What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [114]
Barbara Kelly and Ira Smith met in the fall of 1949 when they were sophomores in college in Potsdam, New York, north of the Adirondacks. Ira was studying engineering at the then all-male Clarkson College of Technology. Barbara was a student at what was then Potsdam State Teachers College (now part of the State University of New York system). The first time they saw each other, Barbara was dressed up for a sorority Halloween party in a cowgirl outfit with toy pistols. But they did not date until two years later, when Ira returned from ROTC sporting a buzz cut in the fall of their senior year. “The one and only night I think I ever went out on a weekday night, one of the girls I was with saw him and asked, ‘Didn’t that used to be Ira Smith?’ I was sitting at the end of the booth, so I said I would go ask.” In less than four months, they were engaged. “It was the only way I could get a date with her. She had a couple of other guys after her,” Ira said.
Barbara almost didn’t go to college, though she graduated as valedictorian of her class of twelve at Heuvelton High School. Even the state college tuition of $900 a year was prohibitively expensive for Barbara’s family. Her father, Edward “Bert” Kelly, was a well-respected farmer with an eighth-grade education. He owned a small dairy. Her mother, Corrinne Gilbert, worked as a domestic for the wealthy in and around Ogdensburg. Together they barely made enough to keep their family afloat. Born into the teeth of the Great Depression in 1931, Barbara was the youngest of ten children.
During the summer of 1948, she received a letter notifying her that she had won a New York State scholarship. It asked her to indicate to which college the money should be sent. She scurried around to find a college that would accept her at that late date. Her father scraped together the additional $300 needed to pay the first year’s tuition. “It was a stretch for him, but he did it,” Barbara said.
There seems little doubt that the old-fashioned values of helping others that existed in the communal life of a farm have influenced Barbara’s devotion to HGRM. Despite the size of her family, her parents kept an open house and were forever taking in others who needed a place to stay and work, a tradition that Barbara and Ira would later continue. Moreover, Barbara developed the habit of letting nothing go to waste. “We used everything. I learned to squeeze a nickel, as they used to say, until the Indian was riding the buffalo.”
Ira was the only child of a mother who also did domestic work for wealthy families, and a gas station owner and truck driver who eventually became highway superintendent of Westport, New York, on Lake Champlain. The family was comfortable but thrifty. Ira had no real ambition when he graduated from high school. But in the post-World War II climate, there was much talk of engineering as the profession of the future. And mostly with that as his rationale, he signed up to study electrical engineering at Clarkson. He wasn’t well-suited for engineering, he later realized, and fared little better than average in his course work.
Barbara and Ira were married in 1954 soon after he returned from serving in the army in Korea after the armistice was signed. He went to work as an engineer at the Rome Air Development Center (RADC), an important Cold War research and development lab that the Air Force had opened a year earlier at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, not far from where Barbara grew up. Credited for the time he served in Korea, Ira was made a first lieutenant and assigned to a unit developing technical navigation systems for the nascent missile defense program. Being able to write more clearly than other engineers—not a great accomplishment, Ira jokes—he moved up the ranks quickly.
In 1960, he was appointed chief engineer of the Pincushion Project, a radar system that was meant to analyze incoming missiles, decoys, and their data. “Back in those days, you could get money for all sorts of ideas, whether they were well thought out or not. The government