Lee

 

Lee

There was one other engineer that spent a brief period as a member of our little lab team. Lee Schilling was another of those minimally qualified professionals that NASA hired in desperation to fill their employment allotment. He wasn’t qualified for aeronautical research, but he may have had a couple of courses in electrical engineering, which would explain why he was assigned to our group. He had a pleasant personality, and he had an enthusiasm for our lab project, but he had one shortcoming that drove Joe nuts. He was accident prone. Almost every day he would accidentally knock something off of a table, or trip over some object, or commit some other bungling antic. Joe wasn’t merely annoyed by Lee’s ineptness. He was worried. The problem was that, at that time, we had high voltage wires all over the lab. We generated the spark for our sonic boom simulation experiments by charging up a powerful capacitor to a very high voltage and then discharging it across the spark gap. The joule content of that discharge would guarantee death to anyone that happened to get in its path. Admittedly, we were violating all kinds of safety protocols, but the proper safety procedures and equipment would not only require a long time to install, it would also take too long to change every time we altered our experiment – which was a frequent requirement simply by the nature of the research. Every time Lee would have one of his accidents, Joe would come around afterward, literally wringing his hands, and whisper, “He’s going to kill himself!”

Fortunately, Lee didn’t stay with us long, but he did stay long enough to attend one of the very few social occasions that our little group shared. The mechanic who was assigned to us had a fishing boat, and he invited the rest of us to go clamming with him one Saturday. I had no enthusiasm for clams, and I knew nothing about clamming. But I saw this venture as an opportunity to learn more about Tidewater life and tradition, as well as a chance to spend some casual time with my amiable colleagues.

We met in Poquoson, boarded the boat, and headed toward a spot that our host had been wanting to check out for clams. After he dropped anchor he meted out clam rakes, and we climbed into water that was barely knee deep, and spent well over an hour raking the sandy bottom with little to show for our efforts. But it was a fine day with a blue sky and little wind and surf. The tide was coming in and time was beginning to run short when our host decided to try a different spot. This time we hit the jackpot! The bottom was a bit more mucky than our previous site, but the clams were plentiful, and what had been work now became fun. However, the tide was now coming in strongly, we were in water to our thighs, and with the water bouyancy it was getting hard to get enough traction to dig the clams out. That was an even bigger problem for Lee, who was shorter than the rest of us, and dealing with water nearly to his shoulders. But he was so enthusiastic that he kept hanging in there trying to pull up a clam but actually pulling himself under. We were worried that he might actually drown, but we could hardly keep from laughing because from our view it appeared that the clam was fighting back. Finally three of us grabbed him and dragged him into the boat. I donated my clam cache to the others and went home clamless, but feeling well rewarded.

Lee’s hobby was sculpture, and in my opinion he was good at it. He approached it with the same enthusiasm that he approached everything else. He would rave endlessly about a slab of hardwood that had a grain that fit perfectly into a design that he envisioned. He also worked in marble, spending hours chipping, grinding, and finally smoothing and polishing to a fine sheen. His style was abstract, and its beauty lay partly in the gracefulness and interplay of its multiple curvatures. He was proud of the texture of his wood and stone sculptures, and encouraged browsers at the art and crafts shows to caress his creations.

When he was still in his thirties he went through a brief, painful divorce. His enthusiastic personality changed suddenly to a state of constant depression, causing him to sleep fourteen hours every night and consequently show up for work late nearly every day. Fortunately, he found a savior in the form of a woman about fifteen years older than he was. They met at an arts and crafts show in North Carolina, where she was selling her handcrafted dulcimers. Their common interest in woodcraft led to lengthy conversations, which led to a romantic relationship, which led to marriage, which led to Lee’s resignation from NASA. He moved to her home in western North Carolina, and I lost track of him for several years. Then a colleague, on a vacation trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee ran into him. He had grown an impressive beard and adopted the garb and persona of a mountain man, which was appropriate, as he and his wife were living in a cabin on a mountainside facing the town. He helped her construct dulcimers, which they sold locally to the summer tourists. But their primary source of income was concerts of folk music, often presented at schools, along with brief lectures about local folklore. She played her dulcimer and sang while Lee accompanied her on his harmonica, and they both contributed to the lectures.

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