ABSTRACT
I. INTRODUCTION The twentieth century was a lot of fun for me. I was lucky to experience the last 55% of it, by far the best half. In my mid-teens (ca. 1960) I envisioned myself as a naval aviation officer, a writer, a scientist, or an engineer. My limitations as an athlete kept me out of the Naval Academy, narrowing my choices. Mathematics was something I could do, but did not enjoy. That pretty well steered me away from engineering. Chemistry in a liberal arts setting seemed an ideal compromise. By now I've been an officer in a corporation, a pilot, a university scientist, and an engineer designing a number of instruments. I've had plenty of work published. Thus I've been lucky to achieve much of what interested me in 1960. The decade of the 1960s arguably saw the most dramatic advances in science and engineering of any decade before or since. Funding for academic and industrial research was readily available. Solid-state electronics, polymer science, and the first minicomputers transformed many fields.
