James Wright:  

Hi Classmate. Thanks for stopping by and taking an interest in my page. It doesn’t seem possible that it has been 55-years since we were all together at graduation. Since then, about the only time I spent in town was to get a haircut, a bag of groceries, or a tank of gas at Sheetz. So maybe this is a good time to catch up with some of you. After graduation, I worked the summer at Herger’s golf course. Thanks primarily to Bill Risko I enrolled at Mansfield State as an English Education major. He taught me to appreciate great literature and to enjoy writing and literary criticism so I thought that was as good a choice as any. The English was OK but the education courses quickly convinced me that I was at the wrong place studying the wrong subject. I left after a month. II finished the year working at Pierce Glass, bought a car, and my first really good semi-professional photography equipment and started s life-long hobby. In the fall, I enrolled at Penn State and completed a degree in Philosophy and started a MA program in Classical Studies concentrating in Ancient Greek Language. Jobs were very hard to find when I was graduated, and since I already had a radiotelephone licensee I took some additional courses in circuit theory and mathematics. That’s how I spent most of the remainder of my 35 year career. I started designing and building automatic test equipment for piezoelectric resonators in Central PA. Later, I got involved in multichip module design and fabrication and spent over 20 years doing that at several companies. Most of my engineering positions were working in aerospace and military programs at various companies up and down the East coast. I think I had the most appropriate career ending possible for someone with my experience. I ended up at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena CA. as the lead fabrication engineer on the Mars rover Curiosity. What a wonderful experience! Because I was in a senior leadership position on a flagship mission, I was on call 24-7 and I loved it. I said then and I still say that I never worked a day in all the time I was there. But even though the hours were long and the standards and expectations high, I was having too much fun to consider it work. On the Rover, I was responsible for about $200 million of avionics, landing radar, cameras and vision, and motor control electronics. As well as the Rover, I also worked on several earth-orbit missions such as Aquarius and OCO, a moon mission for the Argentinians, and a Jupiter mission Juno. I had originally intended to retire in February 2009, but there were some significant problems with the motor controls and the 80 motors for Curiosity so I was asked to stay on a bit longer to sort that out. I finally left in July. I was having fun, but my wife didn’t always see it that way. I was out of the house most of the time so she and our daughter were there alone. She asked me one time: “Why don’t you take your pillow and your blanket and your stuffed rabbit to the lab and just stay there.” Actually some people thought I did live on site because they never saw me come in to work or leave. Fortunately we lived just one block off Colorado Blvd. and within easy walking distance of a lot of neat things. Still we were able to do some neat things. I’m sure some of you have seen the televised Tournament of Roses Parade on New Year’s Day. We were able to watch it live several years. It is quite spectacular watching it on TV but seeing it in person will forever ruin watching it on TV for you! One year we volunteered to help decorate the JPL float. What a nice experience that was for all three of us. We also spent some time in the San Gabriel Mountains, at Sequoia National Park, San Francisco, San Diego, and the coast redwoods at Muir Woods.. We also had a delightful week-long cruise to Mexico. So we had our family fun too even though I had to keep my cell phone in my pocket in case something blew up at the lab. The flight hardware for Curiosity I was responsible for had been built, integrated into systems, and the electrical, mechanical, and planetary protection test passed. I always thought it was neat that I worked for an organization that found it necessary to fund a department called Planetary Production, but panspermia is a credible theory and JPL took it seriously. Every device that left there that was destined for space flight had to pass their analysis for two reasons; first we did not want to inoculate a foreign planet with organics from earth and so upset possible existing life forms there; and second, part of our charter for exploring mars was to search for evidence of life and we wanted to be sure that any organics were from the planet and had not fallen off one of JPL;s technicians. Before leaving New York to go to California, we sold our house, had its contents packed into a 40-foot sea cargo container, and shipped to the Port of New Jersey destined for Manila, Philippines. We spent a couple of months together in the Philippines making plans for building our new house and storing our things when they arrived. Mely and Kathleen stayed in the PI seeing to this while I flew back to New York. I had already made the cross-country trip north-to-south, but ever since reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road I had wanted to do that also. I picked up the van and headed west. Eventually the house was finished and Mely and Kathleen joined me in Pasadena. So after 30 odd years in high tech (some more odd than others), I retired in 2009 and started a whole new adventure. I must have done something right at the Lab because our Division honored me with a far...Expand for more