Kelly

by Clarence L. Johnson

  Alice and I packed our things in a single suitcase and headed for Sands on the train. It was a six or seven mile walk from the railroad station to our aunt’s house, on a hot June day, and when we got there we were told that we could not stay that summer. So, we picked up our suitcase, put a long branch through the handle so we each could carry one end, and trudged back to the train station for the return trip home.

  Our parents were stern but not severe, serious in manner but considerate of us children. I never was struck by either of them. We children were expected to show responsibility. I had access to my father’s tools and a workshop from the time I was seven or eight years old. I could use any of his tools I could handle, so long as I didn’t break or lose them and always put them back in place.

  Some of my earliest lessons in construction were in watching my father build toys for me. One winter day, in a very, very cold barn which housed his shop, he constructed a rocking horse from a piece of birchwood, half a dozen pieces of wood, and some rope. It was a fine, sturdy horse when finished—painted white, with the birch body section left in its natural state.

  He also built me a wagon, painted green, with a remote control brake that I could operate with either knee or hand. The wheels were purchased, as was some hardware, but the rest was the product of his workmanship. It, too, was very sturdily constructed, and I used that wagon for many years.

  My father was very mechanically inclined, too, as well as being a proficient carpenter and mason. An all-around craftsman. My respect for tools and machinery I learned early in life from his example. He worked throughout his life in the building business and taught me a great deal about construction. It was to be very useful to me.

  My father’s hands were so gnarled and calloused from handling rough bricks under every sort of condition that he ceased to have much feeling in them. The hard life once caused even him to rebel. He spent one whole paycheck on drink. It was the only time.

  Our parents instilled a love of learning in us children. They always encouraged us to study in school and to read on our own. Next to my father, I credit Andrew Carnegie with being the most important influence on my early life through the library he had donated to Ishpeming—as he had in many other small towns whose natural resources had helped build his fortune. In Ishpeming, of course, it was the iron ore. He returned an even richer resource.

  I went to the library almost every day with Putsie. It opened a whole new world to me. I discovered Tom Swift and read not once but several times Tom Swift and His Aeroplane, Tom Swift and His Electric Automobile, Tom Swift and His Submarine, and on through the entire series. Tom Swift was a very highly skilled designer, engineer, pilot, and operator of many kinds of locomotion, and an adventurous young man. It became my goal to be just like Tom.

  I read other books on aircraft—the Rover Boys, Collins’ book on model airplanes—and decided by the time I was 12 years old that I would be an aircraft designer. My whole life from that time was aimed at preparing for that goal. I put together my first book on aircraft, mostly from clippings, and designed my first plane—the Merlin battleplane—named for the magician of King Arthur’s court. I made hundreds of model airplanes.

  The other kids resented my studious habits as well as the good marks I consistently got in school and would taunt me. I didn’t let it bother me. But it made me one of the fastest runners in Ishpeming. The kids would lie in wait for my daily return from the library and in winter would fire off snowballs stuffed with coal chunks.

  There was a fearful period of two weeks, though, when my future was in serious doubt when I was hit in the left eye with an arrow fired by Helen while playing cowboys and Indians with her and Clifford. I was blinded.

  My mother’s training and experience as a nurse helped her keep calm and take charge. She had served in the local hospital during the dreadful influenza epidemic that spread worldwide after World War I. None of our family contracted the disease, and Mother worked long hours at the hospital while Agnes and Alice took care of the household.

  She carefully removed the arrow, which had entered alongside the eyeball, mopped up the blood, and determined that the eyeball itself had not been hit. But I was in such a state of shock that I lost sight in both eyes. I was terrified. It was two long unforgettable weeks before my sight returned.

  I continued to read everything I could get my hands on about aviation. The war had made the airplane a reality, and every now and then we actually could see one as a barnstormer came through selling rides for $3 apiece.

  My enthusiasm for the subject spilled over into my more conventional studies. One day while I was expounding on current events—aviation, of course—the school principal, then Mr. Walter Griese, visited our classroom. He thought it was good that the kids were studying such subjects outside the routine curriculum, and he invited me to address a luncheon meeting of the local Lions Club on the future of aviation.

  This was quite an honor for me, and my parents were so proud that they bought me my first pair of long pants for the event. In white shirt and tie, I made my debut as a speaker on aviation. I was still so short that they stood me on a chair to speak. I was pleased to receive quite a lot of applause.

  When I was about ten years old, I saddled our horse, Mac, and rode out to western Ishpeming where Emil was working at lathing, and I learned that trade. He and my older brother Arthur already had married and moved on, as had the older girls, while I was growing up. There was quite a few years’ difference in our ages, and I hardly knew them.

  The building business was picking up in Ishpeming, and at an early age I could work as a lather. Laths are wooden slats, four feet long, that are nailed on studding and two-by-fours in new construction as the base for the finished coat of plaster or wood siding. I became quite proficient. By the time I was 12 years old, I was contributing $7 every week for room and board. I had to make $10 to have a little left over for myself. I could put on 40 bunches of laths a day at 25¢ per bunch. From then on I was self-supporting.

  An impoverished but high-spirited and determined youngster, Kelly with his younger brother Clifford. Below, a book written at age 12, an example of Kelly’s early interest in the fascinating new field of aviation.

  The improvement in the building industry convinced my father that he should move our family from the small city of Ishpeming to Flint, a much larger city offering more opportunity. So in 1923, when I was 13, we moved to Flint, some 300 miles away on Michigan’s lower peninsula.

  We couldn’t take a dog with us in the passenger car of the train, and we could not afford the cost of shipping by crate. My last view of Ishpeming is of Putsie running along beside and then behind the train, trying to keep up.

  2

  A Good Move

  THE FORTUNES OF OUR FAMILY improved significantly with the move to Flint. There was lots of building, and my father was able to establish himself in the construction business. I worked for him and others all through high school and junior college. And my mother no longer needed to take in washing nor work outside the home.

  My goal remained to become like Tom Swift, and I studied toward that end. Flint had an excellent public school system, and, as before, I enjoyed very much attending classes. The city had an even larger library than Ishpeming’s, and I quickly became a regular visitor there, too.

  It was a year yet before Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic solo crossing would awaken the world to the excitement and potential in the air, but in 1926 there was enough stirring of interest that the city’s Kiwanis Club sponsored a model airplane building contest for schoolchildren.

  I carved out a model of my Merlin battleplane, and it won second prize—$25. That didn’t cause much excitement at school. I was always talking aviation, making it the subject of my reports when given a choice, and getting A’s in my studies.

  After graduation from high school, I was tempted to digress from my dedicated course. After all, I had worked hard and saved $350 from lathing, and I thought I owed it to m
yself to take a ship and work my way around the world, have some adventure. But one of the dedicated teachers it has been my good fortune to know, Miss Bertha Baker, spent most of one afternoon explaining to me why there should be no gap between high school and junior college. She convinced me. And I entered Flint Junior College.

  In junior college, I was able to take engineering courses for the first time. I studied physics, mathematics, and calculus. I reached the point where I could tutor in calculus and make some money. I loved mathematics and still do. It was a very good junior college, and I received a solid background for my more advanced university courses later.

  As often as I could on vacations and weekends, I worked at lathing. My average pay per day was $10 to $12. I’d have to put up 2,000 laths for that $10. That took a lot of nail pounding.

  In summers, I also worked for the Buick Motor Car Company, swinging fenders on the production line or working on motor repair and block test. I would be so dirty and oily after a day’s work that I was not allowed to sit down on the streetcar going home. It really didn’t bother me too much. I was reading and studying all the time, standing up. In that period, I even tried to understand Einstein. Only 12 people in the whole world were supposed to be able to do so; I wanted to be the 13th!

  At long last in Flint I had my first airplane flight. It cost $5 for three minutes. It was a big clumsy machine—an old Standard biplane, a four-passenger model with a single pilot. We got all the way up to 700 feet before the engine quit and we had to make a forced landing. But it was fun! It was noisy, it was drafty, it was great! I still wanted to design airplanes.

  Actually, I began to think maybe I should learn to fly because all of the early great designers—Glenn Curtiss, the Wright brothers, Glenn Martin—they all knew how to fly.

  So one rainy morning after I had been graduated from junior college but had not yet enrolled in a university, I went out to Bishop Airport in Flint, prepared to hand over my entire fortune at the time, $300, for 10 hours of flight instruction. In the shack that served as his office I found the pilot, Jim White. He talked to me for some time, inquiring about what I hoped to do with my future.

  “Kelly,” he said then, “you don’t want to start off on your career by giving me $300 to learn to fly. That won’t get you far enough. You have good grades; you will go a lot farther if you go on to the university. I won’t take your money. You don’t want to end up as an airport bum like me.”

  Well, he needed that money perhaps even more than I did. But he was a big man. It was another fortunate encounter for me to meet another person who guided me with wisdom at a critical point in my life. I took his advice, and I’ve always been thankful for it.

  Flint Junior College had a championship football team. I played on it. After graduation, several of us were offered scholarships at a university in the South known for its athletic prowess. I went down during summer vacation to get in some football practice.

  When it came time to enroll, I was planning to select courses that could lead to my transferring to aeronautical engineering in another university after a year. I soon found out what my options were.

  “Here, kid, here’s your curriculum,” the coach told me one day.

  “But I haven’t chosen my courses yet,” I said, surprised.

  “Yes, you have,” he insisted. “You’re a coach’s assistant. You’re taking physical education.”

  “But, sir, I’m going to be an engineer. I’ve wanted to be an airplane designer all my life. I want to study aeronautical engineering,” I protested.

  “Kid, you’re a coach’s assistant.” He repeated, “You’re a coach’s assistant. Take it or leave it.”

  “Not me.” And that was that.

  My next move was to phone the University of Michigan about athletic scholarships. They offered them, and my grades were good enough for admission, so I got in my trusty Ford Model T roadster and drove up to Ann Arbor to try for a scholarship there. My $300 would do no more than pay the tuition.

  Just about the second thing I found out was that an undergraduate was not allowed to have a car on campus. So I decided to take my car home and then come back to try out for football.

  On the way, I was forced off the road and across a culvert by a big Pontiac. I was draped across the windshield and had a deep gash in my forehead. Worse than that, the cut later became infected. I couldn’t go out for football.

  It was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because now I had to try to find work in an engineering line. I did, but not before I had washed at least 10,000 dishes, as many glasses, even more silverware, and carried out tons of garbage working in a fraternity house that first semester. The year was 1929, and there was almost no building at Ann Arbor so I couldn’t work at lathing.

  The best thing about that kitchen job was the way we were treated by the wonderful black cook. She saw to it that her twelve fellows in the kitchen working for their meals were fed first before the fraternity brothers—and with the best portions.

  After one semester, I became assistant to Professor Edward A. Stalker, head of the aeronautical engineering department at the university. It was a job I was to keep throughout my university career. But more importantly, it was my first work in engineering.

  3

  Becoming an Engineer

  THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN dates from 1817 as a territorially-chartered college in the then-frontier town of Detroit. The present campus was established at Ann Arbor in 1837. It is one of the early great universities, and a beautiful one—its big brick buildings of classical design, ivy-covered, amid neat lawns bordered by trees that flower in season, on a spacious, sprawling campus. It can be at once formidable and welcoming to an incoming student.

  But the real beauty of it for me when I enrolled in 1929 was the distinguished faculty. Many had impressive national, even international, reputations in their fields. I thought I never could be so smart as these men. I couldn’t wait to begin my classes.

  At that time, in order to get a degree in aeronautical engineering you had to study all the different fields of engineering—civil, chemical, electrical, mechanical—leading to the study of aeronautical engineering. It was an excellent curriculum because it provided a very good basic education in everything it took to design and build an airplane.

  My first professor was Felix Pawlowski, teacher, pioneer aircraft designer, and philosopher. The Polish and Russian universities had been into aviation early and were in the forefront of aeronautical knowledge at that time. Pawlowski, a Pole, had worked in Russia with Igor Sikorsky on the world’s first four-engine airplane in 1913. He had been trained by Professor Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Paris tower, and worked with him on a wind tunnel. Professor Pawlowski was responsible for bringing the first wind tunnel and the first aeronautical engineering curriculum to the University of Michigan.

  He taught my first course in aerodynamics and helped me get the first engineering jobs that would pay my way through school. He, like some of the other professors, had contracts outside the college. In the wind tunnel, I worked for him on design of the Union Pacific streamlined train, on a smoke-removal project for the city of Chicago, and on one of the very early proposals for generating energy with a wind machine.

  The professors were broadminded people, with interests and contacts outside the university. They took a personal as well as professional interest in their students. One day Professor Pawlowski taught me an important lesson in keeping an open mind. He took me down to a bank vault where he had some wax impressions of hands, “spirit” hands, he had from a seance. They were entwined in a manner that could not be explained. This eminent scientist was willing to consider their validity. He wanted me to learn to keep an open mind.

  “Don’t automatically write anything off,” he said. “Anything.” I’ve remembered that.

  Professor Edward A. Stalker, author of a basic text on aerodynamics and an outstanding mathematician, was head of the aeronautical department. He, himse
lf, not some registrar, helped me plan my course of study.

  After I had shown enough academic progress he selected me as student assistant and I was able to earn enough money to quit the lowly job in the fraternity kitchen.

  As head of the aeronautical engineering department, Professor Stalker operated the wind tunnel and got me involved in wind-tunnel testing.

  One day I asked Professor Stalker, “Could I rent the wind tunnel when it’s not needed by the university and get some jobs on my own?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  So for $35 a day, plus the power charges, my best friend in college, Don Palmer, and I became part-time proprietors of the University of Michigan wind tunnel. The money didn’t mean anything to the university; renting the tunnel afforded them a chance to see what the students could do.

  Immediately, I approached the Studebaker Motor Company. It was obvious that the wind tunnel could be very useful in designing streamlined automobiles. We got an assignment to test the Pierce Silver Arrow, which was to become one of the early “totally-streamlined” cars. We knew all the tricks on how to reduce drag caused by air resistance. We found, for instance, that the big ugly headlamps on Studebaker cars were eating up 16 percent of the power the engine developed at 65 miles an hour. We managed to get them shaped into the fenders. We worked on a lot of other problems and ran many, many tests.

  So we worked not only for Professors Pawlowski and Stalker but for ourselves. Tutoring in calculus also brought me $7.50 an hour.

  Some of the courses, seemingly not much related to aircraft, turned out to be especially useful to me later.

  Mechanical engineering, for example. For our final examination, we students had to make a heat balance evaluation of the university’s power plant, a large steam facility with four big boilers, that provided not only heat but power. I, an aeronautical engineer, was put in charge of the other mechanical engineers for the three-day continuous test, measuring coal input and then accounting for all the energy through the entire process down to the ashes. It was a valuable lesson in energy balance.