5. Technician in a Trench Coat

Trained in geology and armed with a fresh doctoral degree in geography, Ives left academia and promptly went to work as a gunnery instructor and then electronic researcher, though not entirely by his own choices. When he received his PhD he also received a draft notice from his friends at the U.S. Army.

Following his stint as a civilian instructor in electronics and remote control aerial gunnery, Ives went to work at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, or simply CAL, in Buffalo, New York. He stayed from 1951 to 1955. His title was principal physicist and later principal engineer, and his work consisted of evaluating various military ideas for practicality and then conducting research on selected ones. He also designed and built equipment in some cases, and even inspected and evaluated military installations for purposes of improving operational methods and suggesting improvements or modifications where possible. He worked on several projects including one called the Buffalo Bill Radar Project for the Tactical Air Force,²⁰⁶ and his official reports included "Effect of Centrifugal Force on Vertical Indices" (CAL GM-776-T)²⁰⁷ and "Measurement of the Earth's Electrical Field" (CAL RA-764-P-1-4). On the side, he also produced 29 publications of his own.

College student Ronald Ives wearing a trench coat and its personality; self-portrait about 1935.

(Courtesy Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, Ives Collection, MS-983, photo book 14, no. 3252.)

Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL)

Helen Beck was a secretary for Ives in the physics department at CAL for a year and a half, and then in the same area during his tenure. She remembered him well, having been hired there in May of 1951.

Most of the things that I remember best about Dr. Ives were unusual, funny, and different. He used to joke that he really approved of me because I reminded him of his best friend who was a madam in Las Cruces. He always came to work in a taxi. I don't think he ever learned to drive. But if, for some reason, a taxi wasn't available or if he didn't like that taxi driver, which sometimes happened, he walked. And it was a good three miles from where he lived to where he worked. I can still see him coming up the road with that slouch hat pulled down over one eye. And, you could always tell when he was coming down the halls because you could always hear his shoe soles flapping. They were leather. His soles had come partway off, and they flapped when he walked.

And frugal? Oh my. In the months that I worked directly for him, he wore the same shirt every day. I know it was the same shirt every day because he cut himself shaving one morning, and the blood spot was still there all that time. I did see him dressed up once, sometime later. One time he came up for some speech that somebody was giving, and he was dressed up.

The only thing that he ever softened up enough to talk about really was Mexico, the mission down there, or the little church. He bought a bell for them. That was near to his heart. He liked that part of the country, and he was very fascinated with it. He'd bring out the maps, and tell me where he'd been and the areas he was interested in. He'd talk about what a nice area that was. And then he was really quite friendly, quite likable. I always got along fine with him. He struck me like the kind of a person that maybe had always been a brilliant person who has never really known how to interact with people. He didn't act like a man who had received a great deal of affection.

He was pretty good about keeping regular hours, but sometimes we wouldn't see him for a week, or he might spend days in a library or sleep at the office overnight. Our engineers were a very strange [End...