This is an oral history interview with Robert E. Eskew, Bob, class of 1949, conducted by Marilyn Summers on December the 7th, 1995, at Mr. Eskew's office in the Overlooked. The subject of this interview is student life at Georgia Tech. Mr. Eskew, Bob, if I may, thank you so much for having us here today. You were kind of tough to run down, but we got you now. I'm glad I have it, too. We'd like to hear your story. Will you begin at the beginning, please? 

At the very beginning. At the very beginning. 

Well, it was, I didn't realize it at the time, when I was born in 1922, but I was born in Lebanon, Tennessee, the home of Cumberland University that Georgia Tech went on in later years to beat, well, they had already beat Cumberland, 222 to nothing, and that's a story in itself. and that also happened to be the year that Dr. M. L. 

Britton became president of Georgia Tech that I learned later on and he was president until right before I entered school but I got to know him and I enjoyed that and he was an intelligent great fellow and being born in Lebanon was an asset to me because now with all the international things that are going on, people say, where are you from? 

And I tell them I'm from Lebanon, and they think I'm Lebanese, and I look Lebanese, so it works out real well. 

But we lived in Lebanon, but my father passed away when I was just right at three years old, and I have a younger brother, 22 months younger than I am, so my mother was saddled with raising two young boys, and She then went to work for a while selling Compton's encyclopedias, and I went to live with an aunt in Gallatin, Tennessee. 

My brother went to live with an aunt and uncle in Lafayette, Louisiana, and a year later mother came back and went to Peabody College and got a master's degree. She had already been a school teacher before we were born. 

And then she, we went to live on the campus of Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, and had a great experience there going to a demonstration school, because that was the College of Education. 

And I can remember so well the gray wool bathing suits that we had to swim and that was in the early days of people thinking about space and Buck Rogers and all and I can remember so well tying magazines up rolling them up like they were you know running over the hills and in Nashville and that was that was a great experience and mother then came to Atlanta to teach school after she finished her master's degree and she taught in the Atlanta public schools for 30 years started out at old commercial high school and people don't know anything about commercial high school and but in those days we had boys high tech high girls high commercial high and then we had one school that the ****** went to and I hate to admit it but it wasn't until I was a grown man and out and work and everything else that I ever knew where that school was, things have really changed and for the better. 

But we came here so I went from the second grade on to public schools in Atlanta. We lived over in what's now the Virginia Highlands area and went to SM Inman Elementary School. 

It's now a middle school, still on Virginia Avenue, and I can remember going, we lived on Greenwood Avenue, and it was about four blocks to the school, and I would walk through the back of our apartment complex and through peanut fields and cotton fields and pass a black community called Roosterfoot and then going on to school and we thought nothing at all about that. Of course all of that has been developed and it's nothing but housing and all over there now. When I finished elementary school mother didn't want me to go to Bass Junior High School. 

They had junior highs now, now they call them middle schools, but she thought that we would be better off going to O'Keeffe and of course that's now part of the Georgia Tech campus which brings us right back into the into the scene. 

Well how did you get there from where you left? 

Well we moved. 

We moved to Ansley Park and we lived on Peachtree Circle and I walked from Peachtree Circle, thought nothing about that and nobody else thought anything about it. Nobody would do it today. 

Well, probably not. You know, you'd ride today. 

You'd find some way to ride, but I'd walk and the area that's now Midtown was a really neat community shopping area, and we'd walk through there, and many times we'd walk through Cress's. They had a big Cress's store down there. Across the street was a Woolworths store. They had a delicatessen, they had a pharmacy, they had a place that sold live chickens. 

I can remember the live chickens out on on the sidewalk and the 10th Street Theater which I had great times going to as a boy and especially on Saturdays and watching Tom Mix and all of the old Western shows and everything. 

So I had a really neat experience at O'Keefe. Played football for a lady football coach. Ms. 

Corbin was coach and she was a good one and we had the Black Panthers and we had a great time and made a lot of friends that I went on to Boys High School with and Boys High was it was a unique school and he is a unique school today. 

They just don't make them like that anymore and one of the interesting thing was that Boys High and Tech High occupied the same super block which is now where Grady High School is and on 10th Street you know near Monroe Drive and and right across from Piedmont Park and we had a great rivalry between the two schools. They were two separate schools. 

Two separate schools and in those days the main building was home for both the administrations of Boys High and Tech High. 

Boys High at the north end Tech High at the south end and we had a few classrooms in that building, but most of our classrooms were in portables. They were like trailers all today and they were lined up outside and had pot bedded stoves and those. You got to remember this was in the late 30s. 

Why do you think they had two schools? 

Well, because Boys High School was a college preparatory school. 

Tech High school was mostly technical and a lot of them went on to college and many of them went to Georgia Tech but it was more of a of a vocational school. Today we call it a kind of vocational oriented school. 

And you were on the boys high side? 

I was on the boys high side and during that time I played football a little bit until one day in fact Dwight Keith who came to Georgia Tech as a basketball coach, later on was our backfield coach, and we played both ways in those days, and he taught me to stay in an extra semester to play football. I was going to stay until the fall of 1940, and during the spring, we had a great big guy named K. L. Alexander that weighed 230 pounds. In those days, that was humongous. 

I was backing up the line one day and he came through and he didn't throw a block at me, he just came and gave me a push like this and I turned a flip over backward and I decided that wasn't for me. I wasn't going to stay in school an extra semester and I went on and graduated. I was in ROTC and had a great time wore a uniform, a Sam Brown belt and all those good things. Had some great teachers at Boys High School. It was, it was really, H. O. Smith was the principal and he kind of set the tone for everything. 

Hal Hulsey was the assistant principal and he was the one who would always come out and try to find a smoking out among the portables. 

Going over to Jennings Road's room which was across Monroe Drive and Chechus skipping school or going to the varsity and playing pool at the Q room next to the varsity. 

So you were into those things before Tech? 

Oh yeah I was those things were long gone and of course I knew about Georgia Tech and all that. Did you know that's where you wanted to go to school? 

No not at all. I had no idea of going to Georgia Tech for several reasons. 

One of which was that because mother was in school, we never spent a Christmas Day or Fourth of July in Atlanta. 

We'd go back to Tennessee and visit with the families in Lebanon, Gallatin, Nashville, and all that little Tennessee area. 

And besides that, in those days, the University of Tennessee had football teams that you couldn't believe. 

In fact, they had people like Suffrage and Cafigo and Molenski that were making them undefeated one year, not only, I mean, unscored on, not only undefeated, but unscored on. 

And Georgia Tech had a fair team, but I can remember so well Vanderbilt coming and beating Georgia Tech on grand field, and I went to the game, and they had a great big 300 pounder named Baby Ray. I'll never forget. 

But Georgia Tech in, see this was 37, 38, 39. And in 37, 38, they had so -so teams. 39, they had a really fine football team. 

But by that time, they had already come around at Boise High, and they didn't ask you if you were going to Cotton. 

They asked you where you were going and I had no idea of anything but when they came and asked that question in the junior year I said I'm going to Tennessee you know I've going back to my home state great football and all those things that's another interesting thing later on because I worked for coach Dodd and I'll tell you about that but because he went to the University of Tennessee and we lot of things in common. 

So you graduated from Boys High? 

Graduated from Boys High School and decided by that time that I was going to Southwest Louisiana, Lafayette Louisiana, where we had relatives, two sets of uncles, aunts and uncles, and I was going to make my fortune in the onslaught but oil fields in Louisiana. 

And I, this was, which I had already decided that I wasn't going to Tennessee, so I was, I was not going anywhere, and this was in the, in the late spring after we had graduated from Boys High School and, and before I went to college, and I went down there and was roused about in the oil fields. 

One of the reasons that I was going to really make a lot of money because while I was in high school, I did a lot of things to make money because I didn't, your mother couldn't give us everything, but I sold Liberty magazines, delivered the papers, I did, but I worked for the Firestone Station at the corner of Peachtree and 11th Street, which is not a Firestone Station, hadn't been for years, but they were interested in selling tires and I had a very interesting job because I would walk the streets and look at the tires on people's cars and if they were looked like they were ready to be replaced I'd write down the license number and take that back in and they would find out who that was. 

It was a great marketing thing you know and the people that were working there then were making $22 a week and I thought you know golly if I could ever make $22 a week I'd just be a rich rich man and I could make that in the oil fields so I was going down there. 

Well let me tell you I get up five o'clock every morning, walk downtown, get on a pickup truck, we drive out into the oil fields and I don't know how much you know about southwest Louisiana but it rains every night and the sun comes out and it steams every day. 

And we were, our job was to move bored roads that they had in the oil fields for the trucks to roll over. And they had two by 12s, 20 feet long, unfinished, you know, and they were heavy as lead. 

And we were supposed to pick those things up and hoist them up here, not let them rest on my shoulders, but march those and put them down in a different place, and it was horrendous. It was a great experience. 

One time, I went over to get some water and a salt tablet in the shadow of one of the trucks, and when I kneeled down, every muscle in my body drew up. 

I just couldn't do anything, just roll over it and do nothing about that and I think that was the thing that made me decide that working with your back was not really the best thing. 

How long did you last? 

I lasted all, lasted all summer but by that time my brother had, well I'd lasted long, longer than that. My brother had, had gone on to the University of Tennessee because he had, he had been finished. 

See we were, So he was born in November and I was born in January, and so we were really very close together. And he had already gone to UT, and so I decided I'd better go on up there. 

Well, did it develop your physique? 

You must have had a lot of muscles after all that evolved, huh? 

You know, when you're that age, it really doesn't matter very much. 

So you left the oil fields behind? 

I left the oil fields behind, went to Knoxville, Tennessee, and the short of that story is that I spent two wonderful country club college years on the campus in Knoxville, Tennessee, taking business administration because I really had no idea what I wanted to do. and I saw great football and then the war broke out and I had written my career book in civics class at O 'Keeffe junior high school on Annapolis so my first thing I headed toward the Navy recruiting office and I was gonna try to get into an OCS school and be in the Navy and they turned me down I didn't think too much of that, and I tried the Marine Corps, and they turned me down, and then I tried the Army, and they turned me down for OCS, and I finally decided that, heck with this, I was going, and I would just, I'd go in as a buck private, and the nearest recruiting station was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, so I hitchhiked to Chattanooga, and got this recruiting sergeant, and he says, how old are you? 

He says, you know, if you're not yet 19, you can choose your branch of service. 

I lied about my age one year, so I could choose to be in the armored division, ride in a tank or a half track or something, rather than being a foot soldier. And then I hitchhiked back to Knoxville, and that's when my brother found out. And so he'd nothing would do, but he would go too. 

So we go back to Chattanooga and he gives the same recruiting sergeant his correct age. And the upshot of that was that our picture appeared on the front page of the Chattanooga Times. Twins but not twins joined the Army. And a friend of my mother's founder saw that and sent it to her. 

And that was the first that mother knew about having volunteered and she was really upset about that, but we went to old Camp Forrest, Tennessee. 

It was in Tullahoma, Tennessee and spent three days and they sent me back to school because of my perforated eardrum and sent my brother to North Africa. He didn't stay in the United States at any time, so Ray fought my wars finally. And you know that was devastating to me at the time. 

And to make it even more devastating a lot of my fraternity brothers, I was a Pacquiao in the Seder chapter in Tennessee, had a great life up there. 

And some of them were working out at the Alcois, the American Aluminum Company in Miracle, Tennessee, a short distance away. 

So I decided I'd go out there and do something for the war, but I could still go to school, and they turned me down because of my perforated bedroom, and they were afraid that aluminum dust and all would get in there and it infected, and I can still remember the long walk back up to the highway where I could catch the bus back into, into Knoxville, and it was the gloomiest. You were a defeated man. 

I was, I was really, I think, you know, if, if that's the case, what am I going to do? 

If that's not going to let me go to work, what's going to happen to me? 

And I went back to school. Mother knew how really upset I was and all. 

And so when I went home for the 4th of July and we were talking, she says, Bob says the Bell Aircraft has built this plant out here in Marietta, and they're hiring people and says maybe there's something where, you know, it won't affect you here. Why don't you apply for that? 

And you're talking about my life is lived by Providence. I mean always. And and I went and applied and boy they put me to work and I didn't even go back back to Knoxville. 

And they put me to work and gave me a battery of tests and decided to put me in a division called materials release because they found out I could read blueprints. 

Not everybody could read blueprints and my job was taking the blueprints and listing the materials that would go to the assembly line and then giving them to the to the shop and they would send materials to the assembly line. 

And from that I ended up in design engineering and I was working in the power plant division of design engineering as a draft. Ended up being the senior draftman and not an engineer. 

I hadn't had no engineering training, but and this was really providential for lots of reasons, not the least of which was that I met my wife, Iris. 

I used to tell people that she was a riveter in the wing section of the B -29s, but because she is very small, five feet tall and she didn't weigh a hundred pounds at the time and and she would protest that you know yeah that's not true and all and then all of a sudden she decided that that make pretty good story so she kind of went along with it well after that it wasn't nearly that much fun you know but she was one of my boss's secretaries and they had come from South Carolina to get a job she had been working as a secretary. 

She'd gone to Anderson Junior College and then had worked as a secretary in a in a textile bleaching plant up there and she came to Atlanta for a better job, more pay, all those things. 

So what year was that that you married her? 

Well I didn't marry her then. It was after the war. In fact I was already in Georgia Tech by that time. 

Well now how did Georgia Tech come about? 

Well, you know, I was working with these engineers from all over the country. A lot of them deferred because they needed them in the defense industry. And here we were building Boeing B-29s, and that goes to Mal Stanford, which I'm working with today. 

But we had people from Michigan, Wisconsin, Cal, Tennessee, Georgia Tech, everywhere. And the Georgia Tech folks were getting along better than anybody else. 

They would do a better job than anybody else and I said and then I had met during that time and I had become close friends with people like Tommy Plaxico and that'll be another story too, but he had been in the Navy and had flipped over on a carrier approach in his aircraft and then been mustered out and he'd come to work there. 

Tom Bachman, who was another good Georgia Tech alumnus and turned out to be a good friend of ours and still is. And a fellow named C. O. Penn that I just thought the world of and don't get to see C. O. anymore. Married a girl from Nashville, Georgia, and I don't know what did that. 

Somehow or another, our paths kind of separated, but I decided that when the war was over I'd stay at home, go to Georgia Tech, which I did. 

So when did you enter the school? 

What year was that? 

I entered in September of 45. Gave up your job and came to school full time? 

The war was over. 

The war was over and everything was winding down and I came came to Tech with a lot of the first wave of GIs. 

I know that Georgia Tech had fewer than 3,000 students in it during the 1944-45 year before I went and the year I went they had something like 4,200 students. A lot of us were GIs and And boy, it really, it poured and put a great strain on the classrooms. 

But Georgia Tech, I think you'd expect this. They wanted to help the guys that were coming back, you know, from going to the service. 

Well, I didn't have a GI Bill, but I came anyway. 

So it didn't matter, then, that you were a little bit older because everybody else was also. Oh, yeah. I have a lot of contemporaries age-wise that were coming back at the same time. most of them had been in the in the battlefield or on an aircraft carrier or somewhere. 

So did you come back to school full-time then as a regular student? 

I came because I went to work then part-time for two fellows that had had been working at Bell Aircraft and then started an architectural engineering practice and Smith and Hobbs, and Iris and I both went to work for them. 

She is the secretary and I as a draftsman and working on a survey crew and and that was a great experience and one of the interesting things about that our office was in at number one Wall Street and you won't find that now but it was in true underground Atlanta under the viaduct where Peachtree went up changed to Whitehall and went over and Wall Street was at the lower level that was across Cross Street and our office opened up under the viaducts and right on the level with the railroad tracks and everything and so I was familiar with well that was right across the street was the arcade and people don't have any idea about the arcade anymore because it was torn down and it's where the now I guess it's Wachovia, it was the first National Bank building, the building that was built there and and we had an old hotel next next door to us and it was the hub of everything going on in Atlanta in those days. Really different times. 

But I had to work. 

You know, I'd save some money and could go, and my mother was willing to help me, and so I went to school and just worked part-time. 

How did you start it? 

What year? 

Did you start as a freshman, or did they give you credit for Tennessee? 

Let me tell you, they gave me plenty of credit for the two years that I had completed at the University of Tennessee but it was apparent from day one that I would have to spend four academic years to get a degree at Georgia Tech because of the subjects and the prerequisites. Your idyllic college days were over. You were here for work. You knew that right? 

That's right. 

So the days of Tennessee were behind you and you had to buckle in. 

So you were challenged? 

I was very much challenged in those days. 

I realized then if what I wanted to do and that was in the industrial option of mechanical engineering. I'd worked in the power paint division at Old Bell Bomber plant. 

So you came with a lot of experience. I came with some pretty good experience. 

But the academics were still a challenge. 

The academics I felt like now I could handle when I was at Boys High I wasn't really sure because Tech was a lot tougher to get in than any other school you did. Bob, tell us some more now. Here we are at Georgia Tech. 

What's the next part of the story? 

Well, it was a great experience that changed my whole life from that point on and almost everything I've done has been oriented to Georgia Tech and the things that I learned and the people that I met, which is the greatest asset in the world, but I had to, had to do something, and I thought, well, maybe I could get a football scholarship. 

I'd played football in high school, and I can remember so well going down to, and Coach Ennick sent me to Coach Joe Pittard. 

Joe Pittard was the freshman coach at that time, and he was also our baseball coach, and served his whole career in the athletic department there. 

He was a philosopher of sorts, a great guy with people, and he and I talked for a while, and he says, Bob says, really, I think you'd be better off as a manager of the football team. And I said, well, that's not really what I wanted to do. And so I went out for track. 

I had you know in those days I had some speed and we we had been playing softball and all that that breaks out at the bomber plant and I felt like I was still in pretty good shape and and so I went out for track and I ran track for two years the dashes 100. 

Who coached that? 

Norris Dean and Tommy Plaxico went back and was helping coach the track team and coach the golf team those days. 

A fellow that I'd worked with out there and and I knew of Tommy Plaxico and I jump ahead a minute because this is interesting. He had gone to Tech High School and he had run track at Tech High School. 

He was a great hurdler, championship hurdler, and was known as Monroe Plaxico and all through his high school and I didn't learn until later years in fact Ed Harrison was the president by that time that he had been he had gone into the Navy and the Navy started calling out Tommy Plaxico he didn't answer Tommy Plaxico and he says well my name's Plaxico, but I'm Monroe Plaxico. And they said, are you the son of Mr. and Mrs. So-and -so Plaxico, born on such -and-such date, such-and-such. He says, yes, that's me. They said, well, your name is Tommy Plaxico. 

And it turned out that his doctor, the doctor that delivered him, had delivered four or five of his siblings before him. And it told his parents that they were going to have to name a child after him. And unknown to his parents, he had signed the birth certificate and named him Tommy Plaxico. And that was what is on his birth certificate and that's what Tommy is today, Tommy Plaxico. That was an interesting experience and still haven't jumped ahead. When Ed Harrison heard about that, we went and got, he had never picked up his diploma. 

It was still as Monroe Plaxico and so we had a new diploma made for him and we had a ceremony in the alumni office which was then in the bottom of what's now the Carnegie building where the president's office is and and awarded him his his diploma. Anyway I had a good time and and and ran track had a wonderful time thought anybody was crazy. 

If I wanted to run more than 440 yards in those days, it was all yards. 

But my track experience, I ran out of eligibility. You see, I only had two years. I didn't have any of the war years to service time to keep me from losing the eligibility. And so I became the manager of the track team. 

And Norris Dean, who was a great fellow, was one of the first people that I knew that had his own private airplane. He liked to fly and he would do all these things and he was basically lazy though. 

Norris was a great guy and a good coach but he was basically lazy and so I just took over running the program for the track things. He was doing coaching and I was doing everything else. Keeping it organized. 

As a matter of fact when when I was finishing school, he went to Coach Ellick to see if Coach Ellick wouldn't hire me as the manager for the track team because Coach Ellick wouldn't go do anything like that, but that was that was a big compliment to have him do that. 

Where did you live? 

We lived, we got on, I lived with my mother on Peachtree Circle at 18 Peachtree Circle, which is right across right on Peachtree Circle just behind the what's the the Christian scientist church and then there were two couple of houses and then we had an apartment building there and it's still there and so I lived with mother and I was Iris who might admit it at the Bell aircraft and we started going together and we hadn't become engaged in anything but we were we were going together a lot and she loved to dance. I would take her to dances. 

I didn't like to dance, but I'd take her to dances where my friends liked to dance so she could dance with them. 

But she was living in a boarding house on 14th Street, had been all that time. And in those days, we didn't have gasoline, you know, during the war years. 

And so she and I would walk to various places, and we went walking up and down Peachtree, visiting all the churches, you know, that I'd grown up in the United, the St. 

Mark United Methodist Church, and she had been a Baptist in, in South Carolina, and so we did, we'd visit all of them, and we decided that, and it was in the fall of 1945 that we decided to get married. I was in school, I was going to school, but we decided to do it, and it did several things. 

One, it made me quit going around to the Pacquiao House and I'd never had transferred my affiliation with the Pacquiao attorney, which was then on Spring Street, just a couple of blocks north of the Varsity and there was a big old rambling White House there. It was a fun thing, but we also wanted Dr. Bill Gardner to marry us. 

He was the minister of the First Presbyterian Church, Peachtree and Sixteenth Street, and he then lived in a Terrace apartment building. It was right across the street. 

He and I didn't have any children, and so he was living right close to the church, and so we were sitting in his living room making plans, and he agreed to marry us after talking with us and everything, and the last thing he said was, Bob says, you know, if you were a member of our congregation, you could use the chapel free, but as it is, we have to charge you $10, and that was his nice way. He wasn't going to proselyte. 

He wasn't going to do anything, but that was an invitation that we both took, and we've been happy in the First Prebeterian Church ever since then. 

In fact, Iris is a sitting elder today, and both of us have served as officers, and I was even clerk of the session at one time, which was a great influence on my life. 

Well, then where did you live while you continued to live in school? 

We got an apartment in the same building, 18 Peachtree Circle. Lived right above my mother. 

And you still were walking back and forth? 

Oh yeah walking back and forth and she was catching the trolley then to go downtown to work it which was right there at Five Points and she was working for Smith & Hobbs and I was I was going to school I was still working for them part-time and then I got a job even part -time teaching in the engineering drawing you know that there's part of the mechanics department at that time and they taught engineering drawing while you were going to school while I was going to school and what was it like to go to school in those days well I tell you it was a it was a lot of fun because it was hard work and everybody was expected. You know, we went to school six days a week in those days. We had half a day on Saturday, but we'd go to work six days a week. And because of the overcrowded conditions and all, why, we had 7 30 a.m. classes. And you know, How did you find time to work? 

Well, you'd squeeze it in between things. And I had kind of jobs, you know, that you could do. At your time. You could schedule it. 

And one of the things that the Tennessee experience did for me was that I didn't have to take a lot of elective courses. I only had to take the required courses for the most part. 

So I was, I had more time than I would have if I'd had to take full, full load all the time. But... 

Do you remember any of your professors from that time? 

Oh yeah, I remember, I remember a lot of them and I, one of them I remember so well Shorty Bartell who taught physics and was our tennis coach you know and he and I became good friends in later years and I can remember him so well because in the wintertime after the time had changed and all and going to 730 classes you weren't in the dark and I can remember walking up the third street to the physics building at the corner of there and and it was the only building that had any lights on it because the architecture school was on the top floor of the old physics building. The library wasn't there. It was over where the Carnegie Building is now. 

And I remember Shorty Bortel so well and it was later, not that first first year, but the only F I ever got was in physics because I really I had not done the work. 

I found out if you went to class every day and you did the homework every night that you can make it at Georgia Tech. 

If you could get in Georgia Tech and you did those two things you could make it even even Bob Eske you could do that and I just didn't do do the homework and all in physics and I thought I was didn't have a chance of getting in there. 

Didn't realize that he was going to grade on the curve and I funked it because I just didn't take the final exam. I learned a great lesson. He taught you a story. Yeah, but we had a lot of great teachers. D. M. Smith I got to know real well and I was one of his bunnies. 

You know, he'd call people and he Yeah, he was a great guy, crippled, wonderful mathematician, loved the athletes. He'd coach them. He wouldn't give them anything, but he'd coach them, teach them how to do the math and all that. And he would talk about Georgia Tech and what a great school it was and how tough it was. And you were a bunny if you didn't do all the work, you'd do everything. 

And then he'd talk about the University of Georgia, And he talked about the courses that they have down there, like milking one and milking two. He made great sport of the University of Georgia. 

And I learned at that time people kind of had a disparaging view of our industrial management course because it was, quote, so much easier than the engineering courses. and I could tell them firsthand that that course was far harder and far more than the business administration course I'd taken in Tennessee. 

But people kind of would, if they weren't really engineering students, they'd transfer them to industrial management because it was the only school that didn't require all the math in those days and all of those things. It still wasn't easy though. No, it wasn't easy at all, but it was, it was less rigorous than the engineering course. 

But I got a, I got a job not too long after that. 

Iris and I got married in February of 1946, and so she kind of helped me go into school until our first child was born. 

That was pretty darn quick and she she worked through the through that summer and then she quit quit work to take care of Taylor and and she never has worked full-time since then so then you were a father and a husband and a full-time student full-time student and somehow you found time to say well I got a job with Phil normal with dr. 

Phil normal was then the executive dean of Georgia Tech we don't have executive deans anymore, but he was the executive dean, and he was kind of like the guy that was over all of the academic things, just to do it. And I had a job as a student assistant to the executive dean. 

What a wonderful opportunity that was, because he would let me, you know, work it in with my schedule of classes, and he had a wonderful secretary, administrative assistant we'd call her today named Nan Lingle. 

Her father had been a educator and minister and her brother was then the president of Procter & Gamble and she was she was smart a spinster lady though but you can see why I liked her because I can remember walking down North Avenue one day and right in front of the old YMCA which is now the Alumni Faculty House and And she says, Bob, I've always considered you a 4.0 student because you're making a 2.5 now and working half-time. 

If you go to school full -time, you'd be a 4.0 student. That wasn't true, but it sure didn't make me feel good. Of course, I was making a 2.5 because in those days, you could make a double-A. And I made a double -A in public speaking. 

So I'd help my grade. but I had, that gave me a different view of the campus. 

It put me in touch with a lot of the people on the campus besides the students and we had a great time, but you talked about some of the professors I had. 

We had to take wood shop in those days because they were teaching how to make patterns for the foundry and all those things and Uncle Heine was my professor and this was this was early on I think it was in the spring of 46 that he was teaching this in the old mechanical engineering building and they had not very large classrooms like they did in the physics department but they were tiered and you'd sit up in there And Uncle Anthony was getting along in years, you know, he died at, what was he, 92 or something like that, and this was only a few years, so he was in his late 80s, early 90s. And still teaching. He may have been nice, still teaching. 

And he had a, his voice had, you know, gotten tough for him to make himself heard, and so in those days, he had made himself a Lavalier mic. 

There were no lava-lil mics in those days, but he had created this halter and put a microphone in it and was using this PA system in this little classroom. 

And I can remember a great lesson he taught me, not about woodworking, but the Navy still had students in school. 

Some of the V-12 guys were still in school, and the Navy sent lots of folks to Georgia Tech in those days. And there was a fellow, and I think his name was Eccles, I can remember. He was sitting next to me, and he had nodded off. It was in the spring, and the sun was coming through the windows in the back. And he had nodded off, and Uncle Johnny blew in that microphone. And, of course, that was just like a shot going through the whole place. And he says, you sit up and lie to me, boy, lie to me. 

He says, I don't care whether you're paying attention or not, but you make me think you're paying attention. You sit up and lie to me. 

And that was a lesson that I never forgot, and I used it to good stead because I would make the professors think I was listening to them, whether I really was or not. And what happens, of course, is you listen. You end up absorbing a lot more. 

Uncle Andy, of course, he retired, and they had built the Burge Apartments, and he had an apartment on the ground floor of the Burge Apartments, And I'd go over and visit with him once in a while because I thought he was one of the great people. And this was, of course, after I was through school and working. 

Was Georgia Tech his whole life then, his whole family and everything? 

Yeah, he taught at Georgia Tech something like 47 or 49 years. Almost from the beginning. Yeah, that's right. He'd been there, and he was a wonderful, wonderful person. And I can remember him so well. One visit I went, and I found him, and he had two or three Bibles. out on the table. And I said, what are you doing, Father? 

He says, well, I'm doing my own translation, these things. 

He says, you know, while I was actively teaching why woodwork was my profession and the Bible was my avocation. And since I've retired, why I've switched those. You've met the Bible as vocation. 

Woodworking, he still put around at the wood shop, didn't he? 

So he actually lived right on the campus. Right on the camp. He lived right there at Burge. 

Now, I'm not sure where he lived before that time, but, you know, there were a lot of little houses around Georgia Tech in those days. 

But he was one of those that I remember so well. 

Another one that I remember so well is I tried to get in the co-op program when I first started trying to find some way to get in there. And Thussle McDaniel was head of the co-op division. And he says, Bob, you're too old. We can't take you. Of course, I didn't have anything. It would lead him to believe I could do the work anyway. They had age discrimination then. 

Well, nobody thought a thing about that. I didn't think a thing about you. He was right. I just went on. 

But he was a great fellow. There was a math fellow named Reynolds that was a big favorite on campus. and he and Professor McDaniels were really close friends, and, and Professor Mc would have to go to visit plants and all like that, and, and he'd go out to the airport, and, and Reynolds would, would drive him out there, and Professor McDaniels had this big Cadillac, and, and Reynolds was driving the Chevrolet, and when he went out there to get Professor McDaniels, one time, Professor Mac got behind the wheel and he says, hey, these are not my keys. 

And Reynolds just unconsciously had taken his Chevrolet keys and put them in the ignition and they worked. And Professor Mac Daniels got so mad he read GM up one side and down the other. Having any Chevrolet key that would fit his Cadillac, it just didn't suit him a bit. That was great. 

But But the co-op division, I wish I could have been a co-op, because it was certainly, and is today, the best way to get an education. 

And I wonder now, of course it was in operation while they had the semester system, because we changed to the quarter system when I started school, so I only went under the quarter system. and the co -op division had operated on a quarter system even while they had the semester system. 

If we go back to the semester system, I think it's going to be a bigger detriment to the co-op division than anything else, and that's a great part of Georgia Tech and always has been. You mentioned earlier that you did get to know Dr. Britton. Oh, yeah. Before we leave the early days, tell us a little bit about him. 

Well, he was so smart. it was, but he was a great, and he wrote a book, and if you haven't read his book, why, it's really a classic, but he was an educator in, in the true sense of the word, and he ran Georgia Tech that way. 

He was, had to be a pretty good administrator, but Georgia Tech was fairly small, but he helped grow and he and the academics were always there and that was part of his legacy I think he he came in at an early time 1922 and he retired in in 45 how did you happen to come across him then well he you know he was just going out of office and we used to eat in the Britain dining hall and and since I've I was working for Dr. 

Narmore, where I got to meet a lot of administrators and a lot of the department heads and faculty people that I would never have got. As a student, you would never have had that opportunity. No, I would have not even thought to make that opportunity in those days. 

So that was a really neat thing for you to know those people. It really was. 

And, of course, Blake Van Leer came in at that time, and he was the first engineer that had ever been made president of Georgia Tech. All the rest of them had been. 

What did you think of him? 

Oh, he was, he was a, he was a true soldier, and he was, he was a good administrator, and, uh, and he had... 

Was he very military in his, uh, bearing? 

Yeah, in his bearing and all, and he's very, very decisive, and, uh, and all, and, and which is, uh, what characterizes him is the time that, uh, Georgia Tech was going to the Sugar Bowl and playing Michigan, and they had a black football player, and you know that story, and, and, uh, I still have fun hearing about it and reading about it and telling the governor and the regent says, if you don't honor this contract, you can find yourself another president. And that was, he meant that too. Took a lot of courage on his part. 

But he had the knack of drawing really good people around him too. He had Cherry Emerson, who was like his shadow, really. He was the guy that really did all the detail work in the true military way why he could do that. Did you get to know him? 

Yeah, real well. 

And he was, he had a big part in my life later on because I had, I'd graduated, I was, I wanted to go to work for one of two people. 

I either wanted to go to work for Procter & Gamble at DuPont because they were hiring, they were the best people you get to and I took a job with DuPont in Old Hickory, Tennessee. 

That's how I was still going back to my roots and before I finished, first of all Roger Howell, who was called Steamboat, Steamblood Howell by the people that had gone to school under him in mechanical engineering but he was then the director of the engineering extension division and the extension division had a very extensive evening school program where they taught not only Georgia Tech classes but they taught a lot of classes that will kind of refresh your things or for people who had gone through high school and this was particularly true of the military people come back and and hadn't taken enough math in high school to start math at Georgia Tech and with chemistry and all and we also taught technical Institute courses and that was a different thing it didn't call them vocational they weren't really vocational but they weren't engineering it was technical Institute courses and it was out of that that Southern Tech grew. 

And so we had the evening school, we had the technical institute program, and we had short courses and conferences. And he offered me a job as assistant director of the evening school. 

And I had known him even before I'd gotten to Georgia Tech because he had a son that was my age and we used to end up at New Smyrna Beach Florida during vacation times together and their family and our mother took us down there frequently and and so I'd gotten to know him and then he knew that of course I'd been working on the campus and all and I thought that would give me a great opportunity to stay in Atlanta number one which is hard to do when you graduated from Tech in those days. It's hard today, but it was even harder then. And you already had family. I already had family. In fact, of course, my second daughter was born, well, it was after I graduated. You see, we only commenced once a year in those days. And I actually went straight through. I'd go to school in the summertime and everything else. 

I finished four academic years in three years but I didn't finish until September and so my class is 49 because I finished in September 48 but we didn't have any I had to wait until around a whole another year yeah and by that time you were a daddy again by that time I was a daddy again let's continue with this story. 

Let me let me go back just a little bit because one really significant thing happened while I was in school and I was completing the second semester, second quarter of mechanics and of course in mechanical engineering where you're required to take two years of mechanics and Professor Johns was the head of the engineering drawing and mechanics department. I had worked for him, see, and he knew me, and I was taking his course. And he called me in, and he says, Mr. Eskew says, you know, we've just created the School of Industrial Engineering. I said, yes, son. I was just interested in that, but I was a little hesitant. It's a new school in mechanical engineering. It's a bedrock at Georgia Tech. 

And he says, well, I said, you know, if you're in the industrial option, and if you're going to transfer to industrial engineering, they only require one year of mechanics, and mechanical engineering requires two. And if you're going to transfer, I'm going to give you the C that you've earned. 

But if you're going to stay in mechanical engineering, I'm going to give you an F because you do not know enough to take the next year's work. 

And that was, that was a great lesson to me, and, and I didn't really want to be an engineer in a technical sense of the word. 

That was not my, my thing, and I went to Colonel Grossclose, Frank Grossclose, who had come there to, to be the director of the School of Industrial Engineering. 

Now it's Industrial and Systems Engineering, but he, he said, sure, we'll take you as a transfer and he he was he was one of my mentors too but Fuster Johns really did me a great thing when he did that and so I was really you know I guess this was the first graduating class in industrial engineering because I was by that time so I was finishing up a junior year and I only had a short time to go but and Frank Grossclose was the one that told me he says always put the put your name badge in the upper right hand side. Shake hands with people. And you remembered it all. 

I remember that and it was great and we went to school by that time they had built the new textile engineering building. 

Ain't new anymore but it was brand new then and the A French building which was right back of the of the tower was where we had our classes and all and that was a place for me to be. 

And I have another, I've got a job as an industrial engineer with DuPont and would have been a technically oriented industrial engineer and that would have been of interest to me. 

But I stayed on the campus and went to work with Roger Howell and the evening school. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Well, first of all, did you graduate before you did that? 

Yeah, right. I had, see, I finished all of my degree work in September of 48. 

So I finished school, and it was during that time that he offered me the job to start in September of 48. 

So I stayed at Georgia Tech. I never did leave. 

I turned down the job at DuPont and stayed on the campus and started taking work, total master's degree, and working as the assistant director of the evening school. 

Now is that the school that ultimately became Georgia State? 

Yeah, well a part of it because there was the evening school of commerce but it had already been taken away from us. 

We didn't, we didn't, we had some industrial management courses, but they were not, they were not, none of those led to a degree. You could earn a degree. 

One of the best mechanical engineers I have ever known went to the Eden School and earned a degree, and he had to go a long time to do that, but he's one of the, and I've worked with him at Heary after that, and he, and he was one of the top mechanical engineers that we had, and he and I knew each other back in the days when he was in the evening school. 

An interesting thing happened, of course I had, I worked in the stadium during about the times, I'd football games, I'd work in the press box, and I was there the year that it got so cold we were playing, who were we playing, Charleston, Furman, I've forgotten even who we were playing, but it got so cold that I was having trouble with an ulcer, and I was taking thermos of milk into the press box, and it was so cold that I couldn't pour the milk out of it without it freezing before I could drink the milk, and there were only a handful of people in the stadium, and at halftime, we went over to the YMCA across the street to get warm. 

It was a great experience, but I stayed kind of close to the athletic department and doing things with them besides being manager of the track team and all that. 

So you were kind of a jack of all trades in those days, a bob of all trades. I don't know. 

I think my industrial engineering has stood me in good stead in more ways than than anybody could imagine, but I wanted to tell you about one interesting thing had happened. 

I didn't think anything about it but then fall of 1948 I was a graduate student and I was a faculty member and so I managed to get two sets of two pairs of tickets both of them at reduced rates and all and coach Alexander found out about that and boy he called me down and he taught me another really good lesson about looking at things that you should and shouldn't do and all like that and took them all away. I got to go to the game but I didn't get to take anybody with me. I worked in the press box but I didn't get to take anybody. He thought that was unethical? 

That's right. He thought that was that was been. Of course you got to realize in those days Georgia Tech football was the game in town. 

See we had no professional sports and people come to the football game they dressed up in a coat and tie and the ladies even before it got cold enough would come in their fur coats and and it was it was the social event and the tickets were in great demand and he saw me as taking taking away seats that They ought to be selling to somebody. Anyway, I thought Coach Ellick was a great fellow, by the way. Tell us a little bit about him. What was he like? 

Well, I tell you, he was a mathematician. He was a math teacher before he was a coach. And he was a strict disciplinarian. And he was a good football coach. And he had some really good teams. and when I when I got there he was just ready to turn the reins over to Bobby Dot and so Bobby was coaching. 

Let's see I've forgotten the exact year that Bobby came in but he was the backfield coach while Coach Ellick was coaching the team And Coach Ellick was a man of great perception, and he had a dream of building a coliseum, and it was to be built where Rose Bowl Field is today, where the baseball stadium field is. And we even produced a brochure. 

If you go back to look in the archives somewhere, you'll find this brochure that had a picture of this, with the lights on and everything, and it was going to seat 11,000 people, and it would accommodate everything. In those days, Atlanta had no Coliseum. It would accommodate anything. 

They couldn't bring the circus in here, because unless it played outside in the tent, and his idea was to have that, and they started a fundraising campaign to build that. it wasn't called the Alexander Memorial in those days, but the, what was it, the Korean War came along and it stopped that effort, and after the conflict got settled, why they built what's now the Alexander Memorial with the money that they had, which wasn't very much, and that's the reason it's a round thing because they could excavate and then they could build this thing it had the same numbers going going up and they built this round coliseum with because of the money not because of this now of course it's gonna be wonderful now that he actually initiated the funding oh yeah it was his idea he was gonna build it was gonna be for the community it wasn't gonna be just for Georgia Tech it was gonna be for the community but it would just do wonders for Georgia Tech and here today we're going to have the Olympics at Georgia Tech which is a big extension of... Would he have loved that? 

Oh yeah, oh yeah. He was an all -around sportsman? 

He was an all-around sportsman. 

He was mostly a football player, football coach, but he was a mathematician and he had a lot of intelligence and he was pretty farsighted kind of fellow. 

So you felt pretty honored to get to know him too. Oh yeah. Then you got to know Mr. Dodd. Listen, there's some gaps in there. I got to know him because I had hung around there. 

I remember when I first started at Georgia Tech where I walked down there by the on Third Street and at that time there was no North Stand there and they were they always practiced down in that area behind what used to be the Heisman gym is not there anymore but I was walking by there one day and they had these these sleds out there and all these people in full gear on were going and running out there and they'd hit those and and jar it a little bit and here was this one fellow that came in there with no helmet on or anything else and he would run at that and he'd take that sled and lift it off about a yard further back, and it was Bobby Davis who turned, went on to be an All-American for us in that first football season, and some great friends of mine now, Paul Duke, that I'm real close to, and George Matthews, and who's always were great football players, and we had a great team that first year and it was fun to keep on talking about being the captain of Coach Dodd's worst football team the next year. 

So you were actually working then and then you had to come back for your commencement service then because it was a long time after you finished. And we commenced in the Fox Theater. Do you remember it? 

Oh, very well. And, of course, there were some great people, and all of them, you know, have stories all their own. George Griffin, I'd gotten to know really well, and he was Mr. Georgia Tech, and he was a great friend. I mean, he was everybody's friend, and he'd do anything for you. And while I was working there, he knew how much I'd wanted to be in the Navy, and he was Mr. Navy. You know, he was a captain during the war and he he was Mr. 

Navy and he tried two different times after I'd had my ear operated on to get me a commission in the Navy and I mean that was just the way he worked and the fellow that worked so closely with him was Fred Ajax and Fred was got later on to be known as the man who started the Alumni Placement Service. And then the son of was named for him at one time in the old Pickrick. And so I got to know a lot of... Did, did Dean Griffin ever find out that you were from Cumberland? 

Oh yeah. He told you the story about the game? 

Oh goodness, yeah. I've heard, I've heard him tell that, tell that story firsthand. 

And that was a lot of fun because I, I knew some people even then there was a fellow named Colin Allison that came down here from Lebanon and opened what was then Joy's Florist and he'd been on that train and on that team to come down here because he and my father were good friends and I never really knew my father but I knew some folks that talked about Cumberland. 

Do you have a Dean Griffin story that's one of your favorites or there are too many? 

Of course, and most of them are so well -known, but, you know, he started the Sack Brain Club and everybody, and he called himself a sack, and he would award a sack to anybody that had made a blunder, and I was president of the Sack Brain Club on more than one occasion. 

But there's so many stories about him going to the wrong funeral, you know. he'd ended up at this this funeral and and find out he sat through the whole thing and find out it wasn't the person that he had gone to but today he he pulled up in front of what's now the the administration building there and left his car running and the thing somehow got in gear and went over the bank but he and he'd make so much fun of that himself you know. It wasn't hard to laugh. 

No but he was he was smart in his own way he was but he was such a genuine person and such a giving person you know he gave me and I'm stupid I don't know what I've done with it but he gave me a Bobby Jones putter. He also gave me the first pair of all-weather golf shoes that I ever had. And he would just, he would do things like that for you. 

And later on, we went out to Fort McPherson and we'd play golf out there with Roan Beard and Howard Hector and had a great time. 

He was always, in fact I've got his book, the inscription in it, and he was saying, you better go practice. He was after you all the time. The thing about Griffin, he was such a gentleman, always in a coat and tie, even on the golf course. He would wear a suit coat and a tie, even when he was playing golf. 

He was that kind of And the statue that's out there in front of the Theater for the Arts now is it's just so lifelike and realistic. It makes me feel good every time I see it. And Fred Ajax turned out to be a bulldog. 

We went to the student faculty industry conference at Callaway one time, the last time that he ever went I'm sure, and he had gotten fat as a poison pup, as Tonto Coleman would have said, but he, I can remember having breakfast with him, and he had a plate that was literally piled high with food, and I think that was his whole reason, but he'd gotten such a kick out of following the first ****** that we had to be sure that nothing went awry when they were going through school and they went through the through the bookstore and he got such a kick out of them picking up integrated calculus. He thought that was a significant thing, you know. You know the campus has changed a lot since those days. You've seen it all. 

Let me tell you, when I started school, the administration building was where the tower is and then the bottom was the bookstore and the store which we called the robbery but it also had a little cafeteria line in there and you go through there, get breakfast, get lunch and it was not heavy food but it was all right. 

You ate there a time or two did you? 

Did I and the thing I went through there breakfast one of the early times on my county campus and And I got through, and I had toast and grits and milk. And when I got to the end, the fellow says, that'll be 10 cents. And I says, wait a minute. You haven't charged me for the grits. He says, if I charged you for the grits, they'd fire me. 

So grits were free. That's right. And right outside of there is where we buried sideways. And I don't know what ever happened to the tombstone. There was a dog that was riding the campus and ran sideways because he'd been hit by a car, I'm sure. 

So those were pretty good days. Oh they were good days. 

How long did you stay there? 

How long did you stay there? 

Well the short course and conference department was headed by a fellow named Charlie Taylor and he and I of course knew each other because we worked together and he got he was a and he got called back into the service. 

And Sherry Emerson knew that he he had accepted the job as the director of the executive director of the then Southern Industrial Relations Conference, which was a conference that had grown out of the industrial section of the YMCA's of the South and was held up at Black Mountain, North Carolina every year. And the YMCA secretary that had been there at the beginning, Mr. E. G. 

Wilson, had retired from the Y, stayed on with the conference which had separated from the Y during the Depression years when the YMCA couldn't afford it. And then he was ready to retire. 

He'd gotten up in years, and they'd come to the logical place, the director of short courses and conferences at Georgia Tech, to do that because it was strictly a part-time sort of thing, and Charlie then got called back in the Marine Corps, and ***** Emerson asked me if I would come and be the acting director of short courses and conferences. 

Well, Charlie had taken me to Blue Ridge. This is another part of my life. He'd taken me up there to be a runner and a driver for him in 1950. And then the next year, why Mr. Wilson had retired and Charlie had taken that over. and and so the long short of that long story is that I'm still I became the executive director of what's now called the Blue Ridge Conference on Leadership we changed the name of it and I have been going up there ever since that's I'm the the oldest living person except for one one guy Dr. George Heaton who is one of my great inspirations and who... 

So for 45 years you've been doing this? 

Been going up there. 

I wasn't always the executive director, but George Heaton was the Baptist minister in Lynchburg, Virginia when he started in 1939 coming up to give three inspirational addresses. 

He didn't miss you by much I mean you know it's only a few years and first time I went up there I still see him standing at the podium and he's still active he's still coming up there he's still addressing this conference but he's not doing these three morning inspirational dresses but he was he had the Bible open and he was telling the story he wasn't reading the Bible but he was telling what that's what it was saying to you in language that you could understand and know how it affected your life and that was before the days of the Living Bible and any of that and and he's been one of my inspirations ever since that time. 

Well what else was happening with you as breadwinner of this family, as the young family you had. 

Well that's right in fact one sideline is that in, you see I graduated, I've commenced. 

I graduated in September of 48, but I commenced in June of 49, and in May of 49, we had an inter -conference track meet with the old Southern Conference and the Atlantic Conference, and I was still active, although I didn't stay as a manager track team, but I was the clerk of the course for this inter-conference track meet, big track meet, and in fact, one of the, in taking the registrations. 

Norrstein, the only time he ever really got upset with me and mad at me, was that we got to taking the registrations in the two mile. 

And I just thought that was, and I said, is anybody else here crazy enough to run the two mile? 

And he got so upset with me about that. 

But it was during that track meet that Iris started having labor pains with our second child and by the time I commenced I had two children and I still have a picture in the cap and gown with Iris and me and my oldest daughter who by the way is a Georgia Tech alumnus. 

She only went to Georgia Tech one year in architecture she figured she thought that art and math were her strongest subjects and that would fit in architecture and then she decided she wanted to be an interior designer and Georgia Tech really didn't have much of a course in that. 

She went on to the University of Denver and eventually the Pratt Institute and she lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey and is a project manager for the New York State University system up there now. She's made her daddy proud. Would love to get back to Atlanta but just produced a couple of grandchildren. 

No, but Martha is my second child and she was born right before then and we moved into the Callaway Apartments at that time and Martha, well we were still living on Peachtree Circle, but we then moved into Callaway Apartments and two significant things happened, of course the president's home was brand new right across the street. The Alexander Memorial was there, but they were built in the interstate. And all these earth movements were moving up and down. All that dust coming in there. 

But I came home from the Blue Ridge Conference shortly after that and we were on the second floor and each of those has a little balcony on it still there. 

You come going west on 10th Street where you could see this and I saw my daughter propped up there with a leg and a cast and Taylor had gotten to racing Susie Tabor downstairs on their tricycles and had actually broken her leg. 

Her father was a professor in mechanical engineering and a Navy veteran and he was, Trav Tabor, he was a great person and another really significant thing that happened during that first period was that Vernon Crawford came to be an instructor in physics, and I got to meet him because they were living in Callaway, and Professor Howey, who was the head of the physics department, was a strong member of First Perpetual Church, which we had joined, and so he brought Vernon and Helen to the church, and we ended up being close, lifelong friends. Greatest tennis bar dive I have had. Dr. Crawford was? 

Yeah, I still miss him a lot. I bet you do, I bet you do. Wonderful guy. 

Saw him go from instructor to assistant to associate to academic vice president to acting president to chancellor and a wonderful intelligent person with all the common sense in the world. Did a lot for Georgia Tech. Oh, did a lot for Georgia Tech. Yeah. He was a great person. You haven't told us any of your Bobby Dads stories yet. 

Well, let me tell you, I have to, after, when Charlie Taylor came back from service, I didn't have a job. Uh-oh. 

And so I moved to Columbus, Georgia, went to work for Ed Swift, another old tech man who had a construction company down there, and I went to work for Swift Construction Company. 

That really didn't work out real well and I worked for an air conditioning firm down there, two other old Georgia Tech men, Smith Raymond, and stayed down there for two years and had had a great time. It was a great experience living in Columbus, Georgia. It's a wonderful town. 

That's George Matthews hometown and I made a lot of friends that I still have down there but when Charlie Taylor had come back and two years later he decided he wanted to go to Harvard and get an MBA and so Chair Emerson called me and said would you come back and take this job over again and says I'll assure you you'll have a job when it's over. Oh so that's what happened so back you came from Columbus to Tech one more time. Yeah, but there's more. There's even more. I didn't realize my life was so, so involved. 

So what happened next? 

Well, I came back to Georgia Tech and worked for another year as director of short courses and conferences, and true to his word, Chair Anderson sent me to help set up the Rich Electronic Computer Center, and And that was the first computer on the Georgia Tech campus. And that was what year? 

Well, that had to be 1955, I guess. 55. And I was then moved to the engineering experiment station. I was a research engineer. 

And I was in charge of business applications for computers, trying to use a UNIVAC 1101 that we'd gotten from the Navy. And we had to build a building for it. 

Frank Neely at Rich's gave us the money to build a building and to have all this air conditioning, all this stuff in there, and a room that was as big as this whole office suite for the computer itself plus offices and all like that. And I shared an office with Charlie Reed. He and I became really close friends, and he was a mathematician. He was smart, and he was working with computers. 

Those days, the only way you could communicate with a computer was with the binary system, using zeros and ones. You had to learn binary arithmetic and do all these things. I taught courses in the School of Industrial Engineering in business applications for computers. and the only textbook that was available for me was a pamphlet that was put out by the Arthur Anderson Company and that was how new and young the use of computers were and that Univac 1101 would not do what this watch will do today. 

That's how far we've come and I only stayed there for a year and and Rowan Beard had asked me to go to Gainesville to an alumni meeting to speak to him about the Computer Center and during that trip he and I got to talking about a lot of things and he ended up offering me a job as assistant director of the Alumni Association and now so I left left the Computer Center and I've often wondered what would have happened in my life if I'd stayed in the wonderful world of computers. 

It would have really been different, but I worked for Rome Beard for three years in the Alumni Association, and one of the things that I did was to automate the record keeping, not like it is today, but to put some kind of order to it, and Dean Griffin just got so upset. He says, SQ, you're just making everybody a number, because he's a people. And that was the way he thought about things. He didn't notice that there were lots of people? 

Lots of people. 

But I really had grown, and I had been friends. 

And, you know, he was a great football player on the 1940 Orange Bowl team, along with Howard Hector and Hawk Cavett and so many folks that I'd gotten to be friends with. Anyway, he and I worked together, and that was the time that Bob Wallace was also working for him. 

You know, Bob wrote a really nice, really good book, Dresser in White and Gold, about Georgia Tech, and it's a great resource and part of my library. but during that time Howard Ector was the business manager and treasurer of the Athletic Association and and I had been working for him you know off and off and on all this time in the stadium and all and when he got an opportunity to go be a trust officer within the trust company bank he recommended to coach Dodd that hire me as his replacement. 

And interestingly enough, the year before that, I had finished 12 years of suffering with an ulcer and had had a subtotal gastrectomy and I'd spent, you know, that time out of commission and everything and talking about Providential coming back from Black Mountain that summer we stopped at Posse's barbecue place in Athens because I had to have something to eat and a fella that was dressed like a farmer had about a 12 year old daughter with him was sitting at another table and there were there iron pipe columns in Posse's or what in those days and I kept noticing this fella kind of looking around and he got up to pay his bill and he came over to me and he says I've just got to tell somebody what a wonderful thing it is to be able to eat anything you want. He says I had an ulcer for seven years and I had it taken out and he says here I am eating in posses. 

And he said it's just wonderful and he turned around and walked away and I don't know who that fellow was but I had been suffering so much and I went straight to the hospital and Dr. 

Spalding Schroeder, who had been treating me all this time and never would talk to me about an operation, says, says, Bob, I think that you've been a good boy for 12 years and you ought to consider an operation. I says, Spalding, I'm ready. I said, I've already gotten the word. You don't even know who it was. 

I have no idea who that person was, but that was one of the better things that ever, ever happened to me. 

And that was while I was still working for the Alumni Association of course and an upshot of that was that I went to New Orleans to speak to the New Orleans Alumni Club. 

A fellow named Freddie Fuchs, an alumnus down there, was head of that thing and afterward why he says I want to take you over to the Pontchartrain Hotel to their buffet. 

He says great buffet and I thought well that's fine so I we went over there and of course my capacity wasn't very great in those days, and I was full, and he says, you got to try the ice cream pie. I said, no, Fred, I don't think I've had enough. He says, you got to do this, and I thought, you know, a small slice of pie, like that. 

It came in, and it was a foot high, half cake meringue, and half ice cream, and swimming in chocolate sauce, and like a fool, I tried to eat that thing and Freddie looked over me he says he says Bob I believe you're not feeling well sweat was popping out of my eye we walked outside walked up and down the sidewalk and finally went back to the hotel called the house doctor and Dr. 

Emory Mayo isn't that a great name he ended up being the the president of the Tulane Medical alumni but he came to the hotel and he he thought I had pancreas complications and all kind of things and put me in the Turo infirmary and after three days he came and says Bob says you just obeyed that was a that was a great experience as a tech alumni group but then coach Dodd I went to coach Dodd when Howard told me says you need to go see him he wants to talk to you about this job and I had just one question of him he had questions of me. He didn't want to know if my health was going to let me do this. 

Well, it had been a year since then, and I was doing fine, but I said, Coach, I just got to ask you one question. 

Are we clean? 

Are we doing the things that we ought to be doing and not doing anything that we shouldn't be doing in athletics? 

And he assured me that we were doing everything by the book, that there was nothing under that, and I worked for him for seven years, and I never found any inkling of anything to refute that. As somebody you could really respect. 

Man, and I've always been proud of Georgia Tech and proud of people like that that were leaders of men. 

And let me tell you, he would have been a success in whatever he chose to do because he never graduated from college. You know, he never got a degree. but he had the great knack of of seeing a problem and cutting away all the chaff and getting right to the heart of it and solving the the basic question and you do it because many times why he said when I let's let's think about this and run he'd get to a point and he says well gosh this doesn't seem like it's gonna cost much money or you know this seems like he was really logical about oh really logical about it and had had that kind of coordinated mind. He was great checker player, you know, great tennis player and he was strategy. 

It wasn't it wasn't his tennis playing and he'd kick a football and and people thought it was all his physical ability but he could put that football anywhere that he chose to put it because he could figure out what it was gonna do. 

He was a natural He was a natural athlete, and that's what he wanted, and that's the reason he never graduated up there. And I tell you, I have a lot of friends in Kingsport today. Of course, that's a great Georgia Tech town, and he was raised there and all. 

And the TVA built a lake and a dam up there, one of the first ones, and they wanted to name it after him. And they ended up naming it for some military thing because everybody started calling it Dodds Dam. but the natives up there still call it Dodge. 

But he was he was he was a great leader. 

Was he a good recruiter? 

He was a tremendous recruiter and the thing about it is that the guys all loved him. 

I mean he treated them like people and because he never graduated he had this ****** about having everybody graduated. 

He kept everybody on scholarship as long as they would do the work in school until they got a degree and sometimes that was five and six years, but very few of them didn't graduate and if none of them failed to graduate because he didn't keep them there during that. 

In those times, Howard Hector had done a great job of putting some system and order and priorities to the football seating because we'd been so successful that the demand for tickets far exceeded anything that we could supply, and we had some people who were not Georgia Tech people, but that had been buying big blocks of tickets when they really needed for big blocks of tickets, and Howard turned the apple cart upside down, and he cut those people back to four tickets, and put them in one place, and said, you ever cease to buy tickets for any reason why they're not yours, and gave alumni the priority for buying the tickets. And did Coach Dott approve of that? 

Oh, yeah. The athletic board approved. They all gave him great support for that, but he took the unshirted **** for doing that. 

And I came in behind him, and all that had been done, and people still, you know, would complain and everything, but the system was all there. 

And I got Charlie Reed, who I had worked with at the computer center, to automate the ticket seat assignment. 

I worked in the manual seat assignment of those football seats for one year, and I said, well, I'm not going to do this anymore. 

And Charlie Reed was the guy, and it's still used, not in exactly the same form, and he had used a military radio interference matrix program that he was working on in there to figure out how to put all these seats in place and figure out which one was better than the other one. and I like it. All of your Georgia Tech connections are interacted, aren't they? 

Oh, yeah. Every place you worked, you knew somebody. 

Yeah, and I found in the vault a set of plans for the East Upper Deck that had been drawn up by Virginia Bridge Company, and I took them to Robert and Company and got them to look at it and then put together a financial system where we would sell options to people, they could be non -alumni as well as alumni, to buy seats in there, $300 a seat, and they could buy the seats for 10 years. 

And I went to an advertising agency in Atlanta who helped me with the promotion of that, and we oversubscribed that. 

We paid for the East Upper Deck without ever owing anybody any money and the only problem we had was that in the middle of that they were building an addition to to the stadium in Birmingham and a piece of the of it started to fail and the same chief engineer that was with Virginia Bridge had done that work in Birmingham and so we went Chastain and Tindall and got them to look at it and ended up with the most horrendous columns of any stadium I've ever had, you know, and that was, but it did, it did the job for us, you know. And you stayed with that position how long? 

Seven years. Seven years. 

Seven years, and, uh, and Iris says that it was providential that I left because I was more in love with my work than I was with my family, and by that time, uh, I had three children, and, uh, Coach Pitta, did I mention to you earlier, was still there, and, and I was passing out cigars because I'd had my first boy, you know, and Ed, Ed had come along and I, and he says, uh, Eskew, you better slow down. Your feet are not even touching the ground. 

But I was, I was a family man. And no doubt you were a rambling wreck. I was a rambling wreck. Yeah, in fact, we found it. 

We didn't, we didn't acquire it at the time, but we found the, uh, Model T Ford that had been restored and they later bought it and made the ramming wreck out of it. I'll tell you another thing about the Athletic Association in those days, they paid for everything. 

You know, even the band uniforms and when the band would go somewhere, the Athletic Association paid the whole thing. While I was working for Phil Normore, I modeled a new band uniform. I would have pictures and standing out by the sundial in the quadrangle with that band uniform in. 

But George, the Athletic Association was self -sustaining. 

Now they have a big fundraising thing for the, for the alumni, for the Alexander Thorpe Fund and all like that. 

In those days we had only a handful of contributors and Coach Dodge says we can't we can't let people contribute because if they do they've got to have something in exchange for it and their seats and we don't have any seats for them and so he would accept and it was all done very in the back background it wasn't done in front at all and but we had plenty of money in those days and he would he felt like it everything that the football team did was for the whole school. 

And even on bowl trips he would do this, but one other trip a year, Goodwin, why he would take everybody. We went to Notre Dame, took everybody to Notre Dame one year. Had to sweep the snow off the seats. 

But we took them to New Orleans when we played Tulane. 

And he'd take all of the the staff and the coaches wives, players wives, some of that by that time a lot of them were married and we take a lot of faculty and their wives on these trips and charter another airplane to do that and some people were still didn't want to fly. 

We had a football player named Flowers that didn't want to fly and we'd always have to send him by train and we got down to Dallas, no Houston, playing in the Blue Bonnet Bowl and we started to leave the Blue Bonnet Bowl and the plane that was carrying, we always split the wives and men up, the wives and players, and the plane took off with the wives and it flew flew around and came back and had one engine feathered on it and that door had not even got well open before two of them. 

John Robert Bell's wife and Camille, golly that's bad, I can't call her name, one of the Dean's wives bolted out and said we're not, you know, we're not going back. 

We're going back on the train, and we had to go and get them a train ticket and get back, and, and by that time, by the time they got back to, they had a transfer in New Orleans. They had an 11 -mile delay, and when they got back, it was Christmas Eve. We played that game on the 19th of December. I mean, that was a game. 

It was a horrible thing because Billy Lothridge was the quarterback and and Billy Martin was was one of the great ends and the Jolly Giant and we had had a really good season and Lothridge could not do anything but throw that ball in the ground that day it was just it was a very disappointing thing but I remember one one trip we made to New Orleans and Tonto Coleman was another I met a lot of great people that worked for the Athletic Association. 

Tonto Coleman and and Ray Graves and Frank Broils and Buck Andell who was our trainer there for many years and he and he and I would make arrangements for all the trips and everything you take and a lot of a lot of really great people and Tonto Coleman was the assistant athletic director. He eventually became the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference. It doesn't sound to me like this was work. This sounds like it was a good time. It was absolutely. I was having a great time. You were able to milk your time from school just go on and on and on. Yeah, that's right. 

But Tonto, we lost, we missed Tonto down on Bourbon Street and I finally found him in this strip joint doing research. He wanted to find out and he was sincere. He wanted, he found a girl from Carrollton, Georgia that was working in this place. He was trying to find out what would make a girl do that sort of thing. He was a devoted Christian himself. He wouldn't do anything. He wouldn't take a drink in there or anything else, but that was a memorable experience. 

You found him in there, huh? 

Another great experience I had in New Orleans was with Huacata, a basketball coach for so many years and a wonderful, great fella. 

He was tone-deaf and he stood up one time when they thought they were playing the national anthem and they were playing the Ramblin'' Reggae song, but he says that's the way, that's the way I am anyway, but he, I was business manager and treasurer, which meant that I had all the fiscal responsibility and all of the arrangement for the teams and the game day operations and all like that, but he took the basketball team down to New Orleans and he wanted to show these boys most of whom were for rural parts of Indiana and all and he wanted to show them something New Orleans and I had an uncle that lived down there and he arranged for us to go to Antwine's and we all set this one big round table and all they had to do was say whether they wanted fish, meat, or fowl and then they brought out the whole meal and everything everybody was having and they were great eaters you know and they turned down the lights and all of a sudden out comes this cherries jubilee and the waiter was just having a great time ladling that cherries did all that brandy up and down and he got to this big round table where we're all sitting around he took that thing just spewed the brandy all the way around it flame it all right of course it didn't burn very long but you could have their eyes were biggest salsas. I don't think any of them will forget that. That was a real show. That's right. 

Well it was a pretty good time. Oh it was a wonderful time and I got lured away for money and well with three children. With three children. You could understand that. 

Coach Dodd, after a while this fellow, a fellow named Alvin Davis that I had known a long time, used to be the industrial relations director for Callaway Mills and was then the president of Garden Services Incorporated at Callaway Gardens which is the profit-making taxpaying arm of the gardens and he had wanted me to come down he really wanted me to be the sales manager for their Holiday Inn and I didn't want to do that and he kept coming back and giving me more opportunities and more money and more money and more money and finally coach Dodd says Bob I just don't see how you can turn that down. I didn't see the way I'd ever make that much money to go down there. And Callaway is a wonderful place to vacation, but I did not enjoy working down there. 

And Alvin Davis, as nice a guy as he was, he did not know how to delegate both authority and responsibility. And Coach Dodd was a great delegator. He was an executive par excellence. And it just almost drove me crazy. I stayed down there six months trying to figure out how to, you know, get it all done. Had a great job. Developed that little airport farm while it was down there. 

I was in charge of the golf courses, the hunting preserve, the trout shooting outfit, and had a great job, but I didn't have the authority to do things. I had to always go through everybody to ever get anything done. And Bo Calloway wasn't there. If Bo had been there, I think I might still be at Calloway Gardens. 

But I just, six months trying to find a way to get away. 

And Mario Golia used to be on our faculty and then was a vice chancellor at the university system, helped me open up, get me the job to open up an office of the Institute of International Education in Georgia that administers the Fulbright scholarships and all and he thought I could do that job and was interested in it and let me tell you I took a six thousand dollar cut in pay in those days just to get away from the job because I just I couldn't stand it was eating me alive. 

So back you came to Atlanta. 

Back I came to Atlanta and which was another thing I said is providential because Iris, by that time, while we were in Columbus, we had our fourth child. And we came back to Atlanta and not long after that had our fifth child. 

And Iris has always said, she says, I really think you were more in love with what you were doing than you were with the family. 

But she was, oh, she never said that to me while I was having such a great time. 

But a year later, I only stayed in that position a year and we did open up the office and get it started, but George Heary, with whom I'd been in the Georgia Tech Infirmary when I had the mumps, had graduated and started his own architectural practice and then talked his dad into forming Heary & Heary, architects and engineers. 

His dad was in the practice of architecture in Athens and George had worked for a couple of firms and then he wanted to open up his own firm in Atlanta and they had been successful and they along with Bill Finch's firm had designed the Atlanta Fulton County Stadium and of course George knew of all my background by the way I did all the planning work for the West End up at that and Coach Dodd didn't want to build it but I knew that that thing had to be built if we were going to really take care of our alumni. 

By that time we had too many alumni and when I got to Callaway Gardens I started a letter writing campaign and eventually White got funded and do it and coach Dodd did come back to me later years and said Bob I think you were right we really didn't need to have that, but George Heary asked me to come on board and help them with their sports facility work because they'd done, they'd done the Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, they had the Cincinnati Riverfront Stadium under construction, and they were doing work in Buffalo, New York, and it needed economic feasibility work, and he knew I'd done all the fundraising campaign for, for the East up a deck and so he thought I could do that and I went to to Maurice, gosh, what is Maurice's last name? 

He was in the School of Industrial Management. Anyway, he had, he helped me set up the economic capabilities. 

So it was still Georgia Tech connection? 

Still all Georgia Tech. George Heary and then the professor in the math. That's right. 

So right down the line it's been Georgia Tech. All the way. Has it been a good experience. Do I need to even ask you this question. 

Here I am, I'm still, George Matthews and Mal Stamper have got me in this office today and it was because of, I was a Rotarian with the, when I was with the Athletic Association. 

I've been able to stay in Rotary all that time and ended up being a district governor and because of that, I've got the Rotary Clubs of Georgia you're working on Operation Outreach. 

I always ask people when I do the interviews, has it been good? 

Are you glad you did it? 

Would you have done it either way? 

I can't imagine that you would answer anything other than yes. No way. Still have a multitude of friends that are all Georgia Tech. 

So Georgia Tech's been good to Bob. It sure has. And Bob's been good to Georgia Tech. 

Well I don't know whether I've contributed much, I was on the alumni board for a few times when we decided to convert the Y to the alumni faculty house. 

Well, we're going to have to come back again and do, I think, part two. Yeah. You mean my life is a stadium sale. I think so. Thank you so much for your time. 

Well, I thank you. I've enjoyed it.