Ovide Pomerleau remembers his father-in-law:
I first met E. King Stodola in 1964 in Northport as Cindy Stodola’s boyfriend - and potential son-in-law - visiting “the parents." From the beginning, I enjoyed an easy relationship with King, finding him to be genial, smart, and very knowledgeable. I remember him fondly as the very model of a proper engineer (he was a big fan of Gilbert & Sullivan!), sporting not only the obligatory pocket protector for miscellaneous pens and pencils but wearing clothes that endured aggregated assaults from numerous glasses cases, slide rules, calculators, business cards, wallet, address books, keys, and small change plus at least one paperback novel and some engineering manuals stuffed in the jacket. He tried to convince me to buy suits from his Hong Kong tailor, oblivious to his own sartorial indictment of Chinese haberdashery.
Mostly, we talked about gadgets and gizmos, past, present, and future. Though his current work in electronic warfare was classified and off-limits for discussion, we reveled in shared experiences such as searching for equipment bargains in the surplus electronics bazaar in lower Manhattan’s Canal Street. Though he was no longer active in amateur radio during this time (1964-1992), he regaled me with vivid tales of setting up ham stations growing up in the 1920’s, conducting experiments that paralleled the development of commercial radio communication and broadcasting. Though he never mentioned it, his youthful interest in engineering must have been something of a shock to his artistic mother and musician father, but when I knew him, he seemed superbly comfortable in his chosen profession as an electronics engineer, and he was extremely modest about his accomplishments. It was many years after meeting him that I first learned about his role as scientific director of Project Diana at the end of World War II - and it was his daughter, Cindy, who informed me, not him. Project Diana’s earth-moon-earth radar transmission set a new record for distance and signaled the beginning of the Space Age. It also set precedent for Roman and Greek mythological names in space exploration.
Toward the end of his life, the tenor of our discussions changed. Previously, our interactions had focused mostly on recent family stories, current events, and technological developments. Now, as his memory for the recent past faded from his grasp, he was left with crystal-clear recollections of earlier events unclouded by all that had happened since. Knowing I was familiar with the contributions of Major Edwin Armstrong, the electronics engineer who made modern radio possible by developing the regenerative circuit, the superheterodyne receiver, and frequency modulation broadcasting, King related with uncanny immediacy and detail the engineering community’s strong disapproval of RCA’s Chairman David Sarnoff for not honoring Armstrong’s pioneering patents. The story involved a succession of suits and countersuits taking place over many decades - complicated legal skirmishes costing each party millions of dollars - that ultimately caused Armstrong to kill himself in despair before final vindication in the courts of law and public opinion. King had clearly cared deeply about these issues, and I felt fortunate to be able tap into these memories, almost as though a window on history had suddenly opened before my eyes.
Ovide Pomerleau
Ann Arbor, MI
November 7, 2014
I first met E. King Stodola in 1964 in Northport as Cindy Stodola’s boyfriend - and potential son-in-law - visiting “the parents." From the beginning, I enjoyed an easy relationship with King, finding him to be genial, smart, and very knowledgeable. I remember him fondly as the very model of a proper engineer (he was a big fan of Gilbert & Sullivan!), sporting not only the obligatory pocket protector for miscellaneous pens and pencils but wearing clothes that endured aggregated assaults from numerous glasses cases, slide rules, calculators, business cards, wallet, address books, keys, and small change plus at least one paperback novel and some engineering manuals stuffed in the jacket. He tried to convince me to buy suits from his Hong Kong tailor, oblivious to his own sartorial indictment of Chinese haberdashery.
Mostly, we talked about gadgets and gizmos, past, present, and future. Though his current work in electronic warfare was classified and off-limits for discussion, we reveled in shared experiences such as searching for equipment bargains in the surplus electronics bazaar in lower Manhattan’s Canal Street. Though he was no longer active in amateur radio during this time (1964-1992), he regaled me with vivid tales of setting up ham stations growing up in the 1920’s, conducting experiments that paralleled the development of commercial radio communication and broadcasting. Though he never mentioned it, his youthful interest in engineering must have been something of a shock to his artistic mother and musician father, but when I knew him, he seemed superbly comfortable in his chosen profession as an electronics engineer, and he was extremely modest about his accomplishments. It was many years after meeting him that I first learned about his role as scientific director of Project Diana at the end of World War II - and it was his daughter, Cindy, who informed me, not him. Project Diana’s earth-moon-earth radar transmission set a new record for distance and signaled the beginning of the Space Age. It also set precedent for Roman and Greek mythological names in space exploration.
Toward the end of his life, the tenor of our discussions changed. Previously, our interactions had focused mostly on recent family stories, current events, and technological developments. Now, as his memory for the recent past faded from his grasp, he was left with crystal-clear recollections of earlier events unclouded by all that had happened since. Knowing I was familiar with the contributions of Major Edwin Armstrong, the electronics engineer who made modern radio possible by developing the regenerative circuit, the superheterodyne receiver, and frequency modulation broadcasting, King related with uncanny immediacy and detail the engineering community’s strong disapproval of RCA’s Chairman David Sarnoff for not honoring Armstrong’s pioneering patents. The story involved a succession of suits and countersuits taking place over many decades - complicated legal skirmishes costing each party millions of dollars - that ultimately caused Armstrong to kill himself in despair before final vindication in the courts of law and public opinion. King had clearly cared deeply about these issues, and I felt fortunate to be able tap into these memories, almost as though a window on history had suddenly opened before my eyes.
Ovide Pomerleau
Ann Arbor, MI
November 7, 2014