[00:00:00.50] [MUSIC PLAYING] 
[00:00:15.11] MARILYN SOMERS: Interview with Dr. Ward Winer, faculty, staff at Georgia Tech between the years of 1969 to 2007, conducted by Marilyn Somers on November the 19, the year 2007. We are at his home in Sandy Springs, Georgia. And the subject of the interview today, his life in general, his experiences at Georgia Tech. And I may call you Ward because we do know each other. It's such a pleasure to be here with you today. And I really want to go back to the very beginning. 
[00:00:43.36] We have this in common. We're both from Michigan. I want you to tell me where you were born and when. 
[00:00:49.00] WARD WINER: Well, June 27, 1936, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the home. 
[00:00:54.32] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, you were born at home, not in one of the hospitals there? 
[00:00:56.92] WARD WINER: 1812 Madison Avenue. I even know that. 
[00:00:59.19] MARILYN SOMERS: You can remember your home address. Your parents were there for how many generations? Why were they there? 
[00:01:05.75] WARD WINER: They were there because of my dad's work. They had only been there a few years. 
[00:01:10.05] MARILYN SOMERS: So where were they from? 
[00:01:11.61] WARD WINER: They both grew up in the eastern part of Michigan, in the thumb area, Marlette, Michigan. 
[00:01:16.33] MARILYN SOMERS: Farming country out there. 
[00:01:17.13] WARD WINER: Farming country. They both grew up on farms, yeah in fact, my mother's relatives are still there, got Cousins and what have you. And one of her brothers just died a year and a half ago. So, yeah, they grew up in Marlette. He was born in-- well, he was actually born in Crediton, Ontario in-- 
[00:01:36.07] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, your dad? 
[00:01:36.67] WARD WINER: 1896, yeah, Canada. 
[00:01:38.77] MARILYN SOMERS: OK. 
[00:01:38.99] WARD WINER: And my mother was born in Marlette area in 1903. 
[00:01:44.17] MARILYN SOMERS: How did they meet, then? 
[00:01:45.55] WARD WINER: Well-- [LAUGHS] 
[00:01:46.63] MARILYN SOMERS: Did he immigrate down to-- 
[00:01:48.39] WARD WINER: My dad's family came. They were farmers in Canada as well. And they came across the ice in the wintertime across Lake St. Clair in Michigan. I jokingly say they were icebacks. They weren't wetbacks. They were-- I guess you'd consider them illegal immigrants now. 
[00:02:06.05] MARILYN SOMERS: Because they just came. 
[00:02:07.25] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, they came. But-- 
[00:02:08.41] MARILYN SOMERS: There would be no border crossings on the ice flow 
[00:02:10.57] WARD WINER: Horse and sleigh and all their belongings, and got a farm in the thumb area of Michigan, had crop farm and some cattle, and the same for my mother. Her mother was born in Marlette area. But her father was also born in Canada, Ontario someplace. 
[00:02:32.79] MARILYN SOMERS: I think that might've been a pretty common thing to come across when they could. 
[00:02:36.67] WARD WINER: Yeah, well-- 
[00:02:37.51] MARILYN SOMERS: To do better. 
[00:02:37.77] WARD WINER: Yep, well, it was to get some better land and what have you. 
[00:02:42.41] MARILYN SOMERS: Did you ever have the opportunity to know any of your grandparents? 
[00:02:45.03] WARD WINER: Oh, I knew all four of them. 
[00:02:46.13] MARILYN SOMERS: Did you get to know all four? Oh, that's wonderful. 
[00:02:49.29] WARD WINER: My father's parents died first. I was probably about 12 or so when my father's father died and, I don't know, maybe 18 or 19 or so when my father's mother died. And then my grandfather on my mother's side lived to be 89, I think. And my grandmother on my mother's side lived to be 97. And so I knew them quite well. 
[00:03:18.42] MARILYN SOMERS: So you have long-lived genes in there. That's wonderful that you knew them, then. So you have real clear memories. 
[00:03:24.96] WARD WINER: Well, they had formative experiences on my father's side. The parents lost their farm in the depression, which had them turn around and never buy a farm again. I mean, they just rented farms after that. And my parents lost the house in the depression. But my father went through the eighth grade. My mother went through the 11th grade and then left school. My dad had to leave school to go to work. He went to work. 
[00:03:56.71] Well, his father put him out to work on another farm and came and collected his wages every week. And that lasted a couple of years. And my father had enough. So he had to fight with his dad. And he left and didn't speak to his dad for several years after that. 
[00:04:12.83] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, they were used to hard times. Life was tough for them then. 
[00:04:16.85] WARD WINER: Well, my grandparents, to give you an idea, on my father's side, I remember when they-- I'm pretty sure they did not have electricity. No, they didn't have electricity. They had outhouse and no central heating or any of that sort of thing. My mother's side was a little better off. 
[00:04:37.19] MARILYN SOMERS: But they all knew what labor was. They all knew what a hard day's work was. 
[00:04:40.67] WARD WINER: And as a kid, I would spend vacations on the farm. 
[00:04:43.71] MARILYN SOMERS: So you got a chance to go there? 
[00:04:44.47] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah, yeah. 
[00:04:45.13] MARILYN SOMERS: He tested, so to speak. 
[00:04:46.93] WARD WINER: To test it, yeah. 
[00:04:47.87] MARILYN SOMERS: He tested, you know. 
[00:04:48.23] WARD WINER: Right. Right. 
[00:04:49.83] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, what prompted your father to move to the Grand Rapids area? 
[00:04:53.45] WARD WINER: Well, he went into World War I. And actually, being a veteran in World War I is how he became a citizen, a US citizen, because they gave citizenship to people who joined the military who were not citizens. So that's the way he became a citizen. 
[00:05:12.11] MARILYN SOMERS: So what year was that that he would've gone in? He volunteered, no doubt? 
[00:05:16.15] WARD WINER: Yeah, it was about a year, 6 to 12 months before the armistice, which was, what? 1917. 
[00:05:23.63] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah. 
[00:05:23.85] WARD WINER: Because he never saw battle. He sailed from New York Harbor on Armistice Day, November 11, 1917. 
[00:05:32.55] MARILYN SOMERS: His timing was impeccable. 
[00:05:33.71] WARD WINER: And he spent a year in France, most of the time in Paris. 
[00:05:39.33] MARILYN SOMERS: How wonderful. So he had some good experiences from it. 
[00:05:41.91] WARD WINER: And he spent-- well, he was trained before going as a motor mechanic. But when he got there, they put him in into helping muster out soldiers to go home. So he never performed as a mechanic. And he never was in battle or something. 
[00:05:59.60] MARILYN SOMERS: He had the training. 
[00:06:00.24] WARD WINER: Yeah, he had the training. Actually, he went to training at the University of Michigan. They had camps at the University of Michigan, just like Georgia Tech did in those days. And then, when he came home, he joined the Railway Mail Service, which is a job that doesn't even exist anymore. In those days, trains had mail cars on them. And men worked in the mail cars. And they would go follow the train from city to city and sort the mail on the train. 
[00:06:27.78] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, really? 
[00:06:28.32] WARD WINER: Throw the mail off in the little towns as they went through. 
[00:06:30.86] MARILYN SOMERS: I think I've seen that in movies or something, yeah, where they would-- 
[00:06:33.28] WARD WINER: They have an arm that would catch a bag as they went by, pick up the mail. 
[00:06:36.36] MARILYN SOMERS: I can remember seeing it at the movies. 
[00:06:37.16] WARD WINER: So he spent something, like, 42 years as a railway mail clerk. 
[00:06:41.68] MARILYN SOMERS: So he spent his whole life going on the railroad, back and forth, back and forth. 
[00:06:44.98] WARD WINER: And with the job he started out in Detroit. Then they moved to Saginaw. And then they moved to Grand Rapids and spent the rest of the time, depended on what runs he was on. He was on Detroit to Chicago, and Detroit to Mackinac, and Grand Rapids to Chicago. 
[00:07:00.29] MARILYN SOMERS: So it's almost as if he were a traveling salesman in the sense that he was gone a lot. 
[00:07:04.85] WARD WINER: Yeah, at least when I was a kid, I remember the job was such that he worked double time one week. And then he had a week off, double time, then a week off, which was nice in the summertime. We would go out and camp on Lake Michigan all summer. And he would go away and work for a week and then come back out and spend the week with us. Yeah, it was a great experience. 
[00:07:24.47] MARILYN SOMERS: How many brothers and sisters did you have? 
[00:07:26.59] WARD WINER: One of each. 
[00:07:27.51] MARILYN SOMERS: One of each. and where were you in the lot? 
[00:07:29.49] WARD WINER: Youngest. 
[00:07:30.39] MARILYN SOMERS: Youngest. You were the baby boy. OK, so your older brother and older sister-- 
[00:07:35.01] WARD WINER: The older sister's is 10 years older. And the brother's seven years older. So it was kind of like-- 
[00:07:38.99] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, quite a bit older. 
[00:07:39.81] WARD WINER: Like having two sets of parents growing up. 
[00:07:42.17] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, because they were probably told to mind you and keep an eye on and everything. 
[00:07:45.52] WARD WINER: Yep 
[00:07:45.86] MARILYN SOMERS: Do you remember when you started school? 
[00:07:48.90] WARD WINER: Yeah, yeah, I went to Dickinson Elementary School in Grand Rapids. It was just about two or three blocks away. 
[00:07:57.96] MARILYN SOMERS: So you walked. 
[00:07:58.72] WARD WINER: Yeah. Oh, yeah. 
[00:07:59.62] MARILYN SOMERS: I would think it was probably a happy thing for you because you didn't-- 
[00:08:03.18] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:08:03.42] MARILYN SOMERS: Being the youngest one, you go meet lots of people that way, going to school. 
[00:08:07.24] WARD WINER: Well, I made a good youth. 
[00:08:09.56] MARILYN SOMERS: Were you a good student? 
[00:08:10.76] WARD WINER: Yeah, yeah, Pretty good. [LAUGHS] 
[00:08:13.10] MARILYN SOMERS: You're laughing. Why? 
[00:08:15.05] WARD WINER: No, I jokingly tell people that I began to get recognition when I was in the kindergarten. One day, the teacher pinned a 3-by-5 card on me with a gold star on it, had some writing. Of course, I couldn't read. So I went home, and I said to my mother, what's it say? She says, you got a gold star for being a good rester. 
[00:08:34.52] [LAUGHTER] 
[00:08:37.54] MARILYN SOMERS: You had the ability to nap? 
[00:08:39.24] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. I was good at napping, no problem, no problem at all. 
[00:08:42.54] MARILYN SOMERS: That's a great talent to have. Some people can't accomplish those things. 
[00:08:45.98] WARD WINER: Well, back to my mother, I talked about my dad a lot. My mother, as I said, her dad was from Canada. And she grew up on a farm. And actually, the way they met was my dad was a hired hand on her father's farm. Now, he was seven years older than she was. And I don't know whether they dated before he went in the military or not. But when he came back-- 
[00:09:10.86] MARILYN SOMERS: That's when they married? 
[00:09:11.16] WARD WINER: They got married, yeah and my mother, the reason she had to drop out of school in the 11th grade, she was from a family of seven kids, actually. One died, I think, within six months. And one had some kind of physical problem. I'm not sure what it was. 
[00:09:39.48] MARILYN SOMERS: Just handicapped in some way. 
[00:09:40.32] WARD WINER: Yeah, he was handicapped in some way. And she was the oldest. And he lived until he was 12. And then he died. And her father said, we got to do something different because of the trauma the family went through just raising him and then when he died. And so he organized himself and, I think, two other families. This is now-- I think we're talking 1917 maybe. 
[00:10:15.23] He organized three farm families. They rented out their farm for the year. They bought five cars and drove them all to California, to Southern California. 
[00:10:25.67] MARILYN SOMERS: For an adventure? 
[00:10:26.69] WARD WINER: Yeah, it took them two weeks or so to drive. And I've got a copy of their diary from the trip. 
[00:10:31.79] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, how interesting. 
[00:10:32.43] WARD WINER: My one uncle, who was 12 years old, drove one of the cars all the way out. And they camped. They camped along the way. And then I don't what the-- well, then they sold the cars when they got there for income. And my grandfather worked as a carpenter for a year, building homes in Long Beach along the beach. That was when that was being developed. I don't know what the other guys did. But my mother's brothers and sisters, there were five that survived. So there were five that actually lived to be quite old, all of them. 
[00:11:05.50] The others went to school. My mother went to work in a Ford dealership as a telephone operator out there. And my grandfather told her she had to save her money up to pay for her way home because they stayed there for a year. And then they took the train back to Michigan and took over their farm again. 
[00:11:25.92] MARILYN SOMERS: How could they make themselves come back after being in California? 
[00:11:29.84] WARD WINER: Well, they still own the farms. They still owned farms. 
[00:11:32.12] MARILYN SOMERS: That's an amazing story. 
[00:11:33.44] WARD WINER: It was, yeah. 
[00:11:33.88] MARILYN SOMERS: What an adventurer he was. 
[00:11:34.78] WARD WINER: Yeah, it was quite an adventure in 1916 or '17 or whatever it was. 
[00:11:37.68] MARILYN SOMERS: For him to even have come up with the concept of something like that is amazing. Wow. 
[00:11:41.56] WARD WINER: So, anyway, but the interesting thing about her dropping out of school, she always wanted to finish. She always wanted to have a high school diploma. And when she was about 72 or 73, she went back and got a GED. 
[00:11:54.28] MARILYN SOMERS: Did she? Oh, God love her. Isn't that wonderful? 
[00:11:56.70] WARD WINER: I've got a picture of her in her cap and gown, graduating from high school. 
[00:12:00.20] MARILYN SOMERS: She would set the example for all to follow. 
[00:12:01.46] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:12:01.92] MARILYN SOMERS: That's amazing. She dropped out of school, probably for financial necessity. 
[00:12:06.60] WARD WINER: Because the family went to California. 
[00:12:08.58] MARILYN SOMERS: So there was no coming back after that. And then she married your dad not too long after that time. But he had been to France. And she'd been to California. They were, for the times, rather accomplished. 
[00:12:19.76] WARD WINER: Well, my mother enjoyed traveling, which I do too. But it was an interesting story about my grandfather, my mother's father. He also came from Canada and also came over. I suppose you would call it illegally these days. And he was a pretty prominent citizen in the community. He ran for the school board. And he was on the school board and head of the school board. And he was a county commissioner and whatnot. And he'd been doing this for, I don't know, quite a few years. 
[00:12:51.23] And his opponent in one of the elections found out he wasn't even a US citizen and shouldn't have been in any of those jobs. And so he used it against him in an election. 
[00:13:00.09] MARILYN SOMERS: Smears, huh? 
[00:13:01.09] WARD WINER: Yeah, I think my grandfather still won the election. But he then decided he'd better become a citizen. 
[00:13:07.19] MARILYN SOMERS: So he went through the ropes, huh? 
[00:13:08.61] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:13:09.27] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, my. Yeah, things were different. There wasn't all that research available. So you could probably get away with that. I mean, I know people would assume. 
[00:13:16.15] WARD WINER: So my parents, shortly after they got married, they moved to Detroit in a suburb. If I heard it, I'd know it. And I think they got married in 1923. And when the depression came, they lost the house and then moved to Saginaw, where they also had a house, then later moved to Grand Rapids. 
[00:13:40.24] MARILYN SOMERS: But they never farmed? 
[00:13:41.00] WARD WINER: No, no. 
[00:13:41.84] MARILYN SOMERS: As a husband or wife, they didn't farm? So that was a transition from agriculture into some other kind of life. 
[00:13:47.50] WARD WINER: Right. 
[00:13:48.94] MARILYN SOMERS: Did your dad ever discuss with you how he happened to latch on to the railway, the mail railway? Because that's kind of an interesting profession that he took in to. 
[00:13:56.56] WARD WINER: I don't know. He may have. But I don't recall. 
[00:14:00.98] MARILYN SOMERS: Talk about living your life on the rails. That's really something that he did that. But once he got to Grand Rapids, he could stay put, then, and just travel from there. 
[00:14:09.50] WARD WINER: I think they moved there probably two or three years before I was born, something in that range. My brother was born in Saginaw, I think. And I think my sister was born in Detroit. But I'm not sure. She may've been born in Saginaw also. 
[00:14:24.10] MARILYN SOMERS: You were lucky. You got born in Grand Rapids. It's much nicer than Detroit or Saginaw. 
[00:14:30.08] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:14:30.48] MARILYN SOMERS: Really, really nice community 
[00:14:31.92] WARD WINER: But my brother and sister both still live there. 
[00:14:34.92] MARILYN SOMERS: In Grand Rapids? 
[00:14:35.78] WARD WINER: Yeah, 
[00:14:36.06] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, see, they knew a good thing when they found it. 
[00:14:38.40] WARD WINER: My brother's, well, some of his kids are in Grand Rapids, and some are moved away. My sister's kids both moved away. But they're still there. 
[00:14:48.60] MARILYN SOMERS: It's a nice, little community because it's not just automobiles. It's lots of things. 
[00:14:53.14] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah, furniture is big. It's a nice town. 
[00:14:57.42] MARILYN SOMERS: In fact, at the time that your parents moved there, that's what it was was a furniture industry. 
[00:15:00.10] WARD WINER: Furniture was a big deal, right. 
[00:15:01.90] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, the furniture there. It's a beautiful city, too. 
[00:15:04.92] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:15:05.32] MARILYN SOMERS: They had good city planners because it is a beautiful city. So little Ward goes off to school. And he excels in napping right off the bat. 
[00:15:13.30] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:15:13.68] MARILYN SOMERS: But then he must've have gone on to other things. So do you remember the transition from elementary school into, what, junior high or middle school? 
[00:15:22.26] WARD WINER: Well, junior high, they called it then. It was Burton Junior High School, which was probably about a mile away. I went there for seventh, eighth, and ninth grade, and then to South High School for 10, 11, and 12, graduated from South High School. 
[00:15:37.49] MARILYN SOMERS: What were your interests at that time, band, sports? 
[00:15:41.81] WARD WINER: Oh, I played in grade school only. I played a tuba and sousaphone. But I never followed it up after that. I should've. I wish I had. 
[00:15:53.19] MARILYN SOMERS: You wish you had because you have an ear for music. 
[00:15:56.07] WARD WINER: And, oh-- 
[00:15:57.63] MARILYN SOMERS: I don't know how far you'd have got on the sousaphone. 
[00:15:59.69] WARD WINER: No, it's not exactly your hot item. When I was about 12, I don't know, 11 or 12, I got a paper route, a morning paper route. So I delivered morning papers for several years. And when I was probably 14 or 15, I started working in a gas station garage. 
[00:16:24.67] MARILYN SOMERS: So your family had a work ethic. 
[00:16:26.53] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah, yeah, everybody worked. 
[00:16:29.22] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, and the idea was going to be that had to pitch in? Or were you allowed to keep your money for your own? 
[00:16:34.92] WARD WINER: No, I kept it. No, my dad was pretty serious about that since his dad took it away from him. He wouldn't do that. 
[00:16:41.40] MARILYN SOMERS: He didn't make you. So you learned the value. If you want something, you earn the money for it. And you got it. 
[00:16:46.94] WARD WINER: And, well, probably the only significant thing about those years, when I was in high school, between my junior and senior year, a friend of mine and I, a guy named Kurt Richter, drove a new car to Alaska from Detroit. 
[00:17:06.92] MARILYN SOMERS: So you had a little bit of your grandfather's adventure genes. 
[00:17:09.88] WARD WINER: Well, we-- 
[00:17:10.06] MARILYN SOMERS: You were how old, 17? 
[00:17:12.54] WARD WINER: I think-- no, let me see. It was summer of '53, so I must've been-- what would that be? 
[00:17:18.48] MARILYN SOMERS: 17. 
[00:17:19.10] WARD WINER: 17. Well, actually, I was 16 when I left home, the drive up there. 
[00:17:23.24] MARILYN SOMERS: And nobody thought that that was kind of young to head off across the country? 
[00:17:27.10] WARD WINER: Well, nobody that I knew. 
[00:17:28.48] MARILYN SOMERS: Your parents didn't mind? 
[00:17:29.92] WARD WINER: No, actually, I drove it up for a friend of theirs. They had a-- guy was a Presbyterian minister who was a friend of theirs. He had been a minister in Grand Rapids. And they were good friends. They were about the same age. And he first moved to Minneapolis and then to Alaska. And the summer before, the summer of '52, he came back to the lower 48 States and did some visiting. And he stopped at our house. 
[00:17:59.12] And one evening we were talking. And I said, I'd like to go to Alaska. I'm, what, at that time, 15, something like that, I guess. And he said, well, I want to buy a new car next year. Maybe you could drive it up for me. I said-- 
[00:18:12.26] MARILYN SOMERS: A brand-new car you got to drive? Wow. 
[00:18:14.68] WARD WINER: In those days, when you bought a new car, you had to pay the delivery cost from the factory to where you picked it up. Today, they average it out, everybody. So it's not such a big deal anymore. But in those days, the cost of getting a new car delivered in Alaska was almost as much as the cost of the car. 
[00:18:37.33] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, so he was ahead of the game to have you do that 
[00:18:39.83] WARD WINER: Yeah, so I said, jeez, I'd love to do it. 
[00:18:44.11] MARILYN SOMERS: So he was happy to pay for your gas? 
[00:18:45.19] WARD WINER: My parents were there. And they said yeah. It was OK with them. 
[00:18:48.65] MARILYN SOMERS: Isn't that neat? 
[00:18:49.57] WARD WINER: So he bought a new Plymouth from a dealer in Anchorage and sent the paperwork to me. And my friend and I hitchhiked to Detroit, to the Plymouth factory, and showed him the paperwork. And he picked up the new car and drove it up. Well, we drove it home to Grand Rapids first. And he had given us a long list of things to bring with it. We had to get new brake sets and some new oil filters and gas filters. 
[00:19:15.37] MARILYN SOMERS: He was thinking ahead because those things would not be available to him up there. 
[00:19:18.35] WARD WINER: And he also gave us instructions on, once we got to gravel roads, how to cover up all the chrome in the lower parts of the car. 
[00:19:27.02] MARILYN SOMERS: I think it [INAUDIBLE]. 
[00:19:27.66] WARD WINER: Yeah, heavy paper. You know, the packing paper. And so we got all that stuff and took off and drove. 
[00:19:37.82] MARILYN SOMERS: That was the days before Google map, too. So you had to know where you were going. 
[00:19:41.84] WARD WINER: Well, it was 5,200 miles from Detroit to Anchorage. And over half of it was gravel road. 
[00:19:48.62] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, my word. So that was a real concern about getting a car all dinged up, then, huh? 
[00:19:52.62] WARD WINER: Yeah. And we managed to go through Yellowstone, spend a couple of days there. 
[00:19:58.62] MARILYN SOMERS: So you got to see the country. 
[00:20:00.40] WARD WINER: Yeah, it was great. 
[00:20:01.46] MARILYN SOMERS: What a great adventure you had. 
[00:20:03.16] WARD WINER: Then we worked up there all summer. 
[00:20:04.96] MARILYN SOMERS: What a different world it was, too, that you could do that. 
[00:20:07.36] WARD WINER: Well, it was very, very expensive. And it wasn't a state. But it was very, very expensive. And it was my first big lesson in economics because, when we were talking to him the summer before in '52, he was talking about how much money he could make up there. Labor has got really high pay. I mean, 1952, you'd make about $14, $15 an hour or something like that. 
[00:20:31.40] MARILYN SOMERS: So you were going to get rich. 
[00:20:31.96] WARD WINER: So we were going to go up and get rich. But not paying attention to politics and things, we missed the fact that, in the fall of '52, Dwight Eisenhower was elected. And he came in making lots of economic slashes. And one of the big slashes was money going to the army, which ran Alaska at the time. And so there was just an incredible number of people unemployed in Alaska at the time. 
[00:21:00.94] MARILYN SOMERS: Really? 
[00:21:01.24] WARD WINER: My recollection is the numbers were something, like, that Anchorage had 50,000 people in the wintertime. And in the summer, another 100 showed up for jobs. And they were almost all unemployed. 
[00:21:13.30] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, what did you guys find to do, then? 
[00:21:14.78] WARD WINER: Well, we lived in the garage of this Presbyterian minister we drove the car up for. And he had lots of connections, obviously. So he managed to get us in the Longshoremen's Union. So we were longshoremen members. And once a week, we would go to the Longshoremen's Hall for the call for jobs. We got one night's job that way and for about a month. But it was one night loading ammunition on barges for the army. 
[00:21:44.27] And I think we made something, like, $16 an hour doing it, which was pretty damn good. And then, later, we got a job as working in a salmon cannery, unloading salmon off of ships that came in. 
[00:22:00.35] MARILYN SOMERS: The fish itself, right? 
[00:22:01.41] WARD WINER: And that was pretty interesting. They had a policy where I think we were getting, like, $8 an hour base. I'm not sure. But if you stayed in that job unloading fish off the boats, which was a dirty job-- 
[00:22:19.52] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, my gosh, yes. 
[00:22:20.26] WARD WINER: If you stayed until the end of the season, which was only three more weeks or something like that, they would give you a bonus equal to what you had earned. So you doubled your-- 
[00:22:30.02] MARILYN SOMERS: Wow. 
[00:22:30.40] WARD WINER: --doubled your take. 
[00:22:31.28] MARILYN SOMERS: That's a good incentive. 
[00:22:32.44] WARD WINER: [CHUCKLES] And it turned out we were the only ones who managed to do it because the other people that were doing the job were typically winos or something. They'd get their money at the end of the week. And they'd go off and hang on a drunk and not come back. But you'd put on waders that'd go up under your armpits. And you get a pitchfork. And you jump in the ship. And you just sink into about your waist and fish. And you're loading them in a barrel until the ship is empty. 
[00:23:01.02] MARILYN SOMERS: Must smell really wonderful, too, huh? 
[00:23:02.88] WARD WINER: It was nasty. But it paid good. And it was the only job we could get. After that was over with, we managed to work, I don't know, two or three weeks for a landscape architect, putting fences in and doing landscaping and that sort of thing. Over Labor Day, we had saved up enough money. We flew up to Kotzebue and Nome. 
[00:23:26.41] MARILYN SOMERS: You flew up? Wow, I'm impressed. 
[00:23:28.71] WARD WINER: Well, it was a regular flight, spent, I don't know, two or three days up there in Nome and Kotzebue, and then flew back. And at the end after Labor Day, we missed the first two weeks of class in the fall term because it was cheaper to come home after that. I mean, if you're up there, it's being on an island. You either got to fly out. Or you got to drive out. Or you've got to take a boat out. And we saved up enough money to take the boat back from Valdez to Seattle. And by waiting until after-- 
[00:23:59.39] MARILYN SOMERS: The season. 
[00:24:00.61] WARD WINER: After a season, yeah, it stopped at seven different stops along the way. So we got to see a lot of inland passage and stuff. And then we hitchhiked home from Seattle. 
[00:24:11.15] MARILYN SOMERS: I was going to ask you how you home. You hitchhiked home. 
[00:24:12.51] WARD WINER: Yeah, hitchhiked home, made it in three days. 
[00:24:14.85] MARILYN SOMERS: Just isn't done. 
[00:24:15.03] WARD WINER: No, you don't do it anymore. 
[00:24:16.55] MARILYN SOMERS: That isn't done, no. 
[00:24:18.47] WARD WINER: Actually, it went pretty fast. We met some people on the boat who had a car. And they were going to Salt Lake City. So they gave us a ride to Salt Lake City. Everything went well until we got to, I think it was, Iowa someplace. And a guy dropped us off on the corner out in the farm area, no buildings around. And we hitchhiked. We were there about three hours. And a state policeman came along. And he stopped. And he asked us what we were doing. We told him, trying to get to Michigan. 
[00:24:48.17] And he said, well, nobody's going to pick you up here because there's a prison about five miles away. 
[00:24:52.89] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, my goodness. 
[00:24:53.51] WARD WINER: And there was a breakout last night. And so there's all kinds of announcements on the radio, don't pick up hitchhikers. 
[00:24:58.45] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, isn't that wonderful, huh? 
[00:24:59.91] WARD WINER: He said, get in. I'll drive you to Des Moines. Then you can get a bus from there and take it away and then start hitchhiking again. So he drove us to Des Moines to the bus station, about 50 miles. [LAUGHS] 
[00:25:10.70] MARILYN SOMERS: That was really nice of him to do. 
[00:25:11.98] WARD WINER: But we made it home in three days, which was pretty good. 
[00:25:13.78] MARILYN SOMERS: That's pretty remarkable. And, boy, did you guys see a lot of stuff. 
[00:25:17.60] WARD WINER: Yeah, it was good. It was a great experience. 
[00:25:19.60] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, great experience. And that was before your junior year or before your senior year? 
[00:25:23.44] WARD WINER: Between junior and senior year. 
[00:25:24.44] MARILYN SOMERS: Junior and senior. Oh, that's just amazing. And I think, back in the day, back in those days, you were much more mature for your age than a typical-- 
[00:25:32.78] WARD WINER: Yeah, probably. 
[00:25:33.34] MARILYN SOMERS: --17-year-old today would be. I mean, let's face it, no 17-year-old today would be pitchforking fish. That's for sure. They'd ask you if you were on your mind, huh? What a wonderful experience for you and your friend too. 
[00:25:46.26] WARD WINER: Yeah, I had a good time. We had a good time. 
[00:25:48.24] MARILYN SOMERS: Where in the game did you decide you were going to college? 
[00:25:52.32] WARD WINER: Well, probably, I'm not sure, sometime during high school, probably because of just competition between my brother and I. He had gone to college. 
[00:26:03.76] MARILYN SOMERS: Where had he gone? 
[00:26:04.74] WARD WINER: Well, he went to Grand Rapids Junior College first, which is what I did. And then he went to Michigan State and got a degree in civil engineering. And then he went off to the Navy, spent, I don't know, some time in the Navy, two or three years or so. Then he came back to Michigan State and got a master's degree. And he had his own business. He and another guy had an architects and engineers firm in Michigan. 
[00:26:28.17] MARILYN SOMERS: And so that was setting a standard for you that you were not going to do-- 
[00:26:30.31] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, I wanted to outdo him. So I went. 
[00:26:33.35] MARILYN SOMERS: Isn't that funny, even though he was 10 years older than you? 
[00:26:35.17] WARD WINER: No, he was seven, seven. 
[00:26:36.13] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, seven years older. You still felt competitive with him, though. 
[00:26:38.71] WARD WINER: Yeah, a little bit, sure. [LAUGHS] 
[00:26:41.05] MARILYN SOMERS: You weren't going to be the kid that didn't do anything, huh? So what were you thinking of? What were you going to go towards? 
[00:26:45.91] WARD WINER: Well, I had worked in this garage, so I worked on cars. Lots of mechanics work on cars. I wanted to become an automotive engineer. I was in Michigan. 
[00:26:53.31] MARILYN SOMERS: That was your mind, yeah. Before we move into that, I didn't ask you if you have any recollection of World War II. 
[00:27:00.55] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do. 
[00:27:01.55] MARILYN SOMERS: Did it affect your family in any way at all? 
[00:27:06.45] WARD WINER: Well, my dad, having been in World War I, he was always and my mother were always concerned about him being drafted again. 
[00:27:13.11] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, they were? 
[00:27:13.81] WARD WINER: Yeah, he managed to stay a couple of years ahead of the draft all the time. So he didn't get drafted. But he obviously paid a lot of attention to it, read the news, listened to the radio. And so I saw-- 
[00:27:23.35] MARILYN SOMERS: So the household was aware 
[00:27:24.57] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. And, well, he often not only worked on the train but sometimes would spend time in the post office at the railway station, working, sorting mail at night. And because there were blackouts, they had all the windows painted black. And I remember going to pick him up. My mother would drive down, pick him up. And I'd go with her and have to have the headlights of the cars partially covered and that sort of thing. So, yeah, I remember a fair amount of it. 
[00:27:59.31] MARILYN SOMERS: So you have some vague recollections of it. 
[00:28:00.79] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:28:01.07] MARILYN SOMERS: But no one in your family went off to war that you can recall? 
[00:28:04.05] WARD WINER: No, my sister married a veteran after the war. He had been in the war in the South Pacific. But I didn't know him during the war. So I don't remember that. And I can't say that I knew anybody that was. Obviously, I remember in the-- 
[00:28:19.98] MARILYN SOMERS: There would've been people in your neighborhood and stuff. 
[00:28:21.20] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah, in neighborhoods with stars and gold stars in the window and all that sort of thing. 
[00:28:26.48] MARILYN SOMERS: But it didn't directly affect you. It was just what you might've heard on the news and the awareness you had. So when you graduated from high school, you were going to go to Grand Rapids Junior College, you said. Get the basics in? 
[00:28:40.48] WARD WINER: Yeah, for what it's worth, in high school, after coming back from Alaska, I ran for high school president, class president. So I was the class president. 
[00:28:50.32] MARILYN SOMERS: Very cool. 
[00:28:51.44] WARD WINER: The reason may be worth mentioning that is a couple of things happened. I remember this is 1953, OK, fall of '53. We had an election for the homecoming king and queen. And they elected a Black kid to be the king and a white girl to be the queen, which is kind of unusual in those days, very unusual, as a matter of fact. 
[00:29:18.29] The king was a star athlete, both in basketball and football. And the queen was a fairly popular girl. And the queen's parents objected to the king being Black. And the high school principal called me and the other class officers into his office and said, you have a problem. He said, I won't mention her name. But her parents had called and objected to this king and queen arrangement. 
[00:29:51.47] And he said, they want it changed. But it's up to you. I'm not going to tell you what to do. And we said, well, we're not going to change it. They were elected. And he said, that's fine. So the girl's parents made her resign. 
[00:30:07.49] MARILYN SOMERS: Really? 
[00:30:08.47] WARD WINER: And so the gal who was runner up, we went to her and said, OK, you were runner up. You want to be queen? She said, oh, great. So we had a Black king and a white queen. 
[00:30:20.73] MARILYN SOMERS: I think that must've have been extraordinary in 1950. 
[00:30:22.67] WARD WINER: Well, it was I mean, I didn't think much of it at the time, frankly. But it really struck me in, well, in 2004, a few years ago, when there was all the stuff about the 50th anniversary of Brown versus the Board of Education. 
[00:30:41.47] MARILYN SOMERS: You were making your own quiet, little history there. 
[00:30:43.85] WARD WINER: Well, the class was a very, very diverse. There were probably 20% to 22% Blacks in the class. There were a number of Hispanics. There were lots of Europeans of one kind or another because there'd been a lot of immigration right after World War II. I mean, there were Latvians, Estonians. There were Dutch and Germans. 
[00:31:06.74] MARILYN SOMERS: You grew up in a really open community, then. 
[00:31:08.16] WARD WINER: Yeah, Lebanese. It was very, very diverse bunch of people. The other interesting thing about it was that the high school is the high school Jerry Ford graduated from, long before me, obviously. And that year he was a young congressman, US congressman. He had either just been elected or been elected. Or maybe it was his second term or something. But he was a young congressman. And so we asked him to come back to the homecoming to crown the king and queen, which he did. So I had my picture with Jerry Ford. 
[00:31:43.82] MARILYN SOMERS: Never knowing where all that was going to go ahead, huh? Pretty cool, though. 
[00:31:48.30] WARD WINER: Now the high school doesn't exist anymore. I mean it's-- 
[00:31:50.20] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, they tore it down? 
[00:31:52.42] WARD WINER: It was closed, gosh, I don't when. But I don't-- it's gone, anyway. 
[00:31:58.83] MARILYN SOMERS: As you talk about this and you look back at it, the principal was pretty fair, wasn't he? 
[00:32:03.03] WARD WINER: Oh, no, he was a good guy. He said, it's up to you. It's up to you. I'm not going to tell you what to do. 
[00:32:07.35] MARILYN SOMERS: He treated you like adults. 
[00:32:08.09] WARD WINER: Yeah, yeah, no, it was a good experience, very good experience. 
[00:32:12.23] MARILYN SOMERS: Very good experience. And it's only when you juxtapose it against what was going on in other parts of the country at that time you realize. 
[00:32:17.93] WARD WINER: Which we didn't know about. I mean, we didn't what was going on. 
[00:32:22.33] MARILYN SOMERS: It really was a wonderful opportunity for you to have that experience. 
[00:32:27.33] WARD WINER: So, anyway, I wanted to go to college to be an automotive engineer. 
[00:32:31.27] MARILYN SOMERS: Did you have counselors in high school that helped direct you? 
[00:32:36.57] WARD WINER: Not that I recall. 
[00:32:37.55] MARILYN SOMERS: You did it on our own. 
[00:32:38.17] WARD WINER: No, I knew what I wanted to do. And my dad's policy was that, when you graduated from high school, you were on your own. 
[00:32:49.21] MARILYN SOMERS: So he wasn't paying? 
[00:32:50.77] WARD WINER: No. He said, if you live at home and go to college, you can live at home free. OK, but if you don't go to college and live at home, you got to pay room and board. And if you go out of town to go to college, you're on your own. 
[00:33:05.55] MARILYN SOMERS: Good luck. 
[00:33:06.01] WARD WINER: So I went to junior college in Grand Rapids for two years, so I could live at home, and then went to the University of Michigan because I wanted to go to a place better than my brother. 
[00:33:14.65] [LAUGHTER] 
[00:33:16.83] MARILYN SOMERS: And you clearly knew about state rivalries there. So you had to figure-- 
[00:33:21.21] WARD WINER: Yeah, so I went to Grand Rapids Junior College for two years and then went to Michigan. 
[00:33:26.21] MARILYN SOMERS: How did you do? I mean, you were a good student. 
[00:33:27.93] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah, I did fine. 
[00:33:28.55] MARILYN SOMERS: It was easy for you to do. Well, then, how did you manage to pay for it? I mean, how did you pay for it? 
[00:33:33.75] WARD WINER: Well, I had saved up money from working. I worked all the time. The year between graduating from high school and going to junior college, that summer, not year, but summer. I drove a truck for Borden's Dairy delivering ice cream to resorts along Lake Michigan. 
[00:33:53.30] MARILYN SOMERS: Really? 
[00:33:53.90] WARD WINER: Yeah, and made very good money. And of course, in those days, I don't what the tuition was at Grand Rapids Junior College. But-- 
[00:34:01.62] MARILYN SOMERS: Not like what we think. 
[00:34:02.42] WARD WINER: $50 or something like that. 
[00:34:04.12] MARILYN SOMERS: So it was manageable. 
[00:34:05.98] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. University of Michigan, tuition was either 100 or $110 a semester or something like that, or maybe a year, might've even been a year. I don't really know. 
[00:34:14.98] MARILYN SOMERS: But you had to have a place to live. 
[00:34:16.62] WARD WINER: Well, the first year I went down there, I got with four other guys. And we rented the third floor of an old house and lived there. And then I worked in a restaurant between the house and the place where the classes were. And the deal with the restaurant was, for every hour you worked, you got a free meal. So if I worked three hours a day, I got three meals. 
[00:34:42.26] MARILYN SOMERS: That was very cagey. 
[00:34:43.78] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:34:44.12] MARILYN SOMERS: It worked out fine. So you didn't have-- 
[00:34:45.76] WARD WINER: No. 
[00:34:45.94] MARILYN SOMERS: You had everything all balanced out. 
[00:34:47.76] WARD WINER: And then I don't think it was the first semester. But after that, after I was there a little while, I arranged, at the beginning of each semester, to work in a bookstore when the rush was on, selling slide rules and drawing sets to engineering students, and made good money doing that. And then the next summer, my wife and I got married. So then she was a secretary in the psychology department at Michigan. And that helped-- 
[00:35:15.69] MARILYN SOMERS: Where did you meet her? 
[00:35:17.01] WARD WINER: We were at high school together. 
[00:35:17.69] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, you knew her from high school. 
[00:35:18.89] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. 
[00:35:19.65] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, OK. So then, you had a long-distance courtship, too. 
[00:35:22.85] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, we met, I think, in the 10th grade, the fall of the 10th grade. And, yeah, so she went to college for, I think, a year to Western Michigan. And then she-- 
[00:35:38.43] MARILYN SOMERS: So what'd you do, write letters? Because people didn't have money for telephone calls that much in those days. 
[00:35:42.55] WARD WINER: And then she came home and was a secretary at the Grand Rapids Press for the advertising department. And she worked in a bank for a while. And then, when we got married and came to Michigan, to Ann Arbor, she worked as a secretary in a psychology department. 
[00:35:58.50] MARILYN SOMERS: You know, what I hear through all of this is everybody worked. 
[00:36:01.78] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. 
[00:36:02.94] MARILYN SOMERS: There was no idle time. 
[00:36:03.64] WARD WINER: I'm not sure how I'm going to adjust to retirement. 
[00:36:06.32] [LAUGHTER] 
[00:36:07.32] MARILYN SOMERS: Because, man, whatever was handy, you were doing it. You were trained and programmed. And you didn't think anything of it Everyone expected to-- 
[00:36:13.70] WARD WINER: It was just part of the deal. 
[00:36:15.52] MARILYN SOMERS: And you also made do, right? 
[00:36:17.20] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:36:17.70] MARILYN SOMERS: I mean, you didn't have to have a lot of money to be happy. 
[00:36:20.90] WARD WINER: No. 
[00:36:21.30] MARILYN SOMERS: You could make do. 
[00:36:21.84] WARD WINER: Yep. 
[00:36:22.60] MARILYN SOMERS: So as a young couple, then, you rented your own apartment somewhere in the campus area? 
[00:36:25.86] WARD WINER: Yeah, we had a one room-- well, it was one room and a kitchen and a very small bath. The bath was so small that-- [LAUGHS] it was so narrow, and the toilet was situated across ways, that you had to sit crooked on the toilet in the room. And to get into the shower, you had to step over the toilet to get in the shower. 
[00:36:47.70] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, boy. That was utilizing every square inch of space. 
[00:36:50.40] WARD WINER: We were there for a year. Yeah, I think for a year, maybe two. 
[00:36:56.10] MARILYN SOMERS: And this, we might say, was in Ann Arbor. 
[00:36:59.14] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:36:59.98] MARILYN SOMERS: I assume. I imagine you weren't on the campus. You were somewhere in the city of Ann Arbor. 
[00:37:03.94] WARD WINER: Yeah, it was. Well, but it was only about three blocks south of where the main engineering program is. So we could both walk everywhere. 
[00:37:14.06] MARILYN SOMERS: Do you think back at that time was a happy time? 
[00:37:17.98] WARD WINER: Yeah, I do, I'm not sure she does, but I do. [LAUGHS] 
[00:37:21.84] MARILYN SOMERS: Usually, you're just not worrying about the whole world, just getting through each semester. 
[00:37:27.34] WARD WINER: We had our first kid within about a year and a half. And that kind of slowed down. 
[00:37:31.82] MARILYN SOMERS: Before you graduated? 
[00:37:33.00] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. Yeah, our oldest son, Matt, was born in January 1, '59. We were married in June '57. So I guess it was a year and a half. And we were still in that apartment. 
[00:37:51.05] MARILYN SOMERS: You were really young. 
[00:37:51.83] WARD WINER: No, we were still in that apartment when he was born. And then the next-- 
[00:37:56.29] MARILYN SOMERS: That's a tiny, little place. 
[00:37:56.81] WARD WINER: --summer we moved out. Oh, yeah. 
[00:37:58.47] MARILYN SOMERS: Tiny, little place. 
[00:37:59.39] WARD WINER: We had a fold-out bed in the living room. That was where we slept. 
[00:38:02.59] MARILYN SOMERS: What year did you get your undergraduate degree? 
[00:38:04.63] WARD WINER: '58 
[00:38:04.85] MARILYN SOMERS: '58, OK. And here you are, married with a child. 
[00:38:09.47] WARD WINER: Well, actually-- 
[00:38:10.39] MARILYN SOMERS: On the way. 
[00:38:10.99] WARD WINER: Obviously, he was born after I graduated because he was born in '59. 
[00:38:15.87] MARILYN SOMERS: '59. But on the way. 
[00:38:17.75] WARD WINER: So six months after, yeah. And I was a graduate student at the time. 
[00:38:21.59] MARILYN SOMERS: And what was your plan? What were you thinking of doing? 
[00:38:24.13] WARD WINER: I really hadn't thought a whole lot about it. [LAUGHS] 
[00:38:28.27] MARILYN SOMERS: Wasn't it, like, get a job? Usually, isn't that what you think? 
[00:38:31.33] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, the other context you got to put it in is-- and you'll remember this just because, within the last month, there was all the stuff in the press about Sputnik. October. Was it early October '57. '57. 
[00:38:50.28] MARILYN SOMERS: '57. 
[00:38:51.02] WARD WINER: '57, yeah. And, as I've jokingly said, I need to thank the Soviets for my career. 
[00:38:58.68] [LAUGHTER] 
[00:39:00.90] Because-- 
[00:39:01.24] MARILYN SOMERS: Who knew? 
[00:39:02.44] WARD WINER: Sputnik went up in the fall of '57. And the money just came down out of the sky to support students studying science and engineering. 
[00:39:10.28] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, really? 
[00:39:11.86] WARD WINER: Oh, it was incredible. 
[00:39:13.46] MARILYN SOMERS: You were a beneficiary of that, then. 
[00:39:14.86] WARD WINER: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. 
[00:39:16.28] MARILYN SOMERS: In what respect? What did they say? 
[00:39:18.48] WARD WINER: Well, my plan, as I'd said earlier, was to become an automotive engineer and get a job in Detroit, like lots of Michigan kids. And probably within a month or two after Sputnik went up, a faculty member stopped me in the hall and said, what are you going to do? I had also been working as a research assistant for the Department head and for another faculty member. So they knew me. And he said, what are you going to do when you graduate? 
[00:39:50.60] I said, I don't know. I'm looking for a job. I've been doing some interviewing. And he said, oh, no, no, you don't want to do it, go to a job. You want to go to graduate school. I said, I can't afford to go to graduate school. I'm putting myself through. And my wife's working. And he said, well, no you don't pay to go to graduate school. They pay you to go to graduate school. So I said, OK, tell me more. [LAUGHS] 
[00:40:09.54] MARILYN SOMERS: That was a revelation. It never had occurred to you. 
[00:40:11.74] WARD WINER: I didn't know about it. I didn't know about graduate school. 
[00:40:14.32] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, isn't that interesting? 
[00:40:15.48] WARD WINER: And so I said, tell me more. And he did. So they offered me a scholarship and a research assistantship to go to graduate school. And I talked to Mary. And she said fine. And I started a master's degree. And about halfway through the master's degree, one of the faculty members said, you're going to go on for a PhD? I said, oh, I got to get a job and get out of here. 
[00:40:45.51] Oh, no, no, no, you should-- so I said, what's involved? And he said, well, you got to take some coursework. I wasn't worried about that because I could do OK at that. And you've got to pass two language exams, in those days, reading and translating ability in two languages. And you got to take qualifying exams, prelim exams. And I said, well, what are those? And he described them to me. And I said, well, can I take them while I'm a master's student? And he said, yeah, you can. I said, OK, if I pass them, I'll stay on. If I don't pass them, I'm getting out of here. 
[00:41:17.99] MARILYN SOMERS: Hedging the bets, huh? 
[00:41:19.13] WARD WINER: I took them and passed them. So I stayed on for a PhD. And it was in about-- this kind of ties back to why I'm at Georgia Tech. About 1957, I think, Art Hansen joined the faculty at Michigan in mechanical engineering. And I took a couple of courses from him. And when it came time to do a PhD thesis, I decided to do a thesis under his direction. 
[00:41:45.22] MARILYN SOMERS: Ah. 
[00:41:45.92] WARD WINER: So he was my thesis advisor. 
[00:41:47.70] MARILYN SOMERS: What was your topic? 
[00:41:50.68] WARD WINER: A moderately useless topic fairly quickly after I finished, but it was three-dimensional boundary layers, similarity solutions and three-dimensional boundary layers. And it was mainly mathematical, applied math. That's the area Hansen was in. But it had some experimental work with it. 
[00:42:10.68] MARILYN SOMERS: In relation to mechanical engineering? 
[00:42:12.78] WARD WINER: Yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah, well, it was a fluid mechanics area, fluid mechanics application area. And so I did that. It was the days before computers. Or computers were so-- 
[00:42:25.44] MARILYN SOMERS: Rare. 
[00:42:25.98] WARD WINER: So what? Rare in engineering research at that time that this was all pencil and paper and some experimental work. And so the next step, I guess might as well keep going with the-- 
[00:42:45.74] MARILYN SOMERS: I want to ask you. What was it like to be a college student at University of Michigan at that time period in the mid-to-late '50s? Because you were married, was your experience different than if you had-- 
[00:42:57.12] WARD WINER: Oh, I'm sure it was, yeah. 
[00:42:58.70] MARILYN SOMERS: So you were pretty responsible? 
[00:43:00.86] WARD WINER: Well, I mean, we were both working. And we had one kid and our second-- 
[00:43:06.34] MARILYN SOMERS: Because there was a lot going on in the world then. The Korean conflict had come and gone. 
[00:43:13.10] WARD WINER: Well, that's another thing that was going on. It wasn't my intention. But I managed to avoid the draft-- 
[00:43:17.98] MARILYN SOMERS: Because you were in a position like that. 
[00:43:19.94] WARD WINER: Well, initially, they were giving deferments if you were studying engineering or physical sciences. So I was deferred for that. And then we got married. And they were given deferments for married people. 
[00:43:32.66] MARILYN SOMERS: That's happenstance. I mean, it's just the way things-- 
[00:43:34.69] WARD WINER: Then they were given deferments if you had kids. So I managed to never have to-- 
[00:43:38.73] MARILYN SOMERS: To go to Korea, which is-- 
[00:43:40.39] WARD WINER: Yeah, to go in the military. 
[00:43:41.99] MARILYN SOMERS: --very fine. I mean, because you've had experience at Tech for almost 40 years here, did you find that they were nurturers at University of Michigan, the professors? I mean, were you impressed with or-- 
[00:43:55.13] WARD WINER: Well, some of them were, certainly. 
[00:43:56.51] MARILYN SOMERS: Affected by them? 
[00:43:56.75] WARD WINER: I don't know in general. Oh, yeah, well, I mean, the reason I went to graduate school and the reason I went into the academic world was because faculty member coming to me-- 
[00:44:04.33] MARILYN SOMERS: And taking an interest in you. 
[00:44:05.43] WARD WINER: Yeah, absolutely. 
[00:44:06.25] MARILYN SOMERS: Do you remember what his name was? 
[00:44:07.65] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. I remember them all, sure. I mean-- 
[00:44:10.17] MARILYN SOMERS: Who actually set you on that path? 
[00:44:11.25] WARD WINER: Well, certainly, I'm not sure exactly which one. But I know various ones that talked to me about it were Hansen, obviously. Gordon Van Wylen, who was head of the department, later became dean, and later became president of Hope College in Holland, Michigan. John Clark, who was a senior faculty member. [INAUDIBLE], who was a younger faculty member at the time. 
[00:44:37.12] MARILYN SOMERS: See all of them-- 
[00:44:37.94] WARD WINER: Joe Shigley. 
[00:44:39.36] MARILYN SOMERS: It's great that you remember their names because there's no one else to say. 
[00:44:44.00] WARD WINER: Well, see, after going to Cambridge for two years, came back to Michigan, then I was working with most of those people. So I spent six years with them and got to know them fairly well. 
[00:44:53.98] MARILYN SOMERS: If someone hadn't spoken up, you would've had a whole different life. 
[00:44:56.86] WARD WINER: Oh, absolutely. 
[00:44:57.54] MARILYN SOMERS: Because you would not have known. 
[00:44:59.38] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:44:59.56] MARILYN SOMERS: And that relationship between student and mentor/faculty person is so important. 
[00:45:06.00] WARD WINER: No, they were very good, very good. And the reason I ended up becoming an academic and first going to Cambridge was again-- 
[00:45:19.94] MARILYN SOMERS: Somebody intervened? 
[00:45:20.86] WARD WINER: Yeah, absolutely. 
[00:45:21.90] MARILYN SOMERS: Who? 
[00:45:23.75] WARD WINER: Well, It was Van Wylen and Hansen. I had-- 
[00:45:29.10] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, they recognized recognize something in what you were doing, that there was a value to this. 
[00:45:32.60] WARD WINER: Yeah, oh, yeah. This would've been either fall of '62 or spring of '63, I forget which. I mean, I knew them and had been working with them off and on for several years by that time. So we would see each other in the hall and what have you. And I think it was Van Wylen who said they were interested because of people in the auto industry in Detroit had said to them they needed to get a faculty member in the area of lubrication. 
[00:46:06.90] And for some reason, they thought lubrication was basically an application of fluid mechanics, which part of it is, of course. And Van Wylen said they had interviewed two or three people from industry. And they weren't happy with them. And so they had decided to grow their own, as he put it. 
[00:46:23.72] MARILYN SOMERS: Does that rate? 
[00:46:24.84] WARD WINER: So he said, we wanted to know if you'd be interested. What are you going to do? I said, well, I'm looking for a job. They knew I was approaching the end of my thesis work. And I said, what do you have in mind? And he said, well, we can get the money to send you to do a postdoc someplace to study that field and then if you'll come back and be on the faculty. So I said, OK, where do you want to send the person? 
[00:46:56.73] And he said, well, we'd like you to go to Cambridge, England, and work with a couple of guys named Bowden and Tabor, who were the world-renowned people in that field at the time. And I went home, talked to Mary about it. She agreed. She was pretty agreeable in those days. 
[00:47:12.07] [LAUGHTER] 
[00:47:12.57] MARILYN SOMERS: Thank God. 
[00:47:13.09] WARD WINER: I'm not sure if I'd go and ask today whether she'd be as agreeable. So I said, OK. 
[00:47:20.99] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, did you go on your own? Or did she and-- 
[00:47:23.49] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah, no, she went. 
[00:47:24.59] MARILYN SOMERS: She went, too. Great adventure, then. 
[00:47:26.99] WARD WINER: I wrote to Bowden and gave him a brief resume and said, I've got the money to come and work for you for a year. Will you have me? And he said, oh, yeah. He wrote back and said-- this is all writing in those days, letters. I was quite impressed with the fact that he wrote back and said he would accept me. Of course, now I realize, in retrospect, if a reasonably smart person with a pretty good education writes you and says, I'm willing to work for you for a year for nothing if you'll take me in, of course you say yes. [LAUGHS] 
[00:47:58.58] MARILYN SOMERS: And you were coming from very reputable people, too. 
[00:48:00.88] WARD WINER: Yeah, so. But he said in his letter-- he was an incredibly sharp guy. I learned a lot from him. He said in his letter, one year's really not enough. He said, you're changing fields-- because he was in physics and mostly in surface physics and surface chemistry, not applied math or not fluid mechanics at all. He said, you really ought to stay for two years. 
[00:48:25.70] MARILYN SOMERS: And back to Mary. 
[00:48:27.30] WARD WINER: So I took that to her. And I took it to Van Wylen. And Van Wylen said, well, let me see what I can do. And a week later, he came back to me. He said, OK, I got enough money. You can go for two years. 
[00:48:37.24] MARILYN SOMERS: Did they make you sign a contract that you'd come back after the end of that two years? 
[00:48:43.06] WARD WINER: Well, we had a-- I don't recall signing anything. But we certainly had a gentleman's agreement. 
[00:48:47.38] MARILYN SOMERS: A gentleman's agreement, which is my point. I mean, what a long time ago that was. Nobody would be doing that these days. 
[00:48:53.56] WARD WINER: I don't think I signed anything. 
[00:48:54.72] MARILYN SOMERS: So it was on good faith that you would go there, gather as much as you could into your brain, and come back. 
[00:48:59.82] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, then so I wrote Bowden and said, yeah, I got enough money. I can come for two. He writes back and says, well, at Cambridge, to get a PhD, all you have to do is do research for three years and write it up and defend it. You don't have to do any coursework. You don't have any language requirements. You don't have any-- 
[00:49:18.98] MARILYN SOMERS: Really? 
[00:49:19.62] WARD WINER: --prelims. And he said, if you have an advanced degree, which you will have, because I was getting my PhD at Michigan, he said, they'll waive one of those three years. So you might as well sign up and be a student. And you'll get another PhD out of it. So I said, OK, how much-- 
[00:49:35.73] MARILYN SOMERS: In two years. 
[00:49:36.51] WARD WINER: Yeah, so I said, how much the tuition? We're going back and forth with it. Tuition was 25 pounds a year. And in those days, 25 pounds was about $75 a year. 
[00:49:49.01] MARILYN SOMERS: You're kidding. 
[00:49:49.59] WARD WINER: No. [LAUGHS] So I said, OK. 
[00:49:51.59] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, my God. That's incredible. 
[00:49:54.03] WARD WINER: So he directed me to one of the colleges. At Cambridge, you got to be admitted to a college before you can be admitted to the university. So he directed me to Emmanuel College. And I wrote them. And they admitted me. So I was a student and a postdoc all at the same time while I was there. 
[00:50:09.43] MARILYN SOMERS: What a great opportunity it was. 
[00:50:11.31] WARD WINER: But, I mean, we went with two kids. I mean, we only had $11,000 to pay our transportation over and back, and live for two years. 
[00:50:18.67] MARILYN SOMERS: Here's the amount of money. Let's see what you could do with it. So it was really-- 
[00:50:21.40] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:50:21.72] MARILYN SOMERS: You weren't living high on the hog. 
[00:50:23.84] WARD WINER: Although, compared to a lot of people in England at that time, that was pretty good. 
[00:50:28.24] MARILYN SOMERS: You were doing OK. 
[00:50:28.76] WARD WINER: --pretty good money. 
[00:50:30.48] MARILYN SOMERS: There's a great deal of respect for education and for-- 
[00:50:34.98] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, I mean, Cambridge, of course, it's a lot of it. 
[00:50:38.36] MARILYN SOMERS: It's a lovely, lovely area to go into. 
[00:50:42.16] WARD WINER: Part of the time I was there, I worked as what they call a demonstrator in the physics department, which is what we would call a TA, working the undergraduate labs, teaching physics students. So I made a little extra income that way. And we managed to travel to France and Italy and Spain. 
[00:51:01.48] MARILYN SOMERS: See a little bit of the world. How exciting. 
[00:51:04.06] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[00:51:04.84] MARILYN SOMERS: Who knew? 
[00:51:05.68] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. 
[00:51:06.44] MARILYN SOMERS: Who knew all that could come out of applying yourself? 
[00:51:08.96] WARD WINER: So then I came back in June of '63, managed to-- well, in the process of being there, managed to meet people, like CP Snow, who actually was a-- he and Bowden, the guy I worked for, were graduate students together in the early '30s. And they published together. And so I met him, happened to meet Crick and Perutz the evening that they got announced the Nobel Prize. 
[00:51:39.29] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, you were really moving in some fast circles. 
[00:51:41.11] WARD WINER: It was just all kinds of really top people that you got to meet. 
[00:51:44.07] MARILYN SOMERS: You were there just at the very best time, were you not? 
[00:51:46.27] WARD WINER: Well, it was a good time, anyway, good time. 
[00:51:50.91] MARILYN SOMERS: Ward, let's go back before we go forward. I want to go back and talk about some of these academics that you were exposed to in Cambridge, these names that you were tossing out. As, again, the only one I remember is CP Snow. But there was about a half a dozen there. Let's talk a little bit about these people. What were they doing? What was their context to Bowden. And how did they affect you in any way? 
[00:52:13.47] WARD WINER: OK well, let's talk about them one at a time. 
[00:52:15.73] MARILYN SOMERS: Yes. 
[00:52:16.15] WARD WINER: CP Snow I only met once. 
[00:52:17.95] MARILYN SOMERS: And who was he? 
[00:52:20.29] WARD WINER: Well, CP Snow was a very reasonably prominent scientist and a very prominent government employee, government advisor in the British government, and also an author. 
[00:52:35.47] MARILYN SOMERS: This is where I do know his name. 
[00:52:36.89] WARD WINER: Probably, well, there are two possibilities why you have heard of him. He is the guy who wrote a book or small book about the concept of the two cultures, the culture of scientists and engineers on the one hand versus the literature and arts people on the other hand, and how the two cultures live side by side, but really didn't talk the same language and didn't interact with each other. 
[00:53:05.87] MARILYN SOMERS: The right brain, left brain theory there. 
[00:53:07.49] WARD WINER: Exactly. 
[00:53:07.91] MARILYN SOMERS: That's exactly where I know him from. 
[00:53:08.79] WARD WINER: That's what he's most famous for, probably. And when we were in Cambridge from summer of '61 to the summer of '63, it was shortly after he received-- I think it was called The Reid Prize, which was an award for Literature in England. And it really upset some of the people in the literature and arts community. There was a big controversy. 
[00:53:39.08] MARILYN SOMERS: Because he was science? 
[00:53:40.38] WARD WINER: Yeah, because he was a scientist. And some of the people in the literature community didn't think he was a real writer. But the other thing he wrote-- he wrote several books, quite a few books, novels, most of them centered around life in Cambridge. One was called The Masters. And the whole series, I think, was called Strangers and Brothers or something. It was all about Cambridge life. And they're excellent books. I think I've read them all, but maybe not all of them. 
[00:54:07.72] Because he was part of the Cambridge community, both as a student, a graduate student, or they called call them research students, and there as a faculty member for quite a few years before he went off to government. 
[00:54:19.85] MARILYN SOMERS: And what context did you meet him in? 
[00:54:21.69] WARD WINER: Well, I played two roles when I was in Cambridge. On the one hand, I was a postdoc, which Michigan was supporting. On the other hand, I was also enrolled as a student. Well, at that time, there was an organization in Cambridge known as Friends of Cambridge, which was, at the time we were there, I think, was organized by Sir Lady Mott, who was Nevill Mott's wife. And it was for visiting scholars and postdocs. 
[00:54:55.09] There were probably, I don't know, 25 plus or minus 5 people in it at any given time. And they would have different events every other month or something like that. 
[00:55:07.63] MARILYN SOMERS: To make you feel welcome and to help you integrate in the community. 
[00:55:10.59] WARD WINER: And to get to know each other sort of thing. 
[00:55:12.51] MARILYN SOMERS: Very cool. 
[00:55:13.19] WARD WINER: And one of the events they had was CP Snow as a speaker. And I can still picture the room. It was in an old, probably late 1800s classroom, steep incline, not very big, flat, wooden benches and a flat table in front of you, just long rows, and a podium up in front. And so Mary and I went to this. And CP Snow was a big, heavy guy. And I don't know how old he was at the time, maybe, well, probably in his mid 60s, something like that. 
[00:55:48.37] And he stood behind the podium and talked about his life and experiences. And one of the things he said was he had lived in Britain and Europe and Canada and the United States. And he made the comment-- I may not have it exactly right, but I've got the gist of it-- that living in Europe was much more comfortable than living in North America. Well, that really set Mary off because-- 
[00:56:15.88] [LAUGHTER] 
[00:56:16.96] We were living in a house that was only 10 years old. It was built in 1949, not too long after the war. In fact, there were a lot of economic signs of World War II still in England. When we were there, things were still fairly tough. The house had no central heating. It had no central hot water heater. It had windows that didn't close. And so the wind would whistle through them in the wintertime. And the first winter we were there-- I think this was in the spring of the next year, one way or the other. 
[00:56:51.84] MARILYN SOMERS: After the first winter, yeah. 
[00:56:54.68] WARD WINER: I've got a newspaper I saved, said it was the worst winter since 1740. 
[00:56:59.70] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, great. 
[00:57:00.54] WARD WINER: The Cam River froze over. We had snow on the ground. We couldn't get coal for heating because they claim the coal was frozen in the piles. So obviously, my wife didn't think it was particularly comfortable. We'd had a two-bedroom apartment when we left Ann Arbor. It was central heating, and a washer and dryer. Oh, we didn't have a washer and dryer, or any of that stuff. And she had two kids in diapers at the time. 
[00:57:26.93] MARILYN SOMERS: And this here is this guy going to tell her. 
[00:57:27.71] WARD WINER: This guy says it's more comfortable living in Europe than in the United States. Well, when it came to the question-and-answer period, he sat down in a an old desk chair with arms on it behind the podium. And we were right in front of the podium. So she couldn't see him. He couldn't see her. And different people asked questions. And so she asked the question, something to the effect, how can you possibly say it's more comfortable than-- 
[00:57:55.43] [LAUGHS] 
[00:57:56.29] MARILYN SOMERS: Based on what? 
[00:57:57.79] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, of course, he heard this obviously irritated-- 
[00:58:01.63] MARILYN SOMERS: Woman. 
[00:58:02.09] WARD WINER: --young woman ask a question. And he grabbed his chair and bounced across the stage to get away from behind the stand, so he could see who it was. And of course, he was talking about living in towns that were tightly packed where you could walk to everything. He wasn't talking about creature comforts. He was talking about-- 
[00:58:22.09] MARILYN SOMERS: Urban development and you know-- 
[00:58:24.25] WARD WINER: So, anyway, that's the way we met. 
[00:58:26.89] MARILYN SOMERS: You'll always remember CP Snow. 
[00:58:28.95] WARD WINER: No, no doubt about it. 
[00:58:30.15] MARILYN SOMERS: Tell me about some of the other names you mentioned. 
[00:58:32.85] WARD WINER: Well, let me go on a little bit more about CP Snow because the books he wrote, the ones about The Masters and the series that were called, I think, Strangers and Brothers. In those books, there's a character named Getliffe. I forget the first name he had for him. But Getliffe, anyway, was his name. And he was an academic in Cambridge who was a physical scientist. 
[00:59:02.35] And he was a new breed. He was a new breed of academic scientist who was involved in consulting for industry, and working on real-world problems, and advising government agencies, and raising money. And he was. I mean, he was just a new breed of cat on the faculty. Well, Getliffe is fashioned after Philip Bowden, the guy that I worked for. And they were buddies as graduate students together. And if you read the books and you knew Philip Bowden, you couldn't miss it. 
[00:59:34.50] I mean, it was just so obvious, even to the point of describing Bowden's house. In the book, he talks about going and visiting Getliffe. 
[00:59:43.34] MARILYN SOMERS: They say write about what you knew. And he knew about Bowden. 
[00:59:47.14] WARD WINER: We had been in his house at a holiday party. 
[00:59:49.98] MARILYN SOMERS: So you could recognize it. 
[00:59:50.88] WARD WINER: We recognized it. 
[00:59:51.66] MARILYN SOMERS: Now, what did Bowden do besides be your mentor? But, I mean, what was his field of experience? 
[00:59:56.50] WARD WINER: He was a-- he was a-- 
[01:00:00.39] MARILYN SOMERS: Physicist? 
[01:00:01.51] WARD WINER: Yeah, he was a physicist. Well, he started out as a chemist, a chemist and surface chemist, really. At the time I was there, he was in the Cavendish lab in the physics department. 
[01:00:12.21] MARILYN SOMERS: You mentioned that they selected him because he was world renowned, the University of Michigan. 
[01:00:19.17] WARD WINER: Well, he and his colleague named David Tabor, who was also somebody there that I worked-- Bowden and Tabor, I mean, they're names that go simultaneous together, but Bowden was the more senior person-- were the top people in the world in the area of friction and wear. 
[01:00:39.09] MARILYN SOMERS: OK, so that's what they were-- 
[01:00:40.23] WARD WINER: Yeah, surface physics. 
[01:00:40.87] MARILYN SOMERS: the experts at. 
[01:00:42.01] WARD WINER: Surface physics things of all kinds, friction and wear, and catalysis, and fast reactions, like explosives and that sort of thing. That was their area. That's why they wanted me to go work with him. 
[01:00:58.71] MARILYN SOMERS: Would they say go work with him, actually work on experiments that he was conducting or work on his research? Or what were you doing for him? 
[01:01:06.05] WARD WINER: I worked on research that he had brought in. He had a lot of industry contacts, a lot of industry money, and a lot of government money in the lab. 
[01:01:14.73] MARILYN SOMERS: So not on GTRI kind of thing so that-- 
[01:01:17.35] WARD WINER: No, no, he was an academic. So it was an academic position, like working for a faculty member here, a postdoc. 
[01:01:22.83] MARILYN SOMERS: And then, when the postdocs come in, that's what they do is do the actual legwork on that. 
[01:01:26.79] WARD WINER: There were a lot of doctoral students there and a lot-- not a lot, number of few postdocs. I think there were about 40 people total in the lab. 
[01:01:36.05] MARILYN SOMERS: And the lab was run by these two who attracted the money. 
[01:01:39.19] WARD WINER: Right, yeah. 
[01:01:40.11] MARILYN SOMERS: Now I got a complete picture of what it is. 
[01:01:42.23] WARD WINER: And it was in the Cavendish lab at that time in Cambridge. 
[01:01:47.97] MARILYN SOMERS: Interesting work? 
[01:01:48.37] WARD WINER: Well, it was a great experience. Oh, yeah, yeah, very interesting. 
[01:01:52.29] MARILYN SOMERS: You said you learned a lot from him. 
[01:01:54.11] WARD WINER: I learned a lot watching him. 
[01:01:56.65] MARILYN SOMERS: Ah-ha. 
[01:01:57.54] WARD WINER: He was very much like the character in Snow's book, Getliffe, in that he always had industry visitors coming, other academic visitors from all over the world coming, a lot of government people coming up from London to visit the lab, just an incredibly interesting character. 
[01:02:21.54] He was born and raised in Tasmania and went to college there, and then came to Cambridge on a scholarship from Australia, I guess, or Tasmania, and did his doctoral work in Cambridge, and then just stayed on. And he did a lot of work on friction and wear, and Explosives, which, now, remember this is in the '30s. 
[01:02:44.92] MARILYN SOMERS: Mm-hmm. 
[01:02:46.10] WARD WINER: And when World War II came along, he was very involved in doing work for the Ministry of Defense in England for industry. 
[01:02:58.75] MARILYN SOMERS: That really elevated him. 
[01:02:59.97] WARD WINER: Yeah, I mean, he was considered, their lab, a national treasure, to the point where, when World War II really got hot for the British, the government there decided to pack his lab up, lock, stock, and barrel, and move it to Australia, so they would be out of the war zone to work. And he went there for about four years, I think, for the duration of the war, anyway, and then came back to-- 
[01:03:29.07] MARILYN SOMERS: When it was safe. 
[01:03:29.79] WARD WINER: --to Cambridge and spent the rest of his career there. But I've often described this. Each year, I think it was probably in the spring, he would invite the sponsors from the government in London to come up for a day to see the work that was being done. And they would come up on the train in the morning. And he would send taxis to the railway station to pick them up. It would be, I don't know, maybe 10, 12 of them, something like that, from different ministries. 
[01:04:02.38] And they would come back to the lab and hear two or three prepared lectures by people in the lab talking about projects that they were interested in. And then everybody would go to lunch at Caius College, which was the college that Bowden and Tabor belonged to. And a Cambridge College meal for a fellow of the college, which Bowden and Tabor both were, I mean, it's something out of a movie, very, very well prepared, excellent food, tablecloths, wine and sherry beforehand, and wine for the meal, and pour it at the end of the meal. And you name it. 
[01:04:44.06] And that would take a couple of hours. And then we'd go back to the lab. And these visitors would go around to each individual's lab and talked to them one on one in their lab. And then, along about 3:30 or so, they'd all start getting in cabs, going back to the railway station to go back to London. And then the money would show up. The money would come. 
[01:05:04.86] MARILYN SOMERS: I knew the money was going to show up. I was thinking, I know what this is all about. 
[01:05:08.72] WARD WINER: His ability to work these people was just incredible. 
[01:05:11.50] MARILYN SOMERS: And that's what you were learning by watching. 
[01:05:13.30] WARD WINER: Absolutely, watching. I mean, he was just a master at dealing with visitors and sponsors. And he did a lot of consulting. He did a lot of traveling. He was a very prominent guy and a nice guy, too, very interesting guy. 
[01:05:29.42] MARILYN SOMERS: So it was a real privilege for you. 
[01:05:30.70] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. 
[01:05:31.06] MARILYN SOMERS: And I can see where that was important, which you wouldn't have known at that time, but for your future, for your future to have that. 
[01:05:38.06] WARD WINER: But then, other people that you met, like I said-- well, just to get back to the Friends of Cambridge thing, one night, they had scheduled an event that two speakers were to be Francis Crick and Perutz. Crick and Watson and Perutz are the ones who got the Nobel Prize for the double helix. And it happened totally by accident that, the morning of that event, is when it was announced that they got the Nobel Prize. 
[01:06:09.23] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, really? You were right there with them? 
[01:06:12.13] WARD WINER: So they came that evening. And they brought their helical model and talked about it. 
[01:06:16.49] MARILYN SOMERS: They were all full of themselves, then. 
[01:06:18.21] WARD WINER: Watson wasn't there because, by that time, he'd already gone back to the United States. So you got to see them. 
[01:06:24.43] MARILYN SOMERS: You were right at the window of history, though. That's so cool. 
[01:06:27.43] WARD WINER: And the Cavendish professor, which means the guy who was head of the physics program at Cambridge, was Sir Nevill Mott, who you probably never heard of. But he, at the time, he was master of Caius College. And he was a very prominent scientist in material science. And so got to meet him. And you'd see him occasionally. And, I mean, people were around. 
[01:06:54.46] MARILYN SOMERS: This was just really a super experience for you to have. 
[01:06:58.02] WARD WINER: Yeah, now, my wife wasn't all that keen on it because-- 
[01:07:00.38] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, she paid her dues for you at that time because of creature comforts, like you say. 
[01:07:04.80] WARD WINER: And then we had another child while we were there. 
[01:07:06.46] MARILYN SOMERS: Really? So you had the three boys while you were there. 
[01:07:09.02] WARD WINER: The third boy was born in Cambridge, yeah. 
[01:07:13.38] MARILYN SOMERS: She had her hands full. 
[01:07:14.56] WARD WINER: Oh, absolutely. 
[01:07:15.32] MARILYN SOMERS: She definitely had her hands full. 
[01:07:16.16] WARD WINER: Well, we were there maybe a couple of months. We had two kids at the time. Well, Jim was probably, at most, 14 months old. And Matt would've have been probably two and a half, I guess. And we got a call from somebody who had an au pair from France, a young girl who was there to learn English in Cambridge. 
[01:07:49.92] And they were out in the country someplace. And there was no transportation for this girl to get to class. And so she was looking for a different place to be. So somebody suggested that we might be somebody who would take her in. So we took her in. 
[01:08:02.20] MARILYN SOMERS: Did you have room for her? 
[01:08:03.72] WARD WINER: Well, it was crowded. Well, we had a three-bedroom place. I mean, they were very small rooms. But it was three-bedroomed place. 
[01:08:09.48] MARILYN SOMERS: All of England is very small. 
[01:08:11.28] WARD WINER: And so she lived with us for, I think, until Paul was born. And then we obviously didn't have room. So she moved. 
[01:08:20.18] MARILYN SOMERS: But still, that was a little bit of a help for Mary. 
[01:08:22.38] WARD WINER: And, well, she wasn't much younger than we were at the time. And they've become lifelong friends. We visited her several times. 
[01:08:31.72] MARILYN SOMERS: Really? Even to now? 
[01:08:32.90] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah, yeah, we still communicate. When I go to Georgia Tech, Lorraine, sometimes I go visit her. 
[01:08:40.68] MARILYN SOMERS: Isn't that wonderful? 
[01:08:41.78] WARD WINER: Mary's visited her with me two or three times over the years. And our oldest son, Matt, he's taken his family to Europe. And they've gone and visited her. So, yeah, no, it was a great experience. 
[01:08:54.45] MARILYN SOMERS: All these things are so interesting when you look back at them and how they fell into your life. 
[01:08:58.53] WARD WINER: At the time-- 
[01:08:59.79] MARILYN SOMERS: You weren't looking for it, and there it was. 
[01:09:01.23] WARD WINER: You don't think a whole lot about it. 
[01:09:02.45] MARILYN SOMERS: Did the two years go by fast for you? They probably didn't for Mary. But did they go by fast for you? 
[01:09:07.65] WARD WINER: I think so. I think so. I don't know. I don't pay much attention to time. 
[01:09:10.99] MARILYN SOMERS: Time doesn't matter to you. 
[01:09:12.09] WARD WINER: No. 
[01:09:12.91] MARILYN SOMERS: Spoken is the true academic. 
[01:09:13.79] WARD WINER: Yeah, right. 
[01:09:14.75] MARILYN SOMERS: So you were focused on the learning process and what you were gaining and what you were being exposed to, thinking, I'm going to go back. I've got a job to go back to. You knew you were going back to faculty. 
[01:09:25.49] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[01:09:25.83] MARILYN SOMERS: That had to be a heady thing. Not only did you go to a, excuse me, but better college than your brother, but you're going to go back and be faculty at that. 
[01:09:33.65] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[01:09:33.95] MARILYN SOMERS: I mean, because that was then and is now a very well recognized school. 
[01:09:38.77] WARD WINER: Well, just to make a final statement about the creature comforts there, I said I had a newspaper from the first winter we were there. I said it was the worst winter since 1740. I have another newspaper from a different publisher in the next winter. The headline says, "the worst winter in living memory." [LAUGHS] 
[01:09:56.90] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, dear. So there are probably the two-- 
[01:10:00.06] WARD WINER: And if you talk to people in England who were living at that time, they'll-- oh, yeah-- they remember '61, '62 and '62, '63. 
[01:10:09.52] MARILYN SOMERS: The way the Atlantans remember Snow Jam. It's one of those epic things that happened. So it wasn't the best of times as far as the weather was concerned, or the accommodations. Still had to be a good experience. 
[01:10:20.02] WARD WINER: We got traveling in. We went and visited this French au pair parents at her house on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day of '62, I guess. Yeah, '61 to '62. And we visited friends in Belgium who had been in Ann Arbor. And we knew military people who were over there. And we got together with them and went to Mallorca for a week vacation. 
[01:10:50.84] MARILYN SOMERS: It all sounds very idyllic. 
[01:10:52.34] WARD WINER: Yeah, it does. 
[01:10:52.68] MARILYN SOMERS: Especially if you're a reader and you've read about all these places, it sounds quite charming. 
[01:10:57.30] WARD WINER: Yeah, when we did those trips, at least some of them were in a 1949 shooting break. Now, that doesn't mean much to you. But this is '61. So it was a 12-year-old car that was not in very good shape. But it's all we could afford. And then the second year we were there, we bought a new German Ford that we kept in England for about six months and then brought home with us when we came home. So that was a little better, a little better deal. And we made lifelong friends in Cambridge. 
[01:11:27.62] I mean, I shared a lab with a guy who was also married. He was maybe a year younger than me. And his wife was a year or two younger. And they had kids about same age we did. So we became very good friends with them. And we've gone back and forth with them several times. 
[01:11:43.07] MARILYN SOMERS: To this day. 
[01:11:43.81] WARD WINER: In fact, they came over last summer for our 50th wedding anniversary. And then we spent two and a half weeks traveling together, up to Kentucky and Michigan and Wisconsin and Chicago. 
[01:11:58.71] MARILYN SOMERS: How neat. Isn't that wonderful? 
[01:12:00.55] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[01:12:01.01] MARILYN SOMERS: Old friends that will stay friends forever. But I know, when you read about Cambridge and you read about it, it all sounds so charming. But the reality can be just a little more rigorous than that. 
[01:12:10.99] WARD WINER: Well, it is. It is kind of charming. But it's not all sweetness and light. 
[01:12:15.29] MARILYN SOMERS: It's not. It's cold. 
[01:12:16.53] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[01:12:16.91] MARILYN SOMERS: Cold and hard and not always cheerful sunshine. I'm sure Mary was more than ready to come back when the two years you were granted-- did you stay there for some sort of ceremony to get your PhD? 
[01:12:30.85] WARD WINER: No, no, actually, when I left, I had finished writing it. But I hadn't undergone the exam. So they gave me a written exam. They don't have a requirement for presentation and an oral exam. I mean, they normally do that. But they don't have a requirement for it. So I did a written exam. They sent me a bunch of questions. And I wrote up my response and sent it back after I'd come back here because I had an obligation to get back and work at Michigan. 
[01:12:58.76] MARILYN SOMERS: I guess you did. They had invested all this money in you. 
[01:13:01.52] WARD WINER: So then-- 
[01:13:02.52] MARILYN SOMERS: So we moved back to Ann Arbor? 
[01:13:04.76] WARD WINER: Yeah, I came back to Ann Arbor. But then the degree was officially-- 
[01:13:08.88] MARILYN SOMERS: Granted a short time later. 
[01:13:09.56] WARD WINER: Granted in, I think, in January or February of '64, something like that. 
[01:13:13.36] MARILYN SOMERS: We know that, in '63, that summer of '63, you got a cash-paying job. 
[01:13:19.96] WARD WINER: Yep, yeah. I went to work for GM research for the summer. I mean, they knew I was coming back to Ann Arbor. And so they hired me for the summer. Probably charity but-- 
[01:13:30.94] [LAUGHTER] 
[01:13:32.18] MARILYN SOMERS: It was cash money, though. That's the important part. 
[01:13:34.80] WARD WINER: Another interesting contact in Cambridge, the project that I worked on in the lab was sponsored by a company called Midland Silicones, which was, and I think still is, the British subsidiary of Dow Corning Corporation. And so I went there and visited them. They were near Swansea in Wales. But because of that, they put me in touch with Dow Corning in Midland, Michigan when I got back to Michigan. 
[01:14:07.10] So for quite a few years after that, I used to consult regularly for Dow Corning while I was at Michigan, and some after I came down to Georgia Tech. But, yeah, I came back and started teaching at Michigan in the fall of '63. 
[01:14:19.86] MARILYN SOMERS: You come back with three children. 
[01:14:21.70] WARD WINER: Yep. 
[01:14:21.96] MARILYN SOMERS: Were you looking for a house or an apartment this time? 
[01:14:24.92] WARD WINER: We were looking for a house. We bought a house. It was under construction when we bought it. So we had to-- well, for the summer, actually, Mary went to spent a little time in Grand Rapids, I think, with her parents. And then we rented an old house in Ann Arbor, up in the countryside, for the summer. And I stayed some of the time in the YMCA in Hamtramck, Michigan, to work at Warren. 
[01:14:51.99] And then, I think, long about, maybe, October, the house was finished. And we moved into a new house. 
[01:14:59.53] MARILYN SOMERS: Yay. I'm so happy for her. 
[01:15:01.57] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. Central heating, washer and dryer. 
[01:15:04.17] MARILYN SOMERS: She had enough room. 
[01:15:05.21] WARD WINER: All the comforts of home. 
[01:15:06.81] MARILYN SOMERS: She still had her hands full with the young'uns. 
[01:15:09.79] WARD WINER: So we stayed there until '69. Then, when we came down here, we sold it. 
[01:15:13.45] MARILYN SOMERS: Now talk about-- you were on faculty. 
[01:15:15.43] WARD WINER: Yep. 
[01:15:15.71] MARILYN SOMERS: Assistant professor. 
[01:15:16.93] WARD WINER: Yep, well, for the first three years. And then I was promoted. 
[01:15:20.01] MARILYN SOMERS: Your teaching experience to that point had been TA and whatever. So this is now I'm in the classroom, full responsibility. How'd you feel about it? 
[01:15:29.71] WARD WINER: Oh, I like it. 
[01:15:30.74] MARILYN SOMERS: You liked it? 
[01:15:31.42] WARD WINER: Yeah, I enjoyed 
[01:15:31.90] it. 
[01:15:32.04] MARILYN SOMERS: It was OK? No surprises? 
[01:15:33.68] 
[01:15:34.50] WARD WINER: Not particularly, no, no. 
[01:15:35.74] MARILYN SOMERS: You didn't miss being with all these researchers? 
[01:15:39.14] WARD WINER: It was just-- 
[01:15:40.18] MARILYN SOMERS: It was a good life. 
[01:15:40.86] WARD WINER: --where I was going. Yeah, I mean, there were good people in Ann Arbor. 
[01:15:43.92] MARILYN SOMERS: What was the political environment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the end of the-- not the end. This is the middle of the '60s. That's the Vietnam stuff. 
[01:15:52.76] WARD WINER: Yeah, part of the reason I came down here. 
[01:15:54.52] [LAUGHTER] 
[01:15:56.02] No, seriously. 
[01:15:56.92] MARILYN SOMERS: A little bit more political than Georgia Tech. 
[01:16:00.20] WARD WINER: Yeah, oh, absolutely, yeah. There were marches and demonstrations, and stand-ins and sit-ins. 
[01:16:06.78] MARILYN SOMERS: So you were exposed to all that when you were up there. There was a lot of that kind of stuff going on. 
[01:16:10.76] WARD WINER: I remember I had a lab on the North campus and an office. But I also had an office in the main campus, which is where most of the classes were at that time. All of engineering now, I think, has moved out to the north campus. But at that time, we were mainly on the main campus. And I remember, across the hall from my office, was a small wing of the building that housed the placement center. 
[01:16:38.32] And I remember when, I think it was the Navy, came to interview that the student activists came in and smashed up the place. I remember them interrupting seminars that were being given by people from the Naval Research Lab or the Army Research Lab. Or the FBI would come or CIA come and interview. And they'd have disruptions of those. It was not good at all. 
[01:17:06.58] And the department was pretty heavily very right wing Republican. 
[01:17:16.22] MARILYN SOMERS: You were more conservative than the-- 
[01:17:18.22] WARD WINER: And there were a few-- 
[01:17:19.80] MARILYN SOMERS: --student body. 
[01:17:21.44] WARD WINER: --liberal Democrats. And Hansen was one of those. And I took after him. And so there was a lot-- oh, and never forget the, what was it, Goldwater? Who did he run against? Goldwater and-- was it Nixon? No. Who did Goldwater run against? 
[01:17:42.45] MARILYN SOMERS: We should know that. I was sitting here blank, blank. 
[01:17:46.63] WARD WINER: No, maybe it was Goldwater and Kennedy. Maybe it was Goldwater and Kennedy. 
[01:17:50.51] MARILYN SOMERS: No. 
[01:17:50.81] WARD WINER: Kennedy was elected just before-- 
[01:17:52.99] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, no. 
[01:17:53.89] WARD WINER: --before I left there to go to England. And I think it was Goldwater and Johnson. 
[01:17:57.67] MARILYN SOMERS: He was assassinated. 
[01:17:58.85] WARD WINER: Yeah, Goldwater and Johnson was the-- 
[01:18:00.85] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, that's who it was. 
[01:18:02.25] WARD WINER: Man, that was just nasty, really nasty. 
[01:18:04.77] MARILYN SOMERS: There was so much of a reaction to Vietnam. 
[01:18:07.63] WARD WINER: Now, Hansen left, I think, in '65 or '66 to come down here to become dean. 
[01:18:13.85] MARILYN SOMERS: And that was a job, a career move for him. He was headhunted and went down there. Where was he from originally? What part of the country? 
[01:18:24.34] WARD WINER: Well, the Midwest, undergraduate degree from Purdue. I'm not sure where-- I think either Indiana or Ohio, one of the two. 
[01:18:33.90] MARILYN SOMERS: But he was a Midwesterner. So he was going to step down into the South when he took that job. 
[01:18:40.24] WARD WINER: I told his story many times to student groups. I sometimes give a talk to student groups called The Serendipity in Career Planning. And the basic message is, don't worry about career planning. It'll happen. 
[01:18:55.88] MARILYN SOMERS: It happens. 
[01:18:57.06] WARD WINER: And Hansen is my main example. I mean, my own situation, as I've already described, is a pretty good example. 
[01:19:03.42] MARILYN SOMERS: It's been very serendipitous, yes. 
[01:19:05.06] WARD WINER: But he got a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Purdue. And I'm not sure what he did immediately after that. But beyond that, my first knowledge of what he did-- this is still before I met him. He was working for NASA at Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. It's now called NASA Glenn, named after Senator Glenn. And he was an applied mathematician, basically, doing three-dimensional boundary layer, similarity solutions to three-dimensional boundary. That's why I got into it. 
[01:19:40.65] I don't think his were-- yeah, anyway. And I know people who were there who worked with him at the time. And they say, if there was anybody who was a closet researcher, it was Art Hansen. He'd sit in the corner and crank out papers. 
[01:19:55.69] MARILYN SOMERS: It's what he liked to do. 
[01:19:56.73] WARD WINER: Didn't interact with people. And he was also married fairly young and had kids. And he was going to, I think it was John Carroll University, at night and got a PhD in applied math from there. And when he finished there, he thought he would go off and do something different. And he went to Cornell aero labs in Buffalo, New York and, of all things, became manager of a group in nuclear research. I don't know why he got into that, but he did get into that. 
[01:20:33.27] And there, he met a guy named Art Trabant, who was, I think, Dean of Engineering at SUNY Buffalo. They met in. A service club, like the Rotary or Lions or something like that. Anyway, they met there. And Hansen decided-- and this is what he's told me-- that he really didn't particularly like managing people. 
[01:21:05.43] And so he was kind of in the mood to do something different, possibly. And one day, he got on an airplane in New York City to fly to Detroit. And he happened to sit down next to Gordon Van Wylen, who had just become department head at Michigan. And they got chatting. And Van Wylen says, what do you do? And he said he was interested in fluid mechanics and applied math. And Van Wylen says, well, I'm the new head of mechanical engineering at Michigan. And we really need somebody like you. Would you be interested in a faculty job? 
[01:21:36.90] Hansen, if you ever knew him, just about anything you pose to him, he'll say, well, yeah, why not? 
[01:21:42.52] MARILYN SOMERS: Why not try that? Yeah. Talk about-- Isn't that amazing? 
[01:21:45.58] WARD WINER: So he became a faculty member at Michigan in mechanical engineering. 
[01:21:48.88] MARILYN SOMERS: Just as easy as that without even trying. 
[01:21:50.98] WARD WINER: Well, I mean, in those days, that's the way hiring was done. And so that's where I met him. I took a class from him. And then I worked for him and so on. Anyway, I was in his house the afternoon he got the phone call and the offer from Georgia Tech. And he was after me to come down from that time on. And we still communicated. And in those days, Mary wrote all our Christmas letters. And in Christmas of '68, she wrote and said how discouraged I was and how chaotic things were at Michigan and de-da-de-da. 
[01:22:27.77] So he got the letter. And he called up and said, well, how about coming down for an interview? 
[01:22:31.93] MARILYN SOMERS: We don't have those problems at Georgia Tech. 
[01:22:33.57] WARD WINER: Right. So I came down in early April for an interview. The dogwood were in bloom. The azaleas were in bloom. It was a beautiful day like today. 
[01:22:41.81] MARILYN SOMERS: I know what that's all about. 
[01:22:43.29] WARD WINER: And I came from Ann Arbor, where there was dirty snow on the ground. And it was muddy. 
[01:22:47.21] MARILYN SOMERS: You didn't to think twice about that, did you? 
[01:22:49.07] WARD WINER: So then we came down. But-- 
[01:22:52.37] MARILYN SOMERS: Let me ask you this. Now, Michigan is a school that's very high-- 
[01:22:56.97] WARD WINER: Oh, it's very good. 
[01:22:57.49] MARILYN SOMERS: National ranking. And there was a lot of controversy with the kids drug use. The whole hippie thing was up there and everything. And yet what did you find? Were they good students? Did you have good student? 
[01:23:08.13] WARD WINER: Yeah, sure. 
[01:23:09.53] MARILYN SOMERS: Somehow or other, the chaos that was around them-- 
[01:23:11.67] WARD WINER: Most of the chaos was in the literature school, the literature, science, and the arts, not-- 
[01:23:15.83] MARILYN SOMERS: Not in engineering. 
[01:23:17.33] WARD WINER: Not in engineering, not in the other more professionally oriented schools. 
[01:23:20.07] MARILYN SOMERS: You weren't too sure if you wanted to raise your kids in that environment. 
[01:23:25.09] WARD WINER: Yeah, that was part of it. 
[01:23:26.75] MARILYN SOMERS: And the crappy weather. I mean, let's face it. That's why people leave Michigan. 
[01:23:29.65] WARD WINER: And actually, moving down here was probably one of the best things that happened to our kids. 
[01:23:33.01] MARILYN SOMERS: That could've happened to them, yeah. 
[01:23:34.17] WARD WINER: And in Ann Arbor, at least at that time, the pecking order was such that, if you were not faculty and if your kids didn't aspire to be faculty, you were nobody. 
[01:23:48.51] MARILYN SOMERS: Really? 
[01:23:49.05] WARD WINER: Yeah, so coming down here opened up all kinds of career opportunities for them. And they're doing extremely well. So, I mean, it was good. 
[01:23:56.91] MARILYN SOMERS: It was a good move. So Hansen didn't have to coax too much. You came for one interview and said, yeah, I could do this. 
[01:24:02.19] WARD WINER: Mary and I flew down later. 
[01:24:03.07] MARILYN SOMERS: Did you have to beg Mary? Or was she more than ready to come? 
[01:24:05.65] WARD WINER: No, she came down to look. And actually, we bought this house and moved into this house, been down here ever since. 
[01:24:11.51] MARILYN SOMERS: 1968? 
[01:24:12.59] WARD WINER: '69. '69. 
[01:24:13.06] MARILYN SOMERS: '69, you bought this house. 
[01:24:15.40] WARD WINER: Now, we've done renovations. That used to be a porch. And we've done a lot of other renovations. But we're still in the same place. 
[01:24:20.14] MARILYN SOMERS: It's a wonderful area. 
[01:24:21.56] WARD WINER: It's very nice. 
[01:24:22.02] MARILYN SOMERS: You didn't have so far to go. It all worked out fairly well in that respect. What was it like to come to Georgia Tech in 1968? 
[01:24:29.16] WARD WINER: Well, I jokingly tell people that, until I came down here for an interview, I had never been further south than Washington, DC. And I thought Indianapolis was the deep South. 
[01:24:39.72] [LAUGHTER] 
[01:24:40.78] MARILYN SOMERS: Boy, did you find a different culture here. 
[01:24:43.56] WARD WINER: Well, when I grew up, our next door neighbors had moved there from Indianapolis. And they had a Southern accent, really strong, more than you hear around here, actually. 
[01:24:54.08] MARILYN SOMERS: Really? 
[01:24:54.44] WARD WINER: So I thought Indianapolis was kind of the deep South. 
[01:24:57.46] MARILYN SOMERS: But you found out very quickly that there was a big difference. 
[01:25:00.94] WARD WINER: Well, for one thing, we moved into this neighborhood. And I think only the people next door on that side were native Georgians. Everybody else in the neighborhood-- 
[01:25:12.81] MARILYN SOMERS: Was from somewhere else. 
[01:25:13.37] WARD WINER: Somewhere else, yeah. 
[01:25:14.25] MARILYN SOMERS: And yet there was a sense of hospitality. You felt welcome. 
[01:25:17.23] WARD WINER: Yeah, no, it was great. We've enjoyed it. 
[01:25:19.27] MARILYN SOMERS: And what about going to the campus? You were assigned to mechanical engineering. Where were you at that time? What building? 
[01:25:25.95] WARD WINER: I had an office in the Space Sciences building, which is now, I think, called the Weber building, where-- 
[01:25:31.57] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, I know exactly. 
[01:25:33.21] WARD WINER: So we had an office and a lab in there for, well, until I became chair of the department in '88, when I moved up to the Coon building, and then later over to MRDC. 
[01:25:45.93] MARILYN SOMERS: Now, when you came to the campus, Georgia Tech was quite progressive by this time. We had integrated. We had women. And we had integrated. 
[01:25:53.09] WARD WINER: But you still had Hemphill going down through the middle of the campus. 
[01:25:55.47] MARILYN SOMERS: We did. But that was far, far-- I mean, Michigan was way ahead on all of those aspects. And you found a fairly conservative base of people. 
[01:26:05.39] WARD WINER: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. One of the biggest things you notice was there were almost no women on campus, where at that time, at Michigan, probably 40% of the students were women. 
[01:26:15.51] MARILYN SOMERS: And in '68, we still hadn't hit even 100 yet. We were under 100 in the student body population. 
[01:26:19.95] WARD WINER: They were still rare. 
[01:26:21.33] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, of maybe, what, 3,000 or 4,000, something like that. 
[01:26:25.77] WARD WINER: I'm not sure. 
[01:26:26.69] MARILYN SOMERS: I think somewhere around there, maybe [INAUDIBLE]. 
[01:26:28.17] WARD WINER: Maybe a little higher, a little higher. 
[01:26:30.31] MARILYN SOMERS: And Hansen was here as a dean? 
[01:26:32.61] WARD WINER: Yes. 
[01:26:32.99] MARILYN SOMERS: Dean of engineering? 
[01:26:33.97] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, when I came down to interview, Harrison was president. Hansen was dean. I don't know who was vice president of academic affairs. 
[01:26:47.45] MARILYN SOMERS: Harrison was right at the end of his time here then. 
[01:26:49.77] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, that's what I was going to say. Between the time I interviewed and the time I showed up, July 1, Harrison retired or resigned. 
[01:26:56.25] MARILYN SOMERS: He resigned, yeah. So you never really got to know him at all? 
[01:26:58.77] WARD WINER: I never met him, no. I never saw him. 
[01:27:00.33] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, you never even saw him. He was gone already by that time. 
[01:27:02.39] WARD WINER: I heard the name, yeah. 
[01:27:05.19] MARILYN SOMERS: And he was a Midwesterner. 
[01:27:06.73] WARD WINER: Is that right? 
[01:27:07.28] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, he was from Purdue. 
[01:27:08.36] WARD WINER: OK. Oh, OK. 
[01:27:09.46] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, that's where they had hired him from. 
[01:27:11.36] WARD WINER: OK, well, to get back to Hansen and how he got here, this is why I think it'd be great if you would be able to do a living history with him. If you do, I hope that what I'm telling you is consistent with what he's going to tell you. He in about '63 or '64, Van Wylen, who was head of mechanical engineering at Michigan, became dean. And through a quirk of fate, Hansen became department head. The guy who would logically become the department head was away on sabbatical in Berlin. And he was a kind of a controversial guy. And so-- 
[01:27:58.58] MARILYN SOMERS: Hansen got it. 
[01:27:59.80] WARD WINER: They appointed Hansen to be department head. And it was within a year or so after he became department head there that he got a call from Art Trabant. That's why I mentioned Art Trabant earlier. At the time, at that time, Art Trabant was vice president of academic affairs at Georgia Tech. 
[01:28:20.21] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, really? 
[01:28:21.09] WARD WINER: Yeah, I don't know how he got here, but he was, anyway. And you probably heard from other people, although maybe not, that, in the early '60s, early-to-mid '60s, there was a really big controversy between the dean of engineering and the number of the department heads. And a number of the department heads-- I don't any details, except I know several department heads left. And the dean either quit or was fired or whatever. I don't really know. But, anyway, there were more than one department head job open. And the dean's job was open. OK, so Art Trabant, looking for people to fill these slots-- 
[01:29:07.97] MARILYN SOMERS: Calls his friend Hansen. 
[01:29:08.75] WARD WINER: --calls up Art Hansen in Michigan, who is now department head there. And he says to him, Art, we need a director of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. Would you be interested? And of course, Art says, oh, yeah, why not? I'll look at it. So he came down to interview. And since Trabant was his friend from Buffalo, Trabant escorts him around for two days, introducing him to other deans and to other department heads and whatnot, and to some of the faculty. 
[01:29:38.69] And they start heading back to the airport. And Trabant says to Hansen, well, are you interested? And Hansen says, well, yeah, I am kind of interested. But I spent two days here. You introduced me to all kinds of people. You never introduced me to the dean of engineering. I mean, what happened? How come? And Trabant says, well, as a matter of fact, we don't have a dean of engineer. We're looking for that position, too. Would you be interested? 
[01:30:03.92] MARILYN SOMERS: [LAUGHS] Just like that. 
[01:30:05.20] WARD WINER: And Hansen says, well, yeah. Why not? 
[01:30:07.08] MARILYN SOMERS: Why not? 
[01:30:07.98] WARD WINER: So he became dean. 
[01:30:09.74] MARILYN SOMERS: That's exactly how that happened. 
[01:30:11.06] WARD WINER: Yeah, so then he's looking for a department head. And he tried to talk me into coming down and take the department. I said, no way. I'm too young. I'm not going to do that. And that was in '65. I was in his house the day he got the call from here. And so then he talked me into coming down in '69. 
[01:30:30.36] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, like you said, circumstances up there were controversial, to put it mildly. So it wasn't hard to talk you out of it. 
[01:30:36.12] WARD WINER: No. 
[01:30:36.34] MARILYN SOMERS: And anybody who leaves Michigan in April to come here, it's got to be sold. 
[01:30:40.96] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, a lot of people there thought I was crazy coming to Georgia Tech. And at that time, Georgia Tech didn't have a whole lot of stature nationally, other than athletics maybe. But nevertheless, I did-- 
[01:30:53.10] MARILYN SOMERS: Well known in the South but not all over. 
[01:30:55.88] WARD WINER: They used to joke about it being the best engineering school on North Avenue. [LAUGHS] 
[01:31:01.97] MARILYN SOMERS: It's interesting because, different parts of the country, it had a very high reputation for engineering. 
[01:31:07.23] WARD WINER: Well, mainly for undergraduate. 
[01:31:09.25] MARILYN SOMERS: It was all undergraduate. That was the big product. 
[01:31:11.19] WARD WINER: Not research, yeah. 
[01:31:12.41] MARILYN SOMERS: That was the big product. I don't think research ever came about until Pettit came about. I mean, there wasn't really a lot of interest. So you get down here. And almost before your very eyes, Hansen is not a dean anymore. He's immediately the president. 
[01:31:26.27] WARD WINER: Yeah, and I don't know whether you're aware of it or not. But that was a fluke as well. Are you aware of that? 
[01:31:33.17] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, it seems like his whole life was. 
[01:31:36.13] WARD WINER: Well, I remember seeing the newspaper headline that said Ray Bisplinghoff was appointed president of Georgia Tech. 
[01:31:46.03] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, you saw that? 
[01:31:46.61] WARD WINER: Yes. 
[01:31:47.05] MARILYN SOMERS: I didn't know that ever got published. 
[01:31:48.47] WARD WINER: It was on the front of the second section of either Journal or Constitution, whatever it was. And a picture of Bisplinghoff and a headline says, Bisplinghoff accepts president of Georgia Tech. And that was what? In the early-- it was within a few months after I got down here. They were doing the search. And again, the story that Hansen told me was that he was a candidate for president because just deans normally are. 
[01:32:18.80] Dean of engineering is the logical one of the candidates. And as a result of it, as the course of the search went on, he realized he probably wouldn't get it. But he thought, yeah, maybe he'd be interested in being a president. So there's always places looking for presidents. And he threw his hat in the ring at Brooklyn Poly. And so he became a finalist at Brooklyn Poly for president. And he was scheduled to go up there for an interview, I think, the day this headline showed up or the next day, one of the two, at that time. 
[01:32:54.16] And as he was leaving the office late in the morning to go to the airport, the phone rings. And his secretary gets it. And she says, Dr. Hansen, Dr. Hansen, the chancellor wants to talk to you. It was Chancellor Simpson at the time. So Hansen takes the phone. And again, according to him, Simpson says, Art, we got a problem. Bisplinghoff called, and he's backed out. And we've told all the other candidates we don't need them. We can't go back to them. Are you still interested? 
[01:33:21.88] [LAUGHTER] 
[01:33:23.86] MARILYN SOMERS: That is just so funny. 
[01:33:25.50] WARD WINER: Oh, it's hilarious. 
[01:33:26.52] MARILYN SOMERS: Nobody could make this up. 
[01:33:27.92] WARD WINER: So Hansen says, well, let me think about it. He said, I'm on my way to interview for Brooklyn Poly. Let me think about it. And I'll get back to you. So he's heading to the-- 
[01:33:37.02] MARILYN SOMERS: So we had a breathless day there. 
[01:33:38.56] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, he's heading to the airport. And he says he's thinking about it. And he says to himself, what the hell? If I want to be president of a university, I might as well take this one. 
[01:33:46.40] MARILYN SOMERS: I don't have to move. 
[01:33:47.28] WARD WINER: So he gets off the expressway, and goes back to the office, and calls the chancellor and says, OK, I'll take the job. And he calls Brooklyn Poly and says, I'm withdrawing. And that's the way he became-- 
[01:33:57.49] MARILYN SOMERS: I've just been hired. And that's the way he came president. 
[01:33:59.59] WARD WINER: And I've talked to people who tell me that Ray Bisplinghoff did the same thing at two or three other places. 
[01:34:09.05] MARILYN SOMERS: He was willing to step up but not all the way in, huh? 
[01:34:11.43] WARD WINER: Yeah, I think, at the time, he was dean of engineering at MIT. I think. He certainly was at MIT. And he had been, I think, head of NACA, which was NASA, the forerunner of NASA. And I found out recently-- and this might be another person you will want to do one of these interviews with, Bob Loewy in aerospace-- 
[01:34:35.65] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, he's on the list. 
[01:34:36.85] WARD WINER: --was Ray Bisplinghoff's PhD student. 
[01:34:39.99] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, so he might have a little insight into that. 
[01:34:41.11] WARD WINER: And so I was chatting with him about it. And I mentioned it. And he said, oh, yeah. He said, Ray did it at-- I think he said Carnegie Mellon or, no, Case Western and some place in the Midwest, did the same kind of thing. 
[01:34:51.76] MARILYN SOMERS: So that's funny that he would go through all that fuss and then step back? 
[01:34:54.54] WARD WINER: I don't know what [INAUDIBLE]. 
[01:34:55.84] MARILYN SOMERS: I don't even remember ever seeing that headline, I didn't know that had-- 
[01:34:58.30] WARD WINER: Well, I'm going to have to look it up. I swear to God I saw it. I swear I saw it. Yeah. 
[01:35:02.60] MARILYN SOMERS: That is just hilarious. So here's Hansen, just going to pick it up, might as well, I'm here. I'll just go ahead and do it. Now, he didn't stay in the position for very long. 
[01:35:11.30] WARD WINER: No, he didn't. 
[01:35:13.08] MARILYN SOMERS: And that's a whole story unto itself, too. 
[01:35:15.40] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, getting this job, he's obviously a hero at Purdue. One of Purdue's graduates becomes president of Georgia Tech. So shortly after he became president, Purdue contacted him and said, how about being our commencement speaker next spring, whatever it was? And so he said, yeah, he'd do that. According to him, between the time he accepted that and commencement there, their president-- guy's name was Hovey or Hawkins or something with an H, anyway-- who had been president of Purdue for a long time, I think, 20 years or so, announced his retirement. 
[01:35:53.78] So when Hansen gets up there to be the commencement speaker, he said he went in. They had a reception for him. And here's a lineup of big-shot alums of Purdue saying, we want you to be our next president. And so he went there. 
[01:36:08.34] MARILYN SOMERS: I mean, it's bizarre. 
[01:36:09.76] WARD WINER: It is. 
[01:36:10.10] MARILYN SOMERS: It's just bizarre. 
[01:36:10.68] WARD WINER: Well, it goes on. There's more to it. He goes up there. And shortly after he's up there, the editor of the Purdue student newspaper asked for an interview with him. And so in the interview, the editor asked him, how long do you think you'll stay in this job? The last guy was here 20 years. But you didn't stay very long in your last job. 
[01:36:37.46] And Hansen-- and I know I'd heard him say this before. So it just makes total sense-- said, well, I don't intend to stay in a job for more than eight or nine years. I mean, that's it. I should move on to another job, shouldn't stay in this kind of a job. Well, it was either eight or nine, or eight or 10, or something like that. But, anyway, eight or nine or 10 years, whatever it was, to the date of that interview, the then student newspaper editor asked for an interview, brings the old newspaper with him and says, well, when are you leaving? 
[01:37:10.59] [LAUGHTER] 
[01:37:12.97] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, my word. 
[01:37:14.61] WARD WINER: So then he-- well, I don't know how he made the connection with Texas A&M. But, anyway, that's-- 
[01:37:19.81] MARILYN SOMERS: Pause for thought. 
[01:37:20.66] WARD WINER: Threw his through his hat out and ended up at Texas A&M. 
[01:37:24.25] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, I mean, I don't know. Did he stay long enough to be inaugurated at Tech? Did you go to his inauguration? 
[01:37:30.29] WARD WINER: I did not go to it. 
[01:37:31.51] MARILYN SOMERS: But he had one? 
[01:37:32.41] WARD WINER: I think so I think so. I don't really know. I mean, I was not paying that much attention to things in those days. I mean, I knew he became president, and that was it. 
[01:37:40.73] MARILYN SOMERS: His time was so short. His legacy was not large because-- 
[01:37:45.37] WARD WINER: No, that's right. 
[01:37:45.98] MARILYN SOMERS: He didn't have time to make an impact or change anything at all. I heard he was a very pleasant man. 
[01:37:51.40] WARD WINER: Oh, he was real nice guy. 
[01:37:52.08] MARILYN SOMERS: Different people've commented about what a nice man he was. 
[01:37:54.24] WARD WINER: Mary says that, when you have a conversation with Art, even if you're in a crowded room, you think you're the only person around because he just bears right in. 
[01:38:03.84] MARILYN SOMERS: So he has a lot of charisma. 
[01:38:05.42] WARD WINER: Yeah, he's very, very personable, a really nice guy, great sense of humor. 
[01:38:09.14] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, it through Georgia Tech for a loop to have to look for a president again so quickly. 
[01:38:14.06] WARD WINER: Yeah, yeah. 
[01:38:15.32] MARILYN SOMERS: And they threw the net out a little farther. And that brought Pettit in. And Pettit changed the culture of Georgia Tech. 
[01:38:21.98] WARD WINER: Oh, very much so. 
[01:38:22.90] MARILYN SOMERS: Very much so. So you worked under Hansen for a short period of time and then along comes Pettit. Did you have a good relationship with Dr. Pettit. 
[01:38:31.98] WARD WINER: Yeah, very good. But it's interesting. I think it's fair to say the reason Pettit came here is probably the same, basically the same, one of the driving forces was the same reason I came here, because he was fed up with the student unrest and controversy at Stanford. And otherwise, why would anybody leave Stanford, even to become president of Georgia Tech, quite frankly? He was dean of engineering. 
[01:39:00.72] He very likely may have become president of Stanford if he'd stayed there because his predecessor became president at Stanford. And the current president of Stanford was the former dean of engineering. 
[01:39:10.92] MARILYN SOMERS: But, as you say, he found all that extracurricular stuff very distracting. And he was a pretty focused person. 
[01:39:17.32] WARD WINER: Very focused, yeah. 
[01:39:18.10] MARILYN SOMERS: And don't you think that he probably recognized this as a chance to make a real change? 
[01:39:23.58] WARD WINER: Well, yeah, that I don't know. He certainly did. 
[01:39:26.06] MARILYN SOMERS: I mean, because he seemed to come in with a goal and a purpose. 
[01:39:29.06] WARD WINER: No, he was pretty focused. He raised the standards and shifted the standards. He managed to come up with incentives to make things happen the way he wanted them to happen. He and Stillson, Stillson was very good at coming up with incentives to get people to do the kinds of things he wanted done. He was more controversial guy and a tougher character. 
[01:39:55.21] MARILYN SOMERS: He took the flack for a lot of the changes that got made. 
[01:39:58.27] WARD WINER: He was pretty hard-nosed character. 
[01:39:59.87] MARILYN SOMERS: People do not like change. They're set in their ways in the South as well as anywhere else in the world and don't like change. So always, the change makers are targets. That's just the way it goes. 
[01:40:09.43] WARD WINER: But Hansen hired Stillson to be dean of engineering. That's how Stillson came here from Carnegie Mellon. And then when Pettit came along, I guess, Stillson first became vice president for research or something. And then, I guess, Crecine made him-- 
[01:40:27.97] MARILYN SOMERS: Later, yeah. 
[01:40:29.29] WARD WINER: --later provost or something. 
[01:40:31.21] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, so Hansen did have an impact in that he brought Stillson. I mean, that is something in the way that-- and then that he must've gotten along good enough with Pettit to stay in. How much does politics influence a faculty person? You're teaching. You're in the classroom. And you're teaching. 
[01:40:50.20] WARD WINER: Well, what do you mean, the academic politics? 
[01:40:52.50] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah. 
[01:40:53.04] WARD WINER: Are you talking about? 
[01:40:53.68] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, I mean, just the changeover. 
[01:40:54.56] WARD WINER: Eh, a little bit. 
[01:40:55.72] MARILYN SOMERS: The president comes in, goes out. And a new president comes in. And then there's the scurrying around of who's going to take what position. And is it disruptive to faculty to go through that? 
[01:41:05.58] WARD WINER: Oh, I mean, you get anxious about what's going to happen. 
[01:41:09.26] MARILYN SOMERS: Are you going to get funded enough? 
[01:41:10.44] WARD WINER: Is the next person going to be very different than the last one? 
[01:41:14.16] MARILYN SOMERS: And is there going to be funding enough, always. 
[01:41:16.06] WARD WINER: But they get over it in a hurry. A story I like to tell about how long faculty remember administrators was-- 
[01:41:24.68] [LAUGHTER] 
[01:41:26.12] --told to me by a guy at Berkeley, Dan Mote, who is now president of the University of Maryland. He was on our advisory board, ME's advisory board, for a while. And at one time, he was head of mechanical engineering at Berkeley. And then he became vice chancellor for external affairs at Berkeley. And the reason he became vice chancellor for external affairs is the chancellor at that time was also a mechanical engineer named Cheng Lin Chen, a Chinese-origin guy, but did his graduate work in this country. 
[01:42:01.34] And Cheng Lin Chen was a very big driver on diversity. I mean, he was the lead guy in California and, certainly in engineering, lead-wide guy in the country, very well known heat-transfer guy. And he pushed diversity hard. And he served five years as chancellor. And then he went back to being a faculty member. Unfortunately, he later died of a brain tumor. 
[01:42:26.92] But about five months after Cheng Lin Chen stepped down from being chancellor at Berkeley, a woman reporter from the student newspaper came to Dan Mote, vice chancellor for external affairs, to interview him about Berkeley's policies about diversity. And Dan Mote says to this young woman, well, I'll be glad to talk to you about it. But the person you really ought to talk to is Cheng Lin Chen because he was the main driving force. And she says, who's he? 
[01:42:57.47] [LAUGHTER] 
[01:42:58.73] MARILYN SOMERS: I knew that was going to be the punchline. Oh, yeah. In today and out tomorrow. Yeah, we joke about that at Tech. Once you retire, people don't remember you after three months. 
[01:43:10.89] WARD WINER: Well, I mean, it's a pretty regular turnover. People tend to think of faculty being around for a long time. But, in fact, there's a fair amount of turnover. And there's a fair amount of turnover of presidents and deans and what have you. 
[01:43:22.87] MARILYN SOMERS: That's why, when we find somebody who stays as long as you did, we have to talk to them. Because what was the magic? How could you stay? How could you? 
[01:43:30.59] WARD WINER: Well, one of the reasons was my wife didn't want to move. Once she got here-- 
[01:43:34.50] MARILYN SOMERS: She got paradise, and she was staying in paradise. She'd already paid her dues. 
[01:43:37.62] WARD WINER: I mean, the early years I was here, I was not a happy camper. I mean, I-- 
[01:43:40.72] MARILYN SOMERS: You had to adjust. 
[01:43:42.74] WARD WINER: Well, not so much that. The department head who hired me-- I mean, he hired me because Hansen wanted him to hire me. It didn't take long after I was here to realize that he and I didn't have a match at all. 
[01:43:56.82] MARILYN SOMERS: That's always bad. 
[01:43:57.68] WARD WINER: And lots of people didn't have a match with him. And there was a lot of controversy, a lot of turmoil among the faculty and him, and the administration about him. And I fought with them, with the faculty for a couple of years, I guess. We tried to convince the administration they should remove him. And of course, they stuck together and said, no, they weren't going to. 
[01:44:23.06] And once that became pretty clear-- and actually, they non-reappointed four or five young faculty members at the time. I was already tenured, or else they probably would've nailed me, too. So it was obvious that nobody was putting up a fuss anymore. So I just stuck my nose in the book. And actually, it was probably good for me because it was during that period when I did most of the good research that got me the recognition that I got as a researcher. 
[01:44:50.61] MARILYN SOMERS: Isn't that funny how things happen for the right-- 
[01:44:52.63] WARD WINER: And so eventually, they did remove him in '82. And then things turned around for me. And things got a lot better. John Brighton came in as department head. And he and I got along well. And that made a big difference. 
[01:45:07.59] MARILYN SOMERS: What did you think of the students you were getting, the caliber of the students? 
[01:45:12.67] WARD WINER: Well, they were pretty good. Actually, most during that period, many of, at least the thesis students that I had working in my own lab, were from overseas. And they were very good. 
[01:45:26.75] MARILYN SOMERS: So you had a lot of foreign students. 
[01:45:27.39] WARD WINER: Yeah, a lot of foreign students. I had a few US students. And they were good. The students in the classrooms were-- they were good. I mean, they were good students. I mean, obviously the caliber's increased a lot since that time, at least caliber based on the measure of the SAT scores and that sort of thing. 
[01:45:46.85] MARILYN SOMERS: We got pickier and pickier about who we're letting in. But I've heard people talk about, especially with mechanical engineering, that a lot of tinkerers came back in the day that might not do so well on SATs and that, when we raise the standards too high, we wipe out those inventor-type people. Have you seen that to happen? No? 
[01:46:04.57] WARD WINER: There's probably something to that. There's probably something to that. But it's not just mechanical engineering. Students today across the board don't have nearly the experience of being tinkerers, as you put it, that they had in the past. And that's true, not just for mechanical engineering. Although I haven't talked to anybody about it, I'll bet it's true in electrical engineering. I've heard from people in chemistry at Michigan, not here, but at Michigan, that the students aren't nearly as adept at understanding chemistry as they were years ago when many of their students going into chemistry or chemical engineering came from farms. 
[01:46:46.40] And they inherently understood chemistry and how it worked and how important it was. 
[01:46:51.94] MARILYN SOMERS: It's something when you interview people from the '40s and '50s. Just prior to your time coming here, even in the early '60s, it was easier to get into tech. And it was easier to get out of tech, too. I mean, people drop left and right, but also that some people just don't test well or don't show up good on SATs, and yet really have the ability to apply themselves once they get here under the right mentorship. 
[01:47:15.02] WARD WINER: The SATs or GRAs, either one of them, are not the telling measure of students. 
[01:47:26.20] MARILYN SOMERS: No, they're not. 
[01:47:26.89] WARD WINER: They're a common one. And they're uniform across the country. So it's one that can be done. But the real issue is, how much drive does the student have? How much inherent ingenuity do they have? And that's as important or more important than the SATs. But there's no way to measure that. 
[01:47:47.27] MARILYN SOMERS: There is no way to measure it until they come in and try it out. 
[01:47:49.69] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[01:47:51.55] MARILYN SOMERS: The students at Tech, famously, were always too busy to be bothered with political uprisings or anything like that. 
[01:47:59.65] WARD WINER: I think that's true of engineering students in general. And the reason Tech is different than other universities is engineering represents over 60% of the students. And a lot of the others are in physical sciences who are very similar. They tend to be more conservative. They tend to be less involved in political issues or issues of the day. And that's true at, I think it's fair to say, at most major universities. It's just that, at a major university, engineering is a small package. 
[01:48:30.47] I mean, at Michigan, engineering is probably only about 5% or 6%. Places like Berkeley and Stanford, MIT is different because they're heavily engineering. 
[01:48:40.13] MARILYN SOMERS: It's logistics that have created that environment. 
[01:48:41.85] WARD WINER: It's just the proportion of people. It's not that Tech is fundamentally different as Tech. It's just that it's dominantly engineering. And dominantly, they're a different breed of cats. 
[01:48:51.75] MARILYN SOMERS: So you dug in and focused on your research and spent some time laying low-- 
[01:48:56.77] WARD WINER: Yep. 
[01:48:57.89] MARILYN SOMERS: --and enjoying teaching. 
[01:48:59.17] WARD WINER: Yeah, oh, yeah. I enjoyed teaching. I did a fair amount of consulting, did a lot of research, a lot of publishing, and a fair amount of research money, and graduate students. 
[01:49:10.33] MARILYN SOMERS: So life was going along pretty good. 
[01:49:11.87] WARD WINER: Yeah, oh, yeah. 
[01:49:12.41] MARILYN SOMERS: And then Dr. Pettit came. Well, we already said he came. You got along with him fine. He did the right things. At what point in time did you transcend from being faculty to being administrator, taking that responsibility? 1988? 
[01:49:29.30] WARD WINER: Yeah, '88. And I think it was the beginning of December '87. 
[01:49:35.44] MARILYN SOMERS: By this time, we already knew that Pettit was sick. 
[01:49:39.24] WARD WINER: Yes, yep, yep. This was towards the end of his time there. Well, I had been after Kezios was removed and Brighton came in '82, I started getting involved in faculty service things. I was involved in the committee that wrote the first set of faculty statutes for the faculty handbook, with a guy named Walker from math. 
[01:50:10.20] I was elected to the first executive board and was chair of the first executive board. And so I got to know Pettit quite well through that. And Vernon Crawford, I knew-- well, I met Vernon Crawford when I first came here because he and Hansen were buddies. And so Hansen introduced me to him. 
[01:50:29.37] MARILYN SOMERS: What a lovely man he was. 
[01:50:29.79] WARD WINER: Yeah, he was. He was great. And so I'd sort of gotten back involved in faculty activities. In the early '70s, I was involved in the s I became, I don't know, vice chair or chair of the tech chapter. And then I was vice president of the Georgia chapter of AAUP for a year. And then I kind of got out of all that stuff. And then, when Brighton came in '82, I started getting back involved. 
[01:50:58.43] And I think it was the beginning of December '87 that Brighton announced that he was leaving to become dean at Penn State. And Bill Sangster asked me-- I'd been told later that a few faculty leaders went up to him and said, you ought to point Winer as interim. And so Bill Sangster asked me if I would be acting director. 
[01:51:28.61] And I said, yes, on the condition that I can also be a candidate for the job. Because up until that time, it was pretty standard-- I don't think it was written anyplace. But it was pretty standard policy that, if somebody was acting in a position, there couldn't be a candidate for the position. 
[01:51:44.63] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, it was smart of you to clear that. 
[01:51:46.87] WARD WINER: So he said, yeah, that was OK. Well, they interviewed at least two people from the outside. I can only remember one of them. I can't remember the other's name. And it took them until about October to decide that they were going to give me the job. So it was October '88 when I became regular director of the school. 
[01:52:09.63] MARILYN SOMERS: Was it a good, little time to transcend to that? 
[01:52:12.35] WARD WINER: Yeah, it was. It was because, well, for one thing, it was interesting, which probably, well, certainly helped my case. In February, while I was acting chair, I was informed that I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. 
[01:52:26.58] MARILYN SOMERS: I don't think that hurt your case at all. 
[01:52:28.74] WARD WINER: Well, it turned out, up until that time, only Joe Pettit was a member. And I think, the year before I became a member, John White became a member. 
[01:52:43.18] MARILYN SOMERS: So we can say you were right at the very forefront of that. 
[01:52:46.12] WARD WINER: And then the year I became a member, Bob Nerem also became-- he had just been hired about six months earlier into mechanical engineering. And we were both inducted the same time. And so, all of a sudden, Tech went from two members of the National Academy of Engineering to four. And I was one of them. So, I mean, that certainly helped my case a little bit. And so I figured, if I got the job, it was time to do something else, which I have done. 
[01:53:16.69] I kept research going for about probably 10, 12 years. But it kind of tapered off because the job got bigger and bigger. 
[01:53:25.11] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, yes. 
[01:53:25.73] WARD WINER: And my last PhD student graduated about, maybe, well, at least two, maybe three years ago. So I had PhD students up until that time. 
[01:53:36.35] MARILYN SOMERS: All this time, all the way up until then. 
[01:53:38.23] WARD WINER: But then I just decided I wasn't going to take any more on. I didn't have time. 
[01:53:42.11] MARILYN SOMERS: Isn't that funny how it eats up your time? You know, Ward, I've interviewed a lot of people that knew Pettit. And, as we had talked earlier, I felt bad that we didn't get Janice Sangster's story because she would've known him better than anybody. But he comes across through the other peoples' stories as a kind of a mixed bag, that he was very stern and focused, and begin to research and very academic, and yet, other times, that he loved to play the piano, that he was happy and sang, and that he was interested in sports. I mean, zealously interested in football and always full of suggestions and such like that. 
[01:54:19.59] How did he strike you? How did you know him as? 
[01:54:26.45] WARD WINER: Well, I would say, in general, a fairly serious guy. But you got to remember. I was a faculty member. He was the president. 
[01:54:36.75] MARILYN SOMERS: He was the president, yeah. 
[01:54:39.01] WARD WINER: Probably most of the interaction we had was when I was chair of the executive board for a couple of years, and he was president. So we met fairly regularly. We had another interaction, which may be worth telling here. As I said, not too long after I got here, it was obvious that the department head was not somebody that either I or several of the other people could hit it off with. 
[01:55:08.35] Pettit was president at that time. Vernon Crawford was a vice president of academic affairs. Stillson, I don't know whether he was vice president-- yeah, I think he was vice president of research at the time. And Sangster was dean. And I was a young guy, obviously, a young turk. But there were some older people that were pretty upset with him as well, the department head. 
[01:55:37.46] And so we had a meeting with-- we had a meeting with Sangster. And then we had a meeting with Crawford to air our concerns. And they didn't agree with us, not surprisingly. And the upshot of it was that, as I said earlier, I think four or five young people who were untenured got non-reappointed. So that was a pretty clear signal. And some people really got hurt in the process. 
[01:56:08.16] One of the people that got non-reappointed, a guy named Uwe Bauder, who was German, he had been at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and was hired here to head up an important research area, at the time, that we had invested in, decided to fight it, fight his non-reappointment. And he got the AAUP to support him in a suit against the Institute for improper dismissal. 
[01:56:37.83] And, to make a long story short, I mean, he sent a grievance up the line all the way to the board of regents. And they all rejected it. And so then he could go to court, which he did. I think it was probably a superior court in Atlanta. But I'm not sure. But, in any event, I was ordered by the court to come and be a witness. I didn't want to be. And I certainly didn't volunteer to be. So I was ordered to come and be a witness. And I'll never forget. 
[01:57:06.03] I'm in the witness stand in court. And sitting as far as from me to the cameraman over there, in the front row in the court are Joe Pettit, Vernon Crawford, Bill Sangster, and Scotty Kezios, who was the department head. They're sitting there while I'm being quizzed. I mean, I just answered the questions as honestly as I could 
[01:57:28.97] MARILYN SOMERS: Under oath, you'd have to. 
[01:57:30.87] WARD WINER: And so that was it. But, I mean, it made a big impression on me. But later, I mean, Vernon Crawford and I were, I would say, on very good terms. All of us were on good terms, except for Kezios, at the time. And to all of their credit, Pettit's as well as Crawford and Sangster, I mean, they all treated me very well afterwards and obviously appointed me to be chair of the school of mechanical engineering. 
[01:57:58.89] MARILYN SOMERS: How did the case end up? 
[01:58:00.57] WARD WINER: Oh, he lost. 
[01:58:01.49] MARILYN SOMERS: He did lose? 
[01:58:02.05] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. I mean, you don't have much of a chance in those kind of cases. 
[01:58:06.36] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, you did the right thing. And they respected you for doing that. 
[01:58:07.48] WARD WINER: It was an interesting experience. Yeah. Another interesting story I had with him, when I was chair of the executive committee, he and his wife, was it-- 
[01:58:23.40] MARILYN SOMERS: Florence. 
[01:58:24.02] WARD WINER: Florence, yeah, invited Mary and I out to dinner and to the Alliance Theater to a play. They had tickets to the alliance theater. And they would invite various people. Anyway, they invited us. And we had a dog at the time. The dog moved in with us when we moved in here. The neighbors thought we brought the dog with us. We thought it was the neighbors'. It was just a stray that moved in with us. And the dog lived for 16 or 17 years. And it died. 
[01:58:57.84] It died about two or three weeks before we were invited to this play. Well, it turned out, we, Mary and I had already been to the play. But we didn't dare tell them we'd been to the play and say, no, we're going to turn down your invitation. 
[01:59:13.91] MARILYN SOMERS: You can't do that. 
[01:59:14.51] WARD WINER: And one of the things in the play was a dog had died. And a guy was carrying the dead dog's body around in a gunny sack. [LAUGHS] 
[01:59:24.43] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, no. And so there's you and Mary having to see this. 
[01:59:27.11] [LAUGHS] 
[01:59:28.63] WARD WINER: We just had to see it twice. I think it was in between the time we saw it the first time and the time we went with the Pettits, our dog had died. 
[01:59:36.29] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, my goodness, what a story that is. 
[01:59:38.33] WARD WINER: No, you mentioned-- I didn't know he played piano. But he was also a photographer, a pretty good photographer. 
[01:59:45.17] MARILYN SOMERS: I did not know that. 
[01:59:46.29] WARD WINER: Well, the only way I know that is, at one time, I'm not sure when, probably in the mid '80s or something, I think it was the students put on a photo show, student photo show. And they invited him to put some of his work there. And he did. 
[02:00:04.62] MARILYN SOMERS: No one's ever told me that about him. 
[02:00:07.18] WARD WINER: Yeah, so he was-- 
[02:00:08.48] MARILYN SOMERS: It's funny how people can be different things to different people. But someone told me, some other interview that I did told me that he was really quite gregarious in small situations but could be quite stern. Now, he got along very well with the Atlanta political community. He was very good about building networks, which-- 
[02:00:31.26] WARD WINER: No, he was a very straightforward guy. 
[02:00:36.04] MARILYN SOMERS: Got along great with-- 
[02:00:37.60] WARD WINER: He had a good great reputation. 
[02:00:40.10] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, yeah, he did have a great-- no one has ever said an unkind word about him. 
[02:00:44.22] WARD WINER: No. 
[02:00:44.54] MARILYN SOMERS: Other than he was, rather-- some people said he was rather cold. He was rather cool. 
[02:00:48.54] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[02:00:48.82] MARILYN SOMERS: Not real effusive about things. He obviously nurtured the Coca-Cola relationship and the George Woodruff relationship, which ultimately turned out to be a nice thing. 
[02:00:59.72] WARD WINER: Helped us a lot. 
[02:01:01.72] MARILYN SOMERS: For which we're all grateful. Because I have some footage of George Woodruff and Pettit. 
[02:01:07.34] WARD WINER: Oh, is that right? 
[02:01:08.10] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, that the I guess I got from the family. But I think you all have that already, anyways. But it was interesting to see the relationship between the two of them. Well, his death came as a big-- well, not a shock because everyone knew he was dying, but at a very inopportune time for Georgia Tech since all the big celebration for the capital campaign was going on. The first big, big effort to be a fundraising, pull this place up from, there had been fundraising attempts 50 and 70 years before that, but not on the scale that they undertook under Pettit's leadership. 
[02:01:40.88] And then he passed away. And the campaign was very successful. And then along comes the big search for another new president. Here we are again. We're going to look for a president. Were you on that search committee? 
[02:01:55.54] WARD WINER: I chaired it. 
[02:01:56.42] MARILYN SOMERS: I was afraid to ask you. 
[02:01:57.24] WARD WINER: I've never lived it down. 
[02:01:58.77] [LAUGHTER] 
[02:02:01.63] MARILYN SOMERS: We all have those things in our life. Why didn't I say no? You were not in a position to say no. 
[02:02:07.23] WARD WINER: No. 
[02:02:07.35] MARILYN SOMERS: I'm sure you were invited to chair that committee. Crecine was a change maker. 
[02:02:14.37] WARD WINER: Yep. 
[02:02:14.87] MARILYN SOMERS: I don't know if that was his intention when he came. But he really was a change maker. 
[02:02:19.17] WARD WINER: Probably. 
[02:02:19.63] MARILYN SOMERS: And people don't like changes. So of course, it was going to be controversial. But even his hiring was controversial. 
[02:02:27.05] WARD WINER: Yep. 
[02:02:28.55] MARILYN SOMERS: Dictated from the board of regents? 
[02:02:30.99] WARD WINER: Yes. Actually, I would say, from-- 
[02:02:33.95] MARILYN SOMERS: A member of the board of regents? 
[02:02:36.11] WARD WINER: Yep. What's her name? Jackie Ward. 
[02:02:39.11] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, you're so good to see this. What happened? What was going on? Did you have decent candidates from all over? 
[02:02:45.89] WARD WINER: Yeah, we did, actually. I don't what kind of number we started out with. But I think we interviewed five or six people, not on campus. We interviewed them downtown in a law office. Gosh, what was it? One of the people on the-- I think it may have been Alston and Bird's office. One of the people on the committee was an alum who was fairly high up in, I think it was Alston and Bird. I'm not sure. 
[02:03:22.42] The committee had a couple of students on it. It had some other faculty on it. I remember Katharine Ross was on it. Sandra Thornton was on it, on the committee. Gosh, I can't remember. 
[02:03:36.16] MARILYN SOMERS: So it was a goodly number of you. 
[02:03:37.40] WARD WINER: Yeah, I think Jean Kaminski was on it. John Aderhold, I think, was on it. I'm not real sure about that. And, well, initially, Love, what's his first name? 
[02:03:55.68] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, Erskine. 
[02:03:56.58] WARD WINER: Erskine. Erskine Love was on it. And actually, we had a morning meeting. The first meeting we had of the committee was a breakfast meeting in one of the clubs downtown. I don't remember which one. And Erskine Love sat next to me at the breakfast. And that was the afternoon that he died. 
[02:04:14.36] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, my word. 
[02:04:15.38] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[02:04:16.22] MARILYN SOMERS: So his death really came as a huge shock to everybody, then. 
[02:04:18.92] WARD WINER: It was, yeah, totally unexpected. And on the committee, there were two or three regents. One was Turner. 
[02:04:32.16] MARILYN SOMERS: Big committee, wasn't it? 
[02:04:33.06] WARD WINER: Yeah, it was. 
[02:04:34.28] MARILYN SOMERS: Huge. 
[02:04:34.80] WARD WINER: Turner, the guy from Columbus, Georgia, been on the board of regents for a long time. Who's the Black guy who's been on the regents for a long time? God, I can't think of his name. I'll think of it eventually. He'd been on the regents for a long time. And a woman regent, who I believe was actually chair of the board of regents at that time, she was with the Ivan Allen Company. 
[02:05:12.39] Those are the three regents that I remember. Yeah, I don't whether it was another one or not. And they were very good. I mean, my respect for the regents went up tremendously at that time. All three of them were very good, very concerned about getting somebody who would be good for the place, who was somebody that the faculty would accept, and what have you. The other alums who were on it, gee-- 
[02:05:44.07] MARILYN SOMERS: It was a huge committee. 
[02:05:45.37] WARD WINER: Yeah, it was about 15, 18 people, something like that? 
[02:05:48.07] MARILYN SOMERS: It's a wonder we ever got anything done. How do you do that with that many people? 
[02:05:51.34] WARD WINER: You meet. And you run ads. And you seek candidates and what have you. Oh, God, an alum who used to own the building that's HR offices, I can't think of his name either. But, anyway-- 
[02:06:08.36] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, Ziegler. 
[02:06:09.64] WARD WINER: No, no. No. 
[02:06:10.72] MARILYN SOMERS: No, not that one? 
[02:06:11.22] 
[02:06:11.72] WARD WINER: No, the other building, where human-- well-- 
[02:06:16.50] MARILYN SOMERS: That's where human resources actually is, in the Ziegler building, aren't they? 
[02:06:19.68] WARD WINER: No, I don't think so. 
[02:06:20.28] MARILYN SOMERS: On the corner of First drive and Main Street? 
[02:06:23.32] WARD WINER: Yeah, but that's not the Ziegler building. Ziegler building's the next one over. It was a building-- God, I'll think of it eventually. But anyway-- 
[02:06:31.28] MARILYN SOMERS: I don't know how you got anything done with that many people. 
[02:06:33.06] WARD WINER: [LAUGHS] Well, we did. But, anyway, we zeroed in on about, well, at least four candidates that I can remember and maybe more for interviews. 
[02:06:45.96] MARILYN SOMERS: How long was the span of time, from beginning to end, from when you organized yourselves? I mean was it two months, three months, six months? 
[02:06:53.82] WARD WINER: Oh, no, it was, jeez, I don't really remember. I wouldn't be surprised if it was at least eight months. 
[02:06:58.90] MARILYN SOMERS: It was a long stretch, then. 
[02:07:00.58] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[02:07:01.46] MARILYN SOMERS: [AUDIO OUT] pointed to be a chair of a committee like that? Did they tell you, well, you need to get this done in the next three months or take all the time in the world? What do they tell you? 
[02:07:10.70] WARD WINER: They don't say anything about that. 
[02:07:12.06] MARILYN SOMERS: They don't? 
[02:07:12.64] WARD WINER: No, what they say is, bring us three to five candidates that are acceptable to you and unranked. 
[02:07:20.50] MARILYN SOMERS: Unranked. 
[02:07:21.20] WARD WINER: That's what they want. They don't want them ranked because they want to make the choice. 
[02:07:24.68] MARILYN SOMERS: The decision. So you guys had to go through all these resumes and then interviews. 
[02:07:29.36] WARD WINER: Well, we interviewed one guy named John Hancock who-- 
[02:07:34.40] MARILYN SOMERS: What a lovely name. 
[02:07:35.46] WARD WINER: Yeah, well he had been dean of engineering at Purdue and was probably the dean of engineering deans at the time in the United States. But he left that job about a year or two before we interviewed him. And he went to some electronics-- he was an electrical engineer. He became an executive in some electronics firm in the Midwest, Kansas or something like that. 
[02:08:00.29] MARILYN SOMERS: Gave up academia altogether, huh? 
[02:08:02.11] WARD WINER: Well, he, I think, had hoped to become president of Purdue when they were looking for somebody. And he didn't get it. And so he moved on. But he was very well known in engineering circles. We interviewed a guy named Dale Compton, who, at the time, had just stepped down as vice president of research for Ford Motor Company, was a physicist who was quite well known. They were both members of the National Academy of Engineering, very prominent guys. 
[02:08:35.19] We interviewed-- God, I can't think of her name but a very prominent woman material scientist from MIT. 
[02:08:46.84] MARILYN SOMERS: Really? 
[02:08:47.82] WARD WINER: Oh, God, I-- 
[02:08:48.72] MARILYN SOMERS: I didn't know a woman was ever even considered. 
[02:08:50.80] WARD WINER: She was. She was interviewed. These are all off campus interviews, OK? I may think of her name eventually. And of course, Pat Crecine. And I think there was one other one whose name escapes me right now. And the committee wanted John Hancock. And the three names we gave him were John Hancock, Dale Compton, and Pat Crecine. 
[02:09:23.82] The woman, when we interviewed, made it clear that she wanted the job so that she could have a platform nationally to advocate women in science and engineering. And she had, if I'm not mistaken, she had no administrative experience. She was a very prominent person. And she still is. I may think of her name before I'm done. But she was a physicist, material scientist type. 
[02:09:54.64] And although they said don't rank them-- 
[02:09:58.64] MARILYN SOMERS: You did. 
[02:09:59.82] WARD WINER: Oh, well it became clear in our discussions. I mean, we met with the chancellor. We met with-- the deal was, the big committee that I described that I chaired was called the presidential search committee. But the smaller committee of the regents who were on the committee, plus, well, the chair of the board of regents-- God, I can picture her, but I can't think of her name-- was part of that group. They were to be the presidential selection committee. 
[02:10:34.16] MARILYN SOMERS: They were the deciders. 
[02:10:35.38] WARD WINER: Yeah, well, which is fine. I mean, it's fine. I mean, the person's got to report to the chancellor and to the board of regents. So it became clear from the discussions, after we'd interviewed the people, what our priorities were, our preferences were. I mean, we didn't have to put that in writing or anything. But it became clear. And this was going on-- well, to help you decide how long it took, I think we started along about the first of the year. Pettit died in the fall of '87, right? 
[02:11:09.33] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah. 
[02:11:10.55] WARD WINER: It may have been the end of '87. It dragged on to the point where, by the time it got to May, when we were at the end and we'd come up with these three finalists, the new chairman of the board of regent chair, the board of regents, was announced and got involved-- OK, the new chair was Jackie Ward. 
[02:11:38.68] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, boy. 
[02:11:40.38] WARD WINER: She replaced this woman from Ivan Allen. And Jackie Ward came in like a storm and took over. And she really liked Crecine because he was in computers. He was pushing computers and computerization, and software, and all this sort of thing. And she's in the software training business. 
[02:12:01.44] MARILYN SOMERS: OK, so Ross Perot and Steve Jobs would've been her heroes. And he actually knew them. 
[02:12:07.24] WARD WINER: Yep, absolutely. And so that's who she wanted. And she found reasons. I mean, this is going to be a long time before anybody else sees this. She found reasons why John Hancock wasn't acceptable and why Dale Compton wasn't acceptable. And that left Pat Crecine. 
[02:12:25.84] MARILYN SOMERS: So she was on a campaign. 
[02:12:27.28] WARD WINER: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it really irritated me at the time and has since. 
[02:12:32.84] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, it took it right away from you. 
[02:12:34.78] WARD WINER: I mean, other than interviewing him, I didn't know John Hancock. I knew of him. And he was really a first-class individual. But I've known Dale Compton. Oh, I know another, God, another person we interviewed, very, very prominent guy who is now-- he may be emeritus now. But he was involved in government a lot. 
[02:13:04.17] Lewis Branscomb, I think, who had been head of National Bureau of Standards, been quite involved in the industry. We couldn't even talk him in-- we interviewed him. We went to Washington and interviewed him. We couldn't even talk him into becoming a-- 
[02:13:18.17] MARILYN SOMERS: A candidate. 
[02:13:18.73] WARD WINER: --a candidate, in spite of the fact he actually had some tenuous connections with Georgia Tech through relatives or something. 
[02:13:24.11] MARILYN SOMERS: But he didn't. He never came on campus. 
[02:13:25.21] WARD WINER: He spent, well, at that time and the rest of his career, at Harvard in the Kennedy School of politics or government. And he had been in the government, fairly good position in the Kennedy Administration. 
[02:13:42.11] MARILYN SOMERS: Did Crecine interview well? 
[02:13:45.79] WARD WINER: Reasonably well, yeah. Reasonably well. It was kind of interesting, Not as well as the others. In fact, the committee, at least the faculty members of the committee, weren't too hot on even putting him on the list. But we had to come up with three. 
[02:13:58.55] MARILYN SOMERS: You had to have three. 
[02:13:59.43] WARD WINER: And the other, we just didn't have others that we could put up there. 
[02:14:04.19] MARILYN SOMERS: How ironic that it should end up the way it did. 
[02:14:07.55] WARD WINER: Well, then when the regents were courting him, Crecine, they wanted to bring him and his wife to campus to see the campus. But they didn't want anybody to know it was there. So I had the chore, part of the time, taking him around. And Ron Shafer from-- yeah, Ron Shafer from electrical engineering was on the committee as well. 
[02:14:36.82] And so he and I and our wives were responsible for different parts of taking him around. And I forget who, somebody-- I don't remember who it was. But somebody was responsible for-- oh, I know. OK, can't think of his name. He was head of GTRI at the time. I can't think of his name. He was predecessor to Truly. Picked Crecine up at the airport and took him to Westminster School to visit there because he wanted to get his kids into Westminster. 
[02:15:11.22] And then Mary and I picked him up at Westminster, I guess, picked him and his wife up at Westminster, and brought him down to see the president's house. And we had arranged for a policeman, a Georgia Tech policeman to show up at the president's house to let us in. I will never forget it. We went in. And he's looking around. And she's looking around. And Mary says to me, she doesn't want to come here. I mean, they'd only seen each other for half an hour in the car or something. 
[02:15:41.35] MARILYN SOMERS: That's called women's intuition. 
[02:15:42.59] WARD WINER: Absolutely. And I said, how do you know that? Well, I mean, she was right. She was absolutely right. 
[02:15:48.27] MARILYN SOMERS: She did not want to come, yeah. 
[02:15:49.25] WARD WINER: She didn't. And so then we took them out to dinner that evening, I think. And it was pretty obvious she was not happy about it. She was basically, you do what you want to do. Well, she came. And not too long after she was here, she divorced him. 
[02:16:05.49] MARILYN SOMERS: And a lot of people think that was her just cooperating long enough for him to look respectable. 
[02:16:11.11] WARD WINER: Yeah, I think so. I mean, like I say, when doing the interview, Mary says she doesn't want to come. 
[02:16:16.45] MARILYN SOMERS: It's so interesting. Oh, yeah, a woman would know that, definitely. 
[02:16:20.05] WARD WINER: Yeah, so, anyway, he became president. 
[02:16:23.23] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, he certainly did. And it didn't take very long. 
[02:16:28.83] WARD WINER: He did some innovative things, some of which were probably good. But he was kind of a disaster as president. 
[02:16:35.71] MARILYN SOMERS: Controversial. 
[02:16:36.83] WARD WINER: Oh, absolutely. The chancellor-- oh, God, what was the chancellor's name at the time? 
[02:16:44.09] MARILYN SOMERS: Propst. Propst. 
[02:16:45.57] WARD WINER: Propst, yeah, Propst. 
[02:16:46.63] MARILYN SOMERS: I don't know how you say it. 
[02:16:47.53] WARD WINER: Propst, Dean Propst, he said to me, you work with him and help him to integrate and get to know people. And so I took him seriously. So I met with him a couple of times. And it became pretty clear to me that he was a terrible speaker. I mean, he was just an atrocious speaker because I thought, if Propst telling me to help him, I got to say something. So I met with him. 
[02:17:10.61] MARILYN SOMERS: You try to coach him, did you? 
[02:17:11.99] WARD WINER: No, I said-- he said something about, how am I doing? I said, well, to be honest with you, you really ought to look into getting some help on speaking because-- 
[02:17:21.11] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, my God, how did he take that one? 
[02:17:23.47] WARD WINER: Well, I mean, he didn't hit me or anything. But it was the last meeting we ever had. 
[02:17:27.64] [LAUGHS] 
[02:17:28.34] Or at least for quite a while. 
[02:17:29.80] MARILYN SOMERS: That was so cutting off your nose. 
[02:17:31.48] WARD WINER: So, I mean-- 
[02:17:32.32] MARILYN SOMERS: No, he didn't want to deal with any of the realities of anything. 
[02:17:34.64] WARD WINER: Oh, God, he was terrible speaker. 
[02:17:36.02] MARILYN SOMERS: That's why he quickly brought people in from Carnegie Mellon. He surrounded himself with his-- 
[02:17:40.32] WARD WINER: Oh, and he-- 
[02:17:41.26] MARILYN SOMERS: --strange folk. 
[02:17:42.54] WARD WINER: Yep. Well, later, when he was having so much difficulty-- and, in fact, Jackie Ward eventually kind of turned-- 
[02:17:51.08] MARILYN SOMERS: Realized the error of her ways. 
[02:17:51.98] WARD WINER: Yeah, I don't know about the error of her ways. But she wasn't happy with him as president. And Propst contacted me and told me about the difficulties that they were having. And there was no surprise to me, although he knew a whole lot more about it than I did. And he said, we've kind of told him he might not get reappointed if things don't change. He said, now, he's willing to accept some help. So he said, how about you chairing a committee to try to see how we can salvage things? And I said, OK. So he appointed Dick Truly. Robert Hawkins, who was dean of-- 
[02:18:36.69] MARILYN SOMERS: I remember him. 
[02:18:37.25] WARD WINER: --something at that time. John Aderhold. 
[02:18:42.25] MARILYN SOMERS: [LAUGHS] And you guys were going to give him a cure? 
[02:18:45.77] WARD WINER: Yeah. And who else? It was somebody else. 
[02:18:48.25] MARILYN SOMERS: You would've needed a band of holy angels. You know that, don't you? 
[02:18:51.41] WARD WINER: A vice chancellor, whose name escapes me, but he was Propst's number one man. And I think there was another alum. But I'm not sure who. Actually, I think it's the same guy whose name I couldn't think of earlier that owned the building. But, anyway, so we said, OK. So we met. And we decided what we were going to do. The first thing we needed to do is get a copy of the organizational chart of the institute that Crecine had. 
[02:19:26.91] They couldn't come up with one. They finally did eventually. But it was the most contorted damn organization chart. And then we said, OK, what we need to do is we need to interview all his direct reports. And then we'll interview him to see what needs to be done. We interviewed a lot of people. We did it one at a time over in the conference room of the old college of management, which is now where ISYE is. There's a conference room there. 
[02:19:54.95] And, I mean, we would go away just shaking our head because we interviewed one person who was-- I don't remember. It's good that I don't remember their names, but one person who maintained that he was hired for a particular task in a particular area of responsibility. And not too long after he was hired, he went to a social function and met another person. And when they got talking to each other, they found out they both had the same responsibility. 
[02:20:26.76] MARILYN SOMERS: [LAUGHS] So there was tag team, huh? 
[02:20:30.42] WARD WINER: No, it turned out that the other person who had been there longer wasn't doing a good job. 
[02:20:36.16] MARILYN SOMERS: So he just hired somebody else. 
[02:20:37.26] WARD WINER: So he just hired somebody else and didn't tell that person. 
[02:20:39.38] MARILYN SOMERS: Didn't even tell him. 
[02:20:40.50] WARD WINER: But the really funny part about before it was over, when we finally interviewed Crecine, we interviewed him for, I think, a couple of hours. We had all kinds of information from previously. We interviewed him. And when we were done, he got up and left the room. And we were just silent, sitting there, just silent. Didn't know what the hell to say. Finally, Dick Truly spoke up. Now, if you're not aware of it, Dick Truly was head of NASA. 
[02:21:08.44] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, I know him. 
[02:21:09.02] WARD WINER: He was an astronaut. He'd flown in space. 
[02:21:11.98] MARILYN SOMERS: A man of this world and another 
[02:21:14.90] WARD WINER: Dick Truly finally broke the silence and said, this is the most difficult problem I have ever dealt with. 
[02:21:21.71] [LAUGHTER] 
[02:21:22.57] MARILYN SOMERS: To put it mildly. 
[02:21:23.91] WARD WINER: And I said, Good God, Dick, most people say rocket science is the most difficult thing. You were there. And you're saying this is the most difficult-- 
[02:21:33.59] MARILYN SOMERS: He was right. He was right. It was an unsolvable problem-- 
[02:21:37.21] WARD WINER: Yeah, it was. 
[02:21:37.89] MARILYN SOMERS: --because it was a one side. 
[02:21:39.31] WARD WINER: Yeah, we reported to the chancellor as a group. And of course, there was the vice chancellor who was on the committee. And, I mean, they just informed Crecine that they were not going to reappoint him when the time came. And he fought it, went to court and fought it. 
[02:21:56.89] MARILYN SOMERS: He really, I don't think, even recognized it coming. 
[02:22:00.45] WARD WINER: No, I don't think he did. 
[02:22:02.01] MARILYN SOMERS: And yet, giving the devil his due, everybody we've talked to that was around during those times and all, he did have a big picture. The change making that he took place had certainly affected us and has affected Georgia Tech. And it's been good. But PR wise and-- 
[02:22:19.67] WARD WINER: As a speaker, he was terrible. But a fundamental change that resulted from him was the fact that the regents, at that time, decided to change their policies such that the president of any of their institutions cannot have tenure. 
[02:22:38.27] MARILYN SOMERS: And this was a good policy. 
[02:22:40.01] WARD WINER: Yeah. I mean, if you came in from the outside, you could not get tenure. And if you were a tenured member of the-- 
[02:22:47.47] MARILYN SOMERS: Faculty to start with. 
[02:22:48.01] WARD WINER: --faculty itself to start with, if you accepted the job as president, you had to give up tenure. They didn't want to have that hanging over their head. 
[02:22:55.05] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, lesson learned. 
[02:22:56.37] WARD WINER: Yeah, absolutely. 
[02:22:56.83] MARILYN SOMERS: Because he was very difficult. I think it's a miracle that the press wasn't worse than it was. 
[02:23:03.71] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[02:23:04.01] MARILYN SOMERS: It could've been so much worse. It could've killed Georgia Tech. 
[02:23:07.29] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[02:23:08.15] MARILYN SOMERS: I mean, he burned more bridges and stomped on more toes and didn't care more than anybody. And I think he had-- again, changemakers are higher on. But even the students, I mean, he was a bad role model for students. His own children were out of control. I mean, they're just so-- I traveled with him. 
[02:23:28.16] WARD WINER: Is that right? I can tell you. 
[02:23:29.54] [LAUGHTER] 
[02:23:30.82] MARILYN SOMERS: There are stories that are just unbelievable. But, anyway, somehow or other, Georgia Tech survived that. He came in. He was appointed in the end of '88? 
[02:23:41.30] WARD WINER: Yes. 
[02:23:42.14] MARILYN SOMERS: Inauguration in '89 and gone by '90. 
[02:23:46.68] WARD WINER: '92? '93? Something like that, yeah. 
[02:23:48.84] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, so it seemed like a very long four years. 
[02:23:52.64] WARD WINER: It was. Yeah, it was. 
[02:23:53.82] MARILYN SOMERS: Four to five years. And yet it was a relatively short tenure but very difficult tenure. And in the midst of all that, of course, he had the brilliant idea of the Olympics, of the Olympic village and all that. 
[02:24:06.96] WARD WINER: Was it his idea? Or was it dropped in his lap? 
[02:24:09.32] MARILYN SOMERS: It was a combination of the two. 
[02:24:12.58] WARD WINER: How can you go wrong? 
[02:24:13.71] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, well, it was dropped in his lap in some respects. But in other respects, I mean, he did demand that we step above the three-dimensional cardboard model of what the village was like. 
[02:24:24.71] WARD WINER: Oh, that helped sell it. Yeah, no doubt. 
[02:24:26.15] MARILYN SOMERS: I mean, he sold the technology end of it. 
[02:24:28.31] WARD WINER: But it was also part of his downfall because, while this committee was functioning, one of the major criticisms at the time was the guy wasn't around. He wasn't paying any attention to the store, what have you. Well, it turned out he was apparently designing the natatorium. 
[02:24:46.13] MARILYN SOMERS: Micromanaging is what they call it. If you talk to the people who were actually supposed to be doing it. 
[02:24:50.13] WARD WINER: Well, that's what he supposedly was doing. He spending his time designing the natatorium. 
[02:24:54.49] MARILYN SOMERS: And dating a lot, if we want to call it that. 
[02:24:56.51] WARD WINER: Well, that could be. 
[02:24:57.01] MARILYN SOMERS: His social life was very demanding for him at that time, too. 
[02:25:00.35] WARD WINER: I don't know anything about that part. 
[02:25:01.25] MARILYN SOMERS: Because, of course, Barbara had divorced him. And he had the kids and didn't never knew where they were. And it was just a very controversial time. How did we survive it? I don't know. But somehow, we did. 
[02:25:12.55] WARD WINER: You remember Marvin Sledd? Did you know Marvin Sledd? He was a professor in mathematics-- 
[02:25:16.43] MARILYN SOMERS: The name, I know. 
[02:25:17.43] WARD WINER: --for many, many years. He died a couple of years ago. But I took a class from him once. I wanted to study a particular area, variational calculus. And he was teaching the class. So I took a class. He was an excellent lecturer, really excellent. He was prone to say that Georgia Tech is like a great horseshoe crab. It will go on for hundreds of millions of years without any change. 
[02:25:44.17] [LAUGHTER] 
[02:25:45.31] And so there's just a lot of inertia in the place. And we survive. 
[02:25:49.97] MARILYN SOMERS: We managed to survive all that. But it was a very difficult time. 
[02:25:53.33] WARD WINER: It was, very difficult. 
[02:25:54.37] MARILYN SOMERS: Very difficult time with the focus of the Olympics, plus all the controversy he generated with the-- I mean, he knew nothing about relating to alums. He could care less if he ticked off-- there are some influential people that you don't really want to make enemies of. 
[02:26:10.90] WARD WINER: Apparently, he ticked off Coca-Cola folks pretty seriously. 
[02:26:14.26] MARILYN SOMERS: Pretty seriously, yeah. He pretty seriously got every major company in the city after [INAUDIBLE]. 
[02:26:19.64] WARD WINER: Is that right? 
[02:26:20.40] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, so that made it very, very hard for him to be successful with anything. So it was with a great sigh of relief when he wasn't renewed and that they could start looking. Did you get to go be on the second committee looking for president? 
[02:26:37.04] WARD WINER: No. 
[02:26:37.32] MARILYN SOMERS: You passed on that one, huh? 
[02:26:38.48] WARD WINER: Yeah, right. [LAUGHS] 
[02:26:41.46] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, well, what can you say? Everything happens for a reason. But in retrospect, at the time, I could not see a value. But in retrospect, I'm glad that some of the things happened and that we did have structure change in that, I think, Georgia Tech is more vibrant in having some of the new schools. 
[02:26:59.82] WARD WINER: Well, the college of management was a very difficult bunch of people to deal with. 
[02:27:04.36] MARILYN SOMERS: And they gave him more grief than anybody, 
[02:27:06.32] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[02:27:07.17] MARILYN SOMERS: There was a Professor Green over there that-- 
[02:27:08.97] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. Yeah, Bob Green. 
[02:27:10.63] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, Bob Green. We always wondered if he didn't have a contract out on him. We would've blamed him if he did. But some of the other things were good things. The Ivan Allen College certainly was a good thing to come out of it. And I think we'll get a lot of stature in the world. 
[02:27:24.13] WARD WINER: Yeah, it's taking a while to turn that around. It's doing well now. 
[02:27:27.25] MARILYN SOMERS: None of these things come easy. Academia's like the great ship in the water. It doesn't turn. 
[02:27:33.49] WARD WINER: The great horseshoe crab. 
[02:27:34.79] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, it doesn't turn on a dime. But then along came Dr. [INAUDIBLE] and-- I mean, Dr.-- 
[02:27:41.99] WARD WINER: Clough. 
[02:27:42.21] MARILYN SOMERS: Clough. Dr. Clough. And I don't suppose, if somebody was drawing up the peacemaker, they could've found somebody that was more suited to being a peacemaker in that he certainly could speak well. 
[02:27:53.65] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[02:27:54.01] MARILYN SOMERS: Looked the part. That was another thing. I used to come back from presentations with [INAUDIBLE] to take his resume out and look at it because what was on paper didn't match what I had just seen. He didn't ever wear his clothes right. He never spoke right. I mean, he had a very difficult time in the public eye, whereas Dr. Clough just the complete opposite. 
[02:28:15.44] WARD WINER: He's a very good spokesperson, yeah, very good. There was a professor in management, Levy. What the heck was his first name? Anyway, Levy, I forget his first name. Turns out, he was not on the search committee. I didn't know him during the search. Actually, I had met him. I had some earlier dealings with him through the AAUP when I was involved in that. 
[02:28:46.38] But he and Crecine were graduate students under the same professor at Carnegie Mellon. 
[02:28:55.24] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, really? So he knew him from way back when. 
[02:28:57.88] WARD WINER: Levy was ahead of Crecine But he knew him. And I swear to God. Ever since the time Crecine became president, any time I see Levy, which, fortunately, is not very often-- Ferd Levy, Ferd Levy. It's not very often. He says to me, Ward, if you had asked me, this never would've happened. 
[02:29:19.68] [LAUGHTER] 
[02:29:20.34] MARILYN SOMERS: I could've told you, yeah. It's funny about the hindsight of all these things, huh? So did he affect your job at all? Did he interfere with you at all? 
[02:29:29.86] WARD WINER: [INAUDIBLE]? No, I was too small a fry. 
[02:29:32.56] MARILYN SOMERS: Just left you alone? 
[02:29:33.36] WARD WINER: Too small a fry. 
[02:29:34.38] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, so that didn't matter, other than ignoring your advice on how to present a program. OK, well, yeah, he pretty much ignored everybody's advice on that in his own separate way. Once Dr. Clough came into the scene, what changed in mechanical engineering? Or what changes did you see in the institution? From your perspective. 
[02:30:02.33] WARD WINER: Well, it was a big sigh of relief. It's over. 
[02:30:06.61] MARILYN SOMERS: You can stop hurrying up to get the headlines every morning. 
[02:30:09.23] WARD WINER: And yeah, obviously, he's a very personable guy, very good at interacting with people, well liked by the alums and by students, as far as I know, by faculty. 
[02:30:24.29] MARILYN SOMERS: He was just the right peacemaker. 
[02:30:25.85] WARD WINER: And because of his background, I assume, very good at dealing with the politicians and the regents and all that sort of thing. 
[02:30:34.09] MARILYN SOMERS: We've come into a period of quiet, yeah. 
[02:30:36.51] WARD WINER: Well, quiet, but also-- 
[02:30:38.29] MARILYN SOMERS: Progress. 
[02:30:38.99] WARD WINER: Positive, just very positive. And progress, yeah And it's grown a lot, obviously, since then and doing well. 
[02:30:47.17] MARILYN SOMERS: He's proved that you can have change and mandate things without being controversial about it. 
[02:30:53.43] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[02:30:53.89] MARILYN SOMERS: We can retain students without jamming it down somebody's throat. We can make improvements. 
[02:31:00.56] WARD WINER: Well, one thing that he did, which was kind of funny. And I'm not sure people understand it, many understand it to this day. There was a lot of agitation on the part of some faculty to change the titles of unit heads from director to chair. And that was a little bit controversial. A lot of faculty felt strongly about it, that they shouldn't have a director as head of an academic unit. 
[02:31:27.06] MARILYN SOMERS: It should be chair. 
[02:31:27.42] WARD WINER: It should be a chair. Of course, they had a different vision in their mind of what a chair was than Clough did. So finally, I didn't go on very long. Clough sent out a memo. And I still have a copy of it. Effective today, all the academic unit heads will be called chairs and not directors. It was a very short memo. It's a little longer than I'm saying but not a whole lot longer. He said, this change of title shall have no effect on their duties and responsibilities. 
[02:31:58.44] [LAUGHTER] 
[02:32:00.02] MARILYN SOMERS: Give them what they asked for, huh? 
[02:32:01.78] WARD WINER: You want a different name? We'll give you a different name. 
[02:32:03.12] MARILYN SOMERS: We'll give you a different name. We aren't going to give you any more money for that or change your duties. So you went from director to chair. 
[02:32:09.32] WARD WINER: Yeah, that was it. 
[02:32:10.10] MARILYN SOMERS: You were one of the ones that got it, yeah. 
[02:32:12.06] WARD WINER: And of course, a lot of the faculty felt, oh, it's great. We've got chairs now. We don't have directors. But, in fact, the duties and responsibilities hadn't changed at all. 
[02:32:19.94] MARILYN SOMERS: It didn't make any difference at all. But again, give them what they ask for. You relent the little things, and people will embrace the bigger things. I thought that he handled the Olympics pretty seamlessly, considering that he inherited one big, fat mass and was able then to still oversee the Olympics. 
[02:32:37.92] WARD WINER: Yeah, I guess. Right, yeah, he was in before the Olympics. That's right, yeah. 
[02:32:41.68] MARILYN SOMERS: He came in, well, just before. And then, also, there was the change with the chancellor just prior to his coming in. So education had a big change. Fortunately, he got along very well with Dr. Porch. So that was not a problem. In fact, it was looking good all over the state of Georgia, that we finally were going to settle down to people who would get to work and not be Making waves, I guess is the word we want to say. 
[02:33:09.43] WARD WINER: Yeah, no, it's been a good time since then. 
[02:33:12.13] MARILYN SOMERS: When you think back on all these years, almost 40 years of, technically, what, so just shy of that, 38 years? 
[02:33:20.09] WARD WINER: 38 and a half, yeah. 
[02:33:21.31] MARILYN SOMERS: 38 and a half years. When you look at it that way, you've ridden a lot of ups and downs at Tech, dig in, dig out, come up, come down. 
[02:33:32.57] WARD WINER: In general, it's been good. 
[02:33:33.93] MARILYN SOMERS: Overall? 
[02:33:34.93] WARD WINER: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Overall, it's good. 
[02:33:36.87] MARILYN SOMERS: You got good, strong-- 
[02:33:37.41] WARD WINER: Well, if you're ending up on a good point-- [LAUGHS] 
[02:33:39.86] MARILYN SOMERS: And we are. This is a good point. 
[02:33:41.95] WARD WINER: Absolutely, yeah. 
[02:33:42.57] MARILYN SOMERS: I mean, the Woodruff School is doing exceptionally well, in the top 10 in the nation for both graduates and undergraduates, I understand it. You graduate more undergraduates and more graduates than any other engineering school in the country? 
[02:34:00.20] WARD WINER: Yeah, sometimes Penn State at Texas A&M might be close with the undergraduates. But they're not close at the graduate level. And this past year, we were first in bachelor's, master's, and PhD. There are some other schools that do well at the graduate level. But typically, they have much smaller undergraduate programs, like Stanford. 
[02:34:25.64] MARILYN SOMERS: Much smaller than our, then, huh? 
[02:34:26.86] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah, undergraduate, Stanford's undergraduate's very small, very small. They might have-- 
[02:34:32.00] MARILYN SOMERS: What about MIT? 
[02:34:33.72] WARD WINER: It's bigger. It's bigger but not as big as we have. They might graduate, I think, lately, they've been in the neighborhood of 120 or something like that. We graduated 347 or 48, something like that last year. 
[02:34:44.88] MARILYN SOMERS: That's incredible, that kind of a difference. 
[02:34:46.42] WARD WINER: Yeah. At the graduate level, they're not a whole lot different than we are. 
[02:34:50.64] MARILYN SOMERS: But we still rank ahead of them. 
[02:34:53.28] WARD WINER: Well, in the US News and World Report popularity poll, number one is MIT and then Stanford. And then it varies between Michigan, Illinois, and Berkeley, and then us. And sometimes we're a little ahead of them. Sometimes [INAUDIBLE]. Sometimes we're a little behind. 
[02:35:11.72] MARILYN SOMERS: And you say, that's a popularity poll, too. 
[02:35:13.68] WARD WINER: Yeah. The department rankings are strictly beauty contests. 
[02:35:17.90] MARILYN SOMERS: Really bizarre how they do that. 
[02:35:19.20] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[02:35:19.66] MARILYN SOMERS: They can be influenced by the number of percentage of giving on the part of alums. Or there's some really screwy things that go into that. 
[02:35:27.32] WARD WINER: No, no, the beauty contest at the department level is strictly a beauty contest. What they do is-- what they've been doing the last three or four years, they send around, to the deans, a list of-- they send them a package of materials. And one might be a list of all the mechanical engineering departments in the country offering undergraduate degrees. And then they asked the dean to rank them 1 through 5. 
[02:35:57.17] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, so it's that kind of a vote? 
[02:35:58.75] WARD WINER: Yeah. 1 through 5 or you don't know. 5 is exceptional program. 1 is-- I think 2 is marginal. So 1 is something worse than that. And the dean's, I'm sure they all do the same thing our deans do. They take them and send them out to the department heads. They give me the mechanical engineering ones and the nuclear engineering ones and say, you fill it out. 
[02:36:21.25] MARILYN SOMERS: You fill it out. I don't know what's going on. 
[02:36:23.09] WARD WINER: So I go down the list and do my checking. And on the undergraduate list, there's 320 schools. Well, what the hell do I know about 320 schools? 
[02:36:32.99] MARILYN SOMERS: Nobody can know that. 
[02:36:34.09] WARD WINER: No, nobody does. At the graduate list, it's probably only 150 offering graduate degrees. 
[02:36:39.13] MARILYN SOMERS: But that' still too many to know. 
[02:36:39.79] WARD WINER: It is, yeah. 
[02:36:40.85] MARILYN SOMERS: How bizarre. 
[02:36:41.21] WARD WINER: So clearly, past reputation plays a big role. And the halo effect of the institution they're in plays a big role. 
[02:36:51.58] MARILYN SOMERS: Of course, it does. 
[02:36:52.34] WARD WINER: Stanford is Stanford. And MIT is MIT. So they're ME department must be pretty good. 
[02:36:57.44] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, that's what people say. That's the way the judgement goes. 
[02:37:00.12] WARD WINER: When they're ranking the colleges of engineering or the institute as a whole, they use more data. There is some beauty contest element. 
[02:37:12.28] MARILYN SOMERS: I knew there was some kind of data that went in on stuff 
[02:37:14.04] WARD WINER: At the college level, they use things like, oh, a number of PhD students, number of faculty, amount of research dollars-- 
[02:37:23.44] MARILYN SOMERS: That kind of thing. 
[02:37:24.18] WARD WINER: That kind of thing. Plus, reputational, in other words, a beauty contest from other deans and also from industry, selected industry group of people. And those are weighted differently. So that's a little more rational at the college level. 
[02:37:39.42] MARILYN SOMERS: I've heard many people say that they think it's a mixed-- it's a double-edged sword. Do you feel that way about it? Do you think there's an-- 
[02:37:45.76] WARD WINER: In what sense? 
[02:37:46.64] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, that it can harm you as well as help you. 
[02:37:50.34] WARD WINER: Well, it can harm you if you don't rank well. 
[02:37:52.02] MARILYN SOMERS: If you don't rank well, yeah, absolutely. But, I mean, as far as recruiting goes, do you think the youngsters are really influenced? 
[02:37:58.28] WARD WINER: Oh, absolutely. 
[02:37:58.96] MARILYN SOMERS: Absolutely influenced by it. 
[02:38:00.20] WARD WINER: Yeah, absolutely. 
[02:38:01.16] MARILYN SOMERS: Sometimes you know what I hear? That we've got a freshman class that represents 48 States in the Union. You think, how do these people know about this? Why do they come here? 
[02:38:09.46] WARD WINER: It absolutely does. 
[02:38:10.48] MARILYN SOMERS: So it does. That's where it comes from. 
[02:38:12.08] WARD WINER: And the way we easily see it is at the graduate level because, at the school level, we do the admissions, primary responsibility for admissions. And as we started going up in the ranks of the beauty contest, we got more and more and more applications. I mean, they look at it. And, OK, we're number 6 or 7 or whatever. 
[02:38:34.70] MARILYN SOMERS: I can't get into number 1, I'll-- yeah. 
[02:38:36.52] WARD WINER: So they'll apply to three or four places. And one of them is you. They might apply to MIT as well. And occasionally, we can outmaneuver MIT on recruiting a top student. We probably lose more to MIT and Stanford than we gain. But we can still match. And we can easily go one on one against Michigan or Illinois or Purdue or Berkeley. 
[02:38:58.99] MARILYN SOMERS: Interesting, isn't it? 
[02:38:59.97] WARD WINER: Yeah no, there's no doubt about it. Students look at that stuff. And their parents look at it. 
[02:39:03.79] MARILYN SOMERS: Big, big, big game, in a way. It's a big game of Monopoly or something. Take your chances. Wow. 
[02:39:10.17] WARD WINER: Well, that's one thing John White did when he was dean. He put a lot of effort into trying to understand that. And being an industrial engineering type, he got a couple of his logistics faculty to-- 
[02:39:22.41] MARILYN SOMERS: Take a look at it. 
[02:39:23.09] WARD WINER: --study it and see what the weighting factors were and, therefore, put effort in this direction or that direction. 
[02:39:28.45] MARILYN SOMERS: So we could do better. 
[02:39:29.39] WARD WINER: Yeah, and I think he made an impact in that respect. 
[02:39:32.59] MARILYN SOMERS: I didn't know that. But I would agree that it would've had to. How did you make the decision that you were ready to retire? How do you sit back and do that? 
[02:39:46.00] WARD WINER: Well, I'd been thinking about it. A lot of factors go into it. One factor is the fact that, because of when I came, I'm on the Teachers Retirement System of Georgia. And they have a maximum of 40 years of service that you can accumulate. OK, well, about 12 or 15 years ago, I bought in 3 and 2/3 years of service from when I was at the University of Michigan. I could've bought in 6 and 2/3 years or something like that. 
[02:40:18.84] I figured I'd buy that just in case, something happened to me, it would improve Mary's benefits when I died. And then, later, they changed the law on sick leave and allowed you to use unused sick leave towards service. Well, I've rarely been sick. So I haven't used much sick leave. 
[02:40:36.56] MARILYN SOMERS: Accumulated a lot of that. 
[02:40:38.20] WARD WINER: So I have about two and a half years of sick leave credit to count. And I've got the 3 and 2/3 years that I bought in from Michigan. 
[02:40:46.61] MARILYN SOMERS: So you're getting close to that. 
[02:40:47.29] WARD WINER: I've now got 38 and a half years in. So I'm way over the 40. 
[02:40:50.55] MARILYN SOMERS: Oh, you're way over it. 
[02:40:51.09] WARD WINER: So it's costing me to continue to work. 
[02:40:53.97] MARILYN SOMERS: That is pretty crazy how that works out, isn't it? 
[02:40:56.47] WARD WINER: But then, probably the thing that triggered it, quite frankly, for one thing, another thing, I'm 71. OK, I mean, there's a limit. I'm not going to live forever. And I want to have a little free time out there some place. 
[02:41:07.91] MARILYN SOMERS: To do something, yeah. 
[02:41:09.79] WARD WINER: The thing that triggered it and made me move ahead at the time, again, since this is not going to be seen for a long time, I was one of the people interviewed for the provost job when [INAUDIBLE] left. And when I got a call while I was on vacation that said, you're not going to be one of the finalists. I turned to Mary and said, OK, that's it. 
[02:41:31.93] MARILYN SOMERS: That's enough now. 
[02:41:34.15] WARD WINER: I figured, if I got that, I'd be willing to put in another four or five years just because it'd be something different. 
[02:41:40.87] MARILYN SOMERS: A challenge. 
[02:41:42.21] WARD WINER: I had talked to Clough about it. And he said he was looking for somebody for a short time because he wasn't going to be around long. And so he said he saw it as a thing that might be three to five years. And I said, OK, I'll give it a shot. But when I got word that I wasn't in the running, I said, OK, that's it. 
[02:41:58.79] MARILYN SOMERS: Plan B. 
[02:41:59.39] WARD WINER: Yeah, plan B. Well, plan B was already. So that was a year ago last, I don't know, August or-- 
[02:42:07.41] MARILYN SOMERS: That you announced and you've been wrapping-- 
[02:42:09.85] WARD WINER: No, that's when I got the word. So I-- 
[02:42:11.89] MARILYN SOMERS: Started wrapping things up. 
[02:42:13.79] WARD WINER: Yeah, I figured I'd go through Last academic year. But I knew that, if I announced very early, it'd just be a lot of questions and turmoil. You'd be a lame duck. So I waited until November. 1st of November, I told Giddens that I wanted to retire the end of May, which would take me through the academic year. 
[02:42:40.46] MARILYN SOMERS: And he sweet talked you into staying longer. 
[02:42:42.38] WARD WINER: Well, he was kind of slow in getting the process going. But the process has been pretty slow. And so then he approached me and say if I'd stick around for a while. And I said, well, OK, I will, but no longer than the end of November in '07. 
[02:42:56.88] MARILYN SOMERS: Is that final? 
[02:42:58.10] WARD WINER: That's final. That is it. I've filed the papers. I've signed all the paperwork. And he's going to appoint an interim, probably in the next week. He's already settled on somebody. And so he's going to appoint an interim in the next week. 
[02:43:11.10] MARILYN SOMERS: And then that'll free you up, then, too. 
[02:43:13.02] WARD WINER: So I'll be off for December. And actually, he wants me to come back and work in the dean's office half time for a while on some special projects he's got, which I think I'd like to do and will do. 
[02:43:23.96] MARILYN SOMERS: In the long term, what are you going to do? You've got tons of hobbies. 
[02:43:29.58] WARD WINER: Yeah. 
[02:43:30.20] MARILYN SOMERS: Are you-- 
[02:43:31.12] WARD WINER: Well, I would like to do some more traveling, both in the US and abroad. I like to read. I've been taking cooking classes and-- 
[02:43:45.47] MARILYN SOMERS: Gourmet cooking? 
[02:43:46.83] WARD WINER: Well, at the Cook's Warehouse, they run courses. And Mary bought me a gift certificate for courses about a year and a half ago for Christmas, maybe two years ago now. And so I used that up, took three or four courses and, in the process, learned that, if you become-- they call them an assistant, like a TA at the classes-- then you go free. And you actually get credit towards new classes. 
[02:44:11.37] MARILYN SOMERS: So are you doing that? 
[02:44:12.25] WARD WINER: Yeah, yeah. I've been working as a TA. 
[02:44:14.07] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, good for you. 
[02:44:16.11] WARD WINER: Cooking classes. 
[02:44:16.85] MARILYN SOMERS: Good for everyone who knows you because you'll become a very good cook, then, no doubt? 
[02:44:20.99] WARD WINER: I don't know about that. But Mary's a very good cook, so it's tough to compete with her. But I enjoy it. 
[02:44:26.21] MARILYN SOMERS: You do. 
[02:44:26.75] WARD WINER: I like photography. I like to read. I like music. 
[02:44:30.87] MARILYN SOMERS: So you don't plan on being bored at all. You're going to keep real busy. 
[02:44:34.63] WARD WINER: She plays bridge much better than I do. 
[02:44:37.05] MARILYN SOMERS: Don't you have a home up on the lake, too? 
[02:44:39.19] WARD WINER: Yeah, Lake Hartwell, we've got a place. 
[02:44:40.83] MARILYN SOMERS: So there's always something to be done with one house or another. 
[02:44:44.09] WARD WINER: So I've taken some bridge lessons. And we hope to play in some sanctioned bridge tournaments and see how we do. 
[02:44:51.71] MARILYN SOMERS: A little competition to keep the blood going, huh? 
[02:44:53.93] WARD WINER: As I say, I want to have more control over my time for the time I have left. 
[02:45:00.09] MARILYN SOMERS: Very good. It's a plan. Tell me about the children now. Let's start with Mathew with one T. 
[02:45:06.37] WARD WINER: OK. 
[02:45:07.27] MARILYN SOMERS: What does Mathew do for a living? 
[02:45:09.01] WARD WINER: He's an institutional stockbroker for Robinson-Humphrey, doing very, very well, much better than I ever dreamed of-- 
[02:45:15.25] [LAUGHS] 
[02:45:16.75] --fortunately. 
[02:45:17.19] MARILYN SOMERS: Where did he go to school? 
[02:45:19.01] WARD WINER: Well, all the kids graduated from Riverwood High School here. And he went to Georgia State and studied finance in the business program, got a bachelor's degree, and then went to work for Robinson-Humphrey, actually working, I think, in the computer support initially. And then people identified him as somebody with a good gift of gab and a really hard-working guy. And so he's [INAUDIBLE] doing very well. 
[02:45:45.32] MARILYN SOMERS: Is he married? 
[02:45:46.76] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah, he's married. His wife graduated from Emory undergraduate and then Georgia State with a master's degree. She's a CPA. And she's taking care of the kids and doing consulting now as a CPA. 
[02:46:04.54] MARILYN SOMERS: And how many children do they have? 
[02:46:05.66] WARD WINER: Three. Three. And I can name them, all three. The oldest one is Kelly. She's a junior at Marist. And Christy is the next one. And she's in the eighth or ninth grade at Marist. And their son is Jonathan. And he's in Jackson Elementary School over on Mount Paran. They're all great kids. 
[02:46:34.07] MARILYN SOMERS: Next up would be Jim. 
[02:46:35.25] WARD WINER: Jim, yep. Jim was-- well, Matt was born January 1, 1959. Everybody says, oh you missed an income tax deduction. And I say, no, we didn't because we didn't have any income at the time. 
[02:46:48.41] MARILYN SOMERS: It didn't matter. 
[02:46:49.81] WARD WINER: Jim was born in June of 1960 in Ann Arbor, both of them in Ann Arbor. Jim went to Georgia Tech architecture, bachelor's and master's degree, participated in the France, Paris program for a year, and then in the summer program in England for a year during his master's. He started out working for-- well, he did a lot of work for a couple of different architects and some on his own while he was still a student. 
[02:47:22.35] And then he worked for Jova/Daniels/Busby for a few years. And then he and his partner, who also worked at Jova/Daniels/Busby, split and started their own firm, Menefee and Winer. 
[02:47:35.93] MARILYN SOMERS: And he's done so well. 
[02:47:37.19] WARD WINER: Yeah, they're doing very well. 
[02:47:38.31] MARILYN SOMERS: It's gotten much, much recognition. 
[02:47:40.31] WARD WINER: Yep. They recently bought property over on Bradford Street-- or Brady? Brady? 
[02:47:45.93] MARILYN SOMERS: Brady Street. I've been there. 
[02:47:47.11] WARD WINER: Have you? Yeah, they did a great job. Took an old taxi muffler shop or something like that, and turned it into a really nice, modern building. 
[02:47:55.59] MARILYN SOMERS: It's wonderful. 
[02:47:56.51] WARD WINER: Yeah. And, yeah, they're doing well. I don't how many they've got, maybe 18 or so employees or something like that. 
[02:48:02.45] MARILYN SOMERS: And he married Anna. 
[02:48:04.05] WARD WINER: He's married to Anna, who's from Winchester, Kentucky. And I think she graduated from Emory. No, no, she graduated from-- oh, God. what's the place up in South Carolina, just north of Greenville? Starts with an F. 
[02:48:26.52] MARILYN SOMERS: Furman? 
[02:48:27.04] WARD WINER: Furman, yeah. She graduated from Furman in art, I believe. 
[02:48:31.00] MARILYN SOMERS: Yes, in art, for sure. 
[02:48:32.34] WARD WINER: Yeah, she worked at the High for a while, assistant curator for photography. And she does various jobs now. But she's mainly mother. She's got three kids. 
[02:48:45.14] MARILYN SOMERS: And they are? 
[02:48:46.40] WARD WINER: Oldest one is James. He's about eight, I think, eight. 
[02:48:50.44] MARILYN SOMERS: Sounds good. 
[02:48:51.32] WARD WINER: And the next one is Ellen, who's probably six, I would guess six, seven, maybe seven. And Mary Victoria, who's five, I think, four or five. And they go to, maybe Morningside School, I think, someplace over there. And they live in Ansley Park. 
[02:49:15.16] MARILYN SOMERS: And what about Paul? 
[02:49:16.84] WARD WINER: Paul went to Tech. 
[02:49:19.24] MARILYN SOMERS: Did he? 
[02:49:19.68] WARD WINER: Yep. Got a bachelor's degree in computer science. Went out to work for a few years and decided being a computer software guy wasn't for him. He wanted more interaction with people. So he came back to Tech, got a, what is it, a master of management science, like an MBA, with Tech and went to work for Curt Salmon for a few years. Part of the time, he was up in the Northeast, lived in Princeton, working out of their office there. 
[02:49:51.33] And he met his wife there, Carol, who is a Georgia Tech industrial engineering graduate. And they continued to work there for a while and realized that there was no way to have a family because they saw each other about every third weekend or something. She was traveling to Italy. And he was traveling to California and New England and Canada. And so they left, came back to Atlanta, and has worked for two or three outfits since then. They recently moved to Fairfield, Iowa. 
[02:50:24.21] They're both meditators and TM. And there's a big TM community in Fairfield. So they wanted to go there for a while. They kept their home over by Little Five Points and are going to rent it out, but bought a place in Fairfield. And he actually is working for or doing a consulting job for JC Penney's in Dallas and commutes on the weekends from there to Fairfield, Iowa. 
[02:50:52.41] MARILYN SOMERS: Is that not quite a commute? 
[02:50:54.19] WARD WINER: Oh, well, it's quite a commute, yeah. A couple hour drive and a long air flight, and he spends four days a week down there, and then comes back for three days in Fairfield. They're redoing JC Penney's catalog and internet sales. He's heading up a group of JC Penney employees. Yeah, so-- 
[02:51:16.21] MARILYN SOMERS: They have children? 
[02:51:17.19] WARD WINER: Yeah, they got two. Yeah, that's right, OK. I'm trying to make sure we come out with 11. They have two. The oldest one is Phillip. He's about eight. And then a girl named Chase, who's probably six, I would guess, something like that. 
[02:51:40.50] MARILYN SOMERS: Good, you're doing fine. 
[02:51:41.66] WARD WINER: Yeah, I'm doing OK. It turns out, three of the boy grandchildren were born within a month or two of each other. 
[02:51:48.90] MARILYN SOMERS: They're all going to be cousins of about the same interests and ages. What about Mary Margaret now? 
[02:51:53.38] WARD WINER: Mary Margaret went to Riverwood High School. And then she went to two or three different colleges. She went to Valdosta for a year. She went to Georgia for a year. She finally got a bachelor's degree from Grand Valley College in Grand Rapids. 
[02:52:11.40] MARILYN SOMERS: Up in Grand Rapids, hmm. 
[02:52:12.64] WARD WINER: She moved up there after she went to Georgia and lived with my brother for, I don't know, six or eight months to establish residency. And then she moved out and lived on her own for a while and went to school, worked and went to college. She met a guy there who had been married before and had two kids. And they got married. And she basically raised those two kids from teenagers until they've gone out on their own. 
[02:52:43.27] And they have three kids. She married Don Phillips, who is a tool-and-die maker for General Motors. 
[02:52:55.03] MARILYN SOMERS: So they live in Michigan? 
[02:52:56.25] WARD WINER: Yeah, she lives in Middleville, yeah, Middleville, just south of Grand Rapids. And they have three kids, the oldest one is Christopher, who is eight, like the other, roughly eight-year-old types, and then a daughter named-- oh, you're going to get me here. 
[02:53:18.21] MARILYN SOMERS: I can't help you. I don't know. 
[02:53:19.75] WARD WINER: I know you can't help me. But it's-- 
[02:53:21.21] MARILYN SOMERS: It'll come to you. 
[02:53:23.49] WARD WINER: Well, Christopher and Caitlyn, OK, Caitlyn, she's probably about six. And then a boy who's four, I think, his name is Adam Ward. His second name's Ward. 
[02:53:38.13] MARILYN SOMERS: Do you ever get all of these youngsters together? 
[02:53:40.59] WARD WINER: Oh, we used to get them all together quite often, actually. 
[02:53:43.51] MARILYN SOMERS: Holidays coming, are you all going to be together? 
[02:53:44.61] WARD WINER: Mary would come down for Christmas, for example, or Thanksgiving or something. And actually, they came down for my retirement. So they were all here for the retirement party. 
[02:53:56.27] MARILYN SOMERS: What fun to have them all together. 
[02:53:58.27] WARD WINER: And until a month ago, Paul lived here. So now you're 8 out of the 11 were here in town. 
[02:54:06.01] MARILYN SOMERS: Isn't that something? 
[02:54:07.07] WARD WINER: Oh, yeah. It was a real mob scene around here if we had them all in. 
[02:54:09.67] MARILYN SOMERS: I'm trying to think of a Christmas morning with that many children around. 
[02:54:12.23] WARD WINER: Well, no, we didn't do Christmas morning. We always had Christmas Eve, which was pretty chaotic. 
[02:54:17.44] MARILYN SOMERS: In its own right, yeah. And do you ever take them up to the lake to the cottage up there? 
[02:54:21.04] WARD WINER: Yeah, we have. We have. Not so much lately, earlier, we did. But it's hard to get them-- well, I mean, they do individually. Some of the ones who live here will go up and use it. 
[02:54:29.54] MARILYN SOMERS: But not all together at one time. Living farflung makes it harder. 
[02:54:32.00] WARD WINER: We have had them all together. But I think before the last two were born, probably. It's been several years. 
[02:54:37.96] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, I'm glad that they all came for your retirement. 
[02:54:39.64] WARD WINER: Yeah, it was great. 
[02:54:40.34] MARILYN SOMERS: That was great. I knew there were a lot of little bodies around there. But I didn't know that they were all your little bodies. Well, congratulations, grandpa. You did it. 
[02:54:48.34] WARD WINER: Thank you. [LAUGHS] 
[02:54:49.36] MARILYN SOMERS: I wish I had a prize to give you. But all you have from this is satisfaction. 
[02:54:53.46] WARD WINER: That's right. 
[02:54:54.36] MARILYN SOMERS: 50 years from now, when this has been transferred to who knows what medium-- 
[02:54:58.48] WARD WINER: And who knows who Ward Winer is? 
[02:55:00.48] MARILYN SOMERS: Well, they'll always who you are. 
[02:55:02.18] WARD WINER: No, I know. But I told you the story about Cheng Lin Chen, when they didn't know who he was. 
[02:55:06.84] MARILYN SOMERS: At Georgia Tech, no, we probably won't. But your family better, my goodness sakes. 
[02:55:10.52] WARD WINER: That's true. 
[02:55:11.91] MARILYN SOMERS: I remember a very prominent alum who was a president of his company. And he retired. And he said he went back just two weeks later. And they had already changed the receptionist. And when he went in, she wanted to know who he was. Excuse me, sir, where do you think you're going? Who are you? He said it was such a shock to him. And he had owned as well as be president of that company. But he had sold it. 
[02:55:34.37] WARD WINER: Good grief. 
[02:55:34.89] MARILYN SOMERS: Just like that. He said, boy, talk about putting you in your place. We keep ourselves humble. Well, I think you've done a fine job recounting. 
[02:55:44.91] WARD WINER: Well, I lasted a whole lot longer than I expected. I'm sure, a lot longer than you expected. 
[02:55:48.37] MARILYN SOMERS: No, no, not at all. No, I knew we were going to be here for a while. You can ask Scott. 
[02:55:52.15] WARD WINER: By the way, how do you know Jim and Paul so well? 
[02:55:55.83] MARILYN SOMERS: I don't know Paul very well. But I know Jim really well, just from being an alum at Tech. And he was involved with young alumni when I was in there. And we've just gotten to be friends. And a couple times a year, we have lunch together. 
[02:56:07.21] WARD WINER: He talks about you, and you talk about him. But I didn't how the two of you got together. 
[02:56:14.10] MARILYN SOMERS: He gave me the grand tour of the Biltmore ballrooms. 
[02:56:16.72] WARD WINER: Oh, is that right? 
[02:56:17.28] MARILYN SOMERS: Went over, went through all that with him. 
[02:56:18.80] WARD WINER: Yeah, that was a great opportunity for him. They did a great job at it. 
[02:56:22.68] MARILYN SOMERS: And I knew Anna when she worked at the High. 
[02:56:25.24] WARD WINER: Oh, is that right? 
[02:56:25.88] MARILYN SOMERS: Yeah, so it's just, even though Atlanta's a big city, sometimes it's a small community, knowing people. So, yeah. And Jim will be most pleased that we've done this because my dad's got some great stories. So I said, well, don't worry. As soon as he retires, I'm going to nail him down. So it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing that with us today. 
[02:56:45.56] WARD WINER: Thanks for the opportunity. 
[02:56:46.56] MARILYN SOMERS: We took the whole afternoon away from you. But-- 
[02:56:49.06] WARD WINER: That's all right. 
[02:56:49.76] MARILYN SOMERS: You're worth it. Every minute of it, it was worth it. You'll be glad to have it. 
[02:56:53.42] WARD WINER: Good. Thank you. 
[02:56:54.20] MARILYN SOMERS: Thank you. 
[02:56:54.82] WARD WINER: Thank you.