The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)
Issue link: http://wpialumnimag.epubxp.com/i/406282
54 Fall 2014 class notes though at a greatly reduced level. Wrote a couple of books on business strategy that came out in 1987 and 1994. I invented a "System and Method for Pricing a Product" for the business community, which my fraternity brother, Ralph Gelling, Esq. '63, wrote up to produce a patent. It was awarded on Jan. 31, 2012, the day after my 70th birthday. My value-analysis process and software help business teams to set the price for a new product, based on its warranted market value, while knowing its unit costs and the prices of competing products. I'm currently trying to draft a third book. In my spare time I enjoy singing, tennis, sailing, kayaking, clamming, theater, and travel/touring." Duke enjoyed music at WPI, even while studying for an EE degree. "It was fun singing in the Sig Ep octet and the WPI Chorus. Classmate (and fraternity brother) Bob Geiger taught me to play the ukulele. I used to play and sing at WPI parties while in school and still do at the Lankau annual WPI/ PKT Class of 1964-centered muster in Mashpee on Cape Cod. I think that making music lifts the spirits of family, neighbors, friends, and guests and makes the immediate world a more enjoyable place." Clark Gesswein chronicles his life as "My WPI Plan"—a journey from that took him from ROTC to the CIA to national security jobs in the private sector. "It may not have been a formal plan per se, but WPI was indeed the cornerstone of an unexpected and extraordinary journey," he writes. "Of course it started with loving and supportive guidance by my parents, especially my patriotic Dad, who strongly believed I had an obligation to serve the country in the military. So in 1964 I graduated from WPI with a BSEE degree and a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserves, Signal Corp. I worked my frst engineering job with Otis Elevator during the summer of 1964. Then came two years of active duty military service with the Special Forces (Airborne) at Ft. Bragg, N.C. ('Airborne' meaning I was a paratrooper and jumped out of 31 perfectly good airplanes. It was my job!). I married my college sweetheart, Janice (Jan) Hamlin, whom I met in 1963 at WPI, while on active duty. "Shortly after I fnished military service, the CIA offered me a position in their Offce of Communications, responsible for operating and maintaining a 24/7 worldwide radio communications network. My true love was always radio communications—I became a licensed amateur radio operator when I was 16. I went on to serve 26 years with the CIA, including nine years overseas in the Philippines, Liberia, and West Germany. I retired from the government in 1993. I am what's known as a "Cold War Warrior"—that's the nickname for people who worked in the intelligence agencies and other frontline elements of the government Send your class note to classnotes@wpi.edu. Images welcome! '64 John Schmidt retired last year from ABC Television Network Group as senior audio/visual systems engineer. "I started out working for Grumman Aerospace as a systems reliability engineer, mostly on the Lunar Module program. Left Grumman in 1970, worked for Adelphi University as university electronics engineer. (Don't let the title fool you; I was also responsible for the University-owned 13KV power distribution system, and made repairs on more than one occasion to the fre control system on the boilers in their central heating plant.) In 1977 I started at ABC Television, where I stayed until retirement. While at Grumman and Adelphi I also did a lot of consulting/contract engineering for a number of radio stations and a couple of recording studios in the Long Island/New York area. I was the (mostly volunteer) technical director of WALI/WBAU, the college radio station at Adelphi from 1965 until it went off the air in 1995. "Now that I'm supposedly retired, I'm trying to get everything done that I put off until after I retired. Somehow, the list is getting longer, not shorter... I have recently become involved in audio restoration, volunteering to transfer a large number of audio tapes and cassettes of some historic value from Trinidad to digital formats. For the last 25 years I have been traveling to Trinidad, mostly for Carnival. I have many friends who play steel drums (the correct term is steelpan). I hang out with them, make audio recordings of some of them, and take a lot of photographs. (I don't play—I'm 'rhythmically challenged.') If you want to see some of that, look at my website, panjumbie.com.