1950's

For complete class notes, please see the latest issue of the Grapevine.

Announcements

• Charles E. Billings ’53 shares that he is “an Emeritus Professor in preventive medicine at The Ohio State University.  Since my second retirement from NASA in 1992, I have been active in the O.S.U. College of Engineering, which has been my major activity and interest since 1973, when I left here to do aeronautical and aviation safety research.  It sounds odd, but it’s been a great ride and I’m one of the few who has been able to spend my entire career doing what I like best:  aviation (and some space) medicine, mostly research, much of it involving flying.

   

   I’ve tried retirement three times now and they’ve all been abject failures, so I continue to work with cognitive engineering graduate students and some world-class faculty here, as a volunteer.  The grad students keep me hopping intellectually, and the faculty have been kind about helping me avoid administrative duties, which I didn’t like when I was a government employee and have hated since.  Everything I’ve written since 1992 has been a labor of love rather than necessity, and there’s been a fair amount of it:  a book on human-centered aviation automation (which has sold out), perhaps 15 papers and conference presentations, and a number of lectures, including the Wilbur and Orville Wright Memorial Lecture at the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1990, and next spring, the Air Vice Marshal Stewart Memorial Lecture, also at the Royal Society, of which I’ve been a Fellow for many years. 

   

  Dr. Judah Folkman had a sign on his door:  ‘Retirement gets in the way of doing what you love!’  My take on it is a little more earthy:  ‘Retirement can be dangerous to your health.’  But I’ve had a wholly satisfying 55 years since graduation, an incredible wife and family, both two-legged (with our first great grandchild now a year old) and four-legged (with lovely Whippets still gracing our home and winning a fair number of prizes over the years).  I am proud that I got through NYU-Bellevue with a lot of help from my smarter classmates – thank you all! – and that I’ve been able to apply what I learned to the task of keeping people alive in difficult and often dangerous environments, which is what preventive medicine is all about, in my view. . . 1949-53, in retrospect, were four of the best years of my life!  But they’ve all been pretty good!!” 

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