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the East Coast—Sikorsky, Martin, Curtiss—with no encouragement. We decided to join the Army Air Corps and become aviation cadets. We would learn to fly and test airplanes and learn all about them. I had passed every other entrance requirement and then took the eye examination. My left eye, the one nearly lost to the arrow in a childhood game of cowboys and Indians, was not up to the standard required by the Air Corps although it never had given me any trouble. Once again, an accident changed the course of my career. If I’d been accepted as an aviation cadet, I would have taken that route and stayed with it.
    Don and I then borrowed Professor Walter Burke’s Chevrolet and set off to tour the aircraft plants in the West looking for work as engineers.
    We were short of money, of course. Our earnings in the tunnel and elsewhere had gone toward school expenses. To get better mileage from the professor’s car and save money on fuel, we drilled a one-eighth-inch diameter hole in the manifold inlet and inserted a valve, so while driving we could open it and lean out the fuel in flight, so to speak. We did get three or four more miles to the gallon.
    To hold down expenses, we’d buy milk, bread, and sandwich meat to make our lunches. We camped out in schoolyards, by the side of streams, in fields, wherever we could, and nearly ended our careers early when we picked a site in the dark one night and were awakened by a passing railroad train uncomfortably close. We decamped hurriedly.
    That was the most excitement we encountered until we got to Lockheed in Burbank in the San Fernando Valley of California. The company had been purchased from receivers by a small group of aviation enthusiasts just that June for $40,000.
    The company was in the process of being reorganized. Lockheed already was a big name as designer and builder of fast plywood aircraft flown by many of the famous names in early aviation. There were no jobs for engineers yet, but Richard von Hake, chief engineer at Lockheed when it was part of Detroit Aircraft and who was to become production manager of the new company, suggested:
    “Look, something is going to come of this. Why don’t you go back to school and come out again next year. I think we’ll have something for you.”
    Well, there were no other job opportunities that year; we’d tried all the principal companies.
    So, we returned to the University of Michigan for a year of graduate study. To afford this extra year to get my master’s, I applied for and was awarded the Sheehan Fellowship; the $500 paid my expenses. I majored in supercharging of engines, to get high power at high altitude, and boundary layer control,how to control airflow around fuselage, wings, and tail. It later proved a fortunate choice. Of course, aerodynamics is basically boundary layer control. And I always loved engines and aerodynamics. It was a natural choice, as well.
    In our graduate year, Don and I did much more wind-tunnel testing on our own as well as for the university.
    The local newspaper reported, “Five of the qualifying cars which will race at Indianapolis Memorial Day have bodies designed by two University graduate students, C. L. Johnson and E. D. Palmer. All of the cars are semi-stock Studebakers and all qualified for the race at speeds ranging between 110 and 116 miles an hour.…”
    We managed to improve the miles per gallon on these cars from seven to 11.6 at 113 miles an hour. That was important, because in those days fuel-tank capacity was limited.
    A few proposals we explored, such as streamlining wheels, the drivers refused to accept. I was given a demonstration of the argument against that one day when we were at the track for tests.
    It was very exciting circling the track at speeds of 130 to 140 miles an hour; but if you had solid-disc streamlined wheels, the wind across the track would just pick up the car and set it down again about four feet off course.
    Another idea I tried to sell was dive brakes