whole building would be motivated by that arrangement. 

So the job that we were doing at Serene was re-engineering there to tear all of that stuff out and electrify everything, all of the looms and all of the equipment and all was to be electrified. Along with that was an upgrade of the boiler plants and the boiler rooms and all. And that was a part of the activity that I was assigned to. 

And in doing that, the thing that annoyed me was that the second law of thermo was staring us in the face. And in those days, we were faced with what they called a metallurgical limit. 

And that was in a boiler, you would take, you had to put the fire on the outside of the metal and the steam and the water on the inside. 

And that piece of metal in there would transmit the energy from the fire into the steam, generate the steam, and then put the steam through a turbine and all generate the electricity or the power or to do process work, whatever you wanted to do with it. 

But our limitation was about 1,000 degrees because the metal that we had in those days with the pressures that we had inside the boiler and the temperature on the outside, that 1,000 degrees was about the limit. And because of that limitation, a power plant had about a 30% or 35 % efficiency rating. 

So what you would do is you would buy coal, and you would buy coal at whatever it cost you, but big money to buy the coal, and you would burn it, and you'd sit here and think about it, and if it cost you $100, only $33 of it was getting into your product, and $66 of it was being, in essence, pumped down the river or pushed out into the atmosphere to get rid of. Question, why does that have to be? 

Second law says that that's true. 

And now, so that was the one thing that said that, hey, you need to learn something more about the second law. 

The other thing that made me decide when to go, that's the thing that made me go back to school. 

But the thing that made me leave was we had a birthday celebration for an old gentleman that had been, as I recall, 30 years with Serene. Maybe it was 10, but he'd been there a long time with Serene. 

And after we'd eaten his cake and gone back to work and all, I sat there and thought for a minute, well, after 30 years or something, where will I be in this organization? 

And I made it a point to go over and look on his desk to see what he was working on. And as chance would have it, he was doing exactly the same thing I was doing. And you knew that wasn't going to be you, huh? 

And I knew I'm out of here. 

So you went back to Georgia Tech for a master's degree. Again, in mechanical engineering. In mechanical engineering. And there was where I first got my first chance to teach. because Tech hired me on as a, I taught drafting for three quarters or, anyway, nine months. Yeah, which enabled you to help pay for your tuition. Right, and a GI bill and that. And, of course, I had my wife, we still had no family, so it was just my wife and I. 

So you managed to eke out. 

So we get. And you got your master's degree. Got my master's degree. And again, you did not go to a graduation. That's right. 

Because why? 

What was up? 

Well, after all, when I got my bachelor's degree and went to interviews there, I ran into a guy that was from Worthington Company, and we were, oh, 10 or 12 of us in the room, and he said, well, you guys can all go. We're not interested in any of you guys. 

Why not? 

Well, Worthington will only hire people over six feet high because anybody that works for Worthington has got to be looked up to. And so we were out of there. 

So I'm thinking, I'm not going through any more of this foolishness. 

So I decided, hey, I'm just going to go home. And I'll find out what I can do when I get home. And I'm not looking for a job. I'm out of here. 

So home was Miami. Home is Miami. 

So back home you went. 

So back home I went. 

And I said, well, I'll look around over at the University of Miami, see if there's anything going on there get a temporary sign and I went in there and sure enough there was an opening there and they took me on as a as a prof there so you were an instructor and you were teaching what in Miami I taught I taught is it now I'm strictly green now this is the shocker they put me on and I had course in thermodynamics I had advanced heat power strength of materials and drafting. Wow. 

And here's a greenhorn coming in, and now I say, I got my degrees at Tech, but I got my education at the University of Miami, because standing up in front of a bunch of GIs that don't take anything from anybody, and if you not ride on, they'll tell you about it, which is another thing, you think that an instructor has the blackboard and the chalk and the eraser eraser as instruments of instruction. That's not so. 

They are protective things for the prof because when you get the question, you have to erase the board while you think, what am I going to do next? 

So they really challenged you. It was a real challenge. 

But while you were there, you acquired another degree. Yes, I got credits for an electrical, bachelor of science in electrical engineering. 

So you were well educated in engineering from different angles. 

Yes, but to make a living, I still won't tell anybody how low the salary was that they paid us there because... It wasn't enough. 

So we had to get outside work and I started taking work, another buddy of mine there, we started working at Miami Shipbuilding and the big effort there was the design of hydrofoils and this was a new effort and totally new and so we got into that and so we worked extremely long hours and all there to work that out. How many years did you teach? 

I taught seven years there. And then what made you finally give it up? 

What I gave it up for was because just too much. By that time, we had our family started, and we had three daughters there. We had Mary Alice was the oldest, and then Nancy Ann was the second, and Carol Jean was the third. And they were all three married. Two of them are here in the local area. And one of them is still down in Florida. 

So you knew you had to provide a little more money for three new women folk in your life. 

So I opened Albert W. Hainland and Associates, engineers. Opened that as an office in Coral Gables. And what I did is I used my buddies on the staff and they used students that I knew were capable. and we did design work for all sorts of things around there we had a steady customer with valve design designing valves for all kinds of strange things and and then another interesting one was the the the blinker lights that you see along the the construction along the highways those yellow blinking lights they had a fellow that rented them or he that was his business and he was totally dissatisfied with what they had in there so we redesigned him a thing it went from a mechanical device that would blink it to transistorized thing so we were able to make that transformation for him the batteries would let change from about oh 10 or 12 days to like 50 days was the difference so so that was one thing but then what made me close that up was the work with the hydrofoil I got the offer and the more and more effort was down at Miami ship and so where they made the deal with me that if I'd come down there move my office into of their building, which was right down on the river, and that was a big place. 

But that was a mistake if I intended to stay in there, because they then took over there, and I became chief engineer for Miami shipbuilding there, and we were designing hydrofoil big time there, and our work was trying to get the landing craft thing away from what we did in War II to get something that would get the boys ashore in a hurry. 

So we had hydrofoils that had the drop front on it that you're familiar with and we had one of them with a gas turbine in it that would make about 35 knots. 

And if you had guts enough you could run that thing right up on the shore and we could collapse the foil system while you were going and this You could get them off in a hurry then, huh? 

Well, but it was a turmoil in there because the government wasn't spending money and nobody really trusted this thing. 

But we did end up with the first two gas turbines that were designed by Lycoming for helicopter service. We had the first two of them. We put one in a wartime duck. the duck was a four-wheeled truck that floated it was a clunking little machine there but we were able to fly it I have a picture of it over here if you're interested but so we did that and they we were quite successful in it as far as everybody in the hydrofoil business was and the the end of it came when the government decided that they wanted to have a Navy wanted to put out their own hydrofoil craft so they had designed one and they put it out for bids and we took a look at it told them that was too big a boat for us to handle it was just too much for us but the Admiral up there and assured us no this was going to be a design that was for the shipbuilding people he knew the shipbuilding people were in trouble so this was going to be a shipbuilding operation we told him no you know it's going to end up somebody in the aerospace is going to end up with this no no no in a nutshell we made a deal with Laurel Corporation too and they were the big front then they had the money and the backing and they had done extensive work with the Navy principally in submarine work and so we made a deal with them and we put in a bid we put in a bid seven and a half million or whatever it was and Boeing out in the west coast they put in a bid they their estimate for the job was about 12 million but they put in a bid about two about two million because they could look at the design as we could and say this was a sick sick design and if it was going to be anything to it they were going to have to rework it big time, and that was what they were planning on. 

Needless to say, when the bids were opened, the admiral that had conned us in there, he was in Spain, so the bids went to Boeing, and Boeing, I'd give government credit, they didn't give Boeing the thing that Boeing had to eat all of that, that extra money, and they did put the boat out, and it's around someplace still, but it's not functional, not operational. 

So that was the end of pretty much my shipbuilding. That bankruptcy was looking us in the face. 

And so we had an offer from our friends or acquaintances that were in the hydrofoil business up in Long Island. They were associates of Grumman. And in a nutshell, they hired all of us that would go. up to join them. 

They had a totally different type of hydrofoil design than we had worked on but anybody that was in the hydrofoil business knew what each other were doing so I joined them and I was the project engineer on that design. 

They were building a boat at that time for the Merchant Marine, Merchant Association, something's wrong here. 

Anyway it's the first government agency that put out the Savannah, that was a nuclear powered boat, and then this was another thing. 

And we finally put it, designed it and put it out, and it ran from Miami to Bahamas until they ran it on a rock and tore the foils off of it. 

So it was a limited success. 

But there was a lot of things going on there that made me decide that wasn't the final place for me. Mainly is that I'm a southern boy and that's no place for a southern boy to be stuck on Long Island. 

A little too cool in the winter there, huh? 

It so happened that that winter, South Bay froze and they had cars out on South Bay. And you said, what am I doing here? 

What am I doing here? 

I said, no place. 

So comes Christmas time, get a little time and I get down to where she was down in Orlando So I went down there and made an offer at Martin Marietta in Orlando and I quickly moved into there. In the next 13 years I was in Martin Marietta which just a little snapshot of that. 

In there they put out the Pershing missile and we had bullpups and many, many, many different weapons and all, but they never called us, there was never any scientist at Martin Marietta, and we all jokingly had it figured out, is Martin was too cheap to buy everybody a white jacket. That was the inside thing. 

Because the only reason that you've got to have a white jacket is to keep the coffee stains off of your blue jeans, right? 

And they didn't want to go the rug. 

And the way Martin solved it is that it was absolutely a firing offense if you had coffee in your office. You only had coffee in the cafeteria. That way they didn't have to worry about that. 

So they didn't have to worry about it. 

So nobody was known as a rocket scientist there. 

But in that, I was associated with component parts in that effort. 

And just as a little byline here, right now the government and all of the political people are wondering about whether or not we can field a system that will intercept incoming weapons you hear all this conversation back in the 60s we did it we already had it we had they would fire a weapon at Vandenberg and fire it out over the Pacific and we were set up in Kwajalein and we take the paint off of that baby with a weapon. Isn't that interesting? 

And the technology is already there and it has been there for forty years. Right, right. 

So we can do it and but politically and so forth and all of the deals that you know the Eisenhower thing and the Gary Powers over there and all of that how we've had to modify and shift and everything, and now we're back still discussing whether or not it's... Whether we're going to have Star Wars or not. We're going to have Star Wars. 

So I'm saying, hey, it's... 

For you, it's been there, done that, huh? 

Yes, of course, we did it much different than they're doing it now. In this way, we're going to burn them out. That way, we had to blow them out. And, of course, we were talking in terms... We were the last thing. 

There were some others that were trying to catch them higher, but our weapon was the last the last defense and we had an atomic weapon in it so to fire it was a little bit of a hazard on our side too because so it was not a pleasant weapon at all how did you end up at Lockwood and Green back here well when peace broke out in the in the aerospace thing then I they were they cooperative and I sent out as I remember 150 different applications to everything and I got one response from a man that I had met in ASME and I was I had been a chairman of ASME in Orlando area and we had separated ourselves from the Florida section and got to be a separate section there and then I met this man here and he was working here in Atlanta with McBurney and that was the only offer I got and I took it and came up here. Back to Atlanta. Back to Atlanta. 

So this is as far north as I decided I wanted to go but this was back back to home in a way. Right. 

So I was there. 

So you re-established yourself here and worked with McBurney and then with Lockwood Green. Yes. Yes. And then most recently with International Engineers. International Applied Engineering, yes. Right. Always keeping your hand as an engineering consultant. You've had a rich, wide background and experience. 

Yeah, and the thing that's crying out in all of this is that, I guess if there's one thing I had to tell anybody is you don't take whatever it is that you hear or see or run into for the first time, don't take it at face value. Nothing. 

Because anything out there that you pick up and hear either it's the slight chances that it's correct most likely it is incomplete it may well be incorrect but for sure the first time that you get it you haven't got nearly the picture of it that there is to get and in designing a power plant, which is the last major assignment that I had was, I was the project engineer on there, and I have stacks of one set of the drawings over there that show dog can't jump over, you know, but it takes, you take a plant as complicated as a power plant, and you don't, you're not through with the design on that plant until every item in that plant, every item in the plant is completely satisfied at the interfaces of that item. 

If it's a light bulb, it's got to have the right socket, it's got to have the right voltage, it has to have the right protection, it has to have everything's right for that light bulb to last. 

And you talk about the myriad pieces in a power plant, you are not through with that plant until So every item is completely satisfied because you're making it for a 30-year life with normal maintenance. It's got to have the right lubricant. There's got to be maintenance. Somebody has to think of the big picture in the beginning. 

But that's it. 

So that's one principle that you've got to know. 

So any design that you put out, no matter what it is in it, every item, every item has got to be completely satisfied or else you haven't got a successful project. Sounds like a pretty good piece of advice to pass on to our young people today. Do you have young people in your life? 

Do you have any grandchildren? 

I have five grandchildren. there is there's two boys and three girls and they're all scratching and clawing and getting at it and the thing that I realize now is that for the first time maybe a little ahead of them but for the first time the kids in our country for the first time in their in the life of a kid coming up he is competing one on one with every other kid on the planet when I came up I only competed with my with my little group but now a key click away and they are in competition with every kid across the planet and I can tell you that the oriental mind is dedicated to taking the job that the kids here are just, well, what am I doing here in school? 

Why do you make me go to school? 

And we've got to get that attitude changed. You're definitely a proponent to education as opposed to WB's father, right? 

Oh, man, yes. You know the importance of it. Oh, it's incredible. 

So you're encouraging your grandchildren to college. 

Yes, and everybody's got to go where they are And one of my, three of them have gone through homeschooling type of preparation, been remarkably successful at it. 

The homeschooling people, that program is astonishingly complete for what you, they're not given the proper credit for what they're getting out of that. the other the other groups other kids are working their way through different things have been through private schools and into into public schools so have you any hopes of anyone going to Georgia Tech no the nearest thing I had to go into Georgia Tech I had an I had a nephew my younger brothers one of his boys he went there and he graduated in 85 I think it was electrical engineer Well, maybe someday some of your great -grandchildren will go to Georgia Tech. It could be. Let's hope that they'll follow in your footsteps. 

Looking back on your life, we started out, you wanted to tell about your family, and you did, and about your education, and you did, and you said the role that God had played in your life, and I think you did by letting us know how circumstances played themselves out. The biggest thing along that line is the language. 

And the language I'm talking about is every culture and everything we have, when we talk and where we think, it's impacted on us from our background. 

And when I talk with you and I use words there, I'm assuming that you understand what I'm saying because of my knowledge of the way the word was used where I came from but it turns out particularly when you're crossing from secular to to religion that that is a big conflict and that there is the place where so many of us and so much of the public in general has lost confidence in the in the Christian belief because the words don't jibe and they don't have an understanding that what is real and what is fantasy and if you have anything in your mind about trying to find out what is real and what is not you have an immense challenge ahead of you to go dig it out. 

So along the things that I have spent is a number of years trying to dig it out and from the background of all kinds of people that I've had a lot of confidence in, that I've had different persuasions of all different kinds, I have beat my way through and I've reached a conclusion. 

And one of the most comforting things was when I found a verse that said, whatever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not man, because after all your reward comes from him. That's the thing that set me free. 

And from then on, you couldn't hire me or fire me because it was beyond what you guys were doing or anything, so that set me free. Yeah. And it's that sort of thing that you need to... That's the message you want to give. 

Everybody needs to know that it's real, but you've got to fight the system and the garbage out there to find out the reality. 

And the other thing is that I think we as Christians, by most measures, we've driven most people out of the kingdom with our attacks and saying, well, you've got to see it my way, whereas the God that I serve, he hadn't even figured out how to make two oak leaves alike and let alone how he can have two of us that can think alike, no way. 

So you accept diversity. You see it as a beauty. Absolutely. It's a beauty of nature and God. Yeah, man's idea is to Cone it, make everything identical. And God, he hadn't figured that out yet. He's going to never make anything identical. Mr. Hanlon, it's been a joy listening to you tell your story about your family and your faith. and your career, and I thank you very much for giving us your time today to put these stories together for Georgia Tech. It's been a pleasure, sir. Thank you for letting me know you, and to be a part of Tech this way.