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D-DAY AND CAMP EVANS

6/6/2019

“Full victory - Nothing else.” Those were General Eisenhower’s orders to the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division at the Royal Air Force base in Greenham Common, England, as they waited to board their planes for the first assault wave.

Lt Col Simon R Sinnreich, America’s highest ranking Jewish officer during World War II, had a similar take.
Our family didn’t know him during that era, but Si and his wife Emilie became close friends of my parents soon after we moved to Long Island in 1956 - a friendship that lasted to the end of their lives and has continued into the next generation of Sinnreichs and Stodolas. Although it wasn’t easy to get Si to talk about the War or his service in Europe, my husband, who has a gift for drawing people out, once asked him how many troops the generals were prepared to lose in the Battle of Normandy. Si’s answer was stark and simple: “As many as it took.”

For most of us, the term "D-Day" evokes haunting images of wave after wave of landing craft approaching the Normandy beaches, of the hapless paratrooper left hanging for hours after his chute became entangled on a church steeple in the nearby village of Sainte-Mère-Église, and of course of the Normandy American Cemetery with its seemingly endless expanse of crosses. On this 75th anniversary of D-Day, when solemn military ceremonies and moving first-person accounts by the few remaining veterans, now in their nineties, flood the media, these heroic exploits and appalling sacrifices claim most of our attention.

Diorama at the InfoAge Science and History Center of an American paratrooper caught on a church steeple.

World War II era mobile radar unit on the site of the former Camp Evans, now the InfoAge Science and History Center.

Less well known, though also worthy of recognition, are the contributions of the so-called “wizard war” to this historic victory. Here are a few words about Camp Evans’ participation in this effort:

To induce Field Marshal Rommel to hesitate or possibly even to deflect the German Panzer Divisions to the wrong place, Eisenhower stationed a shadow invasion fleet in Northern England, complete with dummy inflatable tanks, and leaked misleading information through his network of spies to suggest the invasion would take place at Calais, not Normandy. He knew, however, that this ruse would not be enough to deceive Rommel, because the Nazis had radar units all along the French coast searching for signs of an invading fleet. The Allies' only hope of evading these tireless sentries was to destroy as many of them as possible and then to use the same strategy of adding competing information to the mix.

The radar scientists at Camp Evans, along with their counterparts in Great Britain, the US Navy, Harvard, and MIT, were tasked with developing the equipment needed to carry out these plans. Their efforts enabled bombers to zero in on German radar sites, to interfere with (jam) their communications, and to introduce confusion by dropping “chaff” - mostly strips of aluminum - to create a cloud of indecipherable images on Nazi radar screens, ploys that caused Rommel to delay sending Panzer Divisions to Normandy long enough for the Allies to establish a beachhead. As a result, the German air response was next to non-existent. In addition, radar sets designed at Camp Evans landed on the beaches to protect the troops as they fought to fend off Panzer attacks.

By D-Day, radar and its military uses had clearly come a long way in both sophistication and precision since the Chain Home network described in my most recent post. Using radar not only to obtain information but to spread disinformation, then called radar countermeasures, is now known as Electronic Warfare or EW, the field in which my father continued for the remainder of his career.

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A VISIT TO LITTLE GLEMHAM

5/27/2019

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My father’s maternal grandfather, Arthur King, emigrated to the U.S. in the late 19th century from Little Glemham, Suffolk, England, where his father and then his brother had served as clergymen at St. Andrew's Church. He left behind a large and close family of siblings, and for the rest of his life, black-and-white photos and letters written double-sided in a spidery script on flimsy "airmail" paper flowed freely across the Atlantic.

My great grandfather Arthur King. He contracted polio late in life and walked with a cane.

At a family wedding a few years ago, surrounded by the people I love best - my husband, my daughters, my grandchildren, my siblings and their families - I had the sudden insight that as the oldest grandchild of Edwin and Beatrice King Stodola, I am the Stodola family matriarch.

With great honor comes great responsibility! In particular, I find myself heir to most though probably not all of the Stodola family archives. This material did not come to me all at once, but piecemeal over the course of many decades. I can't even remember how it all made its way to me. Some of it I've had as long as I can remember. Some my father packed away in cardboard cartons when we moved from New Jersey to New York. Once my mother died, he never again opened them or made any attempt to sort their contents. Later the boxes, still unopened, were carted from our basement on Long Island to a storage unit in Florida. My stepmother tried valiantly over time to identify and get things into the hands of the right Stodola child (mostly me, because she knew I would care and share), But like me, she was hampered by cryptic labels (my favorite: "him and me") and nonexistent dates, and in addition knew far less about our family history than I.

Although I have eight great grandparents and sixteen great great grandparents, just like everyone else, the Kings have always seemed a little larger than life to me because I heard so much about them from my grandmother, who as an adored only child maintained close ties with her father’s relatives in England; and because the Kings were a prolific and retentive lot, leaving a rather large paper burden behind for their descendants to sift through. Over the years, I have threaded my way through most of the documents in my possession and succeeded in identifying many though not all of the photos. I have also connected, through DNA matching and more traditional methods, with second and third cousins who still live in the UK and are much more steeped in King history than I.

In order to become an American citizen, my great-grandfather had to renounce allegiance to Queen Victoria. His citizenship papers are part of my King family collection.

In 1998, before genealogy tourism was even really a thing, Ovide and I made a fascinating visit to the tiny town of La Copechagnière near the Loire Valley of France, birthplace of his ancestor Paul Vachon who in the 17th century brought his three sons to the New World, giving one the “dit” name of Pomerleau. As a family history buff with a keener interest in how our forebears participated in the larger sweep of human history than in an exhaustively-documented series of begats, I concluded that If one hopes to learn about the life and times of one's ancestors, there is no substitute for walking where they once walked.

I vowed on the spot that we would one day make a similar pilgrimage to Little Glemham.

“One day” finally arrived more than 20 years later, this past April, when we embarked on a two week tour of London and environs that included an exploration of Little Glemham in Suffolk and a visit with two second-cousins-once-removed in Sussex. Except for the stress of driving on the left, along narrow roads with many roundabouts, which fell solely upon Ovide, and the stress of navigating, which was my bailiwick, our vacation could only be described as idyllic. Even the weather cooperated - we never even unpacked our umbrellas.

The rest of this essay is about our trip to the UK.

* * * * *

In case you are wondering where to find Little Glemham, population 187, it’s located just a couple of miles south of Great Glemham, population 224. Even the Brits have to google to find it. And yes, it’s really spelled that way - two m’s, no n’s.

When we started planning our itinerary, we realized we could include Easter in our schedule, which seemed a propitious time to visit St. Andrew’s. I emailed the current rector, who assured me that although St Andrew’s is now part of a “benefice” of eight churches - necessary because attendance had dwindled too much to justify weekly services at each church - an Easter service was indeed planned for St. Andrew’s.

On our first full day in East Anglia, knowing we might not have an opportunity to poke around much on Easter Day, we stopped by St. Andrew’s, which looked exactly as I remembered it in my photographs. The only problem was, it also looked like every other church in every other nearby village, even to the little gatehouse in front, with only minor variations in size and layout. These parish churches date back to the Middle Ages - starting life as Roman Catholic churches and after Henry VIII becoming Anglican - and I guess having hit on a successful formula, the builders decided to stay with it.

We were greeted by two devoted volunteer caretakers, Rod and June Clare, who were busily cleaning and decorating the church for Easter. No need to knock - like all the little churches we visited it is open 24/7, with signage apologizing profusely if for any reason it might have to be closed for even a few hours, just please close the door when you leave to keep the birds out - and we were welcome to stay as long as we wished.

Rod Clare sharing some of St. Andrew's rich history with me.

June Clare dusting and polishing.

St. Andrew's has been fortunate in its history and is happily well-loved by those few who remain on its rolls. Since it was first built in the 12th century, it has benefited from several updates in its first few centuries, from a restoration project in the 1850s, and from extensive recent repairs. Though the departure of the lead bellringer several years ago led to a silencing of the bells, they can now be heard once again thanks to a troupe of ringers that circulates among the local churches. (Listen to the bells of St. Andrews!)

Then...

Babies have been baptized at this font since the 13th century.

...and now.

The window on the north wall, given by parishioners and friends in honor of Arthur's brother, was the work of a local artist, Margaret Rope of Leiston.

After we finished our tour of the sanctuary, Rod led us to the King family plot in the churchyard, where we found monuments marking the graves of my great great grandfather and several of his descendants. Though the stone was partially effaced with time, we could make out the words “parish priest” faintly etched on the side. My grandmother had always referred to him as “rector," so I consulted Professor Google and found that the terms rector and parish priest, along with vicar and curate, are used more or less interchangeably despite barely perceptible differences in their technical definitions. (My brother, who has spent lots of time in the UK, claims that “understanding the ins and outs of the Anglican Church is like cricket - if you weren’t raised with it, it will always be a Mystery!”)

I assumed at first that the charming old home next to the church was where my great grandfather had grown up but later learned that by the time the Kings came on the scene, the rectory had been relocated about a mile away, to a house large enough to accommodate Richard Henry II, his wife Fanny, and their twelve children. A sign in front of that building (now privately owned) identifies it as the "Old Rectory", presumably making the one next to the church the old Old Rectory.

The original rectory, next to the church.

The newer "Old Rectory," about a mile from the church, where the Kings lived.

* * * * *

We arrived early on Easter Day so that we would be sure to find seats. We needn't have worried - the six of us who attended could each have occupied a whole row with room to spare. I was repeatedly struck by the thought that Little Glemham was once home to enough parishioners being born, getting married, suffering, dying, and attending church each and every Sunday to provide Richard Henry King II with year-round full-time employment. He would probably roll over in his grave to learn that the attendees at the 2019 Easter service barely outnumbered the clergy, largely because Ovide and I were there and another man was in town for his father’s funeral, and that the current rector is a woman - who rushed off at the end to conduct another service in another part of her benefice.

* * * * *

Also in honor of Easter Day, Glemham Hall (more properly Little Glemham Hall) was open for a tour of the premises. Such tours are common in the UK, as many of the beautiful old Elizabethan stately homes that once formed the backbone of England's social, economic, and governmental system struggle to maintain themselves in a state of “arrested decay.” Today the key employees are more likely to be event planners than butlers. Unlike many such tours, however, this one was conducted by the lord of the manor himself, who had grown up in those 80-some rooms and knew it as no docent ever could.

The house was built by the DeGlemham family in the mid 16th century, replacing the moated manor house their forebears had built on the site in the 13th century. In 1709 the North family purchased the property, along with the lordship of the manor, and shortly thereafter made major structural changes to give it the beautiful Georgian facade it boasts today. During the latter half of the 19th century, when my great great grandfather was rector of St Andrew’s, the mansion was occupied by Alexander George Dickson, a Conservative Member of Parliament and second husband of the widow of Lord North.

Think Upstairs Downstairs. Think Downton Abbey. Think (as did I) of the rector of St Andrew’s being honored by an occasional invitation to tea at Glemham Hall.

Beautiful Glemham Hall

Phillip Hope-Cobbold, surrounded by his ancestors, welcoming his guests.

A modern painting of the Glemham Manor grounds, showing Phillip's two sons playing lawn tennis in the background.

The current lord of the manor is Major Philip Hope-Cobbold, a descendant on his mother’s side of the Cobbold family, who made their fortune in the 18th century by founding a major brewery. The Cobbolds bought the house from what was left of the North family in 1923, so in fact Philip Hope-Cobbold’s forebears just barely overlapped with the Kings’ tenure. Still, the tour was both intimate and amusing, and Philip himself was totally charming, leaving us satisfied that we had gained at least a little insight into a social system that somehow allowed the Kings in their rectory to interact in a carefully choreographed way, friendly but at a distance, with the occupants of the nearby manor house.

* * * * *

As luck would have it, East Anglia, land of my father’s forebears, also played a critical role in the history of radar during World War. The Bawdsey Radar Transmitter Block, just 15 miles from Little Glemham in the village of Bawdsey on the Suffolk coast, was the first operational radar station in the world, where British scientists and engineers secretly gathered during the 1930s to demonstrate that radio waves could in fact be used to locate moving targets. Chain Home, code name for a series of early warning radar antennas strategically placed all along the British coastline to detect and track incoming aircraft, fanned out from Bawdsey.

During the Battle of Britain in 1940, their resources stretched almost to the breaking point, the British sent a delegation to the United States to propose a marriage of British science and knowhow with American industrial capability. Public sentiment in America favored neutrality; Henry Tizard, head of the mission, took the bold step of showing the Americans the technical innovations they had achieved without any promise of reciprocation. As Tizard hoped, the sheer impact of British superiority in the development of radar was sufficient to convince the Americans it was in their own best interest to support the British effort, and thus began the amazingly productive British-American collaboration in the development of radar.

It was just around this time that my father left his entry-level job at the War Department assigning radio frequencies to Army facilities ("boring!") to begin his fledgling career as a radar scientist. Although the Tizard Commission visited Bell Labs in New Jersey and Columbia University in New York City, I have found no evidence of their having stopped in Belmar - and in fact the subsequent locus of collaboration focused on the creation and development of the famous Rad Lab at MIT rather than on work already in progress by the Army Signal Corps at Camp Evans. Still, it seems likely the American commitment to the British war effort, cemented by the Tizard Commission, set the stage for my father’s career in radar research and his particular expertise in moving target detection.

Although we didn't have a chance to visit the Bawdsey Radar Museum, we did spend a couple of engrossing hours at the Parham Airfield Museum near Little Glemham, housed in the original World War II Control Tower of Framlingham Air Force Station #153. The museum is dedicated to the 390th Bombardment Group, which carried out more than 300 combat missions in the Boeing B17 “Flying Fortress,” during which 19,000 tons of bombs were dropped and 342 enemy aircraft were downed. Nearly 200 American planes never returned, and today being Memorial Day, it seems especially fitting to honor the more than 700 service members killed in these risky missions. Also worthy of mention are the humanitarian flights undertaken just before V-E Day to supply desperately-needed food to the Dutch.

In a world where Americans aren’t universally welcomed or appreciated, it was heart-warming to bask in the affection and gratitude with which the Yanks are still, even after all these decades, remembered at Parham.

Ovide owned a Hallicrafter SX28 receiver as a teenage ham radio operator. More recently, he and some fellow Club members restored one at Station W8UM. So he was delighted to find one on display at the Parham Airfield Museum.

* * * * *

Over the past year or so I had become friendly with my DNA match Jane, a second-cousin-once-removed who is also descended from Richard Henry II, so we spent a few days at an inn near her home in Sussex, south of London. Jane and her husband David turned out to be the most gracious hosts imaginable. Jane is a superb cook who served up steak and kidney pie and other traditional delicacies, and David entertained us with a video he had made for the BBC back in the 1980s in which he persuaded some friends to help him mow his lawn by staging a very amusing lawnmower tango worthy of Monty Python. We also watched an episode of Escape to the Country, the BBC version of House Hunters (but much better), featuring a visit to the one-of-a-kind Black Cow Pure Milk Vodka distillery developed by a well-known maker of cheddar cheese in West Dorset - where their daughter (my third cousin) happens to be employed.

Cousin Jane introduced me to her cousin (and like Jane, my second-cousin-once-removed), Ian, and we enjoyed a delightful luncheon with him and his wife Nathalie. Ian, unlike me, is a bona fide genealogist, so it was gratifying to be able to help him fill in the blanks on Arthur’s family (including five generations of descendants with the middle name of King).

Of all the things he shared with me, nothing was more thrilling than his photos of the Boys’ Butterfly Collection. One of the few pieces of information I could coax from my father about his relationship with his grandparents was his fond memory of butterfly collecting expeditions with Arthur. Thanks to Cousin Ian, I now understand that this activity was not just an idiosyncratic passion of Arthur's, it was part of a King family tradition that he must have hoped my father would enjoy and carry on.

My great grandparents (Arthur and Vergetta Sayers King) with my father.

The King Boys' Butterfly Collection

After our time with Jane and Ian, we had one day left to tour Sussex and decided to spend it exploring Canterbury and its Cathedral. Coincidentally, the date of our visit (April 25) was probably very close to the date more than six centuries before on which Chaucer’s fictional pilgrims were busy concocting tales to entertain their fellow adventurers as they wended their way towards the Canterbury Cathedral. Even from today’s perspective, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are amazing structures, but to appreciate them fully, it is necessary to imagine them rising up almost literally out of nowhere, with nothing nearby of anywhere near the same magnitude; and then to imagine yourself a penitent who has never been more than a few miles from where you were born, whose sole experience with churches is with something on the scale of St. Andrew’s in Little Glemham. No wonder the pilgrims felt themselves in the presence of something supernatural and otherworldly.

* * * * *

My grandmother’s stories had given me the impression that a long line of Kings had been rectors of St. Andrew's in Little Glemham since time immemorial. In actual fact, my second great grandfather Richard Henry King II appears to have been the first to serve in that capacity, succeeded by his son Edward Septimus King (younger brother of my great grandfather Arthur, and of Richard Henry III, grandfather of my cousins Jane and Ian).

Richard Henry King II (1824-1886)

Edward Septimus King (1864-1925)

I have no further evidence of a King dynasty in Little Glemham. Richard Henry II himself was in fact baptized not in Little Glemham but in Mortlake, south of London, where the King family had apparently resided for a very long time: The King family crest that my cousins regard as authentic (as opposed to a somewhat different version painted by my grandmother that was a prominent part of my childhood iconography) is labeled “King of Mortlake/Arms granted 1589." I don't know the profession of Richard Henry King I, my third great grandfather, but like his forebears he was buried in Mortlake. His father, my fourth great grandfather Dr Charles King II, was a physician who lived and died in Mortlake.

Dr. Charles King II (1730-1814)

For much of its history Mortlake ("mort" apparently meaning "salmon," not "dead") was officially a village, though a village large enough to support a variety of industries including potteries whose products are still very much in demand, a tapestry works, a sugar refinery, and breweries at various times in its history. Its dreamy beauty was captured by JMW Turner in two landscapes painted in 1826 and 1827, depicting views of and from a large town house then known as Mortlake Terrace, commissioned by its owner. Currently Mortlake is a suburban district of London and a popular sleeper community.

In Little Glemham it was possible to walk where my ancestors had walked because the landscape has retained its small-village character and hasn’t changed beyond recognition. Probably Mortlake would have been more of a challenge.

At any rate, a quest for another day.

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ROSIE

3/11/2019

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Late last fall we visited a superb traveling exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan called “Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, and the Four Freedoms.”

In late 1940, against the backdrop of a long-simmering war that was starting to boil over, President Franklin D Roosevelt was preparing for his upcoming State of the Union address, struggling to find a way to express his longstanding conviction that the our response to any world crisis, whatever it might be, should not be simply an expression of fear. (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he had famously said in 1932, speaking not of war but of the Great Depression.)

Then, on January 1, 1941, while crafting his third draft of his message to Congress, Roosevelt was struck by what he believed to be an inspired way of encapsulating his vision for both America and the world - that is, by enumerating what he called “The Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The peroration he dictated to his secretary at that moment was retained almost verbatim in the actual speech five days later.

How disappointed Roosevelt must have been, then, when the major American newspapers, while covering the address in detail, pretty much ignored the four freedoms passage. Even after the US entered the War in December of 1941, polling results showed that although 80% of Americans responded favorably to the underlying ideals, fewer than 25% could name even one of Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”, and 61% had never even heard of the four freedoms at all. As a catchy slogan Americans could unite behind, the four freedoms were a nonstarter.

"The Four Freedoms" on display at Camp Atterbury.

And then, almost miraculously, the four freedoms were rescued from the dustbin of history by the painter Norman Rockwell, who, wanting to do his part to support the war effort, retired to his studio in Arlington, Vermont in 1942 and in the space of seven months translated the four freedoms into four compelling images. Although the subject matter was taken from the everyday life of small-town America, they were in many ways aspirational rather than realistic. As Rockwell knew well, not all Americans enjoyed all four freedoms and some enjoyed none. Nonetheless, the scenes were recognizable to all, and the four freedoms, so abstract in Roosevelt’s words, became memorable in Rockwell’s hands.

Images and descriptions of these beloved paintings can be seen here. They appeared as covers on four consecutive weeks of the Saturday Evening Post in February and March of 1943, as well as on posters issued by the US Government Printing Office and on postage stamps. A photograph in the Camp Atterbury, Indiana Archives dated April 12. 1943, showing a WAC and a soldier flanking a four-freedoms poster, suggests that they were widely distributed on military bases (likely including Camp Evans).

* * * * *

Although the Four Freedoms paintings were the centerpiece of the exhibit, it encompassed much, much more, covering Rockwell’s growing commitment to contributing to the War effort in a meaningful way, and later to the advancement of civil rights. The work of other artists and writers also appeared, along with photographs and an evocative assortment of memorabilia.

As I wandered through the aisles, I felt sure there was a blog post here. After all, Rockwell’s fame as an artist/illustrator peaked between 1941-1946. My parents subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, for which Rockwell created more than 300 cover illustrations over the course of his 47 year association with the publication. I remember looking forward to each issue as soon as I was old enough to read, always hoping Norman Rockwell’s instantly recognizable work would be featured on the cover, since I enjoyed both the visual humor and the satisfying sensation of “getting it.” And yet I can’t recall any specific discussions of Norman Rockwell, and when I polled my siblings, neither could they. I can only conclude that Norman Rockwell was so much part of the water we swam in, the air we breathed, that his work was too familiar and omnipresent to be worthy of comment.

* * * * *

The Four Freedoms were in some ways a turning point in Rockwell’s work, transforming him from an illustrator for whom the war effort was simply something he had to capture as part of his weekly deliverable to a painter with a much more ideological commitment and a will to determine how he could use his special gifts to contribute to that effort. A fire in his studio at around that time destroying all his irreplaceable costumes and props provided him with an additional impetus to focus on contemporary issues.

One outcome of all this introspection was Rockwell’s focus on a series of “characters” who came to stand for the American “can do” response to wartime mobilization. Perhaps the most notable was Private Willie Gillis, who appeared on several Post covers. Another, painted not long after the Four Freedoms tetralogy, was Rosie the Riveter, who appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on May 29, 1943.

I always loved the idea of Rosie because of what she represented - a woman who, when the men were called away to fight a war, willingly did the work of the world, supplying both wartime needs and what was needed on the home front, and was paid for it. But no matter how often she was admonished that once the War was over she would have to cede her job to a returning serviceman who needed the work to support his family, that genie could never quite be put back in the bottle, and Rosie unexpectedly turned into an agent of radical social change.

Rose Balaban LaMay Stodola (1921-2017)

I also felt a special affinity with Rosie for a more personal reason: In 1968, my widowed father married a woman who had actually been a Rosie. My stepmother Rose (yes, that was really her name) was a gifted pianist who as a young woman had performed in Carnegie Hall; but when the War broke out she went to work as a welder at Grumman Aircraft on Long Island. After the War she resumed her musical career, working as a music teacher in the Suffolk County School System, but she always enjoyed talking about her service as a real live “Rosie.” Rose was a kind-hearted and good-humored woman, not unlike my mother; she nursed my father throughout his final years as he sank deeper and deeper into the fog of Alzheimer’s, and for this I shall always be grateful.

So imagine my surprise, as a self-professed Rosie buff, to learn at the Rockwell exhibit that 1) Norman Rockwell had painted an enormously popular picture of Rosie the Riveter, with which I was completely unfamiliar; and 2) the image I and most others knew as Rosie was not the one Rockwell had painted and was possibly not even Rosie.

How could this be?

* * * * *

Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter (1943)

The answer is that “Rosie the Riveter” actually started out as a song, written in 1942 by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. There was no real-life Rosie; or perhaps more accurately there were thousands. As Robert Lissauer, a business partner of Loeb’s, later recounted, “They wanted to write a song about women who were working for the war effort for the country. So they just made up the name ‘Rosie the Riveter.’ You pick a name for the alliteration and you go ahead and write it.” The song was recorded by numerous artists; one, by the big band leader Kay Kyser, became a national hit.

The song inspired a number of paintings, of which Rockwell’s was the most popular and widely known at the time, but far from the only one. Rockwell’s Rosie wore a blue jumpsuit, with a rivet gun in her lap, a sandwich in her hand, and a copy of Mein Kampf beneath her foot. Her lunchbox was labeled “Rosie,” a backlink to the popular song by Evans and Loeb. Rockwell’s Rosie had red hair and was so hefty and muscular that Rockwell felt he had to apologize to his neighbor Mary Doyle, a much more petite woman who had served as his model.

The painting behind me in the upper right is the one now celebrated as Rosie.

Among the many other contemporary Rosie and Rosie-ish images was the one with which we are most familiar today, a determined woman with her dark hair swept back by a polkadot bandanna and flexing her biceps, with a text balloon asserting, “We Can Do It!” This image, painted by a young artist named J. Howard Miller, was commissioned by Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1943 as part of a series of posters boosting support for the war effort on the home front. It was displayed for a couple of weeks in factories in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, then replaced by the next-up poster. Fewer than 1,800 copies were printed.

It is not clear that the woman depicted in Miller's poster was ever intended to represent anything other than a generic woman who should be welcomed - temporarily - into the workforce, an idea that met with considerable opposition despite the obvious need for many extra pairs of hands. Nothing on the poster identifies the woman as Rosie or hints that her job was riveting (as opposed to welding or even mopping floors) - though the popularity of the Evans and Loeb song probably made Rosie spring to the minds of many viewers.

And there things stood for decades, until circumstances conspired to create a need for a heroine like Rosie. The 1980s marked the start of 40th anniversary celebrations of World War II (including my father’s largely unsuccessful attempt to commemorate Project Diana in 1986). It was also the time in which the second wave of feminism was winding down, having for the most part (with the glaring exception of its failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment) met its goals, and many women were encouraged by the legislative and social victories their efforts had brought about. The National Archives, faced with the budget cuts of the Reagan era and looking for a way to generate income by capitalizing on both World War II nostalgia and the feminist wave, somehow hit upon the Miller image, licensed it, and plastered it on tee-shirts, mugs, and other souvenirs. And the crowd went wild!

Although licensing Rockwell’s Rosie would have been a much more expensive proposition, there are probably additional reasons why his painting was passed over for this campaign. Miller’s portrait, more feminine than Rockwell’s, was less likely to create uneasiness around the issue of gender bending. The Miller painting is also less of a period piece; “We Can Do It,” though at the time it implied “win the war,” translates more fluidly to the hope of achieving other goals than does the symbolism of Rosie tromping on Mein Kampf. The choice of Miller’s painting, far from being obvious, was a stroke of genius. Its moment had arrived.

What is harder to fathom is the alchemy by which Miller’s painting came to occupy Rosie’s identity, probably displacing Rockwell’s Rosie for all time.

* * * * *

So here are a couple of my faves from the Four Freedoms exhibit:

The Marble Champion (1939)

Back to Civvies (1945)

More or less bookending the War era, these paintings both appeal to me for their engaging portrayal of youth. "The Marble Champion" shows a girl ready not only to compete with the boys but to win; with her red hair and resolute expression, she could have been a young Rosie the Riveter. "Back to Civvies" is to me a poignant reminder of how very young were the still-growing boys sent off to do battle on faraway shores.

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JACK DEWITT: "A LUNAR LOVE AFFAIR"

2/21/2019

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John Hibbett DeWitt, Jr was many things to many people over the course of his nearly 93 years:

He was Nashville through and through, from his birth on February 20, 1906 to his death on January 22, 1999. His father was a judge in the Tennessee State Court of Appeals. He later attended Vanderbilt University and, after an interruption in 1929 to work in Bell Labs in Washington DC, in those days sort of a quasi-graduate school for aspiring engineers, he returned to complete his degree. For the rest of his life, he left Nashville only when he was needed elsewhere, and always returned when it became possible to do so.

Jack DeWitt at WSM, standing 4th from left (Grand Ole Opry Archives)

He was a seminal figure in the Golden Age of Radio. In 1922, at the age of 16, he drew on his skills as an amateur radio operator (N4CBC) to launch Nashville’s first broadcasting station in his parents' living room - the 15-watt WDAA, commissioned by the Ward-Belmont school for advertising purposes. WDAA lasted about a year. He then took on a much more ambitious project when he helped install the transmitter for WSM, Nashville’s first commercial radio station, which took its name from the slogan of its sponsor, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, "We Shield Millions.” WSM first signed on in October of 1925 and a couple of months later introduced the show that would make Nashville and country music famous around the world, the Grand Ole Opry, now approaching its 95th year on the air. In 1932, after another stint at Bell Labs (now in New York), he returned to Nashville to become chief engineer at WSM. where he oversaw installation of its new 878-foot tower and 50 Kw transmitter, operating on a clear channel of 650 kHz (meaning that no other station in the country could share that frequency). After sundown under good conditions, WSM's AM signal can "skip" across the ionosphere, reaching perhaps 35 states. The cultural impact of bringing live country music and the diverse performers who made it into living rooms across America, if only for an hour a week, can hardly be overstated. From 1947 until his retirement in 1968, he served as President of WSM AM, FM, and TV. In an innovation that was pure DeWitt, WSM was the first TV station in the US to broadcast near-real time weather satellite photographs.

He was passionate about astronomy, an interest solidified in 1934 when he and his brother Ward built a 12-inch Cassegrain telescope, grinding the mirror themselves. In 1947, upon his return to Nashville following completion of his mission at Camp Evans, he built a dry-ice refrigerated photoelectric photometer that subsequently served as the basis for many Vanderbilt masters’ theses, bringing photoelectric photometry to Nashville and indeed to the whole Southern US. Although I and others think of him as first and foremost a radio man, the American Astronomical Society regards hims as one of their own, stating in their obituary that “the world lost a pioneering astronomer."

At least temporarily, he was a military man - though perhaps less in the tradition of stoic and unquestioning obedience than in the macho Chuck Yeager tradition of having the “right stuff.” When WWII broke out, he left WSM and his beloved Nashville to answer the call of duty and join the Army, becoming a pioneer in the development of RADAR (an acronym only coined in 1940) when he was assigned to the Evans Signal Laboratory of the US Army in Belmar NJ. By 1943, at the age of 37, he had become Director of the Signal Laboratory, supervising the work of many thousands at employees at the height of WWII.

And on January 10, 1946, he accomplished the goal for which he will always be best remembered, when the Project Diana team he assembled after the War ended successfully bounced radar waves off the moon.

* * * * *

Jack DeWitt and King Stodola, meeting and greeting visiting dignitaries who came to verify DeWitt's moonbounce claims, on a cold January day in 1946.

To my father, Jack DeWitt was both friend and hero - two roles seldom combined in one and the same person. But perhaps most importantly, considering the circumstances that brought them together, he was a good boss:

“Col DeWitt was director of the Laboratory,” my father wrote in a letter in January of 1986 (hoping - in vain - to interest a reporter in a 40th anniversary feature on Project Diana), “but he was no figurehead participant; he was the conceiver of the project and had undertaken trying to perform the experiment before he entered the Army - his original experiment failed because of known equipment inadequacies; he is a skilled engineer and his extensive participation was essential to the project’s success.”

The feeling must have been mutual, for of the 1,200 or so employees remaining at Camp Evans by 1946 - about 70 officers, the rest (like my father) civilians - he assembled an elite team of five experienced radar engineers, including himself, and of those, selected my father to serve as scientific leader. As I observed in an earlier post, my dad was just the sort of man Jack DeWitt would like and respect - "an engineer with good social skills and expertise in moving target detection (in this case a very large moving target). His approach to everything, from household repairs to shooting the moon, reflected the can-do spirit that Americans brought to World War II - work rapidly and intensively, use and modify materials already on hand, and then test, test, test." They also shared a connection to the state of Tennessee - DeWitt as a lifelong resident, my father, who resided there during his middle school years, when many of his adult interests developed.

At any rate, the two men clearly worked superbly well together and forged a lasting bond, remaining in touch with one another until my father's death in 1992. I never heard my father speak of him with anything but the greatest affection.

* * * * *

The title of this post, "A Lunar Love Affair," was taken from an overview of Project Diana by Trevor Clark that appeared in the IEEE Spectrum in May, 1980. The love affair began in earnest during the three years he spent at Bell Labs between 1929 and 1932, when he became deeply engrossed in the study of astronomy - even then with a special fascination for the moon. When he returned to Nashville, as noted above, he found that his brother Ward had also been bitten by the astronomy bug, and the two built a telescope together which they undoubtedly aimed at the moon.

As early as 1935, he attempted unsuccessfully to receive noise from the then newly-discovered Milky Way. Nothing daunted, he continued thinking about extraterrestrial communication, and by 1940, more specifically about the moon. On May 21, he famously wrote in his notebook: "It occurred to me that it might be possible to reflect ultrashort waves from the moon. If this could be done, it would open up wide possibilities for the study of the upper atmosphere. So far as I know, no one has ever sent waves off the Earth and measured their return through the entire atmosphere of the Earth." He went on to describe his attempt the previous evening to reflect 138 MHz (2-meter) radio waves off the moon, using an 80-watt transmitter and receiver he had developed and built for radio station WGN in Chicago. The experiment failed.

Fate handed DeWitt a second chance to attempt a moonbounce in 1945, when his demobilization was delayed for several months after World War II ended. He quickly assembled a small team of his most skilled engineers and gave them access to all of Camp Evans' resources, including in the Laboratory's Theoretical Studies Group (in particular the mathematician and astrophysicist Dr. Walter McAfee, without whose elegant computations of the velocity of a position on the moon relative to a position on earth, the project could not have succeeded), the Antenna and Mechanical Design Group, and others.

It was DeWitt who christened the experiment Project Diana, after the Roman goddess of the Moon, stating a little crudely, "the Greek [sic] mythology books said that she had never been cracked." His choice led to the American tradition, which continues to this day, of naming space missions after figures from ancient mythology.

To Jack DeWitt, failures were just speed bumps on the road to success. He thought about his "negative result" in 1940 and carefully considered how his little team could modify equipment already on hand - time was of the essence and funds were limited - to improve their chances of succeeding. The antenna and Dr McAfee's calculations needed to compensate for Doppler shift have been described elsewhere in this blog. To address the problem to which he primarily attributed his previous failure, insufficient receiver sensitivity, DeWitt settled on a crystal-controlled receiver and transmitter specially designed for the Signal Corps by radio pioneer Edwin H. Armstrong, to improve frequency stability. "We realized that the moon echoes would be very weak," he later recalled, "so we had to use a very narrow receiver bandwidth to reduce thermal noise to tolerable levels." They chose a wavelength of 2.7 meters - short enough, they believed, to penetrate the ionosphere.

Initial efforts to hit the moon were frustrated repeatedly, by dodgy equipment and possibly (as later suggested by team member Dr. Harold Webb) by their ignorance of a phenomenon known as the Faraday effect, which could cause the signals to be rotated as they passed through the ionosphere and escape detection.

Finally, on January 10, 1946, it all came together. The first signal was broadcast just before noon, and 2.5 seconds later - the amount of time required for a round trip of about 500,000 miles - the echoes lit up a 9" cathode-ray tube and produced an 180 Hz beep amplified by a loud speaker. Minutes later, when the moon moved out of range, testing ended for the day. Although the source of the echoes was inferential, DeWitt later remarked that it had to be the moon "because there was nothing else there but the moon."

Ironically, DeWitt himself wasn't present on that fateful day. "I was over in Belmar," he confessed later, "having lunch and picking up some items like cigarettes at the drug store (stopped smoking 1952 thank God)." Testing was repeated daily for the next 3 days, however, and then on eight additional days during the month, so he eventually had ample opportunity to enjoy the fulfillment of his dream.

The equipment, however, remained "haywire," as DeWitt put it, and some of the media excitement that followed was actually based on simulations, recordings, and scripted interviews. When a couple of prominent colleagues from the MIT Radiation Laboratory arrived to observe a test carried out under my father's direction, what happened was...nothing. As DeWitt recounted the story later, "You can imagine that at this point I was dying. Shortly a big truck passed by on the road next to the equipment and immediately the echoes popped up. I will always believe that one of the crystals was not oscillating until it was shaken up or there was a loose connection which fixed itself." Cheers erupted from the bystanders.

Such a project clearly needed a military justification, and DeWitt found it in a directive from the Army's Chief Signal Officer to develop radars capable of detecting missiles coming from the Soviet Union. Since no such missiles were available for tests, DeWitt argued, the Moon could serve as a handy stand-in. But DeWitt himself was more interested in its potential for space exploration, and radio man that he was, in the project's implications for communication. In his visionary notes of 1940, he wrote "There are times when communication by this method might be extremely valuable such as during magnetic storms and daytime radio "blackouts". This may provide a means in the future of bringing television programs over long distances, such as across the oceans." According to Harold Webb, Project Diana's potential for communication was still his obsession in 1945: "He thought TV signals could be bounced off the moon and spread to one-half the earth." Nary a word about its military implications was spoken, at least to those with whom he worked most closely.

* * * * *

A brief postscript: Anyone who has followed this blog will not be surprised to learn that DeWitt shared with many of his fellow radio engineers, including Armstrong himself and of course my father, a fascination with towers - and the bigger the better.

In 1928, WSM was assigned the frequency of 650 kHz, giving it membership in the highly select club of Class 1-A clear-channel broadcasters. To take advantage of all this power and obtain nationwide coverage, the station under DeWitt's supervision erected an unusual diamond-shaped vertical tower (manufactured by Blaw-Knox) in 1932 to support the station's new 50,000-watt transmitter. Topping out at 878 feet, it was at that time the tallest antenna in North America.

Can a tower possibly be too tall?

DeWitt and his crew of engineers soon noticed that the tower was actually causing self-cancellation in its "fringe" reception areas, keeping it from reaching fans in Chattanooga and Knoxville, and in 1939 it was trimmed to a mere 808 feet. It is now known that the optimal height for a Class A station on that frequency is about 810 feet, so - close enough. The lopped-off portion was recycled as a flagpole at a nearby school, where it remained for more than 50 years.

During World War II, the tower was assigned to service as a backup relay station for transmissions to submarines should ship-to-shore communication be lost.

The tower, still standing proud just south of Nashville in Brentwood, has been designated a National Engineering Landmark and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. In 2001, when the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum moved to a new facility in the heart of downtown Nashville's arts and entertainment district, its design incorporated a replica of the distinctive diamond-shaped tower on top of the Rotunda, in recognition of WSM's revered place in country music history - thanks in no small part to its tower. It is among the oldest operating broadcast towers still in use, and for tower-philes everywhere, a must-see.

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SPOOKY CAMP EVANS

10/30/2018

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Hallowe’en is a big deal at InfoAge.

Director Fred Carl and his band of enthusiastic volunteers have made great progress in taming and refurbishing the interior spaces, including some truly stunning exhibits - space exploration, of course, but also World Wars I and II, vintage computers, shipwrecks, model railroads, and military technology, to name a few.

The grounds, however, are still largely frozen in time, dotted with an assortment of mobile radar units, jeeps, and outbuildings ranging from the merely quirky to the downright bizarre.

Making a virtue of necessity, InfoAge has embraced its own spookiness by turning the run-up to Hallowe’en into a month-long fear-fest. Every Friday and Saturday of October, from 7-11pm, Camp Evans Base of Terror (CEBOT) is open for business. It’s the major fund-raiser of the year.

* * * * *

When my husband and I traveled to New Jersey in August of 2017 to celebrate my father’s election to the InfoAge Wall of Fame, we devoted an afternoon to an unofficial self-guided tour of the grounds. Fortunately the campus is open to the public whenever nothing else is going on, and no one seemed to mind if we wandered around staring and taking photographs .

All around us were the ghosts of Hallowe’ens past - both the mysterious ruined structures and props created for CEBOT events.

Top billing in the annual Hallowe'en extravaganzas deservedly goes to Camp Evans' unique collection of Dymaxion Deployment Units or DDU's, small yurt-like structures designed by Buckminster Fuller.

Along with the Beatles, Ravi Shankar, Marshall McLuhan, Woodstock, and psychedelia, Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was part of the interior landscape of my generation. It was he who popularized the geodesic dome, a distinctive hemispherical shape composed of triangular surfaces that distribute structural stress to maximize strength and stability. The geodesic dome was the darling of not one but two World's Fairs, in New York in 1964 and Montreal in 1967.

Not until I wrote a blog post on Buckminster Fulle r, however, did I learn about his earlier work, before the geodesic dome catapulted him to fame, and about the dymaxion concept - dynamic, maximum, and tension - which Fuller applied to a whole spectrum of creations ranging from dwellings to maps to sleep-wake cycles, all sharing the goal of achieving “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input."

The DDU was the only Dymaxion concept that ever came close to being mass-produced - if double or low-triple digits can be called mass-produced. Yet ironically it was in some ways more Dymaxion in name than in fact, having as much in common with the corrugated sheet metal grain bins it was modeled on as with the much more elaborate and sophisticated Dymaxion house. Still, it filled a wartime need for cheap, sturdy, easily assembled portable structures that could be used as houses, emergency shelters, and specialized work spaces, and it might have enjoyed even greater success had not the wartime demand for steel brought production to a halt. Between 1941 and 1943, around 28 DDU’s were ordered and installed on circular concrete pads at Camp Evans where they were used for conducting hazardous procedures or for storage.

I have no idea what Fred actually said when he first encountered these odd yurt-like structures in the early 1990s, but it must have been something along the lines of “What the heck are these?” It wasn’t till 1996 that the mystery was finally solved, with the completion of an historic resources study conducted by the Department of Defense.

When the campus was divided between InfoAge and the Wall branch of Brookdale Community College, the DDUs that were on the Brookdale property were disposed of. At this point only a fraction of the original structures remain, but the InfoAge collection is still probably the largest assemblage of DDUs anywhere in the world. A 2013 NYTimes article spoke of twelve, but I only counted eleven during our visit.

Unfortunately, most of the survivors are in serious disrepair. One can only hope that funds will be found to preserve and restore these historic treasures.

* * * * *

Hallowe'en is also a big deal for the history of Project Diana and for this blog because it's the 104th anniversary of the birth of E. King Stodola. Here he is with his little brother Quentin; I'm not sure it was actually Hallowe'en but both boys are in costume so - close enough. Happy birthday, Dad, I miss you!

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MY FATHER'S BRUSH WITH LITERARY HISTORY

10/2/2018

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Shortly before my uncle Quentin was born in 1918, when my father was around 4 years old, his family left Brooklyn and moved to the Boston area, where they lived for several years in a series of apartments in a cluster of Boston suburbs - Milton, Wellesley, Brookline, Auburndale.

My dad's maternal grandparents, Arthur and Vergetta Sayers King, joined them in Wellesley sometime between 1920, when the census showed them as living in Lakewood, New Jersey, and 1924, when they were ensconced in a flat at 5 Waban Street. According to my father, they actually lived with the Stodolas for awhile, and my father and his grandfather bonded over a shared passion for butterfly-collecting. One of their neighbors, a Mr Denton, sold them cocoons for a nickel apiece.

5 Waban Street, where my great grandparents lived in Wellesley, shown today

674 Washington St, Brookline, MA, a onetime Stodola address, as it looks now

The Massachusetts years were apparently happy times for my father. For a man who claimed to remember little of his childhood, he came up with quite a few touching or amusing anecdotes. His earliest memories were of a St Bernard-Newfoundland mix named Sandy that they adopted in Milton. Later the family moved to the larger and more urban town of Wellesley, where after attending the Hunnewell Elementary school, my father was transferred to a rapid-promotion class in a Wellesley Hills school that enabled him to complete three years' work in two. Sandy's Wellesley career was less distinguished - he was jailed for fighting with the town clerk's dog.

My dad and Sandy, playing in the snow.

The Hunnewell school as it looked when my dad was enrolled; it is in a different location today.

Mr Denton the butterfly collector was also an avid fisherman and took my father fishing in his canoe. Another neighbor, Thomas Reed, was a craftsman who fashioned a washing machine from a butter tub and encouraged my father's interest in learning how things worked - which he pursued by walking several miles to the Waltham Woolworth's to buy electrical gadgets. His well-to-do friends the Wentworths invited him to their summer home near Lake Massapoag in Sharon, where he and the Wentworth children made ice cream in a hand-operated freezer and enjoyed songfests at a nearby Salvation Army camp. The Wentworths' maid once scolded the children for too much rough-housing - only to discover there had been an earthquake!

* * * * *

As I noted in an earlier post, my grandmother was a professional elocutionist who also painted, acted, and wrote poetry and plays; my grandfather was a concert pianist, and the pair often gave joint performances. My father described them, especially his mother, as "pursuers of causes" who entertained a succession of artists and intellectuals - in some instances people who for political or personal reasons might not have been so warmly welcomed elsewhere.

Because of this, and because Wellesley College was the center of a yeasty intellectual community, my father and his two younger brothers must have been exposed to a number of minor and perhaps even major literary lights. Two in particular were singled out in our oral history interview:

* * * * *

The first was Katharine Lee Bates. Although she is best known as the author of “America the Beautiful,” some of her admirers may be surprised to learn about the breadth of her activities and interests, as well as about her long and productive academic career.

Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts in 1859. Her father, a Congregationalist pastor, died a few weeks after she was born, and she was raised mainly by her mother, a graduate of the Mt Holyoke Seminary for women. She herself attended Wellesley College and subsequently studied at Oxford University. After teaching for several years at the secondary school level, she joined the Wellesley faculty, starting as an instructor and ultimately reaching the rank of full professor of English Literature. In addition to being a popular teacher and mentor, she was a scholar, a prolific poet and novelist, a journalist, and an activist who supported the rights of women, people of color, workers, immigrants, the poor, and oppressed populations in general. She was an advocate for the League of Nations and opposed the American policy of isolationism. She has been credited with helping to found the field of American literature by creating a new college course and writing one of the first textbooks on the subject. She died in 1929.

She was courted seriously by at least two men and appears to have reciprocated their feelings, but in the end she somehow couldn't find a way to remain in the same place with them long enough to cement the relationships. By contrast, she managed to live for 25 years with her beloved friend and fellow scholar Katharine Coman, until Coman's death from breast cancer in 1915, in an arrangement commonly referred to as a "Boston marriage" (or sometimes a "Wellesley marriage"). The exact nature of these close and intense relationships has been much debated, but further speculation about the two Katharines is beyond the scope of this essay.

Bates began writing "America the Beautiful" in 1893, while on a train trip to Colorado ending at Pike's Peak, and published it as a poem two years later. She reworked the words many times, though the basic bones of the piece remained mostly the same. It has been set to music at least 75 times; the one with which we're most familiar was written by Samuel A. Ward in 1882 for his hymn "Materna." I count myself among the many who believe this joyous paean to the multifaceted beauty of our land would make a far more appropriate national anthem than the warlike text of the "Star-Spangled Banner," penned by a slave-owning lawyer and set to the almost unsingable tune of a rowdy English drinking song.

According to my father, Bates was one of my grandmother's elocution students. Since she retired from Wellesley in 1925 at the age of 66, after decades of lecturing, one might well wonder why she would want or need elocution lessons. In fact, Katharine did study elocution in 1885 (before my grandmother was born!) when she was preparing to teach at Wellesley, but Melinda Ponder, author of a fascinating biography of Bates published in 2017, told me she had never come across any indication in Bates's notes or diaries of her ever having done so again. We do know, however, that Bates "abominated" lecturing and all her life considered herself to be a poor public speaker.

Two possibilities, then: 1) She may have anticipated (correctly) being in great demand as a lecturer to wider and more varied audiences after retirement and wished to hone her public speaking skills further. 2) She was part of my grandparents' social circle and visited their home, but my father (who was only a boy at the time) was mistaken about her having studied elocution with his mother. We will likely never know.

* * * * *

Another visitor to the Stodola home was Mary Antin, an immigrant writer and activist best known for her 1912 autobiography The Promised Land.

Antin was born in 1881 to a Jewish family living in present day Belarus. Her father emigrated to Boston in 1891; his wife and six children joined him three years later. Mary completed her elementary school education and attended the Girls' Latin School, now the Boston Latin Academy.

In 1901, she married Amadeus William Grabaum, a German geologist at Columbia University, and moved to New York, where she attended Barnard and Columbia Teachers' College.

Among her new friends in New York was Josephine Lazarus, sister of the poet Emma Lazarus, author of the sonnet “The New Colossus," once mounted on the Statue of Liberty. (Its most famous lines: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ the wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.”) Josephine Lazarus urged Antin to write her autobiography; after Lazarus' death in 1910, she pushed forward with the project as a tribute to her friend. In The Promised Land, she gave an account of the treatment of Jews in Czarist Russia and described her own education and assimilation in her adopted homeland. No other narrative has improved upon the discernment and authenticity with which she captured the Jewish immigrant experience.

In 1914, she published her last full-length work,They Who Knock at our Gates, protesting the movement to restrict immigration. The book was well-received but failed to achieve the popularity of The Promised Land.

Antin must have been near 40, and at a very sad moment in her life, when she encountered the young King Stodola. During World War I, while she campaigned on behalf of the Allies, her husband threw his support to his native Germany. The resulting rift led to their separation. At the end of the War, her husband was forced to leave Columbia and went to China to rebuild his career - in fact, he is known as the "father of Chinese geology." Although they continued to correspond, Antin and her husband never saw each other again. She never fully recovered from this devastating blow.

After the War, with scant hope of ever being reunited with her husband, she moved from New York to the Boston area, where her family still resided, and this is when she was presumably drawn into my grandparents' orbit.

Antin died of cancer in 1949.

* * * * *

Sadly, Arthur King died in Wellesley in 1925. Around the same time, my grandfather was offered a position as training director for the Kingsport Press in Kingsport, Tennessee. The whole family, including Sandy the dog, piled into their Model T touring car and laborously plowed their way south along potholed roads coated with Kentucky red mud. A year later Vergetta died in Kingsport, either during a visit or perhaps more likely because she accompanied her only daughter when the family moved. Vergie's remains were returned to Wellesley for burial alongside her husband.

My grandmother, Beatrice King Stodola, in Tennessee with her sons King, Sid, and Quentin

Kingsport in the 1920s was something of a boom town, boasting the Eastman Chemical Company and a large paper mill in addition to the Kingsport Press. After gaining a foothold there, my grandfather was able to set up his own multigraph business, where my father helped him with printing, typography, and composition.

But as my father told it, Kingsport also had a darker side: The Ku Klux Klan was active, and the men carried revolvers in their coat pockets. My grandmother attended a small Episcopal church in a YMCA that was regarded with suspicion because it was considered to be just short of Roman Catholicism.

And so the family's Boston idyl came to an end - and along with it, my father's carefree childhood. His immediate future held a move to junior high school and the turbulent days of preadolescence, compounded by a fair dose of culture shock. For him and his younger brothers, there would be no more rubbing elbows with the literati.

The family remained in Kingsport though my father's junior high school years, then returned to New York in time for him to attend Brooklyn Technical High School.

The rest, as they say, is history.

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AN INTERVIEW WITH MY DAD

9/4/2018

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On the morning of April 6, 1992, as I was on my way out the door to go to jury duty, my stepmother Rose called from her home in Florida to tell me that my father had died peacefully during the night. My first impulse was to start packing, but Rose felt it was a good idea to postpone the memorial service until a time when we could all make arrangements to come, and I conceded she had a point. So there I stood, with my coat on, feeling slightly stunned. I wasn't sure what to do; I wasn't needed in Florida, so I just went and did my jury duty.

Later in the week, I mentioned to my sister Leslie that it felt very odd to be going about my business as usual, when what I really wanted to do was shout, "Hey, World, stop! Something's missing! Someone's gone!" Leslie replied that her response to this dilemma had been to listen again to an oral history interview I'd conducted with our father in 1979. I thought that was a wise suggestion, and over the next few days my husband Ovide and I spent our dinner hour doing the same thing.

I expected hearing my father's voice to be therapeutic because it would give me an opportunity to reflect on him and his life as I felt the need to do in the immediate aftermath of his death. It did that, but it also turned out to be therapeutic in a way I didn't anticipate: It took me back beyond those last terrible two or three years of watching the tragedy of a man with over twenty patents to his name forget how to use his computer and unable to work his answering machine and brought back a larger perspective on his life as a whole.

* * * * *

I caught my father at perhaps the ideal moment for our interview. He had had major surgery a few weeks earlier; he was now nearly recovered but not quite ready to return to work full-time. He was just shy of his 65th birthday and was considering various retirement schemes; at this crossroads in his life, he was very receptive to my proposal that we use that time to capture and preserve on tape his personal and professional history.

I had recently completed a two-year stint as editor of a grant-funded oral history project, so I not only recognized the importance of seizing the opportunity but also had a pretty good idea of how to go about conducting such an interview. I prepared a well-elaborated "interview schedule," starting with close-ended questions that were easy to answer (what was your mother's name? when were you born? etc.) so that he would be relaxed by the time I got to the tougher and more thought-provoking questions. I took along two portable tape recorders and mikes (to ensure a backup if either failed) and plenty of pre-labeled audiocassettes. When I arrived at his home, I identified a couple of comfortable chairs in his living room, where over the course of the three days I had set aside for this project, October 2, 3, and 4, we talked for more than five hours, limiting our sessions to a couple of hours apiece to avoid tiring either him or myself.

Any fears I might have had about persuading him to open up proved unfounded. Although he always professed to remember little about his childhood, over the course of the interview I was able to elicit many anecdotes I had never heard and details about his past of which I was only vaguely aware. I think that like me, he had prepared for the interview and spent some time reflecting on what made him the man he was - formative experiences, the importance of friendships and of mentors in his life, his hard-won education at highly selective institutions, his long affiliation with the Unitarians, the development of his career-building skills, and of course his family commitments. In all, we covered the entire sweep of his life, starting with his parents and their roots and ending with a retrospective on his career as he started looking forward to a new life stage. My post About My Father, as well as many other entries to this blog, draws heavily on this material.

In the half-dozen audiocassettes that resulted from this effort, my family has something more precious than anything else he could have left to us.

It was standard procedure at every interview conducted during my time with the oral history project to take a photograph of the subject. So I can hardly believe I didn't take one of my own father, but if I did, I haven't been able to find it. This photo taken in 1976, of my dad, my stepmother, myself, and my dog Goldie, is as close as I can come to how we must have looked at the time of the interview.

* * * * *

A few months after his death, when we discussed what we could do to commemorate the life of King Stodola at his memorial service, it occurred to me that the tapes might have the same healing effect on those in attendance as they had on me, that of restoring to us in some measure the man as we knew him.

From the several hours of material I'd gathered, I chose a brief segment about his proudest achievement, his participation in Project Diana. I particularly liked this excerpt because I felt it captured the pride he took in this accomplishment, his fundamental humility, his keen intelligence, his dry sense of humor - and perhaps above all, his gentleness. A transcript of this passage appears elsewhere on this site.

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ME AND MY UKULELE

6/29/2018

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I received a ukulele for Christmas one year and learned to play it well enough to give me pleasure and avoid annoying those around me. Compared to the other instruments I took up as a kid (or more accurately had thrust upon me) - the piano and the saxophone (for which my father paid $25 in an Asbury Park pawn shop) - my ukulele was, well, quiet. And while playing it at a virtuoso level would have taken more practice than I was ever willing to throw at it, and probably more talent than I could muster, it wasn’t that hard to tune it (G-C-E-A, with the memorable lyrics “my dog has fleas”) and to learn enough chords to make my way through a few familiar songs. “On Top of Old Smoky,” all umpty verses - even without googling I can still dredge up at least five - was my hands-down fave.

But what was a little girl in a small coastal New Jersey town doing with an exotic Hawaiian stringed instrument?

Me and my ukulele.

Luckily enough, I have a photograph of myself clutching my ukulele - slightly blurry, but clear enough to permit further research on the topic.

The ukulele is a plucked stringed instrument belonging to the lute/mandolin family. Although it is sometimes thought of as quintessentially Hawaiian, along with hula dancers in grass skirts and leis, it was actually developed in the 1880s by Portuguese immigrants who came to Hawaii from Madiera and Cape Verde, based on similar guitar-like Portuguese instruments. Its place in Hawaiian music and culture was cemented by the support of King Kalakaua, who enthusiastically promoted the instrument and made it a central part of performances at royal gatherings.

The US mainland discovered the ukulele in 1915, at the Hawaiian Pavilion of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Being cheap, portable, and relatively easy to learn to play passably well, the uke quickly passed into the popular culture, appearing in film and becoming a mainstay of jazz, country music, and American song.

The life trajectories of two men converged to turn the ukulele into the musical phenom it was to become in the post World War II era:

The first was Arthur Godfrey, folksy host of a series of eponymous radio and then television variety shows. My Aunt Phyllis, my mother’s younger sister, always claimed to dislike Arthur Godfrey because, she said, he laughed at his own jokes, but whenever his show came on the air, she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down to listen. We often spent several days with Aunt Phyllis and her family in Worcester MA during our summer vacations, and when “the Old Redhead” (as he called himself) came on we stopped what we were doing and joined her in her kitchen. He was famous for poking good-natured fun at his sponsors’ products. The off-script commercial I remember best was his test of the proposition that Lipton teabags could be reused for several days in a row. The second day came and went without too much comment, but by the third day his reaction was simply “blecch.” He got away with it because it was known he would not accept a sponsor whose products he didn’t personally enjoy, and because (bottom line) it sold those products.

Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts started in 1945 as a radio show. From 1948 to 1958 the show was transferred to the next big thing, TV, but continued to be simulcast on the radio. From 1949 to 1959, he also broadcast Arthur Godfrey and his Friends, also known as simply the Arthur Godfrey Show, which featured many of the Talent Scout winners including Pat Boone, Eddie Fisher, Tony Bennett, Connie Francis, Patsy Cline - and Julius LaRosa. LaRosa, in fact, triggered a downturn in Arthur Godfrey’s popularity in 1953 when Godfrey fired him on-air, without warning, for exhibiting too much independence or, as Godfrey put it, “a lack of humility.” That was not how underlings were supposed to be treated in those days, and it didn’t sit well with his fans. But during his radio days and his early years on TV, everything he touched turned to gold. He raked in millions of dollars for his bosses and as a result was probably the first media star to become truly wealthy.

It is sometimes said that apart from being an uber-genial host, Arthur Godfrey was devoid of any special talent. This isn’t strictly true; he was an accomplished ukulele player who even gave on-air ukulele lessons. “If a kid has a uke in hand,” he assured parents, “he’s not going to get into much trouble.” Too bad color TV had not yet come in; black-and-white could never do full justice to Godfrey’s shock of red hair and his colorful Hawaiian shirts as he strummed his big baritone ukulele. Through him, the ukulele found a welcome in millions of American homes.

The second contributor to the postwar ukulele craze was an Italian luthier named Mario Maccaferri, until then best known for designing the guitar played by the legendary Romani musician Django Reinhardt. Maccaferri was also a classical guitar virtuoso in his own right, perhaps in a league with Segovia, until a freak swimming accident in 1933 injured his right hand and ended his performing career forever. He continued making stringed instruments, however, and also started a business in France making high-quality reeds for woodwind instruments.

In 1939, Maccaferri fled with his family from war-torn Europe to the US, struggling to maintain his reed-making business (now christened the French American Reed Manufacturing Company) in the Bronx, despite a wartime shortage of the French cane he needed to make his product. Then a visit to the NY World Fair introduced him to a new concept - plastics! - and fired his imagination. He started experimenting with polystyrene reeds and found that indeed, they worked pretty well, especially when wooden reeds were unavailable. Endorsements from clarinetist Benny Goodman and other Big Band musicians brought him a good customer base. Emboldened by his success, he went on to found his own molding and manufacturing company, Mastro Industries, which produced cheap plastic versions of everything from clothespins to toilet seats.

Everything went well until it didn’t. Eventually, a combination of increased competition, increased demand for more upscale fixtures, and increased availability of alternative construction materials started making serious inroads, and Mastro Industries found itself on the skids.

That’s where things stood when a chance poolside encounter between Mario Maccaferri and Arthur Godfrey in a Florida hotel rocked both their worlds - and ended up putting ukuleles into the hands of millions of American kids including mine. The two men knocked back a few drinks, played a couple of impromptu duets, and bemoaned the lack of affordable mass-produce-able ukuleles. Maccaferri had long dreamed of making a plastic ukulele but lacked the capital to proceed without some promise of success. When Godfrey replied that he could sell a million of them, Maccaferri was inspired to revive his dream and redouble his efforts to finance this new venture.

Although Maccaferri’s earlier attempts to make a plastic guitar and his subsequent attempts to make a plastic violin were neither commercial nor artistic successes, it turned out that plastic was well suited to producing an instrument-quality ukulele. After extensive research, he settled on Dow Styron, which gave him the warm wood-like tone he was seeking, and strung it with nylon strings made by DuPont. He called his creation the Islander and packaged it with a pick, a tuning tool, instructions, and a songbook. It sold for $5.95.

Just like the box that appeared under our Christmas tree.

Nine million sold!

Toy plastic ukuleles like Mattel’s Uke-a-Doodle had done well, but the Islander was no toy. Arthur Godfrey, who as noted would never embrace a product he wasn’t willing to use himself, tried it and fell in love. He began promoting it on his shows and the orders poured in. In the end, more than nine million ukuleles were manufactured and sold. Godfrey never asked Maccaferri for a penny; he could well afford to indulge his own dream of making the ukulele a household item. A broad grin would undoubtedly have lit up the Old Redhead’s freckled face to see me and a dozen other student ukulele players in an onstage strum-fest during a school assembly - a scene that was probably repeated hundreds of times in school auditoriums across the nation during the heyday of the ukulele.

* * * * *

Look closely at my photo and you’ll see an odd gadget on the neck of my ukulele. At first I thought it might be a capo - basically a clamp used to shorten the strings evenly, enabling you to play in different keys using the same fingering - so you only have to learn one set of chords. (Call it a "cheater" at your peril!) But no, it was something that potentially simplified the process even further - the Chord Master, an automatic chording device invented and patented by Maccaferri that allowed you to play six basic chords with the push of a button. For an extra dollar you could get a Chord Master for your Islander, as obviously my parents did.

It all comes back! The Chord Master was supposed to be attached with two rubber bands, and I sort of recall having trouble making the darn thing stay put - probably more a commentary on my technique than on the device itself. Again stirring up some long-dormant memories, I think there was an additional reason for my Chord Master woes: The buttons are labeled D7, B7, and G on the upper row and D, A7, and E7 on the lower row - indicating that the Islander was supposed to be tuned not to G-C-E-A, as I did, but rather a whole tone higher, to A-D-F#-B. That had to be confusing to anyone who was looking for the chords you’d expect to use in the key of C.

For whatever reason, in the end I ditched the Chord Master. Instead, I mastered a handful of chords and then limited my repertoire to songs that required only those chords.

* * * * *

Tiny Tim

Predictably, imitators started cutting into Mastro’s market, and in response additional models, both larger ukes and the smaller “ukette,” proliferated in the wake of the Islander’s success. And then, with the advent of rock music, the popularity of the ukulele took a nosedive. As Arthur Godfrey had said, “If a kid has a uke in hand, he’s not going to get into much trouble.” Where’s the fun in that? Kids eager to cultivate a "bad boy" image followed their musical heroes and took up the guitar, not the ukulele. If you were inclined to write the ukulele’s obituary, you could do worse than to choose February 9, 1964 as the day it officially died, with the Beatles’ American debut on the Ed Sullivan Show (though in fact the Beatles loved the ukulele and occasionally played it onstage). Herbert “Tiny Tim” Khaury probably put the final nail in its coffin in 1968 with his popular but wildly campy falsetto rendition of “Tiptoe through the Tulips,” stripping the poor old uke of whatever shred of dignity it might once have had and masking its genuine musical versatility.

But the ukulele just won’t stay dead. It has enjoyed at least two revivals since then. The first was in the 1990s, when a new generation of instrument makers started appealing to a new generation of musicians, most of whom had forgotten Tiny Tim and maybe even the Beatles. The second is now in progress, fueled by the rise of youtube ukulele artists like Hawaii native Jake Shimabukuro, whose videos routinely go viral.

Don’t look at me, however. I haven’t played a uke since the 1950s, and my once-cherished Islander has long since disappeared into the mists of time.

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edwin howard armstrong: DIANA's godfather

6/8/2018

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In 1991, just a few months before he died, my father was awarded the Armstrong medal and plaque by the Radio Club of America. Of all the accolades he received, none would have been more meaningful to him. Sadly, he was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and beyond grasping the nature of the honor that had been bestowed on him. He hadn’t forgotten, however, that Major Edwin Howard Armstrong was one of his heroes, and he would happily discourse about the importance of Armstrong’s work to anyone who would listen.

I now wish I had listened more closely.

* * * * *

Most radio buffs are familiar with Armstrong’s turbulent career in wireless communications, during which he revolutionized the field not once but repeatedly - in the process stirring up mighty opposition from stakeholders in a new way of doing business that had little use for lone-wolf inventors like Armstrong.

His earliest work focused on improving receiver sensitivity. While still in college, he perfected the regenerative circuit, which dramatically improved radio reception by means of a positive feedback loop in the receiver, using a triode tube recently invented by Lee De Forest. Armstrong went on to invent the superheterodyne, which still further improved reception by mixing an incoming high-frequency signal with a second tunable lower-frequency signal to produce a predetermined intermediate frequency (IF) still further improved reception. The superheterodyne outperformed every previous approach including his own regenerative receiver and remains the industry standard to this day.

He then turned his attention to developing wide-band frequency modulation (FM) radio. Radios in use at the time were designed to be sensitive to the strength or amplitude of the incoming signal (that is, amplitude modulation or AM), but were also sensitive to environmental disturbances such as thunderstorms or electromagnetic waves emanating from electronic equipment. No amount of tweaking or shielding could fix this problem. Armstrong took a radically different approach, arguing that by varying the frequency instead of the amplitude of the signal to be transmitted and designing receivers accordingly, such interference could be prevented. He devoted much of the remainder of his life to demonstrating the superiority of FM.

As a wedding gift to his wife, Armstrong (shown here on their honeymoon in Palm Beach) built the world's first boombox.

Armstrong, a fearless climber, atop RCA's 115-foot north tower on the roof of the 21-story Aeolian Hall in midtown Manhattan.

Unfortunately for Armstrong, the commercial potential of the burgeoning field of wireless communication created a mercilessly competitive environment dominated by huge, well-heeled corporations. Armstrong’s genius as a radio engineer was matched only by his naivete about the realities of organizational politics (“all substance and no style,” as one biographer put it). Wildly underestimating the ability of greed and self-interest to prevail against (as he saw it) simple truth and honesty, Armstrong engaged in a long series of time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes quixotic legal battles to defend and protect his own interests.

His first such encounter was with Lee De Forest, who responded to Armstrong’s success by laying claim to the idea of regeneration, despite little evidence that he even understood how the triode tube he invented worked, let alone that he had dreamed up Armstrong’s brilliant new application for it. The ensuing litigation lasted for over a decade, with AT&T throwing its muscle behind De Forest after buying up his patents. In the end the Supreme Court, befuddled by the technical details, ruled against Armstrong, despite universal recognition among his scientific peers that regeneration was his invention and not De Forest’s.

His conflict with De Forest, personally and professionally devastating though it was, paled in comparison to that subsequently elicited by the introduction of FM technology. By essentially eliminating the static that bedeviled AM radio, FM threatened the broadcasting industry not only by obsolescing millions of dollars worth of existing radio equipment overnight but also by diverting interest, attention, and coveted frequencies away from the anticipated Next Big Thing, television.

The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) - led by David Sarnoff, formerly his friend and collaborator, now his bitter foe - was not about to take this lying down. Both fair means and foul were employed to thwart Armstrong: Lawsuits were filed and then intentionally dragged out, patents were infringed, royalties were withheld, reverse engineering was used to buttress fake claims of priority. Armstrong was forced to remove his equipment from the top of the Empire State Building, ostensibly to make room for television equipment, driving him to move his operation to Alpine NJ. Here the first FM station, W2XMN, began broadcasting in 1939 - but only after the FCC first revoked his license and then restored it but diverted FM into a new frequency band at limited power - again, supposedly to make way for TV channel 1. (Ironically the Alpine station was briefly resuscitated after radio communication from the World Trade Center came to an abrupt halt on Nine-Eleven.)

FM station W2XMN broadcast from Alpine, NJ, where Armstrong's 425 ft antenna tower dominated the Palisades landscape. It's still there!

Faced with the prospect of seemingly unending legal battles he could ill afford, Armstrong became despondent and even lashed out at his beloved wife Marion, who moved out of their home to escape further abuse. On the night of January 31, 1954, Edwin Armstrong donned his overcoat, scarf, gloves, and hat, removed the air conditioner from a window of his 13th floor apartment in Manhattan’s exclusive River House, and jumped to his death. Marion Armstrong continued to prosecute her husband’s unresolved infringement suits and ultimately triumphed, winning some $10 million in damages. Sadly, this vindication came too late to comfort or benefit Armstrong himself.

* * * * *

Far less known - perhaps because it remained highly classified for many years - is the story of Armstrong’s work on FM radar during World War II. Indeed, in Armstrong’s entry in the Dictionary of American Biography, this phase of his career is casually dismissed as “a hiatus caused by World War II.”

Politically conservative and proud of his military service in World War I, Armstrong generously extended to the US government royalty-free use of the patents he had so fiercely defended - a patriotic but costly gift. Meanwhile, in addition to his legal expenses, he was self-funding much of his research at Columbia (having declined a salary for his appointment as a full professor at Columbia in order to escape administrative duties and minimize teaching responsibilities), as well as his high-powered FM station in Alpine NJ. (His red and white antenna, all 425 feet of it, still looms over the surrounding Palisades landscape, where its affluent neighbors regard it as an eyesore.)

As his debts mounted catastrophically, his attorney, Alfred McCormack, urged him to accept government contracts for his investigations of long range radar. These contracts enabled Armstrong to hire an assistant, Robert Hull, a newly-minted Columbia graduate, and together the two set about adapting FM technology to radar. The end of World War II, however, brought these explorations to a close, leaving no clear indication of what they hoped to accomplish. Since then, continuous wave FM radar has found only specialized applications, and pulse radar remains the technology of choice for most purposes.

* * * * *

And here begins my quest to clarify the nature of Armstrong’s role in Project Diana. Starting with a standard SCR-271 early warning radar, Armstrong and Hull had transformed the equipment into a powerful transmitter and sensitive receiver using conventional pulse radar. The Project Diana team modified the set still further, adding a tunable crystal to allow the narrow band receiver frequency to be adjusted to compensate for the Doppler shift caused by the constant relative motion between the earth and moon.

As I worked on my most recent blog entry, about the famous bedspring antenna, I found myself becoming increasingly curious about whether Armstrong had directly interacted with the Project Diana team, and whether he had actually spent time with them at Camp Evans during this period. On the one hand, I had never, among all the first-person accounts I’d read by the Project Diana team, including my own oral history interview with my father, encountered any mention of face-to-face meetings or discussions with Armstrong. On the other hand, Belmar and Alpine are less than 100 miles apart, and Armstrong was highly familiar with the Marconi facility, where he and David Sarnoff in happier times had first listened to signals from his regenerative receiver.

The answers to these questions proved surprisingly elusive, even after I consulted such authoritative and comprehensive sources as Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis, Man of High Fidelity by Lawrence Lessing, The Invention that Changed the World, by Robert Buderi, and the librarians in charge of the Armstrong archives at Columbia University. Finally, with the help of Fred Carl, Director of the InfoAge Science History Learning Center, I found my way to Al Klase and Ray Chase, who work with the New Jersey Antique Radio Club's Radio Technology Museum at InfoAge, where they specialize respectively in the development of radar and Armstrrong's career.

Al very kindly directed me to an audio recording made in 2005 of an interview with Renville McMann, a panelist at a celebration broadcast from Alpine of the 70th anniversary of FM radio [starting at min 7:00]. In this loving reminiscence of Armstrong, McMann describes the time he innocently suggested that Armstrong point his equipment towards the moon - and with uncharacteristic vehemence, Armstrong refused. That feat, as McMann later learned, was reserved for the Army. “Armstrong had a duplicate setup of the Camp Evans equipment at Alpine,” adds Al; indeed, “the SCR-271 radar tower, sans antenna, is still there…. So clearly, there was direct contact with the Diana team. Armstrong's narrow-band receiver was crucial to the success of the project.”

Al goes on to observe, “It's easy to assume Armstrong visited Camp Evans during the Diana era, it was only a day trip, even without modern roads, but I see no hard evidence. Dave Ossman, in his excellent radio drama version of Empire of the Air [starting at min 7:26] has Armstrong at Evans for the first experiment, but rereading [the original book version of Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis, p. 298], we could attribute this to artistic license. I, too, would like to know if he was there.”

But as Ray muses, it appears that the famous radio pioneer took pains to maintain an "arm's length" relationship with the youthful Diana team to ensure that they got full credit for whatever successes they achieved. He did such a good job of covering his tracks that barring some unexpected scholarly find, the nature and extent of his personal interactions with the Project Diana team will remain shrouded in mystery.

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THE FAMOUS BEDSPRING ANTENNA

4/22/2018

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My parents, never known to be particularly demonstrative, were uncharacteristically ebullient. After months of intense activity and preparation, my father and his colleagues had “shot the moon” with radar waves, and the moon had echoed back: message received. “We did it!” he exclaimed, enfolding his wife in a bear hug. “I knew you would!” my mother replied with a broad grin. She knew from long experience that if my father said something could be done, it almost certainly could.

Not everyone, however, had shared my mother’s implicit faith that Project Diana would succeed. Radar had more than demonstrated its utility during World War II in locating enemy aircraft and submarines, but - hit the moon? Earlier unsuccessful efforts had convinced many that asking radio waves to pierce the ionosphere, hit a designated object in space, and then return back through earth’s atmosphere to the point of origin was expecting too much of the technology. Indeed, the standard method for measuring the distance to the ionosphere at that time was “pulse ranging” - that is, bouncing radio waves off the reflective surface of the ionosphere and timing their return, not passing through it.

Only a group of optimistic visionaries would attempt such a feat. Only a group of engineers would have the practical know-how to accomplish it.

This effort was the brainchild of Lt Col John "Jack" DeWitt, head of the Evans Signal Laboratory at Camp Evans in Wall, NJ. Right after the Japanese surrender in September of 1945, DeWitt was assigned the task of developing radars capable of detecting missiles from the Soviet Union. Since no missiles were available for a test,
DeWitt decided the moon could serve as a stand-in - and incidentally allow him to carry out a project he had dreamed of since long before World War II. Like my mother and unlike the skeptics, he was quite confident (despite a previous failure of his own several years earlier) that it could be done, if done right.

If ever there was a monument to American ingenuity, it is surely Project Diana. The approach, as I mentioned in an earlier post, was to work rapidly and intensively, use and modify materials already on hand, and then test, test, test. “Materials already on hand” was the watchword. No attempt was made to design any of the main components for the project from scratch, and little if anything new was purchased to make it happen. The transmitter, the receiver, and the antenna all represented novel applications and redesigns of equipment they had used before.

These three elements were interdependent and had to work together as one for the project to succeed. Arguably the most critical, however, was the antenna, since the failure of previous attempts was attributable in large measure to insufficient sensitivity of the receiver antenna.

* * * * *

By the end of World War I, Army scientists at Fort Monmouth realized that the biggest threat in the next war would come from the air, and that Americans could no longer depend on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to protect and isolate them. Early detection of incoming threats was crucial if attacks on the homeland were to be avoided or minimized. Initial conceptual explorations of radar began as early as 1920. In the mid 1930s, radar research at Fort Monmouth took a more practical turn, to the point where development of a prototype of the SCR [Signal Corps Radio OR Set Complete Radio, used interchangeably]-268 was well underway.

Then, in 1938, shaken by the discovery in their midst of a Nazi spy named Guenther Gustave Maria Rumrich, a Chicago-born German whose friendly curiosity had enabled him to infiltrate the radar research program alarmingly easily, the Army decided to increase security and reduce accessibility by moving the operation from Fort Monmouth to Fort Hancock.

It was at Fort Hancock that the legendary SCR-270/271, capable of detecting bombers 150 miles away, was developed under the leadership of Dr. Harold Zahl. Among other important innovations, this system featured a common antenna for both transmitting and receiving, made possible by a gas-discharge device called a duplexer invented by Zahl. The SCR-270 was a mobile unit; the SCR-271 was a fixed, tower-mounted version that differed mainly in having an antenna with a somewhat higher resolution.

My father was recruited as a young engineer to the Army's radar research program at Fort Hancock in early 1941, in the Radio Position Finding section. He participated in the development of the SCR-270/271 radar and continued to work on modifying and improving it throughout the War. Many years later, he wrote of this radar that it was "still the Old Faithful, coming through where more modern and more advertised sets have become unavailable."

An SCR-270, with its bedspring-type reflective array antenna, ready to rock and roll.

As the nation inexorably drifted towards war, it was realized that Fort Hancock, at the tip of a peninsula surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, New York Bay, and Sandy Hook Bay, also had some shortcomings as a location for radar research. More space was needed, it was argued, and the fierce nor'easters that periodically struck the base coated the radar equipment with a film of salt that undermined performance. Its location, so favorable to defense from conventional land and sea attacks, made it vulnerable to U-boat strikes.

So the Army purchased the old Marconi site in Belmar from King’s College and rechristened it Camp Evans. Piecemeal, the radar research program was evacuated from Fort Hancock. Pearl Harbor hastened the transfer, and by 1942 the move to Camp Evans was complete.

With the acquisition of the Camp Evans site, the Signal Corps inherited a rich history of antenna development. During World War I, the Navy had assumed control of the property, and although Marconi’s famous 400-foot wireless towers were used for the dispatch of important messages - indeed, historians dubbed World War I the “wireless war” - breakthroughs in reducing radio static achieved by a resident Canadian scientist named Roy Weagant enabled replacement of these ungainly structures by safer and cheaper if more ho-hum 30-foot antennas. This news was kept under wraps until after the War; “The End of the Giant Towers,” proclaimed contemporary headlines. All of them were gone by 1925.

The arrival of the Army and the entry of the US into World War II transformed the site into a major center for radar research. In addition to newer systems (some involving testing of conceptual designs developed at the MIT Rad Lab), refinement and stepped-up production of the "Old Faithful" SCR-270/271 continued throughout the War - turning Building 37 into a veritable antenna factory as bedspring-type array antennas ranging in length from 2 to 30 feet were assembled for installation on trailers to be used in remote locations. One such SCR-270 radar provided an early warning of incoming Japanese aircraft at Pearl Harbor - though in one of history’s most egregious command and control failures, the information was initially misinterpreted by the Operator and subsequently discounted by the Commanding Officer on duty.

* * * * *

Project Diana, a name intended (among other things) to befuddle the Guenther Rumrichs of the world, introduced a whole new series of challenges beyond the reach of existing technology designed for (relatively) short-distance detection of enemy aircraft.

Early on, DeWitt decided to use as a starting point a crystal-controlled FM transmitter/receiver specially designed for the Signal Corps by Major Edwin H. Armstrong, the "father of FM radio," by modifying an SCR-271. This set had features that could address two important problems:

1) Due to the relative velocities of the earth and moon, the frequency of the returning echo differed from the transmitted signal (a phenomenon known as Doppler shift) by as much as 300Hz, a number that was constantly changing depending earth's rotation and moon's orbital path. DeWitt called on the Theoretical Studies Group for these elegant calculations, which were done by the mathematician Walter McAfee.) The Armstrong radio was capable of being fine-tuned to the exact frequency required to compensate for the Doppler shift at a given point in time.

2) Signals bounced off an object 238,000 miles from earth would take much longer to echo and be much too weak to be detected by receiving antennas then in use. As noted, this was a problem that had bedeviled previous attempts to shoot the moon. To amplify the incoming signal, it was decided to generate a much longer pulse that would be easier for the receiving antenna to detect. The Armstrong radio was one of the few existing sets capable of generating such a long pulse.

The long pulse, while solving one problem, created another, since there was no antenna on site ready to receive such a signal. To come up with a solution, DeWitt called on the Antenna Design Section at Camp Evans. Two prominent antenna specialists, one the section head, designed a novel system using a quarter-wave step-up transformers. This approach failed to work, however, even after extensive efforts to tweak the transmitter.

DeWitt then turned to his own little group of engineers, who came up with the inspired solution of positioning two SCR-271 stationary radars side-by-side to create an enormous (40x40 ft) double bedspring antenna consisting of a 8x8 array of half-wave dipoles in front of a reflector that further enhanced the 111.5 MHz signals. Who was the first to propose that approach will probably never be known, but given my father's long experience and intimate familiarity with the SCR-271, his leadership role on the team, and his general approach to problem-solving, it wouldn't surprise me if the credit belonged to him. In any event, translating the idea into reality was undoubtedly easier said than done, but engineers from the Mechanical Design Center rose to the occasion and succeeded in assembling the Diana Bedspring. (Unfortunately, engineering specifications were destroyed by the Army in 1971, so our knowledge of the design details remains sketchy.)

This whole contraption - there is no other word for it - was mounted atop a 100-ft reinforced tower in the northeast corner of Camp Evans. The heavy and ungainly antenna could not be tilted, it could only be rotated in azimuth; so moonshots could only be attempted twice a day, usually at moonrise but occasionally at moonset, during the 40-minute window open when the moon passed through the 15 degree wide beam of the antenna pattern.

Panoramic view of Camp Evans

The iconic Diana Bedspring, perhaps the most famous antenna in history, has become the unofficial symbol of Project Diana. Its picture, doctored by a photo editor who thought the moon looked too dim in the original so used 20th century “Photoshop” technology to “burn in” a picture of the sun in its place, appeared on the front pages of newspapers and on magazine covers throughout the world. Readers of this blog see it every time they open a new post. If the late David Mofensen’s dream of having Project Diana commemorated on a postage stamp is ever fulfilled (which can’t happen before 2046 because - I know, I checked - the US Postal Service will only issue such stamps in multiples of fifty years after the event), surely the Diana Bedspring will be the featured image.

* * * * *

So where is the Diana Bedspring? Perhaps it was scrapped in the mid-1950s, when the Army removed its old radar units from the site to make way for a parabolic dish antenna, a design already in widespread use by most US search radar at the end of the War. Or perhaps it was finally destroyed in the early 1990s, when the Army began to demolish the historic site in response to a Department of Defense decision to close many military bases including Camp Evans - until Fred Carl, now Director of the InfoAge Science History Center, almost literally threw his body in the path of the wrecking ball. Or perhaps it is still being stored in pieces in some forgotten location, awaiting reassembly. In any event, it is, in the wistful words of an InfoAge volunteer, “no longer available.”

The replacement antenna was a 50-foot dish created by the Signal Corps, using the frame of a captured Nazi Wurzburg Reise radar, to serve as our first satellite tracking antenna. In honor of its predecessor, it was dubbed the “Diana Dish.” In 1957, when the Soviets stole a march on the US by launching their Sputnik satellite, the Diana Dish was joined by a companion 60-foot dish named the “Space Sentry.” In 1960, control of space research was transferred to a new civilian agency, NASA, which continued the weather observation research already underway at the Diana site and proudly broadcast the first televised images of cloud movements from space.

The Diana Dish has joined the Diana Bedspring in the dustbin of history, but the Space Sentry was gifted by the Army to InfoAge, which has refurbished it for scientific and educational purposes as part of a larger effort to restore and preserve the Diana site. On January 10, 2015, a local amateur radio club celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Project Diana experiment by using the Space Sentry to make a series of Earth-Moon-Earth contacts.

The Space Sentry, just a few hundred feet from where the Diana Bedspring once stood.

* * * * *

Although the development of communications satellites has obsolesced moon bounce as a national security tool, Earth-Moon-Earth or EME has become quite popular among amateur radio operators. The object of modern EME, unlike Project Diana but like successor projects such as PAMOR, is a two-way exchange of information, in which a signal is sent from one station to another by ricocheting it off the moon; overcoming the challenges of weak signal communication is part of the fun and represents a test of skill. EME is the longest path between any two stations on earth.

To accomplish this feat, EME enthusiasts need to erect antennas that by amateur radio standards are often large enough to jangle the nerves of Property Owners’ Associations and perhaps violate the aesthetic sensibilities of their XYLs (ham-speak for ”ex young ladies” - that is, ahem, their wives). By Project Diana standards, however, most modern EME antennas are mere minikins and some are even portable.

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CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

I was just shy of 3 years old when the US Army successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the opening salvo in the Space Race, the birth of radioastronomy, and the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. I was born on the Jersey coast for the same reason as Project Diana: my father, as scientific director of the Project, was intimately involved in both events. Like Project Diana, I was named for the goddess of the moon (in my case Cynthia, the Greeks' nickname for Artemis - their version of Diana - who was born on Mt Cynthos). Project Diana is baked into my DNA.

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TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)

D-DAY AND CAMP EVANS

A VISIT TO LITTLE GLEMHAM

ROSIE

JACK DEWITT: "A LUNAR LOVE AFFAIR"

SPOOKY CAMP EVANS

MY FATHER'S BRUSH WITH LITERARY HISTORY

AN INTERVIEW WITH MY DAD

ME AND MY UKULELE

edwin howard armstrong: DIANA's godfather

THE FAMOUS BEDSPRING ANTENNA

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

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TO THE MOON AND BACK ​(ARCHIVED BLoG)

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

Archives

Categories

TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)